2.         

          If not culture, how do we explain the so-called “division between East and West”? The emergence of a new religion (and culture), a distortion of “the Faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).  The cause of the “division” is largely the work of one man --- Augustine of Hippo (“father of the Schoolmen,” Khomiakov called him) --- whose religio-philosophical synthesis, his ambition to elevate “faith” to cognition (credo ut intelligam) gradually and fatally infected the Latin West. Put another way, “insofar as the ‘Western’ tradition in theology is different from the ‘Eastern’,” writes A.H. Armstrong, “it is because it is Augustinian rather than because temperamentally, racially, geographically “Western’ or Latin or Roman.”  He adds that the sine qua non of Augustinianism is Neo-Platonism (²).   

          The dominance of Augustinian theology begins during the Carolingian era.  Charlemange slept with a copy of The City of God under his pillow, and his minister of education, Alcuin of York (735-804) wrote De fide Trinitate with Augustine as “the bedrock of his argument”(³).  The work is little more than recitation of Augustine’s new model of the Trinity with the filioque. Such a cataphatic triadology signifies the formation of a new religion which includes a Nestorian dissolution of traditional christology (⁴) and, therefore, a bifurcation of the visible and invisible Church (for which Protestantism will be forever grateful), including the Mysteries which, incidentally, provide only a created grace. Augustine also joined the Platonic Ideas (kosmos noetos) to the divine Word which, among other things, linked them with his theory of double predestination. During the last decade of his life, he abandoned the traditional soteriology of the Church, that is, deification (⁵).

          There are other theological errors to be discussed, but what has been delineated here  sufficient to make the point. The numerous questions he raised (and failed to answer) were the offspring of rationalism hitherto unknown in the Church.  Augustinianism has numerous components, some of them personal, but mostly it is a superbia cognescendi, the womb of theories born “in the fury of the dialectic hunt” (⁶).  Having succumbed to the Graeco-Roman culture of his time, he fatally altered for himself and his posterity the Christianity with which he was entrusted.  From his daring speculation came new religions and, indeed, a new culture. To honor Augustine with a place among the Fathers, to call him “saint” or “blessed,” is not only to render a consensus patrum impossible, but to conceive culture rather than religion as “transcendent.”  The “transcendence of culture” is an invitation to doctrinal innovation, for culture changes and, if it dominates the religion with which it is associated, then, religion in its substance must change.  What else has the philosophy of the post-Orthodox West demonstrated?  

Such was the result of the religio-philosophical enterprise of both Augustine and Origen --- the unlawful use of pagan Hellenism ---, although Augustine succeeded in doing to the West what Origen failed to do to the East (⁷). Augustine is the source of every heresy that has hitherto tormented the West. Without the dualism (⁸) which characterized his thought, Western Orthodoxy would not have become the Roman Catholicism which spawned the multiplicity of Christian sects known as Protestantism.