Prologue: Looking West, but Walking East: The Dilemma of Orthodoxy in a Modernising World

Abstract

The historic strength and the historic weakness of Eastern Orthodoxy are one and the same. The perception that the Church is, and should be, timeless and unchanging; that all its doctrines and practices—including that of icon-painting—are traceable back to Christ and the apostles; that doctrinal development is fully and definitively encompassed by the first seven ecumenical councils: these convictions have protected it in the fast-changing world of the modern era from the liberalisation that has ravaged Protestantism since the late 19th century and from the aggiornamento that has pushed Catholicism—at different speeds in different countries, to be sure—in the same direction of accommodation. But the very intractability of Orthodoxy has sharply limited its ability to make converts outside its historic homelands, and sometimes even to hang on to its historic constituency.