Therefore, to reject Orthodoxy on these charges of caesaropapism or anything similar of the sort, would logically require you to reject Catholicism as well.
You are indeed right that secular rulers have often interfered in ecclesiastical settings in the Western Church as well. One only has to consider the Avignon Papacy and the excessive influence of Philip the Fair on the pope. Certainly, I wasn’t trying to intimate that this problem hasn’t occurred in Catholicism. However it would be hard to argue that the victory of the Gregorian Reform in the Investiture Contest did not result in a significant change in church-state relations that is unparalleled in the Orthodox world.
Caeseropapism is not part of Orthodox theology, indeed ‘phyletism’ is condemned as a heresy. Since it is not part of Orthodox dogma, this is not in any way a critique of Orthodoxy
itself. It is rather a reflection that the ecclesiastical structure of Orthodoxy
lends itself more easily to a caeseropapist mould than the state-like centralized bureaucracy of the Catholic Church under a Holy See that is in theory an independent diplomatic actor headed by a bishop who claims the
plenitudo potestatis (fullness of power). While the papacy has come under secular influence, it has been almost impossible to keep it as such for long in view of this dogmatic precept in Catholic theology. As a result church-state relations have been far more fraught in the West since the Bishop of Rome has been in a far stronger position to contest imperial or national claims to spiritual as well as temporal authority. What Orthodox Patriarch has ever attained the zenith of power reached by the papacy in the High Middle Ages?
European kings and emperors had a
genuine challenge from the papacy that is unparalleled in any other part of the world. The papacy was for a time the only true ‘state’ in Europe, the only modernized, buraecratized entity governed by law. This created an odd sort of ‘balance’ in Europe, in which secular and religious authority could at times be on a ‘level playing’ field that was ultimately conducive to the emergence of the rule of law and constitutionalism.
If I may reference a secular source from a book by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama titled
The Origins of Political Order:
"…The equivalent of the investiture contest and the Gregorian reform never took place in the Byzantine world. The Eastern church failed to develop a state-like bureaucracy by which it could promulgate law, and did not succeed in codifying its decretals into a uniform canon law in the manner of the Catholic Church…Autonomy is a hallmark of institutional development, and here law in the West became far more developed than its counterparts elsewhere. No other part of the world experienced the equivalent of the Gregorian Reform and the investiture conflict in the which the entire hierarchy of a church engaged in a prolonged political conflict with the temporal ruler and ended up stalemating the latter. The resulting settlement, the Concordat of Worms, ensured autonomy for the church as an institution and gave it considerable incentive to develop its own bureaucracy and formal rules. Thus in premodern times, the rule of law became a far more powerful check on the power of temporal rulers in Western Europe than was the case in the Middle East, India, or in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This had significant implications for the later development of free institutions there…The modern legal order [therefore] had its roots in the fight waged by the Catholic Church against the emperor in the late eleventh century, and the first bureaucratic organizations were created by the church to manage its own internal affairs…The Catholic Church had became far more institutionalized in terms of its adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence than the religious establishments of any of the other world religions…"
This is one of the major points that draws me towards Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy. I genuinely like the fact that the pope is in a position, especially today with the independent Vatican city-state, to challenge secular authority in a manner that is inconceivable for Orthodox leaders.
The papacy is a fully independent, self-governing, autonomous actor in world affairs
today whereas the same cannot be said for contemporary Orthodox patriarchates. For me this is a draw in confronting secular powers, whether that be on religious freedom, abortion, labour rights, climate change or a host of other issues. The papacy is an asset for me.
As an example, consider Pope Benedict XV during WW1. In most parts of Europe, churches - including the respective local Catholic Bishops - all followed the same hymn sheets as their countries. German churches were patriotic for Germany, English churches patriotic for England, Russians for Russia and etc.
The papacy did not have an independent ‘state’ at this point (it had lost it a few decades previously and had to wait till 1929 to get its next one) but the Holy See was a recognised autonomous subject of international law, with its unique diplomatic voice. As a result the papacy could and did remain neutral, condemning the war as the “suicide of civilized Europe”. A tribute engraved at the foot of a statue to him that the Turks, a non-Catholic, non-Christian people, erected in Istanbul reads: “
The great Pope of the world tragedy… the benefactor of all people, irrespective of nationality or religion.” Pope Benedict XV could not have acted so independently and universally, to my mind, unless his office claimed a universal power and had an independent voice on the world stage.
This is why I see the papacy’s relative independence from secular authority and its centralized power structure as an assert in the worldwide dissemination of the the Gospel.
Uh…I think not. Spain has a largely secularized culture today and a constitutional monarchy that does not have much of an active role in society whether positively or negatively. It once did persecute other minority religious groups savagely, as did Franco but I think you ought to go on holiday to Spain if you think its still the case…
). Even so, I instantly fell in love with the Eastern Orthodox tradition. I just somehow felt right at home even though I was much less familiar with it.