The Great Schism of 1054

It is the tidiest date in Church history, and almost everything about it is misleading. On the afternoon of Saturday 16 July 1054, as the clergy of Hagia Sophia were preparing for the Liturgy, three legates from Rome walked up the nave, laid a document on the altar, shook the dust from their feet at the door, and left the city. The document excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople. It is remembered as the moment the Christian Church split in two. It was not that moment, the men who wrote it had no authority to do so, and hardly anyone at the time thought it especially important.

What actually happened that Saturday

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The legation had been sent by Pope Leo IX, a genuinely holy and reforming pope, to settle a quarrel in southern Italy, where Greek and Latin churches lived side by side and the Normans were conquering everything. It was led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, an able man with a short temper and no Greek to speak of, and it was sent to Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who had recently closed the Latin churches of the capital because they used unleavened bread at the Liturgy. Neither side was in a mood to be persuaded.

Then the Pope died — on 19 April 1054, three months before the legates acted. A legation’s authority dies with the pope who sent it. By the letter of the law the bull Humbert laid on the altar was worth nothing at all: it was issued in the name of a dead man by men who were, at that moment, private persons.

The bull itself is a wild document. It accuses the Greeks of selling holy orders, of re-baptising Latins, of letting their priests marry, of “omitting the Filioque from the Creed” — which is exactly backwards, since it was Rome that had added it — and of a string of customs that have nothing to do with the faith. It excommunicates Cerularius and his supporters by name. It does not excommunicate the Eastern Church, and it could not have.

The synod of Constantinople replied on 24 July by anathematising the legates — again, the men, not the Church of Rome, and not the Pope, who was dead and whose name they were careful to leave out. Two groups of churchmen had excommunicated each other. It had happened before, several times, and each time it had been patched up.

Why nobody called it the Great Schism

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Because at the time it was not one. The chroniclers give it a line or two. Communion between Greeks and Latins went on in many places for another century and a half; there were Latin monasteries on Mount Athos into the twelfth century; Greek and Latin clergy served in the same cities in Italy and the Holy Land; there was correspondence, and marriage between the imperial houses, and in 1095 the Emperor in Constantinople asked the Pope for military help and got the First Crusade.

The word “schism” for 1054 is a later tidy-up. Historians now put the real separation somewhere in the following two centuries, and if a single event has to be named, it is not 1054 at all. But the ground had been shifting for a very long time before either date.

The slow causes: two worlds

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The first cause is the least theological and the most important: the two halves of the Roman world stopped being able to talk to each other. Until about the sixth century educated men in both halves knew both languages. Then they did not. By the ninth century a Greek bishop could not read Augustine and a Latin bishop could not read the Cappadocians, and each side formed its mind on half the Fathers while assuming it had them all.

Misunderstanding then becomes almost automatic. The Latin word persona and the Greek word hypostasis do not quite line up; processio is broader than the Greek ekporeusis, which means procession from an ultimate source — so a Latin could say “the Spirit proceeds from the Son” meaning something a Greek could accept, and a Greek would hear him claiming two first causes in God. A great deal of the Filioque dispute is of this kind, and a great deal of it is not.

The second cause is political, and it has a date: Christmas Day, 800, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans in St Peter’s. There already was an Emperor of the Romans; he was in Constantinople and he was not consulted. From that day the West had its own empire, and Rome had a protector who was not the Byzantine emperor, and the two halves of Christendom had separate political skies over them.

It is Charlemagne’s theologians, not Rome, who pressed the Filioque hardest — partly as a stick to beat the Greeks with. Pope Leo III agreed with the doctrine and refused to change the Creed, and had the original text engraved on silver shields in St Peter’s to keep it safe. Rome did not sing the addition until 1014.

The Filioque

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The Creed of the councils says that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father”. In Spain in the sixth century, in local use against Arian Goths, the words Filioque — “and from the Son” — were added. The addition spread through Gaul, was adopted by the Franks, and in 1014 was sung at an imperial coronation in Rome itself.

The Orthodox objection has two parts, and they are worth keeping separate because they are answered differently.

The first is about authority: the Creed is the text of an ecumenical council, and the Third Council forbade the composing of another. No local Church, and no bishop however senior, may alter the confession of the whole Church by himself. Whatever the merits of the doctrine, the manner of its introduction was an act of unilateral authority — which is why the Filioque and the papal question are really one question wearing two hats.

The second is about the doctrine itself. In the Orthodox understanding the Father is the single source within the Trinity: the Son is begotten of him and the Spirit proceeds from him. Say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, and you have either given the Trinity two sources or made the Father and the Son into a single undifferentiated cause — and in either case, the Greeks argued, you have made the Spirit somehow less personal, the bond between the other two rather than one of the Three.

St Photios, patriarch in the 860s and again in the 870s, put this case at length, and the dispute of his time — over the church in Bulgaria, over his own election, over the addition — is where the two halves of Christendom first argued as strangers rather than as brothers.

The papacy

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Every Orthodox Christian accepts that the bishop of Rome held the first place in the ancient Church. The councils say so. The East appealed to Rome repeatedly, and was glad of Leo’s Tome at Chalcedon and of Rome’s steadiness under the Arians and the iconoclasts. The question is what first place means.

In the Orthodox reading, first place is a primacy of honour and of initiative within a communion of equal bishops — the president of a council, not its sovereign; the one who convenes and arbitrates and speaks for the whole, but who is himself under the council and under the faith. A patriarch who errs may be corrected, and several were.

What developed in the West from the eleventh century onward — and was defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870 — is different in kind: a universal, immediate and ordinary jurisdiction over every diocese on earth, and a personal infallibility when the Pope defines doctrine, which does not depend on the consent of the Church. That is the substantive difference between the two communions today, and it is a larger one than the Filioque.

The quarrels about bread and beards

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It is easy to laugh at the list of grievances the eleventh century actually argued about, and worth resisting the urge, because the list tells you what the estrangement felt like from the inside. When two Churches have stopped trusting each other, every difference of custom starts to look like evidence.

The sharpest was the azymes — unleavened bread. The West had come to use it, on the reasoning that the Last Supper was a Passover meal; the East used and uses leavened bread, arguing that the risen loaf is the proper image of the risen Body and that the Gospel of John puts the Supper before the Passover. Cerularius treated Latin practice as invalidating the Eucharist itself, which is why he closed their churches, and it was the presenting issue of the whole crisis of 1054.

Then married clergy: the East ordains married men to the priesthood and always has, taking its bishops from among monks; the reforming West was in those very decades enforcing celibacy on all clergy, and its reformers found Greek practice scandalous. Then fasting on Saturdays, which the West did in Lent and the East forbids outside Holy Saturday. Then beards, which Greek clergy wore and Latin clergy shaved. Then the singing of Alleluia in Lent. Humbert’s bull mentions most of these with as much heat as it gives to the Creed.

One difference on the list is not trivial at all, and it is still there: the epiclesis, the prayer calling down the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. Every Eastern liturgy has one and the East understands the consecration to be the work of the whole anaphora, completed by that invocation; the medieval West located the change precisely in Christ’s own words, “This is my body”, and its ancient Roman canon has no epiclesis of that shape. That is a real difference about how God acts in the sacrament, and it belongs on the short list rather than the long one.

1204: the wound that did not heal

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In the spring of 1204 the Fourth Crusade, diverted from Egypt by debt and Venetian politics and a Byzantine succession dispute, took Constantinople by assault and sacked it for three days.

The altar of Hagia Sophia was broken up for its silver; a prostitute was seated on the patriarch’s throne and sang while soldiers drank from the chalices; relics and manuscripts and the bronze horses of the Hippodrome were shipped west. A Latin emperor was installed in the city, and a Latin patriarch in the cathedral, and they stayed for fifty-seven years. Pope Innocent III, who had forbidden the attack, wrote in fury to his legate that the Greeks now saw in the Latins nothing but perdition and the works of darkness, and rightly detested them worse than dogs.

This is the hinge. Before 1204 the quarrel was between hierarchs and could have been settled by hierarchs. After 1204 it was between peoples, and no document could reach it. Ask an Orthodox historian when the Church divided and you will usually be given this date, not the other.

Two attempts at union, and one bishop’s signature

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There were two serious attempts to put it back. At Lyons in 1274 the Emperor Michael VIII, needing western help against Charles of Anjou, sent envoys to accept the papal terms. The union was proclaimed; his own Church refused it; his sister is said to have remarked that it were better her brother’s empire should perish than the faith. It collapsed at his death.

At Ferrara and Florence, 1438–39, the attempt was far more serious. The Emperor came in person with the Patriarch and a large delegation of bishops and scholars, and they debated for months — the Filioque, purgatory, the azymes, the papacy. Exhausted, frightened of the Turks, far from home and living on Italian charity, the Greeks signed.

All but one. St Mark of Ephesus refused to put his name to the act, on the ground that the additions were innovations and that a union which papered over them was not a union but a surrender. When the Pope was told that Mark had not signed, he is reported to have said: “Then we have accomplished nothing.” He was right. The bishops who signed repudiated it on reaching home; the people would not accept it; and the Orthodox Church commemorates Mark of Ephesus as a saint on the nineteenth of January.

The union was proclaimed in Hagia Sophia in December 1452. Five months later the city fell.

Since then

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For four centuries the Orthodox East lived under Ottoman rule and the conversation largely stopped. It resumed in the twentieth century, and on 5 January 1964 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras met and embraced on the Mount of Olives — the first meeting of a Pope and an Ecumenical Patriarch since Florence. On 7 December 1965, simultaneously in Rome and in the Phanar, they declared the anathemas of 1054 removed from the memory of the Church.

It is important to be exact about what that did and did not do. It lifted two personal excommunications pronounced by and upon men nine centuries dead. It did not restore communion, and it was not meant to. The Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches are not in communion today: their members do not receive the Eucharist at one another’s altars, and the doctrinal questions — the Filioque, the nature of papal authority, and a set of later Western definitions the East has never received — are exactly where they were.

What actually stands between us now

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If a Roman Catholic neighbour asks what the difference is, the honest answer is not “bread and beards”. It is a short list, and it has grown since 1054 because the West went on defining things that the East was not there to receive.

The Filioque, treated above — both the doctrine and, at least as much, the right of one part of the Church to alter the Creed of all of it.

The papacy — universal immediate jurisdiction and personal infallibility, defined in 1870. This is the largest single item, and everything else tends to come back to it: an authority that can define without the consent of the Church is precisely what the Orthodox mean by the absence of conciliarity.

Purgatory — the East prays fervently for the departed and holds that their state may be helped by those prayers, but it has never accepted a defined place of satisfactory punishment, nor the accounting of merit and temporal penalty that grew up around it, nor indulgences. This was debated at length at Florence and was not resolved.

The Immaculate Conception, defined in 1854 — that the Mother of God was preserved from original sin at her conception. The Orthodox honour her above every creature and do not teach this, chiefly because the East has never held the Western doctrine of inherited guilt that the definition is designed to answer. What we inherit from Adam is mortality and its consequences, not his guilt — so there is nothing for the definition to exempt her from.

Created and uncreated grace — the least discussed and arguably the deepest. Following St Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, the Orthodox hold that what we receive in grace is God himself in his uncreated energies, not a created gift; the whole doctrine of deification depends on it, and much Western theology has understood grace differently. A reader who wants to know why Orthodox spiritual writing sounds so unlike Western spiritual writing is usually standing at the edge of this question.

How to hold this

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Two temptations face an Orthodox Christian reading this history, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is triumph — the satisfaction of having been right. It is worth remembering that the Greeks at Florence were not villains but frightened men trying to save a city, that the Latins who sacked Constantinople were excommunicated by their own Pope for it, and that on both sides the schism was largely the work of the confident and the well-connected, while the saints on both sides were mostly trying to prevent it.

The second is indifference — the idea that since we are all Christians the whole thing is a historical misunderstanding best ignored. But Christ prayed that his disciples might be one, and a divided Church is a standing failure of that prayer. Nobody who takes John 17 seriously can be relaxed about this.

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

John 17:21

What is left is neither triumph nor indifference but something more patient: to hold the faith of the councils without subtraction, to be truthful about our own side’s failures, to treat our Western neighbours as people to be loved rather than arguments to be won, and to pray at every Liturgy — as the Church does pray — for the union of all.