Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts by Bryn Geffert & Theofanis G. Stavrou

Author:Bryn Geffert & Theofanis G. Stavrou [Geffert, Bryn]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Great Schism

The 400s to the 1200s witnessed a progressive, albeit gradual, estrangement between churches in the East and churches in the West, marked by crises both big and small as well as by attempts at reconciliation—some successful and some not. Thousands of books and articles have tried to explain the schism. Scholars disagree on particulars, but nearly all agree that the causes were numerous. Divergent explanations and interpretations differ mainly in the relative import granted to each.

Kallistos Ware, the author of a popular history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, rightly notes that “long before there was an open and formal schism between East and West, the two sides had become strangers to one another.”1 The questions are why and how did members of the same faith become strangers?

Distance, certainly, played an important role. Constantinople sits nearly fourteen hundred kilometers east of Rome as the crow flies and twenty-two hundred kilometers by boat: south toward Sicily, east across the Mediterranean Sea, northeast around the Greek peninsula, up through the Aegean Sea, and east across the Sea of Marmara. Communications moved slowly, with difficulty, and infrequently. Travel was dangerous: as noted above, pirates kidnapped Gregory Palamas during a trip to Constantinople.

Although the Roman Empire remained in theory one empire throughout its history, it had begun to function as two different empires by the end of the 200s, each ruled by a co-emperor. (Recall that Constantine served as co-emperor with Licinius before claiming the throne exclusively for himself.) Constantine’s relocation of the capital city to Constantinople only exacerbated divisions. After Constantine died, an alternating series of dual and single emperors followed. The last member of Constantine’s family line, Theodosius I (379–395), proved to be the last emperor to rule a unified empire.

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