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The Eastern Schism
From the time
of Diotrephes (III John 1:9-10) there have been continual
schisms, of
which the greater number were in the East.
Arianism
produced a huge schism; the
Nestorian
and Monophysite
schisms still last. However, the Eastern Schism always means that
most deplorable quarrel of which the final result is the separation
of the vast majority of
Eastern
Christians from union with the Catholic Church, the schism that
produced the separated, so-called
"Orthodox"
Church.
I. REMOTE
PREPARATION OF THE SCHISM
The great
Eastern Schism must not be conceived as the result of only one
definite quarrel. It is not true that after centuries of perfect
peace, suddenly on account of one dispute, nearly half of
Christendom
fell away. Such an event would be unparalleled in history, at any
rate, unless there were some great heresy, and in this quarrel there
was no heresy at first, nor has there ever been a hopeless
disagreement about the Faith. It is a case, perhaps the only
prominent case, of a pure schism, of a breach of intercommunion
caused by anger and bad feeling, not by a rival theology. It would
be inconceivable then that hundreds of bishops should suddenly break
away from union with their chief, if all had gone smoothly before.
The great schism is rather the result of a very gradual process. Its
remote causes must be sought centuries before there was any
suspicion of their final effect. There was a series of temporary
schisms that loosened the bond and prepared the way. The two great
breaches, those of
Photius and
Michael
Caerularius, which are remembered as the origin of the present
state of things, were both healed up afterwards. Strictly speaking,
the present schism dates from the Eastern repudiation of the
Council of
Florence (in 1472). So although the names of Photius and
Caerularius are justly associated with this disaster, inasmuch as
their quarrels are the chief elements in the story, it must not be
imagined that they were the sole, the first, or the last authors of
the schism. If we group the story around their names we must explain
the earlier causes that prepared for them, and note that there were
temporary reunions later.
The first
cause of all was the gradual estrangement of East and West. To a
great extent this estrangement was inevitable. The East and West
grouped themselves around different centres — at any rate as
immediate centres — used different rites and spoke different
languages. We must distinguish the position of the pope as visible
head of all
Christendom from his place as Patriarch of the West. The
position, sometimes now advanced by anti-papal controversialists,
and that all bishops are equal in jurisdiction, was utterly unknown
in the early Church. From the very beginning we find a graduated
hierarchy of metropolitans, exarchs, and primates. We find, too,
from the beginning the idea that a bishop inherits the dignity of
the founder of his see, that, therefore, the successor of an Apostle
has special rights and privileges. This graduated hierarchy is
important as explaining the pope's position. He was not the one
immediate superior of each bishop; he was the chief of an elaborate
organization, as it were the apex of a carefully graduated pyramid.
The consciousness of the early
Christian
probably would have been that the heads of
Christendom
were the patriarchs; then further he knew quite well that the chief
patriarch sat at Rome. However, the immediate head of each part of
the Church was its patriarch. After Chalcedon (451) we must count
five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and
Jerusalem.
The
difference between the East and West then was in the first place
that the pope in the West was not only supreme pontiff, but also the
local patriarch. He represented to
Eastern
Christians a remote and foreign authority, the last court of
appeal, for very serious questions, after their own patriarchs had
been found incapable of settling them; but to his own Latins in the
West he was the immediate head, the authority immediately over their
metropolitans, the first court of appeal to their bishops. So all
loyalty in the West went direct to Rome. Rome was the Mother Church
in many senses, it was by missioners sent out from Rome that the
local Western Churches had been founded. The loyalty of the
Eastern
Christians on the other hand went first to his own patriarch, so
there was here always a danger of divided allegiance — if the
patriarch had a quarrel with the pope — such as would have been
inconceivable in the West. Indeed, the falling away of so many
hundreds of Eastern bishops, of so many millions of simple
Christians,
is explained sufficiently by the schism of the patriarchs. If the
four Eastern patriarchs agreed upon any course it was practically a
foregone conclusion that their metropolitans and bishops would
follow them and that the priests and people would follow the
bishops. So the very organization of the Church in some sort already
prepared the ground for a contrast (which might become a rivalry)
between the first patriarch in the West with his vast following of
Latins on the one side and the Eastern patriarchs with their
subjects on the other.
Further
points that should be noticed are the differences of rite and
language. The question of rite follows that of patriarchate; it made
the distinction obvious to the simplest
Christian.
A Syrian, Greek or Egyptian layman would, perhaps, not understand
much about canon law as affecting patriarchs; he could not fail to
notice that a travelling Latin bishop or priest celebrated the Holy
Mysteries in a way that was very strange, and that stamped him as a
(perhaps suspicious) foreigner. In the West, the Roman Rite was
first affecting, then supplanting, all others, and in the East the
Byzantine Rite was gradually obtaining the same position. So we have
the germ of two unities, Eastern and Western. Undoubtedly both sides
knew that other rites were equally legitimate ways of celebrating
the same mysteries, but the difference made it difficult to say
prayers together. We see that this point was an important one from
the number of accusations against purely ritual matters brought by
Caerularius when he looked for grounds of quarrel.
Even the
detail of language was an element of separation. It is true that the
East was never entirely hellenized as the West was latinized.
Nevertheless, Greek did become to a great extent the international
language in the East. In the Eastern councils all the bishops talk
Greek. So again we have the same two unities, this time in language
— a practically Greek East and an entirely Latin West. It is
difficult to conceive this detail as a cause of estrangement, but it
is undoubtedly true that many misunderstandings arose and grew,
simply because people could not understand one another. For during
the time when these disputes arose, hardly anyone knew a foreign
language. It was not till the
Renaissance
that the age of convenient grammars and dictionaries arose.
St. Gregory I
(d. 1604) had been apocrisary at Constantinople, but he does not
seem to have learned Greek; Pope Vigilius (540-55) spent eight
unhappy years there and yet never knew the language. Photius was the
profoundest scholar of his age, yet he knew no Latin. When
Leo IX
(1048-54) wrote in Latin to Peter III of Antioch, Peter had to send
the letter to Constantinople to find out what it was about. Such
cases occur continually and confuse all the relations between East
and West. At councils the papal legates addressed the assembled
fathers in Latin and no one understood them; the council deliberated
in Greek and the legates wondered what was going on. So there arose
suspicion on both sides. Interpreters had to be called in; could
their versions be trusted? The Latins especially were profoundly
suspicious of Greek craft in this matter. Legates were asked to sign
documents they did not understand on the strength of assurances that
there was nothing really compromising in them. And so little made so
much difference. The famous case, long afterwards, of the Decree of
Florence and the forms kath on tropon, quemadmodum, shows how
much confusion the use of two languages may cause.
These causes
then combined to produce two halves of
Christendom,
an Eastern and a Western half, each distinguished in various ways
from the other. They are certainly not sufficient to account for a
separation of those halves; only we notice that already there was a
consciousness of two entities, the first marking of a line of
division, through which rivalry, jealousy, hatred might easily cut a
separation.
II. CAUSES
OF ESTRANGEMENT
The rivalry
and hatred arose from several causes. Undoubtedly the first, the
root of all the quarrel, was the advance of the See of
Constantinople. We have seen that four Eastern patriarchates were to
some extent contrasted to the one great Western unity. Had there
remained four such unities in the East, nothing further need have
followed. What accentuated the contrast and made it a rivalry was
the gradual assumption of authority over the other three by the
patriarch of Constantinople. It was Constantinople that bound
together the East into one body, uniting it against the West. It was
the persistent attempt of the emperor's patriarch to become a kind
of Eastern pope, as nearly as possible equal to his Western
prototype, that was the real source of all the trouble. On the one
hand, union under Constantinople really made a kind of rival Church
that could be opposed to Rome; on the other hand, through all the
career of advancement of the Byzantine bishops they found only one
real hindrance, the persistent opposition of the popes. The emperor
was their friend and chief ally always. It was, indeed, the
emperor's policy of centralization that was responsible for the
scheme of making the See of Constantinople a centre. The other
patriarchs who were displaced were not dangerous opponents. Weakened
by the endless Monophysite quarrels, having lost most of their
flocks, then reduced to an abject state by the
Moslem
conquest, the bishops of Alexandria and Antioch could not prevent
the growth of Constantinople. Indeed, eventually, they accepted
their degradation willingly and came to be idle ornaments of the new
patriarch's Court. Jerusalem too was hampered by schisms and
Moslems and
was itself a new patriarchate, having only the rights of the last
see of the five.
On the other
hand, at every step in the advancement of Constantinople there was
always the opposition of Rome. When the new see got its titular
honour at the First Council of Constantinople (381, can.3), Rome
refused to accept the canon (she was not represented at the
council); when Chalcedon in 451 turned this into a real patriarchate
(can. 28) the legates and then the pope himself refused to
acknowledge what had been done; when, intoxicated by their quick
advancement, the successors of the little suffragan bishops who had
once obeyed Heraclea assumed the insolent title "oecumenical
patriarch", it was again a pope of Old Rome who sternly rebuked
their arrogance. We can understand that jealousy and hatred of Rome
rankled in the minds of the new patriarchs, that they were willing
to throw off altogether an authority which was in their way at every
step. That the rest of the East joined them in their rebellion was
the natural result of the authority they had succeeded in usurping
over the other Eastern bishops. So we arrive at the essential
consideration in this question. The Eastern Schism was not a
movement arising in all the East; it was not a quarrel between two
large bodies; it was essentially the rebellion of one see,
Constantinople, which by the emperor's favour had already acquired
such influence that it was able unhappily to drag the other
patriarchs into schism with it.
We have
already seen that the suffragans of the patriarchs would naturally
follow their chiefs. If then Constantinople had stood alone her
schism would have mattered comparatively little. What made the
situation so serious was that the rest of the East eventually sided
with her. That followed from her all too successful assumption of
the place of chief see in the East. So the advance of Constantinople
was doubly the cause of the great schism. It brought her into
conflict with Rome and made the Byzantine patriarch almost
inevitably the enemy of the pope; at the same time it gave him such
a position that his enmity meant that of all the East.
This being
so, we must remember how entirely unwarrantable, novel, and
uncanonical the advance of Constantinople was. The see was not
Apostolic, had no glorious traditions, no reason whatever for its
usurpation of the first place in the East, but an accident of
secular politics. The first historical Bishop of Byzantium was
Metrophanes (315-25); he was not even a metropolitan, he was the
lowest in rank a diocesan bishop could be, a suffragan of Heraclea.
That is all his successors ever would have been, they would have had
no power to influence anyone, had not Constantine chosen their city
for his capital. All through their progress they made no pretense of
founding their claims on anything but the fact that they were now
bishops of the political capital. It was as the emperor's bishops,
as functionaries of the imperial Court, that they rose to the second
place in
Christendom. The legend of St. Andrew founding their see was a
late afterthought; it is now abandoned by all scholars. The claim of
Constantinople was always frankly the purely Erastian one that as
Caesar could establish his capital where he liked, so could he, the
civil governor, give ecclesiastical rank in the hierarchy to any see
he liked.
The 28th
canon of Chalcedon says so in so many words. Constantinople has
become the New Rome, therefore its bishop is to have like honour to
that of the patriarch of Old Rome and to be second after him. It
only needed a shade more insolence to claim that the emperor could
transfer all papal rights to the bishop of the city where he held
his court.
Let it be
always remembered that the rise of Constantinople, its jealousy of
Rome, its unhappy influence over all the East is a pure piece of
Erastianism, a shameless surrender of the things of
God to
Caesar. And nothing can be less stable than to establish
ecclesiastical rights on the basis of secular politics. The Turks in
1453 cut away the foundation of Byzantine ambition. There is now no
emperor and no Court to justify the oecumenical patriarch's
position. If we were to apply logically the principle on which he
rests, he would sink back to the lowest place and the patriarchs of
Christendom
would reign at Paris, London, New York. Meanwhile the old and really
canonical principle of the superiority of Apostolic sees remains
untouched by political changes. Apart from the Divine origin of the
papacy, the advance of Constantinople was a gross violation of the
rights of the Apostolic Sees of Alexandria and Antioch. We need not
wonder that the popes, although their first place was not
questioned, resented this disturbance of ancient rights by the
ambition of the imperial bishops.
Long before
Photius there had been schisms between Constantinople and Rome, all
of them healed up in time, but naturally all tending to weaken the
sense of essential unity. From the beginning of the See of
Constantinople to the great schism in 867 the list of these
temporary breaches of communion is a formidable one. There were
fifty-five years of schism (343-98) during the
Arian
troubles, eleven because of
St. John
Chrysostom's deposition (404-15), thirty-five years of the
Acacian schism (484-519), forty-one years of
Monothelite
schism (640-81), sixty-one years because of
Iconoclasm.
So of these 544 years (323-867) no less than 203 were spent by
Constantinople in a state of schism. We notice too that in every one
of these quarrels Constantinople was on the wrong side; by the
consent of the Orthodox, too, Rome in all stood out for right. And
already we see that the influence of the emperor (who naturally
always supported his court patriarch) in most cases dragged a great
number of other Eastern bishops into the same schism.
III.
PHOTIUS AND CAERULARIUS
It was
natural that the great schisms, which are immediately responsible
for the present state of things, should be local quarrels of
Constantinople. Neither was in any sense a general grievance of the
East. There was neither time any reason why other bishops should
join with Constantinople in the quarrel against Rome, except that
already they had learned to look to the imperial city for orders.
The quarrel of Photius was a gross defiance of lawful church order.
Ignatius was the rightful bishop without any question; he had
reigned peaceably for eleven years. Then he refused Communion to a
man guilty of open incest (857). But that man was the regent Bardas,
so the Government professed to depose Ignatius and intruded Photius
into his see.
Pope Nicholas I had no quarrel against the Eastern Church; he
had no quarrel against the Byzantine see. He stood out for the
rights of the lawful bishop. Both Ignatius and Photius had formally
appealed to him. It was only when Photius found that he had lost his
case that he and the Government preferred schism to submission
(867). It is even doubtful how far this time there was any general
Eastern schism at all. In the council that restored Ignatius (869)
the other patriarchs declared that they had at once accepted the
pope's former verdict.
But Photius
had formed an anti-Roman party which was never afterwards dissolved.
The effect of his quarrel, though it was so purely personal, though
it was patched up when Ignatius died, and again when Photius fell,
was to gather to a head all the old jealousy of Rome at
Constantinople. We see this throughout the Photian Schism. The mere
question of that usurper's pretended rights does not account for the
outburst of enmity against the pope, against everything Western and
Latin that we notice in government documents, in Photius's letters,
in the Acts of his synod in 879, in all the attitude of his party.
It is rather the rancour of centuries bursting out on a poor
pretext; this fierce resentment against Roman interference comes
from men who know of old that Rome is the one hindrance to their
plans and ambitions. Moreover, Photius gave the Byzantines a new and
powerful weapon. The cry of heresy was raised often enough at all
times; it never failed to arouse popular indignation. But it had not
yet occurred to any one to accuse all the West of being steeped in
pernicious heresy. Hitherto it had been a question of resenting the
use of papal authority in isolated cases. This new idea carried the
war into the enemy's camp with a vengeance. Photius's six charges
are silly enough, so silly that one wonders that so great a scholar
did not think of something cleverer, at least in appearance. But
they changed the situation to the Eastern advantage. When Photius
calls the Latins "liars, fighters against
God,
forerunners of
Antichrist", it is no longer a question merely of abusing one's
ecclesiastical superiors. He now assumes a more effective part; he
is the champion of orthodoxy, indignant against heretics.
After Photius,
John Bekkos says there was "perfect peace" between East and West.
But the peace was only on the surface. Photius's cause did not die.
It remained latent in the party he left, the party that still hated
the West, that was ready to break the union again at the first
pretext, that remembered and was ready to revive this charge of
heresy against Latins. Certainly from the time of Photius hatred and
scorn of Latins was an inheritance of the mass of the Byzantine
clergy. How deeply rooted and far-spread it was, is shown by the
absolutely gratuitous outburst 150 years later under Michael
Caerularius (1043-58). For this time there was not even the shadow
of a pretext. No one had disputed Caerularius's right as patriarch;
the pope had not interfered with him in any way at all. And suddenly
in 1053 he sends off a declaration of war, then shuts up the Latin
churches at Constantinople, hurls a string of wild accusations, and
shows in every possible way that he wants a schism, apparently for
the mere pleasure of not being in communion with the West. He got
his wish. After a series of wanton aggressions, unparalleled in
church history, after he had begun by striking the pope's name from
his diptychs, the Roman legates
excommunicated
him (16 July, 1054). But still there was no idea of a general
excommunication
of the Byzantine Church, still less of all the East. The legates
carefully provided against that in their Bull. They acknowledged
that the emperor (Constantine IX, who was excessively annoyed at the
whole quarrel), the Senate, and the majority of the inhabitants of
the city were "most pious and orthodox". They
excommunicated
Caerularius, Leo of Achrida, and their adherents.
This quarrel,
too, need no more have produced a permanent state of schism than the
excommunication
of any other contumacious bishop. The real tragedy is that gradually
all the other Eastern patriarchs took sides with Caerularius, obeyed
him by striking the pope's name from their diptychs, and chose of
their own accord to share his schism. At first they do not seem to
have wanted to do so. John III of Antioch certainly refused to go
into schism at Caerularius's bidding. But, eventually, the habit
they had acquired of looking to Constantinople for orders proved too
strong. The emperor (not Constantine IX, but his successor) was on
the side of his patriarch and they had learned too well to consider
the emperor as their over-lord in spiritual matters too. Again, it
was the usurped authority of Constantinople, the Erastianism of the
East that turned a personal quarrel into a great schism. We see,
too, how well Photius's idea of calling Latins heretics had been
learned. Caerularius had a list, a longer and even more futile one,
of such accusations. His points were different from those of Photius;
he had forgotten the Filioque, and had discovered a new
heresy in our use of azyme bread. But the actual accusations
mattered little at any time, the idea that had been found so useful
was that of declaring that we are impossible because we are
heretics. It was offensive and it gave the schismatical leaders the
chance of assuming a most effective pose, as defenders of the true
Faith.
IV. AFTER
CAERULARIUS
In a sense
the schism was now complete. What had been from the beginning two
portions of the same Church, what had become two entities ready to
be divided, were now two rival Churches. Yet, just as there had been
schisms before Photius, so there have been reunions after
Caerularius. The Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and again the
Council of Florence in 1439 both arrived at a reunion that people
hoped would close the breach for ever. Unhappily, neither reunion
lasted, neither had any solid basis on the Eastern side. The
anti-Latin party, foreshadowed long ago, formed and organized by
Photius, had under Caerularius become the whole "Orthodox" Church.
This process had been a gradual one, but it was now complete. At
first the Slav Churches (Russia, Servia, Bulgaria, etc.) saw no
reason why they should break communion with the West because a
patriarch of Constantinople was angry with a pope. But the habit of
looking to the capital of the empire eventually affected them too.
They used the Byzantine Rite, were Easterns; so they settled on the
Eastern side. Caerularius had managed cleverly to represent his
cause as that of the East; it seemed (most unjustifiably) that it
was a question of Byzantines versus Latins.
At Lyons, and
again at Florence, the reunion (on their side) was only a political
expedient of the Government. The emperor wanted Latins to fight for
him against the Turks. So he was prepared to concede anything — till
the danger was over. It is clear that on these occasions the
religious motive moved only the Western side. We had nothing to
gain; we wanted nothing from them. The Latins had everything to
offer, they were prepared to give their help. All they wanted in
return was that an end should be made of the lamentable and
scandalous
spectacle of a divided
Christendom.
For the religious motive the Byzantines cared nothing; or rather,
religion to them meant the continuation of the schism. They had
called us heretics so often that they had begun to believe it.
Reunion was an unpleasant and humiliating condition in order that a
Frank army might come and protect them. The common people had been
so well drilled in their hatred of Azymites and creed-tamperers,
that their zeal for what they thought Orthodoxy prevailed over their
fear of the Turk. "Rather the turban of the Sultan that the tiara of
the Pope" expressed their mind exactly. When the bishops who had
signed the decrees of reunion came back, each time they were
received with a storm of indignation as betrayers of the Orthodox
faith. Each time the reunion was broken almost as soon as it was
made. The last act of schism was when Dionysius I of Constantinople
(1467-72) summoned a synod and formally repudiated the union (1472).
Since then there has been no intercommunion; a vast "Orthodox"
Church exists, apparently satisfied with being in schism with the
bishop whom it still recognizes as the first patriarch of
Christendom.
V. REASONS
OF THE PRESENT SCHISM
In this
deplorable story we notice the following points. It is easier to
understand how a schism continues than how it began. Schisms are
easily made; they are enormously difficult to heal. The religious
instinct is always conservative; there is always a strong tendency
to continue the existing state of things. At first the schismatics
were reckless innovators; then with the lapse of centuries their
cause seems to be the old one; it is the Faith of the Fathers.
Eastern
Christians especially have this conservative instinct strongly.
They fear that reunion with Rome would mean a betrayal of the old
Faith, of the Orthodox Church, to which they have clung so
heroically during all these centuries. One may say that the schism
continues mainly through force of inertia.
In its origin
we must distinguish between the schismatical tendency and the actual
occasion of its outburst. But the reason of both has gone now. The
tendency was mainly jealousy caused by the rise of the See of
Constantinople. That progress is over long ago. The last three
centuries Constantinople has lost nearly all the broad lands she
once acquired. There is nothing the modern
Orthodox
Christian resents more than any assumption of authority by the
oecumenical patriarch outside his diminished patriarchate. The
Byzantine see has long been the plaything of the Turk, wares that he
sold to the highest bidder. Certainly now this pitiful dignity is no
longer a reason for the schism of nearly 100,000,000
Christians.
Still less are the immediate causes of the breach active. The
question of the respective rights of Ignatius and Photius leaves
even the Orthodox cold after eleven centuries; and Caerularius's
ambitions and insolence may well be buried with him. Nothing then
remains of the original causes.
There is not
really any question of doctrine involved. It is not a heresy, but a
schism. The Decree of Florence made every possible concession to
their feelings. There is no real reason why they should not sign
that Decree now. They deny
papal
infallibility and the Immaculate Conception, they quarrel over
purgatory,
consecration by the words of institution, the procession of the Holy
Ghost, in each case misrepresenting the dogma to which they object.
It is not difficult to show that on all these points their own
Fathers are with those of the Latin Church, which asks them only to
return to the old teaching of their own Church.
That is the
right attitude towards the Orthodox always. They have a horror of
being latinized, of betraying the old Faith. One must always insist
that there is no idea of latinizing them, that the old Faith is not
incompatible with, but rather demands union with the chief see which
their Fathers obeyed. In canon law they have nothing to change
except such abuses as the sale of bishoprics and the Erastianism
that their own better theologians deplore.
Celibacy,
azyme bread, and so on are Latin customs that no one thinks of
forcing on them. They need not add the Filioque to the Creed;
they will always keep their venerable rite untouched. Not a bishop
need be moved, hardly a feast (except that of St. Photius on 6 Feb.)
altered. All that is asked of them is to come back to where their
Fathers stood, to treat Rome as Athanasius, Basil,
Chrysostom
treated her. It is not Latins, it is they who have left the Faith of
their Fathers. There is no humiliation in retracing one's steps when
one has wandered down a mistaken road because of long-forgotten
personal quarrels. They too must see how disastrous to the common
cause is the
scandal of the division. They too must wish to put an end to so
crying an evil. And if they really wish it the way need not be
difficult. For, indeed, after nine centuries of schism we may
realize on both sides that it is not only the greatest it is also
the most superfluous evil in
Christendom |
