Page 72 - Beholding Liberty!

2. Paschalis M. Kitromilides,
Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός.
Οι πολιτικές και κοινωνικές ιδέες, Athens 1996, pp. 183-185.
3. See Paschalis M. Kitromilides,
Ιώσηπος Μοισιόδαξ.
Οι συντεταγμένες Βαλκανικές σκέψεις τον 18ο αιώνα, Athens 2004, p. 222.
interpreted vividly, and at the same time he reasons the expectation that the nation would be liberated by carrying out the “Russian expectation” and thus establishing a Hellenic state free of the Ottoman yoke. Evgenios Voulgaris expressed these ideas in texts such as Regarding the glorious peace (1774) and the Priest of Glory (1772) or in translations of texts by Voltaire and oth- ers which emerged from the impact of events from the Russian-Turkish war on European public opinion. This top Enlightener, in fact, proceeded to another particularly noteworthy expression of his views by drawing up the text entitled Goals for the present critical times of the Ottoman state (1772). In this significant treatise of international analysis, Voulgaris placed the Greek nation’s passion for liberation on the level of international relations, competition and the balance of pow- er, by rewording it as an international issue.2 The author let it be known that realism is required as is appreciation of the international conjuncture about pondering the outlook for national re- organization. In any event, through these intellectual processes, the liberation of the nation was drastically re-determined in modern terms and constituted the specific political demand in the context of the European political reality of the late eighteenth century.
The “modernization”, as the vision of the nation’s liberation could be described, is envisaged even more categorically by deacon Iosipos Moisiodax, a pupil of Evgenios Voulgaris at the Athoniada Academy. With unusual daring, Moisiodax expressed sharp educational, cultural and social criti- cism of the realities of the Hellenic world in the last quarter of the 19th century. The road of crit- icism and the bitter experiences of the persecutions provoked by his daring speech, led Moisiodax to a unique excess regarding the Indicated models that should guide the political reconstruction “of Hellas”, as the collective body was now called and to which he felt he belonged, owing to his education and which he wanted to serve. The transgression consisted of abandoning the model of the later, regulatory “enlightened” absolutism that dominated the Greek political thought of the period as the model of political legitimacy. Instead of this, Moisiodax turned to an alternative political choice, the model of the non-royal state, the res publica, as it was represented histori- cally in his time by the government of the Swiss Confederation.3
Notorious it was, and still is, despite the responsibilities of Europe, either partial or public state of these Swiss. Oligarchs and liberals, nor have they ever desired to spread, nor did they ever insist on royal rule, and the teaching of discipline to all regarding the power of the laws passed by them, which protected the weak during the dynasty of the powerful, everybody was similarly pleased with an equality, the like of which has not been found in the remaining aristocratic countries of Europe.
Moisiodax spoke in this truly memorable quotation about freedom, equality, the power of laws, and the protection of the weak from the “dynasty” of the Powerful; he introduced the distinction between public and private. In a few lines, he passed into the Greek language and thought the principles and central ideas of European liberalism. That is, he provided the vision of freedom with specific normative and practical content. The democratic Enlightenment thus acquired a Greek voice in order to express itself and to inspire.
Dimitrios Katartzis, a contemporary of Moisiodax, was not as daring. Equally as dedicated as Moisiodax to the Enlightenment, he was the Greek who expressed the Enlightenment spirit. Dim- itrios Katartzis did not follow the path of severance as Moisiodax had done, by promoting the non-royal political model of equality and freedom. Katartzis did, however, work out an equally profound subversive idea, that of the Greek nation as a state, as a political community in cap- tivity. The political community was composed of the ecclesiastical and political institutions by
72 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!