Confessionalization And/As Knowledge Transfer in the Greek Orthodox Church

by Kostas Sarris, Nikolas Pissis, Miltos Pechlivanos

This volume seeks to explore the potential of the confessionalization paradigm for the purposes of the history of knowledge. Its point of departure is an understanding of confessionalization processes in the early modern Greek Orthodox Church as 'collateral effects' of the Catholic-Protestant clash and as a product of and a response to an 'epistemic pressure' put by representatives of the Western Christian confessions on Greek Orthodox believers. Whether and how such readjustments and reconfigurations of knowledge transfers that amounted to readjustments and reconfigurations of Orthodoxy itself were conceptualized, legitimized or denied, were questions that implied negotiation of the principles of Oikonomia and Akribeia, as marks for leniency, flexibility and elasticity on the one side and strictness, firm application of church canons on the other. The articles of the volume examine, thus, confessionalization as opening up a field of interconfessional communication and conflict, negotiation and modification of knowledge; confessional brokers, interpersonal networks and networks of books, genres and discourses in motion; materialities and medialities of transfer; accommodation strategies and institution-building processes in the Greek Orthodox Church; fluent or ambiguous confessional identities and transconfessional discourses.