The Fundamental Difference Between the "East" and "West"
Professor John Romanides
European and American histories treat the alienation between Eastern and Western Christian Churches as though it were inevitable, because of an alleged separation of the Roman Empire itself into "East" and "West," because of alleged linguistic and cultural differences, and because of an alleged difference between the legal West and the speculative East. [1] Evidence strongly suggests that such attempts to explain the separation between East and West are conditioned by prejudices inherited from the cultural tradition of the Franks, and from the centuries-old propaganda of the Frankish (Germanic dominated) Papacy.
The evidence points clearly to the national, cultural, and even linguistic unity between East and West Romans which survived to the time when the Roman popes were replaced by Franks.
Had the Franks not taken over the Papacy, it is very probable that the local synod of the Church of Rome (with the pope as president), elected according to the 769 election decree approved by the Eighth Ecumenical Synod in 879, would have survived, and that there would not have been any significant difference between the papacy and the other four Roman (Orthodox) Patriarchates.
However, things did not turn out that way. The Papacy was alienated from the (Orthodox) East by the Franks, so we now are faced with the history of that alienation when we contemplate the reunion of divided Christians. By the eighth century, we meet for the first time the beginnings of a split in Christianity. In West European sources we find a separation between a "Greek East" and a "Latin West." In Roman sources this same separation constitutes a schism between Franks (a confederation of Germanic Teutonic peoples living on the lower banks of the Rhine who by the sixth century AD conquered most of France, the low countries and what is now Germany. ed) and Romans. One detects in both terminologies an ethnic or racial basis for the schism which may be more profound and important for descriptive analysis than the doctrinal claims of either side.
The Roman Empire was conquered in three stages: by Germanic tribes (the Franks) who became known as "Latin Christianity," by Muslim Arabs, and finally, by Muslim Turks. In contrast to this,
the ecclesiastical administration of the Roman Empire disappeared in stages from West Europe, but has survived up to modern times in the "East Roman Empire" the Orthodox Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
The reason for this is that
the Germanic - Frankish conquerors of the West Romans (who became known as the "Roman Catholic Church.") used the Church to suppress the Roman nation, whereas under Islam the East Roman nation, the Orthodox Church, survived by means of the Orthodox Church. In each instance of conquest, the bishops became the ethnarchs of the conquered Romans and administered Roman law on behalf of the rulers. As long as the bishops were Roman, the unity of the Roman Church was preserved, in spite of theological conflicts.
Roman Revolutions and the Rise of Frankish Feudalism and Doctrine
The Franks applied their policy of destroying the unity between the Romans under their rule and the "East Romans," the Orthodox, under the rule of Constantinople. They played one Roman party against the other, took neither side, and finally condemned both the iconoclasts and the Seventh Ecumenical Synod (786/7) at their own Council of Frankfurt in 794,
In the time of Pippin of Herestal (687-715) and Charles Martel (715-741), many of the Franks who replaced Roman bishops were military leaders who, accordingto Saint Boniface, "
shed the blood of Christians like that of the pagans."
[2]
