I spoke with Sam Huntington earlier this year, about the Christian East and West actually being the two halves of the same civilization that need to be reunited. He said that he did not know much about or understand Orthodoxy or its culture, and never did. Therefore, by his own admission, his statements on the Orthodox civilization in "Clash of Civilizations" are based on ignorance, and may be dicounted.
As for Soviet despotism, it really was conceived in the West (Marx, Engels, etc.), not the Orthodox East. In Russia and other Eastern countries, communism was born out of rejection of Orthodox Christianity, and the desire to exterminate it.
As for Orthodoxy and despotism in medieval times, Western feudalism was even more despotic than the Eastern Roman Empire, and nowhere near as civilized. Neither Orthodox Serbia nor Greece in modern times could be called despotic, in the case of Serbia not until its communist conquest by Tito.
God only became a junior partner to Caesar in Czarist Russia under the Western Enlightenment-oriented Peter the First, who abolished the Patriarchate and put the church under the state. Catherine the Second, another Western Enlightenment-oriented Russian ruler, was also a gross despot. I hope that the next time we try to unite East and West, we will do it right, based on the undivided faith of the Christian Church, not some atheistic ideology.
As for the Anglicans (or us Lutherans) uniting with Orthodox Christianity, as we should, it won't happen until we reverse our revisionist, liberal protestant drift. For example, Jefferts-Schori and "Selfish Gene" Robinson have got to go.
As for the Anglicans (or us Lutherans) uniting with Orthodox Christianity, as we should, it won't happen until we reverse our revisionist, liberal protestant drift. For example, Jefferts-Schori and "Selfish Gene" Robinson have got to go.
Couldn't agree with you more, HS. I would only like to add that Cathrine the Great was actually a westerner (German) and not Russian.