1054: East and West divided

Brothers grown apart

For nearly a thousand years the churches of East and West were one church. They confessed the same creed and received the same councils, but the West spoke Latin and the East Greek, and fewer and fewer on either side knew the other's language. The bishop of Rome claimed, as Peter's successor, authority over the whole church; the East gave Rome the first place of honour but held that the great matters of the church belong to its councils together. The West's addition of ‘and the Son’, the filioque, to the Nicene Creed was a quarrel too, and so was the bread of the Supper, unleavened in the West and leavened in the East. The theology of these questions is the Theology course's Monks, missions and the parting of East and West; this lesson follows what happened.

In the middle of the eleventh century southern Italy held churches that worshipped in Greek and churches that worshipped in Latin, and the Normans were taking the land. Around 1053 a letter from the East rebuked the West for celebrating the Supper with unleavened bread, and Western accounts say that Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople had the Latin churches of his city closed. Pope Leo IX, who hoped for an alliance with the Byzantine emperor against the Normans, sent legates to Constantinople in the spring of 1054 to answer, led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida. Leo died in April, while they were there.

July 1054, Hagia Sophia

The meeting went wrong from the start. Cerularius would not recognise the legates' authority, and Humbert attacked Eastern customs in sharp writings. On Saturday 16 July 1054 the legates walked into Hagia Sophia before the service, laid on the altar a bull excommunicating the patriarch and his followers, and left. A deacon ran after them, begging them to take it back; they refused. A few days later the patriarch's synod condemned the bull and those who wrote it.

We know the events in detail because both the bull and the edict of the patriarch's synod survive The bull of excommunication and the patriarchal synod's edict. Read side by side, they show that this was not a break between two whole churches. The bull called the emperor and the citizens orthodox and aimed at the patriarch and his party, and the pope who had sent the legates was already dead. For a long time afterwards Latins and Greeks in some places still shared communion. So many historians see 1054 not as a sudden rupture but as the year an estrangement centuries in the making came into the open.

1204, and how the two churches remember

What made the wound deep came a hundred and fifty years later. The Fourth Crusade, called by Pope Innocent III in 1198 to recover Jerusalem, could not pay the Venetians for its ships, and in 1202 it attacked Zara on the Adriatic, a Christian city. Then the son of a deposed Byzantine emperor promised money and the union of the churches if they would put him on the throne, and the crusaders sailed for Constantinople. When the promises were not kept, they stormed the city in April 1204 and sacked it for three days. Hagia Sophia and other churches were stripped, relics and treasures were carried off to the West, and a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch were installed.

Nicetas Choniates, a Byzantine official who escaped the burning city, wrote in his History that the Muslims who had taken Jerusalem had been kinder than these men who carried the cross on their shoulders. Innocent III had forbidden the crusaders to attack Christians, and when he heard of the sack he rebuked them, but he went on to accept the Latin empire and its Latin patriarch. Latin rule lasted until the Byzantines retook the city in 1261. Many historians judge that the sack of 1204, far more than the excommunications of 1054, divided the hearts of ordinary believers.

The Eastern Orthodox tell the story as that of a church that has kept unchanged the faith of the seven councils, while Rome, by altering alone the creed the whole church had confessed and by claiming power over every church, went its own way. The Catholic Church sees communion with the Roman church, the see of Peter, as the centre of the church's unity, and tells how the Eastern churches drew away from it, while holding the Orthodox sacraments and apostolic tradition in deep respect. The Protestant churches, born in the West, mostly confess the creed with the filioque, yet stand with the Orthodox in not accepting the pope's authority. Councils at Lyon in 1274 and Florence in 1439 proclaimed reunion, but most Eastern believers never received it.

Reconciliation, and the church today

The road to reconciliation opened in the twentieth century. In January 1964 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople met in Jerusalem and embraced, and on 7 December 1965 the two churches read a joint declaration on the same day in Rome and in Constantinople. They grieved over the excommunications of 1054 and declared them erased Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration. On the Day of Pardon in March 2000 Pope John Paul II confessed the sins that had divided Christians from one another Memory and Reconciliation, and in Athens in May 2001 he asked God to forgive the wrongs Catholics had done to the Orthodox, and spoke of his deep sorrow that crusaders had sacked a Christian city in 1204. In April 2004, eight hundred years after the sack, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople accepted the apology The apology for 1204, and its acceptance.

On the night before he was arrested, Jesus prayed not only for his disciples but for all who would believe through their message (John 17:20-23):

that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.

John 17:21

The men of 1054 each believed they were guarding the true faith and the right customs of their church. But they did not learn each other's language, they counted different customs as sins, and in the end they condemned each other on the altar where the Supper was offered. Paul appealed "that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be united in mind and conviction" (1 Corinthians 1:10), and urged believers to keep the unity of the Spirit "with all humility and gentleness" (Ephesians 4:2).

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism;

Ephesians 4:4-5

Matthew Henry warns that "The more they dispute about lesser things, the more they throw doubts upon Christianity" Matthew Henry, and counsels, "where there is not unity of sentiment, still let there be union of affection" Matthew Henry. The excommunications are lifted, but the two churches do not yet share one table. Still, that after nine hundred years they confessed the wounds they had dealt each other shows that unity begins when we name our own wrongs first. The story of the church's divisions is taken further in Why are there so many churches and denominations?. The next lesson, Popes, emperors and the Crusades, follows the struggle of popes and emperors in the West in the same age, and the Crusades.

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