Understanding the Great Schism in Christianity

Growing up in the modern world, it can be easy, particularly if you're Protestant and you grew up in the context of North America, to neglect the reality that there is an entire wing of the church known as the Orthodox Church. Depending on your context and depending on the world that you grew up in and your denominational affiliation, etc., it can be a challenge at times to have a great deal of exposure to the Orthodox Church. I think this is symbolized most importantly by the fact that so often at the lay level, it becomes common simply to refer to the Orthodox Church as Greek Orthodox, which is a misnomer because while there is a Greek Orthodox Church, The Orthodox Church itself is actually quite varied, both geographically and in terms of its language, and in terms of the patriarchy of those who are governing the church. Another name that's often used is the Byzantine Church, which again is a misnomer. It simply locates the epicenter of the Orthodox Church entirely in the Byzantine lands, out in Asia Minor, and in particular in the former city of Constantinople, which is the modern-day Istanbul. I often joke that if it weren't for that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza attempts to convert to Latvian Orthodox, that many people would be unaware that there is a denomination or a branch of the church known as the Orthodox Church. Well, this needs to be fixed. We need to have an awareness of the wide-ranging and significant development within the church away from the Catholic Church that arose in the Middle Ages. Orthodox Church is actually the second largest single-unit church in the entirety of the world. The Orthodox Church numbers somewhere around 250 million people. Now, that number needs some context. There are roughly two and a half billion Christians in the world, somewhere in the There are roughly 800 million Protestants in the world today. But of course, trying to label all of Protestantism as the same is a bit of a challenge, given that you have everything from high church Anglican and Lutheran, all the way down through Methodist and Presbyterian, and all the way to the end with Anabaptist and a number of other non-denominational churches in the world today. So when we say that the Orthodox Church is the second largest single church, what we mean by that is that it's the second largest church that self-identifies as one body. And at 250 million people, it is a vitally important church in the world. And it's even more important given that so much of the Orthodox Church today is located in regions that are quite hostile at times, at least in the modern world, to the Christian church itself. Well, the natural question is, how did this church come about? How did this branch that calls itself the Orthodox Church come to reside in a place that is different from both the Catholic Church and subsequently the Protestant Church? Well, the answer is the Great Schism, the Great Schism of 1054. And so in this lecture, we're going to be looking at the Great Schism. We're going to determine what caused it and then look at some of the implications of this schism all the way down until today. And we can begin with vocabulary because there are a number of schisms throughout the centuries, particularly in the Middle Ages, that sometimes are called the Great Schism, or at least for the first student coming to this period of time. can feel as if they all kind of jumble up together. When people refer to the Great Schism, very often what they have in mind is this schism from 1054. The Great Schism is the time when the Catholic Church, the Western Church, sundered from the Eastern Church, which would later be identified as the Orthodox Church. Now that is to be distinguished, obviously, from papal schisms, which we'll have a lecture on in a later lecture, which unfortunately... historians sometimes call the Great Schism as well. Now, ideally, historians will call this the Great Papal Schism and not simply the Great Schism itself. But you have to be aware that when we're referring to the Great Schism, we're referring to the separation of Catholic and Eastern churches. And in our lectures on the Crusades, we did make mention of the schism. When the Crusades got underway, the first one in the 1090s, we mentioned that there was already a schism between East and West. that complicated the issue and made it quite tense between both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Church. Well, now we want to double back and get a running start at just what this schism was. There are a number of factors that led to the separation between the East and the West. Some are political, some are theological. And some just simply have to do with the bozos that were running the show at the time. And we're going to go through all three of these in this order. First of all, the political issues that were in play. As we've seen throughout a number of lectures, coming out of the Constantinian world, the Christian world saw itself politically as a united empire. This was the heritage of Constantine. He had united East and West. He had put it under the banner of Christ. Even if we deny, though we're not going to do this, but even if we deny that Constantine was actually a committed Christian, still, the Constantinian revolution paved the way for the ongoing Christianization of the empire. And for centuries after Constantine, the church saw itself as a united front. When we looked at the Byzantine world, for example, we commented on how those who were in the Byzantine world would not have called themselves anything but Roman, at least not in the first several centuries after Constantine comes to the throne, if not quite a bit thereafter. And there are a number of ways that this sort of presented itself. First and foremost was for centuries, down until roughly the 8th or 9th century, there was this tension between the Byzantine emperor, the emperor over Constantine and Opal, who was, at least in terms of the heritage, believed by some, particularly those in the east, to also be emperor over the West. And just as in the Byzantine world, those who are patriarchs, in particular the patriarch of Constantinople, the primary seat of the Byzantine church for centuries, and even until today, it was customary for the Eastern emperor to at least give his vote of approval whenever someone was appointed to the chair or to the office of a patriarch or to a primary bishop. And what many people don't realize is that for a number of years, for centuries, the papacy actually had to be approved in name by the Eastern Emperor. Now, this rarely created much problem. At times it did, but it rarely created this real strong problem where someone wanted to be pope or someone was elected to be pope, and the Eastern Emperor simply denied this. By and large, it was rubber-stamped. But all the way until roughly the beginning of the... the... real serious Middle Ages, in particular after the time of Charlemagne, it was still considered to be appropriate for the papacy to be ratified or approved by the Eastern Emperor. Well, what happens over the course of the early Middle Ages and on into the high Middle Ages is the papacy, in particular, is not comfortable with always answering to the Eastern Emperor. All the way back in around the 5th or the 6th century. What you see happen is the papacy beginning to assert some of its own independence. Now, none of this is controversial in the major sense of that word. It doesn't create massive friction or schism. There are only a number of cases where there is actually a real tussle as to who is in charge, papacy or the East. But it is an issue. And in fact, as we've seen, when the Pope, when Leo, coronates Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800, 800. There is a conscientious move in the West for the papacy to coronate his own emperor that was over the western half of what was formerly Constantine's world. Now, by and large, the Eastern Emperor looked on this with suspicion. He knew what was afoot. He knew that what was going on here and what would continue for some time is the disentangling of the empire from East and West. But by and large, this was the Pope's move. The West wanted to go its own way. It wanted to have its own autonomous authority in a manner of speaking. And though the ideal was always for East and West to be united as one Christendom, the fact of the matter is that this was nearly impossible, given the complexities of life in the Middle Ages. Not only was there a language barrier, with the East primarily speaking Greek, and with the West increasingly speaking only Latin, but there were cultural issues, and issues of communication, and issues of real political authority and influence over these areas of the West. No matter how much the Eastern Emperor claimed to be over all of Christendom, it was simply impossible for him or her ever to exert enough authority over these regions to claim them as their own. And this really comes to a head in 962, after a famous battle, the Battle of Letchfield. In this battle, Some of the heirs to the Charlemagne regions rose up and there was founded what's called the Autonian dynasty. And this is the dynasty of Otto himself, the great emperor who would claim, just as Charlemagne had before, the title Holy Roman Emperor. Now, when Otto comes to the throne, this title, Holy Roman Emperor, takes on a new significance and a new depth of meaning in the self-identity of the West as its own entity and its own Christendom, apart from the Eastern world. Part of what's driving this is simply the fact that the West wants to go its own way. But also, what's driving this is the fact that in so many of the lands out East, in Asia Minor, Down in Palestine and in North Africa, the Arab conquest and expansion had at least severed any Christian identity or any connection between the Christians of the West with these other regions. And so, in a number of ways, the West simply says, that's it. There is now a Holy Roman Emperor, and he is here in the West, and his name is Otto. And following on that, in 1049, Otto's successor, Henry III, has appointed to the papacy Leo IX, who will be pope during the schism. Now, in this day, of course, politics and church government are not all that separate. They are separate in terms of theme or in terms of their influence. But this is not a world of separation of church and state. And so it's no surprise then that there's an analogy between the tension that is going on between the emperor of the East and the rise and the cementing. of the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire, in the government of the church itself. A fundamental difference between the way the East understands authority in the church and the way the West was beginning to really significantly understand the power of the papacy really hinges again on this separation between East and West. If you were to find an Eastern Orthodox person either in this point in the Middle Ages, and frankly even until today, Their model of government is not to have a single papacy or a single pope over the entirety of their church. This is one of the great myths that's often out there, which is that the patriarch of Constantinople is somehow pope of the entire Orthodox Church. Rather, what happens in the Eastern Church is they believe that there are principal patriarchies that are governed by someone who is sometimes called the pope, but who with the other patriarchs rules in a collaborative unity with each other. Now, the legacy of this argument goes all the way back to the Constantinople Council, the second great ecumenical council. It was at that council where there was appointed and named five principal seats or bishops who have a preeminence within the church that is to be considered at least first among equals, though increasingly it became superior. to the other bishoprics in the Christendom world. And at that time, it was Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. Now, the two big ones here, obviously, are Constantinople and Rome. The papacy actually, at this time, resisted the idea that Constantinople would be made a de facto patriarch or de facto leading bishop that was seen to be at least coterminous, if not equal, with that of the papacy. In other words, from the Eastern perspective, from the Orthodox perspective, the Bishop of Rome is a significant seat of power. Their perspective, though, as the Middle Ages continued on, and again, even down until today, is that the Bishop of Rome is one of these patriarchs. He is part of their band of brothers, even if he has first chair, even if he has primary voice. even if he leads in some ways in a way that the others do not, at least in terms of first among equals. In the Orthodox Church, the Bishop of Rome is simply one of these patriarchs. In this case, he is the Patriarch of the West. Constantinople is patriarch over Constantinople and its regions, so on and so forth. Now, that might help you understand some of where the Orthodox Church has come down to the modern period. Because if you look around the modern Orthodox Church, You'll find a number of patriarchs, as they're called. For example, the Russian patriarch, who is considered to be yet another, a new patriarch, who is the lead bishop over a given region, in this case, Russia. Now, this is the kernel of the fight. All the theological and historical squabbles that go on between East and West, frankly, always have at their root, right at the core, the distinction and the division over the issue of where the Pope or the Bishop of Rome fits in with these other patriarchs. Just about every issue, just about every fight seemingly comes down to the issue of, does the Pope have to answer to the will of the body, the will of the other patriarchs? Can he be checked? Or does he have supremacy and the other patriarchs out east need to therefore listen to the will of the pope? And I think that's important to realize as the real root cause of this schism. Because we're going to notice that there are a number of fights and things that percolate up to the surface over the centuries that tend to be cited as the real cause or at least the beginning of the cause of the schism. The problem, though, is that many of these fights occur hundreds and hundreds of years before the schism itself. Rather, a better way to understand this is that the root cause, the root distinction, the root issue between East and West is the role of the Bishop of Rome in the life of the Eastern Church and vice versa. And, as we'll see repeatedly, the issue becomes that the Pope will not succumb or bow to the will or the pressure of those who are the patriarchs of the East. And it all comes to a head in the 11th century. So if that's the political and the ecclesiological context, what were some of these percolating fights? Well, one we've already looked at in our lectures on the Byzantine world. We looked at the trouble of the issue of iconoclasm. Now, let's just look at this as an example or a microcosm of this problem. What we have is the emperor of the east declaring and getting the eastern patriarchs to back his position that they use. of images and icons in the church is itself now to be condemned. Well, the church out west, led by the papacy, said, not in your life. You will not tell us to throw down our art and our images and our statuary that are used to make worship beautiful and that decorate the inner sanctuaries of our churches. In the east, muscling up with the emperor, stress that the church needed to follow suit out in the West, and the church refuses to do so. So that's one. There is another issue, though, between East and West that is frequently cited as a massive theological problem that, again, though, has at root the issue of the authority of the papacy, and that is the controversy over the filioque. The filioque clause, or the filioque controversy, goes all the way back to the Council of Nicaea, though the filioque itself was not written at this time. Those of you who have grown up in the West saying the Nicene Creed in your churches will be accustomed to saying, under the rubric of the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Now that phrase there, and the Son, in Latin is filioque. And just so you understand this, que, the ending there, is something that is attached to just about any word in Latin when you want to add the phrase. and the. So you see the quay ending there is simply just a way of saying and the. Filio is, of course, the root of so many of our modern words that means sun. Filios is the root here. So the phrase filio quay means at the beginning the sun and the ending there and the. So in one word you have the phrase and the sun. Well, in the Western version of the Nicene Creed, there is this affirmation that the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from the Father and the Son. Well, if you were to go to an Eastern church, an Orthodox church of any variety, you will not find the phrase, and the Son, expressed in the Nicene Creed. This issue, in other words, is one of the major theological problems between East and West. It's still debated today, and there's all kinds of... spectrum of positions on this issue, both from the Eastern Church and from the Catholic Church. Well, the issues are is that when the Council of Nicaea met and when Nicaea Constantinople was finished, the original Greek version of the creed simply said that the spirit proceeds from the father. So the image or the theology that is in play here is that you have the father as you might say the source who is eternally begetting the son. and, according to the original creed, from whom proceeds the spirit. Now, there's all kinds of reasons why this is a problem in the West, and we really can't go into every single one of them. First and foremost, though, is the issue that in the West in particular, they are concerned primarily with the subject of Arianism. You'll recall, of course, that Arianism spread quite rapidly in the West, that after it was quashed pretty rigorously in the East, that a number of these Aryans went up into the northern European areas and they converted a number of the Gothic tribes to their faith. Well, if you just look at the mental image, the mental sort of representation of the way the creed could be misunderstood. at least according to the way the West viewed it, is that if you have a father at the top, and from the father there is proceeding the son, being begotten from eternity past, and from the father only you have proceeding the spirit, well, the West is particularly concerned that this is just sort of a closet Arianism, or at least it could be interpreted by Arians to espouse their own teachings on the subject of the lack of divinity, of the creation. the Son and the Spirit. They believe, in other words, you could draw a line and say that the Father is only really God, and he is begetting the Son, and he is the one from whom proceeds the Spirit. Well, sometime around the 6th century, the West began to include in the creed this phrase and the Son. And people always scratched their head. Why would they do this? Why would they add this? Well, the belief was, theologically, And there are all kinds of biblical reasons why they believe this, by the way. I'm just going to give you the historical reasons, the contextual reasons. The biblical reasons are numerous, and I'm not going to simply make this only an issue of historical issues. But the historical issues were that with Arianism afoot in the western part of the world, it made more sense to affirm that because the Father and the Son are equal, therefore, if the Spirit is proceeding from the Father, if there is a procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, that it made sense also theologically to affirm that the Son, being consubstantial with the Father, that from him also proceeds the Spirit. This is the doctrine that is referred to as the double procession of the Spirit. But don't get lost in the jargon. The issue here is the divinity of the Son, as well as a number of verses that people in the West believe champion the fact that the Spirit comes from the Son. Well, as you can imagine, the issues between the East and West are significant on this issue, because you have essentially the West saying, we're going to change the creed. We're going to add to it in order to clarify the theology of the creed in the midst of our context. It was really only a century later, in the 7th century, in fact, that the East began to notice this and began to criticize this vociferously. They found this to be an anathema. The only place that a creed can be formed or changed is in the context of a council. Well, what do you think the West's response to this was? The West responds about this time and thereafter with the simple proclamation that the papacy has so decreed this, and therefore it is good theology because the papacy has led the church and has ratified this by his own authority. He did not need the East in order to allow for this. Again, you'll see the controversy is more about authority and the right to do things between East and West than anything else. And to this day, the vast majority of the opinion hinges on the opinion of whether or not the West had the authority or the right to add the filioque to the confession or the creed from the 4th century. Now, I can stop right now and just give you some of the modern context on this. In the summer of 2004, I was studying in the city of Rome. studying all kinds of things like Roman Catholicism, the Reformation, etc. And because of who I was invited to study with there, I was actually given a ticket to attend a pretty significant event in terms of the history of the church. I didn't know it at the time. I showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, typical seminary student, and I was ushered up onto the dais, believe it or not, sitting with the dignitaries across the way from the College of Cardinals. And the event was important because this was still... the regency of John Paul II. But at this time, the Patriarch of Constantinople had come out, and there had been a number of high-level discussions, as well as some important meetings between these two patriarchs. They came out and did a service together, and there, in 2004, for the first time that I can find record of, the two of them said the creed, the Nicene Creed, together. Only in this case, they said it in the Greek, which is probably why it went unnoticed by a number of people. But they said it in the Greek, and, famously, John Paul II did not say the filioque. And I remember asking the professors of the curriculum that I was taking part in what the significance of this was, and I was told that they had come to some sort of an agreement that when they are together, the Eastern Patriarch and the Pope will agree not to say the filioque. But it was understood that when the West is doing its own liturgy by itself in the Catholic Church, that the filioque will still remain, and that this will not be a massive offense, at least not a principle, to the Eastern Church. Now, I have no way of verifying if that's still in effect or if that was simply the opinions of the professors who taught me. But it was nevertheless the case that in 2004, the Eastern Patriarch, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Pope, for the first time since roughly the 6th century, left the filioque off. But you can see historically that this is the issue. The issue is the West added the filioque, and even if it's theologically and biblically justifiable, The issue becomes one of the East feeling like the West had usurped and overly extended its own authority by altering the creed itself. So in the end, with these contextual issues of the church and the state, as well as the theological underpinnings of the authority of the papacy, it's no wonder then that this fight didn't happen earlier, frankly. Well, it didn't. It happened in the year 1054. Now, how did it happen? Well... As you can imagine, given the tension between East and West, there were always, again, percolating little bubble-ups of fights and accusations from one side or the other. The issue on this side, though, is that there was a man who was the papal advisor to the Byzantine world by the name of Humbert of Silva Candida. Now, Humbert was a well-educated man, extraordinarily well-educated. He had the ear of the pope, and he was his right-hand man theologically. Well, it happens that Humbert was down in the area of Apulia in the Italian peninsula in 1053 when he heard of a letter from Leo, who was Archbishop of Ocrid, one of the Eastern archbishops out in the East. And the letter had arrived in Apulia and it was written in Greek and it condemned a number of practices in the Western church. It condemned the filioque, of course, sort of a standard argument at this point, but it also condemned the West because it practiced the Eucharist with unleavened bread. And Leo, the Eastern Archbishop, alleges that the West had caved to what he called a Judaistic practice of maintaining unleavened bread as part of the Eucharistic service. Well, Humbert hears about this. He's a man who knows Greek himself, and he gets the letter. He translates it, and in a bit of a gossipy kind of way, he runs to the Pope, Pope Leo IX. saying, look what these Easterns have said about you, and what they've said about us. Not surprisingly, the Pope was incensed, and he sends a letter back. This time, he sends it to the Patriarch Michael I, sometimes referred to as Michael Cellularius. And it all comes to a head when Humbert and some others are sent as a delegation to the city of Constantinople, in an effort to smooth this out. Now, Humbert and others are in no mood to compromise, but... Not surprisingly, Michael I was not in a position to compromise either. And really what happens in 1054 is you have two egomaniacs throwing temper tantrums at each other, and as a result, sundering the church. Humbert and his entourage arrive in 1054, and Michael, to kind of put them in their place, refuses to see them for a number of weeks. And this is a typical move by diplomats of all kinds, all throughout the centuries. Which is if someone comes to meet with you, if you really want to show them who's boss, you don't tell them off. Usually what you do is you make them sit and wait. Humbert, of course, is incensed by this. He finds this to be an affront, both to his own personal dignity as well as to the dignity of the Pope. When Michael and Humbert do eventually meet, they eventually get into a shouting match over these issues between the East and the West. Now, again, the issue is the authority of the papacy. It's not necessarily with all these ticky-tack issues. Of course, it's a bit insulting to say that these are ticky-tack issues. But the issue is, is Humbert there to assert the authority of the papacy, and Michael, as patriarch of Constantinople, is not willing to hear it. And, in the end, on Easter Sunday, 1054, while Michael is in Hagia Sophia performing the vigil for the Easter service, Humbert marches in and slaps a bowl of excommunication down on the altar, thereby excommunicating Michael. for his insolence. As you can imagine, Michael eventually does the same thing to the entourage, to Humbert and to others. And if you can believe it, that action, the double excommunication of each other in 1054 was the cause of the Great Schism. Now, to clarify, no one in his time believed that it was a de facto schism that was going to last for nearly a millennia. By and large, most people in both the East and West would have seen this as a couple of egomaniacs duking it out with each other. But, as the centuries wore on... And as the Crusades get launched, and as East and West come actually at one point in the Fourth Crusade to attacking each other, the schism started by two men throwing a tantrum eventually became a fixed reality of the separation between the East and the West.

Another name that's often used is the Byzantine Church, which again is a misnomer. It simply locates the epicenter of the Orthodox Church entirely in the Byzantine lands, out in Asia Minor, and in particular in the former city of Constantinople, which is the modern-day Istanbul. I often joke that if it weren't for that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza attempts to convert to Latvian Orthodox, that many people would be unaware that there is a denomination or a branch of the church known as the Orthodox Church. Well, this needs to be fixed. We need to have an awareness of the wide-ranging and significant development within the church away from the Catholic Church that arose in the Middle Ages.

Orthodox Church is actually the second largest single-unit church in the entirety of the world. The Orthodox Church numbers somewhere around 250 million people. Now, that number needs some context. There are roughly two and a half billion Christians in the world, somewhere in the There are roughly 800 million Protestants in the world today.

But of course, trying to label all of Protestantism as the same is a bit of a challenge, given that you have everything from high church Anglican and Lutheran, all the way down through Methodist and Presbyterian, and all the way to the end with Anabaptist and a number of other non-denominational churches in the world today. So when we say that the Orthodox Church is the second largest single church, what we mean by that is that it's the second largest church that self-identifies as one body. And at 250 million people, it is a vitally important church in the world.

And it's even more important given that so much of the Orthodox Church today is located in regions that are quite hostile at times, at least in the modern world, to the Christian church itself. Well, the natural question is, how did this church come about? How did this branch that calls itself the Orthodox Church come to reside in a place that is different from both the Catholic Church and subsequently the Protestant Church? Well, the answer is the Great Schism, the Great Schism of 1054. And so in this lecture, we're going to be looking at the Great Schism. We're going to determine what caused it and then look at some of the implications of this schism all the way down until today.

And we can begin with vocabulary because there are a number of schisms throughout the centuries, particularly in the Middle Ages, that sometimes are called the Great Schism, or at least for the first student coming to this period of time. can feel as if they all kind of jumble up together. When people refer to the Great Schism, very often what they have in mind is this schism from 1054. The Great Schism is the time when the Catholic Church, the Western Church, sundered from the Eastern Church, which would later be identified as the Orthodox Church. Now that is to be distinguished, obviously, from papal schisms, which we'll have a lecture on in a later lecture, which unfortunately...

historians sometimes call the Great Schism as well. Now, ideally, historians will call this the Great Papal Schism and not simply the Great Schism itself. But you have to be aware that when we're referring to the Great Schism, we're referring to the separation of Catholic and Eastern churches.

And in our lectures on the Crusades, we did make mention of the schism. When the Crusades got underway, the first one in the 1090s, we mentioned that there was already a schism between East and West. that complicated the issue and made it quite tense between both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Church.

Well, now we want to double back and get a running start at just what this schism was. There are a number of factors that led to the separation between the East and the West. Some are political, some are theological. And some just simply have to do with the bozos that were running the show at the time.

And we're going to go through all three of these in this order. First of all, the political issues that were in play. As we've seen throughout a number of lectures, coming out of the Constantinian world, the Christian world saw itself politically as a united empire. This was the heritage of Constantine.

He had united East and West. He had put it under the banner of Christ. Even if we deny, though we're not going to do this, but even if we deny that Constantine was actually a committed Christian, still, the Constantinian revolution paved the way for the ongoing Christianization of the empire. And for centuries after Constantine, the church saw itself as a united front. When we looked at the Byzantine world, for example, we commented on how those who were in the Byzantine world would not have called themselves anything but Roman, at least not in the first several centuries after Constantine comes to the throne, if not quite a bit thereafter.

And there are a number of ways that this sort of presented itself. First and foremost was for centuries, down until roughly the 8th or 9th century, there was this tension between the Byzantine emperor, the emperor over Constantine and Opal, who was, at least in terms of the heritage, believed by some, particularly those in the east, to also be emperor over the West. And just as in the Byzantine world, those who are patriarchs, in particular the patriarch of Constantinople, the primary seat of the Byzantine church for centuries, and even until today, it was customary for the Eastern emperor to at least give his vote of approval whenever someone was appointed to the chair or to the office of a patriarch or to a primary bishop. And what many people don't realize is that for a number of years, for centuries, the papacy actually had to be approved in name by the Eastern Emperor. Now, this rarely created much problem.

At times it did, but it rarely created this real strong problem where someone wanted to be pope or someone was elected to be pope, and the Eastern Emperor simply denied this. By and large, it was rubber-stamped. But all the way until roughly the beginning of the... the...

real serious Middle Ages, in particular after the time of Charlemagne, it was still considered to be appropriate for the papacy to be ratified or approved by the Eastern Emperor. Well, what happens over the course of the early Middle Ages and on into the high Middle Ages is the papacy, in particular, is not comfortable with always answering to the Eastern Emperor. All the way back in around the 5th or the 6th century. What you see happen is the papacy beginning to assert some of its own independence.

Now, none of this is controversial in the major sense of that word. It doesn't create massive friction or schism. There are only a number of cases where there is actually a real tussle as to who is in charge, papacy or the East.

But it is an issue. And in fact, as we've seen, when the Pope, when Leo, coronates Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800, 800. There is a conscientious move in the West for the papacy to coronate his own emperor that was over the western half of what was formerly Constantine's world. Now, by and large, the Eastern Emperor looked on this with suspicion. He knew what was afoot. He knew that what was going on here and what would continue for some time is the disentangling of the empire from East and West.

But by and large, this was the Pope's move. The West wanted to go its own way. It wanted to have its own autonomous authority in a manner of speaking.

And though the ideal was always for East and West to be united as one Christendom, the fact of the matter is that this was nearly impossible, given the complexities of life in the Middle Ages. Not only was there a language barrier, with the East primarily speaking Greek, and with the West increasingly speaking only Latin, but there were cultural issues, and issues of communication, and issues of real political authority and influence over these areas of the West. No matter how much the Eastern Emperor claimed to be over all of Christendom, it was simply impossible for him or her ever to exert enough authority over these regions to claim them as their own.

And this really comes to a head in 962, after a famous battle, the Battle of Letchfield. In this battle, Some of the heirs to the Charlemagne regions rose up and there was founded what's called the Autonian dynasty. And this is the dynasty of Otto himself, the great emperor who would claim, just as Charlemagne had before, the title Holy Roman Emperor. Now, when Otto comes to the throne, this title, Holy Roman Emperor, takes on a new significance and a new depth of meaning in the self-identity of the West as its own entity and its own Christendom, apart from the Eastern world. Part of what's driving this is simply the fact that the West wants to go its own way.

But also, what's driving this is the fact that in so many of the lands out East, in Asia Minor, Down in Palestine and in North Africa, the Arab conquest and expansion had at least severed any Christian identity or any connection between the Christians of the West with these other regions. And so, in a number of ways, the West simply says, that's it. There is now a Holy Roman Emperor, and he is here in the West, and his name is Otto.

And following on that, in 1049, Otto's successor, Henry III, has appointed to the papacy Leo IX, who will be pope during the schism. Now, in this day, of course, politics and church government are not all that separate. They are separate in terms of theme or in terms of their influence.

But this is not a world of separation of church and state. And so it's no surprise then that there's an analogy between the tension that is going on between the emperor of the East and the rise and the cementing. of the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire, in the government of the church itself. A fundamental difference between the way the East understands authority in the church and the way the West was beginning to really significantly understand the power of the papacy really hinges again on this separation between East and West. If you were to find an Eastern Orthodox person either in this point in the Middle Ages, and frankly even until today, Their model of government is not to have a single papacy or a single pope over the entirety of their church.

This is one of the great myths that's often out there, which is that the patriarch of Constantinople is somehow pope of the entire Orthodox Church. Rather, what happens in the Eastern Church is they believe that there are principal patriarchies that are governed by someone who is sometimes called the pope, but who with the other patriarchs rules in a collaborative unity with each other. Now, the legacy of this argument goes all the way back to the Constantinople Council, the second great ecumenical council.

It was at that council where there was appointed and named five principal seats or bishops who have a preeminence within the church that is to be considered at least first among equals, though increasingly it became superior. to the other bishoprics in the Christendom world. And at that time, it was Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. Now, the two big ones here, obviously, are Constantinople and Rome.

The papacy actually, at this time, resisted the idea that Constantinople would be made a de facto patriarch or de facto leading bishop that was seen to be at least coterminous, if not equal, with that of the papacy. In other words, from the Eastern perspective, from the Orthodox perspective, the Bishop of Rome is a significant seat of power. Their perspective, though, as the Middle Ages continued on, and again, even down until today, is that the Bishop of Rome is one of these patriarchs.

He is part of their band of brothers, even if he has first chair, even if he has primary voice. even if he leads in some ways in a way that the others do not, at least in terms of first among equals. In the Orthodox Church, the Bishop of Rome is simply one of these patriarchs. In this case, he is the Patriarch of the West.

Constantinople is patriarch over Constantinople and its regions, so on and so forth. Now, that might help you understand some of where the Orthodox Church has come down to the modern period. Because if you look around the modern Orthodox Church, You'll find a number of patriarchs, as they're called.

For example, the Russian patriarch, who is considered to be yet another, a new patriarch, who is the lead bishop over a given region, in this case, Russia. Now, this is the kernel of the fight. All the theological and historical squabbles that go on between East and West, frankly, always have at their root, right at the core, the distinction and the division over the issue of where the Pope or the Bishop of Rome fits in with these other patriarchs. Just about every issue, just about every fight seemingly comes down to the issue of, does the Pope have to answer to the will of the body, the will of the other patriarchs? Can he be checked?

Or does he have supremacy and the other patriarchs out east need to therefore listen to the will of the pope? And I think that's important to realize as the real root cause of this schism. Because we're going to notice that there are a number of fights and things that percolate up to the surface over the centuries that tend to be cited as the real cause or at least the beginning of the cause of the schism. The problem, though, is that many of these fights occur hundreds and hundreds of years before the schism itself. Rather, a better way to understand this is that the root cause, the root distinction, the root issue between East and West is the role of the Bishop of Rome in the life of the Eastern Church and vice versa.

And, as we'll see repeatedly, the issue becomes that the Pope will not succumb or bow to the will or the pressure of those who are the patriarchs of the East. And it all comes to a head in the 11th century. So if that's the political and the ecclesiological context, what were some of these percolating fights? Well, one we've already looked at in our lectures on the Byzantine world.

We looked at the trouble of the issue of iconoclasm. Now, let's just look at this as an example or a microcosm of this problem. What we have is the emperor of the east declaring and getting the eastern patriarchs to back his position that they use. of images and icons in the church is itself now to be condemned. Well, the church out west, led by the papacy, said, not in your life.

You will not tell us to throw down our art and our images and our statuary that are used to make worship beautiful and that decorate the inner sanctuaries of our churches. In the east, muscling up with the emperor, stress that the church needed to follow suit out in the West, and the church refuses to do so. So that's one.

There is another issue, though, between East and West that is frequently cited as a massive theological problem that, again, though, has at root the issue of the authority of the papacy, and that is the controversy over the filioque. The filioque clause, or the filioque controversy, goes all the way back to the Council of Nicaea, though the filioque itself was not written at this time. Those of you who have grown up in the West saying the Nicene Creed in your churches will be accustomed to saying, under the rubric of the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Now that phrase there, and the Son, in Latin is filioque. And just so you understand this, que, the ending there, is something that is attached to just about any word in Latin when you want to add the phrase. and the.

So you see the quay ending there is simply just a way of saying and the. Filio is, of course, the root of so many of our modern words that means sun. Filios is the root here. So the phrase filio quay means at the beginning the sun and the ending there and the. So in one word you have the phrase and the sun.

Well, in the Western version of the Nicene Creed, there is this affirmation that the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from the Father and the Son. Well, if you were to go to an Eastern church, an Orthodox church of any variety, you will not find the phrase, and the Son, expressed in the Nicene Creed. This issue, in other words, is one of the major theological problems between East and West. It's still debated today, and there's all kinds of... spectrum of positions on this issue, both from the Eastern Church and from the Catholic Church.

Well, the issues are is that when the Council of Nicaea met and when Nicaea Constantinople was finished, the original Greek version of the creed simply said that the spirit proceeds from the father. So the image or the theology that is in play here is that you have the father as you might say the source who is eternally begetting the son. and, according to the original creed, from whom proceeds the spirit.

Now, there's all kinds of reasons why this is a problem in the West, and we really can't go into every single one of them. First and foremost, though, is the issue that in the West in particular, they are concerned primarily with the subject of Arianism. You'll recall, of course, that Arianism spread quite rapidly in the West, that after it was quashed pretty rigorously in the East, that a number of these Aryans went up into the northern European areas and they converted a number of the Gothic tribes to their faith.

Well, if you just look at the mental image, the mental sort of representation of the way the creed could be misunderstood. at least according to the way the West viewed it, is that if you have a father at the top, and from the father there is proceeding the son, being begotten from eternity past, and from the father only you have proceeding the spirit, well, the West is particularly concerned that this is just sort of a closet Arianism, or at least it could be interpreted by Arians to espouse their own teachings on the subject of the lack of divinity, of the creation. the Son and the Spirit. They believe, in other words, you could draw a line and say that the Father is only really God, and he is begetting the Son, and he is the one from whom proceeds the Spirit.

Well, sometime around the 6th century, the West began to include in the creed this phrase and the Son. And people always scratched their head. Why would they do this? Why would they add this? Well, the belief was, theologically, And there are all kinds of biblical reasons why they believe this, by the way.

I'm just going to give you the historical reasons, the contextual reasons. The biblical reasons are numerous, and I'm not going to simply make this only an issue of historical issues. But the historical issues were that with Arianism afoot in the western part of the world, it made more sense to affirm that because the Father and the Son are equal, therefore, if the Spirit is proceeding from the Father, if there is a procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, that it made sense also theologically to affirm that the Son, being consubstantial with the Father, that from him also proceeds the Spirit. This is the doctrine that is referred to as the double procession of the Spirit. But don't get lost in the jargon.

The issue here is the divinity of the Son, as well as a number of verses that people in the West believe champion the fact that the Spirit comes from the Son. Well, as you can imagine, the issues between the East and West are significant on this issue, because you have essentially the West saying, we're going to change the creed. We're going to add to it in order to clarify the theology of the creed in the midst of our context. It was really only a century later, in the 7th century, in fact, that the East began to notice this and began to criticize this vociferously. They found this to be an anathema.

The only place that a creed can be formed or changed is in the context of a council. Well, what do you think the West's response to this was? The West responds about this time and thereafter with the simple proclamation that the papacy has so decreed this, and therefore it is good theology because the papacy has led the church and has ratified this by his own authority.

He did not need the East in order to allow for this. Again, you'll see the controversy is more about authority and the right to do things between East and West than anything else. And to this day, the vast majority of the opinion hinges on the opinion of whether or not the West had the authority or the right to add the filioque to the confession or the creed from the 4th century.

Now, I can stop right now and just give you some of the modern context on this. In the summer of 2004, I was studying in the city of Rome. studying all kinds of things like Roman Catholicism, the Reformation, etc. And because of who I was invited to study with there, I was actually given a ticket to attend a pretty significant event in terms of the history of the church.

I didn't know it at the time. I showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, typical seminary student, and I was ushered up onto the dais, believe it or not, sitting with the dignitaries across the way from the College of Cardinals. And the event was important because this was still... the regency of John Paul II.

But at this time, the Patriarch of Constantinople had come out, and there had been a number of high-level discussions, as well as some important meetings between these two patriarchs. They came out and did a service together, and there, in 2004, for the first time that I can find record of, the two of them said the creed, the Nicene Creed, together. Only in this case, they said it in the Greek, which is probably why it went unnoticed by a number of people.

But they said it in the Greek, and, famously, John Paul II did not say the filioque. And I remember asking the professors of the curriculum that I was taking part in what the significance of this was, and I was told that they had come to some sort of an agreement that when they are together, the Eastern Patriarch and the Pope will agree not to say the filioque. But it was understood that when the West is doing its own liturgy by itself in the Catholic Church, that the filioque will still remain, and that this will not be a massive offense, at least not a principle, to the Eastern Church. Now, I have no way of verifying if that's still in effect or if that was simply the opinions of the professors who taught me. But it was nevertheless the case that in 2004, the Eastern Patriarch, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Pope, for the first time since roughly the 6th century, left the filioque off.

But you can see historically that this is the issue. The issue is the West added the filioque, and even if it's theologically and biblically justifiable, The issue becomes one of the East feeling like the West had usurped and overly extended its own authority by altering the creed itself. So in the end, with these contextual issues of the church and the state, as well as the theological underpinnings of the authority of the papacy, it's no wonder then that this fight didn't happen earlier, frankly.

Well, it didn't. It happened in the year 1054. Now, how did it happen? Well... As you can imagine, given the tension between East and West, there were always, again, percolating little bubble-ups of fights and accusations from one side or the other.

The issue on this side, though, is that there was a man who was the papal advisor to the Byzantine world by the name of Humbert of Silva Candida. Now, Humbert was a well-educated man, extraordinarily well-educated. He had the ear of the pope, and he was his right-hand man theologically. Well, it happens that Humbert was down in the area of Apulia in the Italian peninsula in 1053 when he heard of a letter from Leo, who was Archbishop of Ocrid, one of the Eastern archbishops out in the East.

And the letter had arrived in Apulia and it was written in Greek and it condemned a number of practices in the Western church. It condemned the filioque, of course, sort of a standard argument at this point, but it also condemned the West because it practiced the Eucharist with unleavened bread. And Leo, the Eastern Archbishop, alleges that the West had caved to what he called a Judaistic practice of maintaining unleavened bread as part of the Eucharistic service.

Well, Humbert hears about this. He's a man who knows Greek himself, and he gets the letter. He translates it, and in a bit of a gossipy kind of way, he runs to the Pope, Pope Leo IX. saying, look what these Easterns have said about you, and what they've said about us.

Not surprisingly, the Pope was incensed, and he sends a letter back. This time, he sends it to the Patriarch Michael I, sometimes referred to as Michael Cellularius. And it all comes to a head when Humbert and some others are sent as a delegation to the city of Constantinople, in an effort to smooth this out. Now, Humbert and others are in no mood to compromise, but... Not surprisingly, Michael I was not in a position to compromise either.

And really what happens in 1054 is you have two egomaniacs throwing temper tantrums at each other, and as a result, sundering the church. Humbert and his entourage arrive in 1054, and Michael, to kind of put them in their place, refuses to see them for a number of weeks. And this is a typical move by diplomats of all kinds, all throughout the centuries.

Which is if someone comes to meet with you, if you really want to show them who's boss, you don't tell them off. Usually what you do is you make them sit and wait. Humbert, of course, is incensed by this. He finds this to be an affront, both to his own personal dignity as well as to the dignity of the Pope. When Michael and Humbert do eventually meet, they eventually get into a shouting match over these issues between the East and the West.

Now, again, the issue is the authority of the papacy. It's not necessarily with all these ticky-tack issues. Of course, it's a bit insulting to say that these are ticky-tack issues. But the issue is, is Humbert there to assert the authority of the papacy, and Michael, as patriarch of Constantinople, is not willing to hear it.

And, in the end, on Easter Sunday, 1054, while Michael is in Hagia Sophia performing the vigil for the Easter service, Humbert marches in and slaps a bowl of excommunication down on the altar, thereby excommunicating Michael. for his insolence. As you can imagine, Michael eventually does the same thing to the entourage, to Humbert and to others.

And if you can believe it, that action, the double excommunication of each other in 1054 was the cause of the Great Schism. Now, to clarify, no one in his time believed that it was a de facto schism that was going to last for nearly a millennia. By and large, most people in both the East and West would have seen this as a couple of egomaniacs duking it out with each other.

But, as the centuries wore on... And as the Crusades get launched, and as East and West come actually at one point in the Fourth Crusade to attacking each other, the schism started by two men throwing a tantrum eventually became a fixed reality of the separation between the East and the West.

Transcript for:Understanding the Great Schism in Christianity

Transcript for:
Understanding the Great Schism in Christianity