(06-15-2020, 03:20 AM)Blazkovitz Wrote: Overall I always considered Russians a part of Western civilization, and this is how the Middle East views them too. But when it comes to politics, Russians are more resistant to democracy than Indonesia with its exotic heritage. Is this because of Stalin's purges, which unwittingly eliminated all people with genetic traits conducive to supporting democracy?
But they're not. The difference between Orthodox and Western Christianity comes from the different paths they took. When Christianity was established as a formal religion in the 4th century it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. When the Empire split for good in 395 CE, the path taken by the Christian hierarchy in the West began to deviate from that of the East. The latter remained true to the original formulation (orthodox) remaining a state religion.
In the West they tried to, but first the Western Empire crumbled before the eyes. The province of Britain reverted to paganism. The Iberian province was overrun by Muslims. The Franks were Roman Christians, and with Charlemagne's conquests, there was once again a western "Roman" empire with western (Catholic) Christianity as its state religion. At this point, not too different from Orthodox. But then the Carolingian empire fell in the West, and you had a period known as the Feudalization of the church. In the absence of the empire, of which state was Catholicism the state religion for? All these petty warlords running around late 9th and 10th century France? What arose was a system of religious institutions (e.g. Cluniac monasteries) that was independent of local political authorities, acknowledging only the authority of the Bishop of Rome (Pope), who was enmeshed in Italian politics and uninterested in the affairs of French monasteries, making them free to evolve along different lines than they would have in the East, where the Roman empire was still intact.
As a result of this split, the West evolved in a different direction than the East. In the West there was the Reformation, because of this independent tradition that originally emerged from the crisis of the 9th and 10th centuries. Once split off, Protestantism continued to develop in all sorts of ways including Liberalism, Humanism and, recently, this new "Woke" theology. Russia and the Orthodox countries have never been part of the West. They are their own thing.
It is true we both count Classical civilization as antecedents, but so does Islam. But we departed from the orthodox path that Eastern Christianity remained on. (Islam is an even more orthodox faith, as shown by it's extreme conservative factions embracing of medieval forms and practices).
