By Dean Kalimniou
The present debate within the Greek community of Australia concerning the language of the Divine Liturgy unfolds with a curious intensity, as though beneath its surface there stirs a deeper anxiety about continuity, belonging, and the fragile architecture of memory.
It is a debate that draws upon history, sentiment, theology, and the lived realities of a diasporic existence that has long ceased to be anchored in a single linguistic world, and yet continues to seek, with varying degrees of urgency, a point of coherence.
For my own part, I admit at the outset to a profound attachment to the Greek language of the liturgy, one that has its origins in childhood and which has only deepened with time. The cadences of the troparia, the intricate weaving of doctrine into poetry, the subtle harmonies through which theology is rendered audible, all these have shaped my sensibility in ways that defy easy articulation. When the hymns are chanted in Greek, there arises a sense of aesthetic and spiritual completeness, as though language itself becomes an icon through which the divine is intimated. This experience, I readily concede, is subjective. It belongs to the realm of personal formation, of memory, of the ear attuned to certain sounds and not others.
In English, I find no such resonance. Others may well experience the inverse. When I hear the troparia in Greek I am entranced and enthralled, seized by the artistry of the language, by its poetics, by the astonishing skill with which fearsome and intricate theology is distilled into phrases of such delicacy and force. That I do not experience this in English is no argument. It is a confession. I prefer the liturgy in Greek and derive comfort from experiencing it in the language my ancestors have participated in it, down the centuries.
Yet it is precisely here that the tension emerges, and it is a tension that is neither new nor peculiar to our circumstances. The Orthodox Church, from its earliest centuries, has prided itself upon its capacity for evangelisation, for the transmission of its message across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius stands as a testament to this impulse, their creation of an alphabet for the Slavic peoples arising from the conviction that the Gospel must be understood if it is to be embraced. The subsequent elevation of Church Slavonic into a liturgical language reflects a paradox that has recurred throughout religious history, whereby a vernacular, once sanctified, assumes a permanence that transcends its original communicative function.
The Greek Orthodox tradition itself participates in this paradox. The language of the liturgy, though rooted in a historical vernacular, has long since acquired a sacral quality that resists reduction to mere utility. In this respect, it stands alongside other religious traditions in which language operates as a vessel of continuity rather than immediate comprehension. Latin persisted within the Western Church until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Sanskrit continues to bear the weight of sacred Hindu texts. Classical Arabic remains the language of the Qur’an, its recitation uniting believers across diverse linguistic landscapes. The Coptic Church preserves a hybrid liturgical form derived from a language no longer spoken in daily life as well as Greek, and yet this has not diminished in the slightest the immediacy, primacy, or cultural indispensability of that sacred tongue. The irony is instructive. Comprehension has not proven to be the sole or even primary condition of devotion.
What is striking in these examples is the absence of any simple correlation between understanding and devotion. Millions participate in rituals conducted in languages that elude their full comprehension, and yet find within them a depth of meaning that transcends the literal. The sacred language becomes, in such contexts, a repository of continuity, a bridge to an ancestral past that remains constitutive of present identity.
At the same time, there exist countervailing examples within the Orthodox world itself. The Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, once predominantly Greek in its liturgical expression, has embraced Arabic as a language of worship, reflecting the linguistic realities of its faithful. This shift underscores a principle that has always coexisted with the preservation of sacred languages, namely the imperative of accessibility. If worship is to form, instruct, and gather the faithful, there remains a compelling case that the faithful ought to know, at least in substantial measure, what it is they are affirming. It is in this context that the words of Saint John Chrysostom acquire their proper force: “If you do not know what is being said, you say ‘Amen’ in vain.” That observation cannot be brushed aside lightly, for it arises from a pastoral concern as much as a theological one.
The early twentieth century controversy in Greece over Queen Olga’s initiative to translate the Bible into the vernacular, which provoked riots and intense political upheaval, reveals the extent to which language can become a site of contestation, where questions of authority, identity, and legitimacy converge. The so called Evangelika disturbances did not concern mere philology. They exposed a deep fear that once sacred language is surrendered, a civilisation begins to forfeit the forms through which it has imagined itself.
Australia inherits this complex historical legacy and refracts it through its own particular conditions. It is a society in which monolingualism predominates, where the acquisition of foreign languages often encounters resistance that borders on the existential. Within such a context, the transmission of Greek across generations becomes fraught with difficulty. The children and grandchildren of migrants, while often expressing pride in their heritage, increasingly express the view that they find themselves estranged from the language that once served as its primary vehicle. This estrangement manifests not only in everyday communication, but also in the realm of worship, where some claim the liturgical language is an impenetrable barrier. While Australia is a multicultural society, it is, in many respects, a society in which foreign languages are regarded with suspicion, inconvenience, or polite impatience, and this almost ontological hysteria before the task of language learning is transmitted to and internalised by descendants of migrants with remarkable efficiency.
I find myself unable to comprehend fully the reasons for this disconnection, yet its existence is undeniable. There are Greek Australians for whom the language of their ancestors has receded into a symbolic realm, invoked in moments of celebration or nostalgia, yet absent from the texture of daily life. For such individuals, the liturgy in Greek may evoke a sense of exclusion rather than belonging. This is particularly so in an age of mixed marriages, diffuse communal loyalties, and conversion, where the parish contains not only those formed by inherited Greekness, however attenuated, but also those who approach Orthodoxy from outside the ethnic fold altogether.
One may insist that we are Greek and that Greek therefore belongs naturally in our churches, yet this assertion becomes unstable the moment one asks what occurs when Greeks no longer feel particularly Greek, when their descendants inherit surname without language, sentiment without practice, ancestry without immersion. What, too, of the convert for whom the faith is real and urgent, yet for whom Greek is a wall rather than a window? What of the spouse in a mixed marriage who stands beside the family, faithful, willing, present, and yet perpetually unaddressed? These are insistent challenges which are generally addressed via social interaction rather than linguistic iconoclasm.
Those who advocate for the retention of Greek within the liturgy often appeal to history, and with some justification. In the Balkans, liturgical language did not merely reflect identity. It enforced and contested it. To worship in Greek, Bulgarian, or Romanian was to declare allegiance within a landscape where church, school, and nation were inseparable. This was no abstract cultural preference. It unfolded within a struggle marked by coercion, reprisals, and at times outright violence, particularly during the upheavals surrounding the Balkan Wars, when competing national projects sought to secure populations through ecclesiastical and linguistic control. To choose a liturgical language was, in effect, to choose a side, and that choice could carry grave consequences. The Church stood at the centre of this process, preserving Greek identity in some contexts with remarkable tenacity, while in others becoming entangled in projects that subordinated faith to emerging nationalisms, a dynamic that would ultimately lead to the formal condemnation of ethnophyletism as a heresy.
In Australia, the situation is markedly different. The social and political conditions that once rendered language a determinant of identity have been supplanted by a multicultural framework in which affiliations are more fluid and less immediately consequential. The argument that the Greek language must be preserved within the liturgy as a bulwark of identity therefore requires careful examination. It retains symbolic force, yet its practical efficacy may be diminished. Many argue that attendance at a Greek church no longer determines allegiance in any immediate political sense, and the old Balkan equation between liturgical language and identity does not operate with the same urgency.
Equally, the claim that the use of Greek alienates the faithful and contributes to declining attendance demands scrutiny. If language alone were the determining factor, one would expect other English-speaking churches to be flourishing. The evidence suggests otherwise. Secularisation exerts its influence across denominational and linguistic lines, reshaping patterns of religious engagement in ways that cannot be reduced to questions of comprehension. If the central difficulty were simply that people do not understand Greek, Protestant and Catholic churches conducted in English should be overflowing. They are not. The crisis of religious participation in the contemporary West has causes far deeper than vocabulary.
At the same time, there are communities, such as the Coptic and Assyrian churches, which have introduced English liturgies for younger generations and have witnessed significant participation. This phenomenon invites a more nuanced analysis. For many from Middle Eastern backgrounds, religious identity assumes a primacy that transcends linguistic considerations. In the Assyrian case, however, language retains a central role, indicating that the relationship between language and worship is mediated by a complex interplay of priorities and historical experiences. This suggests that the question is not simply whether language matters. It suggests rather that communities order their inheritances differently. Some privilege comprehension in worship. Some privilege continuity of ancestral speech. Some seek a hybrid equilibrium. These are, relatively new and not established communities. The answer, in other words, is rarely binary.
The Greek community in Australia occupies a position that resists simple categorisation. It is a community in which multiple languages coexist, often within the same individual, each associated with different registers of experience. Greek may function as the language of heritage and ceremony, English as the language of everyday interaction, and the liturgy as a space where these dimensions intersect. The question, therefore, is whether a synthesis can be achieved that honours this multiplicity without reducing it to a lowest common denominator. Perhaps the true challenge is to discover a mode of worship that reflects the multifaceted nature of our community, one in which several languages may coexist in different registers at the same time, and in which pastoral reality is neither sacrificed to aesthetic nostalgia nor severed from inheritance.
It is also far from self-evident that the assumptions inherited from an earlier migrant era remain empirically true. Much is asserted in communal discourse about the Church as guardian of language, identity, and continuity, yet little serious evidence appears to have been gathered as to how later generations actually experience these institutions, how relevant they find them, or what forms of belonging they now seek. In an age of secularisation, selective participation, and assimilation, the old certainties may be more rhetorical than real. Then again, given the longevity of the Church’s experience we would do well to view its entire trajectory before assume reactive positions.
What is perhaps most revealing in the current debate is that the language in which it is conducted by all parties is primarily English. Whether one militates for the retention of Greek or urges the introduction of English, one does so, overwhelmingly, in the language of the surrounding society. That fact alone says a great deal about where the community now stands. The debate about Greek is largely no longer being waged in Greek. The Greek language, even as it is defended or contested, becomes the object of a discourse that unfolds outside its own parameters.
In such a moment, one recalls the teaching of Saint Kosmas the Aetolian, who regarded the Greek language as indispensable to the renewal of the people. He spoke of it as a treasure through which faith, education, and collective self-recognition might be restored, binding language to liberation and renaissance, to the recovery of a people through the recovery of its speech. Yet the conditions of contemporary Australia are altogether different. The language now stands widely acknowledged to be in terminal decline among many of the third generation, and its preservation can no longer be assumed merely because it is praised. The question that lingers is whether the Saint’s premise itself still holds. In my opinion, the Saint’s words hold the key to our survival.
The debate, then, reveals less a division between opposing camps than a community in the midst of negotiation, seeking to reconcile the claims of tradition with the demands of present reality. It is a negotiation that resists definitive resolution, for it touches upon elements that are deeply personal and collectively significant. Language, in this sense, becomes both a symbol and a practice, a site where memory, identity, and belief converge. The fact that opinion appears so evenly divided is itself fascinating, for it suggests not a settled communal instinct but a people suspended between inheritances, uncertain which losses they are prepared to endure and which they still imagine reversible.
An acknowledgment of this complexity, a willingness to move beyond binaries and an embracing of a plurality that reflects the lived experience of the community may assist in interrogating the issue. Such an approach would require a sensitivity to the diverse ways in which individuals relate to language and worship, an openness to forms of expression that honour both heritage and accessibility. A hybrid solution may prove neither compromise nor capitulation, and may instead constitute an authentic response to a community that already lives in layered linguistic worlds, hopefully allowing those who do not see the importance of retaining Greek, to place it in its proper context.
Whether the Greek language will continue to occupy a central place within the liturgy in Australia remains an open question. What is certain is that the discussion itself has illuminated the enduring significance of language as a bearer of meaning, a marker of belonging, and a medium through which the sacred is encountered. In the end, the future of the liturgical language will depend upon the choices of those who inhabit this tradition, choices that will shape the contours of identity for generations to come. It remains to be seen whether Greek will endure within the liturgy as a holy language lovingly transmitted, or whether it will eventually be discarded by those who no longer experience it as inheritance, only as obstacle. That decision, when it comes, will say much not only about how Greek Australians (and those who join them) pray, but about who they believe themselves to be.
