Nicholas wrote:Chrysostomos, I probably should as he was the son of Pepin the Short, but I really don't have lots of information on him. What points would you suggest I hit upon?
Well, I'd hit on the points made by Fr Romanides, for starters. A lot of his stuff is at romanity.org. In addition, I haven't yet found any other factors that explain the practical split that preceded the formal split so well as Charlemagne. Distancing the western Church from the eastern Church (ie, finding a way to determine them heretics) fits pefectly with his pretensions to being Holy Roman Emperor. How can he be that when there's still a Roman Emperor in Constantinople? So, at the least, that emperor is not legitimate if the Church which coronated him is not legitimate or hasn't been legitimate for some time.
Actually, I've been trying to find an explanation that's not so simplistic. At the time of the 6th Council, Pope Agatho writes a letter to the Emperor that's, of course, thoroughly Orthodox. He quotes Greek Fathers with ease and gives no real indication at any Latin/Greek cultural divide. However, a mere 100 years later, Charlemagne's council at Frankfurt condemns the 7th Council as idolatrous. This has been blamed on a bad translation from Latin to Greek, which certainly may be part of the equation. However, Charlemagne had a vested interest in getting his court theologians to find something to condemn the east with, so even if the translation was good, I don't have a problem believing that Frankfurt would still have found a way to come to the same conclusion.
In addition, his action of condemning the east for deleting the filioque from the Creed is rather amazing.
What I'm saying is that I see him as a catalyst for the eventual destruction of unity between west and east. He gets the ball rolling in a big way. Up to that point, unity could be stretched, but wasn't broken. After all, Pope St Leo's rather grand vision of the papacy was in the early 5th century, but didn't have nearly the effect of later and current disagreements about the papacy. ISTM that Charlemagne is the force that sets all these things in motion. Why, exactly, the popes let him get away with it is still beyond me at this point.
What can also be laid at his feet, it seems, is the problem of lay investiture that plagues the west in the succeeding centuries and the general Church/State problem which eventually leads to the American form of government.
Well, those are just some general thoughts.
