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When the Eastern hierarchs came back to Constantinople from the Council of Florence, the reaction of the lower clergy and laity, both high and low born, was that they and the Empire had been delivered into the hands of "foreign overlords", not the loving embrace of the HMC.

And tell me how exactly the "lower clergy" were able to ascertain that? Are you saying that there was not some bias already ingrained against the Pope by this time (Florence) and any rebuilding was doomed to failure because of the "lower clergy's" attitudes? Are we to believe that these men really knew what Rome was teaching?

I think 300 years of separation had ingrained a number of half truths and twistings of what the West was really doing. They hadn't ANY experience with the Western world - it is a dream to believe these "lower clergy" refused Rome because they had some inner "feeling" based on actual experience that it was wrong to reunite with the West because the West had actually fallen off the rails...

Let's be honest. There was a massive anti-West movement in the East during the time. Florence was doomed because of that, not because of theology.

Regards

"They hadn't ANY experience with the Western world - it is a dream to believe these "lower clergy" refused Rome because they had some inner "feeling" based on actual experience that it was wrong to reunite with the West because the West had actually fallen off the rails..."

Where in God's name did you get the idea that the priests and laity in Constantinople didn't know what was being taught in the West? All the East knew about the filioque and the accusations the Dominicans were making throughout the Levant that Orthodoxy had changed the Creed in an heretical fashion; all the East knew of the Papal legate's unfortunate performance at the Divine Liturgy with his "bull" of excommunication; all the East knew that the Crusaders had set a whore up on the Patriarchal throne in Agia Sophia, threw dice on the altar table and installed a "Latin Patriarch"; all the East knew of the pretentions of the Pope to universal immediate jurisdiction, popes had been making claims like that, to no effect in the East, for centuries. And finally, Jo, Easterners, unlike the masses in the West, could read. They knew what the scriptures said, they knew what The Fathers taught. They were continually exhorted to read the scriptures. It likely had an effect.

If you think theology and ecclesiology had nothing to do with the failure of the False Union of Florence, you don't understand Orthodoxy then or now. Florence wasn't doomed because of anti-Western feelings; it was doomed because the hierarchs who agreed to it sold out Orthodoxy for poltical/military reasons. The people and lower clergy knew that. You know what their response was. They got the sultan's turban and Western Christendom shattered into what is now tens of thousands of pieces 100 years later.

You underestimate the degree to which not merely ordinary clergy, but Orthodox laity, take and took theology seriously, and the degree to which there had been serious engagement with Western ideas in the centuries leading up to Florence.

The Tomus of 1285 (Finally available in English translation online, here!) Forcefully and constructively engaged Western ideas on the procession of the Holy Spirit, condemning the double procession, and the formula 'as from one source' of Lyons, but admitting an eternal manifestation of the Spirit through the Son (not merely the economical manifesation through the Son upheld by St. Photius).

Papadakis, in his scholarly exposition of the unionist controversy that lead to the issuing of the Tomus, argues that the Tomus laid the intellectual groundwork for the resolution of the Palamite controversies, which again involved interaction with Western ideas--the rationalism of Barlaam of Calabria, who was condemned by the Palamite Synods, but ended his life as a Cardinal of the Church of Rome.

The importance of the Palamite doctrine of the Uncreated Divine Energies to the praxis of monastics and to the Orthodox understanding of salvation as theosis is almost impossible to overstate. The monastic clergy were certainly among the leaders in the resistance to Florence, certainly in part because Florence in no way back-tracked on the rejection of the doctrine implicit in the welcoming of the anti-Palamite arch-heretic, Barlaam into the Church of Rome and his elevation to the rank of Cardinal.

The one hiearch who attended Florence/Ferrar, but did not accept the False Union, St. Mark of Ephesus, very much shows a keen appreciation for the Latin deviations from Holy Tradition in his Refutations of the Latin Chapters Concerning Purgatorial Fire. I see no reason to think that the lower clergy or the educated laity would have had less of an appreciation.