Dear brother Palamite
The Orthodox have never had to deal with the intellectual fervor that the West had to face. Basically, the Orthodox have been insulated from the kind of intellectual free-for-all pressures the West had to face throughout the Middle Ages.
The Orthodox Christians were not unaware of the works of the ancient Hellenes, and were in more direct contact in the East with a whole slew of very different living religions and world views. If anything, it was the western world which had become “insulated” through what many call “the Dark Ages”. Indeed, the Orthodox world never went through said experience. The sudden influx of those ideas was a shock for the then quite harsh and backward western world.
What differs, is that the western Churches eventually imbibed many of these fundamentally alien (and unknown to them, already rejected in an earlier age) ideas and I think in truth, gave birth to many of the latter phenomena you’d probably identify as part of the “intellectual free-for-all”. Yes, perhaps it has become a free-for-all, but it’s a situation that ultimately has it’s roots in medieval Catholicism, when it said “yes” to rationalism and dogma founded upon speculation.
That is the reason that the Orthodox have “not had all these problems.” It certainly was not because of your ecclesiology, but simply because the environment in which the Orthodox existed was not amenable to the free-thinking atmosphere in which the Latin Church was forced to exist.
The Orthodox do not claim how they arrange their Bishops, the procedures for calling Councils (which vary), etc. are magical formulas which guarantee anything. There is no fool proof administration. So you’re right, it certainly wasn’t our “ecclessiology” in that sense. But it was our ecclessiology in another - namely that the Lord Jesus Christ is Himself the Head of the Church. These are all the works of God’s Providence. We do very little.
And the Latin Church was not “forced” to do anything, so much as was eaten by the monstrous children it conceived by coupling with ideas the Church of Christ was already aware of and had discarded. It could only be because of a “break in the chain” that this kind of thing would have been received by the Latins.
The Orthodox Christians know who they are. It is precisely because the Latins stopped “knowing who they are”, and had the void filled in with novelties, that we’re sitting on two sides of a fence now. No serious historian, Christian or otherwise, disputes that it is the Orthodox who fundamentally retain the same character as those who dwelt in the heart of the period the Catholics call “the undivided Church.”
But Latin Catholics believe that it was the Holy Spirit working through the papacy that preserved the Catholic Faith DESPITE the quite different circumstances that the Latins had to endure.
You mean like exotic forms of paganism, “Islam”, hellenistic philosophy, barbarian invasions…once again, you make it sound like the “Orthodox world” during any given historical period was existing in some kind of backwater, while western Europe (home of “Catholicism”) was just a riot of diversity. The situation is actually quite reversed - the East never knew a “dark age”, there was no “renaisance”. What problems the Latins would come to endure (basically, the Reformation and the Enlightenment) were both of their own making.
I once spoke to a member of the TAC and asked whether or not he ever considered Orthodoxy. He stated that Orthodoxy did not present the same kind of solidity that Catholicism represented, opining that he was unsure whether Orthodoxy would have survived the kind of intellectual pressures that the Catholic Church had to face if placed in the same situation - simply because of lack of central leadership.
You’re right, the Orthodox Church knows absolutely nothing about persecutions. And how do institutions combat ideas? I thought other ideas did that. Institutions can be mouthpieces for falsehood themselves.
So whether or not the Reformation, or other schismatic/heretical movements existed in the West cannot really be brought to bear on the issue of the validity of the Catholic Church.
It certainly says a lot about the usefulness of the “Papal dogmas” and what real relationship they have to the unity of the Church. The Orthodox world has lived largely under a veil of roving persecutions and political hardships for the larger part of the last millenium. This is by the will of God, for He chastens those who He loves. Suffice it to say, She is still here, and quite integral, which I cannot say about Catholicism (whose doctrine and character varies radically throughout the last one thousand years.)
So you cannot fault me for being utterly unpersuaded.
That’s like doubting the validity of God because there are sinners! The real issue is whether or not the Catholic Church itself remained pure throughout such troubling times.
What does that mean “the Catholic Church remained pure.” Do you mean the people in the pews? The clergy? The Bishops?
