Catholicity : Communion or Domination?

In Western histories of the Church and other theological writings, one commonly reads about the distinction between Latin and Greek Churches, designated as Western and Eastern Churches. I have not come across any serious questioning of this terminology. The term "Eastern" can only tenuously be justified for the Church of Constantinople on the basis of the influence it exercised over the East as a result of the inherited Hellenistic cultural influence in some border areas of the Persian empire, but it was still very much a Greek European church in the eastern part of the Roman empire. The so-called "Churches of Asia" were mostly the churches in Asia Minor, the European Turkey of today. The influence of the Greek Church over Russia was still restricted to the East of Europe.

Moreover, it was the "caesaro-papism" of the Byzantine Church that created problems for the survival of local churches in the Sassanid Persian empire and led to the break-away of the East-Syrian (Chaldean) Church, which kept links with Christianity in the real Asia that was hardly known to Europe. This separation took place before the end of the 5th century.

Hence, the conflicts between the Latin and Greek Churches were very much East-West conflicts within Europe and may be seen as distant heralds of the nationalisms that would emerge following the peak of the Latin hegemony in the Christendom of the Middle Ages. However, there is no denying the fact that the geographical-cultural proximity of the Byzantine Church to the East showed in it some eastern cultural traces that differed somewhat from the Latin concerns. However, the deeper cause of the tension and eventual schism was the cultural predominance that Byzantine Europe enjoyed over the western half as a result of the shift of the capital. The socio-economic and cultural insufficiency of Western Europe and its new political developments enabled the papacy in Rome to exercise leadership and rally the feelings of the western half by drawing upon the Petrine and Roman imperial tradition to compensate for its losses.

In this conflict, the strength of the Byzantine church, namely the presence of the emperor, became also its weakness. It had to share its authority with the emperor, while the papacy in the West could present a unified command and the allegiance of its more rural subjects. Also the prosperity and pomp of the court and its munificence to the Patriarch and hierarchy could hardly provide sufficient experience of threat even in the midst of growing demands of the Roman church for supremacy. Besides, while the emperor could trust himself to control the dissatisfaction of his Byzantine subjects in and around the capital, logistics required that he should be more generous to the demands of the subjects that he had left behind and in the more distant part of the empire.

This may partly explain the nature of imperial interventions and the position taken by the emperor in ecclesiastical conflicts. These socio-politico-cultural contradictions of Western-Eastern European societies can explain to some extent the problems of individuality and catholicity, which saw further deepening when the whole of Europe was reduced to the "periphery" by the Arab-Turkish "centre". In the new situation of encircled Europe, the "crisis of feudalism" * put the religiosity of the local churches of Europe to a severe test.

The "truce of God" could provide only a limited respite, and it was the leadership of the papacy that provided a catholic solution by calling upon the mutually feuding Christian princes and nobles to engage their energies in crusades, which could provide the required Lebensraum. The crusades also offered opportunity to Rome to establish Latin patriarchates in Constantinople, Jerusalem and Antioch and thereby encroach upon the traditional eastern patriarchates.

The Iberian expansion in the 15th century was largely motivated by a continued internal crisis provoked by a population explosion and food shortages. The papal intervention provided a catholic solution to the two Iberian Christian powers that suspected each other's gains in the new enterprise. The catholicity of the intervention was curiously expressed by dividing the globe for the peaceful pursuit of colonization and evangelization by the two contending Catholic powers. The "Roman complex", developed over the centuries of European history with its internal West-East (Oriental Schism) and North-South (Reformation) divides, seems to have been a long preparatio evangelica for a real "missionary" phase. Attempts were made to restore its scriptural meanings to the term "mission", but that could not justify denying the historical origin of its usage and the historical connotations it has assumed in the course of the colonial and imperial phases of European expansion.