I would suggest that the supposed legitimacy of [a great part of] modern Western historical, philosophical and scientific speculation is based on the rejection of the notion of God as a social reality, rather than as a purely personal conceptual system. No culture that believes in God, in the divine, in the mythical, can be said to be able to "compete" with the West, which has "killed God" by deifying objectivity and so-called Open Systems of intellectual speculation. This reaction against the notion of God, however, was the logical consequence of the failure of Western scholastic and systematic theology to differentiate sufficiently between God's essence on the one hand and His energy on the other, namely the failure to understand God as "Mythically" manifest in the material world.
This led directly to a thoroughly transcendent concept of God, devoid of immanent being, and therefore devoid of meaning. It also led to atheism. Philosophers such as David Hume could write that all books of theology and metaphysics should be burnt. And almost two centuries later, the Logical Positivist A. J. Ayer could proclaim that: "It cannot be significantly stated that there is a non-empirical world of values, or that men have immortal souls or that there is a transcendent God" (Truth and Logic, 1946). Such an attitude must also question the place of ethics in philosophical and social constructs, another point where East differs from West.
Byzantine society worked within a mythological and conceptual framework in which ethics could be spoken of as empirical facets of being and not as secondary lapses of emotion. For ethics can only exist within the context of an "imperative" which conceptually at least must exist outside the object it holds sway over.
