A glance at the work of Professor John S. Romanides

Vera Turton tells us that Romanides has himself written much over the past decade or two on the historical development of the Greek church and its divergence from the church of Rome, and hence from all the Western churches. He seems to have been the first to claim that the church in its early years, before it became divided, had a primarily therapeutic aim, which is now almost unknown in the West, and whose meaning has by now been partly forgotten even in the Eastern churches.

The change began because the division between the churches came about as a result of political changes beginning with Charlemagne’s conquest of the Western part of the Roman Empire, and ending with political appointments not only to bishoprics but to the Holy See of Rome itself. The Christian therapeutic method, he tells us, was aimed at resolving what he described, using a modern image, as ‘a short circuit  between head and heart.’