The Greek and Eastern Churches/Part 1/Division 2/Chapter 6

by Walter Frederic Adeney

 

CHAPTER VI

THE GREAT SCHISM

 

(a) Hergenröther, Photius, 3 vols., 1867; Ratramnus, Contra Græcorum Opposita; Anselm, De Proc. Spirit. S.; Mansi, xv. and xvi.

(b) Gibbon, chap. lx.; Neale, History of the Holy Eastern Church, Introd., vol. ii., 1850; Tondini, The Pope of Rome and the Popes of the Oriental Church, 1871; Swete, Hist. of Doctrine of Procession of the Holy Spirit, etc., 1876; Howard, The Schism between the Oriental and the Western Churches, 1892; Bréhier, Le Schisme Oriental du XI^me Siècle, 1899.

 

The most momentous fact in the history of Christendom during the Middle Ages is the separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches. When we look at the two great communions, each of which claims to be the one genuine Church, we see them to have so much in common that we may wonder at the absolutely irreconcilable attitude they maintain towards each other. In discipline, ritual, and doctrine they are much nearer together than Roman Catholics and Protestants, nearer even than High Anglicans and Evangelical Churchmen. Both are episcopal, sacerdotal, sacramental, orthodox in relation to the historic creeds. The note of the Eastern Church is said to be orthodoxy and that of the Western catholicity, so that the one is called "The Holy Orthodox Church," and the other "The Catholic Church." To some extent these differences of title are indicative of distinctions in the essential characters of the bodies they represent. The one is especially concerned with the defence of the creed, the other with the maintenance of organic unity. And yet the Western Church stands for orthodoxy in its proud claim to infallibility, and the Eastern is equally intolerant of heresy, schism, or insubordination. The division followed centuries of close mutual communication, and it was so gradual that much of the common thought and life of the patristic trunk from which they spring is to be found in each of these great branches. As we contemplate them in their stubborn separation we may be reminded of Coleridge's famous metaphor in Christobel—

"They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder,
A dreary sea now flows between."

In tracing the causes of this tremendous cleavage of Christendom we may be surprised to see how insignificant and unimportant some of them were. A personal quarrel between two patriarchs, a slight step of advance in the implied claims of a title, and last of all, a subtle point in the definition of the Trinity—these are among the influences that in course of time by their cumulative effect scooped out the great chasm, like the water brooks that running for past ages have at length separated whole mountains. Nevertheless, we must not set down the final result to a mere chapter of accidents. The occurrence of various incidents—each in itself apparently so unimportant—in a series coming down several centuries points to the existence of persistent causes lurking beneath. Deep lying, slow moving, gigantic forces, operating through centuries, worked with the inevitability of fate.

1. First among these causes we must place the racial. It is true that the Greek and Latin races were near akin, members of the common Aryan stock which has peopled India, Persia, and Europe. But historically, in the period with which we are concerned, neither of these races was self-contained or unmixed with alien elements. The Latins were invigorated and transformed by an infusion of German blood resulting from successive Gothic invasions. The Greeks, on the other hand, were mingled with a host of Northern and Oriental races, especially the Sclavs and the Armenians and other peoples of Western Asia. Probably the Greeks were now a minority of the population of Greece, being outnumbered by the Sclavs. Constantinople ceased to be a Greek city except in language and culture. Her citizenship became more Oriental than Greek, and especially Armenian. The strongest rulers of this late Roman Empire which we call Byzantine were natives of Asia Minor. Thus the natural sympathies and affinities of the two branches of the Church tended century by century to mutual estrangement.

We saw how at the beginning the freer Christianity, the Pauline, that which was emancipated from Judaism, was Grecian.^[1] First and second century literature in Rome was composed in the Greek language. The churches of Lyons and Gaul were offshoots from the Greek colony at Marseilles, and their famous bishop Irenæus was a native of Greek-speaking Smyrna, who wrote his work Against Heretics in Greek. Latin Christian literature first appeared in north Africa a few years later. The great heresies of the Church nearly all sprang from the Eastern branch of the Church, and though at first they flowed to Rome and other Western places, by the middle of the fourth century they were successfully beaten back by the established hierarchial system of the West. The West had its schisms on questions of discipline—first the Novatian, then the Donatist, and its one great heresy, Pelagianism, which was concerned with the human side of religion. The East elaborated the orthodoxy of the Church. The Apostles' Creed grew up in the West, but as a schedule for catechetical teaching, probably originating in earlier Eastern schedules; the West, too—apparently in the monastery at Lerins—gave birth to the Athanasian Creed; but that is rather a hymn to be set by the side of the other great Latin psalm of praise, the Te Deum, not properly a Church creed at all. The one test creed is the Nicene, and this is Eastern. Its greatest exponents were in the East. During the fourth century and after, in spite of the strength of Ambrose, and the massive genius of Augustine, the intellectual centre of gravity of the Church was in the East. Rome accepted the elaboration of the doctrine of the Trinity from the East. It is true that by a flash of inspired political wisdom she stepped in at the critical moment and said the word that settled the orthodoxy of the whole Church for all subsequent ages; for Leo's Tome determined the decision of Chalcedon. But it was the thought which the great pope had received from the East that he was able to enshrine in that immortal document. After this, the West, absorbed in its own practical problems, came to view with weary indifference the hair-splitting controversies of the Eastern Church. She was concerned for orthodoxy, and again and again she struck in with a word of authority to save the situation. But as first the Nestorians by the Euphrates, and then the Monophysites in Egypt and Syria, were cut off, Rome came to have less and less vital connection with what was now essentially the Byzantine Church, identical in area with the Byzantine Empire.

2. A second influence that worked gradually but with inevitable consequences towards this cleavage of the Church was the separation of the Eastern and Western Empires, followed by the slow dissolution of the latter, and then its marvellous resurrection as an independent power, no longer a Roman Empire at all except in name. This process began when the emperors ceased to treat Rome as the centre of government. Diocletian thoroughly Orientalised the administration with its headquarters at Nicomedia. But the most significant fact in this connection was the founding of Constantinople. When Constantine transferred the centre of social influence and intellectual life, as well as the centre of government, from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the Bosphorus, he began to make a fissure which nothing could stop. Subsequently this severance was widened by the Gothic invasions—the establishment of a Gothic kingdom, only nominally subject to the emperor in the East as its suzerain lord—the failure of the exarch at Ravenna to shelter Italy from the awful scourge of the Huns—and the success first of Leo, then of Gregory, in stepping into the breach and saving civilisation and the Church, when their professed protector at Constantinople had proved to be an impotent defence. Meanwhile in the East the Church was becoming more and more identified with the empire. Their she was tied hands and feet by the imperial will. Emperors and empresses appointed and deposed patriarchs and bishops. The Byzantine Church was being converted into a department of the highly organised bureaucratic Byzantine Empire. Naturally the West asked. Why should the free Latin Church tie itself down to the servile ways of the subject Greek Church? If the emperor could not protect the Church in the West there was no reason why she should not be independent of his servants in the East. When the pope crowned Charles the Great as emperor at Rome on Christmas Day, a.d. 800, he definitely broke with the emperor at Constantinople, in whose eyes the Frank was a usurper. Again the marvellous political insight of Rome proved to be correct. It was useless to look across the Adriatic for protection against the Lombards; then the wise course was to find safety in the rising power across the Alps. But the price for the new alliance had to be paid. Henceforth the papacy, with all its dreams of a universal Church, must content itself in fact with being the dominant influence only in Western churches, and see the other half of Christendom drift wholly out of its sphere of authority.

3. A third influence tending to the severance of the two churches is to be detected in the rivalry between the patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople, and especially in the lofty claims put forth by the papacy. We saw how gravely Gregory the Great had expostulated with John the Faster, when that patriarch had laid claim to the title of "Œcumenical Bishop."^[2] Long before this, though not urging precisely the same titular claim, the popes had made great demands on the ground of their succession to the chair of Peter. The council of Sardica (a.d. 344) had given a right of appeal on the part of a bishop who had been deposed by his fellow-bishops to Julius the bishop of Rome. But it is a matter of dispute whether this was intended to refer only to this particular pope or also to his successors, and further how far he might take the initiative. It is to be observed that in this council the Eastern as well as the Western Church was represented; there were bishops from Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Thessaly, and other Oriental districts. But since the Eusebian bishops had withdrawn and Hosius of Cordova was presiding, it is possible that there was a majority of Western bishops when the canon was voted. Then Leo the Great (a.d. 440–461) put forth high papal claims, referring to Peter and his successors as constituting the rock on which the Church is founded.^[3] Peter is the pastor and prince of the whole Church. To resist his authority is an act of impious pride and the sure way to hell. Considering the many times in which the popes make great demands in various ways, it is difficult to think Gregory the Great wholly disinterested when he rebukes his brother at Constantinople for arrogance in calling himself the "Œcumenical Bishop." Gregory claims some merit for not adopting the title for himself on the ground that it has been allowed to earlier popes; but liere he is not accurate, for the previous use of the term has been generic, applying to all the patriarchs,^[4] whereas now the question turns on the exclusive use of it for one patriarch in particular.

The conflict between pope and patriarch reached an acute condition in the ninth century. Ignatius, the patriarch of Constantinople, had dared to rebuke the immorality of the Cæsar Bardas, refusing to administer the sacrament to him on Advent Sunday, a.d. 857. No ecclesiastic in the Eastern Church could follow with impunity the bold example of Ambrose in the West, when he stood at his church door and refused admission to the Emperor Theodosius. Ignatius was arrested and imprisoned on a false accusation of sedition, and in his place the emperor nominated and a synod formally elected a very remarkable man to the headship of the Byzantine Church. This was Photius, who has been greatly maligned by the papal party, but who appears to have been really of high personal character, though haughty and ambitious. Eminent for learning in a church that has prided itself on its scholarship, Photius mentions no less than 280 pagan and Christian authors whose works he has read. He comes only second to John of Damascus among the leading churchmen of the later Byzantine period. If John was the last of the Fathers, Photius may be considered the last of the scholarly leaders of first rank in the Greek Church. His controversial writings reveal intellectual contempt springing from superior knowledge and culture, which he does not scruple to express in dealing with the pretensions of his western rival, the pope, a man his inferior both in learning and in brain power. Here we see the age-long scorn of the finished Greek for the ruder Latin civilisation.

Photius was a layman when he was suddenly called to his lofty post in the Church. But he was a man of noble birth and rank, and he then held the office of chief Secretary of State. He was rushed through the minor orders with a haste that scandalised the proprieties, taking one step a day, till he was promoted to the highest place of all. Ambrose was a layman when he was elected bishop of Milan by acclamation, and though he took some time for preparation and his promotion was not quite so rapid as that of Photius, it was somewhat similar. In both cases, proved ability in the administration of civil affairs was taken as a qualification for the regulation of Church government. But there was one vital difference between the two cases. Ambrose had been elected by the people of Milan in a popular assembly; but Photius was forced on the people of Constantinople by the government.

These high-handed proceedings met with serious opposition, and in order to settle the matter the Emperor Michael invited the pope, Nicholas i., to send delegates to a general council. This was done, and the council was held at Constantinople in the year 861. It deposed Ignatius, although he had the support of the people, and its decision was ratified by the papal delegates. Then the friends of Ignatius, that is to say, the real representatives of the Greek Church, appealed to the pope, who threw over his delegates, and convoked a synod at Rome, which decided in favour of Ignatius, and pronounced excommunication on Photius in case he should dare to retain the patriarchate (a.d. 863). Photius replied by insisting on the equality in rank of the patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople. The emperor summoned another council at Constantinople four years later, at which the patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem were represented; and this council pronounced a sentence of deposition on the Roman pontiff. But Photius was in a precarious position, only able to hold on by the support of his patron Michael; and when that was removed by the murder of the emperor, he was seized and imprisoned in a convent, and Ignatius restored to the patriarchate. In the year 869 a council was held in St. Sophia, which the Latins reckon as the "Eighth Œcumenical Council." It condemned Photius and confirmed the right of Ignatius to be patriarch of Constantinople.

This miserable quarrel ended happily. The rival patriarchs were both really good men, and ultimately they were reconciled. Even Ignatius, who had owed so much to the papacy, could not endure the arrogant interference of Pope John viii. with the missionary work which the Greek Church was carrying on in Bulgaria with remarkable success; and the pope had threatened to excommunicate him too, when death removed him from his difficulties (Oct. 23, 877). Three days later Photius was quietly restored to the patriarchate. It was not to be expected that the pope would find him more complacent. In the year 879, a council, three times as large as Ignatius's council, met with much pomp in St. Sophia, pronounced the previous council a fraud, re-affirmed the Nicene Creed without the Filioque clause on which the Latins were insisting, and ended by eulogising the virtues and learning of Photius. This council is sometimes reckoned by the Orientals as the "Eighth Œcumenical Council," though generally only seven general councils are allowed in the East. Thus if an eighth is to be counted at all—and that is the case definitely in the Roman Church, though less decisively in the Greek—it is taken differently in the West and in the East. With the Latins it is Ignatius's council of a.d. 869; with the Greeks it is Photius's council of a.d. 879. The papal delegates assented to the decision of the latter council, and deceived the pope on their return to Rome by representing that it had conceded his Bulgarian claims. When he learnt the truth and discovered that it had done nothing of the kind, he pronounced an anathema on Photius for deceiving and degrading the Holy See. But it does not appear that the patriarch had had any share in the diplomacy which the papal legates had practised. Photius ended his days in learned leisure at a monastery, and died in the year 891. The feud between the two churches now went on and it only ended with final and complete severance.

4. The last stage of the long quarrel was concerned with the controversy on the Filioque clause of the Nicene Creed. The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in the fact that the chief difference between the two great historic churches is so fine a point of doctrine that ordinary people could never guess its supposed importance. Nobody could pretend to decide it without penetrating into the profound mystery of the Being of God. Both churches accept the Nicene Creed as confirmed in the great Church councils; both are loyal to the idea of the homousion, and to the full Divinity of the Holy Spirit as well as that of the Son; both are thoroughly Trinitarian. But while the Eastern Church maintains that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone though through the Son, the Western Church contends that He proceeds from the Father and also from the Son as a joint source. Not only does the Greek Church object to the latter idea, it accuses the Latin Church of a wrong action in venturing to insert a word in the venerated Nicene Creed. The clause in the Latin version asserting the procession of the HolySpirit originally ran: "Qui ex patre procedit." The Roman Church now renders this clause: "Qui ex Patre Filioque procedit." The insertion of Filioque at this point in the creed became the chief ground of division between the two churches, and it has remained so down to the present day without any hope of reconciliation, each community anathematising the other on account of the fine point of doctrine.

As with most controversies, it was possible for each party to point to testimony in the writings of venerated Fathers of antiquity that seemed to favour its own specific contention. That is nearly always the case, because it is controversy that sharpens definitions; and inasmuch as there is certainly something to be said for both sides of an argument in which sincere and able men are engaged, it is pretty certain that before the ideas crystallise on one side or the other they will be found in a mixed state of solution. Thus Tertullian in the West seemed to favour what was adopted later as the Eastern view, when he said, Spiritum non aliunde puto quam a Patre per Filium,^[5] and Hilary of Poitiers, the most important literary defender of the Nicene Creed in the West during the fourth century, writes, Loqui de Eo (i.e. the Holy Spirit) non necesse est, Qui a Patre et Filio auctoribus confitendus est,^[6] and at the close, referring to the Holy Spirit, he says, ex te per unigenitum suum;^[7] and again explicitly, A Patre procedit Spiritus Sanctus, sed a Filio et a Patre mittitur.^[8] On the other hand, Athanasius in the East seems to anticipate the Western view when he writes, "The Word gives to the Spirit, and whatever the Spirit hath, He hath from the Word."^[9] This may not refer to original being. St. Basil is more definite, writing, "Since the Holy Spirit … dependeth^[10] from the Son, and hath His being dependent^[11] from the Father as its cause, whence also He proceedeth."^[12] The latter part of this sentence would appear to favour the Eastern view. Nevertheless in another place Basil writes, "God generates, not as man, but truly generates. And that which is generated of Him sends forth the Spirit through His mouth."^[13] On the other hand, Gregory Nazianzen definitely asserts that the Spirit proceeds from the Father only.^[14]

Ambrose appears to be the first to teach in express terms that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Thus he writes, "The Holy Spirit also when he proceeds from the Father and the Son,^[15] is not separated from the Father, is not separated from the Son";^[16] and Epiphanius frequently teaches that the Holy Spirit is from both.^[17]

Augustine frequently teaches that the procession is from both the Father and the Son.^[18] As yet, however, nobody had ventured to tamper with the venerated creed so as to insert this idea into it. As far as has yet been pointed out, "the first known instance in which the Filioque was inserted into the Processional Clause of the Symbol"^[19] is at the third council of Toledo (a.d. 589). It reappears in the fourth (a.d. 633) and sixth (a.d. 638) councils of Toledo. The doctrine was received in England at the council of Hatfield (a.d. 680). Passing on to the eighth century, we find Tarasius in his letter announcing his elevation to the patriarchate of Constantinople writing of the Holy Spirit as "proceeding from the Father through the Son"—the Greek doctrine. This expression was vehemently disputed in the Caroline Books—theological writings claiming the sanction of Charles the Great, who forwarded them to Pope Hadrian, and the controversy was now fully alive. After a council at Aix-la-Chapelle (a.d. 809), Charles sent legates to confer with the pope (Leo iii.) on the subject. Leo, while approving of the doctrine, hesitated about the insertion of it in the venerated creed. Four years later the council of Aries formally sanctioned the double procession.

After this, when the quarrel broke out between Photius and Nicolas, the patriarch charged the Roman Church with heresy for accepting what he reckoned an error in the Western doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit. Still, in spite of this difficulty and all other grounds of quarrel, there was no formal severance between the two churches till the middle of the eleventh century. Meanwhile the clause which was the source of so much contention was being gradually adopted by all the local churches in the West. It is a question whether the insertion of it in the creed was ever formally authorised by the Church of Rome in a council at which the pope was represented.^[20]

We now approach the final rupture. Michael Cerularius, who was ordained patriarch of Constantinople in the year 1043, addressed an encyclical letter to the bishops of Apulia, some nine or ten years later, in which he sought closer union with the Western Church, at the same time mentioning some of the difficulties in the way of such union, the chief of which was the Western use of unleavened bread at the Eucharist.^[21] The last item that he referred to was the Dogma of the Procession from the Son. This letter fell into the hands of the pope, Leo ix., who addressed a reply to the patriarch in a very different spirit, ending with a threat that if necessary he would not "Seethe the kid in its mother's milk," but "scrub its mangy hide with biting vinegar and salt."^[22] The patriarch refusing to submit to the pope's directions, the papal legates formally laid on the altar of St. Sophia a sentence of anathema denouncing eleven evil doctrines and practices of Michael and his supporters, and cursing them with the awful imprecation: "Let them be Anathema Maranatha, with Simoniacs, Valerians, Arians, Donatists, Nicholaitans, Severians, Pneumatomachi, Manichees, and Nazarenes, and with all heretics; yea, with the devil and his angels. Amen. Amen. Amen" (July 16, a.d. 1054). The schism was now complete.

The modern mind is naturally amazed that so huge a disaster to Christendom could be seriously promoted by so fine a point of controversy as the Filioque clause. We have seen that this was by no means the only ground of contention. It was but the last ingredient in a bitter cup which the Eastern Church refused to take from the hands of overbearing Roman prelates. Then we must remember that, all along, the deplorable mistake of substituting doctrinal orthodoxy for personal faith was maintained by both branches of the Church. Nor was the doctrinal point under dispute without what people thought to be serious consequences. Some have revived it in recent times. When the idea of the immanence of God has suggested that the Divine presence could be secured without the mediation of Christ, it has been argued that the Spirit of God comes to us from Christ; that otherwise the special Christian gospel would vanish. But this was not the question at the time of the dispute. It was not how we receive the Spirit; but how the mysterious existence of the Third Person in the Trinity comes to be in itself. The Greeks allowed that we receive the Spirit through Christ. Still their opponents thought that the honour of Christ was involved in the controversy. It was in the West, in St. Augustine and the Athanasian Creed, for example, that the absolute equality of the Son with the Father was emphasised. The Filioque clause seemed to agree with that equality, the Greek rejection of the clause to discredit it.

 

1. See pp. 3–5.
2. See p. 140.
3. e.g. Letters, cv., cxx.
4. See Dudden, Gregory the Great, vol. ii. pp. 209 ff.
5. Adv. Praxean. 4.
6. De Trin. ii. 29.
7. Ibid. xii. 57.
8. Ibid. viii. 20—an important passage discussing this very question.
9. Cont. Ar. iii. 25.
10. ἤρτηται.
11. ἐξημμένον.
12. Epis. xxxviii. 8.
13. Adv. Eunomium.
14. Orat. 1; De Filio, 1.
15. Cum procedit a Patre et Filio.
16. De Sp. S. i. 10.
17. παρά (Ancor. lxvii.), ἐξ (Hær. lxxiv. 7) of Both, and παρά of the Father, but ἐξ of the Son (Ancor. viii. 9).
18. e.g. Trin. xv. 48 and passim.
19. Howard, The Filioque and the Schism, pp. 18, 19—a book to which I am indebted for much information on this subject, and the quotations given above.
20. Dr. Dollinger attributed the insertion of it to Pope Benedict viii. on the demand of the Emperor Henry ii., in a.d. 1014. See Howard, op. cit. p. 38.
21. Pro eo maximo, quod de azymis, etc.
22. Mansi, xix. 649.