The Eastern Schism revisited

In response to my recent post, "Petrine jurisdiction exercised in the ancient Church" (on my Scripture & Catholic Tradition blog, Jan. 10, 2005), Dan Jones kindly offered a number of critical rejoinders in the Comments at the end of the post from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. Jones sees "errors" in Rome's idea of Church unity and primacy embodied in a Pope with universal jurisdiction as stemming from (Augustine's?) theological "errors," in turn stemming from the neo-platonic idea of absolute simplicity and the notion that God's own unity must be understood as a unity of being having absolute simplicity. Even the filioque ("and the Son") insertion in the Nicene Creed, he says, is a product of this view. He asserts that this view is problematic and that Orthodoxy offers a solution to the problem of unity and plurality unavailable to the West, and that the Eastern churches preserve an ecclesial unity without the pope. Read more here.