VS, you said;
Well, I don't regard the conservative reformation as innovative at all, so.....
We'll get to that issue eventually
i'm torn on this, but the investiture controversy also opened the door for clerical celibacy in the west and are hard to separate, after all, if the property is owned by the church, and priests are servants of the church, how are they are fulfill their obligations to their sons regarding inheritance?
Today is a different story anyway, but even now as in the past, Orthodox priests in the East have generally have had to hold down regular or semi-regular jobs, and sons who had an aptitude for the priesthood worked at a trade also, while those who did not had something better suited for them to do.
Involuntary celibacy in an entirely dependent priesthood encourages abnormal persons and psychologically maladjusted types to hide behind a cassock and should never have been a universal discipline in the West.
In the Latin west, the king or Lord often financed the building of churches directly, so that he had authority to appoint its ministers was important. I am not about to retro-actively condemn St. Constantine for his own appointing and dismissing of the bishops, indeed, the cry of the early church apologists to have the state establish Christianity as the state church of Rome is the basis of this thinking.
The Canons of the 7th Ecumenical Council and the earlier Apostolic Constitutions I mentioned that cover this problem are more aimed at national erastianism in which the secular ruler names or dismisses whoever he wishes over an enslaved local church, rather than the harmony that should prevail between Laity and Clergy on this issue.
Such curbed the tyranny of the papacy and the Donation of Constantine (a forgery) was used as the basis to claim that the Pope of Rome had temporal authority over churches under the domains of the various magistrates. The Reformation attempted to critique this position on those same grounds.
Orthodoxy fought this villainy as well, condemning Papism and the it's confusion of the temporal and spiritual swords
This all being said, my respect for the seventh Ecumenical council is not without qualification as a Latin Christian, in the same manner that most of the predominantly Greek councils are likewise accepted with qualification, including Nicaea itself.
And this is why most Latins (Papists being the first Protestants, so both should be combined as one spiritual phenomena) are de facto Arians and Nestorians as well as Pelagians to this day. But we can get to that also
Furthermore, there seems to be failure to properly distinguish the evils of Simony on the one hand and investiture on the other in the seventh. The earlier councils condemned the former very early on, but not the latter.
Well, because Western Orthodoxy was dying, and being replaced, the Ecclesiology gradually changed along with everything else. There was no reason for the Pope of Old Rome, Patriarch of the West, to accept the ''Donation of Pepin''. But the true Catholic Faith, she patiently allows time before heretics and schismatics are cast outside the Ark of Salvation, as when the Iconoclast heresy was condemned it took almost 200 years before Iconoclasts were finally cast out. Same as happened with Papism. By then, Investiture was a full on concern of that new church, which had been solved by the old.
I obviously agree with this.
Interesting times, my friend, interesting times. With a lot of work to do on the part of men of good will.