Anastasios, what do you mean by "a scholar who rehabilitated St. Photios for the west"?
Also can all the stickied announcement threads in this forum be unstickied, so you do not have to scroll down to see the first message?
I've just scanned the document, but 2 points readily stood out.
The author says, "It is known that the Orthodox recognize only seven councils as ecumenical, the first being that of Nicaea (325) and the last the second of Nicaea (787), which condemned the iconoclastic heresy regarding representations of Christ and the saints and the worship of their images as unlawful."
Worship of images? Do any of you worship images?
He later says, "he Eastern Church, although it considers itself a continuation of the primitive and indivisible Church, has abstained from convoking an Eighth Ecumenical Council for the reason that it would not be accepted as such by the Roman Church. A council which is not accepted in unanimous fashion does not possess the character of catholicity."
I thought the reason that most state is that there is no need for one, not that we need Rome to have council. Interesting argument he ascribes to the whole of the Eastern Church.
Nicholas,
Photios, after the 13th century, was blamed as the cause of the schism between East and West. If you read what he says about the 16th century Cardinal who said this, you get the point. Even in the 19th century Hergenrother had much this same opinion. Fr. Dvornik issued a scholarly rebuttal of this attitude specifically in his book
The Photian Schism which led modern RC's to have a much higher opinion of him, and led to his being placed back on the calendar of saints of the Byzantine (Ruthenian) Catholic Church.
When reading the article, please keep in mind that this was written in 1966 at the heyday of the ecumenical movement. He is a little too enthusiastic.
Now, as far as the term "image worship" if you read Hussey
the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire or many other scholarly books on iconoclasm, the term image "worship" is used. Western authors didn't have the firm distinction in English that we use between veneration and worship down. It is less common to see that vocabulary used today. Of course they both are aware of the distinction made at Nicea II between latria and dulia.
As far as Rome and the ecumenical councils, Dvornik is probably basing his opinions on things that Patr. Athenagoras et al said at that time. The opinion (which I believe) that ecuemenical has a restricted sense which refers solely to the empire, and thus there are no more ecumenical councils--has only become popular recently in non-Orthodox sources. Remember that in the 1960's ecumenical was being thrown around a lot and in many ways!
I should note that we are working on having a comments section linking each article to a thread on the OC.net board so that you all can discuss this stuff. I don't post stuff because I necessarily think it's 100% right (as the fellow at orthodoxinfo.com seems to do), but rather as a way to dissiminate information. I let the reader form his own opinions. I felt this article had a lot of potential to lead people to think about councils, which is why I posted it.
In Christ,
anastasios
