Between Freedom and Obligation in Greek Orthodox Ethics of Service

Scattered throughout the urban landscape of Athens, Greece, church-run neighborhood soup kitchens exist as a traditional form of social welfare. Due to both  the absence of more organized state services and particular ethical-theological positions within Orthodoxy writ large, the Church of Greece encourages its priests and pious to engage with care for their neighbors. Everyday, people gather in these spaces to cook together, share conversation over coffee, and feed the needy in the direct community. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Athens, this paper considers the ethical underpinnings of this work and the ways in which Orthodox theology and practice come together to generate a system of obligation that is counterintuitively seen as the root of true freedom. 

The priests that I spoke with considered their service a manifestation of "perfect love" that binds people together in the kingdom of God. The women I labored alongside viewed their work as an important contribution to their own salvation and that of others. The people who consistently shared food saw this service as an obvious practice of an active church. I was told repeatedly in many kitchens in Athens that this was simply "what the Church does." All of these communities spoke of duty in nearly reverent tones and did not see that duty as a limit on their agency but rather as a boon for their own capabilities and a manifestation of relational personhood within an Orthodox community. 

The ways that individual practitioners conceived of their carework thus did not align with Western liberal principles of individualism, autonomy, or freedom. The affective and salvific labor of preparing and sharing traditional foods in Greek Orthodox soup kitchens could not be fully conceptualized as either a manifestation of the disinterested love that is found in humanitarian humanitarian reason (Fassin 2012) or the ethical citizenship practices of volunteer regimes (Muehlebach 2012). Instead, their practice built a system of relational ethics more in line with the sacrificial logics of kin networks in non-Western contexts (Aulino 2019; Shohet 2021). In this paper, I argue that this distinction is the direct result of Orthodox theology which is not secluded to the register of high theologians and monks but instead diffuses through Orthodox society even in relatively banal actions. 

The idea that true freedom occurs when one recognizes and acts on the essential relatedness of God and all creation runs through Orthodox theology and daily life (Papanikolaou 2012). This was the guiding principle for my interlocutors. For them, the lack of spontaneity and the deep sense of obligation did not undermine the sincerity of their care or the freedom it could generate. Instead, by acting in accordance with their duty they believed their work to be liberating to themselves and others. Much like Amira Mittermaier's (2019) work has shown the significance of care beyond mere compassion, the theologically-inspired care that I witnessed during my fieldwork highlighted the possibility for other affective dimensions to be cultivated through service.  

This paper brings together anthropological methods and theoretical perspectives with Orthodox theology in new ways to better attend not just to how everyday pious Athenians lived their lives but also to how theological ethics in their ethnographic contexts can offer a nuance to the binary between the free autonomous individual and the obligated relational person.