This is a fascinating and detailed presentation of the history. My limited readings in the split between churches, though, would indicate another theme which isn’t so prominent in your account. The Eastern Church is elitist whereas the Western one is broadminded, as in low brow. You can see this in the names: “orthodox,” with the emphasis on conformity to a correct doctrine, and “catholic,” as in broad-minded, with an aim towards universal application.
This is why the Western Church compromised more with secular powers and why it became more realistic and expert at state planning, because its cynicism and betrayal of its founding countercultural ideals were more complete. After all, this is a religion we’re supposed to be talking about! Why should a church be so expert at politics? What does God have to do with secular efficiencies?
And for all the predictable failures of applying Eastern, quasi-Gnostic idealism or absolutism to the business of running societies, at least the Eastern Church seems to have preserved the countercultural spirit of its dogmas. You’re supposed to contemplate those dogmas in a therapy to deify yourself, to become one with Christ (theosis).
This comes out clearly in your distinction between reforms and transformations. “Reform” seems to me a euphemism that would have a comparable place in Obama’s piecemeal, anti-progressive approach to liberalism. In both cases, there’s talk of reaching the progressive goal eventually, while constantly making excuses in the conservative fashion for falling short of the mission. Cynically, we might say the talk of progress is bogus, and the ideals are being used to distract from a “conservative,” naturalistic/”realistic”/animalistic agenda.
For instance, a church set up in Jesus’s name should be obsessed with helping the poor. When a church makes concessions to secular powers, and eventually to capitalism, the church turns its back on Jesus’s vision altogether. That’s fine if socialism is unworkable, but then the organization has no business calling itself a church at all.
It’s the same with the Evangelical movement in the US after Reagan’s landslide victory and after Trumpism. It’s possible to compromise so much with politics and with the secular business of accumulating material wealth that the organization is no longer religious in any substantive sense. The theological message becomes a sales ploy, a bait-and-switch tactic for hoodwinking the gullible masses.
This is certainly how progressives feel about Obama’s centrism. You seem to emphasize the benefits of Catholic centrism, and to be even-handed in evaluating the two churches. But unless I’m missing something (which is certainly possible), this history fits all too well into my meta-history of the “cold war” between intellectuals and the masses.
We can see this playing out on Medium, for another example: the writers with the broadest aspirations are liable to attract the biggest followings, while the elitists are uncompromising, so they turn off more readers than they attract. The former are the Catholics, the latter the Orthodox, as it were, and the problem with the “Catholic” message is that it’s dumb and riddled with self-serving excuses and loopholes, often to the point of being flat-out fraudulent. The “Orthodox” or artistic/philosophical message is at least pure in its commitment to some vision of how things are and should be.
The deep question here for me, then, is whether the realists ought to confess that they have no faith at all in ideals of any kind. That’s the essence of conservatism, which reduces, as I say, to sheer animality, to a transmission of animal norms (dominance hierarchy, egoism, tribalism, patriarchy, war, grotesque economic inequality) to societies that are supposed to be populated by people who see themselves as having transcended animality. Conservatism is practically just social Darwinism, and centrist “liberals” or “churches” seem to me so broad and hypocritical as to be conservative and thus anti-idealistic or anti-progressive.
