There can be no doubt that, during his visit to Athens, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio received an invaluable gift from Greece: the opportunity to stand before the Acropolis and address humanity from the Pnyx.
And it is my personal conviction that he deserved it. For he did not come to Greece with the audacity of his predecessor, Antony Blinken, and his demand for a corrosive intervention in the very core of Greek society. In early 2024, Blinken had asked the Greek Prime Minister, at his family home in Crete, to implement the New World Order agenda aimed at dismantling the historic institution of the family, an agenda promoted by the Democrats.
They succeeded in Greece with the passage of same-sex marriage legislation. It was a law which the then U.S. administration, through Secretary Blinken, had bound Athens to pass in such a way that, at a later stage, senior Greek government officials would find themselves compelled to justify it publicly, proclaiming that it was supposedly a matter of geopolitics and national security.
Clearly, Marco Rubio’s agenda carried a different orientation. At the very least, it was consistent with the Republican conviction – one that secured a second term in the White House for President Trump – that social cohesion, together with the very notion of the nation, must be a priority for every state that respects its own substance and identity.
That is why, at the Pnyx, the American Secretary of State did not merely speak positively of Greece or praise it simply as a strategic ally. He went further, explicitly referring to its people, the Greek people, acknowledging that: “The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike.”
Of course, Rubio’s speech at the Pnyx, although carefully crafted, was not without weaknesses, both in its overall understanding of Hellenism and Christianity and in certain particular points. One example, symptomatic of a broader Western fallacy, is the fact that the significance of the Greeks is confined to classical antiquity, from which we are then transported directly to the present-day provision of geostrategic advantages to the superpower. Or, again, the underlying assumption that the foundations of the West’s “natural law” are to be found in Greek thought.
And yet Rubio’s speech at the Pnyx reveals to contemporary Hellenism, both through its crucial observations and through its omissions, the path toward a global Greek strategic presence. Let me explain.
The Secretary of State may have recognized the grandeur of the Acropolis standing behind him, unshaken by the passage of time. And he may have referred twice in his speech to kallos (“beauty,” “beautiful”), without discerning the depth of the Greek metaphysics that the West has lost, and whose restoration he himself genuinely and sincerely cares about. The Greeks, however, became a paradigm in world history because they recognized beauty in the world as an attribute of God.
As a devout Catholic, Mr. Rubio understands the significance of Christianity. Indeed, he dared to invoke the name of Jesus Christ only a few hundred metres from the Areopagus, where the Apostle Paul proclaimed the Gospel to the Athenians – even though his speech did not establish the unified classical and Christian cultural framework that so profoundly defined the relationship between man and God, as only the Greeks succeeded in experiencing and bringing to expression.
It is telling, moreover, that although Mr. Rubio’s speech followed an implicit progression – “the cosmos, the rational order of the cosmos, natural laws, the human mind, the natural order, truth-goodness-beauty, objective standards, Christianity-natural law” – and although he himself is a Christian, he was unable to see in the Acropolis a prefiguration of the Christian metaphysics of Creation by God, to which the very beauty of the world bears witness.
He spoke of the world, but did not see it as the work of God. He spoke of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of the Christian theology of Augustine and Aquinas, but he did not perceive the natural law he invoked as an expression of the freedom of God the Logos within Creation. Some readers and commentators may dismiss these points as mere theological abstraction. Yet this is precisely the pivotal point at which Western metaphysics ceases to follow Greece in its affirmation of beauty and becomes distorted into a theology and metaphysics of power with grievous consequences for all humanity.
This is where the responsibility of Hellenism begins – and, in this particular case, especially that of Hellenism in the United States, a responsibility that Rubio’s inspired speech implicitly underscores. Both the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which must recover its deeper spiritual mission rather than merely operate on a political level, and the Greek state, through the Embassy of Greece in Washington – where one should also note the dignified and steadfast presence of our Ambassador to the United States, Antonis Alexandridis, during the American Secretary of State’s visit to Athens – have a great duty and responsibility.
They must operate not merely as institutions of ecclesiastical and state power, but respectively as missionaries and ambassadors of Greek Orthodoxy. They must establish structures for disseminating Greek and Orthodox culture throughout the United States, for the benefit not only of fourth-generation Greek Americans, who may scarcely suspect the power of the Greek spirit and the Greek language, but also of every sensitive American citizen for whom the American dream of mere earthly existence appears small when set against immortality.
What Mr. Rubio said, and did not say, in Athens reveals the glorious field of opportunity before Hellenism in the twenty-first century and lays bare the immense dimensions of the task that the Orthodox Church, the Greek state, and the institutions of the Greek diaspora are called upon to undertake in the United States.
For, whether we like it or not, Greece has always been humanity’s initiator into Beauty, Truth, and Eternity – from Homer and the Presocratics to George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Saint Porphyrios, and Saint Paisios. This, I believe, is what the American Secretary of State himself ultimately seeks at the deepest level; this is what every human being, everywhere, longs for. The momentum is ideal–for both Hellenism and America.
Published in Hellas Journal, October 9, 2026.
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