The Two Europes: Farrell’s Historiographical Frame

The organizing image of God, History, and Dialectic is that there are not one Europe but two — a “First Europe” of the Orthodox East together with the pre-Augustinian West, and a “Second Europe” formed by the reception of Augustine — and that the fault line between them is theological before it is political or geographical. This file expounds that frame in Farrell’s own terms, and marks where it exceeds the repository’s own sober account of the East-West divergence.

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

The Central Image

Farrell’s book is built on a single, deliberately provocative reframing of European history. The familiar story divides Europe geographically (East and West), confessionally (Orthodox and Catholic/Protestant), or politically (Byzantium and the Latin/Germanic kingdoms). Farrell proposes a division that cuts across all of these: the deepest fault line, he argues, is between a First Europe and a Second Europe, and it is a fault line of theology — specifically of the doctrine of the Trinity — before it is anything else (Farrell, God, History, and Dialectic [hereafter GHD], Vol. I, God: The Foundation of the First Europe; and Farrell’s own summary in his published prolegomena and interviews on the work).

The First Europe, in Farrell’s usage, is not simply “the East.” It is the whole world — Greek East and Latin West alike — that held the pre-Augustinian, patristic doctrine of God: the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocians, of St. Maximus the Confessor, of St. Photius, and, later, of St. Gregory Palamas, in which the unity of the Godhead is grounded in the person of the Father (the monarchy of the Father) and the divine essence and energies are distinguished. On this reading the First Europe includes the Latin Fathers before and apart from the distinctively Augustinian synthesis; it is a patristic civilization, not a merely geographical East (see The Two Triadologies; The First Europe).

The Second Europe is the civilization formed by the reception and development of Augustine — “Augustinism,” in Farrell’s term — with its doctrine of absolute divine simplicity, its essence-first Trinitarianism, and the Filioque. This is not co-extensive with the Latin West as such but with the West insofar as it built on the Augustinian foundation: the Carolingian theologians who pressed the Filioque, the scholastics who systematized it, and the whole cultural order that followed (see Dialectic and Simplicity; Augustine and the Filioque Thesis).

Why “Two Europes” and Not “East and West”

The point of the reframing is precisely to deny that the division is fundamentally geographical or ethnic. Farrell insists that the pre-Augustinian Latin West belongs with the East, in the First Europe — that there was once a genuinely common patristic civilization spanning both halves of the Mediterranean world, and that what fractured it was not the fall of Rome, or the Germanic migrations, or the rise of the papacy as such, but the triumph of a particular theological construction in the Latin West. The “Second Europe” is therefore, for Farrell, a deviation from a shared inheritance rather than the natural expression of a Western essence: the West was First-European before it became Second-European (Farrell, GHD, Vol. I; Farrell, published prolegomena to GHD).

This is theologically significant and pastorally attractive, because it refuses to write off “the West” as such: on Farrell’s own frame, the Latin Fathers, the Celtic and pre-Carolingian churches, and the whole Western patristic heritage belong to the First Europe and to Orthodoxy. The repository’s own collections on the Western saints of the undivided Church rest on the same conviction that there was a common patristic West (see the treatment of the pre-Schism Western Fathers across the Church Fathers collection). Where Farrell goes further is in the sharpness with which he makes one theological decision — the Augustinian one — the hinge on which the whole of Western history then turns.

The Frame as a Reading of History

The “Two Europes” is thus not merely a classification but a causal claim about history. Farrell holds that the theological difference is generative: the two triadologies are two different “grammars” of reality, and a civilization that thinks the Trinity dialectically will, over centuries, think everything else dialectically too — its politics, its law, its philosophy, its account of the human person. The Second Europe is not just a region with a different creed; it is a civilization carrying a different and, in Farrell’s diagnosis, a self-destructive theological logic (see The Cultural Consequences). The First Europe, by contrast, carries a theology that does not consume itself, because it does not lodge opposition at the source (see The First Europe: Photius, Palamas, and the Councils).

Where the Frame Exceeds the Repository’s Own Account

Here the discipline of this collection must be applied (see METHODOLOGY.md, §4.1). That East and West came to differ theologically, that the Filioque is a real error, and that this difference had genuine consequences — all of this the Orthodox Church confesses and this repository teaches. But Farrell’s frame makes claims that go well beyond what the repository’s sober treatment of the same terrain asserts. The Great Schism collection presents the estrangement of East and West as a long, over-determined process — jurisdictional and papal, cultural and linguistic, political (the Carolingian and Norman contexts), liturgical, and doctrinal — in which the Filioque is one grave factor among several, and in which the final rupture is dated to the eleventh century and after, not to the fifth. Farrell’s frame, by contrast, effectively pre-dates the schism to Augustine and makes a single Trinitarian decision the master-cause of which all the rest are effects.

The difference must be visible to the reader. It is one thing to say, with the Church, that the Filioque is an error and that Augustine’s Trinitarian theology contributed to it (see Augustine and the Filioque Thesis); it is another to say, with Farrell, that a single theological deviation in the fifth century is the cause of the entire subsequent divergence of two civilizations. The first is confessed doctrine and shared history; the second is Farrell’s thesis — expounded here accurately, and set beside both the repository’s more cautious history and the scholarly objections (see The Scholarly Debate). The reader should hold the “Two Europes” as a powerful heuristic and a serious theological reading, not as an established historical finding.

See Also

References

  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. I: God, The Foundation of the First Europe. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
  • Farrell, Joseph P. Published prolegomena and interview on God, History, and Dialectic (Anthony Flood’s site, farrellghdprolegomena and farrellghdinterview). [Author’s own summary statements of the frame; cited as his self-description of the thesis.]
  • The Great Schism (this repository), for the multi-causal account of the East-West estrangement.