Zobel said:
Another thing that comes to mind. I was reading about postmodernism the other day as a part of a marketing exercise for work. One aspect was the idea that humans use tools to interface with reality, but in postmodernism those tools can be used to flip the script - instead of interacting with the world you can use them to create the world you like (the world you see is the world, world as spectacle, and so on).
Anyway the four tools mentioned are language art music and ritual. Those things imply the world on some level, the same was praxis and theology are codependent. If we extend this idea to this present topic the question becomes how much overlap is there between east and west in - art, music, language, and ritual, in the context of the sacred?
This is a really, really good point.
I'll add as a sidebar: the very tools in the toolbox have changed as well, which is part of the confusion in these discussions.
In Western Europe you had an acceleration of measurement and quantitative thinking taking it far beyond any other region in the world.
These tools and modes of thinking had enormous impacts on how we view the physical world and have taken us from a place of material poverty to material wealth. But have they done the reverse spiritually? Has this mode of thinking relegated the tools you mention above as non-essential?
Take the issue of time. The invention of mechanical clocks in Western Europe allowed people to view time as "an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences" (Lewis Mumford). Before clocks did people experience it as an abstract entity at all?
This was literally the first thing I noticed coming from a Protestant to an Orthodox Church. In my old-school Protestant Church the service would last precisely from 9:00am to 10:15am, and if you were one minute late the ushers would glare at you with contempt, waiting to open the doors until a break between hymns.
In the Divine Liturgy many people show up before, during Orthros, but many people come in gradually over the 30-45 minutes after the Liturgy has begun. If there are a lot of people at the service then it will take a really long time due to the Eucharist, and no attempt appears to have been made to make things more efficient.
From a western perspective laziness or not being mindful of time. Viewed the other way, precise measurement of time has too much control and power over our perception of reality.
In the Divine Liturgy there are parallel actions, prayers, chants, and this multilayered approach converges at the celebration of the Eucharist. In my Protestant service the service was laid out as a series of discrete events, where one thing takes place after another.
Time as a tool and a reorienting and reshaping of reality is just one
minor, indirect difference compared to the direct differences above. But I think it demonstrates the fact that there is a big gap, and it's hard to verbalize every aspect of it.