“Distinctions Stiffened into Contradictions”

The most brilliant encapsulation of the East-West ecumenical situation I’ve yet to come across:

The very problem of Christian reconciliation is not that of a correlation of parallel traditions, but precisely that of the reintegration of a distorted tradition.  The two traditions may seem quite irreconcilable, when they are compared and confronted, as they are at the present.  Yet their differences themselves are, to a great extent, simply the results of disintegration: they are, as it were, distinctions stiffened into contradictions.

Fr. Georges Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church” (an address to the World Council of Churches given in 1960); emphasis in original