In Orthodoxy, one could say that tradition is the heartbeat of the Church. Traditions are generally received and accepted uncritically and without hesitation. This has allowed the Orthodox Churches to remain more "traditional", in the sense that they without doubt more closely resemble the Church of the middle-ages. But this does not in any sense mean that they adhere more closely to the Gospel message. It would be a grave error to see the faith as merely a series of customs and traditions to be handed down, rather than a as a ferment with transformative power. This false view of Christianity as a static construct explains so much about the history of the Orthodox Churches. It explains their rejection of new Church Councils. It explains the backwardness of their views of marriage and procreation. It explains the divide between the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Old Believers, who simply observed the hypocritical contradiction between a Church that on the one hand idolises tradition merely because it is tradition and on the other hand is perfectly willing to discard those traditions for the sake of political expediency. The Old Believers are more Orthodox than the Orthodox themselves, and their very existence invalidates Orthodox claims.
The Catholic Church is different. In Catholicism, faith is the heartbeat of the Church, and the dictates of the faith supersede the importance of any received traditions. The Catholic Church puts the dictates of the faith above culture, custom, and tradition. It has continually reformed itself. It is self-critical. It has been willing to position itself in opposition to human culture, secular society, and temporal power. But this is a double edged sword, because in untethering itself from human tradition, the western Church opens the door to attacks upon it's own authority and legitimacy. These attacks come from both those who believe that the Church itself is merely another tradition of men to be discarded (enlightenment), and those who hold that it has strayed from the traditions of men which they hold to be more important than the message of the gospel itself (Orthodoxy).
The Catholic Church's willingness to rise above human traditions explains so much about the history of the western Church and western society. It explains the momentous Church councils, each one more transformative than the last. It explains the rise of rational Scholastic philosophy, leading in turn to the development of modern science. It explains the conflicts between the Papacy and the secular powers, which were ultimately a conflict between faith and ethics and the traditions of men, in which the spiritual exerted it's supremacy over the temporal, and ethics triumphed over temporal power and human tradition. It explains the development of ethics, rights, and all of the other distinctive features of western civilization which could never have arose in the Orthodox east with its emperor-worship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliks_Koneczny
"... Koneczny claimed that in Latin civilization, ethics is the source of law. If some laws are not ethical, then they are changed. Church is autonomous, independent and separated from the state. Individuality, self-rule and decentralization are highly valued. Government is judged on the basis of adherence to ethics. The law is of dual nature, divided into public and private spheres. In Byzantine civilization, church is dependent on the state. In that type of civilization, in politics all means are justified to achieve the goal. Politicians follow ethics in private life, but in public they are judged by their skills, not by ethics. The legal government has absolute authority and its orders are not doubted. "
I don't deny that secular powers have attempted to exert their power over the Papacy. They have tried, and at times succeeded. However, in Catholic Christendom, the Church had always proclaimed that it's spiritual and moral authority superseded that of any temporal power. This is what led the Catholic Church into conflict with secular authorities, the same secular authorities which the Orthodox Churches in practice worshiped. These facts by and large explain the "traditionalism" of the Orthodox Churches relative to the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. In allowing themselves to be an extension of the temporal authorities, the Orthodox Churches became useful political tools in the hands of their governments. We see this in Putin's Russia in our own day. In contrast, the Catholic Church, in claiming superiority over the temporal authorities, makes of them enemies. An Independent Church, with authority above and beyond human culture, the traditions of men, and the powers of the world, cannot be used as a political tool to buttress a tyrannical regime. In fact, it tends to undermine the political aspirations of the power-hungry, in the process becoming expendable, an obstacle which must not only be overcome but utterly destroyed. It is the Catholic Church's willingness to put Christ above human respect that, ironically,
has brought about it's own near-destruction at the hands of it's enemies, within and without. But it makes sense, doesn't it? Christ was rejected by the world around him, and by his own followers. The hatred of the Catholic Church, the rejection of it's authority and it's tenets, the
mass apostasy... are in some sense a vindication of it's message. The world despises the Church as it despised Christ. It seeks to make a murderous sacrifice of the Church as it murdered Christ. The Church has been abandoned and rejected not because it is not Christian enough, but because it is too Christian. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." The irony is that Orthodoxy has been allowed to stand, allowed to hold onto it's traditions precisely because it has always been willing to grovel at the feet of worldly power.
Catholics too often misrepresent the defections to Orthodoxy as some manifestation of great holiness. They assume nothing but good will on the part of those who abandon the faith, because they are going somewhere ostensibly more "traditional". I'm simply calling this common attitude into question through demonstrating that Orthodoxy's apparent traditionalism is more illusion than reality, that it's traditionalism is more cultural than Christian, and that defections to Orthodoxy are often motivated by something other than sincere faith.
Islam (and, later, Communism) gained strength in the Orthodox lands not because of it's military might alone, but also because of theological and ideological problems in the Orthodox Church that made the Orthodox countries practically incapable of resisting Islamic ideology. The ceasaropapism of the Orthodox Church, and it's servile attitude towards temporal authorities, results in an excessive respect for worldly power amongst the people. Strength, ruthlessness, and the ability to impose one's will at any cost become more important than ethics, or even profession of the Christian faith. The victory of Islam or another equally ruthless ideology is virtually inevitable when such ideas have taken hold of the mind's of the people.
http://www.christendom.edu/news/2012/koneczny.pdf
"In the Turanian Russian system of government the will of the ruler is completely arbitrary and supreme. The entire state is treated like the personal property of the Tsar, who is not bound by any moral rules, who does not recognize any natural or acquired rights or any laws, and who can in one day make a peasant into a prince, and a prince into a Siberian prisoner. As a result, fear replaces the individual conscience. The more brutal are the leaders the more they are cherished and those who try to be humane are despised as being weak. People brought up in such a system are excessively servile towards those who are above and are abusive towards those who are below. The economic strength of such states is based not upon the private enterprise of individuals but on the state with the production of arms being the most important economic sector. Such a system generates expansive imperialism and strictly speaking has no place for nationhood in the Western sense. Revolutions often turn against the historical heritage, changing even the name of cities, something unthinkable in the West. Various ethnic and religious groups may coexist in a state that is governed in a Turanian way, but they have no influence on public affairs. The Orthodox Church of Russia always accepted total dependency upon the state and so it never developed a social ethics. It teaches about private and family spiritual life, but does not dare to view economics and politics from an ethical stance. Its Orthodoxy is therefore basically a ‘Tsarodoxy.’”
Catholic Christendom proved capable of resisting Islam only because of the Catholic Church's insistence that Christian faith and Christian ethics were superior to worldly power in all places, in every circumstance. The ruthlessness and brutality of Islam could not be countenanced by a people with a moralistic world-view, nourished by the Catholic Church and it's absolutely unique emphasis on the suffering of Christ as divine Victim. This emphasis gave precedence to goodness over strength, empathy for the victims of unjust suffering and disgust for those who willingly inflict it. Islam didn't stand a chance in the long term, and the reconquista is a testament to that. Western Christendom could only fall from within.
But from whence does Orthodoxy's excessive respect for worldly power and temporal authorities come from? It seems clear to me that it derives from the distinct Arian strain present in Orthodox theology, which was the underlying cause of the disagreement over the Filioque. Orthodox theology dissolves Christ, and risks transforming our conception of the Christian God into a distant abyss only scarcely distinguishable from the Allah of Islam. In such a system, ethics inevitably become meaningless before power. Below is an extended version of a quote from an article that highlights some of the consequences of Eastern theology:
http://coalitionforthomism.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/and-never-twain-should-meet-orthodox.html
Quote
To Dissolve Christ:
The Real Effect of the Denial of the Filioque
Denying a knowable Essence in God, it seems inevitable that Eastern Orthodox theology and philosophy would be corrosive to human nature. If such concepts as truth, love, goodness are not applicable to God's Essence, then it only makes sense that their eternal verity and applicability to the human condition should also be eroded. As the Essence of God must disappear behind an apophatic (negative) theology, so the being of man becomes engulfed in an eschatological anthropology which is the negation of all that we associate with being human.
Vladimir Losskey writes:
"This is the perfecting of prayer, and is called spiritual prayer or contemplation….It is the 'spiritual silence' which is above prayer. It is that state which belongs to the kingdom of Heaven. 'As the saints in the world to come no longer pray, their minds having been engulfed in the Divine Spirit, but dwell in ecstasy in that excellent glory; so the mind, when it has been made worthy of perceiving the blessedness of the age to come, will forget itself and all that is here, and will no longer be moved by the thought of anything." (Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 208)
Such a description of human fulfillment sounds more like the state of Nirvana, or the Vedantic state of self-realization, than it does union with a Personal God. Even more explicitly "Eastern" is the description of beatitude offered us by Dionysisus the Pseudo-Areopagite who, next to Gregory Palamas, is the most important writer in this Eastern Tradition:
“But these things are not to be disclosed to the uninitiated, by whom I mean those attached to the objects of human thought, and who believe there is no superessential Reality beyond, and who imagine that by their own understanding they know Him who has made Darkness His secret place. And if the principles of the divine Mysteries are beyond the understanding of these, what is to be said of others still more incapable thereof, who describe the transcendental First Cause of all by characteristics drawn from the lowest order of beings, while they deny that He is any way above the images which they fashion after various designs; whereas they should affirm that, while He possesses all the positive attributes of the universe (being the Universal Cause) yet, in a more strict sense, he does not possess them, since He transcends them all; wherefore there is no contradiction between the affirmations and the negations, inasmuch as He infinitely precedes all conceptions of deprivation, being beyond all positive and negative distinctions….He is super-essentially exalted above created things, and reveals Himself in His naked Truth to those alone who pass beyond all that is pure or impure, and ascend above the topmost altitudes of holy things, and who, leaving behind them all divine light and sound and heavenly utterances, plunge into the Darkness where truly dwells, as the Oracles declare, that ONE who is beyond all.” (Dionysisus the Areopagite, Mystical Theology)
Such a view of God and the ultimate destiny of man destroys the foundations of all that we consider solid and of absolute value in this life. It undermines the very basis of all human thought.
If God is beyond the law of contradiction, beyond all positive and negative distinctions, beyond purity , and if He dwells in a Darkness beyond all, then all of our beliefs and efforts on the way to this Divine Nihilism are deprived of ultimate legitimacy and meaning.
Considering this devaluation of all that is human which is integral to Eastern Orthodox spirituality, it is not at all surprising that Christ's humanity is also devalued.
Vladimir Losskey writes:
"The cult of the humanity of Christ is foreign to Eastern tradition….The way of the imitation of Christ is never practiced in the spiritual life of the Eastern Church." (Ibid, p. 243).
Eastern Orthodoxy does not deny the importance of the humanity of Christ in the salvific sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. In other words, Christ's Humanity is integral to their view of the act of Redemption. It does, on the other hand, profoundly devalue the centrality of Christ's Sacred Humanity in the process of our sanctification and deification. This "bypassing" of Christ's Humanity is intimately related to the denial of the Filioque – the Catholic doctrine that the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son (Latin: Filioque).
In the Catholic view the Holy Spirit is sent by both Father and Son in order to enable us to imitate Christ in His birth, life, passion, death, and resurrection. The Way of our humanity is the Way of Christ's Humanity, working out our salvation in imitation of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is thus in a spiritual sense truly "incarnate": sent by the God-Man Jesus Christ in order to form us into the likeness of the Man-God Jesus Christ. The Filioque is therefore absolutely integral to this incarnational work of the Holy Spirit.
It is otherwise with the Eastern Orthodox. Their denial of the Filioque enables the Holy Spirit to be "liberated" from this connection to the Sacred Humanity of Christ in order to that He might become what some Orthodox writers have been so bold as to call the "Soul of the World." The Holy Spirit, having been liberated from the necessity of working through the Humanity of Christ, thus becomes the source of those Divine Energies which are in creation from the beginning, and are the object and source of our Divine communication, sanctification, and deification.
Eastern Orthodox writers are therefore right in claiming that the rejection of the Filioque is the axis around which revolve all the significant differences between Eastern and Latin Rite theology and spirituality. Ultimately, while accepting the salvific fact of the Incarnation, it rejects or bypasses its meaning in regard to our salvation and deification. The Holy Spirit, sent by Christ in order to form us into His likeness, is deflected by Dionysian-Palamite theology into a type of Gnostic-Pantheistic Esotericism. And at the end of this road of ascending gnosis, we also find that our own humanity has also been bypassed.
There, in this Heaven of Orthodoxy, we find no personhood as we know it, no love, no thought, no truth, no purity, and no prayer, but only a Divine Darkness beyond all being, essence, and naming. In other words: the negation of all that we now consider human. With a Heaven like this, who needs a Hell?
Of course the popes have become entangled in wordly affairs. Such was inevitable when the Church asserted its independence from temporal authority, it superiority to any any human institution and it's supremacy over culture and tradition, but yet those claims had to be made in order for Christendom to be built upon the ruins of a pagan Europe. The Orthodox Church, never truly asserting the supremacy of Christ over the world, and limiting itself to the private sphere, was largely able to avoid the terrible conflicts in which the Catholic Church became embroiled. But do not confuse Orthodox indifference and apathy for greater holiness. It is simply a result of their erroneous theology which values detachment above action, an idea that proceeds quite naturally from their conception of God ("beyond all positive and negative distinctions"), and salvation (a state in which we "will no longer be moved by the thought of anything.")
These kind of theological issues illuminate not only Orthodoxy's near-powerlessness in the face of Islam, but many other perplexing details about the history of the Orthodox Churches. Their curious lack of interest in evangelizing non-Christian peoples, for example. Russia is teeming with Muslims and pagans who, it would appear, the Russian Orthodox Church has made almost no effort to convert. It seems that the Russian Church and it's Orthodox Tsars were much more concerned with persecuting Catholics than evangelizing non-Christians within the boundaries of their own empire.
All of this may sound very harsh, but I don't think I'm wrong. I don't intend a blanket condemnation of Orthodox believers. I'm sure many are sincerely faithful and truly holy. But that is in spite of the dominant theology of the Orthodox Church which blatantly devalues the pursuit of holiness.
