East–West Schism

Background

For its first several centuries, Christianity formed a single universal church. However, the Western Church, centered in Rome, used Latin, while the Eastern Church, centered in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey), used Greek. Over time, their liturgical traditions and their ways of expressing theology gradually diverged. The principal points of contention were the following:

• Papal primacy: The two sides differed in their understanding of what authority the pope, as bishop of Rome, held over the whole church.
• Filioque: The Latin term means "and from the Son." The Western Church added this phrase to the clause of the Nicene Creed stating that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father," thereby confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Eastern Church rejected this addition.
• Jurisdictional disputes: In the mid-eleventh century, the Normans seized southern Italy, which had been Byzantine territory, and prohibited the Greek rite there. In response, Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople closed the Latin-rite churches in Constantinople.
• Differences in practice: The Eastern Church permitted priests to marry, while the Western Church maintained clerical celibacy as the rule.

Course of Events

• 1054: Pope Leo IX sent a legation led by Cardinal Humbert to Constantinople. Negotiations broke down, and in the meantime Leo IX died. On July 16, Humbert laid a document excommunicating Cerularius and his supporters on the altar of Hagia Sophia and departed. About a week later, Cerularius convened a synod and excommunicated Humbert and the legates in return.
• Fourth Crusade: The sack of Constantinople by Western crusaders deepened Eastern hostility. Many historians regard this event as the point at which the schism became difficult to reverse.
• 1274 and 1439: Attempts to reunite the two churches were made at the Second Council of Lyon and the Council of Florence, but neither took hold.
• 1453: After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, discussions of unity ceased for a long period.
• 1964–1965: In January 1964, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople met in Jerusalem. Then, on December 7, 1965, a joint declaration removing the excommunications of 1054 from the memory of the Church was issued simultaneously in Rome and Istanbul.

Consequences and Influence

After the schism, the Western Church came to be known as the Roman Catholic Church (Catholicism), and the Eastern Church as the Orthodox Church. Following the Reformation of 1517, the Western Church was further divided into Catholicism and Protestantism. For this reason, Protestant accounts of church history often present the East–West Schism as the first great schism in Christianity and the Reformation as the second. Protestantism inherited the theological tradition of the Western Church, and the Westminster Confession of Faith likewise confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Although the excommunications were lifted by the 1965 joint declaration, full communion between the two churches (unity expressed in sharing the Eucharist) has not been restored.

Assessment

• Views on dating: The prevailing view regards 1054 as the decisive break. However, many scholars hold that the schism was a process spanning several centuries, noting that contemporaries did not regard the event as a permanent division and that contact continued afterward.
• Validity of the excommunications: Some question whether the legates' excommunication was valid, since the pope had already died when it was issued. The Orthodox have understood their own excommunication to have applied only to Humbert and his party.
• Catholic perspective: Cardinal Kurt Koch of the Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity explains that the schism did not occur all at once in 1054. For the same reason, he holds that the 1965 lifting of the excommunications did not mean that the separation had ended.
• Today the event serves as a classic historical example in discussions of church division and reconciliation within the ecumenical movement.