The second volume of Professor Pelikan's monumental work of The Christian Tradition is the most comprehensive historical treatment of Eastern Christian thought from 600 to 1700 written in recent years. This volume covers the great Christological controversies of the seventh century, the debate on icons in the 8th and 9th, attitudes to Jews, to Muslims, to the dualistic heresies of the high Middle Ages, to the post-Reformation churchs of Western Europe. The line that separated Eastoner Christendom from Western on the medieval map is similar to the 'iron curtain' of recent times. Linguistic barriers, political divisions, and liturgical differences combine to isolate the two cultures from each other. Pelikan explains the divisions between Eastern and Western Christendom and identifies and describes the development of the distinctive forms taken by Christian doctrine in its Greek, Syriac and early Slavic tradition.
