The triumph of the Papacy in Western Europe meant the triumph of a judicial universal hierarchy not only over the heathen, but also over indigenous churches such as the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon, where older Social Myths had more or less been maintained. The Papacy and the Latin Church did not, could not, operate within the bounds of a popular Social Myth, but only in terms of a universal institution working against the Myths of the converted. In the place of these Myths, new ones had to be created to justify the "legitimacy" of the Roman Papacy. This may explain that institution's long-standing obsession with primacy, supremacy and infallibility, ideas always regarded as quite ludicrous in the East since they had never existed in the tradition of the people. No fundamental, venerable and valid consensus on the continuity of Myth existed in the West, as it did generally speaking in the East. Nevertheless, the West in the centuries that followed the Renaissance needed to legitimise its self-perceived role as guardian of the legacy of Antique civilisation. In this context, it regarded the Social Myth of New Rome as even more dangerous than the old barbarous ways of the northern European heathen. ...
New Rome, or "Byzantium" constitutes a radically different continuum of the very same Antique tradition that the West claims as its own today.[9] But precisely because New Rome shared so many common points of departure with Old Rome in terms of culture, religion and institutions, it is usually passed over or nodded at politely, but never considered a fundamental alternative to the Western mind-set and to the Western historical tradition.
The invention of the word "Byzantine" drew a line between the pagan and Christian manifestations of the Social Myth in the Eastern Mediterranean. The imposition of this word reflects the fact that Western humanists, amongst others, could not tolerate the idea that their cherished world of pagan Antiquity could have continued for a thousand years in the so-called absolutist and superstitious East.[10] To admit this would be to perpetuate the "crisis of choice" between what could or could not be considered "legitimate" in terms of the West's concepts of continuity. But the context that the West has created for its continuity from Antiquity is nothing more than a reflection of its particular and peculiar priorities over time.
[9]Better : “claimed as its own until today”, because today Europe follows very different directions, against any continuity, it moves to a global coming-out-of-nowhere kingdom of power-thirst. Christianity is not mentioned in the constitution of modern Europe, and even a tepid reference to Thucydides was removed. Beyond this: there is not a Byzantine and a Western continuum, because in the West there is no continuity but, on the contrary, a series of cultural revolutions. First comes the ‘mother of all later revolutions’, the schism of papacy from the East and its resort to an absurd ‘infallibility’ and all sorts of errors, then the rebirth ex nihilo of ancient Greece by humanists, the revolution of the protestants, etc.
[10]And this despite the fact that the very texts of ancient Greece that humanists admire, would have been lost and unknown if Byzantium had not preserved them.
