I recently watched a critique video from Christian Wagner over at Scholastic Answers, taking apart the work of Fr. Stephen De Young.

I know I'm nobody to respond. I couldn't get in the ring with either of these gentlemen, and I hold a minority view among Westerners anyway. But I've been chewing on it, and here's where I sit.

My framework is always the same. Ad Iesum per Mariam; cum Petro; ad Orientem. To Jesus through Mary, with Peter, toward the East.

I generally agree with the criticisms concerning Fr. De Young when he's specifically critiquing on Latin theology, he misses the Latin nuances, and can regurgitate Protestant rhetoric. But I think he has the better patristic read, better than Wagner's. Which is to say the neo-scholastic position, the Wagner, misses the mark more often than it lands.

It's easy to use broad strokes and assume the West, ipso facto, means scholasticism, or Thomism. But "the West" (if there is such a thing) has always held many schools of theological thought.

For example, Catholic tradition has never declared Scotism, Bonaventure's theology, or the broader Franciscan inheritance obsolete. They're still major Catholic schools, often pressing themes Thomism expresses differently: exemplarism, the primacy of Christ, divine freedom, affective knowledge, poverty, and the sacramental transparency of creation.

A couple more points. What we call Thomism today is a loose term. I don't think Aquinas himself would recognize all of it. One unfolding of Thomism rose to the top, and a lot of that was circumstantial. Franciscan and Scotist theology declined mostly because its institutions kept getting disrupted and dissolved across Europe. The Reformation first, then later secularization and the state seizures of religious property, then the upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries, the World Wars included. That broke up its teaching centers and its continuity. Thomism kept steadier networks, and later that direct papal backing, so it stayed better represented in centralized Catholic education.

Is one better than the other? Is that subjective? Yes and no. I think Scotism is better than Thomism. But Thomism is still useful in places, and I wouldn't throw it out.

But I still think Eastern theology hits the nail on the head more often than Latin theology does. A lot of that is built into the default mechanism of the Latin language itself.

Now, every school of theology, every formulation, every word, every syllable we spend trying to explain God is finally a metaphor. Everything we do, even the best of it, is a shadow. And if it's all shadow, some shadows are truer than others. Some schools serve some things better. I'm just proposing that the Eastern one, on the whole, serves better, or at least better aligns with the first thousand years of Christian thought.

It starts when the Western Fathers forget how to read Greek natively. You see it first in Augustine, drifting a few degrees off the rest of the tradition, partly because his Greek was thin. Most of our foundational theological statements, our vocabulary, our poetic refrains, come out of Greek, the language of the philosophers, with its specific terms and nuances. It doesn't carry one for one into Latin. So as men started doing theology in Latin, the emphasis tilted a few degrees, in context, in cultural meaning, in philosophical underpinning. Not the content of the faith, the angle of approach to it. And a degree is nothing up close. But you're a degree off, you shoot an arrow a thousand feet, and it lands nowhere near the first one.

That's why a doctrine worked out in later Latin scholasticism can come out sounding completely different from what the Eastern Fathers were describing. The atonement is the clearest case. Anselm's satisfaction theory worked in terms of honor and debt, not punishment, and the penal substitution that hardened out of that same Latin line later took it somewhere Anselm never did. Neither one reads like the East's language of recapitulation and healing. All of that is a big broad stroke of generalizations, but I think it gets to the heart of the matter.

I'm not implying the early Latin Fathers got it wrong. They knew exactly what they were translating. What I'm suggesting is subtler. A translation captures a word at one moment, but the living Greek terms kept their original range, while the Latin terms went on accumulating theological weight over the centuries that the Greek was never asked to carry. So the divergence isn't error. It's two vocabularies developing along different lines from a shared root.

Here's where I land. The East gets it more right than the West, and it gets it right more often. Grace. The sacraments. The filioque. The afterlife. Theosis, which we renamed sanctification and then half forgot what it meant. Even the office of Rome as it actually stood in the early centuries, before anybody needed it to be more than it was. The Eastern expressions just sit closer to the Fathers.

The papacy is the one place I break the other way. The Fathers don't answer our modern questions about it. They weren't asking them. Both sides have developed past the evidence and stretched the antiquity thinner than it wants to go, reaching in whatever direction they already wanted to land. But on this one, I think Rome got the office right. The thing itself is true.

The application is a different question. Getting the office right and using it well are not the same animal, and the West has often gotten the first and botched the second.

The honest version is messier than either camp wants to admit. Two well-meaning, prayerful, educated people can read the same Fathers on the Bishop of Rome and walk away with opposite conclusions. The sources are not as clean as either side pretends, and both sides mine them to make a point. The truth is murky, because the thing hadn't developed yet, in either direction. I don't think Vatican I is wrong. But getting it right and overreaching are not mutually exclusive. Its scope was aimed at the secularization of the Papal States and the encroachment of government on Church affairs. It was never really meant as a posture toward the East. I think the West sits closer to what the Fathers would have said, even if the Fathers never said it, and I think Heaven has underwritten that with five hundred years of apparitions and miracles as a secondary signpost. But the East gets more of the theology right. And anytime the West says more, the neo-scholastic more, even when that more is objectively true, it doesn't make it helpful, and it doesn't make it the better way to hand to an individual Christian. I'm not in bad company here. The whole ressourcement movement, de Lubac, Balthasar, Ratzinger, landed in roughly the same place.

"Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium." (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 1982)

On the Eastern Orthodox churches: "These churches have an authentic doctrine... they remain faithful to the tradition of the first Christian millennium." (The Ratzinger Report, 1985)

"This is why we must look to the example of our brethren of the Eastern Orthodox churches, great teachers, even today, of authentic Christian asceticism." (The Ratzinger Report, 1985)

So my ranking runs Thomism, then Scotus over him, then Palamas over them both. And every name on that list is finally a hand pointing at a light none of them can hold. It's still shadows, just some cast truer than others, and a Catholic in good standing can land here without leaving the Church an inch.

Which puts me at odds with folks like Wagner, coming from a neo-Thomist place and a certain rigidity. But I'll grant them their best point. They're right when they catch Fr. De Young oversimplifying the Western positions, or framing Latin theology with a polemical strawman. He does that, and it's fair to say so.

I also don't think it's helpful to keep saying "the East" and "the West"-even though I’ve done so all throughout this rant! We use them the way we use "left" and "right," or "conservative" and "liberal," in church politics. They're place markers, not precise things.

And that's the deeper claim, the one Fr. De Young presses hardest. "The West" is not a coherent theological tradition standing beside "the East." There's the patristic faith, held East and West together, and then there's a later Latin scholastic divergence that retroactively got branded "the Western tradition" and read back onto the Latin Fathers who didn't hold it. The hinge is language and the loss of it. Once the Latin world stopped reading Greek, it started doing theology on secondhand translations and built load-bearing structures on them.

I'm with him on the diagnosis. The medieval Augustinian reading of Genesis 3 as "the Fall," loaded the way the West loaded it, is a Latin emphasis the East never put at the center. Same with the treasury of merit and the whole satisfaction-and-penal grammar of salvation. Those are Latin developments, not the shared deposit. The Fathers East and West didn't hand them down. The Latin world built them later.

And that Latin line is exactly what both Rome and the Reformation inherited. Which means Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation are two branches off the same Latin tree. His point lands: the real fault line isn't Catholic versus Protestant. It's Orthodoxy versus Latin Christianity, with the Reformers arguing inside the Latin house, not outside it.

Where I get off the train is the verdict. He reads the Latin line as drift away from the deposit. I read it as development that sometimes sprinted ahead of itself, real growth that occasionally outran its own prudence, but growth, not corruption. The tree is still the right tree. Some of its branches just grew faster and more crooked than they needed to.