Catholic West vs Orthodox East Part 2
From the Great Schism to the Present Day
This is a second in a two part series. Part 1 is here.
The timeline above outlines the historical division between the Euro-American West and the Russian East. I’ve divided the timeline into four color categories: Blue (West), Red (East), Purple (Aristocratic/Imperial), and Green (non-Christian, or neopagan). However West and East are more than just geographical designations. For example, the West (as I define it) is oriented towards the principle of political and moral accountability. Following on the Biblical precedent of Old Testament prophets calling Israel’s kings to repentance, the Catholic church attempted to hold European rulers accountable for their actions. When the the influence of the church waned during the Protestant Reformation, this moral authority shifted, first to Protestant reformers, then to Enlightenment philosophers, then to radical revolutionaries, and finally to “the people,” who still hold political leaders to account today. In the West there is a historical continuity between the imperious Catholic popes who defied emperors and kings, and today’s social justice activists speaking “truth to power.” By contrast, the East has had a more harmonious relationship between church and state. Consequently, states in the East had relatively little political or moral accountability. However during certain periods, the “western” value of accountability spilled into the East (as it did during the Bolshevik Revolution). In these periods, I’ve colored the East blue.
Below is an extended explanation of the events I’ve included in the timeline which I’ve broken up into historical periods. At the end of this analysis, I’ve included my own thoughts on the current war in Ukraine and how it fits into the history of tension between the East and the West.
My primary source for the information in this timeline comes from John Strickland’s four volume history of Christendom. Unlike Strickland who is Orthodox, I am a partisan of the Catholic West and its cultural heritage. However, I’m not blind to the many trade offs the West has made in its restless pursuit of “reform for the better.” Like Strickland, I believe the East has something important to offer the West today.
The Gregorian Reformation (11th-13th Centuries)
The roots of the division between East and West go back to Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire into eastern and western zones in 285AD. These two zones produced two distinct forms of Christianity: Catholic and Orthodox. These two branches officially parted ways in 1045 in an event called the Great Schism. This post picks up the story directly after the Great Schism. (I’ve covered the Great Schism in Part One of this series.)
Unlike the Orthodox church, the Catholic church has often had an adversarial relationship with political leaders. The history of this conflict is important because it led to the development of modern divided governments with independent judicial branches. Conflict between church and state in the West reached its zenith during an event called the Investiture Crisis of 1077. Pope Gregory of Rome excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV for challenging his papal authority. Henry’s excommunication weakened his domestic political position and his Saxon enemies seized the opportunity to raise an army against him. In order to gain re-admittance into the church, Henry had to stand in the snow for three days outside the castle of Canossa where Pope Gregory was ensconced until he was finally reinstated.
After re-consolidating his political power, Henry raised an army and marched on Rome, intent on removing Gregory for good. However, Gregory called on his Norman allies, who marched to his defense. The result was the 1084 Sack of Rome, one of the most destructive in the city’s history. Gregory had defeated the king and defended papal supremacy, but at a terrible price.
The Crusades Unite the West (12th and 13th Centuries)
The Gregorian popes knew that their authority would be relentlessly challenged by future kings and emperors. However they stumbled on a unique solution to this problem. In 1095, Gregory’s successor Pope Urban II called upon the nobility of Europe to join a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from Islamic invaders. Urban realized that he could keep conflicts at bay if Europe’s knights and nobles were away fighting in the East. Indeed, the crusades had the effect of uniting Europe in a common cause overseen by the leadership of the Catholic church.
Urban and other popes justified the crusades on the grounds that they would help liberate Orthodox Christians in the East from Muslim infidels. In practice however, the crusaders were hostile to the orthodox christians and confiscated their lands to create new “Crusader States.” They even sacked Constantinople in 1203 during the 4th Crusade, briefly bringing the city under Catholic dominion.
Clericalism and Scholasticism (11th-14th Centuries)
With the European nobility preoccupied in crusades, the Catholic church set about reforming the church, making it an even more dominant cultural and political power. Catholic canon law was implemented throughout the West in both political and ecclesiastical administration. Crusaders brought back the writings of Aristotle, whose works had been carefully preserved by Muslims. The new vogue for Aristotle led to the emergence of a form of theology called Scholasticism. A series of brilliant philosophers transformed the way that the church thought about the world, effectively separating “faith” from “reason.” Scholasticism set the stage for modern rationalistic science and relegated faith to the realm of emotion and subjectivity.
A new emotive spirituality focused on graphic images of Christ’s crucifixion. St. Francis of Assisi began manifesting stigmata on his hands and feet. Fears of purgatory were stoked by a new class of itinerant monastics intent on reforming the lax spirituality of the laity, who heretofore had been largely ignored by the church. Pilgrimages became popular.
However the laity was still largely shut out from any sort of ritual participation in the life of the church. Eucharist was rare. The people were passive observers of a new clerical class, whose rituals were becoming increasingly theatrical. This led to the emergence of more personal forms of piety informed by the subjective spirituality of mystics like Meister Eckhart. Many of these new forms of piety became popular heresies, setting the stage for the Protestant Reformation.
Eastern Middle Ages (11th-14th Centuries)
In the meantime, the orthodox East resisted the influence of Catholic Scholasticism. In 1351, the Hesychast Council renounced the scholastic influence of a Western cleric named Barlaam and reestablished its commitment to traditional forms of Christian monasticism.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the East was hammered by constant invasions. Turks came from the south and Mongols came from the East. The Mongols ruled over Russian lands from 1247–1480 and subjected the orthodox church to terrible persecutions. Monastics retreated deep into the forests, beginning a process of monastic colonization which would influence the orthodox character of Russia in the future.
The Russians in Moscow collaborated with the Mongols and the influence of the Muscovites began to grow. Dmitry Donsky managed to liberate the city from the Mongols in 1380 and the Muscovite regime started taking control of other Russian lands.
The Avignon Papacy and Schism (14th-15th Centuries)
The Gregorian Reformation had been a high point for the Catholic church, but after two centuries the church had become inflexible, corrupt, and vulnerable to outside political forces. In 1303, King Philip of France assassinated Pope Boniface VIII and installed a French Pope in the city of Avignon. This upset the Italians, who insisted on an Italian Pope in 1378, setting off the Papal Schism. To resolve the schism, a group of cardinals convened the Council of Pisa in 1409, deposing the two rival popes and installing a third “Conciliar Pope.” In 1414 at the Council of Constance, the cardinals finally succeeded in deposing all three popes by overturning the principal of papal supremacy in favor of the principle of conciliar supremacy.
However, the council’s new pope Eugene IV tried to reassert papal supremacy. So the council deposed him as a heretic. Eugene then defied expectations by negotiating a reunion with the Orthodox church at the Council of Florence in 1439. This ecclesiastical coup reestablished Eugene’s authority and gave him leverage to reassert papal supremacy.
However, the Catholic reunion with the Orthodox East was not destined to last. Constantinople was under imminent threat from the Turks, and the Orthodox negotiators had only ceded to Eugene’s demands at the Council of Florence in exchange for a Papal crusade against the Turks. When the negotiators returned to Byzantium and Kiev, the local churches refused to accept the reunion with the West, and drove the negotiators from their cities. Shortly thereafter, the Turks defeated the Pope’s crusade in 1444 and Constantinople fell in 1453, bringing an end to the last bastion of the Roman Empire.
Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation (15th-17th Centuries)
After the papal scandals of the 14th century, the principle of papal supremacy didn’t mean much any more. The popes of the 15th century attempted to restore their status by embracing the new Renaissance spirit, lavishing enormous amounts on neoclassical projects like St. Peters Basilica and sponsoring artists like Michelangelo. To raise money, they relied on the sale of indulgences, capitalizing on fears of purgatory that generations of itinerant monastics had been stoking among the populace. This money was then spent on murals that depicted, not the fires of purgatory, but a new humanist vision that made man the measure of all things (see Marcilio Ficino’s philosophy of homo faber, “man the maker”). In the new artistic vision, God’s angelic hosts were reduced to flocks of passive cherubs. This rank hypocrisy was noted by Martin Luther, whose scathing critique in 1517 launched the Protestant Reformation.
Luther’s Protestant Reformation was less a repudiation of the Gregorian Reformation than it was a renewal of it. New Protestant doctrines like “absolute depravity” and “atonement penal theory” were simply extreme versions of the cross-centered piety that had been birthed by Gregorian scholasticism. Initially, Luther had no intention of separating himself from the church, hoping rather that the Catholic leadership would see the need to reform itself, and indeed, there would soon be a Catholic counter-reformation. But Luther became swept up in political forces beyond his control. Europe was soon engulfed in a series of religious wars that lasted 150 years and cost the lives of tens of millions.
The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1501–1650) had both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, the reforms increased lay participation and led to the emergence of a beneficial Catholic piety still practiced widely today. A new monastic order, the Jesuits, spread the gospel of inclusion across Europe and beyond. Jesuits also contributed significantly to the scientific revolution. On the negative side, new measures were introduced to combat heresy, including the infamous Spanish Inquisition. In all, Catholic and Protestant paranoia over heresy and witchcraft led to the execution of well over 100,000 people.
Moscow: The Third Rome
After the fall of Constantinople, Moscow became the biggest patriarchate in the Orthodox church and claimed to be the “Third Rome,” the true inheritor of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Ivan the Great (1462–1505) expanded the country’s borders and Russia began to come into its own, both culturally and militarily.
The fledgling state was soon engulfed in a violent and unstable period known as “The Time of Troubles,” (1598–1613). Capitalizing on this instability, Poland conquered Moscow, which put it briefly under Catholic jurisdiction. The Catholic church also made significant gains in Ukraine following the 1569 Union of Brest, which established a special “Eastern-Rite” Catholic church in Kiev among Ukrainians hostile to Muscovite expansionism and its new Russian Orthodoxy. (Ukrainians have been “looking to the West” and away from Russia for well over four hundred years, in spite of Vladimir Putin’s accusation Western influence in Ukraine originates with Nazi infiltrators or Western incitement of the 2013 Euromaidan protests.)
The Russian Orthodox rites departed in some respects from the original Greek rites, which aggravated orthodox purists like Patriarch Nikon (1652–1681). He imposed reforms which reasserted the preeminence of the original Greek traditions. This led to a schism between the official Russian Orthodox church, which maintained the Greek rites, and the “Old Believers,” who wanted to keep the new Russian rites. They believed that the Greeks had fallen from God’s favor and that “Holy Russia” was the true kingdom of God on earth. The schism continues to this day.
The Enlightenment (18th Century)
150 years of religious warfare in the West led to a secular backlash called The Enlightenment. Although many Enlightenment philosophers were deists or even atheists, they nevertheless carried on the unique Judeo-Christian tradition of advocating for reform and demanding accountability from political leaders. The demands of these philosophers can be conveniently summed up in the famous revolutionary motto: “Liberté (liberalism), fraternité (nationalism), and egalité (socialism). Liberalism was the first of these three principles to gain widespread attention.
Liberalism emerged quite independently in England, even before the Enlightenment occurred. Exhausted after massacring Irish Catholics during the English Civil War (1642–51), Oliver Cromwell was one of the first Western rulers to begin instituting religious civil rights. This was followed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which created a “constitutional monarchy,” wherein the king’s rights were limited and the rights of parliament increased. This made the English government more representative of the will of the people, although universal suffrage was by no means complete. After the American Revolution ended in 1783, the United States instituted further liberal reforms, including a comprehensive “Bill of Rights,” and universal suffrage for all males, with the notorious exception of black slaves.
The liberal demands of the French Revolutionaries were by far the most comprehensive. Between 1789 and 1793 they abolished slavery, created universal suffrage for men and dramatically increased the rights of women. However, these liberal reforms were accompanied by so much revolutionary violence and instability, that the country reverted to the autocracy of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1805.
Constitutional Monarchies vs Imperial Autocracies (18th-19th Centuries)
During the Enlightenment, a new breed of monarch emerged called the “enlightened autocrat.” The power and wealth of these monarchs had greatly expanded due to colonialism and the collapse of Catholic influence. Enlightened autocrates included Louis XIV “The Sun King” and Catherine the Great of Russia. They were often sympathetic to liberal reforms, but not at the expense of their own power. They were worried that if they gave an inch, they would be walked all over. Sure enough, the piecemeal reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries merely whetted the appetite of the people for more comprehensive reform and led to further calls for revolution.
After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe, creating new nations and balancing the powers of old ones. It was a masterpiece of realpolitik, a pragmatic attempt to prevent further war. It pitted the liberal British and French constitutional monarchies against the imperial autocracies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. On the whole, the Congress was a resounding success. Great power conflict on a large scale would not occur for another 99 years, a period of respite unheard of in human history.
Revolution: The 19th Century
In spite of Europe’s new political stability, radical movements were brewing beneath the surface. The Enlightenment project of “liberalism, nationalism, and socialism” had stalled. While there had been liberal gains in England and France, many were left in grinding poverty, vulnerable to the new machines of industrial capitalism. Throughout the 19th century, revolutions broke out demanding not only liberal rights, but socialist reforms as well. The 1848 revolution in Paris was so violent that it spooked the French majority, who subsequently elected an autocratic government to replace its republican one, setting back decades of liberal progress.
Some lost faith in the Enlightenment altogether. A German counter-enlightenment ignited the Romantic Movement, which looked for religion’s lost transcendence in nature and art. An emerging spirit of nationalism looked to blood and soil for meaning. A group of intellectuals called Left Hegelians began to wonder if they were witnessing the emergence of a radically new historical process unfolding. Chief among them was a political philosopher named Karl Marx.
Liberalism in Russia had gotten off to a particularly slow start. Centuries of Western-looking tzars had aped European culture, but without adopting any of its reforms. During the 19th century, two groups within the Russian intelligencia began strenuously advocating for reform: westernizers and slavophiles. Westernizers managed to convince Tzar Alexander II to emancipate the serfs in 1861, who had existed in slave-like conditions for centuries. However, emancipation didn’t result in noticeable improvements in the condition of the serfs and Alexander II was assassinated by radicals with further demands. No good deed goes unpunished. The assassination provoked a conservative backlash from Alexander III and his son Nicholas II, who returned Russia to a traditional autocracy influenced by the Slavophiles. In the meantime, the underground radicalism of the westernizers continued to increase, inflamed by socialist movements sweeping through Europe under the influence of Marx.
Totalitarianism (Late 19th-early 20th Centuries)
The balance of power in Europe collapsed when German emperor Wilhelm II came to power in 1888. Wilhelm was bellicose, ambitious, and jealous of France and Britain’s vast colonial empires. He sacked his pragmatic military advisor Otto von Bismark and embarked on a series of ill-advised and threatening military adventures, drawing France, Britain, Russia, and eventually the United States into World War I.
Russia’s Tzar Nicholas II wanted desperately to avoid war with Germany. But Nicholas was weak. A failed communist revolution in 1905 had led to the creation of the Duma (or parliament), a concession Nicolas gave to liberal reformers, and one which undercut his authority. Nicholas’s passive personality also allowed his more belligerent military advisors to control him. So in spite of his opposition, Russia entered World War I.
Russia suffered greatly during the war and the Duma demanded that Nicholas abdicate the throne. A Democratic Provisional Government was then instituted and “soviets” (democratic councils) were implemented across Russia. It looked as if democracy might actually take root in Russia after all. Vladimir Lenin had other plans. His Bolshevik party took control of the provisional government and disempowered the local soviet councils. Resentment over Lenin’s brutal dictatorship spiraled into a civil war.
After putting down the war, Lenin retreated from ideological Marxism and embraced a regulated form of capitalism called “The New Economic Policy.” Lenin’s pragmatic dictatorship marks him as a “westerner” to a certain extent. However, after Lenin’s death in 1926, Stalin reverted to a purer brand of ideological communism. He brutally annihilated almost every aspect of the previous Russian culture, murdering millions in the process and created a new quasi-religious cult of personality (proletkult) which he promoted with an iconic style of propaganda memorializing Lenin and celebrating his own semi-divine stature. This puts Stalin in a league of his own, although it does have precedents in the caesaropapism of the Byzantine and Russian Empires.
World War II
Stalin’s totalitarianism was influenced by a contemporary vogue for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his notion of “will to power.” Nietzsche attacked Western humanism and Christianity as decadent and slave-like, advocating a new and heroic “master morality.” Nietzsche would be even more influential in the development of German Nazism, a toxic brew of 19th century post-Enlightenment ideals including nationalism, scientific racism (justified using Darwin’s theory of evolution), and neopaganism.
Hitler’s holocaust against the Jewish people was called “The Final Solution” and was part of a comprehensive effort to solve, once and for all, every dilemma and paradox the West had ever faced by returning to a pre-Christian Imperial order modeled after the Roman Empire. However, unlike the Roman Empire, the new German Reich would be propelled forward by the promise of unlimited scientific advancement and human racial perfection.
Why did the German people fall for this destructive utopian program? This is a question that still haunts the West today. The mandate “never again” informs almost all of the West’s post-WWII politics. Hitler comparisons are routinely made against anything that smacks of racism, nationalism, or ideological perfectionism, even when the comparisons are weak or unwarranted. However the real reasons why ordinary Germans fell for Hitler’s vision are quite mundane. They were simply behaving normally under extremely abnormal circumstances.
After WWI, the Treaty of Versailles (1918) had imposed crushing reparations on the defeated Germans. The victors also instituted a new government in Germany called the Weimar Republic, which soon became the most progressive government in the world. As long as the American economy subsidized the German economy, the Weimar Republic could afford to pay its citizens the generous pensions and benefits it promised them. But after the stock market crash of 1929, the world economy spiraled into a catastrophic depression, and the Weimar’s Deutschmark experienced 700% inflation. Middle class savings were wiped out. Extremist parties won major victories. Violence between communist and fascist groups entered a downward spiral. Hitler shrewdly took advantage of the unrest and by the time he had amassed absolute power, the German people had committed themselves to a program they could not easily escape from.
The Cold War
America and the Soviet Union saved Europe from Nazi rule, but at a colossal cost. Both the US and the USSR capitalized on these hard-won victories in an attempt to ensure that their worldview would now predominate. The world was soon locked in a 45 year cold war.
The victorious allies were anxious to restart their lives in a new era of American opportunity. The 1950s found Americans united as never before. Religion thrived, capital flowed, and innovation flourished. This “greatest generation” of Americans married each other and raised a new generation to value the principles of openness, discovery, and experimentation. However, the baby boomer generation was not impressed by their parent’s accomplishments, nor were they appreciative of the unique moment they had inherited. For them, the American Way was nothing but a decadent trio of materialism, militarism, and racism. Instead, they embraced a countercultural trio of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. They also supported an emerging civil rights movement for blacks and protested against the war in Vietnam.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, his predecessor Nikita Khrushchev de-Stalinized the USSR and ramped up the stakes in the Cold War with nuclear weapons and competition with the US in the space race. His successor Leonid Brezhnev rolled back Khrushchev’s reforms and the USSR settled into an extended period of economic decline and geopolitical setbacks. Mikhail Gorbachev tried to right the ship with a restructuring campaign called “Perestroika” and a liberalization campaign called “Glasnost.” These reforms merely hastened the inevitable collapse of the regime and in 1989, the Cold War was over and Boris Yeltsin presided over a democratic Russia in 1991.
The Neoliberal World Order
The youth countercultural movement in the United States had left urban ruin and civil unrest in its wake. A religious revival brought a resurgence of conservatism in the 1980. Championed by Ronald Reagan, this new conservatism was a unique blend of libertarian economic principles and family values traditionalism. Reagan’s libertarian wing succeeded in remaking US financial and trade policy, which then spread across the globe igniting an unprecedented wave of globalization. Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama all governed America as centrist neoliberals on the economic front and they all tolerated (or facilitated) the emergence of a new consensus on the cultural front. Gay marriage was legalized and protections against discrimination were formally instituted, with broad public support. The election of Barack Obama was seen by many as a signal that the civil rights movement had finally realized its goals.
Yet this economic and cultural consensus was an illusion. Globalization had brought high levels of per-capital prosperity around the world, but that prosperity was not evenly shared. Working class America had been decimated by globalization and middle class Americans had not seen much of an increase in their income. Populist resentment was stoked by Donald Trump, who squeezed out a narrow win in 2016 over the neoliberal Hillary Clinton.
Working class Americans were not the only alienated group in America. Educated and young Americans were also struggling to keep their heads above water within the constantly transforming digital economy. Their frustrations were channelled into activist movements seeking systemic scapegoats: white supremacy, the patriarchy, global warming, transphobia, etc. The cultural consensus of the Obama years collapsed. A vicious culture war between MAGA and woke ensued. With the West distracted and disunited, Vladimir Putin saw his chance to invade Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine: 2022–23
Having traced this history, I’d like to take a look at how Vladimir Putin fits into the larger story of East vs West. Putin’s regime combines three historic Russian governing styles: a communist police state, a caesaropapist orthodox state, and a czarist autocracy. Putin began his career as a KGB officer in the Soviet Union and is a keen practitioner of propaganda and centralized control. Unlike the communists however, Putin attends church and goes to confession. He sees Russia as the “Third Rome,” the true inheritor of Christendom after Constantinople’s fall in 1453. He believes that what the Russian people really need is not liberal freedoms, material wealth, or democracy, but strong moral guidance from paternalistic leaders like himself. In this regard, he is a caesaropapist in the tradition of Byzantine emperors and devout orthodox tzars like Ivan the Great and Nicholas II.
However, this paternal sense of responsibility toward the Russian people hasn’t stopped Putin from lavishing vast amounts of wealth on himself, his family and friends, just as Catherine the Great and Alexander I did. Like these tzars, he has an expansive, imperialist vision of Russian greatness, embodied by the glory of his own regime and a large “sphere of influence” around the world. But Catherine the Great and Alexander I lived in a very different world than Putin does. They faced aggressive empires on all sides, like as the Swedes, the Turks, and the Prussians, who regularly encroached on their territory. The tzars needed states like Ukraine and the Baltics to act as buffers, given Russia’s flat, unobstructed terrain.
Like Alexander I, Putin makes accusations of Western imperial encroachment (citing NATO expansion and Western influence during Ukraine’s 2013 Euromaidan protests). But these accusations ring hollow compared to the real threats that the tzars faced during the imperial age. Putin is following an old playbook long after it has ceased to be relevant. In the 21st century, empires expand through the use of soft power: trade deals, alliances, innovation, cooperation, and investment. And it is this soft power that actually threatens the Putin regime. If Ukraine were to join the EU, it would most likely become a more democratic, prosperous, and liberal state. And while Ukraine would never invade Russia physically, its liberal success would have a political and psychologic influence over the Russian people. That would constitute a grave threat.
Putin cannot admit vulnerability in the face of the superior liberal consensus. Instead, he seeks philosophical cover in the writings of Alexander Dugin, whose Fourth Political Theory analyzes the failure of the West’s three major political theories: liberalism, Marxism, and fascism. In place of these “failed” theories, Dugin proposes a “timeless, non-modern theory” destined to usher in a new era of Russian greatness on the world stage, a multi-polar world freed from American geopolitical hegemony.
While some of Dugin’s critiques of liberalism might have merit, what is wrong with liberalism can’t be corrected by a new political theory. Lyrics from a song by The Police come to mind: “there is no political solution to our troubled evolution…we are spirits in a material world.” While the East cannot offer the West a political solution, it can offer the West a spiritual path forward. The orthodox hesychast tradition invites practitioners to repeat, over and over again throughout the day, the phrase “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” To translate this phrase into Western secularism, “let us humble ourselves before transcendent realities, for we are mired in individualism and have forgotten how deeply dependent we are upon cultural and religious traditions and upon the constraints of our fallen nature.”
The Enlightenment’s liberal reformation was a resounding success in many ways, but it has left Westerners dissatisfied and restless. Putin could set an example for us by following in the footsteps of Byzantine Emperor Theodosius III, who after being deposed, entered an orthodox monastery and spent the rest of his days doing penance for his many sins. Putin’s monastery would need to be in a remote and undisclosed location, heavily guarded. But here he could begin the process of transforming the world, starting with the transformation of his own soul.
