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http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/articles/401/romanides,-romanity-fall-old-rome/
ROMANIDES, ROMANITY AND THE FALL OF OLD ROME
Written by Vladimir Moss
ROMANIDES, ROMANITY AND THE FALL OF OLD ROME
When Emperor Basil II died in 1025, New Rome had reached its peak – politically, militarily and culturally. Some fifty years later, after the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071, she started upon the path of decline that would lead to the Fall of the City in 1204, and again, more permanently, in 1453. In between these two events lay another: the loss of the West’s unity with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and the religio-political civilization of Orthodox Christian Romanity. This fall was accomplished in the historical capital of the West, Old Rome, in the year 1054, when the Patriarchate of Old Rome fell under the anathema of the Great Church of Constantinople. Simultaneously it was announced symbolically in the heavens by the collapse of the Crab nebula (a fact noted by Chinese astronomers of the time). Thus the great star that had been Western Christianity now became a black hole, sucking in a wider and wider swathe of peoples and civilizations into its murky depths. And the New Rome, too, suffered: one of the two “lungs” of Orthodox Christian Romanity had collapsed, and the whole body was now weaker, more prone to disease and less capable of vigorous recovery…
Such an important event has naturally elicited much study and analysis; and in what is now a very well-known lecture, Fr. John Romanides put forward a new and highly controversial thesis:
that the schism between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism was not a schism between Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) Christianity, but between the Romans understood in a very broad sense and the nation of the Franks.
By the Romans he understands the inhabitants of Gallic Romania (Southern France), Western Romania (Rome and Southern Italy) and Eastern Romania (Constantinople and its dependencies).
By the Franks he appears to understand all the Germanic tribes of North-Western Europe – the Franks, the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Saxons and the Normans - with the exception of the “Romanized Anglo-Saxons” (although the Anglo-Saxons were in fact less Romanized than the Franks). Romanides’ argument is that the
schism was not really caused by theological differences, - at any rate, between Rome and Constantinople, -
but by political manipulations on the part of the Franks, the only real heretics: “The Franks used church structure and dogma in order to maintain their birthright, to hold the Roman nation in ‘just subjection’.”1 The West Romans, he claims, were never really heretics, but always remained in union with the East Romans of Constantinople, with whom they always formed essentially one nation, in faith, in culture and even in language. In another article, Romanides argues that the Protestant Reformation, together with the American and French revolutions, constituted the birth of “Re-Greco-Romanisation, but not in its Apostolic form”!2
Romanides begins his lecture with a tribute to Patriarch Athenagoras and Archbishop Iakovos – two notorious Freemasons who tried to unite Orthodoxy with the heresies of the West. Having failed to see that these two leading contemporary “Romans” are in fact spiritually “Franks”, we should not be unduly surprised to find that he also fails to prove his case with regard to the Romans and Franks of yesteryear.
But we may agree with the comment of Fr. Michael Vaporis in his foreword to Romanides’ lecture, that while “some might not agree with Romanides’ presentation, analysis or evaluation of the events leading to and causing the Schism”, “few will not be challenged to re-think the unfortunate circumstances which led to the tragic division”. Romanides’ presentation is challenging - though deeply flawed, as we shall try to demonstrate. And we shall try to rise to the challenge by presenting a more plausible account of the causes of the schism.
