The Schism of 1054

The gravest and most lasting of Christian divisions separated the Latin West, gathered around Rome, and the Greek East, gathered around Constantinople. It did not happen in a day: it ripened over centuries, before being consummated in 1054, then sealed thereafter. Even today, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches bear its wound.

A Long Estrangement

East and West had gradually become strangers to each other. Language first separated them: Greek was spoken in the East, Latin in the West, and they soon ceased to read one another. Politics also drew them apart: the Empire had split, the West falling into the hands of the new peoples while the East continued, brilliant and learned, under the name of the Byzantine Empire; and when the pope crowned Charlemagne emperor, Constantinople saw in it the affront of a rival. Customs, piety, the way of thinking the faith diverged. The two halves remained one single Church, but already lived like two worlds.

The Question of Authority

The deepest cause touched the government of the Church. The West held that the pope, successor of Peter, has over the whole Church an authority willed by Christ, and not a mere honor. The East venerated Rome as the first of the sees, but conceived the Church as a body of Churches governed together by their patriarchs and their councils; it refused the pope a direct power over all. Two visions thus faced each other: that of one single Church, held in unity by the see of Peter, and that of a communion of sister Churches with no single head on earth. This disagreement, more than any other, made the rupture possible.

The Filioque

To this was added a quarrel of doctrine. The Creed confessed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. To affirm better that the Son is truly God, the West made precise that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, which a single Latin word, Filioque, sums up. The East took offense doubly: because the common Creed had been modified without it, and because some saw in it an error. The quarrel was not new: as early as the ninth century, the patriarch Photius of Constantinople had raised it against Rome, in a first schism soon healed, but which had left the wound open. For the Catholic Church, this formula states a truth: the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, the Father and the Son being but one single principle of his coming forth. Other disputes, such as leavened or unleavened bread for the Eucharist, further embittered the quarrel.

The Rupture of 1054

In 1054, a delegation sent by pope Leo IX and led by cardinal Humbert came to Constantinople to treat of the disputes. The tone rose between the legates and the patriarch Michael Cerularius. One day, the legates laid on the altar of the great church of Hagia Sophia a sentence of excommunication against the patriarch, who excommunicated them in turn. Leo IX had nevertheless died some months earlier, so that his legates had struck without still holding the authority they invoked, which weakened all the more the juridical force of their act. At the moment, this outburst seemed to be but one quarrel more, of the kind already overcome. In reality, it opened a breach that would never again close.

Above all, these anathemas struck persons, not Churches. Humbert had excommunicated by name Michael Cerularius and those who supported him; the patriarch in turn condemned the legates alone. Neither Rome nor Constantinople was cut off as such. This too is why the schism never had a truly clear date: nothing, on that day, formally separated the two Churches.

A Wound That Remains

What engraved the separation in hearts came afterward. In 1204, Latin crusaders took and sacked Constantinople: the Greeks never forgot it. The attempts at reunion, at the councils of Lyon and then of Florence, failed. Since then, Christendom is divided into two great bodies: the Catholic Church, united to Rome, and the Orthodox Churches. They keep the same Creed, the same sacraments, the same bishops descended from the apostles; the division therefore does not bear on the whole faith, but it is real, for full communion is broken. In 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, pope Paul VI and the patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras together lifted the excommunications of 1054 and erased them from the memory of the Church. The separation remains, but the dialogue has resumed. The Catholic Church holds this rupture to be a wound in the side of the Body of Christ, and labors and prays without ceasing that all may be one.

This prayer is that of Christ himself, on the eve of his death, for his own and for those who would believe through them: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you; that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me” John 17:21.

Rome then set on the throne of Constantinople a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch, while the Greek emperor and patriarch went into exile at Nicaea. For more than half a century, until 1261, the Greeks lived under a Latin hierarchy imposed by arms. What 1054 had not accomplished in hearts, 1204 engraved.

These reunions were in fact concluded. At Lyon in 1274, then at Florence in 1439, the emperors and bishops of the East signed the union; at Florence it was even acknowledged that the Latin “and the Son” and the Greek “through the Son” confessed one and the same faith. But the accord, wrung under the pressure of the need for aid against the Turks, was rejected on their return by the Greek clergy and people, and the union of Florence died out when Constantinople fell to the Turks, in 1453.