WESTERN INFLUENCES

WESTERN INFLUENCES. With the decline of Byzantium (q.v.) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, both ecclesiastical and civil officials were increasingly obliged to take into account the rising power of Western Europe and Roman Catholicism (q.v.). Theologically, the issue of the filioque (q.v.) raised questions that, in spite of polemic, were given serious consideration by Byzantine theologians. The list of seven sacraments seems to have come from the West following the failed Reunion Council (qq.v.) at Lyons in 1274. Vigorous efforts at the translation of patristic and medieval Latin texts, including Augustine of Hippo (q.v.) and Thomas Aquinas, began in the 14th c. and were still in process at the time of the Empire’s fall to the Ottomans in 1453. While these efforts at dialogue and reassessment were significant, the story of Western influences on Orthodox thought begin properly with the end of Byzantium and the collapse of an educated Orthodox elite.

Higher education for Christians in the Ottoman Empire (q.v.) was impossible, short of conversion to Islam (q.v.), and the promising young men of Greek families were increasingly sent to universities in Italy and Germany. Similarly, the rule of Poland over most of the territories of Kievan Rus’ led to the adoption of Latin Scholasticism (qq.v.) as the theological method even by those Orthodox intent on avoiding the Unia (q.v.) of 1596. (See Peter Mogila.) In the empire of Austria, a like process went on in the Orthodox-dominated principality of Transylvania and the border regions of Croatia inhabited by Serbs. As a result, by the late 18th c. all the formal theology being taught in the Orthodox oikoumene (qq.v.) was of a distinctively Western flavor. The reforms of Peter the Great (q.v.) in Russia, where clergy were educated in Latin until the early 19th c., and the rise of the nation-states in the Balkans (q.v.) completed the picture. In a sense, this process was inevitable, given the general rise to world dominance of Western European culture.

The situation remains with us today. Historical studies by Russian theologians in the 19th c. lent unexpected assistance to a simultaneous movement of Eastern monastic renewal, which had been begun by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and Paisii Velichkovsky (qq.v.). The pendulum has swung from West to East in the last two centuries throughout the Orthodox oikoumene. The question of the proper balance between the classical theology of the Church Fathers (q.v.) and the thought and methodology of the West is a legitimate one. The rise of Scholasticism and the Enlightenment is something that, mutatis mutandis, every Christian community is required to confront.