Yes, I remember being impressed with those writings.
Apparently reading the scriptures [in the East] didn't have the effect on the laity and lower clergy that it did in the West. Perhaps that's because in the East the practices of The Church, Holy Tradition and the scriptures are seen as a seamless garment.
Perhaps. It is difficult to be sure. (God had to pick somewhere to start the Reformation.... :) It certainly does appear to me that the East has been much more consistent than the Latin Church over time.
"It certainly does appear to me that the East has been much more consistent than the Latin Church over time."
Indeed we have in both theology and praxis and the scriptures have always been available to the people. The preachers have always hammered on reading them...yet we have not chnaged our beliefs and as one other poster remarked, when the hierarchy got out of line, the people and the lower clergy straightened them out.
Here's a thought I've been pondering on. Is it possible that in fact Rome keeping the scripture from the people did contribute to the Protestant revolution in this way. By keeping the bible from the people through centuries of barbarism in the West, which the East didn't experience, the people and even the lower clergy forgot their proper role in the working of The Church. As society became feudal in the West, so did The Church there such that the people's role in The Church became like their role in society...serfs subject to the whim of their overlords. Once the people did read the bible, that knowledge gave them power and that power, once unleashed lead to a true revolution. The Church in the West, untethered from the restraining ecclesiology of the East, reacted rigidly as overlords are wont to do. By the time The Church realized the extent of the reforms necessary, a full blown "French Revolution" was underway and it was too late to stop it. In the meantime, the reformers, having cut themselves off from The Church and its "oneness" and "apostolicity" and, frankly, its holiness, spun off into all sorts of directions, leaving not only those aspects of the Latin Church which likely should have been left behind, but also those essential elements, the "esse" of The Church without which the 30,000 Protestant groups we see today became inevitable. One of the early and truly classic examples of this failure to separate the wheat from the chaff is the correspondence between the Thubingen divines a generation after Luther and the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II.
Meantime, in the East, we sat and watched from our incense filled Divine Liturgies and monasteries...and didn't change.
Looking at all this today I think is difficult because the chasm which opened between Rome and the Protestant communities has become so broad and deep and what started out at base as a sort of religiously inspired social revolution, with all the excesses we usually and historically see with such revolutions has become the basis of a whole segment of Western culture. This is why I have said, sitting on the outside of all this, that it appears to me that Protestants, whether you guys notice it or not, still define yourselves as "not Roman".
I wonder what would have happened if Rome's ecclesiology had been like Orthodoxy's. Would that have made it more flexible? Would the laity have felt more confident of their to reform from within? I don't doubt that there would have been a reformation under even this scenario, but maybe it wouldn't have lead to the Protestanism we see today.
I'm pinging Alex, Blogger, HD, xzins and Jo for their comments.