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J. Kalić, Information about Belgrade in Constantine VII
Porphyrogenitus · D. Popović, On Two Lost Medieval Serbian
Reliquaries · D. Kovačević Kojić, Serbian Silver at the Venetian
Mint · A. Fotić, Coping with Extortion on a Local Level · L. Höbelt,
Balkan or Border Warfare? Glimpses from the Early Modern Period ·
P. M. Kitromilides, Spinozist Ideas in the Greek Enlightenment
· M. Ković, Great Britain and the Consular Initiative of the Great
Powers in Bosnia and Herzegovina · M. Bjelajac, Humanitarian
Catastrophe as a Pretext for the Austro-Hungarian Invasion of Serbia
1912–1913 · F. Guelton, Avec le général Piarron de Mondésir:
Un aller-retour de Brindisi à Valona · D. Bakić, The Serbian Minister
in London, Mateja Bošković, the Yugoslav Committee, and Serbia’s
Yugoslav Policy in the Great War · G-H. Soutou, The Paris
Conference of 1919 · B. Milosavljević, Drafting the Constitution
of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1920) · M. Vasiljević,
Carrying Their Native Land and Their New Home in Their Hearts · S.
G. Markovich, The Grand Lodge of Yugoslavia between France
and Britain (1919–1940) · V. G. Pavlović, La longue marche de
Tito vers le sommet du parti communiste · K. Nikolić, Great Britain,
the Soviet Union and the Resistance Movements in Yugoslavia, 1941 · Y.
Mourélos, Les origines de la guerre civile en Grèce · A. Edemskiy,
Additional Evidence on the Final Break between Moscow and Tirana
in 1960–1961 · Lj. Dimić, Yugoslav Diplomacy and the 1967 Coup
d’Etat in Greece · K. V. Nikiforov, The Distinctive Characteristics
of Transformation in Eastern Europe · B. Šijaković, Riddle and
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ANNUAL OF THE INSTITUTE FOR BALKAN STUDIES

ISSN 0350-7653
UDC 930.85(4-12) BELGRADE 2019 eISSN 2406-0801

[Link]
 [Link]
UDC 130.2(495)"17"
14 Спиноза Б.
141.4 Евстатиу Х.
Original scholarly work
[Link]
Paschalis M. Kitromilides*
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Spinozist Ideas in the Greek Enlightenment**

Abstract: In this paper I discuss the religious ideas and religious criticism voiced by a Greek
eighteenth-century philosopher, Christodoulos Efstathiou from Acarnania, also known
by the pejorative surname Pamblekis (1730?–1793). He is known in Greek intellectual
history on the basis of three works, Αληθής Πολιτική (True Politics) published in 1781,
Περί Φιλοσόφου (On Philosopher), published in 1786, and Περί Θεοκρατίας (On Theoc-
racy), published in 1793. The paper presents an analysis of the criticism of the clergy, the
Church and organized religion voiced in the latter work. It is argued that Christodoulos’s
religious ideas were inspired by the historical criticism of religion that emanated from
the ideas of Spinoza and thus he could be considered a rare representative of the Radi-
cal Enlightenment in the Greek Enlightenment tradition and its broader Southeastern
European context.
Keywords: Radical Enlightenment, religious criticism, anticlericalism, Spinozism, Orthodox
Church

I n the broad debate on the “radical Enlightenment”, which has renewed in sub-
stantial ways our understanding of the intellectual history of Europe prior
to the French Revolution, it has been suggested that as a consequence of the
impact of Spinoza’s arguments it became possible to distil from the Dutch phi-
losopher’s thought “a complete system of social, moral, and political ideas built
on philosophical principles totally incompatible with authority, tradition, and
revealed religion, which could be effectively popularized and infiltrated into the
consciousness of the non-academic reading public, without readers necessarily
even realizing they were imbibing Spinozism”.1

* pkitrom@[Link]
** An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference of the International Soci-

ety for Intellectual History, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, June 2017.

1 Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Ox-

ford University Press, 2001), 431.

106 Balcanica L (2019)

I do not wish on the present occasion to go into the debate on the char-
acter and limits of the radical Enlightenment. I will attempt instead to illustrate
the claim concerning the far-reaching, chronologically and geographically speak-
ing, impact of the heritage of Spinozist ideas on continental Europe by drawing
attention to the evidence supplied by a totally ignored and until very recently
essentially inaccessible text, which registered in substantial ways this heritage
without ever mentioning the name of the controversial progenitor of the radical
Enlightenment.
I am referring to a work with the characteristic title On Theocracy, pub-
lished anonymously in modern Greek at Leipzig in 1793 but with certainty at-
tributed to one of the few genuine representatives of the radical Enlightenment
who wrote in Greek, the encyclopaedic philosopher Christodoulos from Acar-
nania, known in the sources with the pejorative surname Pamblekis, ascribed to
him by his detractors.2 Biographical information on Christodoulos is limited
but we do know that as a student he was connected with one of the major En-
lightenment experiments in Greek culture, the Athonite Academy under Evge-
nios Voulgaris in the 1750s. We also know that he travelled in Italy and in central
Europe where he published two books, one anonymously in Venice in 1781 and
another under his name in Vienna in 1786. His first book was a Greek transla-
tion of the La veritable politique des personnes de qualité by Remond de Cours,
a rather conventional text, to which, however, Christodoulos added extensive
comments modernizing the arguments put forward by the seventeenth-century
courtier author of the original. The second book was much more interesting and
openly aligned to the Enlightenment. It appeared under the title Of philosopher,
philosophy, physical, metaphysical, spiritual and divine principles. It consisted of
translations and adaptations of entries on the subjects listed in the title from
the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert. In this text Christodoulos talks
extensively of Newton and his work in physics and mentions the names of many
philosophers, including Wolff, Locke and Descartes. His real philosophical hero
appears to be Leibniz because, Christodoulos suggests, through his monadology
he managed to harmonize the understanding of the physical phenomena of na-
ture with a conception of the spiritual power that rules the world. In this book
Christodoulos refers twice to Spinoza’s philosophy of nature only to reject it and
call it a frought, because Spinoza, he claims, makes all things in nature their own
cause.3 His objection to Spinoza and his followers, “who are called materialists”,
is based on their refusal of the existence of spiritual powers and the reduction

2 On Christodoulos and his place in the Greek version of the “Radical Enlightenment”,
see Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution. The Making of Modern Greece
(Harvard University Press, 2013), 251–253.
3 Περί Φιλοσόφου, φιλοσοφίας, φυσικῶν, μεταφυσικῶν, πνευματικῶν καὶ θείων ἀρχῶν (Vienna

1786), 301.
 P. M. Kitromilides, Spinozist Ideas in the Greek Enlightenment 107

of everything to material nature, which, however, following the scholastics, they

endow with mind.4
Christodoulos’s philosophical views brought him into conflict with pro-
fessional and ideological antagonists, who were more philosophically conven-
tional and obviously found insufficient his condemnation of Spinozist material-
ism. The ideological and personal confrontation that ensued in the environment
of the Greek and Balkan Orthodox community of Vienna, where Christodoulos
had settled as a private tutor and proofreader in printing establishments, pushed
things to extremes. His enemies circulated a hostile satire in the guise of a re-
ligious service attacking Christodoulos for heresy and atheism. He replied in
kind with his treatise On Theocracy, which is a vehement denunciation of the
clergy, the Church and the fundamentals of Christian belief, without, however,
espousing atheism.5
What I propose to do in what follows is to outline his religious criticism
and try to appraise the relation of his arguments to Spinozist ideas in order to
illustrate the variety of religious radicalism espoused and articulated by Christ-
odoulos in the context of late Enlightenment religious thought. Although in
November 1793 he was condemned posthumously by the Patriarchate of Con-
stantinople, the highest authority in the Orthodox Church, as a follower of the
doctrines of Spinoza, the affinity of his ideas with those of Spinoza can only
hypothetically be perceived in his text. The name of the Dutch renegade is never
mentioned in this text, although Christodoulos’s definition of God (= God is a
necessary and infinite substance, independent of any other external cause, sub-
ject to its own natural necessity […], having as equally necessary and infinite
predicates extent and intellect)6 recalls that of Spinoza in the Ethics. It is impos-
sible, however, to document any form of intertextuality between Christodoulos’s
text and the work of Spinoza.
It would be more historically relevant to suggest that all that Christo-
doulos writes on religion derives from the heritage of religious criticism, which
had its distant origin in the philosophy of Spinoza, but a century later had be-
come more diffused as an almost commonplace questioning of conventional re-
ligious orthodoxy. Thus in Christodoulos’s texts, especially in On Theocracy, we
encounter formulations, definitions and arguments which reflect the intellectual
climate associated with Spinoza’s religious thought, in the form it had been ren-

4 Ibid. 333–334.
5 Christodoulos from Acarnania, Ἀπάντησις ἀνωνύμου πρὸς τοὺς αὐτοῦ ἄφρονας κατηγόρους
ἐπονομασθεῖσα περὶ θεοκρατίας, [A Response by Anonymous to His Foolish Detractors Enti-
tled On Theocracy], 2nd ed., ed. P. M. Kitromilides (Athens: Cultura, 2013; hereafter cited
as On Theocracy). The new edition contains an extensive introductory study on the broader
significance of the Pamplekis case, 9–56.
6 On Theocracy, 214–215.
108 Balcanica L (2019)

dered as a shared substratum of religious dissent during the later phases of the
age of the Enlightenment.
Let us examine the textual evidence more closely. Christodoulos himself
rejects categorically the charges of his enemies for atheism and pantheism. As
it had also been the case in his earlier work On philosopher, his critical religious
attitude does not derive from the espousal of atheism but from a conception of
a rationalized religious belief as an element of a broader critical epistemological
position. At this philosophical level his conception of God as an “infinite and
necessary substance” could not of course be identified with the conception of a
personal God as understood in Judaism or Christianity.
The decisive element which defines the religious attitude that pervades
On Theocracy is an unconditional and uncompromising anticlericalism. The
criticism of the clergy to which Christodoulos resorts, nevertheless, is not
limited to the denunciation of the excesses of the clergy in matters of personal
morality, economic behaviour, misguidance and deception of the simpler masses
of the Christian people through the cultivation of superstition and the exercise,
through the manipulation of fears abetted by superstition, of tyrannical power
over them. All of these issues are extensively and mercilessly treated in his pages
and from many points of view set the background and produce the critical
vocabulary of anticlericalism that will be voiced by the radical strand in the
Greek Enlightenment in the following decades.
Christodoulos, however, does not stop at this vociferous version of social
criticism. He goes several steps further beyond the denunciation of the moral
and pastoral failures of the clergy to the questioning and refutation of many
central and fundamental theses of the sacred tradition of the church, especially
teachings concerning the communion of the Saints and the place of the prophets
in the plan of Divine Providence for the salvation of humanity. At this point
Spinoza’s historical criticism of the Bible in the Tractatus theologico-politicus can
be detected in the distant background. Christodoulos, however, is much more
violent in his expressions and does not spare words and denigratory adjectives in
characterizing all these holy presences in the make-up of the religious world of
the traditional Churches of Christian Europe, Orthodox and Roman Catholic.
His most biting argument that prophets and saints were impostors and were
used only as a mechanism for the imposition of “theocracy” upon the simple-
minded believers place him unquestionably outside the community of the faith-
ful of the Orthodox Church.
The views by means of which Christodoulos articulates his religious criti-
cism do not represent a conversion to Protestantism, which Christodoulos ex-
plicitly rejects denying that he was a follower of Luther.7 We cannot furthermore
detect a straightforward espousal of the views of Spinoza, which as we saw are

7 On Theocracy, 122.
 P. M. Kitromilides, Spinozist Ideas in the Greek Enlightenment 109

only critically referred to in Pamblekis’s earlier work. The historical criticism of

the Bible and of the Christian Church, reflect with reasonable clarity relevant
views and ideas of the religious thought of the Enlightenment. To this kind
of argumentation Christodoulos had been obviously exposed by studying the
relevant entries in the Encyclopédie, on which he had also drawn in composing
his earlier work. That had been an apprenticeship in the “enlightenment”, which
means “virtue and philosophy”, as Christodoulos himself explicitly mentions in
the opening sentence of his proemium to the work On Theocracy.8
The broader appraisal that Christodoulos articulates in this light in con-
sidering the practice of the Church and its ministers turns out to be deeply radi-
cal and subversive of the established order of things in the ecclesiastical space of
the Orthodox East, an order of things he calls theocracy.
Theocracy is the continuous and persistent will of the clergy to exercise
total power upon the minds of the laity by means of the manipulation of reli-
gious feelings and metaphysical fears.9 On these issues “enlightenment”, in whose
pursuit Christodoulos feels existentially committed, leads him to frontal colli-
sion with the entire structure of power and exploitation, which he perceives, as
an independent and emancipated observer, to be integrated at the heart of the
ecclesiastical polity. His enemies and detractors were the closest and most famil-
iar representatives of that awesome, as he understands it, product of darkness
and corruption.
The term theocracy, which Christodoulos uses as a characterization and
at the same denunciation of the system of thought and practice of his enemies, is
used in modern Greek for the first time by Christodoulos. Obviously the term is
not modern Greek. Its authorship belongs to the first-century A.D. Hellenizing
Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who coined the term in order to describe the
polity of the ancient Hebrews. Christodoulos must with certainty have encoun-
tered the term, if not in the editions, of Josephus’s works in the Greek original
that had been available since the early sixteenth century, at least in the pages
of the Encyclopédie, from which he had gleaned the material of his book On
philosopher in the mid-1780s. In the relevant entry in the Encyclopédie, volume
XVI, pp. 210–212, the careful reader can notice the origins of all the ideas and
interpretations that Christodoulos would transfer to the Greek vocabulary of
philosophical and religious criticism. In the Encyclopédie entry “théocratie”, we
find the definition that was going to be employed by Pamblekis: “theocracy is
a government of a nation directly by God, who exercises his sovereignty over it
and announces his will through the medium of prophets and clergy”. It is also
pointed out that the unique example of a “true theocracy” was that of the ancient
Hebrews. Accordingly Christodoulos in explaining the term theocracy cites ex-

8 Ibid. 141.
9 Ibid. 179–184.
110 Balcanica L (2019)

tensively the example of the Hebrews (“first theocracy”).10 He goes on to offer

other examples of theocratic regimes, citing Islamic and Christian models, but
insists on the more purely theocratic organization of the Jewish people (second
theocracy).11
The broader question that arises from the consideration of the “Pamble-
kis case” concerns the relevance of the evidence of the particular case to the un-
derstanding, in more general terms, of the religious thought of the Enlighten-
ment and of the contribution of religious criticism to intellectual change in early
modern European culture. On this level of analysis the fragments of the histori-
cal picture supplied by the Pamblekis case might be fitted into a more general
tapestry of ideological conflict and intellectual problematization.
Beyond its significance for understanding issues involved in the interplay
of religious criticism and intellectual change in the culture of the Greek Enlight-
enment, placed in the wider comparative framework of the evolution of religious
ideas and criticism in the intellectual history of early modern Europe, Pamble-
kis’s On Theocracy could be seen as a Greek offshoot, as an expression in the
Greek language, of the problems and soul-searching provoked by the propaga-
tion of Spinoza’s ideas and by the consequences of these ideas for the formation
of moral conscience. On the evidence of his work Christodoulos could be seen to
move in the orbit of religious skepticism and of the criticism of the sacred, which
emanated from what has been described, by the great Italian historian of reli-
gious ideas Antonio Rotondò, “the centrality of doubt”.12 Pamblekis’s ideas and
personal tragedy, which resonates painfully in his last work, could and should
be interpreted and appreciated in connection and as part of living through the
doubt of religious belief as a personal struggle of intellectual liberation. This is
precisely how the connection between religious criticism and intellectual change
works in the actual flow of historical experience through the drama, most of the
time, of the personal life of individuals who feel they cannot compromise with
injustice, hypocrisy and obscurantism.

10 Ibid. 175–178.
11 Ibid. 179–184.
12 See La centralità del dubbio. Un progetto di Antonio Rotondò, eds. Camilla Hermanin and

Luisa Simonutti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2011).

 P. M. Kitromilides, Spinozist Ideas in the Greek Enlightenment 111

Bibliography and sources

Israel, Jonathan. The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity. Oxford
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Kitromilides, Paschalis M. Enlightenment and Revolution. The Making of Modern Greece.
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