It references other books and studies. I usually don’t bother reading the footnotes but this book is very generous with its sources.
Nine out of ten of the best scholarly arguments are carried out solely in the footnotes of works published back-and-forth, rarely intruding in to the base text. If they are in the base text, chances are it’s more of a squabble (or polemic) than a top-notch argument.
Although that entire tactic likely relies on many men skipping the footnotes entirely or nearly so, leaving them only for those interested in the debate (or the details). I’d also wager it’s why many journals of philosophy reject, often in their submission guidelines, too many or too long footnotes (although, when used extensively, it’s often as a crutch for poor writing, in the same way I use many parenthetical excurses: Jaroslav Pelikan wrote the seminal treatise on the development of doctrine over the course of 1,200 pages and not a single footnote [although with many, many marginal references and enough bibliographic material to keep one busy for five lifetimes, one lifetime for each volume’s bibliography - even I can’t keep up; he learned so many languages, and had mastered the sources so thoroughly, it astounds me, and I am, in my experience, as much above the average in that regard as he is above me (and he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy). He reminds me much of an Augustine or John Calvin, two men also renowned for their memory and mastery of nearly all relevant previous material (if Calvin hadn’t gone Protestant, we’d have two Thomae Aquinitii, I think)]).
As far as the actual split, the roots can be traced back to the times of the early Church Fathers, specifically, as I previously mentioned, Augustine, Origen, and the Cappadocians, themselves, not to mention the arguments over Easter and azymes (nor to even think of mentioning the future Filioque, a whipping-boy for all of the parallel yet divergent development in the two traditions). By the time of the Quinisext Council, the gulf was widening to the point that one doesn’t have to be a theologian or Patristics scholar capable of comparing Origenism and Augustinism or the Greek and Latin Fathers to see that it is wide and deep; by the time of the Iconoclasts and then the Photian schism (at the absolute latest, and likely earlier), the two Churches will be in and out of communion until the final break in the late 1400s, not even a long lifetime before Luther’s first cries for “reformation in head and members” (and not too long before the Ecumenical Patriarch himself, Cyril Lukaris, is seduced by Calvinism, and writes a Calvinistic catechism which he calls
An Exposition of the Faith of Eastern Christians). By the time of the Filioque controversies and Symeon the New Theologian, and, later, Gregory Palamas and the Hesychasts most especially, the traditions have diverged enough that, liturgy and tradition notwithstanding, the dogmatics of the two traditions seem impossible to trace to a common source.
Not only two disparate methods of theologizing, two languages, two cultures, mutual animosity (as Pelikan states, Byzantine theologians would “win their spurs by composing such treatises as
Against the Latin Heresy”, and Roman Catholic theologians would win their spurs by composing such treatises as “
On the Errors of the Greeks”), and the resultant divide contributed to the split, but also the vastly disparate lengths of theological maturation on each side of the Byzantine Curtain (after Byzantium had become an Empire in its own right, and the West had entered the “Dark Age” of barbarian invasion and rising and falling kingdoms) the eighth-century Greeks had theological sophistication not matched in the West until the twelfth, or, likely, thirteenth centuries, with St Thomas Aquinas. Compare the theological sophistication of the Icondules and Iconoclasts, or the dogmatics of John Damascene, with a Carolingian theologian (who, chronologically, postceded the Byzantines), and then with a Scholastic theologian of the High Middle Ages, and see which ones match up.
But, at that point, the West kept marching on, whereas the Orthodox didn’t, and ended up stuck at what, to me, seems to be a most infelicitous time in their development - that of Palamas. The Greeks take it as a point of pride (and, at times I question whether not rightly so, if it was stuck at any other time, such as that of Maximus Confessor, or John Damascene, or even Photius, instead of Palamas) that they have frozen in place - much as the Fathers - Greek and Latin - of the latest antiquity through Middle Ages did, proclaiming again and again, “I do nothing by my own hand, but only transmit what the holy Catholic Fathers and Doctors before me have already said and written”, and tend to deny
any development of doctrine.
Pelikan proposes, and I agree - although for different reasons, as I see the hand of Divine Providence at work - that much of Rome’s authority through the ages was buttressed again and again by it unfailingly and staunchly remaining on the side of orthodox doctrine - with the exception of the naivete, even arguably not formal heresy, of Honorius - throughout the first seven councils, with the period of the formative first four having no errors in Rome, and multitudinous heresies, Trinitarian and Christological, spawned and supported by incumbents of every other see. One can read this as the hand of God, or merely as Bauer would have put it, the Roman legal mind emerging “victorious” in every doctrinal dispute, to insure that it’s own idiosyncratic “Christianity” of many “Christianities” would become “orthodox” in the future (although I imagine everyone in this thread, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, would denounce that interpretation), or even as luck of the draw (although amazingly improbable luck it is). Rome had, and has, a reputation for unblemished orthodoxy (“Truly, St Peter has spoken by the lips of Leo!”), and the other sees didn’t: the effect of this is obvious, contra sees that were breeding grounds for heresy.
Although Pelikan (who obviously sympathizes with the Orthodox, eventually converting to their faith), writes, while still a Lutheran: “The monarchical pretensions [or delusions] of one patriarchal see could be and were voted down by the other four”.
, cheers lad.