Constantelos Demetrios, To feel the Greek Orthodox Church, its faith, history and ethos, transl. Vassileios S. Soteropoulos, Pournaras, Thessaloniki, 1989, pp. 239.
Another book regarding the relationship between Hellenism and Christianity is offered by the reverend – professor Fr. Demetrios Constantelos. It is offered, as pointed out by the author himself in the introduction of the Greek version, in the form of a distillate of his personal experience and his historical research on these issues, with a strong pastoral hue.
The author, a distinguished member of the Greek Orthodox diaspora, dissects the history of Christianity addressing himself mostly to the Greek Orthdox Diaspora, without this diminishing the value of his study to all readers, even the non-Orthodox, who would be interested in such matters.
The problem of the relationship of Hellenism and Christianity is diachronic. It dates from the beginning of the Church presence, but it gains particular interest during the modern time, after the criticism of Harnack about the “Hellenization of Christianity” or after the remarks of the doyen of modern Orthodox theology Fr. Georges Florovsky, about the organic and indivisibly intertwined of the first to the second.
The position of the author is aligned with the view of the distinguished Russian Orthodox theologian as he recognises the catalytic influence of Hellenism in Christianity on two levels: The first level, the historical, Christianity appears linked to the Greek language and the cultural elements of Hellenism, even from the time of the Old Testament. The Hellenistic period, a period of religious coexistence but also existential agony of people for the search of the transcendental, constituted the environment for the thriving of the evangelical message and the fertile fiend of action. This mature historical moment recapitulates in its entirety the impasses of the religious phenomenon and Greek metaphysics in the agony for the salvation of humans, but also the justification of the worldly existence within the chaotic environment of the Roman Empire. The disappearance of Judaic Christianity in a tragic historic adventure, seals the Greek presence in early Christianity.
On a second level, this linguistic and terminological penetration of Christianity, offered, according to the author, a full and incomparable expressive ability for the Orthodox dogma and the divinising Church experience.
Fr. Demetrios recognises the risk of a nationalist or sauvinistic reading of the above and he clearly rejects it. In spite of its pastoral and simplifying nature, the study carries strong historical arguments, although it does not succumb to the temptation in regards to the dynamics of theological and ecclesiastical word in modern multicultural communities, in which it lives, neither the pastoral interests go beyond the Greek Orthodox field.