Grace, therefore, is, according to St. Ambrose, first of all the forgiveness of sins and not, as in the Platonic attitude of the East, deification.
3) This has the following consequences: Western Christianity emphasizes the historical humanity of Christ, his humility, and not his glory. e. g., on the door of St. Sabina in Rome, before which I stood with great awe, I must say, there you find in wood-cut relief the first picture or sculpture of the crucifixion. The door is world-famous, coming from the fourth century. Here the West shows that it deviates, or can deviate, from the Christ in glory which you find in all mosaics but you never find the Christ crucified. This is more symptomatic for the difference of East and West than many theological formulas. But it is of course also expressed in the theological formulas: If I now return to this most difficult lecture I gave on Chalcedon, I now can illustrate it with the two doors, or with a mosaic in, let us say, Ravina, which was under Byzantine influence at that time; and on the other hand the door in Santa Sabina…. There you find the two Christologies clearly expressed in picture. .In one you have always the tremendously powerful Lord of the universe, in all glory as the Judge of the world or of the resurrected, in His majesty surrounded by angels, man, animals, and inorganic parts of nature, which all participate in His glory. And then you have this very wonderful, in some way poor, (presentation) of the suffering Christ on the door at Santa Sabina. The one is Antiochean, Roman theology, which emphasizes the humanity more than anything else, including the suffering humanity of the Christ; the other is Alexandrian Christology which makes Christ a walking God. . . – the bodily existence is swallowed up by the Divine form.
Now this can give you an example of the difference in feeling. And so we have in the whole history of painting in the West, since that time, the most wonderful ,the most cruel, and the most destructive representations of the Crucifixion. The early Gothic crucifixes, of which there are many, are such that perhaps a modern church trustee wouldn’t allow them to be hung in his church, because they are so ugly – supposing that the crucifixion was a beautiful thing. It was ugly. And that is what the West accepted, and could understand.
4) The last point I want to make is the Church. The idea of the Church is much more emphasized than in the East. The Church is built somehow according to the legal structure of the Roman state, with the principle of authority, with the double law – the canonic law and the civil law. All this is characteristic of the West. One element I want to add is the hierarchical centralization of power in the Pope, and the personal participation of everybody, including the monks, in the sacrament of penance.
Now this gives you some ideas about the difference. Now I come to the man who is the representative of the West more than anyone else ever since, even the Reformers, and who is so to speak the foundation of everything the West had to say, in an ultimate formula, Augustine.
Augustine lived from 354-430 after Christ. His influence overshadows not only the next thousand years but all periods ever since. In the Middle Ages his influence was such that even those who were struggling against him in theological terminology and method – the Dominicans, with the help of Aristotle – quoted him often; as a Catholic theologian in Germany has counted, 80% of all the quotations of Thomas are from Augustine, and Thomas is the great opponent of Augustinianism in the Middle Ages. Now if you quote your enemies in the amount of 80% of all your quotations – affirmatively, of course – then this enemy is not simply an enemy, but you live on his basis, and the difference is one in emphasis and a change in method, but it is not a substantial difference. The whole Middle Ages are full of this.
