ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com © Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material Chapter 2 An Intriguing True–False Paradox: The Entanglement of Modernization and Intolerance in the Orthodox Church of Greece  Anastassios Anastassiadis Being accused of introducing ‘dangerous innovations’ has always been Orthodox Church reformers’ second worst nightmare, ceding the top spot only to the charge of heresy. As a matter of fact a church is the archetype of an organization attached to its tradition and genealogy. It does not welcome innovations. Nevertheless, reformers do manage occasionally to modernize the church, that is render it more compatible to the challenges of its time and more capable of addressing the speciic religious and often social needs of its environment society. How does this become possible? In the simplest of ways: by denying the fact that they are innovating and by proclaiming their attachment to tradition while simultaneously upholding a particularly vehement discourse in the direction of perceived menacing outsiders, reformers do manage to minimize criticisms from within. They also shape the debate in such a way as to oppose the church as a whole to the ‘outside’. It can be deduced that rather than just being a sign of ideological sclerosis, an aggressive discourse may actually hint to a cautious observer that a period of profound change within the church is in process. Therefore, this research aims to provide an insight into how the Orthodox Church of Greece functions by examining similar phenomena in two different historical contexts: the 920s (following the First World War) and the 990s (following the end of the Cold War). However, instead of focusing on the church’s public discourse as authors usually do, this research deals primarily with a sociological analysis of the church as an institution composed of various actors with different interests and strategies but at the same time whose range of action is circumscribed by their belonging to an institution with a speciic and limited repertory of actions (Bourdieu 97a, 97b). It sets out to illustrate the dialectics of controversies,  With regard to the original archival research concerning the interwar period this work draws heavily on the third part of my Ph.D. dissertation presented in 2006 at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris where detailed references can be found (Anastassiadis forthcoming).