REFRESHING WORDS FROM AN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN ABOUT THE SACK OF CONSTANTINOPLE IN 1204 The Myth of Schism, By David Bentley Hart [I made this same argument 15-20 years ago, in almost exactly the same terms, drawing from Dr. Warren Carroll. It was in my 2004 book on Orthodoxy and remains as chapter 2 in the upcoming revision of the book. But Hart takes it even further than I did, saying that what the Orthodox did was even *worse* than what the Catholics did] As regards my own communion, I must reluctantly report that there are some Eastern Christians who have become incapable of defining what it is to be Orthodox except in contradistinction to Roman Catholicism; and among these are a small but voluble number who have (I sometimes suspect) lost any rationale for their Orthodoxy other than their profound hatred, deranged terror, and encyclopaedic ignorance of Rome. For such as these, there can never be any limit set to the number of grievances that need to be cited against Rome, nor any act of contrition on the part of Rome sufficient for absolution. There was something inherently strange in the spectacle of John Paul asking pardon for the 1204 sack of Constantinople and its sequel; but there is something inherently unseemly in the refusal of certain Eastern polemicists to allow the episode to sink back to the level of utter irrelevancy to which it belongs. (In any event, I eagerly await the day when the Patriarch of Constantinople, in a gesture of unqualified Christian contrition, makes public penance for the brutal mass slaughter of the metic Latin Christians of Byzantium—men, women, and children—at the rise of Andronicus I Comnenus in 1182, and the sale of thousands of them into slavery to the Turks. Frankly, when all is said and done, the sack of 1204 was a rather mild recompense for that particular abomination, I would think.)
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 05:25:55 +0000
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