From the time of Diotrephes (3 John 1:9-10) there have been continual schisms, most of which arose in the East. Arianism produced an enormous schism; the Nestorian and Monophysite schisms still endure. However, the Eastern Schism has always meant that most deplorable quarrel whose final result was the separation of the vast majority of Eastern Christians from union with the Catholic Church: the schism that produced the so-called “Orthodox” Church.
- Remote Preparation of the Schism
The great Eastern Schism must not be thought of as the result of a single, definite quarrel. It is false that after
centuries of perfect peace, suddenly because of one dispute, almost half of Christendom fell away. Such an event would have no parallel in history; in any case, unless there had been some great heresy, and in this quarrel there was no heresy at the beginning, nor has there ever been an irreparable disagreement about the Faith. It is a case, perhaps the only prominent case, of pure schism, of a breach in intercommunion caused by anger and ill feeling, not by a rival theology. It would then be inconceivable that hundreds of bishops should break union with their head if everything had previously gone smoothly. The great schism is rather the result of a very gradual process. Its remote causes must be sought centuries before there was any suspicion of the final outcome. There was a series of temporary schisms that loosened the bond and prepared the way. The two great breaches, those of Photius and Michael Cerularius, remembered as the origin of the present state of things, were both healed afterwards. Strictly speaking, the present schism dates from the Eastern repudiation of the Council of Florence (1472). Thus, although the names of Photius and Cerularius are rightly associated with this disaster, since their quarrels are the chief elements in the account, it must not be imagined that they were the only, the first, or the last authors of the schism. If we group the story around their names, we must explain the earlier causes that prepared the way for them and note that there were later temporary reunions.
The first cause of all was the gradual estrangement of East and West. To a great extent this estrangement was inevitable. East and West grouped themselves around their own centers — at any rate as immediate centers — used different rites and spoke different languages. We must distinguish the position of the Pope as visible head of Christendom from his place as Patriarch of the West. The position, advanced in 1913 by some anti-papal controversialists, that all bishops are equal in jurisdiction, was utterly unknown in the early Church. From the very beginning we find a graduated hierarchy of metropolitans, exarchs, and primates. We also find, from the beginning, the idea that a bishop inherits the dignity of the founder of his see and that, therefore, the successor of an Apostle has special rights and privileges. This graduated hierarchy is important for explaining the Pope’s position. He was not the immediate superior of every bishop; he was the head of an elaborate organization, as it were the apex of a carefully graduated pyramid. The consciousness of the early Christian was probably that the heads of Christendom were the Patriarchs; then he knew quite well that the chief patriarch had his see at Rome. After Chalcedon (451) we must count five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
Then the difference between East and West was, in the first place, that the Pope in the West was not only supreme pontiff but also the local patriarch. To Eastern Christians he represented a remote and foreign authority, the final court of appeal for very serious questions after their own patriarchs had been found incapable of settling them; but to his own Latins in the West he was the immediate head, the authority immediately over the metropolitans, the first court of appeal for their bishops. Thus all loyalty in the West went directly to Rome. Rome was the Mother Church in many senses; it was through missionaries sent from Rome that the Western churches had been founded. The loyalty of Eastern Christians, on the other hand, went first to their own patriarch, so there was always a danger of divided allegiance — if the patriarch had a quarrel with the Pope — such as would have been inconceivable in the West. In fact, the falling away of so many hundreds of Eastern bishops, of so many millions of simple Christians, is sufficiently explained by the schism of the patriarchs. If the four Eastern patriarchs agreed on any course of action, it was practically a foregone conclusion that their metropolitans and bishops would follow them and that the priests and common people would follow the bishops. Thus the very organization of the Church in some way prepared the ground for a contrast, which might become rivalry, between the first patriarch of the West with his vast following of Latins on one side and the Eastern patriarchs with their subjects on the other.
Further points that should be taken into account are the differences of rite and language. The question of rite follows from the patriarchate; it made the difference obvious to the simplest Christian. A Syrian, Greek, or Egyptian layman might not understand much about canon law as it affected the patriarchs involved; but he could not fail to notice that a travelling Latin bishop or priest celebrated the Holy Mysteries in a way that was very strange and that marked him as a perhaps suspicious foreigner. In the West, the Roman rite first influenced and then supplanted all others, and in the East the Byzantine rite gradually obtained the same position. Thus we have the germ of two unities, Eastern and Western.
Undoubtedly both sides knew that other rites were equally legitimate ways of celebrating the same mysteries, but the difference made it difficult to pray together. We see that this was an important point in the complaints about purely ritual matters made by Cerularius when he sought grounds for dissent.
Even the detail of language was an element of separation. It is true that the East was never entirely Hellenized as the West came to be Latinized. Nevertheless, Greek became to a great extent an international language in the East. In the councils of the East all the bishops spoke Greek. So again we have the same two unities, this time in language: a practically Greek East and an entirely Latin West. It is difficult to conceive of this detail as a cause of estrangement, but it is undoubtedly true that many misunderstandings arose and developed simply because people could not understand one another. At the time these disputes arose, hardly anyone knew a foreign language. It was not until the Renaissance that the age of adequate grammars and dictionaries arrived. St. Gregory (d. 604) had been an ecclesiastical envoy in Constantinople, but he apparently did not learn Greek; Pope Vigilius (540-55) spent eight unhappy years there and yet never learned the language. Photius was the most profound scholar of his age, yet he did not know Latin. When Leo IX (1048-54) wrote in Latin to Peter III of Antioch, the latter had to send the letter to Constantinople to find out what it said. Such cases occurred continually and caused confusion in all relations between East and West. In councils, the papal legates addressed the assembled fathers in Latin and no one could understand them; the council deliberated in Greek and the legates did not know what was happening. Thus suspicions arose on both sides. Interpreters were called in, but could their versions be trusted? A deep distrust arose among the Latins regarding Greek skill in this matter. The legates were asked to sign documents they did not understand on the strength of repeated assurances that they contained nothing that compromised them. And so small a thing made a great difference. The famous later case of the Decree of Florence and the forms kath on tropon, quemadmodum, shows how much confusion the use of two languages can cause.
These causes then combined to produce two halves of Christendom, an Eastern half and a Western half, each distinguished in various ways from the other. They are certainly not sufficient to explain the separation of those halves; we merely note that there was already a consciousness of two entities, the first marking of a line of division through which rivalry, jealousy, and hatred could easily cut a separation.
- Causes of Estrangement
The rivalry and hatred arose from several causes. Undoubtedly the first, the root of all the discord, was the advancement of the See of Constantinople. We have seen that the four Eastern patriarchs were in some way set over against the great Western unity. Had those four unities remained in the East, nothing would have happened. What accentuated the contrast and created rivalry was the gradual rise in authority over the other three on the part of the patriarch of Constantinople. It was Constantinople that bound the East into one body, uniting it against the West. There was a persistent attempt by the emperor’s patriarch to become a kind of Eastern Pope, as nearly as possible equal to his Western prototype, and this was the true cause of the whole problem. On the one hand, union under Constantinople really made a kind of rival Church that could be opposed to Rome; on the other hand, throughout the whole course of the advancement of the Byzantine bishops, they found only one real obstacle: the persistent opposition of the Popes. The emperor was always their friend and chief ally. It was, in fact, the emperor’s policy of centralization that was responsible for the plan of making the See of Constantinople a center. The other patriarchs who were displaced were not dangerous opponents. Weakened by endless Monophysite disputes, having lost most of their flocks and then reduced to an abject state by the Muslim conquest, the bishops of Alexandria and Antioch could not prevent the growth of Constantinople. In fact, eventually they accepted their degradation willingly and became idle ornaments of the new patriarch’s court. Jerusalem too was hampered by schisms and Muslims and was itself a new patriarchate, having only the rights of the last see of the five.
On the other hand, at every step of Constantinople’s advancement there was always the opposition of Rome. When the new see obtained for its holder precedence at the First Council of Constantinople (381, can. 3), Rome refused to accept the canon, since she had not been represented at the Council; when Chalcedon in 451 made it, Constantinople, a true patriarchate (can. 28), the legates and then the Pope himself refused to recognize what had been done; when, intoxicated by their rapid progress, the successors of the little suffragan bishops who had once obeyed Heraclea assumed the insolent title of “ecumenical patriarch,” it was again a Pope of Old Rome who severely rebuked their arrogance. We can understand that jealousy and hatred of Rome took root in the minds of the new patriarchs, that they were willing to throw off entirely an authority that stood in their way at every step. That the rest of the East joined them in their rebellion was the natural result of the authority they had succeeded in usurping over the other Eastern bishops. Thus we arrive at the essential point in this question. The Eastern Schism was not a movement that arose throughout the whole East, nor was it a dispute between two great bodies; it was essentially the rebellion of one see, Constantinople, which, through the emperor’s favor, had already acquired such influence that it was unfortunately able to drag the other patriarchs into schism with it.
We have already seen that the suffragans of the patriarchs would naturally follow their heads. If, then, Constantinople had remained alone, its schism would have mattered comparatively little. What made the situation so serious was that the rest of the East eventually took its side. This also resulted from its successful assumption of the chief see in the East. Thus the advancement of Constantinople was undoubtedly the cause of the great schism. It brought it into conflict with Rome and made the Byzantine patriarch almost inevitably the enemy of the Pope; at the same time it gave him such a position that his enmity meant the enmity of the whole East.
This being so, we must remember how entirely unjustified, novel, and uncanonical this advancement of Constantinople was. The see was not apostolic, had no glorious traditions, and had no reason to usurp the first place in the East except an accident of secular politics. The first historical bishop of Byzantium was Metrophanes (315-25); he was not even a metropolitan, but the lowest rank a diocesan bishop could be, a suffragan of Heraclea. That is all his successors would ever have become; they would have had no power to influence anyone if Constantine had not chosen their city as his capital. Throughout all their progress they did not claim to base their demands on anything except the fact that they were now bishops of the political capital. It was as the emperor’s bishops, as officials of the imperial court, that they rose to the second place in Christendom. The legend that St. Andrew founded their see was a much later idea, now abandoned by all scholars. Constantinople’s claim was always purely Erastian, since, just as Caesar could establish the capital wherever he wished, so too could the civil ruler give ecclesiastical rank in the hierarchy to whatever see he wished.
Canon 28 of Chalcedon says this in so many words. Constantinople has become the New Rome; therefore its bishop is to have honor like that of the patriarch of Old Rome and to be second after him. Only a shade more insolence was needed for the emperor to transfer papal rights to the bishop of the city where he kept his court.
It must always be remembered that the elevation of Constantinople, its envy of Rome, and its unhappy influence over the whole East are a pure piece of Erastianism, a shameless surrender of the things of God to those of Caesar. And nothing can be less stable than placing ecclesiastical rights on the basis of secular politics. The Turks in 1453 cut away the foundation of Byzantine ambition. There is now no emperor and no court to justify the position of the ecumenical patriarch. If we were to apply logically the principle on which he rests, he would sink to the lowest place and the patriarchs of Christendom would reign in Paris, London, or New York. Meanwhile the old and truly canonical principle of the superiority of apostolic sees remains unchanged by political changes. Apart from the divine origin of the Papacy, the advancement of Constantinople was a gross violation of the rights of the apostolic sees of Alexandria and Antioch. It is no wonder that the Popes, although their first place was not questioned, resented this alteration of ancient rights by the ambition of the imperial bishops.
Long before Photius there had been schisms between Constantinople and Rome, all of them healed in time, but naturally all tending to weaken the essential sense of unity. From the beginning of the See of Constantinople to the great schism in 867, the list of these temporary breaches of communion formed a formidable catalogue. There were fifty-five years of schism (343-98) during the Arian troubles, eleven because of the deposition of St. John Chrysostom (404-15), thirty-five years of the Acacian schism (484-519), forty-one years of the Monothelite schism (640-81), and sixty-one years because of Iconoclasm. Thus of those 544 years (323-867), no fewer than 203 passed with Constantinople in a state of schism. We also note that in each of these disputes Constantinople was on the wrong side, while Rome stood out on the right one. And we already see that the influence of the emperor, who naturally always supported the patriarch of his court, in most cases dragged a great number of the other Eastern bishops into the same schism.
III. Photius and Cerularius
It was natural that the great schisms directly responsible for the present state of things should be local quarrels of Constantinople. Neither was in any sense a general grievance of the East. There was neither time nor reason for other bishops to join Constantinople in the quarrel with Rome, except that they had already learned to look to the imperial city for orders. The quarrel of Photius was a gross defiance of the lawful order of the Church. Ignatius was the legitimate bishop beyond all doubt; he had ruled peacefully for eleven years. Then he denied Communion to a man guilty of public incest (857). But that man was the regent Bardas, so the government set out to depose Ignatius and placed Photius in his see. Pope Nicholas I had no quarrel with the Eastern Church, nor with the Byzantine see. He upheld the rights of the legitimate bishop. Both Ignatius and Photius had formally appealed to him. It was only when Photius saw that he had lost his case that he and the government preferred to go into schism rather than submit (867). It is even doubtful how long, this time, there was a general schism in the East. In the council that restored Ignatius (869), the other patriarchs declared that they had immediately accepted the Pope’s earlier verdict.
But Photius had formed an anti-Roman party, which from then on never dissolved. The effect of his quarrel, although it was purely personal, although it ended at the death of Ignatius and again when Photius fell, was to gather into one head all the old envy of Constantinople toward Rome. We see this throughout the Photian schism. The mere question of the usurper’s supposed rights does not explain the outburst of animosity against the Pope, against everything Western and Latin, that we note in government documents, in Photius’s letters, in the acts of his synod of 879, and in the whole attitude of his party. It is rather the rancor of centuries breaking out on a poor pretext; this fierce resentment against Roman interference comes from men who had long known that Rome was the only obstacle to their plans and ambitions. In addition, Photius gave the Byzantines a new and powerful weapon. The cry of heresy, raised often enough on every occasion, never failed to arouse popular indignation. Yet until then it had occurred to no one to accuse the whole West of being soaked in pernicious heresy. Until now it had been a matter of resenting the use of papal authority in isolated cases. This new idea carried the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance. The six charges made by Photius are foolish enough to make one wonder how so great a scholar did not think of something more ingenious, at least in appearance. But these charges changed the situation to the advantage of the East. When Photius calls the Latins “liars, fighters against God, forerunners of Antichrist,” it is no longer merely a question of offending his ecclesiastical superiors. He now assumes a more effective role: he is the champion of orthodoxy, indignant against heretics.
After Photius, [the patriarch] John IX Bekkos says that there was “perfect peace” between East and West. But that peace was only on the surface. The cause of Photius did not die. It remained latent in the party he left behind, the party that still hated the West, that was ready to break the union again at the first pretext, that remembered and was ready to revive the accusation of heresy against the Latins. Certainly from the time of Photius, hatred and contempt for the Latins was an inheritance among the mass of the Byzantine clergy. How deeply rooted and widespread it was is shown by the absolutely gratuitous outbreak 150 years later under Michael Cerularius (1043-58). For on this occasion there was not even the shadow of a pretext. No one had disputed Cerularius’s right as patriarch; the Pope had not interfered with him in any way. And suddenly, in 1053, he sends a declaration of war, then closes the Latin churches in Constantinople, launches a string of absurd accusations, and shows in every possible way that he wants a schism, apparently for the mere pleasure of not being in communion with the West. And he got what he wanted. After a series of malicious aggressions unparalleled in Church history, after he had begun by striking the Pope’s name from his diptychs, the Roman legates excommunicated him (16 July 1054). But even then there was no idea of a general excommunication of the Byzantine Church, much less of the whole East. The legates carefully guarded against that in their Bull. They acknowledged that the emperor, Constantine IX, who was exceedingly annoyed by the whole quarrel, the Senate, and the majority of the city’s inhabitants were “very pious and orthodox.” They excommunicated, however, Cerularius, Leo of Achrida, and their followers.
This quarrel need not have produced a permanent state of schism any more than would the excommunication of any other contumacious bishop. The real tragedy was that gradually all the other Eastern patriarchs took the side of Cerularius, obeying him by striking the Pope’s name from their diptychs and choosing to share his schism. At first they do not seem to have wanted to do this. John III of Antioch certainly refused to enter the schism requested by Cerularius. But eventually the habit they had acquired of looking to Constantinople for orders proved too strong. The emperor, not Constantine IX but his successor, was on the side of his patriarch, and the bishops had learned well to regard the emperor as their sovereign also in spiritual matters. Again, it was the usurped authority of Constantinople, the Erastianism of the East, that turned a personal quarrel into a great schism. We also see how well Photius’s idea of calling the Latins heretics had been learned. Cerularius had a list, longer still and more trivial, of such accusations. His points were different from those of Photius; he had forgotten the Filioque and had discovered a new heresy in our use of unleavened bread. But the actual accusations mattered little in any case; the idea that had been found so useful was to declare that it was impossible to deal with the West because it was heretical. It was offensive and gave the schismatic leaders the opportunity to assume a more effective posture as defenders of the true Faith.
- After Cerularius
In a sense the schism was now complete. What had at first been two portions of the same Church, what had become two entities ready to be divided, were now two rival Churches. Yet, just as there had been schisms before Photius, so there were reunions after Cerularius. The Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and again the Council of Florence in 1439 both reached a reunion that people hoped would close the breach forever. Unfortunately, neither reunion lasted nor had any solid foundation on the Eastern side. The anti-Latin party, advocated, formed, and organized long before by Photius, had under Cerularius come to represent the whole “Orthodox” Church. This process was gradual, but it was now complete. At first the Slavic Churches — Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and others — saw no reason to break with the West because the Patriarch of Constantinople had quarreled with the Pope. But the habit of looking to the capital of the empire eventually affected them too. They used the Byzantine rite; they were Eastern; so they placed themselves on the Eastern side. Cerularius maneuvered skillfully to make his cause appear as that of the East: it seemed, though unjustifiably, to be a question of Byzantines against Latins.
At Lyons and then again at Florence, the reunion, on Byzantium’s part, was only a government expedient. The emperor wanted the Latins to fight against the Turks on his behalf. Thus he was prepared to concede anything until the danger had passed. It is clear that on these occasions only the West was moved by a religious motive. It had nothing to gain; it wanted nothing from the East. The Latins had everything to offer and were prepared to provide their help. All the West wanted in return was an end to the lamentable and scandalous spectacle of a divided Christendom. But the Byzantines did not care about the religious motive; or rather, for them religion meant the continuation of the schism. They had called the West heretical so often that they had begun to believe it. Reunion was an unpleasant and humiliating condition for the Frankish army to come and protect them. The common people had been so well trained in their hatred of the Azymites and creed-adulterers that their zeal for what they considered Orthodoxy outweighed their fear of the Turks. The phrase “Better the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s tiara” expressed their thoughts exactly. When the bishops who had signed the decrees of reunion returned, they were received with an outburst of indignation as traitors to the Orthodox faith. On each occasion, the reunion was broken almost immediately after it had been made. The last act of the schism was when Dionysius I of Constantinople (1467-72) assembled a synod and formally repudiated the union (1472). Since then there has been no intercommunion; there exists a vast “Orthodox” Church, apparently satisfied to be in schism with the bishop whom it still recognizes as the first patriarch of Christendom.
- Reasons for the Present Schism
In this deplorable history we note the following points. It is much easier to understand how a schism continues than how it began. Schisms are easily made; by contrast, they are extremely difficult to heal. The religious instinct is always conservative; there is always a strong tendency to continue the existing state of things. At first the schismatics appear to be reckless innovators; then, with the passing of centuries, their cause seems ancient: it is the Faith of the Fathers. Eastern Christians especially feel this conservative instinct strongly. They fear that reunion with Rome would mean betraying their ancient Faith, that of the Orthodox Church, to which they have adhered so heroically through all these centuries. One may say that the schism continues mainly through inertia.
At its origin we must distinguish between the schismatic tendency and the actual occasion of its outbreak. But the cause of both has now disappeared. The tendency was caused mainly by envy over the elevation of the See of Constantinople. That advancement ended long ago. In the last three centuries Constantinople has lost almost all the vast territories it once acquired. There is nothing modern Eastern Christians resent more than any assumption of authority by the ecumenical patriarch outside his diminished patriarchate. The Byzantine see has long been a plaything of the Turks, a trinket they sell to the highest bidder. Certainly this pitiable dignity is no longer a reason for the schism of millions of Christians. Even less do the immediate causes remain for the breach to continue open. The question of the respective rights of Ignatius and Photius leaves even the Orthodox indifferent after twelve centuries; the ambitions and insolence of Cerularius may well be buried with him. Nothing, then, remains of the original causes.
There is really no question of doctrine involved. There is no heresy, but schism. The Decree of Florence made every possible concession to their feelings. There is no true reason why the East should not sign that Decree now. They deny papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception; they dispute over Purgatory, consecration by the words of institution, and the procession of the Holy Spirit, in each case misrepresenting the dogma to which they object. It is not difficult to show that on all these points their own Fathers stand with those of the Latin Church, which asks only that they return to the ancient teaching of their own Church.
This is the correct attitude toward the Orthodox. They have a horror of being Latinized, of betraying the ancient Faith. It must be insisted that there is no intention of Latinizing them, that the ancient Faith is not incompatible with, but rather demands, union with the chief see which their Fathers obeyed. In canon law they have nothing to change except abuses such as the sale of bishoprics and the Erastianism that their best theologians deplore. Celibacy, unleavened bread, and so forth are Latin customs to which no one thinks of forcing them. They need not add the Filioque clause to the Creed; they will always keep their venerable rite unchanged. No bishop needs to be moved, hardly any feast, except that of St. Photius on 6 February, altered. All that is asked of them is to return to where their Fathers stood, to treat Rome as Athanasius, Basil, and Chrysostom treated her. It is not the Latins, but they, who have abandoned the Faith of their Fathers. There is no humiliation in retracing one’s steps when one has wandered down a wrong path because of quarrels long forgotten. They must also see how disastrous the scandal of division is for the common cause. They should likewise wish to put an end to so much evil denunciation. And if they truly wish it, the way need not be difficult. For, in truth, after ten centuries of schism we can realize on both sides that it is not only the greatest evil in Christendom, but also the most needless.
For details of the schism see Greek Church, Photius, Michael Cerularius, Council of Florence. See also A. Fortescue, The Orthodox Eastern Church (London, 1907), and the works cited there.
Source: Hispanic Encyclopedia
