The Great Schism of 1054 — how East and West divided

In most textbooks, the division of Christianity into Catholic West and Orthodox East has a date: 16 July 1054. On that day papal legates walked into the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople during the afternoon liturgy and laid a bull of excommunication on the altar.

Hardly anyone at the time thought the church had just split in two. The real story is longer, slower, and in some ways sadder: a drift lasting centuries, a quarrel that hardened into a wound, a crusade that made the wound permanent, and two attempts at reunion that failed.

This article traces that story. The councils themselves are covered in The councils and creeds, and the wider medieval context in The medieval church.

A divergence long before a divorce

The church of the first millennium was one communion, but it was never uniform. Several pressures pulled East and West apart long before anyone excommunicated anyone.

Language. In the early church Greek was the shared language even in Rome. By the fifth century the West was Latin-speaking and the East Greek-speaking, and by the seventh century few leaders on either side could read the other's theology in the original. Concepts that were translated were often subtly misunderstood.

Empire. Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople in 330. After the western empire collapsed in the fifth century, the bishops of Rome found themselves the strongest institution left in the West, and they increasingly looked to the Frankish kings for protection. When Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in 800, Constantinople — which regarded itself as the Roman Empire, as it was — saw a rival claim.

Rank. Rome's primacy among the churches was ancient and widely acknowledged. But the Council of Constantinople in 381 gave the bishop of Constantinople honour next after Rome "because it is New Rome", and Chalcedon's canon 28 in 451 extended his jurisdiction on the same reasoning. Rome objected: its primacy, it held, rested on Peter, not on politics. Two theories of the church were already in view.

Style. Western theology, deeply shaped by Augustine, tended to legal and analytical categories. Eastern theology, shaped by the Greek fathers, tended to mystical and liturgical ones. Neither is better; they are different, and difference without contact becomes suspicion.

The filioque

The Nicene Creed, in the form agreed at Constantinople in 381, says the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father" — echoing John 15:26. In parts of the West a phrase was added: the Spirit proceeds from the Father filioque, "and from the Son".

How it entered

It appears in Spain at the Third Council of Toledo in 589, where the Visigothic king renounced Arianism. Most historians think the clause was meant to underline the Son's full equality with the Father — an anti-Arian emphasis, not an attack on the East. The theology behind it drew on Augustine's On the Trinity, which speaks of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son together, while insisting the Father is the principal source.

The Frankish church under Charlemagne pushed the clause hard and accused the Greeks of error for omitting it. Rome was cautious. Pope Leo III, while accepting the theology, refused to add the clause to the creed and, according to the Roman record, had the creed without it engraved on silver shields in St Peter's. Only in 1014, at the coronation of the German emperor Henry II, was the filioque sung in the Roman liturgy.

Why the East objected

The Eastern objection had two parts.

• Theological. The Greek fathers taught the monarchy of the Father: the Father alone is the source within the Godhead, the Son begotten of him, the Spirit proceeding from him. To say the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son appeared to make two sources or to subordinate the Spirit. Many Orthodox theologians were willing to say the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son; "and from the Son" was another matter.
• Procedural. The creed was the common possession of the whole church, agreed at ecumenical councils, and the Council of Ephesus in 431 had forbidden composing a different creed. For one part of the church to change it unilaterally was, to the East, an act of pride — and a claim to authority over the councils themselves.

That second point is why the filioque and the papacy are really one dispute.

Papal primacy

The bishop of Rome claimed a primacy grounded in Peter. Jesus' words "on this rock I will build my church" (Matthew 16:18), Peter's martyrdom in Rome, and Rome's record of doctrinal steadiness all supported the claim. Popes such as Leo the Great in the fifth century spoke of Peter's authority living on in his successors.

The East did not deny Rome a primacy. It understood it as a primacy of honour among the great patriarchates — Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the "pentarchy" — exercised within the communion of bishops and subject to councils. Rome increasingly understood it as a primacy of jurisdiction: final authority over the whole church.

The eleventh-century reform movement in the West, which sought to free the church from lay control, strengthened papal claims considerably at exactly the moment contact with the East was fraying. Protestant readers will notice that the Reformation later asked the same question about Rome's authority, though from a different direction — and that Paul once "opposed Peter to his face" (Galatians 2:11).

Rehearsal: the Photian schism

Two centuries before 1054, a dress rehearsal took place. In 858 the emperor deposed Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople and replaced him with Photius, a brilliant layman rushed through ordination in days. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognise him. The quarrel became entangled with a contest over which church would evangelise the newly converting Bulgarians.

In 867 Photius issued an encyclical attacking Western practices — the filioque above all — and a synod in Constantinople declared the pope deposed. Within a few years politics shifted, and by 879–880 communion was restored. Photius is honoured as a saint in the Orthodox Church. The episode showed every fault line that would later break open.

Bread, beards and fasting

By the eleventh century, differences of practice had become identity markers. The West used unleavened bread (azymes) for the Eucharist; the East used leavened bread, and some Greek writers argued that unleavened bread was a lifeless, Judaising sacrament. The West required celibate priests; the East ordained married men. Western clergy shaved; Eastern clergy wore beards. They fasted on different days.

Most of this would now be seen as legitimate diversity. In 1053, however, Leo, archbishop of Ohrid, wrote a sharp letter condemning Latin practices, and Patriarch Michael Cerularius closed the Latin churches in Constantinople. Rome responded by sending legates.

July 1054

Pope Leo IX sent three legates, led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, an able but abrasive reformer. Cerularius, equally uncompromising, would not receive them on their terms. The Byzantine emperor wanted an alliance with the papacy against the Normans in southern Italy, and tried to mediate.

Meanwhile Leo IX died in April 1054. Whether his legates still had authority was doubtful. On 16 July they nevertheless placed the bull on the altar of Hagia Sophia. Among other charges, it accused the Greeks of deleting the filioque from the creed — a historical inversion. Within days Cerularius and his synod anathematised the legates in return.

1204: the real break

What turned a clerical quarrel into a popular hostility was violence. In 1182 a mob in Constantinople massacred much of the city's Latin merchant community. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, diverted by Venetian debts and Byzantine dynastic intrigue, stormed Constantinople, plundered it for three days, desecrated Hagia Sophia, and set up a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch.

That last detail is the most important ecclesiologically. Two rival bishops in one see, each refusing to recognise the other, is what schism concretely means. After 1204, ordinary Greek Christians had personal reasons to regard the Latin church as an occupier. The crusades themselves have their own article. Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for it on a visit to Athens in 2001, almost eight centuries later.

Two reunions that failed

Lyons, 1274

Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, who had retaken Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, faced a threatened Western invasion led by Charles of Anjou. Papal support could stop it. At the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 his envoys accepted union on Rome's terms, including the filioque and papal primacy.

It was diplomacy, not reconciliation. Most of the Eastern clergy and people rejected it, and Michael's son repudiated it after his death in 1282.

Florence, 1439

By the 1430s the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to little more than its capital, encircled by the Ottoman Turks. Emperor John VIII travelled to Italy with the patriarch and a large delegation, and after long theological debate at Ferrara and Florence, a decree of union was signed in July 1439. The Greeks accepted the filioque as orthodox (without being required to recite it), papal primacy, and the Western teaching on purgatory.

One bishop, Mark of Ephesus, refused to sign. At home, he was vindicated. Clergy and people rejected the union as a surrender under duress; the decree was proclaimed in Hagia Sophia only in December 1452, months before the end. Constantinople fell to Mehmed II in May 1453. The Byzantine historian Doukas attributes to one leading official the view that he would rather see the Turkish turban in the city than the Latin mitre — a sentence that captures the depth of the wound.

Florence's legacy survives in another form: from the sixteenth century onward several groups of Eastern Christians entered union with Rome while keeping Eastern liturgy, such as the Union of Brest in 1596 in what is now Ukraine and Belarus. These Eastern Catholic churches remain a sensitive point in Catholic–Orthodox relations.

1965: lifting the sentences

In January 1964 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I met in Jerusalem — the first meeting of a pope and an ecumenical patriarch in over five centuries. On 7 December 1965, the day before the Second Vatican Council closed, a joint declaration was read simultaneously in Rome and in Istanbul. It expressed regret for the offensive words and deeds of 1054 and declared that the sentences of excommunication should be removed from the memory of the church and consigned to oblivion.

It is important to see what it did not do. It did not restore communion. The filioque and papal primacy remain unresolved. Since then a joint international theological commission has met since 1980; John Paul II's encyclical Ut Unum Sint (1995) invited other Christians to help find a way of exercising papal primacy that could be accepted; and popes and patriarchs have met regularly. Relations are warmer than at any time since the Middle Ages. The churches remain separate.

Orthodoxy today

The Eastern Orthodox Church is a communion of self-governing (autocephalous) churches — Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece and others — sharing one faith and liturgy without a single head. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holds a primacy of honour; the Russian church is by far the largest.

The communion is not free of its own divisions. In 2018–2019, Constantinople's recognition of an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine led Moscow to break communion with it. When the Patriarchate of Alexandria — which oversees Orthodox churches across Africa, including in Nigeria — recognised the Ukrainian church, Moscow set up its own African exarchate in 2021, creating rival Orthodox jurisdictions on this continent.

Not the same family: the Oriental Orthodox

African readers especially need one distinction clear. The Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church are not Eastern Orthodox, and their separation has nothing to do with 1054.

They belong to the Oriental Orthodox family — with the Eritrean, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac Orthodox and Malankara (Indian) Orthodox churches — which did not accept the Council of Chalcedon in 451. They hold a miaphysite Christology: one united nature of the incarnate Word, "from two natures", without confusion. (Tewahedo is the Ge'ez word for "made one", referring to this union.) Chalcedon's opponents and defenders long accused each other of heresy; modern dialogues, including agreed statements between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox theologians in 1989–1990 and a common declaration by Paul VI and the Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1973, concluded that much of the dispute was about terminology rather than substance. Full communion has not followed.

So the Ethiopian church that welcomed the gospel in the fourth century had already been out of communion with Rome and Constantinople for six hundred years when Humbert walked into Hagia Sophia. The history of these African churches is told in The African and Asian church — Christianity before the missionaries.

What to take from it

Schisms are rarely a single event. They are usually the end of a long failure to listen, compounded by language, power and pride, and sealed by an act of violence that people remember for generations. The theological issues are real and deserve careful thought. But the history is a warning that the way Christians disagree can do as much damage as the disagreement.

Jesus prayed that his people would be one "so that the world may believe" (John 17:21). Paul told the Ephesians not to create that unity but to be "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3). East and West both failed that test. The question is whether their heirs — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, in Lagos as much as in Rome or Istanbul — will learn from it.