Event · 1054

Great Schism

The break between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, conventionally dated to 1054, which divided the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

History

Roots

For most of the first millennium the churches of the Latin West and the Greek East were one communion with two cultures. They shared the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople and the councils that followed, but they spoke different languages, answered to different emperors after 800, and developed different habits of worship and church government. The Early Church had already given the bishop of Rome a special honor as the see of Peter and Paul. The East read that honor through the councils: the Council of Chalcedon (451) gave Constantinople, “new Rome”, “equal prerogatives” with old Rome and second place after it (canon 28), a canon Pope Leo I refused to accept.

The two sides had broken communion before. The Acacian schism (484–519) and the quarrel between Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius in the 860s were both healed. Photius’s encyclical to the Eastern patriarchs (867) is the first major Greek attack on the Filioque, the Latin addition to the creed saying the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son.” The text has no reliable online translation; cite it as Photius, Encyclical Letter to the Archiepiscopal Thrones of the East (867). By the early eleventh century the Filioque was being sung in the creed at Rome itself, and the pope’s name had dropped out of the diptychs, the lists of bishops commemorated in the Constantinople liturgy. Patriarch Sergius II was alleged to have removed the name of Pope Sergius IV, though slow communications often left a new pope’s name off the diptychs anyway (OrthodoxWiki, secondary).

Causes

Three pressures met in the 1050s. The first was the Gregorian reform. Popes from Leo IX (1049–1054) onward pressed a strong account of papal authority over the whole church, which Gregory VII would later sum up in the Dictatus Papae (1075): “That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity” (Fordham). The second was southern Italy, where Norman conquerors were imposing Latin customs on Greek-rite churches, and where pope and emperor both needed an alliance against the Normans. The third was a fight over practice. Leo, archbishop of Ohrid, wrote around 1053 attacking the Latin use of unleavened bread (“azymes”) in the Eucharist, and Patriarch Michael Cerularius is reported to have closed the Latin churches in Constantinople (the closure rests on Western sources and is disputed).

Leo IX sent three legates to Constantinople in 1054, led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, a hard-line reformer. Talks went badly. On 16 July 1054 Humbert laid a bull of excommunication against Cerularius and his supporters on the altar of Hagia Sophia. No full English translation of the bull is reliably online; a course page reproduces an English extract (UWM extract, secondary). Among other charges it accused the Greeks of having “suppressed the procession of the Holy Spirit a filio,” which had the history backwards. A synod in Constantinople answered by anathematizing the legates. Leo IX had died in April, so the legates’ authority had arguably lapsed before they acted.

Cerularius’s own account survives in his letter to Peter, patriarch of Antioch (Fordham, trans. Kolbaba). He lists the Latins’ “Judaizing” practices, starting with azymes and shaving, then the creed: “they have made some sort of addition to the holy creed.” Peter’s reply (Fordham, trans. Kolbaba) is the voice of moderation. He agreed the Filioque was “the evilest of evils” but said most of the other complaints should be overlooked: “they are our brothers, even if it happens that, through rusticity and lack of education, they have frequently fallen from what is seemly.”

Hardening

Few people in 1054 thought anything final had happened. Contacts, alliances and some shared worship went on. What turned a quarrel among clergy into a division between peoples was the crusades. Latin patriarchs replaced Greek ones in Antioch and Jerusalem after 1098. In 1182 a Constantinople mob massacred the city’s Latin residents. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople itself. Niketas Choniates, an eyewitness, describes crusaders smashing the altar of Hagia Sophia and seating a prostitute on the patriarch’s throne (Fordham). A Latin patriarch was installed. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215, canon 4) complained that Greeks were washing altars after Latin priests used them and rebaptizing people baptized by Latins.

Two reunions failed. At the Second Council of Lyons (1274) Byzantine envoys accepted union and the Filioque (text) under imperial pressure; the Byzantine church repudiated it within a decade. At the Council of Florence (1439) the Greek delegation signed the decree Laetentur Caeli, which affirmed the Filioque and defined that the Roman pontiff “holds the primacy over the whole world” (text). Mark of Ephesus refused to sign, and on the delegates’ return clergy and people rejected the union. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453.

Influence

The schism fixed the shape of Christianity for a thousand years. The West went on to scholasticism, the Reformation and the Council of Trent; the East to hesychasm, Gregory Palamas and life under Ottoman and then Russian rule. Rome’s later attempts to bring Eastern Christians into union one community at a time, beginning with the Union of Brest (1595), created the Eastern Catholic churches, which the Orthodox still regard as a wound. The First Vatican Council (1870) defined papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction, which widened the gap.

The thaw came in the twentieth century. Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras met in Jerusalem in 1964. On 7 December 1965, the day before the Second Vatican Council closed, they issued a joint declaration regretting the “offensive words” and “reprehensible gestures” of 1054 and committing the excommunications “to oblivion” (Vatican). An official theological dialogue began in 1980. In Athens in 2001 John Paul II asked forgiveness for the times Catholics “have sinned by action or omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters,” naming the sack of 1204 (Vatican).

Key ideas and contributors

Primacy as jurisdiction. The reform papacy held that Christ gave Peter, and through him the bishop of Rome, authority over the whole church (Matthew 16:18). Humbert and Leo IX treated Constantinople’s resistance as rebellion against that authority. Florence and Vatican I set the claim in conciliar form. See Papal Primacy and Magisterium.

Primacy as honor within a council. The Eastern view, voiced by Photius and Cerularius and set out at length by later Orthodox writers, is that Rome was first among equal patriarchs, and that the highest authority in the church is an ecumenical council received by the whole church. See Conciliarity, Holy Tradition and Episcopal Polity.

The Filioque. The Latin case drew on Augustine and later Thomas Aquinas: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, as Lyons stated. The Greek case, from Photius onward, held that the Father is the sole source within the Trinity (John 15:26) and that no local church may change a creed fixed by ecumenical councils. See Filioque and Procession from the Father Alone.

Azymes and customs. Leo of Ohrid and Cerularius argued that unleavened bread was a Jewish practice and that the Eucharist needed leavened bread, a living loaf. Latins defended azymes as the bread of the Last Supper. Cerularius’s letter shows how quickly lists of customs (beards, fasting, married clergy) became evidence of heresy; Tia Kolbaba’s The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (2000) studies the genre (secondary, no link). See Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery.

The estrangement thesis. Modern historians mostly read 1054 as one episode in a long drift. Steven Runciman’s The Eastern Schism (1955, Archive.org) (secondary) argued the break became real only with the crusades. Yves Congar’s After Nine Hundred Years (1959, Archive.org) (secondary) called it an “estrangement” of two cultures before it was a doctrinal rupture. Henry Chadwick’s East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (2003, Archive.org) (secondary) traced it from the apostles to Florence.

Key controversies

When did the schism happen? The textbook date is 1054, but the events of that year were excommunications of individuals, not of churches, and the pope who sent the legates was dead. Runciman and Congar put the real break in 1204 or later. Others point to the rejection of Florence after 1439, or to 1755, when the Greek patriarchs ruled that Latin baptisms were invalid. The 1965 declaration lifted the 1054 sentences without restoring communion, which shows how little those sentences explained.

Papal authority. This is the central issue and still unresolved. Catholics hold that communion with the bishop of Rome is part of what makes a church fully the church; the Orthodox deny that Rome has jurisdiction outside its own patriarchate. John Paul II’s Ut Unum Sint (1995) asked other churches to help “find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation” (§95). The joint commission’s Ravenna document (2007) agreed that Rome held first place among the patriarchs in the first millennium but left open what powers that place carried (cited by title; online text not confirmed).

The Filioque. Some theologians now say the dispute was more about authority than doctrine, since Florence explained that Latins do not posit “two principles or two spirations.” Many Orthodox reply that the theology itself is wrong, and that adding to the creed without a council was the original offense. Catholic practice has softened: popes have recited the creed without the Filioque on some occasions with Orthodox present: John Paul II and Benedict XVI recited it in Greek with Patriarchs Demetrios I and Bartholomew I (Wikipedia, secondary).

Who is to blame? Western accounts long blamed Cerularius’s ambition; Orthodox accounts blame Humbert’s arrogance and the crusaders. Peter of Antioch’s letter is evidence that the Greek church was not of one mind in 1054, and the sack of 1204 is the point most historians now treat as decisive for ordinary believers. The papal apology of 2001 and the joint declaration of Benedict XVI and Bartholomew I in 2006 (Vatican) addressed the memory more than the cause.

Uniatism. The Orthodox see the Eastern Catholic churches as a method of reunion by absorption, and their revival in Ukraine and Romania after 1989 nearly stopped the dialogue in the 1990s. Catholics defend their right to exist. The joint commission’s Balamand statement (1993) rejected “uniatism” as a method for the future while accepting the existing churches (cited by title; online text not confirmed).

What remains unresolved

The two churches recognise each other’s sacraments and bishops to a degree neither extends to most Protestants, and both pray in John 17:21 terms for unity. What divides them is mostly one question: what kind of authority the bishop of Rome has over other bishops. The Filioque, the customs and even the memory of 1204 now look solvable once that question is settled; none of them can be settled without it.