CHRISTIANITY HAS PLAYED A complex part in its contact with the villages. Initially the Church began by opposing the rural or ‘village’ conception of the world (‘pagan’ originally meant simply ‘of the villages’), seeing it as something in which the divine was presented as polymorphous, chaotic and conflicting, in much the same way as the world of nature appears to be in its immediate impact on the senses. From this perspective some western readers may begin with a superficial impression that village Orthodoxy is still battling with residual memories of paganism. There are points where this is true in Greece, as it is everywhere, but judging that a custom is inconsistent with Christianity is not as simple as may first appear, since the Church’s judgments are graduated. In general it can be said that there are areas of belief which have become accepted as a folk expression of the living tradition, such as not doing handwork on the eves of saints’ days, areas with which the Church co-exists while withholding approval, such as belief in nereids, which the Church rejects in the sense that it redefines nereids as a species of demon, and areas—in particular the use of short incantations known as yítia (dialect for γητειές) or spells—where popular practices avowedly defy ecclesiastical injunctions. At the extreme lie those practices, perceived by both villagers and Church alike as powered by ‘demonic energy’, which involve manipulation of forces to harm others, in particular the appeal to witchcraft. Recent scholarly writing on Greece has drawn attention to these liminal aspects of the culture. (31) But for the most part, the formative influence of the Church has concentrated on building an architecture of Christian meanings which could embrace, unify and transform the fragments of old cultures that live on in Greece wherever they are not directly in contradiction with the Christian message; and a representative picture will focus more on this broad phenomenon, as I do here, than on more extreme instances like witchcraft.

Thus, while in many of these areas the Church was contending with varying levels of what it saw as erroneous belief, it was also engaged in a great enterprise of unifying the divine and natural worlds in a new vision of creation, and this accounts for the large areas where village experience of the natural world has integrated easily with liturgical and theological reflection within the Church. This cosmic vision is already described by St Paul in a passage which holds the germ of this enterprise fully formed. (32) The architecture of this vision was especially comprehensive in the Greek East, and in the vision of theologians like Dionysius ‘the Areopagite’, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas, but it was not limited to the East and something of it penetrated every corner of life in the mediaeval world both East and West. (33) In the West in late mediaeval and early modern times, this vision was disrupted by deliberate separation of thought about the natural world from thought about the divine world—a separation which has created the fragmented and desacralized western cosmos of the present day.

Nevertheless in Greece, partly because of Greece’s 400-year occupation by the Turks and its resulting isolation from the cultural changes in Europe, the vision has continued until very recently with undiminished immediacy. From this point of view many western readers may have a sensation that in the cosmos of village Orthodoxy they are coming home to a more ancient Christian understanding.

Even within the Christian framework in the culture, however, there are choices. Greek culture is full of what have been called ‘contested identities’, (34) belonging to subcultures within the whole, and while some of these (the subcultures of prostitutes, for example, or of the hashish dens (35)) are seen as outside the Christian framework, other conflicts between subcultures occur also within its positive values. One such conflict is that between the monastic and the married life. (36) Other choices, mentioned in this book, involve the tensions set up, for instance, between the duty of preserving the ‘strength’ of the house and that of generosity to others, and between the obligation to observe saints’ days as days of rest, and the demands of the household and of daughters who need dowries. These oppositions, however, though they create certain ambivalences, are ultimately reconciled within the Christian paradigm.