In this article I attempt an overview in four parts. First, I shall discuss why Catholics should not only show some ecumenical concern for Orthodoxy but also treat the Orthodox as their privileged or primary ecumenical partner. Secondly, I shall ask why the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches occurred, focussing as it finally did on four historic ‘dividing issues’. Thirdly, I shall evaluate the present state of Catholic-Orthodox relations, with particular reference to the problem of the ‘Uniate’ or Eastern Catholic churches. Fourthly and finally, having been highly sympathetic and complimentary to the Orthodox throughout, I shall end by saying what, in my judgment, is wrong with the Orthodox Church and why it needs Catholicism for (humanly speaking) its own salvation.

First, then, why should Catholics take the Orthodox as not only an ecumenical partner but the ecumenical partner par excellence? There are three kinds of reasons: historical, theological and practical — of which in most discussion only the historical and theological are mentioned since the third sort — what I term the ‘practical’ takes us into areas of potential controversy among Western Catholics themselves.

Hazlitt’s writings as a whole are distinguished by his close attention to the structures of power, political power not excepted. In a Morning Post article of March 1800, he writes,

“Power” in Hazlitt’s metaphysic refers to the mind’s innate faculty, its freedom from subjugation to external influences. His philosophy also connects power with liberty: the mind is free since it is subject only to the laws of its own innate constitution. By affirming innate “power”, Hazlitt refutes the empirical account of epistemology in which the mind, moulded from without, remains passive or subjected. He asserts in its stead that the process of knowledge is ab intra, directed by the mind from within. The creative genius celebrated in Hazlitt’s literary and artistic criticism exemplifies intellectual power in its highest degree, and so vindicates the core principle of his metaphysics.

What makes a “Christology” count as a “Christian” Christology? Evidently, there is some distinction to be made. Presumably the reverent accounts of Jesus’ person and role offered by Islam, by notable non-Christian Jews of modem times, by Jewish writers such as Vermes, or by Gandhi and others in the Hindu tradition, do not count as “Christian” Christologies — and clearly a respectful account of his person and role offered by an agnostic or atheist could not count as a “Christian” Christology. Whether we situate the sentimental nineteenth century Renan, or modem theologians such as Maurice Wiles’ and John Hick, on the “Christian” or “non-Christian” side of the divide in respect of their Christologies, waits upon some clarification of what it is that makes a Christology a “Christian” one.

The term “Christology” does not mean a “Messianology” which would have to do with the role of a Messiah the question of whose identity lies open. Rather it means what would have better been called a “Jesuology”, that is an account of the person and role in human existence and the universe of the historically identified person, Jesus of Nazareth.