Tradition · 1054

Eastern Orthodox

The family of self-governing churches (Constantinople, Antioch, Russia, Greece and others) that share the faith of the seven ecumenical councils. It also claims unbroken continuity with the apostolic church; the Great Schism of 1054 marks its break with the Roman Catholic church.

History

Roots

Eastern Orthodoxy does not think of itself as having a founding date. It sees itself as the Greek-speaking church of the Roman East carried forward without a break: the church of the apostles, of the Greek fathers and of the seven ecumenical councils, from the Council of Nicaea (325) to the Second Council of Nicaea (787), which restored the veneration of icons. The councils’ creeds and canons, collected in Schaff’s The Seven Ecumenical Councils (CCEL), are still its doctrinal and legal foundation. The Council of Constantinople (381) gave it the Creed it recites at every liturgy. The Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451) fixed its teaching on Christ, and in doing so separated it from the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox churches.

The church was organized as a “pentarchy” of five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Rome held the first place of honor and Constantinople, the “New Rome,” the second (canon 28 of Chalcedon, which Rome never accepted). How much that first place meant was the question the East and West never settled.

Causes of the break

The split between Greek East and Latin West was slow. Language, politics and church practice drifted apart for centuries before anyone called it a schism. Two doctrinal issues sharpened the drift. The first was the Filioque, the Latin addition to the Creed saying the Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.” The second was the claim of the bishop of Rome to direct jurisdiction over the whole church. In the 860s Patriarch Photius of Constantinople attacked both, in his encyclical of 867 and later in his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (Photian schism, secondary). That dispute was patched up at a council in Constantinople in 879–880, which Orthodox writers often treat as ecumenical.

The date usually given for the Great Schism is 16 July 1054, when the papal legate Cardinal Humbert laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and Cerularius answered with excommunications of his own (East–West Schism, secondary). At the time it looked like one more quarrel between individuals. What made the break popular and lasting was the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the Latin bishops installed in Eastern sees afterward.

Two attempts at reunion failed. The Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Ferrara-Florence, whose decree of union with the Greeks was signed on 6 July 1439 (text of the council), both accepted the Filioque and papal primacy on Latin terms. Mark of Ephesus refused to sign at Florence, the union was rejected at home, and Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453.

Development

Inside Byzantium, the main doctrinal event after the schism was the Hesychast controversy of the 1330s–1350s. Monks on Mount Athos practiced a prayer of stillness and said they saw the uncreated light of God. Barlaam of Calabria mocked the claim. Gregory Palamas defended it by distinguishing God’s unknowable essence from his uncreated energies, which can be truly shared. Councils in Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld Palamas (Hesychast controversy, secondary).

Meanwhile the church spread north. Cyril and Methodius took a Slavonic liturgy to Moravia in the 860s, Bulgaria and Serbia were converted, and Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized in 988 (Christianization of Kievan Rus’, secondary). After 1453 Moscow saw itself as the “Third Rome,” and in 1589 its metropolitan became a patriarch. Peter the Great abolished that patriarchate in 1721 and put the Russian church under a state “Holy Synod”; it was restored only in 1917, months before Soviet persecution began.

Under Ottoman rule the Patriarch of Constantinople became the civil head of all Orthodox Christians in the empire. Contact with the Reformation produced a correspondence between Patriarch Jeremias II and Lutheran theologians from Tübingen (1573–1581), which ended in polite disagreement. The Confession published under the name of Patriarch Cyril Lucaris (1629) taught Calvinist doctrine. The Synod of Jerusalem (1672), led by Patriarch Dositheus, rejected it, and its confession is printed in Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2 (CCEL).

Influence

The modern shape of the church came from nationalism and exile. As the Balkan nations broke from the Ottomans, each wanted its own self-governing (autocephalous) church: Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria. When Bulgarians set up their own exarchate in 1870, a council in Constantinople in 1872 condemned “phyletism,” the organization of the church by ethnicity (Phyletism, secondary), but the national pattern won in practice.

The Russian Revolution sent theologians into exile in Paris, where the St Sergius Institute became a center of Orthodox thought in conversation with the West. Georges Florovsky called for a “neo-patristic synthesis,” a return to the fathers’ way of thinking, and Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) presented Theosis and apophatic theology to Western readers (Lossky, secondary). Through Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church (1963) and through migration, Orthodoxy became a presence in Western Europe and North America, and Western Christians from Anglicans to evangelicals began reading the Greek fathers again. Orthodox churches joined the World Council of Churches, and in 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I “commit[ted] to oblivion” the excommunications of 1054 (Joint Declaration).

Key ideas and contributors

Holy Tradition. Orthodoxy has no single confession on the model of Augsburg or Westminster. Its authority is Holy Tradition: Scripture read within the life of the church, together with the Creed, the councils, the fathers, the liturgy and the icons. Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers set the pattern. John of Damascus summed it up in the eighth century in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (CCEL).

Conciliar government. The church is governed by bishops in council, not by one bishop over all. The Patriarch of Constantinople is “first among equals” with a primacy of honor, and each autocephalous church elects its own head (Conciliarity, Episcopal Polity). The highest authority in doctrine is an ecumenical council received by the whole church.

Theosis. Salvation is described as union with God, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Athanasius’s line that God “became man so that we might become god” is the classic summary. Theosis frames sin as sickness and death more than legal guilt, and leans toward a Christus Victor reading of the cross.

Essence and energies. Gregory Palamas held that God’s essence stays beyond all knowing, while his energies, which are God himself acting, can be truly shared by creatures. This is how Orthodoxy explains both theosis and the claim that the saints see God’s uncreated light.

The Spirit proceeds from the Father. Orthodoxy holds the Creed in its original form and teaches the Procession from the Father Alone, with the Father as the single source within the Trinity (John 15:26).

Icons. The Second Council of Nicaea (787) taught that icons are to be venerated, not worshipped, and that honor paid to an image passes to the one it shows. John of Damascus gave the argument from the incarnation: since God took a visible body, he can be depicted (On Holy Images).

Liturgy and mysteries. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is the ordinary Sunday service. There are seven sacraments, usually called mysteries; baptism, chrismation and first communion are given together, including to infants (Infant Baptism). The church affirms a real change of the bread and wine without tying itself to the Western philosophical account (Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery). It ordains only men to the priesthood (Male Priesthood) and allows married men to become priests, but bishops come from the monastic clergy.

Modern contributors include Florovsky and Lossky; Alexander Schmemann and Nicholas Afanasiev, whose “eucharistic ecclesiology” defined the church by the local eucharistic assembly; John Zizioulas, whose Being as Communion (1985) made that ecclesiology influential among Western theologians; and Kallistos Ware (Ware, secondary). The Philokalia (1782), compiled by Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, spread hesychast prayer to lay readers across the Orthodox world (Philokalia, secondary).

Key controversies

Papal primacy. This is the main issue dividing Orthodoxy from Rome. Orthodox writers accept that Rome held first place in the undivided church but reject the Papal Primacy of universal jurisdiction and infallibility defined at the First Vatican Council (1870). The official Catholic–Orthodox dialogue, begun in 1980, reached a shared statement at Ravenna (2007) that some primacy exists at every level of the church, but not on what the bishop of Rome’s primacy involves. The Russian delegation walked out of that meeting over a separate dispute about Estonia. Catholics answer that a church of independent national churches has no means to settle quarrels between them, which recent Orthodox history appears to show.

The Filioque and the Western theology behind it. Orthodox critics from Photius to Lossky argued that the Filioque was added without an ecumenical council and that it subordinates the Spirit and confuses the persons. Catholic theologians answer with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas that the Son’s role in the Spirit’s procession is patristic and that the Greek “through the Son” says much the same (Filioque). Some Orthodox writers, Lossky most strongly, traced nearly every Western error back to the Filioque; others think he overstated it.

Essence and energies. Western critics, especially in the Classical Theism tradition that follows Aquinas on divine simplicity, have charged that the Palamite distinction divides God into parts. Orthodox theologians answer that the energies are not a part of God but God himself in action. Since the mid-twentieth century many Catholic scholars have treated the distinction more sympathetically, and the question is now debated more within each side than between them.

Ecumenism. Orthodoxy teaches that it is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, which raises the question of what other churches are. The Holy and Great Council held in Crete at Pentecost 2016 opens its encyclical: “The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is a divine-human communion in the image of the Holy Trinity” (Encyclical; all official documents). Its text on relations with other Christians accepted the “historical name” of other churches, which critics on Mount Athos and elsewhere called a concession. Old Calendarist groups, who broke away when several churches adopted the revised calendar in the 1920s, regard ecumenism itself as heresy (Old Calendarists, secondary).

Who speaks for Orthodoxy. The Crete council was planned for decades as a pan-Orthodox council, but the churches of Antioch, Bulgaria, Georgia and Russia withdrew at the last moment, and Russia, the largest, does not regard its decisions as binding (Pan-Orthodox Council, secondary). Behind this is a rivalry between Constantinople, which claims the right to act for the whole church and to grant autocephaly, and Moscow, which claims that the size of a church should count. The same rivalry decides which churches can call a council and which councils count as ecumenical: some Orthodox treat the council of 879–880 and the Palamite councils as an eighth and ninth, others recognize only seven.

Ukraine. In 2018–2019 the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Moscow, which regards Ukraine as its canonical territory, broke communion with Constantinople in October 2018 (Moscow–Constantinople schism, secondary; Orthodox Church of Ukraine, secondary). Russian Patriarch Kirill’s support for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine deepened the split and revived the old charge of phyletism, now against the “Russian world” idea.

Relations with the Oriental Orthodox. Orthodoxy accepts Chalcedonian Christology; the Oriental Orthodox churches hold Miaphysitism and do not accept Chalcedon. Joint commissions in 1989–1990 concluded that both sides confess the same faith about Christ in different words, following Cyril of Alexandria. Neither side has restored communion, mainly because the councils after Chalcedon and the saints each side condemned are hard to set aside.

What remains unresolved

Orthodoxy agrees with itself on doctrine far more than on governance. Its theology of the councils assumes that the churches can gather and reach one mind, but it has no settled way to decide who calls a council, who grants independence, or what to do when the largest church and the first-ranked church disagree. Its dialogue with Rome turns on the same question from the other side: what a primacy that serves unity without ruling would look like. Until that is answered, the claim that Orthodoxy is the undivided church of the councils rests on a shared faith held by churches that are, at present, not all in communion with each other.