Reddit reviews The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church

If you want an actual Orthodox point of view on this, instead of a Catholic view of the Orthodox view, read The Primacy of Peter. It contains the referenced article by Fr. Nicholas Afanassieff. Further reading might include You are Peter, by Olivier Clement, and Eucharist, Bishop, Church by Metropolitan John Zizoulas.

There's also the excellent His Broken Body by Fr. Laurent A. Cleenewerck, which should basically be required reading for anyone remotely interested in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

There's also Primacy in the Church (Volume 1), which will be coming out on Jan 31st. It contains the essay often recommended by /u/LeonceDeByzance, The Meaning and Exercise of “Primacies of Honor” in the Early Church by Fr. Brian Daley, SJ, which I haven't had access to until now, and am quite interested to read. The rest of this anthology looks similarly excellent.

>Where do I learn about all this stuff?

The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church

St. Symeon of Thessalonica and the Question of the Primacy of the Pope

Perhaps we should add a good book on the schism to the suggested reading on the sidebar, such as His Broken Body or The Primacy of Peter.

The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church

The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity

The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451

Studies on the Early Papacy

The Rise of the Papacy

Off the top of my head, these should be helpful to you, though I'm certain there are others. These are scholarly works, which is what it sounds like you're looking for, though I would strongly suggest simply reading various Church Fathers, starting with the "Apostolic Fathers" collection, then becoming familiar with the Cappadocians. I cannot overemphasize how helpful and illuminating simply reading various Fathers is.

His Broken Body
and The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology

Certainly the philosophies of the Pagan Greeks can be powerful tools, and the Church has always made use of them, but there is a danger that can come if we allow that philosophy to take prominence in our thought above what has been revealed to us by God. We find that Roman Catholicism can flirt rather dangerously with that line at times, and moreover, that at any rate there is no aspect of pagan philosophy that is at all necessary for us in comparison to what we have already been given in the Church. The best we can say about the old Greeks is that they are incomplete.

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As for a divergence of tradition, I think it is fairly apparent, looking at the Roman church today. Even if we set aside the total upheaval that occurred in the wake of Vatican II, almost all of what Rome considers "traditional" today is itself innovative. If we go back to Anselm's novel theory of atonement, propagated throughout the Roman Catholic world just a few decades after the Schism began, we can see the harbingers of a totally new spirituality for the West. Anselm promulgated the "satisfaction theory" of atonement, in which the primary method by which Mankind is saved is by the person Christ 'satisfying' the needs of God's wrath against the human race. This is a total divergence from what Church previously believed, and is foreign to the traditional understanding of atonement - the fundamental difference here being that it sets up a dichotomy between mankind and God, a wall between us.

Instead of God being our ever-loving Father who desires us to become truly His children and participants in Him, with the means of our salvation being a union of our nature to Christ's, God instead becomes a foreign agent to humanity. Our means of salvation becomes indirect - we are saved because Christ bestows upon us a surplus of merit, instead of because he bestows upon us actual participation in His nature. This foreignness immediately begins to permeate throughout Roman Catholic spirituality - we see it in the Scholastics, who begin to turn both to the Pagan philosphers, but even to Muslim and Jewish thinkers to find explanation for God. We see it in their developments of mariolatry, in which the Virgin Mary becomes an entirely different race of being than the rest of humanity in the Immaculate Conception. We see it supreme exaltation of the Pope of Rome above all others, and how the binding tie of Christian unity becomes submission to the pope in Rome, rather than in the chalice of Communion which all Christians share in equally. We see it in the highly-increased focus on physical suffering - in the flagellants, in the stigmata, in the Sacred Heart, in the focus on Christ as one who died instead of one who Lived.

All these practices are not the true inheritance of the West, but rather are institutions that began after the Schism. Even the beloved TLM of the "trads" is the "Tridentine Latin Mass" - Tridentium being the Latin name for the city of Trent - as in, the Council of Trent of the 1500s. The TLM is a liturgical overhaul that brushed away many of the older and local traditions that had stuck around.

It is a mindset, in short, in which we are not truly "Co-heirs with Christ", as St. Paul says, but truly subservient and bound to submission only. It is a spirituality based around the idea that the Prodigal Son's father really did hire him as a servant when the son returned home.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, really, but that outlines some of the issues as I see it.

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Inasmuch as intro-level material goes, I would suggest Fr. Andrew Damick's "Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy." Therein he deals comparatively with many Christian groups against the Orthodox Church, although obviously the most relevant parts here are the sections which deal with Rome. He has it available both as a free podcast here https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/orthodoxyheterodoxy

or as a book https://www.amazon.com/Orthodoxy-Heterodoxy-Complicated-Religious-Landscape/dp/1944967176/ref=pd_cp_14_1/146-8495025-5559228?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1944967176&pd_rd_r=1030f57d-ff08-469a-ba2d-1012747c7cf5&pd_rd_w=Giuwm&pd_rd_wg=nd9eH&pf_rd_p=0e5324e1-c848-4872-bbd5-5be6baedf80e&pf_rd_r=VHQ0WNVD83XCQNX37VZC&psc=1&refRID=VHQ0WNVD83XCQNX37VZC

There's a shorter collection of essays here specifically focused on St. Peter and how he was viewed in the early Church.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881411256

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On the flip side, Dr. Joseph Farrell's "God, History and Dialectic" is a fantastic and very comprehensive 3-volume series about the development of the Church and the divergence of Rome and Western thought in general. Although the full 3-volume series is (somewhat) expensive, given the size of the books the price is really quite reasonable. My priest, coincidentally, was one of Dr. Farrell's students when Farrell was the Professor of Patristics at St. Tikhon's seminary.

https://www.amazon.com/God-History-Dialectic-Foundation-Europe/dp/B076YNRPTT



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Hope that mouthful wasn't too much for you. And sorry for taking a little while to get back to you - hope you're doing well.

Read these:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Primacy-Peter-Essays-Ecclesiology/dp/0881411256

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565481895/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1535523722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0881411256&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0MJRMNA8C2ZTKSBS4W6T