Why the Break Between East and West?

Orthodox Christians living in the United States are generally aware of the fact that outsiders cannot receive the sacraments of the Orthodox Church.  The only exception to this rule—and it is a recent exception—is that Christians from other traditions can marry an Orthodox Christian in a ceremony led by an Orthodox priest or bishop so long as the incoming partner has been baptized in the name of the Trinity.  In canonical terms, this exception is precisely that—an exception made on account of pastoral necessity (i.e. oikonomia), it is not a change in dogmatic policy.  But that begs the question, how exactly did it come to pass that the Orthodox Church forbid sacramental union (baptisms, marriages, the Eucharist, etc.) with Western Christians in the first place?  A careful reading of the historical sources reveals that the canonical grounds for refusing sacraments to Western Christians are more tenuous than most recognize.  Equally problematic is the extent to which the modern reflection on these canonical and ecumenical questions has been hindered by a combination of intellectual stagnation and an ecclesiastical super-structure that, in the post-Byzantine world, has largely failed to resolve important theological questions.

The Ecumenical Councils and writings of the Church Fathers that form the basis for Orthodox canon law all predate the schism between East and West by hundreds of years.  As a consequence, specific canonical interpretations about the legitimacy of the Western Christian traditions (and whether or not any Western doctrines qualify as “heresy”) are always an attempt to adjudicate a theological question on the basis of older, pre-existing regulations that were prompted by different theological concerns.  Thus, even the most well-known questions that differentiated the Orthodox and Roman Catholics in the Middle Ages (such as filioque or Purgatory) were never explicitly addressed by canon law.  The one exception to this, of course, is the debate over papal authority but there are so many conflicting canonical precedents dating to the fourth and fifth century that the appeal to canon law in this regard has always failed to resolve the issue.