East–West Schism

• 1. Introduction

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  The East-West Schism, also called the Great Schism, is the break of communion between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Its traditional date is the 16th of July 1054. On that day, a delegation from Rome walked into Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and placed a bull of excommunication on the altar. The altar had already been prepared for the Divine Liturgy. Yet the date is more convention than fact. Scholars have proposed 1009, 1204-1277 and 1484 as the real moment of rupture. Each side still occasionally accuses the other of heresy, and of having started the quarrel. This documentary asks what pulled the Greek East and the Latin West apart, whether a single act could really have done it, and why the breach has never been healed.

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• 2. Two Thrones

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  In 330, Emperor Constantine moved the imperial capital to Byzantium, the city that later became Constantinople. Rome lost its Senate to the new capital, along with much of its gravitas. The bishop of Byzantium had once answered to the metropolitan of Heraclea. His close tie to the imperial court freed him from that dependence, and in little more than half a century he won recognition as next after Rome.

  That recognition came at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Its ruling declared: "The Bishop of Constantinople, however, shall have the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is New Rome". The decision lifted him above the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. It has since been described as the seed of the rivalry between the two cities.

  Rome's own claims were already old. Around the year 180, Bishop Victor of Rome tried to excommunicate the churches of the province of Asia for celebrating Easter alongside the Jewish Passover. Other bishops rebuked him sharply, and the threat came to nothing. Catholic writers note that nobody denied his right to act, only the wisdom of it. Anglican writers doubt that Victor believed he held sovereign power at all.

  In 382, a synod in Rome protested the promotion of Constantinople and called Rome "the apostolic see". Pope Siricius, who served from 384 to 399, claimed that his decretals bound the church as firmly as the decisions of synods. Pope Boniface I, in 418-422, declared that Rome stood to "the churches throughout the world as the head to its members". Later, Pope Nicholas I, in 858-867, said papal power reached "over all the earth, that is, over every church".

  Rome also served as a referee. In 431, Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, appealed to Pope Celestine I when he accused Nestorius of Constantinople of heresy. Because Rome lay far from the great eastern centres, easterners often hoped its bishop would be impartial. His word was never accepted automatically, and Cyril believed Rome's power to excommunicate Nestorius was effective only in the West.

  The Orthodox East reads the record differently. The first seven Ecumenical Councils met in the East, and Eastern emperors called them. The bishop of Rome never presided over any of them. Easterners also say that canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, proclaimed the equality of Rome and Constantinople. Pope Leo I, whose delegates were absent when it passed, rejected the canon because it infringed the rights of Alexandria and Antioch. It remained a source of friction until 1054. Meanwhile, Patriarch John IV of Constantinople, who died in 595, took the title "Ecumenical Patriarch".

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• 3. Empire, Language, Custom

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  In 476, the last emperor of the western half of the Roman Empire was deposed, and the western imperial insignia were sent to Constantinople. That left a single Roman emperor in name, but he had little power in the West, which Germanic tribes ruled almost entirely. Randall R. Cloud calls this permanent separation of the Greek East from the Latin West the fundamental reason for the estrangement that followed. Latin dominated in the West and Greek in the East. Soon few people spoke both, and cultural unity began to crumble with the linguistic kind.

  Emperor Justinian I took control of the church to a degree that unsettled Rome. His scheme, known as caesaropapism, gave the emperor the right to regulate the smallest details of worship and to dictate theological opinion. Bishops in the empire needed his explicit approval to be consecrated. During the Byzantine Papacy, that rule even applied to the bishops of Rome, most of whom were of Greek or Syrian origin. Resentment showed as early as the 6th century, when "the tolerance of the Arian Gothic king was preferred to the caesaropapist claims of Constantinople".

  By 661, Muslim Arabs had taken the territories of the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Only Rome and Constantinople remained as powerful centres of church authority. Until then, Rome had often acted as a neutral mediator among the eastern patriarchs.

  Emperor Leo III the Isaurian issued iconoclast decrees in 726-729, and the West resisted them. In 732, he took revenge on Pope Gregory III for his opposition. He moved Sicily, Calabria and Illyria out of the patriarchate of Rome and into that of Constantinople. The quarrel over images ended in 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea affirmed that images are to be venerated but not worshipped. Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor of the Romans in 800, commissioned the Libri Carolini, which criticised a faulty translation of that decision. Pope Adrian I rebutted its objections.

  The Council in Trullo of 692 turned the argument toward everyday practice. It condemned Latin customs such as Mass on weekdays in Lent, fasting on every Saturday of the year, omitting the "Alleluia" in Lent, depicting Christ as a lamb, and using unleavened bread. It also affirmed the right of married men to become priests. Pope Sergius I, who was of Syrian ancestry, rejected the council. Emperor Justinian II ordered his arrest, but the attempt was thwarted. Spain ratified the council in 694 at the urging of King Wittiza, and Fruela I of Asturias reversed that decision during his reign of 757-768.

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• 4. The Creed Dispute

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  Filioque is Latin for "and (from) the Son", and it names the best-known single word in the dispute. Western Christianity added it to the Latin text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. It states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father. The Catholic Church, Anglicanism and Protestant churches generally accept it. They also admit it was not part of the text set at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, and they do not demand that others recite it. The Catholic Church does not add the phrase to the Greek text of the Creed, even within its Roman Rite.

  The Eastern Orthodox Church answered with condemnation. At the Council of Constantinople of 879-880, it anathematized the phrase "as a novelty and augmentation of the Creed". In 1848, the Eastern Patriarchs called it a heresy in an encyclical. Photios I of Constantinople, Mark of Ephesus and Gregory Palamas, together called the Three Pillars of Orthodoxy, all described it the same way. The East also objected to the manner of the change. Easterners hold that the West broke communion by inserting the word unilaterally, without consulting the East, and one source dates the insertion to 1014.

  Orthodox writers cite canon 7 of the Council of Ephesus. It forbade anyone to compose a different faith as a rival to the one set at Nicaea. The source answers that the canon made no exception for an ecumenical council or any other body of bishops. It adds that even the Greeks at the Council of Florence denied that a council could add to the creed.

  An earlier round of council fights, in 867-879, had already poisoned the ground. Rome tried to replace a seated patriarch with one friendlier to the Filioque position. The Orthodox denounced the replacement and excommunicated the pope who convened the Roman council. Each church recognises its own councils from that period and rejects the other's.

  The theological case goes deeper than procedure. Michael Pomazansky argues that for the Spirit to proceed from both Father and Son, the one God would need two sources, whereas the Father alone is the source of divinity. Bishop Kallistos Ware disagreed, after further study. He wrote: "The controversy which has separated us for so many centuries is more than a mere technicality, but it is not insoluble."

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• 5. Rival Theologies

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  Jaroslav Pelikan observed that "while the East-West schism stemmed largely from political and ecclesiastical discord, this discord also reflected basic theological differences". In his view, the antagonists of the 11th century exaggerated those differences, while modern historians tend to minimise them. He described much of the dispute as regional usages and customs, some of them adiaphorous, meaning neither commanded nor forbidden. The difficulty was telling harmless customs from those with doctrinal weight. The two sides were technically more guilty of schism than of heresy, though they often charged each other with blasphemy.

  Philip Sherrard, an English Eastern Orthodox theologian, located the root in "the clash of these two fundamentally irreconcilable ecclesiologies". The Eastern view holds that every city church, with its bishop, presbyters, deacons and people celebrating the eucharist, is the whole church. Every bishop is Saint Peter's successor in his own church, and all bishops are equal in essence. Some may receive privileges as metropolitans, archbishops or patriarchs. The Roman Church early on saw a worldwide organism with a divinely appointed centre in the bishop of Rome.

  The First Vatican Council of 1869-1870 sharpened the contrast. Orthodox churches reject its doctrine of papal authority. They reject the dogma that the pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, his direct jurisdiction over all Catholics, and his power to appoint bishops. Orthodox Christians accept a primacy of honor, not authority. They hold synods in which the highest authorities of each church meet, but no single figure has the last word on doctrine. In practice, that has sometimes left Greek, Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian churches divided, with no arbiter.

  Since the second half of the 20th century, Catholic theologians have embraced eucharistic ecclesiology. Henri de Lubac wrote that "The Church, like the Eucharist, is a mystery of unity". Joseph Ratzinger called it the real core of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.

  Vladimir Lossky pressed a different charge. He argued that the West validates dogma through philosophy and scholasticism instead of theoria, the direct experience of God. For that reason, he said, Orthodox and Catholics have become "different men". Orthodox writers date a direct clash on this point to the Hesychasm controversy, which played out at councils in Constantinople between 1341 and 1351. Gregory Palamas taught that creation can never know God's uncreated essence but can know his uncreated energies.

  Even the afterlife divides them. Western doctrine of purgatory, discussed at the Council of Ferrara-Florence, treats sin as something that merits punishment. Some Eastern theologians instead see a state of growth beyond death. At Ferrara-Florence, Mark of Ephesus argued that it holds no purifying fires.

  Catholics do not generally call the Orthodox heretical, and they speak instead of schism. The decree Unitatis redintegratio of the Second Vatican Council says East and West followed different methods in studying revelation. It adds that their theological expressions are "mutually complementary rather than conflicting".

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• 6. Letters and Legates

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  In 1053, Leo of Ohrid wrote a letter to Bishop John of Trani, meant for all the Latin bishops, including the pope. J. B. Bury says Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople prompted it. The letter attacked Western practices such as using unleavened bread for the Eucharist and following different fasting rules. Cerularius himself closed every Latin church in Constantinople.

  Pope Leo IX answered with a letter dated the 2nd of September 1053, called In terra pax. It ran to 41 sections and spoke at length of the privileges that Saint Peter had won for Rome. In section 20, it quoted the Donation of Constantine, which Leo believed was genuine. Some scholars say this letter was never sent. They think the real reply was the softer but still harsh Scripta tuae of January 1054.

  A second worry pushed both sides toward politeness. The Norman conquest of southern Italy threatened the possessions of the Byzantine Empire and the papacy alike. The emperor and Cerularius each wrote conciliatory letters to the pope, but their texts have not survived. Leo's January 1054 reply to the emperor, Quantas gratias, asked for help against the Normans and complained of the patriarch's arrogance. To Cerularius he wrote that the patriarch had tried to subject the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch to himself. He insisted on the primacy of Rome.

  The pope entrusted both letters to three legates. The leader was Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, whom the account calls undiplomatic. With him went Frederick of Lorraine, papal secretary and Cardinal-Deacon of Santa Maria in Domnica, and Peter, Archbishop of Amalfi. Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos gave them friendship and support. Cerularius spurned them.

  Leo IX died in April 1054, and the next pope would not take office for nine months after the July confrontation. When Humbert learned that Cerularius had rejected the demand, he excommunicated the patriarch. The bull named Cerularius and his supporters. At a synod on the 20th of July 1054, Cerularius excommunicated the legates in return. The legates' act is of doubtful validity, since their pope was already dead. Cerularius's own excommunication applied only to the legates personally.

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• 7. A Slow Estrangement

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  Timothy Ware wrote that after 1054 "friendly relations between East and West continued". It is estimated that in 1054 a slim majority of Christians worldwide were Eastern. Ware adds that "The dispute remained something of which ordinary Christians in East and West were largely unaware". Many contemporaries, including Byzantine chroniclers, did not consider the excommunications significant. Endowments to eastern churches such as the Holy Sepulchre stayed in place. Pope Gregory VII confirmed the Patriarch of Jerusalem's ownership of a church in Le Marche. In the 1080s, a synod at Constantinople told Emperor Alexios Komnenos that no canonical decision had broken relations with Rome.

  Commerce wore down that goodwill. From the late 11th century, the Byzantine Empire depended on the navies of Venice and, to a lesser extent, Genoa and Pisa. Venice and others won major trading concessions from the 1080s. Catholic merchants came to dominate trade in Byzantium, and resentment spread among the middle and lower classes. By the second half of the 12th century, Italians were raiding each other's quarters in the capital. Byzantine authorities answered with draconian measures.

  The breaking point came in 1182. Andronikos I Komnenos deposed the regency of Maria of Antioch, an ethnic French empress mother notorious for favouring Latin merchants. He then let mobs massacre the hated foreigners. The West retaliated with the Sacking of Thessalonica in 1185. In 1190, the Byzantine theologian Theodore Balsamon wrote that no Latin should receive the sacraments without first promising to abandon Latin dogmas and customs. Archbishop Demetrios Chomatenos criticised him as too harsh, noting that Latins had not been condemned as heretics.

  The Fourth Crusade, which set out to recapture Jerusalem, carried that resentment to its end. Alexios Angelos asked that his father's rule be restored in Constantinople, and the crusader army arrived there in April 1203. In 1204, Latin crusaders and Venetian merchants sacked the city. They looted the Church of Holy Wisdom and other Orthodox holy sites and converted them to Latin worship. The Imperial Library was destroyed, many holy artifacts went west, and the crusaders appointed a Latin Patriarch of Constantinople.

  Rival Greek and Latin hierarchies then appeared in the Crusader states. Two men claimed each of the patriarchal sees of Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem. The division was now impossible to deny.

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• 8. Unfinished Business

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  In 1965, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I nullified the anathemas of 1054. It was a gesture of goodwill, not a reunion. Earlier attempts at reconciliation had borne no fruit. The breach between the two sides has never been healed.

  The Code of Canon Law shows how real the gap remains. It lets Catholic ministers give penance, the Eucharist and the anointing of the sick to members of eastern churches, including the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches and the Church of the East. It also covers members of western churches such as the Old Catholic Church. Those members must request the sacraments spontaneously. The law names the absence of full communion as the reason for these conditions.

  Contact has nonetheless continued. Each year, a delegation from each church joins the other's celebration of its patronal feast. Rome keeps Saints Peter and Paul on the 29th of June. Constantinople keeps Saint Andrew on the 30th of November. The head of each church has also visited the other several times. At home, the ecumenical patriarchs' efforts toward reconciliation with the Catholic Church have often drawn sharp internal criticism.

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