The Eastern Church has been historically centered on the Greek language
in which many of the early theological works and commentaries of Christianity
were written. The Western Church used Latin as its medium and as knowledge of
Greek declined among western scholars the Western church became increasingly
dependent on theological works written in its own language (most notably those
of St Augustine of Hippo) and
often imperfect translations from the Greek. Words used in one language and
those used in another to translate them sometimes do not correspond exactly,
and can have a broader or narrower significance. In the 7th century, Eastern
theologian and saint Maximus the Confessor applied
this to apparent differences between Western and Eastern, remarking that it
affected efforts by Latin-speaking Westerners to express an idea in Greek, and for Greek-speaking Easterners to express an idea in
Latin: "They cannot reproduce their idea in a language and in words that
are foreign to them as they can in their mother-tongue, just as we too cannot
do.
Orthodoxy reached its golden age during the apogee of the Eastern Roman
or Byzantine Empire, when it spread to the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Russians.
After the Fall of Constantinople it continued to flourish in Russia as well as
within the Ottoman Empire amongst the latter's Albanian, Bulgarian, Cypriot,
Georgian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Syrian Christian subject peoples.
Numerous autocephalous churches have since been established in Southern and
Eastern Europe.
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