ORLAPUBS P. R28: HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY EAST vs. WEST

CHRISTIAN EAST VS. WEST

© 2000, 2002-2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[re-written 19990802; reformatted and divided 19991009; later
enlarged at various times and last updated 20020316, 20030412]

Christian thinking in a developmental perspective

The development or unfolding of Orthodox doctrines is worlds apart from the Latins' invention of new paradigms 1425 or more years later than, and lacking a direct lineal connection with, the Greek-language thought world of Apostolic Christianity. See below and also HERE.

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE PASCHAL TROPARY, "CHRIST HAS RISEN FROM THE DEAD" WITH THE GREEK MUSIC; IT IS REPEATED MANY TIMES DURING THE PASCHAL OFFICE AND LITURGY, THIS ANTHEM IS THE THEME SONG OF HOLY ORTHODOXY; CLICK HERE FOR THE SLAVIC MUSIC OF THE SAME ANTHEM.

One takes note of two very crucial junctions or crossings--X for Christ--in the history of Near East and European thinking. The first divinely timed X occurred at the birth of Christ; this crossing took place at a time of Hellenistic and Hebrew influence in the region where Jesus grew up and His religion spread. (Jesus grew up near Tiberias, an important Hellenistic center.) Christians at Rome spoke Greek for a century and half after the Apostolic Age ended.

HELLENISM

timeless spirituality
images

JUDAISM

Time/Place valued
anti-iconic

ISLAM

Time/Place valued
anti-iconic

OBJECTIVITY
thoughts
mysteries
REASON

POSITIVISM
"The BOOK,"
proof texts
The LAW

POSITIVISM
"The BOOK"
words
The LAW

A minor X occurred in Islamic Damaskos at the time of St. John of Damaskos, while he was Grand Vizier to the Caliph of Islam. Interactions between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism took place; Philo the Jew (Jesus's contemporary) was not the least element in these interactions. Another not-so-minor X occurred between Latin Europe and the Germanic tribes--as will-based in their view of reality as the Semitic peoples-- whose incursions created the Dark Ages from 476 on. The capital of the Roman Empire had shifted more than a century earlier to Constantinople (Byzantion, the "City of cities"). The Eastern patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch fell under Muslim political governance with the rise of the great Arab empire (which, at its peak, extended from Spain to much of India), while the West was overrun by the Huns and the invading Germanic tribes. Eventually, Greece, too, was swamped with Slavic invaders--with the lone exception of Thessalonike, now the second-largest city of the Byzantine Empire.

THE HIATUS OF THE TEUTONIC-LATIN DARK AGE

      The Teutonic-Latin Dark Ages antedated the inundation of the three two oldest Eastern patriarchs, Antioch and Alexandria, with the rise of Islam early in the seventh century. The Dark Ages began with invasions of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes (mostly pagan, though the East Goths were Arians)—in the fifth century (408 in Spain, 439 in Carthage, and 476 in central Italy). Subsequently, the Vikings overran Europe, except for Vyzantion and Islamic Andalus(ia) in Spain. The next 500 years were centuries of prevailing terror, illiteracy, filth and disease—the average life-expectancy was in the low thirties; infant mortality was forty per cent. As the Roman roads fell into disrepair, travel and communication mostly ceased, and Rome, Ravenna, and the other cities became villages. Culture was found on the fringes of Europe—in Vyzantion, Cordova, and even in Ireland, where Greek was still read—in a tradition going back to the second Archbishop of Canterbury—Theodore of Tarsos. There were a few moments of light in sixth-century Italy: Ravenna in Italy under The East-Goth Theodoric, whose rule ended in 526, a couple of years after the death of Voqthios “Boëthius”); Gregory I (the Dialogist) of Rome spent six years in Vyzantion or Constantinople (till 585), never learning Greek. But chaos grew and the next five hundred years very dark and barbarous. During this time, action came from the northern fringe of Europe, where the Vikings began conquests that extended to most of Europe. In Constantinople the Varangians (Vikings) formed the palace guard and fought against other Vikings, the Normans, in the Mediterranean, which the Vikings then dominated. though a rise in Latin scholarship took place under Charlemagne, crowned Emperor of the West in 800. Eventually, the Vikings traded from North America to Baghdad.
     At the end of the tenth century, a bit of light came from a few Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek philosophers, astronomers, physicians, and other scholars made in Spain, which reached Rheims in the later nine-hundreds; when the German Emperor married the Byzantine Princess Theophano; and when her son, Otto III together with Pope Sylvester II renovated a degenerate papacy. Hungary became a Christian state in 1000, shortly after Poland had done so. The learnëd Sylvester even exchanged letters with Waldemar the Viking, with whom the Swedes had also maintained unbroken contact. After Waldemar’s and the Russians’ conversions to Orthodox Christianity, Waldemar became known as St. Vladimir. Speakers of Doric Greek continued to live in Calabria (in the South of Italy) and Sicily. At a time when Teutonic-Latin Europe lacked cities, Cordova, the capital of the Umayyad Arab dynasty, became the largest city of the world—with 700 mosques and amenities as modern as some today. A few Arabic translations of Greek writings had been rendered into Latin at Toledo in the late 900s and were known to the Teutonic-Latins—especially at Rheims.
     Cordova was a city as large and modern as huge Constantinople and great Baghdad. Islamic religious dress, prostration, and architecture, along with much else, had of course been taken over from Vyzantion. The first Caliphate in Damaskos was reasonably tolerant of religions of the book (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity). St. John of Damaskos was Grand Vizier to the Caliph until false denounced. But Baghdad became the center of the successive Caliphate. The House of Wisdom, which from the latter eighth century had translated Greek philosophy and science into Arabic, was founded in Baghdad. In its initial phase, the work was done mostly by non-Muslims, including Nestorians, who first rendered the Greek into Syriac. Had this translation work not been done and passed on in Latin to the West, we would not today have a number of Greek manuscripts—or the entire works of Theophrastos, Euclid, Galen, Porphyry, and Proklos, and many others,. The Arabs invented al-gebra and al-chemy, and carried medicine and philosophy to new heights.
     On the Western fringe of Europe, in Ireland, John Scotus Eriugena (and later Paris) translated some works of St. Maximos the Confessor and Dionysios the Areopagite. But Cordova, taken over by Umayyads fleeing from the East, was where learning in Western Europe found its home when most of Europe wallowed in darkness. Cordova’s philosophy—Aristotelianism eventually prevailed—was affected by the prevailing will-based juridicalism of the shari‘ah and torah among its eminent Muslim and Jewish scholars, preeminentaly the latter-twelfth- century Ibn Rushd (Averroës), a Muslim, and Ben Maimon (Maimonides), a Jew. We are told that “the Muslim Aristotle} created a sensation in the Teutonic-Latin world. From 1128, Arab translations of Greek learning and Arab-language commentaries began to be made officially and systematically at Toledo (by prominent Scots and Herman the German) as well as at Catania and Palermo in Scicily. From the latter twelfth century, the Dark Ages began to recede in some places . . . if only centuries later in others.
     In the first two centuries of the second millennium, scholarship by Italian-born Anselm (a Lombard) and Peter the Lombard came to life. Since the Germanic tribes (Lombards, Vandals, Goths, Burgundians, and above all, Franks) had a will-based outlook, it is no surprise that Anselm’s view of Christ’s work was strongly juridical. But then, Western theology had begun with four jurists, three from the ex-Semitic Punic territory of Carthage—Tertullian (who knew Greek; he eventually became a Montanist), Cyprian, and Augustine (an ex-Manichæan)—and St. Ambrose of Milan, one of the Eastern capitals in his day of the Byzantine-Roman Empire. (Like the Emperor Theodosios with whom he contended, Ambrose had been born in Gaul; he was reported to have earlier been a Montanist). Peter the Lombard (1100-1160), a slightly later contemporary of Bernard (a Burgundian), compiled his deservedly famous systematic compendium—the Sententiæ “Opinions”—a book that was to serve as the syllabus, textbook, and point of departure for later Mediæval lectures on theology. Though Peter’s citations are mostly from Latin writers, there are a few citations of Greek Christians—though not yet any works that may have been brought to Europe at the pillaging of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204-1261). There are a few works by Origen, a number of citations from The Defence of the Orthodox Faith by St. John of Damaskos, only a few notices from St. Athanasios and St. John Chrysostomos as well as one reference each from John Scotus Eriugena’s translations of The Celestial Hierarchy by Dionysios the Areopagite and a homily by St. Maximos the Confessor. Four ecumenical Synods are cited—but only once each and all in the same place.
      The end of the Dark Ages was mainly due to third-hand Latin translations of the Muslim Aristotle and translations of Arabic commentaries on the Greek philosophers. Translations of the Cordovan Arabic materials gave birth to two new Western paradigms that supplanted the original Greek-language paradigm of the New Testament and early Christians. If contact with Eastern thinking had been broken and lost in the West, it remained alive in Constantinople, as it still does in present-day Orthodoxy. Energy is an important aspect of ontology (the study of being) in this paradigm: Each energy is paired with a corresponding dynamis which becomes actual and realized when energized. Even had the Western link with Greek learning not been broken, Latin thinking would probably have replaced it with two new paradigms derived from Cordovan learning; at any; rate, Muslims and Jews were cited by Aquinas as authoritative, though Aristotle was the final authority in philosophy. The two new paradigms were the Thomism of the Dominicans and the Nominalism of the Franciscans—initially developed by scholars at Oxford like Roger Marston and Richard of Middleton, who studied also at Paris. Richard regarded Aquinas’s potentia materiae “potential of matter” as an improvement on the rationes seminales but affirmed that “will is the noblest power in the soul” and that “will is simply nobler than intellect.” What these scholars had begun culminated in three Oxford Franciscans who later migrated to Paris—John Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham. If the fourteenth century was the heyday of Scholasticism—Thomas Aquinas was thirteen years of age in 1832, the half-way point between 476, the beginning of the Dark Ages, and 2000—the fourteenth-century Ockham’s Nominalism remained vigorous throughout the fifteenth century. It was this philosophy, called the via moderna, that the early sixteenth-century Reformer, Martin Luther, claimed to be an adherent of, despite his rejections of Scholasticism generally: Luther is reported to have maintained that Ockham was the only Scholastic worth reading. His other modernism was the Gnostic-leaning devotio moderna, partly derived from earlier German mystical writings and eventuating in seventeenth-century Pietism.
     Born in 1483, Luther began life at a time when the Renaissance was getting off ground—a result of another flight of Greek scholars from Constantinople, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453: Some of these scholars migrated to what had been Magna Græcia in southern Italy; most came via Mistras in the Peloponnesos or the island of Crete (a Venetian colony) to Venice, where printing presses were set up and the Orthodox were allowed to maintain their identity. Moscow (nicknamed “the Third Rome”) then became the most important center of Orthodoxy. Under Turkish domination, Greece underwent its own Dark Ages until 1829, when the Greeks won their independence (recognized by the European powers in 1832).
     Readers interested in these topics are referred to the enlightening paperback volumes by D. J. Geanakoplos, Byzantine East & Latin West (Harper Torchbooks,1966) and James Reston, jr., The last apocalypse (Anchor Books, 1998). The latter title refers to the end of the first millennium.

It should be noted that when the seventh Ecumenical Synod convened at Nicæa [near Constantinople] in 787, the West had been mired in the Dark Ages for more than 310 years.
In the first decade of the last quarter of the eighth century, the "False decretals" were circulated by Pope Adrian I to advance papal pretensions--Adrian's novel and extravagant claims of universal authority. Subject to Charlemagne and the latter's desires to become Emperor, as the pope was, a Western tactic of discrediting the East as heretical came into being: The West unilaterally introduced the novel and patently anti-Biblical (cf. John 15:26) introduction the words "and the Son" into the Creed after the words affirming of the Holy Spirit's proceeding from the Father. Since the East rejected this heresy, the Eastern emperor could be denounced as a heretic in order to clear the way for Charlemagne to be made emperor of the "holy Roman empire." But the Muslims in the East were very different from the Germanic tribes in the West. Where the latter were illiterate barbarians, the Arabs embraced Greek culture and set up an institute in Damaskos to translated Greek learning; from its early days, Islam adopted many manners--prostration at Worship, items of clergy apparel, especially headdress, etc.--in vogue among the conquered Eastern Christians. Until he was falsely denounced, St. John of Damaskos served as grand vizier to the greatest of the Caliphs. It is easy to see how such realities--during nearly seven and a half centuries of Dark Age barbarism-- isolated the West from the Eastern roots of Christianity. The schism of the West from the East was essentially broached soon after the seventh ecumenical Synod (like those preceding it, it was convoked and held in the East and attended by clergy who were Eastern, except for the representatives of the Roman patriarch). The break occurred less than a quarter of a century later, when Pope Leo III, in his sixth year as Adrian's successor, crowned Charlemagne as Roman Emperor on the Birthday of Christ, 800 AD. Treating the legitimate Roman emperor in Constantinople as a heretic for rejecting the novel Filioque which he was requiring the then pope to insert in the Creed in order to discredit the emperor in Constantinople. When this occurred, the Roman patriarchate went its own way, cutting itself off with this heretical innovation (see below) from the four remaining (all Eastern) patriarchates. The cultural separation between East and West that had taken place much earlier continued apace during the barbarism of the Western Dark Ages. The papal Church itself underwent a couple of major schisms during later centuries.

St. Athanasios of Alexandria
Teacher and Defender of the Orthodox Faith

Relief from the Dark Ages was to come to Western Christianity, not very much from the Eastern roots of Christianity, but from the Semitic Muslim capital of Cordova (in Spain),, home to the greatest Islamic and Jewish scholars, where Muslim learning culminated. The greatest Islamic scholar was Ibn Rushd or Averroës. His agemate, born two years later and dying six years after Ibn Rushd, was the great Jewish thinker, Ben Maimon (Maimonides). At Cordova's overthrow by Moorish conquerors, also Islamic, both fled to Moroccan centers of learning. Ben Maimon, after a brief stay in Acre in Palestine, ended up as not only leader of the Egyptian Jews. The non-Arabic (he was a Kurd) Sala(d)din, greatly admired even by Christians, had conquered the East--including Jerusalem, which he nobly spared)--and established his capital at Cairo. There, Ben Maimon became his honored physician. (CLICK HERE for JIHAD and CRUSADE.) When a framework of learning came to the Latin West in the thirteenth century, it did not come by a direct Christian route but rather from Islamic Cordova. But more on this presently.

St. Catharine (Aikaterina) of Alexandria
Learnëd Teacher and Martyr

      It should be pointed out that the Slavic inundation of Greece--except for Thessaloníke, already the second largest city of the Byzantine Empire. Thessaloníke had replaced Alexandria, now temporarily in decline under the Arabs), but was not as large as Islamic Baghdad. The plundering of Constantinople by the Franks in the Fourth Crusade, and the subjection of Byzantion by the Islamic Turks created a long-enduring Dark--or least very Dim--Age in Greece and in what became Istambuli (Greek "to the City").   The capital of Orthodoxy shifted to Moscow, whose patriarchate was eventually ended by Peter the Great but restored in the twentieth century.
     The Nestorians had rendered a good deal of Aristotle into Syriac and then Arabic. Subsequently, a translation institute was established in Damaskos to translate the rest of Greek learning into Arabic, as already mentioned. A number of outstanding philosophers, more Platonic than Aristotelian emerged in the Levant, a number of whom are quoted by Aquinas and other scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages. This new knowledge provided the Latins with a third-hand Aristotelianism (Latin translations, mostly by Jewish scholars, of Arabic scholarship, in turn based on Arabic translations of the original Greek)--a new framework for understanding the Bible and the form of Christianity that had developed under the Frankish hegemony--chiefly in Paris and Norman England--at Oxford.
       The crossing of Christianity with Islamic Aristotelianism in the West was the second major X in the intellectual history of Christianity. As already noted, the outcome of this development had no lineal connection with the Greek-language culture of early Christianity. The development or unfolding of Orthodox doctrines is worlds apart from the Latins' invention of new paradigms 1425 or more years later than, and lacking a direct lineal connection with, the Greek-language thought world of Apostolic Christianity. The Greek learning that came to the West through Islam-- Muslim translations of and commentaries on Aristotle, etc., were filtered through the prism of a more will-oriented, juridical outlook--and often focused on words and "the book"?   The "matter" of Christianity--at least the Bible--had not changed; what had changed was the framework that imposed its "form" or meaning on the Biblical matter common to Eastern and Western traditional Christianity.   Whatever continuity (or "development") of ideas one may discern between early and late-Mediæval Christianity supplant the non-continuity (or "non-development") and incompatibility of the thought worlds or conceptual paradigms of early Greek-language Christianity and Mediæval Latin and Reformation Christianity.
     The centuries of separation and especially the detour that Eastern thinking took to reach the Mediaeval West created a hiatus that no one has any practicable idea how to bridge.   That is no cause for wonder, considering the length of the break (ca. 750 years); and the barbaric conditions that prevailed--illiteracy even among the rulers, primitive clothing, short average life-expectancy (thirty years), deplorable housing, high infant mortality (forty per cent), general dirtiness, primitive hygiene with a few baths per year, not very adequate food--ill-preserved (often so rotten that it had to be highly spiced to be palatable) and lacking in essential vitamins (particularly A, C, and D)--, no forks (till they were imported from Byzantion in later times), mostly wooden bowls, beer preferred to disease-bearing drinking water, disease at all levels of society, prevalent pillaging and fear. Most people were laborers who, if only because of the primitiveness of decayed Roman highways and the dangers posed by robbers, seldom left the villages where most people lived. No large cities were to come into being until merchandising grew up and created cities; Rome was a village, and the largest settlements were "small towns." Another factor that greatly amplified the hiatus in question is that when learning finally did come to the West, very little of it came from visiting Byzantine scholars; most of it--above all its conceptual framework(s)--derived from Islamic Cordova--a city of7 00 mosques, as large as, and indeed at one time or another larger than, Constantinople and Baghdad.
     A few literate monks had of course preserved the works of the early jurists of Carthage--Tertullian (the only one who read and wrote in Greek, Cyprian, Augustine--and Ambrose of Milan, during his life one of two western capitals of the Byzantine Empire.    This juridicalism and that of Semitic Cordova reinforced one another in the new Latin learning--more so that of the Franciscan (and later Augustinian) Nominalists that that of the Dominican Thomists.   Irish monks like John Iriugena Scotus had translated the Greek writings of St. Maximos the Confessor and Dionysios "the Areopagite." And a few Byzantine scholars had come to the West the time of the new learning, just as some Westerners had traveled to Constantinople.    They in fact translated some works of Aristotle, Plato, and Galen as well as some of the Cappadocian fathers, St. John Chrysostom, and St. John of Damaskos into Latin. Some scholastics preferred the translations of Plato and Aristotle they had received via Cordova to those rendered directly from the Greek.
     These developments were followed by the fall of Byzantion, already raped by the crusaders in the Fourth Crusade, to the Islamic Turks in the fifteenth century. The flight of Byzantine scholars (mainly via Crete to Venice, after Constantinople had fallen to the Turks)--benefited the West sufficiently to bring about the Renaissance--the end of the Middle Ages--around the time when Columbus "discovered" the Americas.   But the Greek concept of energy (cf. also synergy below) lost its impact when rendered into Latin (by the Spanish translators) as "operation, function, form, act, efficacy" (CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS). And that alone created a vast gulf between Eastern and Western theologizing.
     There is no doubt that scholasticism, especially the dazzling work of Thomas Aquinas produced a marvel of systematic learning which the world has seldom seen.   But it was not the original Greek-language conceptual framework that early Christian thinking had developed in. It cannot be said too often (i) that the content or "matter" of a writing is formed (given meaning and context) by the conceptual framework of its readers; and (ii) that God evidently chose Greek to be the vehicle for understanding and propagating the holy Gospel. When Greek ideas got lost in translation, it is thus fair to say that, in places where that occurred, Christianity lost concepts of value. The more Islamic-influenced school of scholasticism (which was to become the via moderna or "modernism" of the [fifteenth and] last century of the Middle Ages and to eventuate in the Protestant Reformation) got strongly mixed, through Pietism and other influences, with a substrate of Gnostic rejection of the rôle of materiality and time (tradition) in religion.   This substrate has proved to be the most enduring aspect of the Protestant paradigm--a further remove from original Christianity in some respects than Rome--both both forms of Western Christianity exhibit a greater break with Eastern Orthodoxy than either does with the other. Rome, Wittenberg, and Geneva speak something of a common language--especially their juridical views of Salvation, etc.; their differences are mostly opposed poles of a common non-Orthodox spectrum.
      The transfer of Islamic Aristotelianism to the Latins at Paris and Oxford, respectively, yielded the divergent types already noticed--the Dominicans' Thomism, with ontology and especially intellect foremost; and, with a priority of will over being and reason, the Franciscans' and later Augustinians' Scotism.

Dominican scholastics have held, in E. Gilson's words, that "the thing I know becomes myself in my cognition of it, unless we prefer to say that I am becoming it through knowing it." The distinction between epistemology and ontology thus gets lost; and even the Vision of God is an intellectual vision, a participating in God's Being by knowing him! (The authoritative Latin theologian, Ludwig Ott, speaks of the beatific Vision as being divine Self-knowledge!) Fantasies of this sort would be hard to sustain in today's traditionalist intellectual climate.

It was after the later development of Scotism in Ockhamist Nominalism and the via moderna or "modernism" of the fifteenth century that it provided the framework for the Protestant Reformation. Luther, an Augustinian prior called himself a Nominalist and spoke of Ockham as the only scholastic worth reading. The emphasis on will, on words and "the book", and of course Protestant anti-iconism derive from Islam, though of course they found warrant for their views in the Hebrew Old Testament. This was not the first influence of Islam on Christianity.
Not only was Latin scholasticism based on an Islamic variant of Aristotelianism. Much earlier, when Monophysitism and iconoclasm grew up in territories subjugated by Islam and officials from those provinces became political and ecclesiastical leaders in Constantinople, the heresies were propagated in Constantinople itself. Later in the West, it was no accident that the Filioque was first added to the Creed in recently Islamic Spain and was promoted by equally will-first Teutonic overlords who had taken over the Latin episcopate. The filioquist heresy was originated in Spain in a Teutonic milieu and promoted in Rome to advance Charlemagne's ambition to be the holy Roman Emperor--to do which, he had to discredit the real Roman Emperor in Constantinople. It was subsequently bolstered by two errors: (i) The analogia entis "analogy of being," took it for granted, inter alia, that, contrary to John 15:26, Christ's energetic sending (ékpempsis) of the Paraclete in the economy or dispensation of the created cosmos necessarily parallels the essential procession (ekpórefsis) of the Spirit in divine Essence. (ii) a view of the divine simplicity such that distinguishing the divine Essence and Energies violates that simplicity more than distinguishing the Essence from its Existence or than distinguishing the one Essence from the three diviine Hypostases. Separated by many centuries of barbarism, Eastern and Western thinking diverged enormously--into incompatible paradigms. (iii) In accepting Augustine's idea of "substantial relations" (which reverses the commonsense view that real relations depend on the realities they relate--not vice-versa), the Filioque has got, according to a certain logic that need not be gone into here, follow. (See also HERE.) On the Western side, the scholastic paradigm fell into two types, of which the more Islamic-tainted one yielded Reformation theologies.

As this point, we need to retrace our footsteps in terms of the themes of intellectual history than just in terms of empirical political history. Platonism tended toward a dualism originating in Persian Zoroastrianism (historically related to Hinduism), whose dualistic was to develop into a Gnosticism that scorned the rôle of materiality in religion and considered time to be cyclic (and therefore hardly meaningful) rather than developmental. Aristotle originated a new, more empirical paradigm with a more articulated logic. But Platonism persisted in Middle Platonism of Jesus's contemporary, Philo the Jew, and eventuated in the extreme spiritualism of Neo-Platonism or Plotinism of Plotinos of Alexandria. Alexandria remained more oriented on spirit and Jesus's Divinity, while Antioch, the oldest Christian foundation, and of course Phoenician Carthage remained more Semitic--more oriented on concrete reality, will, and the human nature of Jesus.

ATHENS REASON: TRUTH theoría (vision) noëtic mystical	JERUSALEM WILL : TORAH prAxis (halakhah) concrete experience time & tradition	CORDOVA WILL : SHARI'AH theoría (theory) literalist antitemporal

The preceding table purports to indicate which aspects of a given form of Christianity are Apostolic-Hellenistic and which are Semitic "religions of the book". Hellenistic Athens and Alexandria promoted the urge to think in terms of a coherent rational system rather than a classificatory list of words and laws--the Semitic emphasis. But the Hebrews found soterial meaning in history and in places where historical events occurred; they constantly recalled the Exodos, the Babylonian Captivity, and the destruction of the temple at the time of the Maccabees. Unlike Hellenistic thinkers, the Hebrews saw history as a God-directed drama, a true reality unlike the virtual reality of the doctrines of Grace and Justification among the Reformers.

Where the Orthodox unite the Hebrew respect for creation (in Christianity, the Incarnation sanctifies matter and time) with Hellenic rationality, the Reformers took will and words from the Semitic side and, from the Greeks, a Gnostic negation of a religious rôle for matter and time in religion. Both Latins and Reformers got their will-based orientation, with predestination, and their juridicalism and anti-iconism (Calvin ruled that the Ten Commandments were the only wall decoration permitted in a house of prayer) as well as the WORDS of the BOOK from Cordova--i.e. from Islam and Judaism. The inventors of Protestantism were easily able to justify their juridical outlook with isolated passages from the Old Testament and their Pietist-influenced Gnostic views with anti-incarnational interpretations of passages in the New Testament. Like all thinking, these understandings depended upon their conceptual paradigm. Amid centuries of change, the major themes have persisted in a remarkable manner, even though some of the deductions from them (e.g. predestinarianism and the banning of the image of the Cross) have been tossed out. Some Evangelicals now pray around poles, like the asherim/asheroth or phallic symbols of the Cana'anites denounced by the Hebrew prophets, which some even venerate; and TV preachers even sell "prayer cloths"--not sanctified relics like those in Acts 19:12! Will Evangelical "prayer beads" be next?

The New Testament (CLICK HERE ) uses the"energetic" terminology of the Greek language, influenced three centuries earlier by Aristotle the way English has been influenced by the categories brought to the public's notice by prominent thinkers like Newton, Freud, and Einstein. St. Eirenaios, in his treatise Against Heresies (V.xiii.3), said that Jesus in His Transfiguration "became immortal and incorruptible [i.e. not subject to decay], not out of His own [human] nature but according to the Energy of the Lord, to enable [dýnasthai] Him to bestow immortality on mortality and incorruptibility on corruption." (The Latin uses the term operatio for enéryeia and operari for eneryeîn "energize"; older English translations of the Fathers speak of "[mighty] work[ing]" instead of "energy.") If St. John Chrysostom spoke of the incomprehensible Essence of God, St. Kyril of Alexandria (cited by Romanides from PG 50,1189, which I haven't been able to check; see A. J. Sopko's Prophet of Roman [i.e. Byzantine] Orthodoxy: The theology of John Romanides [1998, p. 31]) also affirmed the difference of the divine Essence and Energies. St. Vasil the Great contended (in Ep. 234) that "So we speak, on the one hand, of knowing our God from the Energies, but on the other hand, we don't presume to approach His Essence Itself."

There is no little confusion in the use of nature and therefore natural in theological discussions, Greek phýsis "nature" and Latin natura being sometimes should distinguished from essence (as essence's function or energy; cf. 2 Pet. 1:4) and sometimes not. When nature is synonymous with essence, it is like Aristotle's dýnamis [a potential] and Plato's [Phaidros 279c] concept of nature as a "capacity" for "acting or being acted on"; when phýsis is a function of essence or relates to existence, it refers to an energy that actualize the potential of the dýnamis. As some Monophysite and early Orthodox writers equated phýsis with hypóstasis "individual existent"--etymologically the same as Latin substance [i.e. essence]--there has much confusion over hypóstasis also. The Orthodox usually stick to ousía for "essence" and enéryeia for "energy." It is wisest to avoid phýsis or nature where the sense could confuse. Dýnamis can be left as it is in English translations, though "potential power" or "force" are acceptable when no confusion can result. This is especially true when dýnamis refers to the meaning of a given word. St. Gregory Palamas denied that energies are "accidents." The Orthodox deny that distinguishing Essence from Energy in the divine Being makes it "compound"--less than the simplicity of a single Being--any more than distinguishing the Essence from the three Persons or Existence from Essence.

While Grace in the West is an additive that does not abolish nature; it contrasts with nature while (as in the East) complementing and perfecting it--the way the Assimilation to God complemented the Icon of God in which humanity was first created. In the East, Grace not only complements but also penetrates an essence, activating its potential to make it live and function when so infused with the uncreated Energies of the Life of Christ.

St. Maximos the Great took such notions for granted; after all they had been part of the Greek language and Hellenistic thought world from before the time of Christ. St. Gregory PalamAs, whose teachings are embraced in Orthodoxy (he is commemorated in the Great Fast on the Lordsday following the Lordsday of Orthodoxy ), merely subsumed the preceding tradition when he clarified and emphasized the distinctions involved in discussions of essence and energy. (For a refutation of the cacodox views of J.-M. Garrigues, see Christos Yannaras, "The distinction between essence and energies and its important for theology," St. Vladimir's theological quarterly 19 (1975), 232. Other Latin writers have held very similar cacodox views--which in recent decades have been refuted in Orthodox theological journals published by Ameican seminaries. Fr. Romanides or someone has shown how the Palamites' position mirror-images that of the western Augustine: Where Augustine had a positive view of human reason's ability to know God's Essence and a negative view of will's ability to love God, St. Gregory had a negative view of reason's ability to know God's Essence and a positive view of a human will's ability to love the God that reason knows.)
The notion of energy that Aristotle inherited from and defined more precisely became part of Hellenistic Greek and was taken for granted by speakers of Greek the same way speakers of English use "atom" and "space" in ways that take for granted the senses that scientists have implanted in English. The conceptualizations of energy in St. John of Damaskos' treatise Exact exposition of the Orthodox Faith sums up what a Greek lexicon or encylopedia would say about it. (For this and the following, CLICK HERE.) The twentieth-century theologians, G. Florovsky, Vl. Lossky, and John Romanides conceptualize Grace as Energy in agreement with the Bible and the Eastern Patristic consensus.

The Orthodox view of being as energy (and of energy as something that can manifest itself as light or life) creates a way of speaking and thinking that reduces the distance between theology and science--despite the differences imposed on the concept of energy by the radically different paradigms--more than is thinkable in the case of static Western theologies. An example is saving Grace--uncreated Energy, Christ's Life, in the Greek Bible and Byzantine Orthodoxy; a created (but "supernatural") form, quality of the soul, an "entitative" (not operative) habit infused in the soul, in the papal Church--though the Scotist school held that santicfying Grace is an operative habit. In the Reformation, Grace is the divine benignity that creates the virtual reality of virtual (imputed) righteousness to believers that remain sinners. The views of early Greek Christianity and the two late-Mediæval views are mutually and radically incompatible; there is no middle ground between any two of them.

CLICK HERE FOR MODELS OF CHRISTIANITY

The Orthodox inherit the view of the Creator as REASON--LOGOS in St. John's Gospel [the West calls the Creator a sermo "Saying" or a verbum "Word"]--but without the rationalistic prying of the Latins into mysteries that the Apostles warn us against in the New Testament, since mysteries are not analysable by finite mentalities (cf. Rom. 11:33). God's Essence is wholly unknowable and imparticipable--intelligible to finite minds only apophatically, i.e. by declaring what it is not--but the operations of God in creation, above all the material-temporal Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the First Mystery (Sacrament) that sanctified matter and time for religion, are of course knowable.

The great fourteenth-century Saint of Mt. Athos, Gregory Palamãs (in his "Defence of the holy Hesychasts") called the desire to go out of the body the worst [aspect] of Hellenic error and the root and fountain of every error and cacodoxy ["wrong belief"]-- an invention of demons, a doctrine fostering the loss of one's senses, and the product of madness." Continuing to condemn this folly, he points out that those who want to expel the noûs (the intuitive intellect or mind) from the body (the vessel of the "heart" and soul) or those who try to bring it into the body (as though it were elsewhere) ignore the fact that "essence (ousía) is one thing and energy (enéryeia) another" in favor of sophistic arguments. The failure to make the distinction between essence and energy--because of the effective absence of energy in Western theology--made it impossible for the West to avoid a number of heretical errors concerning the all-holy Trinity (e.g. the Filioque; CLICK HERE); the Fall of humanity through the sins of our first ancestors (e.g. the cacodoxy of inherited or transferable guilt and merit); Grace (not uncreated Energy but either a static created form or habit of the soul; or, in Protestantism, divine imputation); and Salvation (Divinization through the uncreated Energies).

The anti-sacramentalism of the Denominationists is Hellenistic, while their emphasis on the one BOOK of all truth and laws connected with the Faith, along with their emphasis on words and will-based view of faith as assent, is Semitic. There is a fundamentalist-positivistic emphasis on citing lists of "proof texts" among classical Protestants (and "Biblical Catholics"!) without regard to the way their meanings depend on the conceptual universes.

Meanings depend on the axioms, premises, presuppositions, and assumptions imposed on them by their different conceptual-referential frameworks or paradigms--despite the obvious fact that an energetic template of reality imposes senses on basic terms like being, Grace, responsiblity and guilt, unity, etc., that are incompatible with the senses that a static-intellectual or a volitional-juridical template imposes on that or other basic concepts. And of course a volitional template can ascribe too much will to God and too little freedom to humans or too much freedom to humans and too little will to God. SEE ALSO HERE & HERE.

History and tradition are of no consequence for the virtual reality of Denominationists, time is abolished along with matter, so far as Salvation and religion generally are concerned. The juridical emphasis inherited from Rome, Cordova, and the Franks is self-evident, if only in the proliferated categories of propitiation, satisfaction, atonement, justification, redemption (buying back, ransoming), legal adoption, regeneration (less juridical, more metaphorical than the other concepts), sanctification--to which the Latins add subjection to papal jurisdiction (they call their communion the "Roman obedience") and to which the Reformers add "imputation" and "covenantal" unity in Christ (where Orthodoxy speaks of ontological oneness with Christ; SEE ALSO HERE). In Western Christianity, Grace is a "state"; one speaks of a "state of Grace." As far as the Trinity goes and given that neither Latins nor Reformers distinguish essence from energy and rather include energy (Latin existence, intellection; Reformation will) in essence, the Reformation view of a covenantal unity of believers with Christ differs only from the vantage point from the current Latin teaching that Christians' partake of Christ's Essence intentionally rather than entitatively (ontologically; Ludwig Ott, speaks of participation in God by the faithful according to God's holiness and of participation according to His spirituality.) All such views are incompatible with the Orthodox teachings that the divine Essence in imparticipable and inaccessible, and that repentant and pious members of Christ ontologically (entitatively) participate in the uncreated Energies and Light and Glory (dóxa) of God--which accords with Scripture when read in its original Greek-language framework. However, the Latin's intentionalism leans more in a cognitive direction than Luther's raw imputational-volitional premises.

K I ND OF CHRISTIANITY		STRUCTURE
E	Greek-language Apostles & Orthodox Christianity	Content: Hebrew respect for creation—matter & time Form: Hellenistic energy- based ONTOLOGY	Sight
W	Mediaeval Teutonic-Latin Papal Christianity	Content: Hebrew respect for creation--matter & time) Form: Hellenistic Intellect- based orientation	Sight
W	Renaissance Reformation:** Protestantism	Content: Hellenistic Gnosticism Form: Hebrew will-based jurid- icalism and virtual reality— with individualism and con- centration on ”theWord” and “the Book”	Hearing
*Western Christianity has no sense of the Greek New Testament’s differentiation of essence from energy—a distinction that resolves salient quandaries in Western Christianity. Both kinds of Western Christianity derive from the "Muslim Aristotle"— received from Muslim and Jewish scholars of Cordova at third- hand--in Latin translations of Arabic translations of pagan Greek writers.
*This kind of Christianity--its content-and-form mirror-image Orthodoxy--which had two fifteenth-century "modernist" sources— via* moderna (will-based Nominalism); and devotio moderna (Gnostic- oriented piety). Both strains promoted a radical individualism.

The thinking of an increasing number today is that the gulf between East and West is much greater than between the Latins and Protestants--enormous as that latter gulf is. The failure of the West generally to differentiate essence from energies and the much greater juridicalism common to Western theologies both Latin and Reformation make much of what is said in the East or in the West unintelligible to the other. But, given the 730-year break of the Latin West from the East in the Latin Dark Ages, the more than 1200-year separation of the Eastern and Mediæval Western frameworks, and the derivation of both from Islamic Aristotelianism, it could hardly have been otherwise.
Even the Mysteries became juridicalized in the West, though they did not cease to be ontological among the Latins they way they did among the Protestants; even Luther believed [see his De captivitate babylonica ecclesiae, WA vl.518.10] he could have the Eucharist "by faith" anywhere at any time--without the consecrated Gifts being actually available. The West used the juridical term "sacraments" (originally military oaths), while the more thorough-going Protestants call Baptism and the Lord's Supper "ordinances" (the elements are tokens, symbols, or the like). So, while the Latins stand somewhere between the Greeks and the Reformers--who are on the left of the Christian religious spectrum, with Liberals and Fundamentalists on the far left drawing contrary assumptions from the same individualistic premises, the two Western frameworks have more in common with one another than with the West. The matter--the Bible--is common to all three; but what it means--that depends on one's mental orientation--differs among all three.

John 1:17: "For the Law was given by Moses; but Grace and Truth have come through Jesus Christ"; and John 8:32: "You all will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free." The first Mystery (Sacrament) was the Incarnation of the Son of God, according to Tertullian (Against Marcion, II.27-6-7), Vincent of Lerins, and St. Maximos the Confessor (Migne PG 91:620C; cf. Col. 1:26-27 (cf. 2:2), 4:3, 1 Tim. 3:9, 16b, Eph. 3:3-4); this is the basis of all other Mysteries (Sacraments).

Where traditionalists say that mysteric efficacy necessarily depends on the conditions of repentance and true belief, Denominationists reverse this in holding that repentance and belief are not conditions of sacraments but are what matters, sacraments being non-necessary conditions!

The attitude of Gnostics (modern as well as ancient; SEE HERE) involves a negative view of the rôle of body or corporeality in religion. This is contrary to the exaltation of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ in the Christian view of Salvation; cf. St. Athanasios the Great's embrace of Eph. 5:30: "For we are members of His Body, of His flesh, and of His bones." Dualist Manichaeans or Paulicians, Messalians, Bogomils, and Catharists have plagued Christianity in both East and West in the Middle Ages. Like Tertullian, the Reformer John Calvin first studied juristics. Likewise, the great Cordovans--Ibn Rushd (Averroës, a Muslim) and the Ben Maimon (Maimonides, a Jew)--were lawyers as well as philosopher-theologians. None of this has been without consequences for Christian theology.

The "material" Incarnation and corporeal Resurrection of Christ have had little or no impact on, no ontological significance for, the thinking of many or most Protestants, for whom the religious rôle of matter and time for is not just unnecessary and quite exiguous.

It will be well to pause a moment to dwell on and recapitulate the points already made and to add a few reflections on them. Early on, there were differences of emphasis between Antioch (the oldest diocese of Christianity, where both St. Peter and St. Paul evangelized) and Alexandria--the largest city of the known world in its heyday.¹ Where the Alexandrines were more Hellenically allegorical in scriptural interpretation and emphasized Jesus's divine Nature, the Antiochenes were more Semitically literalist in their exegesis and emphasized Jesus's human nature--though many of them eventually became Monophysites (the Jacobites) like the Alexandrians. As far back as St. Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzos, one of the "three Hierarchs" and one of four Orthodox Saints called "the Theologian"), East-West differences were complained about. That eminent Saint said that Western Christians ("the Italians") were unable to understand Greek terms and concepts, especially those concerning the all-holy Trinity (for which he blamed the "scantiness of [the Latin] vocabulary and its poverty of terms"; I cite from his Oration 21.35 in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, p. 279.). And a writer of our time, S. Runciman, says much the same thing.

A COMMON MISTAKE

A "philosophical system"-- which is excogitated, thought out and about, and is a cognitive sort of thing--should not be confused with a definitional (axiomatic) framework or paradigm. For a defining framework (or paradigm) is at the opposite end of the spectrum from a "philosophical system," being usually adopted unconsciously and at most willed; unless one changes paradigms, they are hardly approached rationally or even consciously. No more than definitions can a paradigm axiomatic framework, grid of reality, or ideology) be proved right or wrong, meritorious or evil; indeed, a paradigm defines what is good or bad. Thought does not begin in a vacuum but with (normally unexamined) presuppositions, premises, or assumptions. There are reasons that one can find for rejecting one's own existing framework or someone else's, but even "correspondence with reality" hardly offers such reasons, since some frameworks don't endorse that concept of truth and all form the basis of what considers to be true or good. Thus, the virtual reality of what God wills is, in the Reformation framework, more real and true than what is "real" or "true." But in English, really still means truly!

Theology is organic; it is much more than a list of beliefs that do not hang together in mutual dependence on common basic concepts of reality. Each item in a system is affected by the status of other items in the system. The whole bears a vital relation to basic assumptions about reality; they can be anti-time/anti-matter or else sacramental; the primacy of being and reason or else will, the "reality" of relations and natures, etc.). One cannot just add and subtract this or that tenet in the list of beliefs without unbalancing and indeed unhinging the system, whose implications and details have required many centuries to be worked out. (SEE HERE & HERE.) The following table schematizes divergent views of primary reality--ways of conceptualizing the all-holy Trinity, human nature, Grace, Salvation, and so on; CLICK HERE for an additional comparative tabulation of distinctions).

GROUP

ORIENTATION

GOD THE TRINITY

GRACE

Orthodox	BEING & ENERGY	being (ontology)	a new creation
Latins	BEING & KNOWLEDGE	psychology, ontology	form of the soul
Reformers	WILL & WORD: VIRTUAL REALITY	subjectivity	imputation & juridicalism
All agree that the common MATTER of the Bible acquires its import and meaning from the FORM of whatever conceptual framework it is interpreted in (or squeezed into). The Western frameworks were invented over a dozen centuries after the Apostles.
PUTTING BEING & TRUTH FIRST: Truth is based on what is, not on what one would like to be so. Intentionality and therefore will depend on reason. This is the traditional ordering of reason and will.
PUTTING WILL FIRST in the Reformation manner confuses what is with what one wishes were existent; it confuses a mythical virtual reality with reality. What one wishes to be true is not necessarily so.

     The Western Augustinian tradition approaches the Holy Spirit in terms of essential relations (if the LOGOS is related only to the Father and Source of Being, then the Spirit will have to be related to--proceed from--both Father and Son in order to be different--one of several reasons for the addition of the Filioque "and [from] the Son" in the Creed!) and psychology: The Father's Love for the Son or His will is substantivized as the Holy Spirit! (the Spirit is the love of the Father and Son!).   Augustinians understand relations to define Trinitarian Hypostases. In this attempt to analyse the Trinity in psychological categories, a relation or an emotion or volition is able to realize or ontologize a Hypostasis or Person of the all-holy Trinity!   Lacking the difference between Essence and Energy (see below), Western theologians think (despite John 15:26) that the relation of the all-holy Spirit in the divine Essence has got to parallel His energetic relation to Jesus in the economy (dispensation) of the materiotemporal cosmos.   If Thomists hold God's Essence to be "pure act" and intellect (see citations later)--thus confusing Energies with Essence, the Reformers give priority to will (a prime form of energy) in the divine Essence. Where the holy tradition thinks God foreknows what will happen since He is outside of time and contemporary with every moment of time, Nominalist Reformers, following Ockham, assume that God can only foreknow what He has foreordained.   In Reformation thinking, the virtual reality that God wills, replacing ontological reality (being) with what God wills, defines Grace and Justification (SEE FURTHER HERE) as well as Calvin's "as if" bodily presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper (see below).   For what God wills (imputes) overrules, without erasing, what is; word and the pulpit efface the Mysteries (Sacraments); and of course the Second Person of the all-holy Trinity is a "Word" (rather than the creative Rational Principle of Order in the cosmos that He is in John 1:1; SEE HERE). For Orthodoxy, Jesus Christ is not only the LOGOS but also YHWH--the o ON (so written on His icons) or "One Who IS" of Ex. 3:14 in the Greek Old Testament--which is older than known recensions of the Hebrew Old Testament.
      A will-based framework, outlook, paradigm, or ideology of course favors positive law--something is bad because someone in authority wills to call it wrong; in a reason-based framework, one can will good or evil only if one understands the different implications and consequences of the alternatives one is faced with and has a certain intention with respect to the outcome of one's choosing; right is what promotes a thing's nature (this is natural law right, and wrong is what injures one's nature. There may of course be conflicts, as when a midwife can save the life of mother or baby but not both. Natural law is of course rejected in Nominalism's positivistic abolition of transindividual or generic "natures"--which are nothing more than "words."   This treatment of words contrasts with the exaltation of words, even to calling the Creator a Word, in Denominationism.   Even those who look at reality in ontological terms may base being on relations rather than basing relations on being; cf. the Latin conceptualization of the Trinity in the Filioque.
     The juridical impetus going rooted in Tertullian and early Romans and even more so in Cordovan Semitic thinking was anything but diminished in the future history of Western Christianity.   Lacking the concept of energies, Latin and Reformation juridicalism fails to understand Orthodox soteriology (teachings about Salvation) simply because it is so simple--incorporation into Christ's Life--the uncreated Energy of Grace--and transfiguration in the vision of God's uncreated Light--in short, Divinization as a partaking (2 Pet. 1:4) of God's uncreated Energies (but not of the divine Essence).    Thomas Aquinas held that "the beatitude of humanity" is found "in the vision of the divine Essence" (Summa theologica I-II.iii.8], even though that Essence is imparticipable--and holds God's Essence to be actus purus (the closest Latin could get to uncreated Energy in its third-hand Aristotelianism; see further on)--as though Essence were an Energy. As for Grace, the New Testament idea (in Philp. 2-13) views Grace energetically: "For it is God in you all energizing you both to will and to energize for the sake of pleasing Him": The works of Christ in His members (operating through the Energy of His uncreated Grace) are Christ's own and thus pleasing to him and part of the soterial development of His members; the Western dichotomy of "good" works and Grace is thus absorbed in a single Biblical and Orthodox Grace!

It will be salutary at this point to obtrude an observation concerning the basic reason why Western Christians--Latins and Denominationists--generally fall so short of understanding Orthodox theology: They cannot understand Orthodoxy when they fail deeply to enter into the Biblical concept of enérgeia (SEE HERE) that lies at the heart of Orthodox thinking about God, creation, Salvation, etc.: cf. Philp. 2:(12-)13 (and Gal. 2:20). Note that a three-volume theological lexicon of the Greek New Testament by a prominent Dominican Latin of our time omits completely (as far as I can discern) a treatment of the many occurrence of the words for "energy/energize/energetic" in the original Greek New Testament. A Jesuit "systematic" treatment of Orthodox piety neither lists energy in the Index nor, so far as I can find, treats it in the volume in question. These phenomena display the enormous power of a person's conceptual filter! Even the most sympathetic Latins and Denominationists fail to grasp the reasons underlying Orthodox teachings because they seem unable to step out of static, late-Mediæval thought modes into (being at home in) the fundament view of reality in the New Testament and Orthodoxy.

Western groups allow guilt and merit to be transferred from one person to another--by God to believers in the Reformers' theology--but among the Latins, the pope transfers Saints' merits to individuals (even to the departed in "purgatory").

In the eyes of the Orthodox, God is "Being beyond being," viz. the One Who described Himself in Ex. 3:14 as "I am Who I am" or "I am the One Who IS." He can will but He is not WILL. Augustinians have thought of the Holy Spirit as WILL, complementing the LOGOS as REASON. But the Father is the ARCHE of all being.

After this tying up of ideas already mentioned and to be elaborated on below, let's continue with a bit more of history. There was obviously a vast cultural divergence between the Christian East and the Christian West during the Middle Ages. While most of the Latin West was dominated by Hun and Germanic semi-barbarians (the Goths were Arians; others, eventually Latin Christians) during the dark centuries, Constantinople reached the heights of its glory. No later than 476 AD, Italy had become a "barbarian kingdom" ruled by Teutonic overlords; the African provinces of the old Roman Empire had succumbed earlier to the Vandals and others. But it was a Frank, Charlemagne, who imposed the Filioque heresy on the papacy in order to discredit Byzantion as a heretical empire, his purpose being to exalt himself and his successors as "Holy Roman Emperors." The Franks soon "cleansed" the episcopate of bishops who were not Germanic or willing to support the Franks and Normans. Before the Germanic Crusaders destroyed Vyzantion in the Fourth Crusade (which proceeded no further in the direction of Jerusalem, though freeing the Holy Land had been the stated goal), they left behind observations to the effect that Constantinople was larger than the five largest Western cities together. (It was in fact larger than that, though Cordova was for a time larger; both were artistic centers as well as centers for every sort of known civilized pursuit and comfort; silks came from China, and spice from the Orient.) The Viking Rus (founders of Slavonic Ukraïne and Russia) were so impressed with the grandeur of the Orthodox cathedral and services that Waldemar (St. Vladimir) adopted Christianity and receiving the report of his emissaries, who visited the various known religions of the time.

The historian, J. M. Roberts, observes (The Penguin history of the world, p. 379) that, at the end of the first millennium, "no city in the West could approach in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, Baghdad, or Ch'ang-an." Of the Dark Ages, he says that "no school in the West could match those of Arab Spain or Asia. . . . for centuries, even the greatest European kings were hardly more than barbarian warlords . . . "

If learning was, as already observed, meager and exceptional in the Western Dark Ages, the fringes of Europe offered tremendous exceptions to the "darkness" that prevailed in most of Europe. Besides Byzantion, Cordova, and the great trading zone of the Vikings stretching from North America to Kiev, there was Ireland, where the Greek Fathers continued to be read and translated.   Byzantine learning proceeded apace till its preliminary destruction by the Franks and Venetians, and even afterwards--right up to the Turks' capture of "the City." From its founding in this millennium, learning was promoted by Athonite/Hagiorite (both terms refer to the monastics of Mt. Athos--the Holy Mountain) scholars.
     If the ending of the Western Dark Ages came about as the result of Latin translations (by Spanish Jews and others) of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, physicians, and scientists, this most momentous cross-fertilization of what was known of the Augustinian tradition of the Latins with the Islamicized Aristotelian conceptual framework resulted in a blend in which a very concrete outlook on praxis and law held sway side by side with the static (energyless) categories of theology that have always typified Western Christianity--Catholic and Protestant alike. In Latin terms, new forms moulded, defined, and interpreted the common matter (the Gospels and consentient Fathers) of Christianity. The Greek concept of energy got eviscerated in Latin as actus "act" or operatio "operation, function"; SEE HERE. Even today, Western theology ignores the concept of energy and thus stands in stark contrast with the East. Western translations of the New Testament often simply render the energy words as "work" or "in-working"; the Greek sense of actualizing or realizing a potential (dýnamis) and its connection with being, light, and Life all get lost. This disconnect of course constitutes a great gulf between Greek-language Biblical and Patristic thinking, on the one hand, and Western theological thought, on the other.   It is noteworthy that, when the original Greek writings became available in the West as the result of Byzantine scholars migrating from the Venetian island of Crete to Venice--an event that initiated the Renaissance in the West--many Latins continued to prefer the translations from Arabic that they were already familiar with; in order words, some continued to depend on a third-hand Aristotle, rather than the original.
     The distinction between the divine Essence and Energies has never, as already mentioned, never taken hold among Christian thinkers in the West, where one observes a consistent failure to resolve the transcendence and immanence of God (and all of the other things that the concept of Energy ties together in a coherent way; CLICK HERE FOR MORE).    As a result of that failure, the Latins discarded John 15:26 (where the essential procession of the all-holy Spirit is distinguished from His energetic sending by Jesus in the created cosmos), embraced the grave error of the Filioque (added to the Creed), departed from the Patristic consensus of the four Eastern patriarchates that remained faithful to the promises of Christ and the guidance of the Paraclete (John 16:13), and fell into many other innovatory errors.   Failing to see that Grace is uncreated Energy (taking it to be a created but supernatural form or quality or habit of the soul--form being understood as what "actualizes" matter), and speaking of Christ's members as partaking of the divine Essence--through "created" means--they have let error pile on error. The root error is paradigmatic--ignoring the concept of energies. (Cf. the acute discussion of the divine Energies in Philip Sherrard's The Greek East and the Latin West: a study in the Christian tradition [ISBN 960-7120-04-3, pp. 61-72; see pp. 35-46].)   In failing to distinguish the uncreated Essence from the uncreated Energies, the Latins and Denominationists are immune to the fact that the ekpórefsis or procession of the Son and Spirit in the Trinitarian Essence does NOT have to be the same as the ékpempsis "mission" in the economy of Creation.
      Tellingly, the Augustinian view of a corrupt and sinful nature and the idea of inherited guilt has had such strong roots in the West that they have been able to generate other doctrinal innovations--e.g. the superfluous "dogma" of the immaculate conception of the Theotokos. It is obvious that Christ would not fully share human nature if it were "sinful" or "depraved," seeing that He is sinless (CLICK HERE).

CLICK HERE FOR LINEAGE CHART OF THEOLOGIES

If the Cordovan influence resulted not only in a small group of Averroists in Paris, it also, as already seen, yielded the consequence of an intellectual split into two forms of late-Mediaeval scholasticism--Dominican Thomism, which was to prevail among the Latins; and Franciscan (and Augustinian) Scotist-Ockhamism--also known as Nominalism or the via moderna "modernism"--prominent among whom were the Britons Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham. (St. Augustine's bête noir, Pelagius, had also been British.) This form of scholasticism firmly rejected the concept of nature (along with "natural") and allowed no distinction among essences (let alone energies) and individual existents. Of importance to understanding the Reformers--Luther, Calvin, etc.--is the fact that in the century preceding Luther, Wycliffe, and Hus had conceived of the Church as the predestinated--an "invisible" entity rather than as a visible, institutional entity.
Luther, who called Ockham the only scholastic worth reading, classified himself as a Nominalist, was brought up in and subscribed to the premises of the via moderna. In fact, Luther's and Calvin's premises were much more obviously "Islamic" than Thomas's. This resulted from the elevation of will over intellect in the Franciscan tradition, as opposed to the Dominican tradition of Aquinas, and is evident in Reformation predestinarianism, anti-iconism, and emphasis on "the book" or "the word," not to speak of the pervasive juridical concepts of satisfaction, atonement, redemption, adoption, federal (covenantal) unity with Christ, etc.--all but the last taken over from the Latins. (The Orthodox emphasis is on a new creation--a new birth (regeneration.) Luther was greatly influenced by Cordovan thinkers--like the Jewish Salomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron)--through his disciple, the Bible critic, Nicholas of Lyra. The Protestant demotion of the rôle of sacraments (and then eventual elimination in some sects) could be ascribed to Islam, but was preëminently due to a Gnostic rejection of materiality as well as time. Unlike some modern Protestant translators of the Bible, however, Calvin was careful to avoid the dualist heresy of speaking of human nature as "sinful," even as he characterized human nature as having been corrupted and totally depraved. The emphasis on will yielded Luther's virtual reality of justification (the believer is righteous by imputation while remaining actually a sinner). Calvin went further and made partaking of Christ's Body and Blood a virtual partaking through the mouth of faith. (SEE HERE for more on Reformation virtual reality.)

Traditionalist	BEING --> TRUTH --> WILL	FAITH = Belief (MIND) fides
Reformation	WILL --> VIRTUAL REALITY --> TRUTH	FAITH = Assent (WILL) [Luther's fiducia]

The dependence of truth on being and the correspondence between being and truth goes back at least to Aristotle (Metaphysics, at the end of I.1 [993b 30]).
It has been noted that for Thomas, the divine Essence was both actus purus (the closest his conceptuology allowed him to come to uncreated Energy; see his Summa theologica I.25.l, I.77.2 [God's "operation is His Essence"], et al.) After stating that the intellect is properly a potency (i.e. dýnamis), not an operatio (the Latin mis-rendering of energy) and rejecting the idea of any unactualized potential in God, Thomas affirms (I translate two citations from Aquinas's Summa theologia referred to in Sopko's book on Protopresvyter John Romanides' theology, pp. 31 and 37) that "in God alone is intellect [the content] of His Essence," but in created being only a potency of essence (S.T. I,79.1); and that ". . . in God, relation to the creation is not a real relation, but solely [a relation] according to reason," even though the relation of the creature to God is a real one (S.T.I.45.3)! It will be recalled that the Persons of the all-holy Trinity are defined strictly by their relations in the West (Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, etc.); nevertheless, the Persons are psychologically characterized in terms of created reason (the Son or LOGOS), and in terms of created will or love (the Paraclete). See below on the analogia entis--the alleged analogy between created and uncreated essences--even among those who, like Calvin, denied the possibility of really knowing God's Essence.
It is worth noting that the Thomists were clear that "Grace does not replace nature but completes it." This squares with the Eastern idea that when the Assimilation to God was lost through the sinning of humanity's original ancestors, human nature (the Icon of God) remained, though its reason and freewill remained (or humans would be animals), though only as a potential waiting to be activated or realized by the Grace of Christ.

Latin scholastics typically relate love to will; they even call the Holy Spirit alternatively God's will and the love between the Father and the Son. (See above on Western reification of the second and third Persons of the all-holy Trinity as reason and as love and/or will.) And the Reformers even defined faith volitionally as fiducia ("trust": more emotional or affective than "fidelity" and indeed conative or volitional for Luther--more like "loyalty"). Properly viewed, though, neither faith nor love is will; for faith is belief, a mental activity, and love is a feeling or craving--"passion" in the ancient vocabulary. Like belief, love can be the ground or motive for a volitional act.

     The Franciscan scholastic tradition begins with Alexander of Hales' lectures on Peter Lombard's Sentences--long the standard text for theological courses. Richard of Middleton and his later contemporary, John Duns Scotus, were the effective founders of Franciscan scholasticism; see H. O. Taylor's The mediaeval mind, 1951, II.542). Its early form is Scotism, but since William of Ockham carried a number of Scotist views to their conclusions, we term Franciscan scholasticism Scotism-Ockhamism--or, Nominalism or the via moderna.   This school steadfastly maintained that "will is the noblest power in the soul" and that "will is simply nobler than the intellect." This Semitic view was due not least to the obvious causal efficacy of will--an "energy" in Eastern thinking. Duns Scotus made the divine will the norm and ground of righteousness or justice. He came near to making foreordaining the basis for foreknowing, though he insisted that God is contemporaneous with every present moment in time; his followers took the step of making divine foreknowledge contingent on predestinating what was to happen, though they emphasized predestination to Salvation more than reprobation--predestination to perdition. Though the Thomists held that the allegëd "indelible Character of the Sacraments" [SEE HERE] inheres in practical reason [i.e. wisdom], the Scotists held that it inheres in the will. Important figures in later Nominalism were Gregory of Rimini--a slightly later contemporary of Ockham's, a member of the Augustinian Hermits and a scholar of a strongly Augustinian outlook--and Gabriel Biel, a member of the Brethren of the Common Life and co-founder of the University of Tübingen whose view of Grace is reported by those who know to have been at the opposite pole from that of Gregory of Rimini.
      Though I have read that the Ockhamists and/or Reformers made will to be the Essence of God--an energy different from intellect and existence in Latin theology, I have been unable to find in Luther's and Calvin's few references to the divine Essence anything beyond an acknowledgement of God's having both intellect and will (the later being the nobler).   In fact, most of these Reformer's discussions of the divine Essence distinguish that Essence from the three Persons (not always with the clearest language in Luther's case).
     Many Latins question that the concept of Grace as uncreated Energy is as old as the New Testament, as St. Eirenaios and the three Cappadocian Fathers, as old as St. Cyril of Alexandria; they do not go so far as to question that it is as old as St. Maximos the Confessor, St. John of Damaskos (also a Confessor), and of course St. Gregory Palamãs.   Actually, energy had become part of Greek language and thinking in the centuries between the Aristotle and the holy Apostles. It didn't require explaining, since it was taken for granted--in St. Paul's writings and thereafter. Faulty translations (e.g. operatio) underlie Western theologians' failure to understood energy in the Greek-language Bible and Patristic heritage. The third-hand Aristotelianism of Western scholastics left energy something of an irrecoverable concept; at least, it's hard to get the idea across to contemporary Latins other than the eminent Jesuit philosopher--Bernard Lonergan.
     Sanctifying Grace in papalist teaching is a created habitus entitativus--NOT a habitus operativus (where the last term is as close as the West got to "energetic") of the believer's soul--a created (but "supernatural"!) habit, form, or quality of the soul. For Aquinas, the Vision of God is a "face-to-face" vision of the divine Essence (divinæ Essentiæ; S.T. I-II.iii.8)!   Compare the Reformation view of Grace and Justification--equally a state, a virtual or imputative reality.   Where Luther viewed unity with Christ as being "by faith" (i.e. will-based fiducia, "consent"), Calvin viewed it as "covenantal" (also will-based), and Aquinas held beatitude to be by intellect.   No doubt some contemporary Denominationists as well some Reformation Pietists have regarded beatitude as purely emotional (affective). In his Summa theologica, Thomas says [my rendering of the Latin], "We however pursue [our "intelligible goal"] through that which is made present to us by an act of the intellect" and " . . . the essence of blessedness consists of an act of the intellect" [both from I-II.iii.4].   This conforms well enough with the Latin dissecting and analysing the inner architectonics of the Trinity, the eucharistic Presence, the After-life, etc.    But how can the intellect present the unknowable Essence of God (a characteristic of God upheld even by the Reformers) to a finite human intellect?   How can a believer participate in the imparticipable Essence of God. Though there is hardly any alternative when uncreated Energy is not distinguished from uncreated Essence, this is all gobbledygook in the Eastern framework.
     When Salvation inheres in the will, it is as instantaneous as divine imputation "is" (SEE HERE). The more ontological traditionalist view agrees with 1 Cor. 1:18 (properly translated--as it is not in the 1611 English Bible) in speaking of those "being saved"--i.e. in a developing way--since one's Salvation is constantly being set back by sin. Traditionally, has priority over will because, as we have already seen,, God or a human being needs to have knowledge of what the choices are and what their consequences entail in order to will anything in a free manner.
     Although the Greek of Rom. 5:12 ends with "and thus did death spread to all humans, for which [cause] all have fallen into sinning," the Latins mistranslate Rom. 5:12 to read in place of the foregoing:   et per peccataum mors, et ita in omnes homines mors pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt ("and through sin death, and thus did death spread into all humans, IN whom [scil. Adam, referred to at the beginning of the verse as the "one human" in whom sin began ] all sinned."   Augustine championed the idea of all humans' having sinned "in Adam," since all humanity is "in Adam's loins"; this emphasis grew out of Augustine's conflict the Pelagians.   But the Bible clearly repudiates the idea of transferable guilt (and by implication, merit); see Dt. 24:16 (quoted twice later in the historical books of the Old Testament) as well as Gal. 6:5 in the New Testament. In Orthodoxy, newborn infants (including, of course, the sinless and specially graced Mother of God; CLICK HERE) are not guilty of Adam's trespasses.
     The repudiation of transindividual natures, etc., that took root in the Ockhamist-Nominalist evolution of Scotism, was only partly the result of their scant interest in being (ontology). In fact, Plato's "universals" (abstract existents--relations or entities like "love" and "humanity" or human nature) and the lógoi (with small "l") in Patristic Greek gave way in St. John of Damaskos to "volitional thoughts" (cf. D. Reid's Energies of the Spirit: Trinitarian models in Eastern Orthodox and Western theology [1997, p. 62, referring to Lossky]) in thinking about God's creation of the world. By this time, the Mon(o)energist-Monotheletist controversy had focused Orthodoxy's attention on will's causality, on will as a principal energy.    Whereas the lógoi or lóyi remain in Thomism under the guise of ideas (also a Greek word), they were roundly rejected by the Ockhamists (including the Reformers) as subsisting entities. While non-Nominalists do not reject the relational reality of abstract relations and natures, the Orthodox do not differentiate the Trinitarian Hypostaseis or Persons on the basis of relations in the Augu

CHRISTIAN EAST VS. WEST

K I ND OF CHRISTIANITY

STRUCTURE