Texts in Context:
A Dread
Estrangement
By Gabriel Blanchard
The Early Middle Ages faintly, but insistently, filed away at the integrity of Christendom; as they drew to a close, it gave way with a snap.
Three Out of One
A little while back, we spoke of a realignment of the papacy in the eighth century. The Bishop of Rome now looked to the Franks, not the East Romans, as his secular protectors. This news was received in Byzantium as a grave political affront. But this papal-slash-Carolingian claim on the (western) imperial crown was only one step on a centuries-long road. Further along the way lay a thousand years of alienation in the heart of Western civilization, from which we have yet to emerge. And this alienation was already a twice-told tale well before the summer of 1054. It is then that the Great Schism1 between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism is deemed to have officially begun.
What is a schism? In Christian theology, three sins are held to offend against the faith itself: heresy; apostasy; and schism.2 Heresy means altering the essential content of the faith, while apostasy means denying it. That third term means a breach of Christian unity, a unity expressed by sharing in the sacraments, hence the name “communion.” In practice, schism usually means rejecting a church leader (e.g., in the Catholic Church, schism is defined as refusal of communion with the Bishop of Rome or those in communion with him). Notably, the Church Fathers came down on schism, not heresy, as the worst offense. Heresy’s rot was a rot in the brain, but that of schism was a rot of the heart.
The First Two Fractures
Most of the Seven Great Councils3 did not leave a lasting opposition behind. However, the third and fourth councils, held in Ephesus and Chalcedon respectively, and are still with us today. The first produced the Assyrian Church, also called Nestorian or (rather confusingly) the Church of the East. This communion was native to the Persian Empire; little of it ever lay within the Roman orbit.4 The non-Chalcedonians, however, also known as the Oriental Orthodox,5 are a very different story.
You may remember the Miaphysites from the history of Justinian and Theodora. These were the main opponents of Chalcedon. Most of Egypt was Miaphysite, and many lived in the Levant as well—so much so that those who, like the emperors, accepted both Ephesus and Chalcedon were called Melkites, “royalists” in the Syriac6 language. The division concerned the authorities, religious and civil alike. Bishops were anxious to reunite the Church; that was, so to speak, in their job description. Less savory motives were present in some clergy as well; the Church had existed “above ground” for a long time now, and rivalries had developed. Jealousy between the patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria was already growing infamous when Constantinople became a patriarchate in 381, and was still thriving when Jerusalem too was elevated in 451.
As for the emperors, they were ruling a confessionally Christian state with a large, disaffected minority—a minority that formed a regional majority in the Empire’s breadbasket. Most heads of state, understandably, are not keen on such situations. The emperors tried several times to resolve the issue, often by brokering some compromise between the Melkite and Miaphysite views.
Foreshadows
An exemplary failure of imperial religious policy was the Henotikon or “Act of Union,” issued in 482. It condemned the Assyrians’ theology (which practically nobody in the Empire subscribed to), along with an extreme version of the Miaphysite view (which also wasn’t a major issue); it said nothing about the crux of the debate; and it hinted that Chalcedon had been heretical. As the kids say, everyone disliked that, and they also disliked an emperor openly trying to dictate theology. But Zeno had secured himself a compliant Patriarch of Constantinople named Acacius, who endorsed the Henotikon. The ensuing Acacian Schism with Rome was mended only long after both the patriarch and the emperor had died.All this formed something of a pattern; Rome and New Rome were out of communion repeatedly over the ensuing centuries, over both theological and administrative issues.
There were also differences on the cultural plane. Some came down to custom—using leavened versus unleavened bread for communion, for example. These could provoke a surprising amount of mutual disapproval; a gathering in New Rome held in 692, called the Quinisext Council, condemned certain ritual practices of the Roman and Armenian Churches, where these differed from those of the Byzantines. Language almost certainly played a part too, not so much in the sense that any specific term is to blame—with one exception—but in the sense that it could lead to distrust between the two halves of Christendom. There were also language barriers between the Greek-speaking Romans, the Syriac-speaking Assyrians, and the Coptic-speaking Egyptians.
Love, we have been told, is slow to anger; it is, as a result, slow to forgive, for it will not be in a hurry to assume that there is anything to forgive ... [T]he instinct of the new life should warn us of any approaching danger of pomposity or guile, and the danger is subtle. The new way—forgiveness, humility, clarity, charity—is there; it is the old man on the new way who is the tempter, and who beguiles us away from it while we think we are walking on it.
The exception is the term filioque, which in Latin means “and from the Son.” It describes the Holy Ghost, whose relation to the other two Persons of the Trinity (the Father and the Son) differs from the relation they have with each other: The Son is described as being begotten by the Father, whereas the Holy Ghost proceeds. Our key term here occurs in the Nicene Creed, which states that “the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father filioque“.,
… Except the Creed doesn’t say that. Or it didn’t when it was first written. Filioque was first added to the creed in Visigothic Spain in the late sixth century, as a safeguard against Arianism; from there, it spread to places like Francia and Britain. Rome resisted the change for a long time; the doctrine had been embraced there for centuries—e.g., St. Gregory the Great mentions it in multiple works—but it was felt inappropriate to alter the wording of that text without the assent of an ecumenical council. And in the East, many voices denounced not only the irregular insertion of the filioque into the Creed, but the doctrine in itself as a heresy. And there may be several reasons Rome’s view was not more influential.
The House of Theophylact
The papacy has cut a tolerable figure thus far. It is now time to throw that away for nothing. To be fair, our understanding of what follows comes largely through just one source, Liutprand of Cremona, who is universally agreed to be hostile to the papacy; yet it still seems just to join historian Will Durant in calling this “the nadir of the papacy.” (Say what you will of the Borgias, at least they were competent.) A darkly ridiculous episode known as the Cadaver Synod, held in 897, sets the tone: Less than a year after his death, Pope Formosus was exhumed by his successor’s successor, Stephen VI; one will notice that they were going through popes rather briskly. Pope Stephen then—and this is not a joke—not only posthumously tried his predecessor for corruption, not only posthumously found him guilty, but posthumously executed him (by dumping the body in the Tiber).
Cadaver synods were not happening every day, but clergy bad enough to hold them abounded. Enter the noble House of Theophylact. Living just outside Rome, they witnessed years of farcical spectacle; in the early tenth century, the dynasty’s patriarch, Theophylact I, resolved that this nonsense simply could not go on … without him and his family getting a piece. At the time, popes were elected by the clergy and laity of Rome (in theory), or else nominated by the Holy Roman Emperor or the pope (more common in practice); the enclosure of the cardinals, secret ballots, these things had not yet been instituted. “Fixing” a vote was possible, especially if one had money or connections, and Theophylact’s wife Theodora had a reputation for intrigue. Beginning with Sergius III in 904, their dynasty achieved a control over the papacy that would not be decisively broken for a century and a half.
The real star of the scandals was Theodora and Theophylact’s daughter Marozia. Reputedly the mistress of Sergius III and later of John X, she got married in the middle of both affairs—her first child was allegedly the son of the former pope, and she and her husband overthrew and may have murdered the latter. The aforesaid son was put to work in the family business, becoming Pope John XI at the ripe old age of twenty-one. One of Marozia’s grandsons and two of her great-great-grandsons also wore the tiara; another two generations on, yet another Theophylact scion reigned as Pope Benedict IX on three distinct occasions. The first was bought for him by his father, and the second, he sold to his godfather; one almost wonders whether his third reign was the mere force of habit.
The Great Repentance
Yet oddly enough, one of the Theophylact pontiffs—young John XI—helped prepare the end of his family’s corruption of the Holy See, by showing special favor to the abbey of Cluny. Cluny was a Benedictine house, but with certain idiosyncracies (such as a highly centralized power structure) and a string of saintly abbots; before many decades had passed, the Cluniacs were for practical purposes an independent order, and a powerful center for reform.
By the eleventh century, with lulls, a great wind of revival was blowing through the Church. Special efforts to root out the ecclesiastical crime of simony, or the sale of sacraments (including offices of the Church).7 In 1059, Pope Nicholas II reserved the election of popes to the College of Cardinals, thus almost eliminating the direct influence of secular powers on the process. But our story must go back a little to one of his predecessors—a Cluniac, it so happens, and a canonized saint—who reigned as Pope Leo IX.
The Great Schism
More precisely, we are concerned with one of his cardinals, Humbert of Silva Candida. Humbert was a zealous partisan of reform, and is thought to have masterminded the new papal election laws of 1059. He was, however, prone to faulty assumptions—for instance, he was under the impression the East had removed the filioque from the Creed—and not a person with a talent for compromise, or much natural tact. He could translate Greek well enough, which at the time was a rare skill in the West; it may have been this which moved Pope Leo to choose Humbert as his legate to New Rome in 1054, in order to deal with a controversy over certain ritual discrepancies between that city and old Rome.
In any case, Humbert’s visit did not go well. The emperor, Constantine IX, was eager to restore ties between the old halves of the Empire and welcomed the cardinal; however, Patriarch Michael I had already written in less-than-respectful terms to Leo IX (and been answered with some incivility back), and was rather icy. Humbert of Silva Candida was exactly the person to make the worst of the situation: He was exasperated by the Greeks’ refusal to simply accept the supremacy of the Church of Rome, and despite the emperor’s graciousness, he probably found the intertwining of civil and ecclesiastical affairs in the East Roman Empire extremely fishy—it must, to him, have smacked of the same worldliness and proneness to simony he had spent years fighting back in Italy.
Pope Leo IX died late in April. This theoretically voided Humbert’s powers, but three months later, word of the pope’s death had still not reached Constantinople. On 16 July, 1054, Cardinal Humbert marched into Hagia Sophia and laid a bull of excommunication against the patriarch on the altar. He then promptly left, only stopping at the doors of the church to shake its dust from his shoes and say “May God see, and judge.”
1The term the Great Schism is sometimes used, especially in older works, to denote a schism that took place from 1378 to 1417, involving first one and then two antipopes (seated in the cities of Avignon and Pisa). However, this is now usually labeled “the Western Schism.”
2Other sins fall under the general heading “impiety”—e.g. blasphemy, irreligion, and superstition. What heresy, apostasy, and schism have in common is the trait of being sins against the Church from within, so to speak: Only Christians can commit them (since one cannot distort, abandon, or tear apart what one does not first possess).
3These were: the First Council of Nicæa (325); the First Council of Constantinople (381); the Council of Ephesus (431); the Council of Chalcedon (451); the Second Council of Constantinople (553); the Third Council of Constantinople (680-681); and the Second Council of Nicæa (787). The first two addressed the deity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost; the next four, Christ’s humanity and the honor given to his mother; and the last, the legitimacy of ikons.
4The Assyrian Church has a fascinating history in its own right. It brought Christianity as far afield as Mongolia and China; as early as the eighth century, there were Christian bishoprics, churchyards, and monasteries as far to the east as Beijing and Quanzhou, and Assyrian Christians were prominent in the court of Genghiz Khan. Sadly, the Church’s membership was devastated by the Black Death, and the Ming dynasty that took power in fourteenth-century China was intensely xenophobic, suppressing Christianity among other foreign faiths. Today, the communion survives primarily in Iraq and India.
5Yes, Oriental Orthodoxy is completely separate from Eastern Orthodoxy, and they are both different from the Church of the East. Also, Anglo-Catholicism is a form of Protestantism, but the Anglican Use is a form of Catholicism. Welcome to the taxonomy party, it’s terrible.
6Syriac is a variety of the Aramaic language. It was spoken from the first century to the twelfth or thirteenth.
7This crime takes its name from Simon Magus, who earned a reputation in early Christian circles as an arch-heretic after trying to buy spiritual powers from St. Peter (as recounted in Acts 8:18-24).
Gabriel Blanchard was exhumed several months after his death and cunningly positioned in a CLT office chair. He has not yet been posthumously executed, but there’s still plenty of time.
If you enjoyed this piece, and want to read more from the CLT Journal, try taking a look at our series on the idea of authority, or this profile of the great Medieval philosopher, diplomat, and ethicist Christine de Pizan. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 10th February, 2025. Page image of the central panel of a triptych by the Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna, who flourished in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; more than two hundred years after the Great Schism, the common iconographic heritage of West and East is still clearly discernible in Duccio’s style.