Now, however, he did not enjoy such influence. His views were all too well known. Many Orthodox Christians who supported him in the struggle against Rome were amazed by them. Nor could he count on the support of the British Embassy. Sir Peter Wych left Constantinople in 1633 or 1634; his successor, Sir Sackville Crowe, was aware of the controversy. Mr. van Haag was about to leave. Antoine Léger left Constantinople, and his friendly successor, Sartoris, died soon after his arrival.453 In the meantime, Schmid-Schwarzenhorn renewed his attempts to depose him, partly for the sake of the Catholics, partly to weaken Dutch influence, and also to prove that the Austrian embassy was more competent than the French had been before. Bribery of the referees brought Kontaris back from Rhodes. In May 1638, Sultan Murad IV declared war on Persia; the grand vizier, Bairam Pasha, rode ahead of him to prepare his way through Anatolia. One of the priests of Cyril Contaris, named Lamerno, hastened to his camp and persuaded him, with the help of a large bribe secured by Schmid-Schwarzenhorn, to accuse Cyril Lukaris before the Sultan of high treason. The vizier chose an opportune moment. The Don Cossacks, incited by the Persians, attacked Ottoman territory in the Azov region. When meeting with the Sultan, the vizier assured him that this had been prepared by Cyril Lukaris. Murad, who considered Kirill to be the cause of anxiety, allowed himself to be convinced. A message was sent to the governor of Constantinople, and on June 20, 1638, Cyril was arrested and imprisoned in a fortress on the Bosphorus. Five days later, he was informed that he should be taken out of there. He was put on a small ship, and when the ship sailed into the Sea of Marmara, the soldiers strangled him and buried his body in the coastal strip. The next day, according to tradition, they sold the few things he had with him. Someone recognized his pectoral cross; This is how his fate became known. Angry crowds of Greeks gathered in front of the gates of the house of Cyril Contaris, shouting: "Pilate, give us the body!" They did it, but threw it into the sea. There he was found by Greek fishermen and identified; he was buried in the little monastery of St. Andrew on an island off the Asiatic coast.454

By order of the Sultan, Cyril Kontaris returned to the patriarchal throne. In September 1638 he convened a council, which was attended by the patriarchs of Alexandria (Cyril's former disciple Kritopoulos) and of Jerusalem by his old friend Theophanes, at which council Cyril and his theology were present. were convicted. But in December of the same year, Cyril II signed a document of his loyalty to Pope Urban VIII. In June 1639, Cyril II was deposed, declared a heretic, and exiled to North Africa, where he died. A moderate cleric, Parthenius I, was elected in his place, but Parthenius rashly allowed Cyril Loukaris' friend, Theophilus Korydalleus, to preach a sermon on his accession to the throne. Korydalleus praised Cyril and his labors. Such loyalty immediately revived the confrontation at a time when the Orthodox world wanted an end to the strife. In response to the speech of Coridalles, the Cretan Meletius Sirigos received permission to deliver a sermon a few months later, in which he condemned the Calvinistic teaching of Cyril, although Cyril himself was mentioned in passing. Sirigos was also asked to write a treatise in which he repeated the condemnation. This work appeared in 1640; Many Orthodox, however, felt that he had gone too far in the opposite direction. Indeed, with the exception of the denial of the double procession of the Holy Spirit. It could have been written by a Roman theologian. The strife continued. In 1641, the ruler of Moldavia, Vasily Lupul, an intractable Albanian businessman who tried to restore order in the patriarchal finances, wrote a pleading letter to the bishops asking them to stop their strife. In May 1642, Parthenius convened a council, at which Cyril's "Confession of Faith" was examined article by article, and some articles were condemned. To appease some of Cyril's supporters, Parthenius issued a document, supported by the Jesuit Skarga, which suggested that Cyril showed sympathy for Rome. Subsequent councils repeated this accusation. The most remarkable of the theologians of the seventeenth century was condemned as a propagator of heresy.455

His disciples scattered. Korydalleus, by virtue of his speech, was appointed metropolitan of Naupactus and Arta; but he was soon deposed and returned to private life. His disciple Nathaniel Konopios hastily left for England. Meletius Pantogalos, whom Cyril had appointed Metropolitan of Ephesus, was deposed by Parthenius I and left Constantinople before the signing of the document condemning his friend. He was closely acquainted with van Haag and Antoine Léger, so he went to Holland to study at the University of Leiden. There he was well received, especially after the signing of the act in support of Cyril's writings. In 1645 he intended to return to Constantinople, armed with letters and a recommendation from the Dutch States-General; During his journey, however, he died. In Leiden, he was joined by the Kefallonian Hierotheos, abbot of Sisis and a friend of Nicodemus Metaxas, who had been assigned to Cephalonia after the destruction of the printing house. Hierotheos never met Cyril, but probably became friends with van Haag during a visit to Constantinople after Cyril's death. In 1643 he went to Venice, vainly trying to raise funds to rebuild his monastery, which had been destroyed by an earthquake. From Venice he decided to go to Holland, where he remained until 1651, except for a trip to England. In Holland, he translated several Calvinistic theological works into Greek, with which he fully agreed. Afterwards he spent several years in Geneva, and in 1658 returned to his monastery in Cephalonia, where he died before 1664. but his writings were not at all distributed in the East.456

Cyril Lukaris failed. He engaged his Church in a strife that led it to issue tenets of faith different from his own, but almost as controversial. He only made an attempt to bring the Orthodox Church into line with the more viable Churches of the West. Lutheran evangelism did not suit the Greek temperament; besides, Anglicanism had nothing important to offer. The Lutheran and Anglican initiatives did not meet with any response. But the heavy, logical intellectualism of Calvinism attracted to itself the realistic, rational side of the Greek character. Had Cyril achieved his goal, the intellectual level of the Orthodox Church would undoubtedly have been raised, and many of its dark features of later times would have been overcome. But the Greek character had another side, namely, a love of the mysterious. The Greek is equally a mystic and an intellectual; The Orthodox Church drew its strength from the former mystical tradition. The strength of her survival in the vicissitudes of the world lies mainly in her perception of the transcendent mystery of the Godhead. Kirill never understood this. For him and his followers, the apophatic approach led only to ignorance and stagnation. He could not appreciate the sustaining power of tradition. The logic of Geneva was as little suited to solving the problems of Orthodoxy as the disciplined legalism of Rome.

Chapter 7. The Church and the Churches: The Anglican Experience

Although the teachings of Wittenberg or Geneva could not be acceptable to Orthodoxy, there was one Church in the West with which they seemed to have much in common. The Church in England denied the authority of Rome, but retained apostolic succession. She believed in the equality of bishops by grace. She followed a rite that contained much that was traditional and familiar in the East. Her attitude toward the laity, who were allowed to take communion under two species and to participate in the councils of the Church, was akin to the Eastern tradition, as was her willingness to regard the monarch as the head of Christian society. Moreover, she was almost as reluctant to pronounce definite opinions on questions of doctrine as most theologians of the apophatic school, although their motives were different.

However, it was almost a century after the English Reformation before the two Churches came into contact. Few Greeks reached England, with the exception of merchants (they were called estradiots) such as Nicander Nucius of Corfu, a people who were generally prone to lawlessness, especially theft. 457 At the end of the fifteenth century, two eminent émigré scholars from Constantinople, John Argyropoulos and Andronicus Kallistos, visited the country, but they did not like the climate and soon left. William Weinfleet's secretary, Immanuel of Constantinople, had arrived earlier and remained there, helping his employer draft the statutes for Eton.458 Few Englishmen reached the Greek lands, except pilgrims to Palestine who passed through Cyprus. William Way included in his pilgrim's guide a few Greek phrases for such travelers, although he advised them not to stay long on this unhealthy island.459 John Locke, who traveled to Jerusalem in 1553, attended a church service in Cyprus; but it seemed to him incomprehensible. At the same time, however, he noted that the Greek monks led a simple and austere way of life, since he did not see a single fat man among them.460 Two of the scholars of the English Renaissance went to learn Greek from the Greeks; these were William Grosinus, who studied under Demetrius Chalkocondylos in Florence, and William Lily, who went to Rhodes and lived there with a Greek family. The leaders of the English Reformation, such as Thomas Cranmer, were lovers of ancient Greek, as were Queen Elizabeth I herself. Even Edward Brerewood's huge study of the world's major languages and religions in the 1614 chapters on the Greek Church is based on second-hand sources, and this information is indiscriminate and not very accurate, though not hostile.462

Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, published seven years later, on the basis of such unreliable evidence, accuses the Greeks of adding much to the true Creed, and concludes that they are "more than anyone else half-Christians."463

Brerewood and Barton must have known more, for more information was available at that time. English philhellenism, however, is actually rooted in commercial interest. In 1579, William Harbourne, the queen's representative, received letters from Sultan Murad III promising special protection to English merchants. This was confirmed by a charter the following year. In 1581, Queen Elizabeth granted a license to the Turkish Company, which in 1590 was renamed the Levantine Company, according to the renewed charter. In 1583 Harborne returned to Constantinople as a full envoy to the Sublime Porte.464

The merchants of the Levantine Company worked almost exclusively with the Greeks. The Greeks grew cinnamon and made sweet wine, which the English bought and in turn provided them with essential consumer goods such as jewelry, medicines, pepper, carpets, and patterned fabrics. They found that the Greeks were enterprising and trustworthy business people. The English, who had begun to settle in the Levant to engage in trade, moved freely in Greek circles; by the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was a small but growing Greek colony in London. Mutual sympathy grew. Sir Anthony Shirley, who visited the East in 1599, believed that it would be just and feasible to free the Greeks from their slavery. And his brother, Sir Thomas, who was in Constantinople from 1603 to 1607, had many conversations, as he wrote, "with wise and wealthy Greeks, who with tears asked for help in this matter."

Merchants had little interest in the Greek Church. But with the increase in their numbers and the opening of a permanent embassy in Constantinople and consulates in Smyrna and Aleppo, it became necessary to appoint chaplains of the English Church to each of these centers. Appointments were made by the Levantine Company, with the approval of the ambassador. These chaplains could not help but be interested in the varieties of Christianity that existed around them; At the same time, many of the merchants showed interest in theology. William Biddulph, the first of these chaplains, was in Constantinople for a short time in 1599 and was not interested in the Greeks. He lived there for a short time; 466 But from 1611 onwards there were regular successive chaplains, beginning with William Foord, of Trinity College, Cambridge, who arrived with a new envoy, Sir Peter Pindar. We know little about him and his immediate successors, most of whom came from Oxford. The chaplain from 1627 to 1638, that is, in the critical years of Cyril Lukaris's life, was a certain Mr. Hunt, of whom we know nothing but his name. Undoubtedly, he adhered to the old traditions because of the direct interest in patriarchy that his two predecessors, Sir Thomas Rohe and Sir Peter Witch, had taken in patriarchy. The next chaplain from Trinity College, William Gothobed, who was transferred from Smyrna in 1642, is known only for having contributed to the removal of an unpopular envoy, Sir Sackville Crowe. Far more prominent was the chaplain who was in Aleppo from 1630 to 1638, Edward Pocock; he was often in Constantinople and was there, on his way home, when Cyril Lukaris was killed. He wrote a moving account of the Patriarch's fate for Archbishop Laud. He used his time in Aleppo to improve his knowledge of the Arabic language, and later became the first and perhaps the most prominent English Orientalist.467

At the end of the century, two prominent theologians, Thomas Smith (1668–1670) and John Covel (1670–1676), served in Constantinople. Smith, of Magdalen College, Oxford, in turn, wrote a well-documented, attentive, but not particularly sympathetic essay on the Greek and Armenian churches, and published a collection of documents relating to Cyril Loukaris. He later became one of the clerics who did not take the oath.468 Covel, a member and later master of Christ's College in Cambridge, was less attractive. As a chaplain, he amassed a large fortune in the silk trade. He did not like the Greeks. "The Greeks are still Greeks," he wrote. "In deceit and treachery, they still deserve the characterization given to them by Iphigenia in Euripides: 'Trust them and hang them.'" He also later wrote a book on the Greek Church, less sympathetic than Smith's, although he considered himself the chief authority in England on the subject, and expected to be consulted when Greek priests visited England.