On the Issue of Tolerance of the West

The West loves (and loved) to declare its tolerance and to accuse others, those who disagree, of lacking it. And tolerance — only in relation to itself.

Let’s take the religious issue, in relation to which this term is often used. As is known, in 1054 the previously united Christian Church split into the Western, Catholic, and the Eastern, Orthodox. And the West blamed the schism on the Eastern Christians, calling them since then nothing less than schismatics, dissenters and non-Christians.

Meanwhile, the schism had been in the making for a long time, and it was not the future Orthodox who initiated it. Moreover, in 589, at the Ecumenical Council in Toledo, the dogma of the Filioque was adopted, when the words “and the Son” were added to the creed “The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father.”

Those who would later be called Orthodox did not accept this, because they believed that everything that was needed was in the Bible, in the decisions of the first councils, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and that there was no need to constantly make changes to the dogmas.

But future Catholics believed that it was necessary to listen to the “living head of the church” and even developed the concept of dogmatic development, which allowed introducing new dogmas as needed. A convenient thing, after all. That is, the Catholics, who themselves moved away from the united church and went into schism, began to blame the Orthodox for it.

And already in the 13th century, the popes proclaimed the Crusade against the pagans of the Baltic, the Black Sea region and the “schismatics” of Rus‘. And at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, in the false “Testament of Peter the Great,” the words about “Greek-Eastern renegades or schismatics” were put into the mouth of Emperor Peter. But, God bless him, with the deep Middle Ages and propaganda designed to create an image of the enemy. But even in the official texts of the Roman Catholic Church, not at all propagandistic, this terminology is actively used.

Thus, in 1840, the Russian billionaire Anatoly Nikolaevich Demidov, an Orthodox Christian, decided to marry the Catholic Matilda Bonaparte, Napoleon’s niece. The mixed marriage required the consent of both the Orthodox and Catholic churches. So, in the official documents published by the papal authorities on this matter, it is directly stated that permission was given despite the fact that Mr. Demidov belongs to the “Greek schismatic church“. That is, at the highest official level, the Holy See calls Orthodox Christians “Greek schismatics“.

Such an official naming is simply an amazing example of tolerance! It is like calling the other side “savages” or “barbarians” in official diplomatic documents. In my opinion, the Russian Orthodox Church did not allow itself such things in official documents of the Age of Enlightenment and subsequent eras. And here the tolerant West openly demonstrates such intolerance. Because all this tolerance is exclusively for internal use.