[Kolokotronis]

"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.

[kosta50]

it was doomed because the hierarchs who agreed to it sold out Orthodoxy for poltical/military reasons

Precisely so.

[jo kus]

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?

From this board. Do you deny that it has taken you a long time to come to grasp what the West teaches on such issues as original sin, purgatory, and the Trinity? If I recall, they didn't have internet back then - so it seems to me it was VERY LIKELY that their ignorance of Western teachings was present.

Regard