Great Schism (1054)

growing up in the modern world it can be easy particularly if you're Protestant and you grow up in the context of North America to neglect the reality that there is an entire wing of the church known as the Orthodox Church depending on your context and depending on the world that you grew up in and your denominational affiliation etc it can be a challenge at times to have a great deal of exposure to the Orthodox Church I think this is symbolized most importantly by the fact that so often at the lay level it becomes common simply to refer to the Orthodox Church as Greek Orthodox which is a misnomer because while there is a Greek Orthodox Church the Orthodox Church itself is actually quite varied both geographically and in terms of its language in terms of the patriarchy of those who are governing the church another name that's often used is the Byzantine church which again is a misnomer it simply locates the epicentre of the Orthodox Church entirely in the Byzantine lands out in Asia Minor and in particular in the former city of Constantinople which is the modern-day Istanbul I often joke that if it weren't for that Seinfeld episode where a George Costanza attempts to convert to Latvian Orthodox that many people would be unaware that there is a denomination or a branch of the church known as the Orthodox Church well this needs to be fixed we need to have an awareness of the wide-ranging and significant development within the church away from the Catholic Church that arose in the Middle Ages as it now stands today the Orthodox Church is actually the second largest single unit Church in the entirety of the world they worth an extra number somewhere around 250 million people now that number needs some context they are roughly two and a half billion Christians in the world somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 to 1.7 billion name themselves as Catholic there are roughly 800 million Protestants in the world today but of course trying to label all the Protestantism as the same is a bit of a challenge given that you have everything from high Church Anglican Lutheran all the way down through Methodists and Presbyterians and all the way to the end with Anabaptist in a number of other non-denominational churches in the world today so when we say that the Orthodox Church is the second largest single Church what we mean by that is it's the second largest church that self identifies as one body and at 250 million people it is a vitally important Church in the world and it's even more important given that so much of the Orthodox Church today is located in regions that are quite hostile at times at least in the modern world to the Christian Church itself well the natural question is how did this church come about how did this branch that calls itself the Orthodox Church come to reside in a place that is different from both the Catholic Church and subsequently the Protestant church well the answer is the Great Schism the Great Schism of 1054 and so in this lecture we're going to be looking at the Great Schism we're going to determine what caused it and then look at some of the implications of this schism all the way down until today then we can begin with vocabulary because there are a number of schisms throughout the centuries particularly in the Middle Ages that sometimes are called the Great Schism or at least for the first student coming to this period of time can feel as if they all kind of jumbled up together when people refer to the Great Schism very often what they have in mind is this schism from 1054 the Great Schism is a time when the Catholic Church the Western Church sundered from the Eastern Church which would later be identified as the Orthodox Church now that is to be distinguished obviously from papal schisms which we'll have a lecture on in a later lecture which unfortunately historians sometimes call the Great Schism as well now ideally historians will call this the great papal schism and not simply the Great Schism itself but you have to be aware that we're referring to the Great Schism we're referring to the separate of Catholic in eastern churches and in our electors on the Crusades we did make mention of the schism when the Crusades got underway the first one in the ten 90s we mentioned that there was already a schism between East and West that complicated the issue and made it quite tense between both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Church well now we want to double back and get a running start at just what the schism was there are a number of factors that led to the separation between the East and the West some are political some are theological and some just simply have to do with the bozos that were running the show at the time and we're going to go through all three of these in this order first of all the political issues that were in play as we've seen throughout a number of lectures coming out of the Constantinian world the Christian world saw itself politically as a United Empire this was the heritage of Constantine he had United East and West he had put it under the banner of Christ even if we deny though we're not going to do this but even if we deny that Constantine was actually committed Christian still the constant entity revolution paved the way for the ongoing Christianisation of the empire in four centuries after Constantine the church saw itself as a united front when we looked at the Byzantine world for example we commented on how those who were in the Byzantine world would not have called themselves anything but Roman at least not in the first several centuries after constant he comes to the throne if not quite a bit thereafter and there are a number of ways that this sort of presented itself first and foremost was for centuries down until roughly the eighth or ninth century there was this tension between the Byzantine Emperor the Emperor over Constantinople who was at least in terms of the heritage believed by some particularly those in the East to also be Emperor over the West and just as in the Byzantine world those who are patriarchs in particular the patriarch of Constantinople the primary seat of the Byzantine church for centuries and even until today it was customary for the Eastern Emperor to at least give his vote of approval whenever someone was appointed to the chair or to the office of a patriarch or to a primary bishop and what many people don't realize is that for a number of years for centuries the papacy actually had to be approved in name by the Eastern Emperor now this rarely created much problem at times it did but it rarely created this real strong problem where someone wanted to be Pope or someone was elected to be Pope and the Eastern Emperor simply denied this by and large it was rubber-stamped but all the way until roughly the beginning of the real serious Middle Ages in particular after the time of Charlemagne it was still considered to be appropriate for the papacy to be ratified or approved by the Eastern Emperor well what happens over the course of the early Middle Ages and on into the high middle ages is the papacy in particular is not comfortable with always answering to the Eastern Emperor all the way back in around the 5th of the 6th century what you see happen is the papacy beginning to assert some of its own independence now none of this is controversial in the major sense of that word it doesn't create massive friction or schism there are only a number of cases where there is actually a real tussle as to who is in charge papacy or the East but it is an issue and in fact as we've seen when the Pope when Leo coronate Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800 there is a conscientious move in the West for the papacy to coronate his own Emperor that was over the western half of what was formally Constantine's world now by and large the eastern emperor looked on this with suspicion he knew what was a flood he knew that what was going on here and what would continue for some time is the disentangling of the empire from east and west but by and large this was the Pope's move the West wanted to go its own way it wanted to have its own autonomous Authority in a manner and though the ideal was always for East and West to be united as one Christendom the fact the matter is is that this was nearly impossible given the complexities of life in the Middle Ages not only was there a language barrier with the East primarily speaking Greek and with the West's increasingly speaking only Latin but there were cultural issues and issues of communication and issues of real political authority in influence over these areas of the West no matter how much the Eastern Emperor claimed to be over all of Christendom it was simply impossible for him or her ever to exert enough authority over these regions to claim them as their own and this really comes to a head in 962 after a famous battle the Battle of let field in this battle some of the heirs to the Charlemagne regions rose up and there was founded what's called the Otto nian dynasty and this is the dynasty of Otto himself the great emperor who would claim just as Charlemagne had before the title Holy Roman Emperor now when Otto comes to the throne this title Holy Roman Emperor takes on a new significance in a new depth of meaning in the self-identity of the West as its own entity and its own christened 'm apart from the eastern world part of what's driving this is simply the fact that the west wants to go its own way but also what's driving this is the fact that in so many of the lands out east and asia minor down in palestine and in north africa the arab conquest and expansion had at least severed any christian identity or any connection between the christians of the west with these other regions and so in a number of ways the west simply says that's it there is now a holy roman emperor and he is here in the west and his name is Otto and following on that in 1049 Otto successor Henry the third has appointed to the papacy Leo the ninth will be Pope during the schism now in this day of course politics in church government are not all that separate they are separate in terms of theme or in terms of their influence but this is not a world of separation of church and state and so it's no surprised in that there's an analogy between the tension that is going on between the emperor of the east and the rise and the cementing of the legacy of the holy roman empire in the government of the church itself a fundamental difference between the way the east understands authority in the church and the way the west was beginning to really significantly understand the power to the papacy really hinges again on this separation between east and west if you were to find an eastern orthodox person either in this point in the Middle Ages and frankly even until today their model of government is not to have a single papacy or a single Pope over the entirety of their church this is one of the great myths it's often out there which is that the patriarch of Constantinople is somehow Pope of the entire Orthodox Church rather what happens in the Eastern Church is they believe that there are principal patriarchy's that are governed by someone who is sometimes called the Pope but who with the other patriarchs rules in a collaborative unity with each other now the legacy of this argument goes all the way back to the Constantinople council the second great ecumenical council it was at that council where there was appointed in named five principal seats or bishops who have a preeminence within the church that is to be considered at least first among equals though increasingly it became superior to the other bishoprics in the Christendom world and at that time it was Antioch Alexandria Jerusalem Constantinople and Rome now the two big ones here obviously are Constantinople and Rome the papacy actually at this time resisted the idea that Constantinople would be made a de facto patriarch or de facto leading bishop that was seen to be at least coterminous if not equal with that of the papacy in other words from the eastern perspective from the Orthodox perspective the Bishop of Rome is a significant seat of power their perspective though as the Middle Ages continued on and again even down until today is that the Bishop of Rome is one of these patriarchs he is part of their band of brothers even if he has first chair even if he has primary voice even if he leads in some ways in a way that the others do not at least in terms of first among equals in the Orthodox Church the Bishop of Rome is simply one of these patriarchs in this case he is the patriarch of the West concept the nobles patriarch over Constantinople and its regions so on and so forth now that might help you understand some of where the Orthodox Church has come down to to the modern period because if you look around the modern Orthodox Church you'll find a number of patriarchs as they're called for example the Russian patriarch who is considered to be yet another a new patriarch who is the lead Bishop over a given region in this case Russia now this is the kernel to fight all the theological in historical squabbles that go on between east and west frankly always have at their root right at the core the distinction and the division over the issue of where the Pope or the Bishop of Rome fits in with these other patriarchs just about every issue just about every fight seemingly comes down to the issue of does the Pope have to answer to the will the body the will of the other patriarchs can he be checked or does he have supremacy and the other patriarchs out east need to therefore listen to the will of the Pope and I think that's important to realize as the real root cause of the schism because we're going to notice that there are a number of fights and things that percolate up to the surface over the centuries that tend to be cited as the real cause or at least the beginning of the cause of the schism the problem though is that many of these fights occur hundreds and hundreds of years before the schism itself rather a better way to understand this is that the root cause the root distinction the root issue between east and west is the role of the Bishop of Rome in the life of the Eastern Church and vice versa and as we'll see repeatedly the issue becomes that the Pope will not succumb or bow to the will or the pressure of those who are the patriarchs of the East and it all comes to a head in the 11th century so if that's the political and the ecclesiological context what were some of these percolating flights well one we've already looked at in our lectures in the Byzantine world we looked at the trouble of the issue of iconoclasm now let's just look at this as an example or a microcosm of this problem what we have is the Emperor of the East declaring and getting the eastern patriarchs to back his position that the use of images and icons in the church is itself now to be condemned well the church out west led by the papacy said not in your life you will not tell us to throw down our art our images in our statuary that are used to make worship beautiful and that decorate the inner sanctuaries of our churches in the east muscling up with the emperor stress of the church needed to follow suit out on the west and the church refuses to do so so that's one there is another issue though between east and west that is frequently cited as a massive theological problem that again though has a truth the issue of the authority of the papacy and that is a controversy over the Filioque the Filioque clause or the Filioque controversy goes all the way back till the Council of Nicaea though the Filioque itself was not written at this time those of you who have grown up in the West saying the Nicene Creed in your churches will be accustomed to saying under the rubric of the Holy Spirit that the Spirit proceeds from the father and the son now that phrase there and the son in Latin is Filioque and just so you understand this kWe the ending there is something that is attached to just about any word in Latin when you want to add the phrase and the so you see the Quai ending there is simply just a way of saying antha filio is of course the root of so many of our modern words that means some fill EOS is the root here so the phrase Filioque means at the beginning the son and the ending there in the so in one word you have the phrase and the sum well in the Western version of the Nicene Creed there is this affirmation that the Spirit the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the son well if you were to go to it Eastern Church an Orthodox Church of any variety you will not find the phrase in the son expressed in the Nicene Creed this issue in other words is one of the major theological problems between East and West it's still debated today and there's all kinds of spectrum of positions on this issue both from the Eastern Church and from the Catholic Church well the issues are is that when the Council of Nicaea met and when Nicaea constantinople was finished the original Greek version of the Creed simply said that the spirit proceeds from the father so the image or the theology that is in play here is that you have the father as you might say the source who is eternally be getting the son and according to the original Creed from whom proceeds the spirit now there's all kinds of reasons why this is a problem in the West and we really can't go into every single one of them first and foremost though is the issue that in the West in particular they are concerned primarily with the subject of Arianism you'll recall of course that Arianism spread quite rapidly in the West that after it was quashed pretty rigorously in the East that a number of these Aryans went up into the northern European areas and they converted a number of the Gothic tribes to their faith well if you just look at the mental image the mental sort of representation of the way the Creed could be misunderstood at least according to the way the West viewed it is that if you have a father at the top and from the father there is proceeding the Sun being begotten from eternity past and from the father only you have proceeding the spirit well the West is particularly concerned this is just sort of a clause of Arianism or at least it could be interpreted by Aryans to espouse their own teachings on the subject of the lack of divinity of the creation of the Sun in the spirit they believe in other words you could draw a line and say the father is only really God and he's beginning the son and he is the one from whom precedes the spirit well sometime around the 6th century the West began to include in the Creed this phrase and the Sun and people Hovis grass their head why would they do this why would they add this well the belief was theologically and there are all kinds of biblical reasons why they believe this by the way I'm just going to give you the historical reasons the contextual reasons the biblical reasons are numerous and I'm not going to simply back this only an issue of historical issues but the historical issues were that with arianism of foot in the western part of the world it made more sense to affirm that because the father and the son are equal therefore if the spirit is proceeding from the father if there's a procession of the Holy Spirit from the father that it made sense also theologically to affirm that the Sun being consubstantial with the father that from him also precedes the spirit this is the doctrine that is referred to as the double procession of the spirit but don't get lost in the jargon the issue here is the divinity of the son as well as a number of verses that people in the West believe champion the fact the spirit comes from the Sun well as you can imagine the issues between the east and west are significant on this issue because you have essentially the West saying we're going to change the Creed we're going to add to it in order to clarify the theology of the Creed in the midst of our context it was really only a century later in the 7th century in fact the East began to notice this and began to criticize this facili they found this to be an anathema the only place that a Creed can be formed or changed is in the context of a council well what do you think the West's response to this was the West responds about this time and thereafter with the simple proclamation that the papacy has so decreed this and therefore it is good theology because the papacy has led the church it has ratified this by his own authority he did not need the East in order to allow for this again you'll see the controversy is more about Authority and the right to do things between East and West than anything else and to this day the vast majority of the opinion hinges on the opinion of whether or not the West had the authority or the right to add the Filioque to the confession or the Creed from the fourth century now I can stop right now just give you some of the modern context on this in the summer of 2004 I was studying in the city of Rome studying all kinds of things like Roman Catholicism the Reformation etc and because of who I was invited to study with their I was actually given a ticket to attend a pretty significant event in terms of the history of the church I didn't know at the time I showed up in jeans and t-shirt typical seminary student and I was ushered up onto the dais Believe It or Not sitting with the dignitaries across the way from the College of Cardinals and the event was important because this was still the Regency of john paul ii but at this time the patriarch of constantinople had come out and there had been a number of high-level discussions as well as some important meetings between these two patriarchs they came out and did a service together and there in 2004 for the first time that I can find record of the two of them said the kree the Nicene Creed together only in this case they said it in the Greek which is probably why it went unnoticed by a number of people but they set it in the Greek and famously john paul ii did not say the Filioque and i remember asking the professors of the curriculum that was taking part in what the significance of this was and i was told that they had come to some sort of an agreement that when they are together the eastern patriarch and the Pope will agreed not to say the Filioque but it was understood that when the West is doing its own liturgy by itself in the Catholic Church that the Filioque will still remain and that this will not be a massive offense at least on a principle to the Eastern Church now I have no way of verifying if that's still in effect or if that was simply the opinions of the professors who taught me but it was nevertheless the case that in 2004 the eastern patriarch the patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope for the first time since roughly the sixth century left the Filioque off but you can see historically that this is the issue the issue is the West added the Filioque and even if it's theologically and biblically justifiable the issue becomes one of the East feeling like the West that usurped and overly extended its own authority by altering the Creed itself so in the end with these contextual issues of the in the state as well as the theological underpinnings of the authority of the papacy it's no wonder then that this fight didn't happen earlier frankly well it didn't it happened in the year 1054 now how did it happen well as you can imagine given the tension between East and West there were always again percolating little bubble ups of fights and accusations from one side of the other the issue on this side though is that there was a man who was the papal advisor to the Byzantine world by the name of Humbert of Silva Candida now Humbert was a well-educated man extraordinarily well-educated he had the ear of the Pope and he was his right-hand man theologically well it happens that Humbert was down in the area of Apulia in the Italian peninsula in 1053 when he heard of a letter from Leo who was archbishop of awkward one of the eastern Archbishop's out in the east and the letter had arrived in Apulia and it was written in Greek and it condemned a number of practices in the Western Church it condemned the Filioque of course sort of a standard argument at this point but it also condemned the West because it practiced the Eucharist with unleavened bread in Leo the eastern Archbishop alleges that the West had caved to what he called a judaistic practice of maintaining unleavened bread as part of the Eucharistic service well Humbert hears about this he's a man who knows Greek himself and he gets the letter he translates it and in a bit of a gossipy kind of way he runs to the Pope Pope Leo the 9th saying look what these Easterns have said about you and what they've said about us not surprisingly the Pope was incensed and he sends a letter back this time he sends it to the patriarch Michael the first sometimes referred to as Michael Solaris and it all comes to a head when Humbert and some others are sent as a delegation to the city of Constantinople in an effort to smooth this out now Humbert and others are in no mood to compromise but not surprisingly Michael the first was not in a position to compromise either and really what happens in 1054 is you have two ego maniacs throwing temper tantrums at each other and as a result son during the church Humbert in his entourage arrived in 1054 and Michael to kind of put them in their place refuses to see them for a number of weeks and this is a typical move by diplomats of all kinds all throughout the centuries which is if someone comes to meet with you if you really want to show them who's boss you don't tell them off usually what you do is you make them sit and wait humbert of course is incensed by this he finds us to be an affront both to his own personal dignity as well as to the dignity of the Pope when Michael Humbert do eventually meet they eventually get into a shouting match over these issues between the East and the West now again the issue is the authority of the papacy it's not necessarily with all these ticky-tack issues the of course it's a bit insulting to say that these are ticky-tack issues but the issue is as Humberts there to assert the authority of the papacy then Michael as patriarch of Constantinople is not willing to hear it and in the end on Easter Sunday 1054 while Michael is in Hagia Sophia performing the vigil for the Easter service humbert marches in and slaps a bowl of excommunication down on the altar thereby excommunicating Michael for his insolence as you can imagine Michael eventually does the same thing to the entourage to Humbert into others and if you can believe it that action the double excommunication of each other in 1054 was the cause of the Great Schism now to clarify no one in his time believed that it was a de facto schism that was going to last for nearly a millennia by large most people in both the East and West would have seen this as a couple of egomaniacs duking it out with each other but as the centuries were on and as the crusades get launched and as east and west come actually at one point in the fourth crusade two attacking each other the schism started by two men throwing a tantrum eventually became a fixed reality of the separation between the East and the West you

Channel: Ryan Reeves

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Keywords: East–West Schism (Event), Religion (TV Genre), Eastern Orthodox Church (Religion), Roman Catholic Church (Organization Founder), Patriarch (Religious Leadership Role), Papal States (Country), Pope John Paul II (Religious Leader), Pope (Religious Leadership Title), Michael Celularius, Ecumenical Patriarch Of Constantinople (Religious Leadership Title), 1054, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves

Id: Q_s9Rcsg5UI

Length: 31min 1sec (1861 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2015