The Great Schism.
In 1054 occurred one of the greatest
tragedies of the Christian world — the Great Schism between the Orthodox and
the Roman Catholic Churches. Officially proclaimed at Constantinople in that year by
the Papal Legate, Cardinal Humbert, it was, in a sense, the culmination of a
process that had been taking place for several centuries, ultimately centering
on two major controversies: Papal authority and the Filioque.
Originally the two branches of
Christendom had begun to drift apart because of cultural and language
differences. Then, in 800, we see a political split with the proclamation of
Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor — there were now two! The hegemony of the
Arabs over the Mediterranean and their expansion into the Balkans made direct contact difficult,
if not impossible, between East and West. And even in theology the two branches
of Christendom began to differ in their basic approaches, with the Latins being
more practical, the Greeks more speculative; the Latins more influenced by
legal ideas nurtured by the basic concepts of Roman law, while the Greeks were
influenced by worship and the Holy Liturgy; the Latins were more concerned with
redemption, the Greeks with deification. These different approaches, practiced
in greater isolation from each other, eventually led to the two main
theological problems outlined earlier.
The first problem was that of Papal
authority. The Greeks were willing to ascribe to the Pope of Rome a primacy of
honor, considering him to be the “first among equals,” whereas the Pope believed
his power of jurisdiction to extend to the East as well as the West, the Greeks
jealously guarding the autonomy of the other Patriarchates. The Pope saw
infallibility as his sole prerogative, whereas the Greeks insisted that in
matters of faith, the ultimate decisions belonged to an Ecumenical Council
consisting of all the Bishops of the Universal Church.
The second great problem was the
Filioque (Latin — and the Son), first inserted into the Creed at the Council of
Toledo in Spain in 589 and later adopted by the whole Western Church.
Whereas the original wording of the Creed ran, “and in the Holy Spirit, the
Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father...,” the Latin insertion
changed it to read, “and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who
proceeds from the Father and the Son__” The Orthodox objected to this insertion
on two grounds: 1) the Ecumenical Councils had expressly forbidden any changes
to be introduced into the Creed, and 2) this insertion disturbed the balance
between the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, leading to a false understanding
of the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.
Prior to the Schism of 1054, there
had been another breach, the so-called Photian Schism, in the 9th Century, but
it had been officially terminated in the latter years of the reign of Patriarch
Photius. The breach of 1054, however, although not universally applied at
first, was never healed, even after several attempts to do so, most noticeably
at the Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1438-9, when the
Turks were already threatening Constantinople, but these reunion attempts were doomed to failure. Probably the
deciding factor in the permanence of the Schism had been the capture and sack
of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204, which forever after remained
indelibly imprinted on the consciousness of the Orthodox.
In 1453, a crucial event occurred in
world Orthodoxy, with the Fall of Constantinople to the Turkish Sultan,
Mohammed II. The Greek-speaking Churches fell under the heavy yoke of Islam,
and for nearly 500 years labored in servitude, only emerging again with the
Balkan Revolutions of the 19th Century and World War I. In the meantime, the
focus of Orthodoxy shifted to the North, to the domains of the Most Pious Tsars
of Russia.