دانلود کتاب ریش، آزیم و برزخ – سایر مسائلی که شرق و غرب را از هم جدا کرد

In 2008, while working on The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, I gave a paper at the annual meeting of the Byzantine Studies Conference (BSC) called “Damn Those Beardless Azymites: Rhetoric and Reality behind the Byzantine Critiques of Latin Christianity.” A few years later I presented another paper, “Holy Hair: Beards in the Patristic Tradition,” at the 2012 meeting of the North American Patristics Society that, like the earlier talk at the BSC, was greeted with the occasional giggle.1 This was not an unwelcome response, for both papers were written and presented with tongue firmly in cheek.2 You see, by this time I had spent several years dealing with the Filioque debates and I thought it might be a fun distraction to speak about the “other issues” that once divided Christendom— the beardlessness of the Western clergy and the Latins’ use of unleavened bread (azymes) in the mass. These questions, once thought so central to the genesis and maintenance of the East- West schism, were now regarded by most scholars as nothing more than relics of a bygone age— that is, as tools used by medieval polemicists to vilify the religious “other” that, even then, had little or no theological significance. To the twenty- first- century mind it seemed ridiculous that a church- dividing schism should occur on account of beards or different types of Eucharistic bread, and I used that fact in order to elicit a few laughs. As time passed I realized I was probably wrong to do so.