03 — The Two Europes

The organizing frame of God, History, and Dialectic: not one Europe but two — a “First Europe” of the Orthodox East and the pre-Augustinian West, and a “Second Europe” formed by Augustinism — divided by a fault line that is theological before it is geographical, and grounded in two rival doctrines of the Trinity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; historiography and Trinitarian theology)

Overview

This section expounds Farrell’s central image in his own terms and marks where it exceeds what the Church confesses and what the repository’s own history asserts. The “Two Europes” is at once a heuristic (the West was First-European before it became Second-European, so “the West” is not written off), a doctrinal claim (two triadologies — the monarchy of the Father versus the Augustinian simple essence), and a causal thesis about history (that the Trinitarian difference is the master-cause of two civilizations). The first two are largely faithful to Orthodox teaching; the third is Farrell’s own, and it is set here beside the repository’s more cautious Great Schism history and the scholarly objections gathered later.

Files in This Section

  • The Two Europes: Farrell’s Historiographical Frame — the “First Europe” and “Second Europe” as Farrell defines them; why he refuses a merely geographical East/West division; and where the frame exceeds the repository’s multi-causal account of the schism.
  • The Two Triadologies — the doctrinal substance beneath the frame: the monarchy of the Father and the essence-energies distinction versus the Augustinian simple essence and relations-of-opposition; where Farrell restates Orthodoxy and where he presses beyond it.

See Also