BOTH THESE WESTERN PERSPECTIVES on the Greek religious imagination have drawn attention to a part of the reality; but if the Hellenist view was too narrowly focussed on the Greece of antiquity, so too, in a different fashion, has been the postmodern alertness to the disenchantment with western ways which is a facet of the term Romiosýne. Another great part of Romiosýne is the Byzantine legacy of the Orthodox Christian faith, whose symbols and thought forms are embedded throughout the culture, and Greeks may resist the ethos of the modern European state not only from individualism or scepticism, but also from an Orthodox vision of society. (9) Studies in Greek literature, especially poetry, by writers such as Zissimos Lorenzatos and Philip Sherrard, set a pattern establishing the influence of Orthodox as well as classical symbolism on the Greek poets. (10) Positive revaluation of the Christian influence on the Byzantine heritage had begun in the 1930s with Steven Runciman’s Byzantine Civilisation, (11) and it continued with Sherrard’s historical and theological treatise The Greek East and the Latin West, (12) and with the history of the contemporary Greek nation state which the anthropologist John Campbell and Sherrard later co-authored. (13) Ethnographic studies, too, have increasingly noticed the influence of Orthodoxy on Greek popular culture; and for this they are deeply indebted to the vision of their first exponent, John Campbell, for he not only achieved the classic study of patronage, economics and kinship among the Sarakatsani, (14) but he also perceived a whole range of imaginative elements, such as the sacred ties between shepherds and their sheep, the symbolic structure of relations within the household, the sense of release felt after the Easter service, the nature of the blood, moving as a ‘mysterious and intelligent force’ binding people together. In this way he was the pathfinder, and provided an incomparable base for those who came after him. More recently aspects of church practice (15) and church ritual, (16) pilgrimage centres (17) and monasteries (18) have been described, and monastic teaching has been extensively documented; (19) and even in the more elusive arenas of city, village and mountain pasture, distinctive Orthodox conceptions, for example of the angelic and diabolic worlds, (20) of time and memory, (21) of women’s role and the use of household space, (22) of the sacramental quality of substances like wheat, wine and oil, (23) and of the relation between man and the land (24) and man and the natural world, (25) have been found largely intact and persisting.

These observations reflect a sense that in Greece the religious imagination has been particularly rich and influential because it informs the whole culture and not merely the lives of individuals; and an awareness of this power of the religious influence in shaping civilization generally has reawakened in the West. The so-called ‘clash of civilisations’, (26) suggested as the new face of the world order after the Cold War and debated as a possible element in the events of 9/11 and after, has caused many people to reappraise the way in which the deep levels of a culture continue at a conscious or unconscious level to carry the thought forms of the faith which created it. This recognition is a return to a view which has always had its adherents: the celebrated religious autobiography of Thomas Merton, (27) for instance, records the influence on him of a childhood spent amid the Christian symbols and structures of an old French town. And more recent ethnographic evidence has confirmed the deep Catholic symbolism still present in the life patterns of many western European communities. (28) In the same way, the transition from the medieval to the early modern period in western Europe has been reappraised, overturning the modernist view and revealing in the thought of the peasantry a deep enculturation of Catholic symbolism which had been overlooked. (29)

These discoveries of long continuities in symbolic elements of Greek, and more generally of European, culture have given fresh relevance to my original preference for centering this book on the whole round of life in a single community, and for exploring the varied symbolism by which the community makes sense of that life. And at the same time the religious grounding found in many of these continuities has endorsed a question which the book increasingly set before me as it developed—the question, how far Orthodox Christianity has provided a central, coherent set of those symbols. This second issue is native to the way Greeks see themselves, whether Orthodoxy is a past from which they wish to free themselves, or one which they take as a matter of course as their own, or one which they long to make more fully present in aspects which have been lost. But these Orthodox Christian roots cannot be explored without also encountering those pre-Christian ideas which others have noticed previously, or those sceptical ways of combining and playing with all such notions, often prompted by the patterns of individual competition and self-assertion already referred to; and since these other aspects of the culture are part of a living, contradictory whole, I have also tried to clarify how they relate to the Orthodox understanding of things, so as to provide as complete a picture as is possible, in the space available, of the Greek religious imagination as I found it within the varied aspects of one community.

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