CHRISTIAN EAST VS. WEST

 CHRISTIAN EAST VS. WEST

© 2000, 2002-2003 by Orchid Land Publications[re-written 19990802; reformatted and divided 19991009; later
enlarged at various times and last updated 20020316, 20030412]

Christian thinking in a developmental perspective

     One takes note of two very crucial junctions or crossings--X for Christ--in the history of Near East and European thinking.  The first divinely timed X occurred at the birth of Christ; this crossing took place at a time of Hellenistic and Hebrew influence in the region where Jesus grew up and His religion spread.  (Jesus grew up near Tiberias, an important Hellenistic center.)   Christians at Rome spoke Greek for a century and half after the Apostolic Age ended.

        A minor X occurred in Islamic Damaskos at the time of St. John of Damaskos, while he was Grand Vizier to the Caliph of Islam.  Interactions between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism took place; Philo the Jew (Jesus's contemporary) was not the least element in these interactions.  Another not-so-minor X occurred between Latin Europe and the Germanic tribes--as will-based in their view of reality as the Semitic peoples-- whose incursions created the Dark Ages from 476 on.  The capital of the Roman Empire had shifted more than a century earlier to Constantinople (Byzantion, the "City of cities").   The Eastern patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch fell under Muslim political governance with the rise of the great Arab empire (which, at its peak, extended from Spain to much of India), while the West was overrun by the Huns and the invading Germanic tribes.  Eventually, Greece, too,  was swamped with Slavic invaders--with the lone exception of Thessalonike, now the second-largest city of the Byzantine Empire.   

     It should be noted that when the seventh Ecumenical Synod convened at Nicζa [near Constantinople] in 787, the West had been mired in the Dark Ages for more than 310 years.   
     In the first decade of the last quarter of the eighth century, the "False decretals" were circulated by Pope Adrian I to advance papal pretensions--Adrian's novel and extravagant claims of universal authority.  Subject to Charlemagne and the latter's desires to become Emperor, as the pope was, a Western tactic of discrediting the East as heretical came into being:  The West unilaterally introduced the novel and patently anti-Biblical (cf. John 15:26) introduction the words "and the Son" into the Creed after the words affirming of the Holy Spirit's proceeding from the Father.  Since the East rejected this heresy, the Eastern emperor could be denounced as a heretic in order to clear the way for Charlemagne to be made emperor of the "holy Roman empire."  But the Muslims in the East were very different from the Germanic tribes in the West.  Where the latter were illiterate barbarians, the Arabs embraced Greek culture and set up an institute in Damaskos to translated Greek learning; from its early days, Islam adopted many manners--prostration at Worship, items of clergy apparel, especially headdress, etc.--in vogue among the conquered Eastern Christians.   Until he was falsely denounced, St. John of Damaskos served as grand vizier to the greatest of the Caliphs.   It is easy to see how such realities--during nearly seven and a half centuries of Dark Age barbarism-- isolated the West from the Eastern roots of Christianity.  The schism of the West from the East was essentially broached soon after the seventh ecumenical Synod (like those preceding it, it was convoked and held in the East and attended by clergy who were Eastern, except for the representatives of the Roman patriarch).  The break occurred less than a quarter of a century later, when Pope Leo III, in his sixth year as Adrian's successor, crowned Charlemagne as Roman Emperor on the Birthday of Christ,  800 AD.  Treating the legitimate Roman emperor in Constantinople as a heretic for rejecting the novel Filioque which he was requiring the then pope to insert in the Creed in order to discredit the emperor in Constantinople.  When this occurred, the Roman patriarchate went its own way, cutting itself off with this heretical innovation (see below) from the four remaining (all Eastern) patriarchates.  The cultural separation between East and West that had taken place much earlier continued apace during the barbarism of the Western Dark Ages. The papal Church itself underwent a couple of major schisms during later centuries.

St. Athanasios of Alexandria
Teacher and Defender of the Orthodox Faith

      Relief from the Dark Ages was to come to Western Christianity, not very much from the Eastern roots of Christianity, but from the Semitic Muslim capital of Cordova (in Spain),, home to the greatest Islamic and Jewish scholars, where Muslim learning culminated.   The greatest Islamic scholar was Ibn Rushd or Averroλs.  His agemate, born two years later and dying six years after Ibn Rushd,  was the great Jewish thinker, Ben Maimon (Maimonides).  At Cordova's  overthrow by Moorish conquerors, also Islamic, both fled to Moroccan centers of learning.   Ben Maimon, after a brief stay in Acre in Palestine, ended up as not only leader of the Egyptian Jews.  The non-Arabic (he was a Kurd) Sala(d)din, greatly admired even by Christians, had conquered the East--including Jerusalem, which he nobly spared)--and established his capital at Cairo.   There, Ben Maimon became his honored physician.  (CLICK HERE for JIHAD and CRUSADE.)  When a framework of learning came to the Latin West in the thirteenth century, it did not come by a direct Christian route but rather from Islamic Cordova.  But more on this presently.    

St. Catharine (Aikaterina) of Alexandria
Learnλd Teacher and Martyr

      It should be pointed out that the Slavic inundation of Greece--except for Thessalonνke, already the second largest city of the Byzantine Empire.  Thessalonνke had replaced Alexandria, now temporarily in decline under the Arabs), but was not as large as Islamic Baghdad.  The plundering of Constantinople by the Franks in the Fourth Crusade, and the subjection of Byzantion by the Islamic Turks created a long-enduring Dark--or least very Dim--Age in Greece and in what became Istambuli (Greek "to the City").   The capital of Orthodoxy shifted to Moscow, whose patriarchate was eventually ended by Peter the Great but restored in the twentieth century.
     The Nestorians had rendered a good deal of Aristotle into Syriac and then Arabic.  Subsequently, a translation institute was established in Damaskos to translate the rest of Greek learning into Arabic, as already mentioned.   A number of outstanding philosophers, more Platonic than Aristotelian emerged in the Levant, a number of whom are quoted by Aquinas and other scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages.  This new knowledge provided the Latins with a third-hand Aristotelianism (Latin translations, mostly by Jewish scholars, of Arabic scholarship, in turn based on Arabic translations of the original Greek)--a new framework for understanding the Bible and the form of Christianity that had developed under the Frankish hegemony--chiefly in Paris and Norman England--at Oxford.   
       The crossing of Christianity with Islamic Aristotelianism in the West was the second major X in the intellectual history of Christianity.  As already noted, the outcome of this development had no lineal connection with the Greek-language culture of early Christianity.  The development or unfolding of Orthodox doctrines is worlds apart from the Latins' invention of new paradigms 1425 or more years later than, and lacking a direct  lineal connection with, the Greek-language thought world of Apostolic Christianity.  The Greek learning that came to the West through Islam-- Muslim translations of and commentaries on Aristotle, etc., were filtered through the prism of a more will-oriented, juridical outlook--and often focused on words and "the book"?   The "matter" of Christianity--at least the Bible--had not changed; what had changed was the framework that imposed its "form" or meaning on the Biblical matter common to Eastern and Western traditional Christianity.   Whatever continuity (or "development") of ideas one may discern between early and late-Mediζval Christianity supplant the non-continuity (or "non-development") and incompatibility of the thought worlds or conceptual paradigms of early Greek-language Christianity and Mediζval Latin and Reformation Christianity.       
     The centuries of separation and especially the detour that Eastern thinking took to reach the Mediaeval West created a hiatus that no one has any practicable idea how to bridge.   That is no cause for wonder, considering the length of the break (ca. 750 years); and the barbaric conditions that prevailed--illiteracy even among the rulers, primitive clothing, short average life-expectancy (thirty years), deplorable housing, high infant mortality (forty per cent), general dirtiness, primitive hygiene with a few baths per year, not very adequate food--ill-preserved (often so rotten that it had to be highly spiced to be palatable) and lacking in essential vitamins (particularly A, C, and D)--, no forks (till they were imported from Byzantion in later times), mostly wooden bowls, beer preferred to disease-bearing drinking water, disease at all levels of society, prevalent pillaging and fear.  Most people were laborers who, if only because of the primitiveness of decayed Roman highways and the dangers posed by robbers, seldom left the villages where most people lived.  No large cities were to come into being until merchandising grew up and created cities; Rome was a village, and the largest settlements were "small towns."  Another factor that greatly amplified the hiatus in question is that when learning finally did come to the West, very little of it came from visiting Byzantine scholars; most of it--above all its conceptual framework(s)--derived from Islamic Cordova--a city of7 00 mosques, as large as, and indeed at one time or another larger than, Constantinople and Baghdad.
     A few literate monks had of course preserved the works of the early jurists of Carthage--Tertullian (the only one who read and wrote in Greek, Cyprian, Augustine--and Ambrose of Milan, during his life one of two western capitals of the Byzantine Empire.    This juridicalism and that of Semitic Cordova reinforced one another in the new Latin learning--more so that of the Franciscan (and later Augustinian) Nominalists that that of the Dominican Thomists.   Irish monks like John Iriugena Scotus had translated the Greek writings of St. Maximos the Confessor and Dionysios "the Areopagite."  And a few Byzantine scholars had come to the West the time of the new learning, just as some Westerners had traveled to Constantinople.    They in fact translated some works of Aristotle, Plato, and Galen as well as some of the Cappadocian fathers, St. John Chrysostom, and St. John of Damaskos into Latin.  Some scholastics preferred the translations of Plato and Aristotle they had received via Cordova to those rendered directly from the Greek.
     These developments were followed by the fall of Byzantion, already raped by the crusaders in the Fourth Crusade, to the Islamic Turks in the fifteenth century.  The flight of Byzantine scholars (mainly via Crete to Venice, after Constantinople had fallen to the Turks)--benefited the West sufficiently to bring about the Renaissance--the end of the Middle Ages--around the time when Columbus "discovered" the Americas.   But the Greek concept of energy  (cf. also synergy below)  lost its impact when rendered into Latin (by the Spanish translators) as "operation, function, form, act, efficacy" (CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS).  And that alone created a vast gulf between Eastern and Western theologizing.
     There is no doubt that scholasticism, especially the dazzling work of Thomas Aquinas produced a marvel of systematic learning which the world has seldom seen.   But it was not the original Greek-language conceptual framework that early Christian thinking had developed in.  It cannot be said too often (i) that the content or "matter" of a writing is formed (given meaning and context) by the conceptual framework of its readers; and (ii) that God evidently chose Greek to be the vehicle for understanding and propagating the holy Gospel.  When Greek ideas got lost in translation, it is thus fair to say that, in places where that occurred, Christianity lost concepts of value.  The more Islamic-influenced school of scholasticism (which was to become the via moderna or "modernism" of the [fifteenth and] last century of the Middle Ages and to eventuate in the Protestant Reformation) got strongly mixed, through Pietism and other influences, with a substrate of Gnostic rejection of the rτle of materiality and time (tradition) in religion.   This substrate has proved to be the most enduring aspect of the Protestant paradigm--a further remove from original Christianity in some respects than Rome--both both forms of Western Christianity exhibit a greater break with Eastern Orthodoxy than either does with the other.  Rome, Wittenberg, and Geneva speak something of a common language--especially their juridical views of Salvation, etc.; their differences are mostly opposed poles of a common non-Orthodox spectrum. 
      The transfer of Islamic Aristotelianism to the Latins at Paris and Oxford, respectively, yielded the divergent types already noticed--the Dominicans' Thomism, with ontology and especially intellect foremost; and, with a priority of will over being and reason, the Franciscans' and later Augustinians' Scotism.   

It was after the later development of Scotism in Ockhamist Nominalism and the via moderna or "modernism" of the fifteenth century that it provided the framework for the Protestant Reformation.  Luther, an Augustinian prior called himself a Nominalist and spoke of Ockham as the only scholastic worth reading.    The emphasis on will, on words and "the book", and of course Protestant anti-iconism derive from Islam, though of course they found warrant for their views in the Hebrew Old Testament.  This was not the first influence of Islam on Christianity.
     Not only was Latin scholasticism based on an Islamic variant of Aristotelianism.  Much earlier, when Monophysitism and iconoclasm grew up in territories subjugated by Islam and officials from those provinces became political and ecclesiastical leaders in Constantinople, the heresies were propagated in Constantinople itself.    Later in the West, it was no accident that the Filioque was first added to the Creed in recently Islamic Spain and was promoted by equally will-first Teutonic overlords who had taken over the Latin episcopate.  The filioquist heresy was originated in Spain in a Teutonic milieu and promoted in Rome to advance Charlemagne's ambition to be the holy Roman Emperor--to do which, he had to discredit the real Roman Emperor in Constantinople.   It was subsequently bolstered by two errors:  (i) The analogia entis "analogy of being," took it for granted, inter alia, that, contrary to John 15:26, Christ's energetic sending (ιkpempsis) of the Paraclete in the economy or dispensation of the created cosmos necessarily parallels the essential procession (ekpσrefsis) of the Spirit in divine Essence.  (ii) a view of the divine simplicity such that distinguishing the divine Essence and Energies violates that simplicity more than distinguishing the Essence from its Existence or than distinguishing the one Essence from the three diviine Hypostases.  Separated by many centuries of barbarism, Eastern and Western thinking diverged enormously--into incompatible paradigms.  (iii) In accepting Augustine's idea of "substantial relations" (which reverses the commonsense view that real relations depend on the realities they relate--not vice-versa), the Filioque has got, according to a certain logic that need not be gone into here, follow.  (See also HERE.)  On the Western side, the scholastic paradigm fell into two types, of which the more Islamic-tainted one yielded Reformation theologies.

     As this point, we need to retrace our footsteps in terms of the themes of intellectual history than just in terms of empirical political history.   Platonism tended toward a dualism originating in Persian Zoroastrianism (historically related to Hinduism), whose dualistic was to develop into a Gnosticism that scorned the rτle of materiality in religion and considered time to be cyclic (and therefore hardly meaningful) rather than developmental.   Aristotle originated a new, more empirical paradigm with a more articulated logic.  But Platonism persisted in Middle Platonism of Jesus's contemporary, Philo the Jew, and eventuated in the extreme spiritualism of Neo-Platonism or Plotinism of Plotinos of Alexandria.   Alexandria remained more oriented on spirit and Jesus's Divinity, while Antioch, the oldest Christian foundation, and of course Phoenician Carthage  remained more Semitic--more oriented on concrete reality, will, and the human nature of Jesus.   

     The preceding table purports to indicate which aspects of a given form of Christianity are Apostolic-Hellenistic and which are Semitic "religions of the book".  Hellenistic Athens and Alexandria promoted the urge to think in terms of a coherent rational system rather than a classificatory list of words and laws--the Semitic emphasis.  But the Hebrews found soterial meaning in  history and in places where historical events occurred; they constantly recalled the Exodos, the Babylonian Captivity, and the destruction of the temple at the time of the Maccabees.  Unlike Hellenistic thinkers, the Hebrews saw history as  a God-directed drama, a true reality unlike the virtual reality of the doctrines of Grace and Justification among the Reformers.  

       The New Testament  (CLICK HERE ) uses the"energetic" terminology of the Greek language, influenced three centuries earlier by Aristotle the way English has been influenced by the categories brought to the public's notice by prominent thinkers like Newton, Freud, and Einstein.   St. Eirenaios, in his treatise Against Heresies (V.xiii.3), said that Jesus in His Transfiguration "became immortal and incorruptible [i.e. not subject to decay], not out of His own [human] nature but according to the Energy of the Lord, to enable [>dύnasthai] Him to bestow immortality on mortality and incorruptibility on corruption."   (The Latin uses the term operatio for enιryeia and operari for eneryeξn "energize"; older English translations of the Fathers speak of "[mighty] work[ing]" instead of "energy.")   If St. John Chrysostom spoke of the incomprehensible Essence of God,   St. Kyril of Alexandria (cited by Romanides from PG 50,1189, which I haven't been able to check; see A. J. Sopko's Prophet of Roman [i.e. Byzantine] Orthodoxy:  The theology of John Romanides [1998,  p. 31]) also affirmed the difference of the divine Essence and Energies.   St. Vasil the Great contended (in Ep. 234) that "So we speak, on the one hand, of knowing our God from the Energies, but on the other hand, we don't presume to approach His  Essence Itself." 

St. Maximos the Great took such notions for granted; after all they had been part of the Greek language and Hellenistic thought world from before the time of Christ.  St. Gregory PalamAs, whose teachings are embraced in Orthodoxy (he is commemorated in the Great Fast on the Lordsday following the Lordsday of Orthodoxy ), merely subsumed the preceding tradition when he clarified and emphasized the distinctions involved in discussions of essence and energy.   (For a refutation of the cacodox views of J.-M. Garrigues, see Christos Yannaras, "The distinction between essence and energies and its important for theology," St. Vladimir's theological quarterly 19 (1975), 232.  Other Latin writers have held very similar cacodox views--which in recent decades have been refuted in Orthodox theological journals published by Ameican seminaries.   Fr. Romanides or someone has shown how the Palamites' position mirror-images that of the western Augustine:  Where Augustine had a positive view of human reason's ability to know God's Essence and a negative view of will's ability to love God, St. Gregory had a negative view of reason's ability to know God's Essence and a positive view of a human will's ability to love the God that reason knows.)  
     The notion of energy that Aristotle inherited from and defined more precisely became part of Hellenistic Greek and was taken for granted by speakers of Greek the same way speakers of English use "atom" and "space" in ways that take for granted the senses that scientists have implanted in English.   The conceptualizations of energy in St. John of Damaskos' treatise Exact exposition of the Orthodox Faith sums up what a Greek lexicon or encylopedia would say about it.  (For this and the following, CLICK HERE.)  The twentieth-century theologians, G. Florovsky, Vl. Lossky, and John Romanides conceptualize Grace as Energy in agreement with the Bible and the Eastern Patristic consensus.

    The Orthodox inherit the view of the Creator as REASON--LOGOS in St. John's Gospel [the West calls the Creator a sermo "Saying" or a verbum "Word"]--but without the rationalistic prying of the Latins into mysteries that the Apostles warn us against in the New Testament, since mysteries are not analysable by finite mentalities (cf. Rom. 11:33).   God's Essence is wholly unknowable and imparticipable--intelligible to finite minds only apophatically, i.e. by declaring what it is not--but the operations of God in creation, above all the material-temporal Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the First Mystery (Sacrament) that sanctified matter and time for religion, are of course knowable.  

     The anti-sacramentalism of the Denominationists is Hellenistic, while their emphasis on the one BOOK of all truth and laws connected with the Faith, along with their emphasis on words and will-based view of faith as assent, is Semitic.   There is a fundamentalist-positivistic emphasis on citing lists of "proof texts" among classical Protestants (and "Biblical Catholics"!) without regard to the way their meanings depend on the conceptual universes.

History and tradition are of no consequence for the virtual reality of Denominationists, time is abolished along with matter, so far as Salvation and religion generally are concerned.  The juridical emphasis inherited from Rome, Cordova, and the Franks is self-evident, if only in the proliferated categories of propitiation, satisfaction, atonement, justification,  redemption (buying back, ransoming), legal adoption, regeneration (less juridical, more metaphorical than the other concepts), sanctification--to which the Latins add subjection to papal jurisdiction (they call their communion the "Roman obedience") and to which the Reformers add "imputation" and  "covenantal" unity in Christ (where Orthodoxy speaks of ontological oneness with Christ; SEE ALSO HERE).  In Western Christianity, Grace is a "state"; one speaks of a "state of Grace."  As far as the Trinity goes and given that neither Latins nor Reformers distinguish essence from energy and rather include energy (Latin existence, intellection; Reformation will) in essence, the Reformation view of a covenantal unity of believers with Christ differs only from the vantage point from the current Latin teaching that Christians' partake of Christ's Essence intentionally rather than entitatively (ontologically; Ludwig Ott, speaks of participation in God by the faithful according to God's holiness and of participation according to His spirituality.)  All such views are incompatible with the Orthodox teachings that the divine Essence in imparticipable and inaccessible, and that repentant and pious members of Christ  ontologically (entitatively)  participate in the uncreated Energies and Light and Glory (dσxa) of God--which accords with Scripture when read in its original Greek-language framework.  However, the Latin's intentionalism leans more in a cognitive direction than Luther's raw imputational-volitional premises.

     The thinking of an increasing number today is that the gulf between East and West is much greater than between the Latins and Protestants--enormous as that latter gulf is.  The failure of the West generally to differentiate essence from energies and the much greater juridicalism common to Western theologies both Latin and Reformation make much of what is said in the East or in the West unintelligible to the other.  But, given the 730-year break of the Latin West from the East in the Latin Dark Ages, the more than 1200-year separation of the Eastern and Mediζval Western frameworks, and the derivation of both from Islamic Aristotelianism, it could hardly have been otherwise.
     Even the Mysteries became juridicalized in the West, though they did not cease to be ontological among the Latins they way they did among the Protestants; even Luther believed [see his De captivitate babylonica ecclesiae, WA vl.518.10] he could have the Eucharist "by faith" anywhere at any time--without the consecrated Gifts being actually available.   The West used the juridical term "sacraments" (originally military oaths), while the more thorough-going Protestants call Baptism and the Lord's Supper "ordinances" (the elements are tokens, symbols, or the like).  So, while the Latins stand somewhere between the Greeks and the Reformers--who are on the left of the Christian religious spectrum, with Liberals and Fundamentalists on the far left drawing contrary assumptions from the same individualistic premises, the two Western frameworks have more in common with one another than with the West.   The matter--the Bible--is common to all three; but what it means--that depends on one's mental orientation--differs among all three.

     The attitude of Gnostics (modern as well as ancient; SEE HERE) involves a negative view of the rτle of body or corporeality in religion.  This is contrary to the exaltation of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ in the Christian view of Salvation; cf.  St. Athanasios the Great's embrace of Eph. 5:30:  "For we are members of His Body, of His flesh, and of His bones."    Dualist Manichaeans or Paulicians, Messalians, Bogomils, and Catharists have plagued Christianity in both East and West in the Middle Ages.   Like Tertullian, the Reformer John Calvin first studied juristics.  Likewise, the great Cordovans--Ibn Rushd (Averroλs, a Muslim) and the  Ben Maimon (Maimonides, a Jew)--were lawyers as well as philosopher-theologians.  None of this has been without consequences for Christian theology.

     It will be well to pause a moment to dwell on and recapitulate the points already made and to add a few reflections on them.   Early on, there were differences of emphasis between Antioch (the oldest diocese of Christianity, where both St. Peter and St. Paul evangelized) and Alexandria--the largest city of the known world in its heyday.1  Where the Alexandrines were more Hellenically allegorical in scriptural interpretation and emphasized Jesus's divine Nature, the Antiochenes were more Semitically literalist in their exegesis and emphasized Jesus's human nature--though many of them eventually became Monophysites (the Jacobites) like the Alexandrians.   As far back as St. Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzos, one of the "three Hierarchs" and one of four Orthodox Saints called "the Theologian"), East-West differences were complained about.  That eminent Saint said that Western Christians ("the Italians") were unable to understand Greek terms and concepts, especially those concerning the all-holy Trinity (for which he blamed the "scantiness of [the Latin] vocabulary and its poverty of terms"; I cite from his Oration 21.35 in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, p. 279.).    And a writer of our time, S. Runciman, says much the same thing.

    Theology is organic; it is much more than a list of beliefs that do not hang together in mutual dependence on common basic concepts of reality.   Each item in a system is affected by the status of other items in the system.  The whole bears a vital relation to basic assumptions about reality; they can be anti-time/anti-matter or else sacramental; the primacy of being and reason or  else will,  the "reality" of relations and natures,  etc.).   One cannot just add and subtract this or that tenet in the list of beliefs without unbalancing and indeed unhinging the system, whose implications and details have required many centuries to be worked out.  (SEE HERE & HERE.)  The following table schematizes divergent views of primary reality--ways of conceptualizing the all-holy Trinity, human nature, Grace, Salvation, and so on; CLICK HERE for an additional comparative tabulation of distinctions).

     The Western Augustinian tradition approaches the Holy Spirit in terms of essential relations (if the LOGOS is related only to the Father and Source of Being, then the Spirit will have to be related to--proceed from--both Father and Son in order to be different--one of several reasons for the addition of the Filioque "and [from] the Son" in the Creed!) and psychology:  The Father's Love for the Son or His will is substantivized as the Holy Spirit! (the Spirit is the love of the Father and Son!).   Augustinians understand relations to define Trinitarian Hypostases.  In this attempt to analyse the Trinity in psychological categories, a relation or an emotion or volition is able to realize or ontologize a Hypostasis or Person of the all-holy Trinity!   Lacking the difference between Essence and Energy (see below), Western theologians think (despite John 15:26) that the relation of the all-holy Spirit in the divine Essence has got to parallel His energetic relation to Jesus in the economy (dispensation) of the materiotemporal cosmos.   If Thomists hold God's Essence to be "pure act" and intellect (see citations later)--thus confusing Energies with Essence, the Reformers give priority to  will (a prime form of energy) in the divine Essence.  Where the holy tradition thinks God foreknows what will happen since He is outside of time and contemporary with every moment of time, Nominalist Reformers, following Ockham, assume that God can only foreknow what He has foreordained.   In Reformation thinking, the virtual reality that God wills, replacing ontological reality (being) with what God wills, defines Grace and Justification (SEE FURTHER HERE)  as well as Calvin's "as if" bodily presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper (see below).   For what God wills (imputes) overrules, without erasing, what is; word and the pulpit efface the Mysteries (Sacraments); and of course the Second Person of the all-holy Trinity is a "Word" (rather than the creative Rational Principle of Order in the cosmos that He is in John 1:1; SEE HERE).  For Orthodoxy, Jesus Christ is not only the LOGOS but also YHWH--the o ON (so written on His icons) or "One Who IS" of Ex. 3:14 in the Greek Old Testament--which is older than known recensions of the Hebrew Old Testament. 
      A will-based framework, outlook, paradigm, or ideology of course favors positive law--something is bad because someone in authority wills to call it wrong; in a reason-based framework, one can will good or evil only if one understands the different implications and consequences of the alternatives one is faced with and has a certain intention with respect to the outcome of one's choosing; right is what promotes a thing's nature (this is natural law right, and wrong is what injures one's nature.  There may of course be conflicts, as when a midwife can save the life of mother or baby but not both.  Natural law is of course rejected in Nominalism's positivistic abolition of transindividual or generic "natures"--which are nothing more than "words."   This treatment of words contrasts with the exaltation of words, even to calling the Creator a Word, in Denominationism.   Even those who look at reality in ontological terms may base being on relations rather than basing relations on being; cf. the Latin conceptualization of the Trinity in the Filioque.  
     The juridical impetus going rooted  in Tertullian and early Romans and even more so in Cordovan Semitic thinking was anything but diminished in the future history of Western Christianity.   Lacking the concept of energies,  Latin and Reformation juridicalism fails to understand Orthodox soteriology (teachings about Salvation) simply because it is so simple--incorporation into Christ's Life--the uncreated Energy of Grace--and transfiguration in the vision of God's uncreated Light--in short, Divinization as a partaking (2 Pet. 1:4) of God's uncreated Energies (but not of the divine Essence).    Thomas Aquinas held that "the beatitude of humanity" is found "in the vision of the divine Essence"  (Summa theologica I-II.iii.8], even though that Essence is imparticipable--and holds God's Essence to be actus purus (the closest Latin could get to uncreated Energy in its third-hand Aristotelianism; see further on)--as though Essence were an Energy.  As for Grace, the New Testament idea (in Philp. 2-13) views Grace energetically:  "For it is God in you all energizing you both to will and to energize for the sake of pleasing Him":  The works of Christ in His members (operating through the Energy of His uncreated Grace) are Christ's own and thus pleasing to him and part of the soterial development of His members; the Western dichotomy of "good" works and Grace is thus absorbed in a single Biblical and Orthodox Grace!

      Western groups allow guilt and merit to be transferred from one person to another--by God to believers in the Reformers' theology--but among the Latins, the pope transfers Saints' merits to individuals (even to the departed in "purgatory").       

      After this tying up of ideas already mentioned and to be elaborated on below, let's continue with a bit more of history.  There was obviously a vast cultural divergence between the Christian East and the Christian West during the Middle Ages.   While most of the Latin West was dominated by Hun and Germanic semi-barbarians (the Goths were Arians; others, eventually Latin Christians) during the dark centuries, Constantinople reached the heights of its glory.    No later than 476 AD, Italy had become a "barbarian kingdom" ruled by Teutonic overlords; the African provinces of the old Roman Empire had succumbed earlier to the Vandals and others.  But it  was a Frank, Charlemagne, who imposed the Filioque heresy on the papacy in order to discredit Byzantion as a heretical empire, his purpose being to exalt himself and his successors as "Holy Roman Emperors."  The Franks soon "cleansed" the episcopate of bishops who were not Germanic or willing to support the Franks and Normans.  Before the Germanic Crusaders destroyed Vyzantion in the Fourth Crusade (which proceeded no further in the direction of Jerusalem, though freeing the Holy Land had been the stated goal), they left behind observations to the effect that Constantinople was larger than the five largest Western cities together.  (It was in fact larger than that, though Cordova was for a time larger; both were artistic centers as well as centers for every sort of known civilized pursuit and comfort; silks came from China, and spice from the Orient.)   The Viking Rus (founders of Slavonic Ukraοne and Russia) were so impressed with the grandeur of the Orthodox cathedral and services that Waldemar (St. Vladimir) adopted Christianity and receiving the report of  his emissaries, who visited the various known religions of the time.     

If learning was, as already observed, meager and exceptional in the Western Dark Ages, the fringes of Europe offered tremendous exceptions to the "darkness" that prevailed in most of Europe.  Besides Byzantion, Cordova, and the great trading zone of the Vikings stretching from North America to Kiev, there was  Ireland, where the Greek Fathers continued to be read and translated.   Byzantine learning proceeded apace till its preliminary destruction by the Franks and Venetians, and even afterwards--right up to the Turks' capture of "the City."  From its founding in this millennium, learning was promoted by Athonite/Hagiorite (both terms refer to the monastics of Mt. Athos--the Holy Mountain) scholars.   
     If the ending of the Western Dark Ages came about as the result of Latin translations (by Spanish Jews and others) of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, physicians, and scientists, this most momentous cross-fertilization of what was known of the Augustinian tradition of the Latins with the  Islamicized Aristotelian conceptual framework resulted in a blend in which a very concrete outlook on praxis and law held sway side by side with the static (energyless) categories of theology that have always typified Western Christianity--Catholic and Protestant alike.  In Latin terms, new forms moulded, defined, and interpreted the common matter (the Gospels and consentient Fathers) of Christianity.  The Greek concept of energy got eviscerated in Latin as actus "act" or operatio "operation, function"; SEE HERE.  Even today, Western theology ignores the concept of energy and thus stands in stark contrast with the East.  Western translations of the New Testament often simply render the energy words as "work" or "in-working"; the Greek sense of actualizing or realizing a potential (dύnamis) and its connection with being, light, and Life all get lost.  This disconnect of course constitutes a great gulf between Greek-language Biblical and Patristic thinking, on the one hand, and Western theological thought, on the other.   It is noteworthy that, when the original Greek writings became available in the West as the result of Byzantine scholars migrating from the Venetian island of Crete to Venice--an event that initiated the Renaissance in the West--many Latins continued to prefer the translations from Arabic that they were already familiar with; in order words, some continued to depend on a third-hand Aristotle, rather than the original.  
     The distinction between the divine Essence and Energies has never, as already mentioned, never taken hold among Christian thinkers in the West, where one observes a consistent failure to resolve the transcendence and immanence of God (and all of the other things that the concept of Energy ties together in a coherent way; CLICK HERE FOR MORE).    As a result of that failure, the Latins discarded John 15:26 (where the essential procession of the all-holy Spirit is distinguished from His energetic sending by Jesus in the created cosmos), embraced the grave error of the Filioque (added to the Creed), departed from the Patristic consensus of the four Eastern patriarchates that remained faithful to the promises of Christ and the guidance of the Paraclete (John 16:13), and  fell into many other innovatory errors.   Failing to see that Grace is uncreated Energy (taking it to be a created but supernatural form or quality or habit of the soul--form being understood as what "actualizes" matter), and speaking of Christ's members as partaking of the divine Essence--through "created" means--they have let error pile on error.  The root error is paradigmatic--ignoring the concept of energies.  (Cf. the acute discussion of the divine Energies in Philip Sherrard's The Greek East and the Latin West:  a study in the Christian tradition [ISBN 960-7120-04-3, pp. 61-72; see pp. 35-46].)   In failing to distinguish the uncreated Essence from the uncreated Energies, the Latins and Denominationists are immune to the fact that  the ekpσrefsis or procession of the Son and Spirit in the Trinitarian Essence does NOT have to be the same as the ιkpempsis "mission" in the economy of Creation. 
      Tellingly, the Augustinian view of a corrupt and sinful nature and the idea of inherited guilt has had such strong roots in the West that they have been able to generate other doctrinal innovations--e.g. the superfluous "dogma" of the immaculate conception of the Theotokos.  It is obvious that Christ would not fully share human nature if it were "sinful" or "depraved," seeing that He is sinless (CLICK HERE).

CLICK HERE FOR LINEAGE CHART OF THEOLOGIES

     If the Cordovan influence resulted not only in a small group of Averroists in Paris, it also, as already seen, yielded the consequence of an intellectual split into two forms of late-Mediaeval scholasticism--Dominican Thomism, which was to prevail among the Latins; and  Franciscan (and Augustinian)  Scotist-Ockhamism--also known as Nominalism or the via moderna "modernism"--prominent among whom were the Britons Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham.   (St. Augustine's bκte noir, Pelagius, had also been British.)   This form of scholasticism firmly rejected the concept of nature (along with "natural") and allowed no distinction among essences (let alone energies) and individual existents.   Of importance to understanding the Reformers--Luther, Calvin, etc.--is the fact that in the century preceding Luther, Wycliffe, and Hus had conceived of the Church as the predestinated--an "invisible" entity rather than as a visible, institutional entity.
     Luther, who called Ockham the only scholastic worth reading, classified himself as a Nominalist, was brought up in and subscribed to the premises of the via moderna.   In fact, Luther's and Calvin's premises were much more obviously "Islamic" than Thomas's.  This resulted from the elevation of will over intellect in the Franciscan tradition, as opposed to the Dominican tradition of Aquinas, and is evident in Reformation predestinarianism, anti-iconism,  and emphasis on "the book" or "the word," not to speak of the pervasive  juridical concepts of satisfaction, atonement, redemption, adoption, federal (covenantal) unity with Christ, etc.--all but the last taken over from the Latins.   (The Orthodox emphasis is on a new creation--a new birth (regeneration.)   Luther was greatly influenced by  Cordovan thinkers--like the Jewish Salomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron)--through his disciple, the Bible critic, Nicholas of Lyra.  The Protestant demotion of the rτle of sacraments (and then eventual elimination in some sects) could be ascribed to Islam, but was preλminently due to a Gnostic rejection of materiality as well as time.  Unlike some modern Protestant translators of the Bible, however, Calvin was careful to avoid the dualist heresy of speaking of human nature as "sinful," even as he characterized human nature as having been corrupted and totally depraved.   The emphasis on will yielded Luther's virtual reality of justification (the believer is righteous by imputation while remaining actually a sinner).  Calvin went further and made partaking of Christ's Body and Blood  a virtual partaking through the mouth of faith.   (SEE HERE for more on Reformation virtual reality.)

The dependence of truth on being and the correspondence between being and truth goes back at least to Aristotle (Metaphysics, at the end of  I.1 [993b 30]).
     It has been noted that for Thomas, the divine Essence was both actus purus (the closest his conceptuology allowed him to come to uncreated Energy; see his Summa theologica I.25.l, I.77.2 [God's "operation is His Essence"], et al.)   After stating that the intellect is properly a potency (i.e. dύnamis), not an operatio (the Latin mis-rendering of energy) and rejecting the idea of any unactualized potential in God, Thomas affirms (I translate two citations from Aquinas's Summa theologia referred to in Sopko's book on Protopresvyter John Romanides' theology, pp. 31 and 37)  that "in God alone is intellect [the content] of His Essence," but in created being only a potency of essence (S.T. I,79.1); and that ". . .  in God, relation to the creation is not a real relation, but solely [a relation] according to reason," even though the relation of the creature to God is a real one (S.T.I.45.3)!   It will be recalled that the Persons of the all-holy Trinity are defined strictly by their relations in the West (Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, etc.); nevertheless, the Persons are psychologically characterized  in terms of created reason (the Son or LOGOS), and in terms of created will or love (the Paraclete).  See below on the analogia entis--the alleged analogy between created and uncreated essences--even among those who, like Calvin, denied the possibility of really knowing God's Essence.  
     It is worth noting that the Thomists were clear that "Grace does not replace nature but completes it."  This squares with the Eastern idea that when the Assimilation to God was lost through the sinning of humanity's original ancestors, human nature (the Icon of God) remained, though its reason and freewill remained (or humans would be animals), though only as a potential waiting to be activated or realized by the Grace of Christ.

     The Franciscan scholastic tradition begins with Alexander of Hales' lectures on Peter Lombard's Sentences--long the standard text for theological courses.  Richard of Middleton and his later contemporary, John Duns Scotus, were the effective founders of Franciscan scholasticism; see H. O. Taylor's The mediaeval mind, 1951, II.542).  Its early form is Scotism, but since William of Ockham  carried a number of Scotist views to their conclusions, we term Franciscan scholasticism Scotism-Ockhamism--or, Nominalism or the via moderna.   This school steadfastly maintained that "will is the noblest power in the soul" and that "will is simply nobler than the intellect."  This Semitic view was due not least to the obvious causal efficacy of will--an "energy" in Eastern thinking.  Duns Scotus made the divine will the norm and ground of righteousness or justice.  He came near to making foreordaining the basis for foreknowing, though he insisted that God is contemporaneous with every present moment in time; his followers took the step of making divine foreknowledge contingent on predestinating what was to happen, though they emphasized predestination to Salvation more than reprobation--predestination to perdition.  Though the Thomists held that the allegλd "indelible Character of the Sacraments" [SEE HERE] inheres in practical reason [i.e. wisdom], the Scotists held that it inheres in the will.  Important figures in later Nominalism were Gregory of Rimini--a slightly later contemporary of Ockham's, a member of the Augustinian Hermits and a scholar of a strongly Augustinian outlook--and Gabriel Biel, a member of the Brethren of the Common Life and co-founder of the University of Tόbingen whose view of Grace is reported by those who know to have been at the opposite pole from that of Gregory of Rimini.  
      Though I have read that the Ockhamists and/or Reformers made will to be the Essence of God--an energy different from intellect and existence in Latin  theology, I have been unable to find in Luther's and Calvin's few references to the divine Essence anything beyond an acknowledgement of God's having both intellect and will (the later being the nobler).   In fact, most of these Reformer's discussions of the divine Essence distinguish that Essence from the three Persons (not always with the clearest language in Luther's case).    
     Many Latins question that the concept of Grace as uncreated Energy is as old as the New Testament, as St. Eirenaios and the three Cappadocian Fathers, as old as St. Cyril of Alexandria; they do not go so far as to  question that it is as old as St. Maximos the Confessor, St. John of Damaskos (also a Confessor), and of course St. Gregory Palamγs.   Actually, energy had become part of Greek language and thinking in the centuries between the Aristotle and the holy Apostles.  It didn't require explaining, since it was taken for granted--in St. Paul's writings and thereafter.  Faulty translations (e.g. operatio) underlie Western theologians' failure to understood energy in the Greek-language Bible and Patristic heritage.  The third-hand Aristotelianism of Western scholastics left energy something of an irrecoverable concept; at least, it's hard to get the idea across to contemporary Latins other than the eminent Jesuit philosopher--Bernard Lonergan.  
     Sanctifying Grace in papalist teaching is a created habitus entitativus--NOT a habitus operativus (where the last term is as close as the West got to "energetic") of the believer's soul--a created (but "supernatural"!) habit, form, or quality of the soul.  For Aquinas, the Vision of God is a "face-to-face"  vision of the divine Essence (divinζ Essentiζ; S.T. I-II.iii.8)!   Compare the Reformation view of Grace and Justification--equally a state, a virtual or imputative reality.   Where Luther viewed unity with Christ as being "by faith" (i.e. will-based fiducia, "consent"),  Calvin viewed it as "covenantal" (also will-based), and Aquinas held beatitude to be by intellect.   No doubt some contemporary Denominationists as well some Reformation Pietists have regarded  beatitude as purely emotional (affective).  In his Summa theologica, Thomas says [my rendering of the Latin],  "We however pursue [our "intelligible goal"] through that which is made present to us by an act of the intellect" and " . . . the essence of blessedness consists of an act of the intellect" [both from I-II.iii.4].   This conforms well enough with the Latin dissecting and analysing the inner architectonics of the Trinity, the eucharistic Presence, the After-life, etc.    But how can the intellect present the unknowable Essence of God (a characteristic of God upheld even by the Reformers) to a finite human intellect?   How can a believer participate in the imparticipable Essence of God.  Though there is hardly any alternative when uncreated Energy is not distinguished from uncreated Essence, this  is all gobbledygook in the Eastern framework. 
     When Salvation inheres in the will, it is as instantaneous as divine imputation "is" (SEE HERE).  The more ontological traditionalist view agrees with 1 Cor. 1:18 (properly translated--as it is not in the 1611 English Bible) in speaking of those "being saved"--i.e. in a developing way--since one's Salvation  is constantly being set back by sin.   Traditionally, has priority over  will because, as we have already seen,, God or a human being needs to have knowledge of what the choices are and what their consequences entail in order to will anything in a free manner.  
     Although the Greek of Rom. 5:12 ends with "and thus did death spread to all humans, for which [cause] all have fallen into sinning," the Latins mistranslate Rom. 5:12 to read in place of the foregoing:   et per peccataum mors, et ita in omnes homines mors pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt ("and through sin death, and thus did death spread into all humans, IN whom [scil. Adam, referred to at the beginning of the verse as the "one human" in whom sin began ] all sinned."   Augustine championed the idea of all humans' having sinned "in Adam," since all humanity is "in Adam's loins"; this emphasis grew out of Augustine's conflict the Pelagians.   But the Bible clearly repudiates the idea of transferable guilt (and by implication, merit); see Dt. 24:16 (quoted twice later in the historical books of the Old Testament) as well as Gal. 6:5 in the New Testament.  In Orthodoxy, newborn infants (including, of course, the sinless and specially graced Mother of God; CLICK HERE) are not guilty of Adam's trespasses.  
     The repudiation of transindividual natures, etc., that took root in the Ockhamist-Nominalist evolution of Scotism, was only partly the result of their scant interest in being (ontology).  In fact, Plato's "universals" (abstract existents--relations or entities like "love" and "humanity" or human nature) and the lσgoi (with small "l") in Patristic Greek gave way in St. John of Damaskos to "volitional thoughts" (cf. D. Reid's Energies of the Spirit:  Trinitarian models in Eastern Orthodox and Western theology  [1997, p. 62, referring to Lossky]) in thinking about God's creation of the world.  By this time, the Mon(o)energist-Monotheletist controversy had focused Orthodoxy's attention on will's causality, on will as a principal energy.    Whereas the lσgoi or lσyi remain in Thomism under the guise of  ideas (also a Greek word), they were roundly rejected  by the Ockhamists (including the Reformers) as subsisting entities.  While non-Nominalists do not reject the relational reality of abstract relations and natures,  the Orthodox do not differentiate the Trinitarian Hypostaseis or Persons on the basis of  relations in the Augustinian-Latin-Reformation manner for the simple reason that relations are derivative from things that they relate and thus cannot "define" them.   
     Since God's Being beyond Being is unknowable, the Orthodox agree with the Scotists  in rejecting the Thomist analogia entis ("analogy of being"), at least insofar as the concept involves an ontological analogy between  the divine Essence and created being.  The Reformation analogia fides ("analogy of faith") is of course a virtual reality that is foreign to Orthodoxy.  In fact, the Orthodox emphasis on being and reason quite generally distinguishes Orthodox doctrine from Nominalist thinking;  the  Nominalist and Reformation emphasis on the primacy of will is only one aspect of a larger difference.   The Orthodox take will (thιlesis and also, with more specific reference to a single willed object, voϊlesis) as an energization by a being (whose thιlema--the ability to will--is actualized in its uncreated Energies; thιlema can also be the result of thιlesis [SEE HERE]).   And for the Orthodox, the energization of a free choice (gnσme) and of reason (logismσs) in human beings is taken to be personal and individual rather than "of nature"; the willer is thus distinguished from will and willing.   Insofar, then, as sin depends on intention and will, human nature cannot be sinful; natures can neither be willers nor sinners.   Only if a nature is created evil, as in Gnosticism, can a nature be evil.  On this, Ockham would have to agree, but the Reformers contradicted themselves in upholding a "sin of nature" or "sinful nature"--not only because of their rejection of (transindividual) natures but also in view of their emphasis on will.  They got around the dilemma by ascribing everything to God's will--which (predestinates and) imputes to humans sin and virtue.
     By the time of Luther (an Augustinian prior), Ockham's Nominalist "modernism" dominated thinking in Luther's Augustinian monastic order.   Luther remained a committed modernist--though when he moved from Erfurt to Wittenberg, he adopted a more extreme will-based orientation--that of the via Gregorii.   It has already been noticed that Luther was greatly influenced by  Cordovan thinkers like the Jewish Salomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) through his disciple, the Bible critic, Nicholas of Lyra.  Nominalism rejected  jussum quia justum "ordered because right" in favor of justum quia jussum "right because ordered" ("might makes right")--the only alternative in the framework in question.   If Luther thought the only scholastic worth reading was Ockham, he carried Ockham further in deducing from the via moderna more clear-cut views than Ockham's own subtle and convoluted reasoning would warrant; and of course, he rejected the soterial place of good works than the Nominalists, transferring the focus on will from human will to a preλmptive divine will.

     Where Ockham speaks of not imputing the lack of (created) righteousness (along with not requiring righteousness), the Reformers speak of God's imputing Adam's sin to everyone and then, becoming wrathful at humans for this imputed sinfulness, imputing Christ's righteousness to believers to get rid of what He has imputed to them in the first place.  Note that sin (really guilt) and Grace are STATES in Western theology--not simply an abstract not being energized by uncreated Energy, as in the East.   Eastern Christians don't speak of "a state of Grace."  The purpose of this paragraph is to contrast the "subtlety" of the Reformers soteriology with the alleged lack of it in the succinct Eastern concept of Salvation as Divinization through the divine Energy of uncreated Grace--Christ's Life--in the Energy of the Vision (theorνa) of uncreated Light--God's Being, but His Energies, not His imparticipable Essence (as in the West).  As St. Athanasios said of God, "He became human in order that we might become divine."  Jesus Himself (in John 10:34) mentions the Psalm verse, 81/82:6:  "You all are gods."
     In the complex juridical categorizations of Reformation soteriology (the extended list of juridical categories have been mentioned above; Protestant writings devote many words to most of them), the incarnationalist respect for the rτle of matter and time in Christianity is wholly lacking--and the ontological resurrection of the body is all but lacking.   Indeed, Christ's Atonement is limited to the Crucifixion rather than being spread out over His Incarnation and Resurrection as well--in short, the entire economy of His life on earth.   The Nominalist emphasis on "singulars" (individual subsistents) and its concomitant rejection of collective natures in Nominalism made the unity of two beings untenable except in terms of a will-based covenant.  There cannot be any ontological unity of one individual with another the way the Orthodox view believers' unity with Christ the Head of the Body--His energy in each member of His Body, energizing them as they share in what He has done and is doing so that they can please God.
      In juridical thinking, judgment is of course very prominent.  One thinks if the krνsis ("judgment") theology of the twentieth-century Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, mentioned earlier.  In his earlier work, the centrality of judgment carries Western juridicalism to new lengths, as does the same theologian's paradoxical view of "time":  "the Resurrection [of Jesus] is . . . an occurrence in history . . .   But . . . the Resurrection is not an event in history at all."   Time doesn't matter?  That may not be exactly what he wishes to say; but it's hard to see what else he is trying to say.   In Hebrew thinking and in both Old and New Testaments, time and tradition are  real, antedating Scripture; and in the New Testament,  juridical terms (mostly metaphorical) and ontological terms are held in a balance in which ontology is the non-dependent side:  An individual is judged righteous if one is righteous and unrighteous if unrighteous.   For the Reformers, the judgment precedes, and the ontological facts are thereafter  to a great extent and in important ways irrelevant.   Except for "righteousness," "energy" (an ontological term) and  its corresponding verb are more frequent in the New Testament than most of the terms describing Salvation in Western theology (CLICK HERE).   Juridical terms are, as just said, often used metaphorically in the New Testament; how could they be avoided in an Old Testament inheritance?  But Salvation in the New Testament is ontological--not something that only a lawyer can fathom.   The West has surely strayed.
     The Latins have been prone to intellectualize the onotological categories of early Christianity (see HERE); Fr. Romanides contrasts East vs. West thus:

If Orthodoxy makes great use of the intellect--after all, the Son of God That we worship is the Reason (Lσgos) and Wisdom (Sophνa) of God (the Great Temple in Constantinople, Hayνa Sophνa, is named for Christ, the Holy Wisdom of God--they also restrict cognitive ability to its proper sphere (see HERE), refraining from using reason speculatively to dissect and analyse God and the holy Mysteries--which are beyond the scope of finite human cognitive abilities--in the Latin manner of both schools of scholastics.
     Luther solved the dilemma of resolving the obviousness that a nature cannot sin with the idea of a sinful (for Calvin, totally depraved) human nature by saying that God imputes the sins of our first ancestors to all of their descendents.  If God is somewhat unintelligibly full of "wrath" toward those whose sins He has imputed to them, He mitigates the situation by imputing our sins to Christ and then shows His mercy by imputing Christ's "merits" to believers in order to blot out the very sins that He has imputed to them or predestinated them to commit in the first place.   Will is prior to (virtual) fact here.   The logic of this back-and-forth imputation is air-tight in this  framework.   But it's as circular as Luther's saying that his view is biblical--after he deutercanonized (demoted the canonicity of) the parts of the New Testament that he was honest enough to see disagreed with him.
      While the Orthodox East avoided both rationalism and will-based Nominalism --in short, a view prevailing in this or that part of Western scholasticism--and retained a mysteric (sacramentalist) view of being in a God-addressed orientation (the Altar being more important than the human-addressed pulpit)--Orthodoxy was also greatly influenced by monastic prβxis--ascetic and mystical experience.   (Some holy monks and other holy people have seen the uncreated Light in miraculous revelations.)   Not only is a Lordsday in the Great Fast dedicated to St. Gregory Palamas; one is also dedicated to the reformed and austere St. Mary of Egypt--both monastics.  (One also thinks of the reformed prostitute, St. Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles, who is honored with a festival on July 22.  Monastics and honoring Saints are of course rejected in Denominationism on democratic grounds.    
     Less Islamic in origin than predestination, anti-iconism, and the ousting of energetic and frequent Mysteries (sacraments) by "the word" in Reformation theology and practice was the Gnosticism that ignored the ontological sides of the Incarnation and Resurrection and confused Immolation with Anaphora (Oblation) in Christ's Sacrifice and in the divine Liturgy.   Calling the Creator of all a "Word"  allowed for a lasting ambiguity among Denominationists.  Thus, the most prominent Protestant thinker of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, exploits the two Western senses of Word when he says (Church dogmatics I/1.255), "The possibility of knowing the Word of God lies in the Word of God and nowhere else" (p. 255) and "God, the Revealer, is identical with His act in revelation, identical also with its effect" (p. 340).  H. A. Wolfson (Religious philosophy, [Harvard 1961]), p. 17] suggests a connection between Stoic fatum "fate" (literally, "spoken") and predestination--another instance in which Gnostic-like philosophy joined hands with will-based Nominalism.   But then, in typically Western fashion, Barth identifies the divine Essence with the divine will or freedom (ibid., p. 426); he says, "The operation of God is the Essence of God . . . "   But within the Essence (ousνa, German Wesen), he distinguishes the operations from the Essence-as-such.   There's a lot of gobbledygook and playing with words here, but in the end the Trinity reflects the economy because the economy, despite all demurrers, has got to reflect the Trinity.  Despite John 15:16 and Karl Barth's three slogans,

[God is] ganz anders ("wholly other");  "no point of contact" [between 
humans and  God]; and  no analogia entis ("analogy of being"),

(The analogia entis or "analogy of being" is rejected by Protestants partly on Gnostic grounds, partly on solid Old Testament grounds; rejected by Orthodox on Biblical grounds and because the created does not mirror the uncreated generally.)  If Barth rejects the analogia entis and fails to find Augustine's "vestiges" of the Trinity in the triads to be found in the created economy, he nevertheless defends  the Filioque because he embraces the error that the Trinitarian Essence has got to parallel the energetic sending of the Paraclete by the Son in the economy.   His cacodox modalist view of the Trinity (ibid., pp. 412-414) depends on the same misguided parallelism between the Holy Spirit's mission in the economy and His procession in the Trinitarian Essence that underlies the Latin heresy of the Filioque.   The order of revelation to humans is the order of the Trinitarian "modes."  Note, too, that the parallelism in question is a "basic axiom" for K. Rahner, the Latin thinker and papal advisor of the twentieth century (see D. Reid, Energies of the Spirit, p. 33).  
     In truth, however, the uncreated divine Essence, Which is Being beyond being, is wholly without comparison or analogy with created being  (Rom. 2:7-9, 11:34, 1 Cor. 2:16 [quoting Is. 40;13, and Job 15:8]); whatever of a positive nature humans know about God is due to the operations of His uncreated Energies (an Eastern concept he would like to revive), to the incarnate Christ, and whatever valid apophatic conclusions reason can draw as to what God's Being would not be.   No sensible person denies "points of contact"  between God and the Icon (Image) of God in human nature--unless that person falsely assumes that the Icon got lost in the Fall-- when the Cognation with, or Assimilation, to God (uncreated Grace) got lost.   Without the reason and freewill of the Icon of God, humans would have become animals.  If members of Christ are "images of the IMAGE," then fallible human lσgos, especially when energized by Grace, is not inevitably  in conflict with the divine LOGOS "Reason, Rational Principle."   Membership in Christ's risen Body and the bestowing of the Assimilation to God also confirms the possibility of some kind of contact points between humanity and God. 
      In contradistinction with Reformation theology, traditional Christianity views (see the citations in the frame above)  the incarnate Logos as a Mystery (Sacrament; cf. Col. 2:2), i.e. as a material vehicle of spiritual Energy.  But the Reformation was a revolution that rejected the religious rτle of both materiality and time--in short, the whole mysteric or sacramental connex of materiality and tradition (qua exιlixis "unfolding") with spiritual reality or energy--in favor of an outlook or way of thinking founded on will and law and a fixation with words, sermons, etc.--the human-addressed pulpit, which replaced the Altar.   (It's amazing to a traditionalist to see the appeal this approach can have for some people, given that religion is Worship of God!)  In view of the way the two main Cordova-derived Western frameworks of the latter Middle Ages effectively ignore the concept of energy, transmogrifying it into form (in Latin Thomism, where form actualizes matter) and will (in Latin Ockhamism and in Protestantism; will is certainly an energy), the question arises: 

Can  scholastic theology be regarded as a "natural development"
 of Biblical and early Christian energy?

A positive answer has got to be claimed by Latin apologetes; for otherwise, their innovations would be more explicitly heretical.   And the Reformers were--whatever contrary claims they may make to be "Biblical--are self-evidently revolutionaries.   The revolutionary character of both kinds of mid-second-millennium scholasticism would be expected in such a late development, even if its direct provenance did not lie in third-hand Aristotelianism directly derived from Islamic commentators--often cited by the scholastics.  But (i) through anachronistic interpretations of texts prior to the Dark Ages that would perplex a Greek-speaking Christian in Rome or elsewhere and (ii) devoting exclusive concentration to details rather than to the unbridgeable differences between these latter-day axiomatic frameworks and the early Greek-language framework of early Christianity, Latin apologetes manage to convince themselves that the innovations are not heretical but just defensible developments.    Since that won't wash with us, a lot of their propaganda directed in our direction is pointless.
      Protestantism moved further from the conservative tradition and imagined even greater anachronisms (viz. virtual reality) than did the Latins.   If a Greek-language early Christian would have been bamboozled by Latin so-called developments, he would consider Reformation virtual reality right out of Wonderland.  The Reformers discarded the notion of a material Sacrifice and disontologized the concept of the Body of Christ (Eph. 5:30, etc.).  The only independently efficacious quasi-sacrament remaining is preaching.   Icons and material relics (despite Acts 19:12) were discarded, though today's Fundamentalists pray around material (flag)poles, evidently recapitulating the phallic asherim and the sacred asheroth of the Old Testament's Cana'anites.  The flag is treated as an abstract icon, like the outlined fish that Evangelicals affix to their automobiles.  Near the beginning of the Lordsday service,  the (Slavic) Orthodox sing the Beatitudes, whereas the Calvinists (and Book of Common Prayer) recited the Ten Commandments there.  Besides the reconceptualization of Grace in terms of will by the Reformers, Luther reconceived faith in volitional terms--viz.  as fiducia--i.e. as a willed decision (or judgment) to assent.

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     1Alexandria was the largest city of the Mediterranean world before Constantinople was founded, and Antioch (now Antakya--in what is now Turkey) was second-largest.  Rome had become a small town well before the middle of the first millennium; it was out-sized by Ravenna, the Byzantine western capital (along with earlier Milan and German Trier).  In the Arab Empire, Baghdad, had half a million people, but was still second to Cordova.  The Arab Empire extended from Gibraltar (an Arabic word) and Ghana (what is now Mali), whose capital was Timbuktu, to China and Indonesia, with northwestern India a major territory.   (Of course, it was not specifically Arab Muslims ruling in those regions; they were Muslims of other races.)   Eventually, Constantinople with almost a million people surpassed all of these except the Chinese capital .  In the Byzantine Empire, Thessalonνke was the second-largest city.   (Mexico City was the most populous city outside of China at the time of Columbus).

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