History of the East–West Schism

The most important theological difference occurred over various questions regarding the procession of the Holy Spirit, and the use of the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed.

[1] Eric Plumer writes "the divergence of the Eastern and Western churches, leading ultimately to the East-West Schism, was a process of many centuries, influenced by a host of political, cultural and theological factors.

"[3] Because so many factors contributed to the ever-widening separation between East and West, it is difficult to point to a specific date when it began or even identify a single primary cause of the schism.

[5][6][7][page needed] Orthodox apologists point to incidents as early as the 2nd century as examples of claims by Rome to papal primacy and rejection by Eastern Churches.

[28] A generation later, synods of bishops in Palestine, Pontus (Northern Anatolia) and Osrhoene in the east, and in Rome and Gaul in the west, unanimously declared that the celebration should be exclusively on Sunday.

[27] In 193, Pope Victor I presided over a council in Rome and subsequently sent a letter about the matter to Polycrates of Ephesus and the churches of the Roman province of Asia.

When Roman Emperor Constantine the Great embraced Christianity, he summoned the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 to resolve a number of issues which troubled the Church.

[41] It divided the eastern Roman Empire into five dioceses: Egypt (under Alexandria), the East (under Antioch), Asia (under Ephesus), Pontus (under Caesarea Cappadociae), and Thrace (originally under Heraclea, later under Constantinople).

[46][47] The Acacian schism (484-519), when, "for the first time, West lines up against East in a clear-cut fashion",[48] ended with acceptance of a declaration insisted on by Pope Hormisdas (514-523) that "I hope I shall remain in communion with the apostolic see in which is found the whole, true, and perfect stability of the Christian religion".

[49][50][51] Earlier, in 494, Pope Gelasius I (492-496) wrote to Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, distinguishing the power of civil rulers from that of the bishops (called "priests" in the document), with the latter supreme in religious matters; he ended his letter with: "And if it is fitting that the hearts of the faithful should submit to all priests in general who properly administer divine affairs, how much the more is obedience due to the bishop of that see which the Most High ordained to be above all others, and which is consequently dutifully honoured by the devotion of the whole Church.

[46] This canon was a source of friction between East and West until the mutual excommunications of 1054 made it irrelevant in that regard;[63] but controversy about its applicability to the authority of the patriarchate of Constantinople still continues.

[64] Canon 9 of the Council also declared: "If a bishop or clergyman should have a difference with the metropolitan of the province, let him have recourse to the Exarch of the Diocese, or to the throne of the Imperial City of Constantinople, and there let it be tried."

The Emperor Diocletian famously divided the administration of the eastern and western portions of the empire in the early 4th century, though subsequent leaders (including Constantine) aspired to and sometimes gained control of both regions.

Soon after the fall of the Western Empire, the number of individuals who spoke both Latin and Greek began to dwindle, and communication between East and West grew much more difficult.

In the Orthodox view, the Bishop of Rome (i.e. the Pope) would have universal primacy in a reunited Christendom, as primus inter pares without power of jurisdiction.

[94] Thus the word ἑτέραν in the seventh canon of the later Council of Ephesus is understood as meaning "different", "contradictory", and not "another" in the sense of mere explanatory additions to the already existing creed.

Leo and Argyrus led armies against the ravaging Normans, but the papal forces were defeated at the Battle of Civitate in 1053, which resulted in the pope being imprisoned at Benevento, where he took it upon himself to learn Greek.

Michael I, Patriarch of Constantinople, then ordered Leo, Archbishop of Ochrid, to write a letter to the bishop of Trani, John, an Easterner, in which he attacked the "Judaistic" practices of the West, namely the use of unleavened bread.

In 1054, Pope Leo IX sent a letter to Michael Cerularius that cited a large portion of the forgery called the Donation of Constantine, believing it genuine.

[111][112][113] On 24 July, the anathema was officially proclaimed in the Hagia Sophia Church, and copies of the legatine charter were set to be burnt, while the original was placed in the patriarchal archive.

Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos (formerly Timothy Ware) writes that the choice of Cardinal Humbert was unfortunate, for both he and Patriarch Michael I were men of stiff and intransigent temper... .

[118] Francis Dvornik states: "In spite of what happened in 1054, the faithful of both church remained long unaware of any change in their relations and acts of intercommunion were so numerous that 1054 as the date of the schism becomes inadmissible.

"[120] In 1089, the Russian Church felt so little separated from the Western that it instituted a liturgical feast to commemorate the formerly disputed translation of about half of the relics of Saint Nicholas of Myra from Asia to Bari in Italy just two years earlier.

[121] This fluidity explains in part the different interpretations of the geographical line of division in the two maps given here, one drawn up in the West, the other in a country where Eastern Orthodoxy predominates.

Victor II was preoccupied with the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire, but after his death in summer of 1057, the papacy was given to Cardinal Frederick of Lorraine, one of three envoys of 1054, who was elected pope as Stephen IX.

When in 1182 regency of empress mother Maria of Antioch, an ethnical French notorious for the favoritism shown to Latin merchants and the big aristocratic land-owners, was deposed by Andronikos I Komnenos on the wake of popular support, the new emperor allowed mobs to massacre hated foreigners.

In the 15th century, the Eastern Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, pressed hard by the Ottoman Turks, was keen to ally himself with the West, and to do so he arranged with Pope Eugene IV for discussions about reunion to be held again, this time at the Council of Ferrara-Florence.

After several long discussions, the emperor managed to convince the Eastern representatives to accept the Western doctrines of filioque, purgatory and the supremacy of the papacy.

However, upon their return, the Eastern bishops found their agreement with the West broadly rejected by the populace and by civil authorities (with the notable exception of the emperors of the East who remained committed to union until the Fall of Constantinople two decades later).

Pope John Paul II visited other heavily Orthodox areas such as Ukraine, despite lack of welcome at times, and he said that healing the divisions between Western and Eastern Christianity was one of his fondest wishes.