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Blanking out of section of article

Why was this section blanked out or deleted ? There was no discussion about this edit. LoveMonkey (talk) 20:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Yeh, I saw that edit by an anon IP. The text has a strong pro-Rome POV to it and I assumed it was some pro-Orthodox editor (frankly, I wasn't sure if it might be you) who was objecting to sentences like "After Jerusalem was destroyed, the church of Rome naturally became the primary church, the capital of Christianity." I can find lots in this section that an Orthodox editor might wish to take issue with. At the least, it needs to be rewritten with a more NPOV tone. I don't think it should have been deleted without explanation, though. Perhaps you can suggest ways to rehabilitate the text.--Pseudo-Richard (talk) 17:48, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Funny I found that to be your forte'. Restore it please. No one here in discussion has raised any objections to the substance of it as far as I can tell. I just don't want to restore it because I want to keep my edits to a bare minimum on the article. LoveMonkey (talk) 19:22, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Hostility East and West

Why is it that the history of the Schism dances around the idea that the Roman Catholic church had to go "into the Middle East" and establish itself? Look at the way the crusades are depicted historically. Why would the Roman Catholic church if indeed the true church have to not only conquer the Muslims factions it faced in the Middle East but also have to conquer Orthodox communities (see the Latin Empire)? Think of it this way if St Thomas was Roman Catholic and so was his community (Saint Thomas Christians) that was outside of Byzantium (they had broken communion by way of the Persian schism) why would they need to conform to the ideas of Roman Catholicism? Why would they not already have a history of Papal understanding and Roman Catholic theology? Why was San Thome Basilica established in India in the 16th century but not sometime in the 1600 hundred years before that? Would it not stand to reason that the community there would not have had to adapt Roman Catholicism since it was already established there (see Catholic Church in India)? Why do none of the early schismatic communities or churches adhere to any of the supposed things that divide the Eastern Orthodox from the Roman Catholics? Why would these communities appear to be closer in the theology and practice to the Eastern Orthodox than the Roman Catholic? Even within their own respective circles of understanding they make no claims to things like Papal Supremacy and the filioque they have no history of these practices and it would seem to reason (again) that if the Roman Catholic church were the true church these communities would have a history of these practices.

If there was in the schism ill will between what became the Greek Orthodox church and these communities that ill will does not seem to validate in any of these communities a desire to "return" to the Roman Catholic church now that the Roman Catholic church has left the Middle Eastern and or Greek Church. Why is that? HOWEVER there is indeed ecumenism between the Greek Orthodox and these communities. Why is it that these communities without communion with the Greek Orthodox Church have themselves had to fight off and have wars with the Roman Catholic Church (see Fasilides for example)? Whats with the forced conversions and all that nonsense? Let alone what happened to Menelik I or even Haile Selassie I at the hands of Mussolini (see Second Italo-Ethiopian War). I mean really historically where is their Caesaropapism? It would seem that they have a right to claim themselves to be the true church and they can historically claim apostolic session. Where is it in their history that the church of Rome was above and ruler over all of Christianity? I mean there is information for people interested in what these communities hold as a stance on the theology of the filioque or Papal Supremacy for example. . Again if the Greek Orthodox got it wrong and these other churches then people are to believe that the whole entire historical location of Christianity and its people have fallen away from true Christianity? REALLY? LoveMonkey (talk) 19:00, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Please use this talk page only for suggestions to improve the article. Misplaced Pages is not an appropriate forum for theological disputes. - Cal Engime (talk) 20:11, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Please do not present yourself as someone whom speaks with authority User:Cengime. Also have a nice day. LoveMonkey (talk) 20:52, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

As explained in the policies and guidelines linked at the top of this page, Misplaced Pages is not a blog or forum, and off-topic posts such as this may be removed. I see nothing aimed at improving the article in your lengthy post, and I would be within my rights to delete it, but instead I'm asking you to stop. Defying the policies and guidelines after being advised of them is likely to lead to administrative action. - Cal Engime (talk) 21:40, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Oh wow man Cengime thank you so much for all the work and time you have contributed to this article and your drive by and assessment. Your comment just made this entire experience just wonderful that is so awesome that you care so much that you would take the time to do this. After 4 years of editing on this page and being blocked by administrators and having threats by edit warring POV pushing editors on my talk page and all that, it appears your drive by and inappropriate and out of touch comment was just what was needed. Why I am now enlightened. Please go ahead and post that you did what you did to an administrator. Go ahead post for them to finally do something. Please. I hope that they bring to your attention that this very thing you just did is the biggest factor in other contributors leaving wikipedia en mass. I think that if anyone should stop it should be you. Just in case you didn't notice and considering what you posted you didn't some of my comment above is already in the article. And will likely be the next set of edits I suggest be pared down and contributed to the article text. LoveMonkey (talk) 21:47, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Could Cengime possibly contribute to the discussion and article rather than engage in disruptive behavior? This person is now behaving like a troll. LoveMonkey (talk) 23:56, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Alright. I have entered the Twilight Zones or something or did Cengime here just do a set of excellent edits? Man this is weird but uh Cengime THANK YOU. Hmm maybe I should make people mad more often..oh never-mind. But WOW thanks to you again Cengime. Good job. LoveMonkey (talk) 02:18, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Tried to shorten lead

I tried to shorten lead. Left footnotes, as usual which now out-volume the text by about 3:1. Eventually all the footnotes have to go. Supposed to be summarizing what is in text.

My focus is still the same. The History subsection still desperately needs shortening IMO. Student7 (talk) 22:05, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Excellent thank you Student7. I think it is fair to have the information Esoglou added just not in the lede. It could probably be shorten a bit more though. But that is again excellent. LoveMonkey (talk) 23:59, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Excellent job on your recent edits Student 7 thank you for moving the article in the direction of improvement. I have a question for you and you can treat it, if you like as rhetorical, and just think about it. The underlying reason for the schism as held by EO representatives like Romanides for example was nothing about the Pope per se or theology. What Romandies says is the real heart and soul of it was that the Western Empire got conquered by the German and French and the German and French in the process of conquering Europe also sought to conquer the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). All these things are fragmented and appear to be petty because no one is contextualizing them in this way. That the Italians never were against the Eastern Empire nor their church but all of that changed once the French and Germans started to take over the Western Christian church. It is then that the Western Church (in order to justify its thirst for conquest and subjugation) invented some of this stuff that has no history to the Eastern Christians as whole. As I have tried to point out the Persian Christians whom were the first group to schism from the catholic church did not do so being for or against anything such as Papal supremacy such a thing never existed in their and the Eastern Orthodox shared history. They are in schism because of Christianity being made synonymous to being a citizen of the Roman Empire.

The Persians were Persians and the Roman Empire rather it be Hellenistic and then Roman for sure was their greatest enemy. The first schism was over the Persians being able call themselves Christians and having that statement divorced from also meaning "Roman". However we as EO (and let no devil tell you otherwise) love the Persians Christians as we do the Coptics and Ethiopians however the Armenians still bother us but that is for a different time (just kidding however who could excuse them for the monstrosity known as Cher?). Oh the Melkites bother us too but whom is keeping count? All funniness aside. The bigger picture is how state or government and or political plays a role in causing these kinds of things like schisms, heresy and or religious wars. As right now in Russia there is a very big discussion about Putin is perceived as being a bit to much involved into directing the goals and affairs of the Russian Church. So this is as much a contemporary thing as it is an ancient one and I think that the Caesaropapism nonsense makes it all rather confusing. As there is every bit reason to believe that the schism would have been over in the 1990s from both parties if the things like the priest sex scandals hadn't darkened all of the negotiations. But to go further sobornost works without any councils without any formalities. We can just get along right now, can't we? There is need for the government or any worldly power to be divorced from the church and for any worldly power to not be able to in the name of Rome, Moscow or Constantinople to do anything close to welding the power of unity in Christianity to do the will of the state. This is the real underlying problem that the schism is about. Christianity divined is Christianity defeated (yes this is all very Soloviev). LoveMonkey (talk) 22:24, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Incoherence in the lede

This passage in the lede if read out loud makes no sense and is not in context..

The date of the 1054 mutual excommunication between the legates of the pope and patriarch approached. Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople. According to the historian John Bagnell Bury, Cerularius' purpose in closing the Latin churches was "to cut short any attempt at conciliation". The Normans who had newly won Apulia and part of Calabria from the Byzantine Empire suppressed Greek liturgical usages in these parts of southern Italy

Could it be rewritten to make sense? LoveMonkey (talk) 17:53, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Agree that this was awkward. Tweaked first sentence only. Maybe should drop the Norman reference entirely? Student7 (talk) 19:37, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Erase entire article?

You know the guy that is putting "reason=" in all the tagged cns? He apparently does other things as well. He wants to erase the entire History of the East-West Schism because (he claims) it violates copyright in the same subsection I copied from here, which is East-West_Schism#Political_division_between_East_and_West. He claims it is a copy of the Romanides lecture series from http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.01.htm. If someone would like to talk to him about that information, which, BTW, seems largely uncited in this article, I would appreciate it.

See comments at User_talk:Student7#Suspected_copyright_violation_at_.22History_of_the_East.E2.80.93West_Schism.22. Student7 (talk) 19:38, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Editor said it was my fault for copying into text, what was intended as a quote. He has corrected it to his satisfaction in History of the East-West Schism. The problem is still in here. I cannot quite put my finger on it, other than what was mentioned above. Student7 (talk) 22:25, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

That editor (an administrator) is me. I never said I wanted to "erase the entire" article. That's an exaggeration. I wrote that perhaps a long series of Student7's edits on the History of the East–West Schism should be reverted back when it appeared there was a possibility that Student7 had (at least once, intentional or not) added copyrighted material. It turned out that he/she accidentally added copyright material to History of the East–West Schism by copying it from this article. In this article, the text under question used to be in a footnote, which, as it happens, was turned into regular text by Student7 (by breaking a ref tag accidentally during a large, complicated edit... do a search for "During the seventh century, however, the seeds of schism", for example, and you can find it). Once it become clear that Student7 accidentally submitted copyrighted material, the rest of his/her edits were no longer under suspicion.

Student7, you seem to be skeptical and confused about the copyright violation itself. I gave a link to the "duplication detector" on your talk page that provides the matched text between the violating article and the source URL. Using it, you can confirm that there was a copyright violation. The same tool can also be used with the URL of a version of this article. for Here's a link comparing the source URL against the recent 15:51 26 March 2013‎ version by Student7. Saying "he claims" above sounds rather dismissive when I've tried to provide the necessary material to substantiate my claims.

As for this article, I made the same solution I did at History of the East-West Schism: I deleted the entire "Political division between East and West" section because it was the only section containing large amounts of obvious violation. If you wish to sort through that material to decide what's was valid free content and what wasn't, please do.

Tracking down the origins of copyrighted material is time-consuming and tedious. It's even moreso when an editor (like me) wasn't involved in the article history until that point. In total, this probably took about an hour and a half to resolve. It's best to be very careful when editing so that mistakes don't creep in in the first place. If you are having trouble following your own edit diffs, Student7, perhaps you are making too many changes per edit.

Lastly, I'm curious about the "You know the guy that is putting 'reason=' in all the tagged cns?" remark. Is there some discussion somewhere about that? Why did you mention this? If other editors have complained about me fixing those, I'd like to tell them that there's more to it than meets the eye. This copyvio was, for example, found and solved as part of fixing of {{citation needed}} templates (or "reason=" editing, if you wish to call it that). Jason Quinn (talk) 03:08, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

One last thing, when copying text from one Misplaced Pages article to another, it needs to be cited (see Misplaced Pages:Copying within Misplaced Pages). The cite is typically made in an edit summary. The original edit on the History of the East–West Schism article that introduced the copyrighted material from this article did not give a cite. This caused confusion and prolonged the investigation. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:22, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Well either way this data should be re-integrated by into the article.

The Franks applied their policy of destroying the unity between the Romans under their rule and the Romans under the rule of Constantinople and the Arabs. They played one Roman party against the other, took neither side, and finally condemned both the iconoclasts and the Seventh Ecumenical Synod (786/7) at their own Council of Frankfurt in 794, in the presence of the legates of Pope Hadrian I (771–795), the staunch supporter of Orthodox practice. Their obliteration of the Empire's boundaries and an outburst of missionary activity among these peoples who had no direct links with the Eastern Roman Empire and among Celtic peoples, who had never been part of the Roman Empire fostered the idea of a universal church free from association with a particular state. On the contrary, "in the East Roman or Byzantine view, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign, and coterminous with it was the one universal church"; and, according to the author of the Encyclopedia of World Religions, the Empire's state church came, by the time of the demise of the Empire in 1453, to merge psychologically with it to the extent that its bishops had difficulty in thinking of Christianity without an Emperor.

As this is central (right or wrong) to the more common Greek perspective (called Frankokratia and Partitio terrarum imperii Romaniae).. LoveMonkey (talk) 14:56, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I apologize to Jason Quinn and thank him for fixing the problem in both places. Student7 (talk) 19:31, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Who is Jeffrey D. Finch?

His quote is used quite a bit on various Orthodox articles and I was just wondering if anyone knows who this person is? LoveMonkey (talk) 17:11, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Good question. He apparently has the key to "East-West rapprochement," but you probably found that out yourself. :) I tried all ways I could think of, in searching for his background and could find nothing that isn't already in Misplaced Pages. Do we need hard copy on this? Student7 (talk) 21:07, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Well no. It is just that I find this something odd from Richard and Esoglou (inner glory or whatever he is). They are Richard largely responsible for Mr Finch being so prominently mentioned here on Wiki. LoveMonkey (talk) 17:43, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi guys. I don't hang around Misplaced Pages as religiously (forgive the pun) as I used to. Instead of checking my watchlist several times a day, I give it a quick glance once every couple of days, sometimes only a couple of times a week. If there is something that you would like me to take a look at, please send me an email. My Misplaced Pages account is email-enabled.

That said, I confess that I don't know who Jeffrey Finch is either. If you Google his name, it shows up prominently in 3-4 Orthodox-related Misplaced Pages articles and not really anywhere else on the first page of results. I'm sure if I worked hard enough, I could eventually figure out who he is. Presumably, he is some scholar specializing in the boundaries of Eastern and Western Christian theology. Still, LM's point is well-taken. His name sticks out like a sore thumb and it would be OK if we were describing a view of Lossky, Meyendorff or Kallistos (Ware) but Finch appears to be a relatively minor star in the theological community. (NB: The last time I wrote something like this, it was about Edward Siecinski who subsequently emailed me to take umbrage at my having slighted his reputation. Quite good-naturedly, of course.)

I do feel that the current text (and its copies in other Orthodox-related articles) is not satisfactory and I'd like some thoughts about how to fix it. I think what Finch wrote is reasonable. Perhaps some might take issue with it but I think it's a reasonable assessment of the situation from a Western point-of-view.

I ran across the quote in this book and thought it was useful. Here is a link to the beginning of Finch's essay titled "Neopalamism, Divinizing Grace and the Breach between East and West". I will grant that the book is described in at least one review as looking at Eastern Orthodox ideas from a Western perspective and so the essays in it may be more canted towards the Western point of view. Perhaps we need to rephrase the sentence that mentions Finch in a way that de-emphasizes or even drops his name and says something like "Some Western scholars such as Jeffrey Finch believe....". Better yet would be to find a reliable source who surveys all of the essays in Christiansen and Wittung's book and provide a summary of Western views regarding deification. I am, alas, not aware of such at the moment. When time permits, I might look further for one. In the meantime, I am open to suggestions on how to implement a temporary fix to the problem that LM has brought to our attention.

--Pseudo-Richard (talk) 19:24, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Here is a review of the Christiansen and Wittung book by Andrei Antokhin (yeah, I know, another "who is that?"). Still, I think what Antokhin writes provides some perspective on the ideas presented in the book.

The problem, I think, is that we have "big names" in the East (Lossky, Romanides, Meyendorff) who have held forth on these topics and no "big names" in the West who have held forth in the same depth and breadth. Even Fortescue doesn't have the stature in the West of any of the preceding "big names" from the East. This fact alone speaks volumes about the relative importance of the topic to the West vs. the East. (NB: I'm not saying it's not an important topic; I'm just saying that the West doesn't tend to focus on it and this is, perhaps, precisely the criticism that the East makes against the West.) So we are left with a bunch of "little lights" in the West trying to explain the Eastern views to a West that is, for the most part, not really listening.

Meyendorff tried to bridge the chasm by explaining the East to the West. The West took some notice but then moved on. Some in the East criticized Meyendorff for having "got it wrong".

It remains a difficult patch of ground to till.

--Pseudo-Richard (talk) 19:38, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Astonomical coincidence?

1054 AD is considered the year of the Great Schism, but is also the year when the Crab Nebula Supernova (M1 - Messier object #1 / SN 1054) was observed by the chinese astronomers. Bigshotnews 01:53, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

1. "FRANKS, ROMANS, FEUDALISM, AND DOCTRINE Part 1". Romanity.org. Retrieved 2013-02-23.
2. Gerland, Ernst. "The Byzantine Empire" in The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. Retrieved 9 November 2012
3. Johannes P. Schadé, ''Encyclopedia of World Religions (Foreign Media Group 2006 ISBN 978-1-60136000-7), article "Byzantine Church". Books.google.com. 2006-12-30. Retrieved 2013-02-23.

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