Eds. Victor Roudometof and Vasilios Makrides. London: Ashgate, 2010. - 268 p.

The book includes ten articles by well-known scholars that define today's research on modern Greek Orthodoxy. Almost all of the authors, including the book's editors Viktor Rudometov and Vassilios Makrides, are ethnic Greeks, but only half of them represent Greek universities or research centers, while the rest work in the West. With a solid Western education, combined with an excellent knowledge of Greece from the inside and familiarity with the original sources, all the authors present us with an interesting and diverse picture of the public, political and more generally public role of the modern Greek Church.

Today we look at Greece through the prism of constant news about the 2011-2012 crisis. After all, this is not just an economic or social crisis, but also a crisis of identity:

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isn't this what membership in the European Union itself is fraught with, the need to meet European standards-the commitments made by Greece in 1981? The endless debate about Greek Europeanness is not subsiding, but growing in waves: despite the long-standing praises of Greece as the cradle of European culture and democracy that date back to the European Enlightenment and nineteenth-century liberalism, Greece is also often associated with the non-European, non-modern legacy of two empires, the Byzantine and Ottoman. Discussions of this level now seem archaic and out of place, but the crisis of the beginning of our century - as, indeed, the entire Greek history of the twentieth century, and perhaps since the war of independence-was undoubtedly built in these now rather implicit coordinates.

Are the crisis events and discussions of recent years somehow related to the role and functions of the Church? The book under review has nothing to say about this, it was written a little earlier. However, all the material in the book is a variation of the same questions that are being acutely raised now. It also covers the previous, openly symbolic crisis of the early 2000s, related to the reform of personal identification cards. In fact, and in all other events, the "implicit coordinates" of Greek identity are always present behind the scenes, and there is no escaping them. They often work invisibly, through cultural and symbolic codes that organize public evaluations, mass attitudes, and everyday behavior. What role does Orthodoxy play in the system of these codes? Even if the authors of the book, as a rule, do not get to the direct, direct analysis of these symbolic codes at a deep, structural level, their operation is tacitly implied. And no matter how hard we try to move away from confessional essentialism, we inevitably return to the experience of Greece as the first Orthodox country to join a united Europe (now, as we know, there are four such countries - besides Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania).

The editors note in the introduction that Greece is unique in that its Orthodoxy, unlike all other Orthodox traditions, has not survived the pressure of official communist atheism. This makes the Greek case "pure" in terms of the juxtaposition of Eastern Christianity and European modernity. Nevertheless, it is interesting to know that the collapse of the communist system in Europe, according to V. Makrides, did not go unnoticed

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in Greece: the resonance of the religious upsurge in post-communist countries in the early 1990s provoked the growth of the "fashion" for religiosity in Greece as well (p.69). Is there any inter-Orthodox cohesion here? Perhaps the religious revival in Russia and Ukraine resonated in the Greek religious milieu; but I think it is rather a global trend towards a greater role for the public voice of religion, starting in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s.secularization, and others-post-secularism.

These definitions do not seem appropriate for Greece. If you look from Paris or London, then what kind of post-secularism can we talk about in a country that seems to be all-encompassing religious and has not survived real secularism! On the contrary, the main process of the 1990s and 2000s, albeit in different periods (more under the socialists, less under other governments), consisted in the difficult adjustment of "Orthodox Greece" to secular European standards, and this process seems to be continuing. However, not everything is so simple: the public revival of Orthodoxy is indeed evident. It was precisely a reaction to the dual challenge posed by Europe: on the one hand, the application of strict Western standards, and on the other hand, the softening of Western secularism itself in the framework of multiculturalist, inclusive rhetoric and practices.

As the authors of the book note, the following is also interesting:: So far, "religious affairs" have been the concern of theologians and clergy only; no matter how devout Greece may seem to the European knights of laicite, the boundary between religious and secular has always been clear, the confrontation between religious institutions and secular elites (powerful and intellectual) is indisputable, so that Orthodoxy has been, quite according to the canons of secular Europeism, pushed out of the public sphere. spheres. But, as the authors show, it was in the 2000s that everything changed, and religion became an active subject of publicity; in this sense, indeed, the Greek situation fits into the post-secular paradigm.

This burst of ecclesiastical activity coincided with the ministry of Archbishop Christodoulos as head of the Church, from 1998, when he was elected, until his death in 2008. In a sense, Christodulus, a bright, popular, and sometimes unpredictable character, is the main character of the book, and his ministry, the very style of this ministry, is determined by-

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whether the face of the new period: an active political and public position; a claim to moral leadership of the people; a clear, consistent conservative program; a heightened sense of institutional church identity, and so on. The first chapters of the book reveal exactly this new state. V. Makrides ' article analyzes the consequences (or price) of this intrusion into the public sphere: the most acute series of scandals in 2005, connected with accusations of corruption, secret unconstitutional ties with the state and political intrigues (Chapter 3).

But even in the second part of the book, which is devoted not so much to official as to" popular " religiosity, we are talking, in one way or another, about the same public role of the Church: for example, the article by L. A. Tolstoy. Molokotos-Liderman about the youth rock band "Eleftheroi "("Free Monks"), founded by Orthodox monks, there is a beautiful illustration of the conscious or intuitive attempt of church people to break through the classical boundaries of social differentiation; in the title of the article, the author formulates the paradox as follows:" sacred words in a secular rhythm " (Chapter 10).

For us in Russia, familiarizing ourselves with the experience of Greece also means an inevitable, almost subconscious comparison with the fatherland. When we read about Christodule, Russian parallels inevitably appear before our eyes: Patriarch Kirill. Not so charismatic, but not without some charisma; also an active politician; perhaps intellectually stronger and much more predictable; but also primarily concerned with the task of establishing "national Orthodoxy" and protecting the Church as a corporation... In Russia, as in Greece, the Church invades public life in order to protect and raise its legal status and interests, to protect the church community with certain rights and interests of its members. The parallel with Russia also lies in the way the educated society is divided in its attitude to this public activity of the Church: even the" open letter of five hundred " intellectuals in 2005 for the speedy and complete separation of Church and state has its obvious Russian parallels... But there is one major difference: in Greece, as Makrides writes, despite the disputes "at the top" about church-state relations, the Church continues to exert a strong influence on society at the grassroots, informal level, simply because of the high "background" of religious activity.-

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In Russia, where the level of this religiosity is still much lower, such informal influence is not observed.

Above, I mentioned the" conservative program " of the Church, which became so vivid and offensive during the years of Christodule's ministry. Indeed, anti-Western and anti-globalist rhetoric, criticism of liberalism, a complex attitude towards minorities and pluralism as such, and a heavy, reluctant movement to reconsider tender relations-all this is present and dominates. But here the authors of the introduction utter a phrase about the "conservative modernization" of the Greek Church (which is not at all the same as a blind defense), and this already means a different analytical turn. Anastasios Anastasiades is particularly brilliant at understanding these subtle things in his article, which directly contains the expression "an intriguing paradox"in the title. It raises a paradoxical question: who is the real reformer in the Church: the openly conservative but overactive Christodule, or the new Archbishop Jerome II who replaced him in 2008, a cautious, non-public, compliant, diplomatic prelate?

V. Rudometov notes in his article that when speaking about the Christodule, it is necessary to separate conservative rhetoric from real changes in the life of the Church-changes that are even an inevitable consequence of its deep, active contact with society (p. 35). Anastasiades raises this paradox to the level of theoretical reflection. He criticizes the old paradigm of secularization and notes that the new generation of scientists who recognize the new role of religion do not have the methods or theoretical language to explain these changes, to go beyond the old dualism of modernity/anti-modernity. Stating this theoretical vacuum, Anastasiades offers his own solution. He speaks of the "creative potential of crises" in the history of religion; in particular, referring to the European Reformation, the author recalls the complex dialectic according to which increasing rigor and conservatism are inevitable conditions for any reform: "A successful innovation has to appear as non-innovative" ("A successful innovation has to appear as non-innovative as possible", c 52, approx. 11). The author, being a historian, dwells in detail on the history of ecclesiastical renewal between the two World Wars, when Greek Orthodoxy "discovered" mass charity, when

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the social activity of the laity (the Zoe brotherhood, etc.) has sharply increased, and when, on the other hand, in parallel with these obvious "modern innovations", a sharp defensive rhetoric of intolerance has developed in response to the opening of society and the rise of nationalism. Anastasiades compares this paradox to the reign of Archbishop Christodoulos, revealing in the actions of the indefatigable prelate a certain energy of change, paradoxically inseparable from a forcibly conservative, tough response to the new challenges of European integration and pluralism.

This is an astoundingly interesting guess! It is confirmed in the text of Eleni Sotiriou (Chapter 6) on the "revision of views on the status of women" in Greek Orthodoxy. During the years of Christodule's ministry, there were subtle but significant changes: the revival of the deaconessship in 2004; the revival of the activities of lay sisterhoods; a new development and new significance of female monasticism; a steady increase in the proportion of women among students and staff of theological schools; and finally, the first ever, albeit rather cautious, official appeal of the Church to the problems of bioethics ("Statement of the Bioethics Commission " of 2006).

The initiators of these reforms-through-their-negation, the reforms of necessity, are placed in the Greek ecclesiastical spectrum between the more liberal supporters of the reforms, for example, around the Academy of Theological Studies in Volos, Thessaly (see Makrides, p. 81 and Sotiriou, p. 138), and, on the other hand, the extreme conservatives-Old Calendarists (of whom from 700,000 to 1 million in 11 million-strong Greece; p. from), accusing the official Church of ecumenical heresy, pro-Catholic and pro-Western sympathies: a subtle analysis of this circle, as if from within, is given in an article by the anthropologist Dimitris Antoniou through the prism of the tough debate surrounding the construction of a mosque in Athens (Chapter 7).

The story of the mosque deserves special attention: As at the time of writing this book, and as you are now reading this review, Athens remains the only European capital without a mosque. The rapid economic growth of the 1990s (which, alas, is now remembered nostalgically) led to the immigration of Muslims (as elsewhere in Europe, although in Greece-on a smaller scale: Muslims make up about 1.3% of the population). The construction of a mosque was on the agenda, and then it turned out that this task is politically non-trivial. Outwardly, the Church, as well as the authorities, expressed positivity-

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In the spirit of European multicultural correctness, however, the "pitfalls" were insurmountable: resistance came from both "above"and " below". The authors who write (from different angles) about this history (Dia Anagnostou and Ruby Gropas, Chapter 4, and Dimitris Antoniou, Chapter 7) show how the" Muslim question " remains painful for Greek historical memory; but they also show how the mosque debate has become another laboratory for re-evaluating the role of the Church in Greek history. Greek society and state. Prodromos Yiannas writes about the same re-evaluation, but it applies to the status of all religious minorities (not only Muslims, but also Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Gypsies) (Chapter 5).

The book as a whole provides a wealth of material, "grasps" Greek Orthodoxy in a complex dynamic determined by the constant response to incessant crises of power and an inescapable crisis of identity. Perhaps several things are missing from the overall picture: a direct analysis of the relations of the Greek Church with the Patriarchate of Constantinople; a more systematic differentiation of different groups and orientations within the Church; and, finally, an analytical ethnography of the entire thickness of "folklore", popular Orthodoxy - the very one that probably changes significantly, but still determines a relatively high " background religiosity".

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