Orthodoxy and the Great Schism

A pope and an Orthodox patriarch embracing in Jerusalem

“He first found his brother Simon, and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ … He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, ‘So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas’ (which means Peter).”

John 1:41–42

The other pages in this section answer Protestant objections. This one does not. The Eastern Orthodox are not Protestants and are not a sect: they have bishops in genuine apostolic succession, a valid Eucharist, and a liturgy older than most of the arguments used against it. The Catholic Church teaches as much herself, and says the communion between the two lacks little of the fullness that would allow a common altar.

That is precisely why the question on this page is the hardest one the site asks. If the argument of Was There a Great Apostasy? holds, the Church Christ founded never disappeared and is somewhere still. If the argument of By What Authority? holds, that Church is governed by bishops who received their commission by succession rather than by rediscovery. Both conclusions land a reader inside ancient, sacramental, episcopal Christianity — and two communions of that description have existed side by side for a thousand years. Rome is Peter’s see, and Constantinople is Andrew’s — the brother who, John says, brought Peter to Christ. For that reason the two still call each other sister churches.

So the honest next question is not whether the apostolic Church survived, but where its center is. The Eastern Orthodox View panel sets out the Orthodox case: that Rome held a primacy of honor which it has since converted into a universal jurisdiction the first millennium never knew, and that the separation was caused by far more than one disputed clause of the Creed. The Catholic View panel answers it, conceding what must be conceded — Gregory the Great’s letter, the condemnation of Honorius, the crimes of 1204 — and resting the case on what the record of the first thousand years does show.

I invite your engagement with me on this question. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Eastern Orthodox View

The Orthodox do not deny that Rome is first. They deny what Rome now claims that primacy to be.

The see of Peter held an honored place from the beginning, and the East has never disputed it. What the East disputes is the conversion of a primacy of honor into a universal jurisdiction — the claim that the Bishop of Rome holds ordinary and immediate authority over every diocese and every baptized person on earth, and can define doctrine irreformably of himself, apart from the consent of the Church. That was defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The first millennium did not know it.1

The Estrangement Was Old Before It Was Formal

East and West drifted apart long before they quarreled. They stopped sharing a language: by the sixth century few clergy in Rome read Greek and few in Constantinople read Latin, and the theological vocabulary diverged with it, so that each side could suspect the other of heresy while meaning the same thing. They stopped sharing an empire: in 800 the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans while a Roman Emperor reigned in Constantinople, which the East read as Rome bestowing the empire on a Frankish warlord. And they rehearsed the breach in the 860s, when a disputed patriarchal election escalated into mutual condemnations between Pope Nicholas and the Patriarch Photius.2

The Councils Gave Their Reasons

The councils that ranked the sees explained the ranking, and the explanation was not Petrine. Constantinople I in 381 assigned the new capital the primacy of honor after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome. Chalcedon in 451 granted it equal privileges with Old Rome, explaining that the fathers had granted privileges to the throne of old Rome because it was the royal city. If Roman primacy rested on Peter, the ecumenical councils did not appear to know it. Rome rejected that canon — which is itself instructive: the assembled East legislated, and Rome objected.3

Doctrine in those centuries was settled by councils, not by popes. Emperors summoned them, bishops debated and voted, and the authority that bound was the council’s. Chalcedon did acclaim Leo’s Tome; less often quoted is that the fathers examined it first, against Cyril, and received it because they found it orthodox.

Two Roman Witnesses

The most striking testimony against universal jurisdiction is a Roman one. When the Patriarch of Constantinople took the title “ecumenical patriarch,” Pope Gregory the Great denounced it in the strongest terms available to him: whoever calls himself universal bishop, or desires to be so called, is the forerunner of Antichrist. He refused the title for himself as firmly as he refused it to Constantinople.4

Nor was the Bishop of Rome held immune from error. The Third Council of Constantinople in 680 anathematized Pope Honorius by name among the Monothelites, and his successor Leo II confirmed the condemnation rather than annulling it.5

Then Rome Altered the Common Creed

The creed of 381 belonged to the whole Church, and Ephesus forbade the composition of any other. The Filioque entered it in the West without an ecumenical council and without the East being asked. That clause is examined on its own page here; the objection in short is procedural before it is theological. A text sealed by the whole Church was changed by part of it.

The Quarrels of 1054 Were Not Chiefly About the Creed

The immediate disputes were liturgical and disciplinary, and to the East they were not trifles. The Latins used unleavened bread at the altar, which looked like Judaizing and, worse, like a denial that the Eucharist is the risen Christ, since leaven means life; Patriarch Cerularius closed the Latin churches in the city over it. There were the Western moves toward a celibate clergy against the East’s married presbyterate, and disagreements about fasting. Then the legation itself: Cardinal Humbert laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during the divine liturgy, sent by a pope who had died before the deed was done, so that the authority behind the act had arguably lapsed with him. Neither side excommunicated the other’s church, and for a long time few people thought a schism had occurred.6

What Made It Permanent Was Not an Argument

In 1204 an army of Western crusaders sacked Constantinople, desecrated Hagia Sophia, and installed a Latin patriarch in the chair of the Greek one. Whatever the theologians had been disputing, that is what the East remembers.

Twice afterward the churches formally reunited, and twice it failed. At Lyons in 1274 and at Florence in 1439 Greek delegations signed unions accepting Roman terms, and both were repudiated on their return by monks, clergy, people, and most of the bishops who had signed. The Eastern verdict on both is the same: a union negotiated by emperors who needed Western armies against the Turks is a political transaction, not the mind of the Church. The proverb of the last years of Constantinople — better the Sultan’s turban than the Latin mitre — measures how the reunions were received.7

And Rome Kept Defining Alone

Since the separation Rome has defined as dogma what the undivided Church never defined together: purgatory in its Latin articulation, the Immaculate Conception in 1854, papal primacy and infallibility in 1870, the Assumption in 1950. Each may be defensible on Western premises. Each was promulgated by half of a divided Church.

The Orthodox claim is therefore not that Rome fell out of the Church. It is that Rome changed the terms. A primacy of honor within a college of bishops is what the first millennium shows, and the East grants it still. What it will not grant is what 1870 defined.

Endnotes
  1. First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870), chs. 3–4, on the pope’s “ordinary and immediate” jurisdiction over all churches and on infallible definitions being irreformable “of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church.” The Orthodox objection is to both clauses, and to the second most of all. ↩
  2. On the linguistic and political estrangement, see Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism (Oxford, 1955), and Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, rev. ed. (Penguin, 1993), part I. The coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800 is recounted in the Royal Frankish Annals. ↩
  3. Council of Constantinople I (381), canon 3; Council of Chalcedon (451), canon 28. Leo I rejected canon 28 in his letters to Marcian, Pulcheria and Anatolius (Ep. 104–106). ↩
  4. Gregory the Great, Register, Bk. VII, ep. 33, to the Emperor Maurice: “whosoever calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Priest, is in his elation the precursor of Antichrist.” See also Bk. V, epp. 18, 20 and 43 on the same title. ↩
  5. Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), session 13: Honorius is to be “expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized … because of what we found written by him to Sergius, that in all respects he followed his view and confirmed his impious doctrines.” He is named again in the Definition of Faith, and Leo II confirmed the acts. ↩
  6. On the events of 1054 and the disputes preceding them, see Ware, The Orthodox Church, and Runciman, The Eastern Schism. Pope Leo IX died on 19 April 1054; the bull was laid on the altar on 16 July. ↩
  7. Second Council of Lyons (1274) and the Council of Florence (1438–1445), the latter’s decree Laetentur Caeli. The saying attributed to Loukas Notaras is reported by the historians of the fall of Constantinople. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic answer begins with what is not in dispute, because a great deal is not.

The Orthodox Churches are not a sect, and this is not the Watchtower’s case in different clothes. They have valid bishops in genuine apostolic succession, a valid Eucharist, and the ancient liturgy; the Catholic Church says so herself, and says the communion between us lacks little of the fullness that would permit a common altar. The mutual excommunications of 1054 were lifted in 1965 by Paul VI and Athenagoras together. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 was a crime committed by men who called themselves crusaders, and Rome has said so in those words. Nothing here argues that the East left the Church.1

Rome Acts Before Anyone Explains Why

The earliest evidence is not a theory of primacy but a pattern of behavior. Around A.D. 96, while the apostle John was in all likelihood still alive at Ephesus — far nearer Corinth than Rome is — the church of Rome wrote to Corinth to settle a quarrel about deposed presbyters, and wrote in a register that expects to be obeyed. Nobody in Corinth appears to have asked what business it was of Rome’s; the letter was kept and read aloud in the Corinthian liturgy for generations.2

Ignatius of Antioch, writing about 107 on his way to execution, corrects every church he addresses except one: to the Romans he gives no instruction, and of that church alone he says it presides in love. By about 180 Irenaeus states the principle outright — with the church of Rome, on account of its preeminent authority, every church must agree. A decade later Pope Victor threatened to cut off the churches of Asia over the date of Easter, and Irenaeus rebuked him for the harshness of it. The rebuke was about severity. Nobody argued that he lacked the standing.3

Rome Hears Appeals

The Council of Sardica in 343 provided that a bishop who believes himself wrongly deposed may appeal to the Bishop of Rome, who may order a retrial. Honesty requires two qualifications: Sardica was not an ecumenical council, and when its canons reached North Africa in a Roman collection that labeled them Nicene, the African bishops objected to the misattribution during the Apiarius affair — rightly. What they disputed was the provenance of the text, not the existence of the practice. At Ephesus in 431 the papal legate told the assembled fathers that Peter lives and exercises judgment in his successors, and no one contradicted him.4

The Council That Rome Refused

Here is the fact that tells hardest against a merely honorary primacy. In 449 a council met at Ephesus with imperial backing, a full assembly, and a presiding patriarch. It deposed Flavian and vindicated Eutyches. It is not an ecumenical council and no one treats it as one, because Leo refused it and called it a robbery rather than a synod. An assembly with everything except Roman consent turned out to have nothing.5

Read in reverse, the same test explains the Formula of Hormisdas. To end the Acacian schism in 519, some two hundred and fifty Eastern bishops, including the Patriarch of Constantinople, signed a statement that in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been preserved unblemished. Eastern bishops signed that, in the East, in the first millennium.6

Gregory Refused a Title That Meant Something Else

The letter must be met head-on, not softened: he wrote it, he meant it, and he refused the title for himself as well. But read what he says the title means. If one patriarch is called universal, he writes, “the name of Patriarch in the case of the rest is derogated” and the honor of all of them is denied; and if the one so called should fall into error, “no bishop will be found to have remained in a state of truth,” so that the universal Church falls with him. That is the claim he calls the mark of the forerunner of Antichrist — a title that would swallow the episcopate rather than preside over it — and the Catholic Church condemns it too: Vatican I and Vatican II both teach that bishops are true successors of the apostles in their own right, not papal delegates. What Gregory refused is not what Rome later claimed. And the same Gregory, in the same years, heard appeals from the East and intervened in sees far outside his own patriarchate.7

Honorius Defined Nothing

He was condemned by an ecumenical council, by name, and Catholics should say so plainly — and should quote the sentence rather than paraphrase it, because the council’s charge is heavier than the usual summary admits. Its thirteenth session decreed that Honorius be “expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized … because of what we found written by him to Sergius, that in all respects he followed his view and confirmed his impious doctrines.” That is not a reprimand for silence.8

What can be said is narrower, and it is what the definition of 1870 actually turns on. Honorius defined nothing. The documents at issue are two private letters to a bishop, answering a question about how to speak; he addressed no definition to the whole Church and did not purport to settle the matter by his authority. Leo II, confirming the acts, described the fault as having let the immaculate faith be subverted by profane treachery — negligence rather than positive teaching, and Catholic apologists have leaned on that word for centuries. It is fair to add that the reading is contested, and that anyone who reads the acts will know it. What is not contested is that the strongest counter-example produced in nineteen centuries is a pope who defined nothing at all. And Leo II’s confirmation repays a moment’s thought: the council’s act was held to require Roman ratification, which is an exercise of the very authority the case is meant to disprove. The fuller treatment is at Apostolic Succession.

Why the Canons Give Civil Reasons

Constantinople I and Chalcedon do explain Constantinople’s rank by the dignity of the imperial city — because that is the only argument available for a see with no apostolic founder. It does not follow that Rome’s claim rested on the same ground, and Rome consistently gave a different ground for itself. Notice what became of canon 28: Rome rejected it, and it did not take effect. A canon of an ecumenical council failed for want of Roman consent, which is a strange fate for a decree supposed to have reduced Rome to first among equals.

Rite Is Not Faith, and the Wounds Are Real

On the disputes that actually triggered 1054, the Catholic answer is that they were never matters of faith at all. Unleavened bread, a celibate clergy, the Saturday fast — these are questions of rite and discipline, and Rome has never required the East to become Latin in any of them. As for Humbert’s legation, it was indefensible, its commission had probably lapsed with the pope who issued it, and nothing in the Catholic case depends on defending it.

The Churches That Are Both

That is not a concession offered now for the sake of argument, and the proof of it is a living one. Some twenty-three Churches sui iuris are in full communion with the Bishop of Rome while keeping their own liturgies, their own canon law, their own hierarchies and their own traditions. The largest are Byzantine in rite — the Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the Melkites, the Romanians, the Ruthenians — and what they celebrate is the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, as the Orthodox celebrate it. Others are Maronite, Chaldean, Syro-Malabar, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian.

They use leavened bread. They ordain married men. They keep the Eastern fasts and the Eastern calendar, and they confirm infants at baptism and give them Communion, as the East has always done and the West does not. None of it is tolerated as an eccentricity: the Second Vatican Council declared that the Churches of the East have the same dignity as those of the West, that none is superior by reason of rite, and it told Eastern Catholics to return to their ancestral traditions wherever Latin influence had eroded them. Rome instructed them to become less Latin, not more.9 If the Roman claim entailed the Latinizing of the East, these churches could not exist. They do exist, and several have paid for it: the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was liquidated by Stalin in 1946 and lived underground for more than forty years rather than be absorbed.

The other half of the account is owed as well. The Orthodox regard these churches not as a model but as a wound — communities detached from Orthodox communion, in several cases under political pressure, standing now as a permanent argument against Orthodoxy inside its own territory. That has weight, and Rome has conceded a substantial part of it: at Balamand in 1993 the joint commission stated that uniatism is not the way to unity, while affirming in the same document that the Eastern Catholic Churches now existing have the right to exist and to serve their faithful. Both halves are Catholic teaching, and neither cancels the other.10

What these churches settle is narrower than a polemicist would like and more useful than he would expect. They do not prove the Roman primacy. They prove that the Roman primacy, as Rome understands it, is compatible with everything the East feared losing — the liturgy, the married priesthood, the bread, the calendar, the whole shape of Eastern Christian life. Whatever divides Rome from Constantinople, it is not that.

The reunions failed, and the reason matters. Lyons and Florence were signed and then repudiated, and the Eastern account of why — political duress, an emperor buying armies — is substantially true. What follows from it is less clear than the objection assumes. That a union was rejected tells us the terms were not received; it does not tell us the terms were wrong. Florence’s own Greek signatories were not all cynics: Bessarion argued for the union on the merits for the rest of his life.

Development Is Not Invention

The definition of 1870 is fuller than anything the first millennium put in those words, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What Catholics claim is that it articulates what was already being done — as Nicaea articulated a divinity confessed before the word homoousios existed, and as the canon of Scripture was recognized before it was listed. Newman’s tests apply here as everywhere: a true development preserves the type and adds without contradicting. And the definition is narrower than critics usually allow. It is not impeccability, not inspiration, not a licence to innovate; it is a negative protection, in defined conditions, exercised twice.

What Remains

This dispute is real and it is not settled here. But it is a dispute within apostolic Christianity, between two communions that both have bishops, both have the Eucharist, and both trace their orders to the apostles. That is a different order of question from the one the earlier pages examined. A reader who has followed the argument this far is no longer choosing between the Watchtower and Rome; he is standing inside the ancient Church, deciding where its center is. Whatever he concludes about Constantinople, the restoration hypothesis is already behind him.

This is the short answer. The companion page What About the Filioque? takes up the one clause of the Creed that divides Rome from Orthodoxy, where the procedural objection turns out to be this same question of authority in another form.

Endnotes
  1. Second Vatican Council, Unitatis Redintegratio 14–15, on the Eastern Churches’ true sacraments and apostolic succession; Catechism of the Catholic Church §838. On the lifting of the 1054 anathemas, the Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration of 7 December 1965. Paul VI and John Paul II both expressed sorrow for 1204; Benedict XVI repeated it. ↩
  2. 1 Clement, esp. 59:1, on those who disobey “the things spoken by Him through us.” On the letter’s continued liturgical reading at Corinth, Eusebius, Church History 4.23, citing Dionysius of Corinth. ↩
  3. Ignatius, To the Romans, salutation (prokathemenē tēs agapēs); Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.2, that with the Roman church, “on account of its preeminent authority,” every church must agree; on the Quartodeciman controversy and Irenaeus’ remonstrance with Victor, Eusebius, Church History 5.23–24. ↩
  4. Council of Sardica (343), canons 3–5: canon 3 directs that those who tried the case “write to Julius, the bishop of Rome, and if he shall judge that the case should be retried, let that be done, and let him appoint judges”; canon 4 forbids ordaining a successor to a deposed bishop who has appealed “unless the case shall have been determined in the judgment of the Roman bishop”; canon 5 provides for the rehearing. On the Apiarius affair and the African objection to canons transmitted as Nicene, the Councils of Carthage of 419–424. Council of Ephesus (431), session 3, the intervention of the legate Philip. ↩
  5. On the Second Council of Ephesus (449) and Leo’s judgment on it, Leo I, Ep. 95, calling it latrocinium — a den of robbers rather than a synod. ↩
  6. The Formula of Hormisdas (519): “At the Apostolic Chair the Catholic religion was always preserved unspotted.” Cited in Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, on the doctrinal primacy of the popes. ↩
  7. Gregory the Great, Register: Bk. V, ep. 18 (to John of Constantinople); Bk. V, ep. 20 (to the Emperor Maurice), “the Universal Church falls from its standing … when he who is called Universal falls”; Bk. V, ep. 43 (to Eulogius of Alexandria and Anastasius of Antioch), that if one patriarch is called universal “the name of Patriarch in the case of the rest is derogated”; and Bk. VII, ep. 33 (to Maurice), “whosoever calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Priest, is in his elation the precursor of Antichrist.” On bishops as true successors of the apostles rather than papal delegates, Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 27. ↩
  8. Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), session 13, the sentence against the Monothelites: Honorius is to be “expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized … because of what we found written by him to Sergius, that in all respects he followed his view and confirmed his impious doctrines.” He is named again in the Definition of Faith. Leo II confirmed the acts and wrote that Honorius had let the immaculate faith be subverted by profane treachery; the Latin and Greek of that letter differ, and the sense of the charge is contested. On the limits of the 1870 definition, Pastor Aeternus, ch. 4. ↩
  9. Second Vatican Council, Orientalium Ecclesiarum 2–6, on the equal dignity of the Eastern rites and the duty of Eastern Catholics to preserve and, where necessary, restore their own traditions; Lumen Gentium 23. On the suppression of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church at the Lviv pseudo-synod of 1946 and its survival underground until 1989, see the standard histories of that church. ↩
  10. Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion (Balamand, 1993), esp. §12 and §16, which rejects uniatism as a method while affirming the right of the Eastern Catholic Churches to exist and to serve their faithful. ↩

Summary

The Orthodox hold that Rome had a primacy of honor and has converted it into a universal jurisdiction the first millennium never knew. The Catholic answer is that the jurisdiction was exercised long before it was defined, and that the record of those centuries shows it plainly.

This is a dispute between two apostolic communions. The Orthodox Churches have valid bishops, valid orders and a valid Eucharist, and the Catholic Church says so. The excommunications of 1054 were lifted in 1965. Nothing here suggests the East left the Church.

Rome acted before anyone theorized about it. About A.D. 96, while the apostle John was probably still alive nearer to Corinth than Rome was, the Roman church wrote to Corinth to settle another church’s quarrel, and expected to be obeyed. Ignatius corrects every church he writes to except Rome. By 180 Irenaeus says every church must agree with Rome “on account of its preeminent authority.”

A council with everything but Roman consent came to nothing. The assembly at Ephesus in 449 had imperial backing, a full body of bishops and a presiding patriarch. Leo refused it, and it is not an ecumenical council. In 519 some two hundred and fifty Eastern bishops signed the Formula of Hormisdas, that in the Apostolic See the faith has always been preserved unblemished.

Gregory refused a different title than the one Rome claims. He condemned “universal bishop” because he understood it to mean the only bishop, every other reduced to a deputy. The Catholic Church condemns that too; bishops are true successors of the apostles, not papal delegates. The same Gregory heard appeals from the East and intervened well beyond his own patriarchate.

Honorius defined nothing. He wrote two private letters to a bishop and was condemned for negligence, not for teaching heresy from the chair — and the council’s act was held to require Roman confirmation, which is the authority in question being exercised.

The quarrels of 1054 were mostly not about doctrine. Unleavened bread, clerical celibacy, the Saturday fast: matters of rite and discipline, on which Rome has never required the East to become Latin. The Eastern Catholic Churches keep leavened bread, married priests and the Byzantine liturgy in full communion with Rome. Humbert’s legation was indefensible, and no part of the Catholic case depends on defending it.

1870 is a development, not an invention. The definition is fuller than anything the first millennium put in those words, as Nicaea was fuller than what preceded it and the canon was fixed after the books were written. It is also narrower than critics allow: not impeccability, not inspiration, and used twice.

The question is not settled by this page, and it is not the question the earlier pages settled. It is a disagreement inside apostolic Christianity, between two communions that both have bishops, both have the Eucharist, and both trace their orders to the apostles. A reader who has come this far is no longer choosing between the Watchtower and Rome. He is standing inside the ancient Church, deciding where its center lies — and the restoration hypothesis is already behind him.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Orthodoxy and the Great Schism (.docx)