I picked up a copy of Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts to read on the upcoming Turkey trip, but I couldn’t resist starting the book last night and came across this rather startling description of Eastern v.s. Western religions in chapter one. The section is too long to blockquote, so I’ll summarize.

Kaplan sees the bloody, century-long feud between the Serbs and the Croats as more than a religious war. The fight is a genuine clash of civilizations, which can be specifically differentiated between Eastern and Western religions. Because Catholicism arose in the West and Orthodoxy in the East, the difference between them is greater than that between, say, Catholicism and Protestantism, both of which are Western religions and both which fundamentally emphasize ideas and deeds. (Kaplan, who is a non-practicing Jew, also includes Judaism in his description of Western religions—on account of the Diaspora, Judaism also developed in the West.)

By contrast, Eastern religions emphasize beauty and magic. An Orthodox church service is an attempt at physical re-creation of heaven on earth. (From my own visits to Orthodox churches in Kazakhstan and Turkey during Lent, where I saw the devout prostrating themselves in in front of dimly-lit icons in the corners of churches, I’d say there is some truth to this.) Even Catholicism, the most baroque of western religions, is, by the standards of Eastern Orthodoxy, austere and intellectual. Both Western monks live industriously, participating in such worldly endeavors as teaching, writing, and community work. In contrast, Orthodox monks tend to be contemplative and philosophical. Physical labor and intellectual endeavours are distractions from the worship of heavenly beauty.

That’s Kaplan’s take. Agree or disagree, I think he put his finger on a concrete, cultural difference between East and West, a flash point of which was the Serb-Croat dispute. More exerpts to come…

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