Great Schism of 1054: The Split Between East and West Churches

The Great Schism of 1054, also called the East-West Schism, is the traditional date for the split between the Western Church, led by the pope in Rome, and the Eastern Church centred on Constantinople. On 16 July 1054 papal legates excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, who in turn condemned them. The quarrel grew out of centuries of drift, and though it was not seen as final at the time, it came to mark the division between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity that still exists today.

Background: one Church, two worlds

In the early centuries Christianity was organised around five great sees, or patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Rome held the first place of honour as the city of the apostles Peter and Paul, and Constantinople, the “New Rome” founded by Constantine in 330, claimed second place.

After the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, the two halves of the Christian world grew apart. The West spoke Latin, the East Greek, and fewer scholars knew both languages. Western churches lived under Germanic kingdoms and, from 800, under a revived Western emperor, while the East remained within the Byzantine Empire, where the emperor played a strong role in church affairs.

Earlier disputes had already caused temporary breaks. During Byzantine Iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries, Rome strongly opposed imperial attacks on religious images. Between 863 and 867, the Photian Schism set Pope Nicholas I against Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, partly over who should evangelise the Bulgarians. Communion was restored each time, but the grievances remained.

Causes of the schism

Papal authority

The central issue was authority. By the 11th century reforming popes insisted that the Bishop of Rome, as successor of Saint Peter, had jurisdiction over the whole Church. Eastern churches generally accepted the pope’s primacy of honour but saw the five patriarchs as a collegial leadership, with major questions settled by ecumenical councils.

The Filioque

The Nicene Creed, agreed at councils in 325 and 381, states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. In the West, starting in Spain at the Third Council of Toledo in 589, the word Filioque (“and from the Son”) was added. The addition spread in the Frankish lands and was finally adopted in the liturgy at Rome, probably around 1014. Eastern theologians objected both to the doctrine and to a change in a creed agreed by ecumenical councils.

Rites and customs

Practical differences took on symbolic weight. The Latin Church used unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist, while the Greeks used leavened bread. Western priests were expected to be celibate, while Eastern parish priests could be married. There were also differences over fasting and other customs.

Politics in southern Italy

Southern Italy was a meeting point of both churches, with Greek and Latin dioceses side by side. In the 11th century Norman adventurers were conquering the region from Byzantium. Pope Leo IX led an army against them but was defeated and captured at the Battle of Civitate in June 1053. Both Rome and Constantinople needed an alliance against the Normans, but quarrels over church jurisdiction in the region made it harder to reach.

What happened in 1054

The crisis began in 1053. Patriarch Michael I Cerularius closed the Latin-rite churches in Constantinople, and Archbishop Leo of Ohrid wrote a letter, sent through the Bishop of Trani in Apulia, attacking Latin practices such as the use of unleavened bread. The letter reached Pope Leo IX’s circle, and Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida drafted sharp replies.

Hoping to settle the dispute and secure an alliance with Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, Leo IX sent three legates to Constantinople: Humbert, Frederick of Lorraine (the future Pope Stephen IX) and Peter, Archbishop of Amalfi. They arrived in the spring of 1054. The emperor received them courteously, but Cerularius refused to deal with them, questioning their authority and the authenticity of their letters.

Meanwhile, on 19 April 1054, Pope Leo IX died. The legates nonetheless remained in Constantinople and continued to act in his name.

On Saturday 16 July 1054, as the afternoon liturgy was about to begin, the legates entered Hagia Sophia and laid a bull of excommunication against Cerularius and his supporters on the high altar. It accused him of a list of errors, some of them inaccurate, including the charge that the Greeks had removed the Filioque from the Creed. The legates then left the city.

The reaction in Constantinople was angry. The patriarch convened a synod, which on 24 July 1054 condemned the legates and their bull. Importantly, both sides directed their condemnations at individuals, not at the whole of the other Church. The new pope, Victor II, did not take office until April 1055, and no general sentence against the Eastern churches was ever pronounced in Rome. The other Eastern patriarchs were not directly involved, and for some time relations between Rome and churches such as Antioch remained uncertain rather than formally broken.

Key people

• Michael I Cerularius (Patriarch 1043–1058), an assertive churchman determined to defend Constantinople’s rights and customs.
• Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, a leading papal reformer and the chief legate in 1054.
• Pope Leo IX (pope 1049–1054), a reforming pope who sent the legation but died before it acted.
• Constantine IX Monomachos (emperor 1042–1055), who wanted reconciliation and an alliance against the Normans.
• Leo of Ohrid, Archbishop of Bulgaria, whose letter helped start the dispute.
• Peter III of Antioch, an Eastern patriarch who urged moderation and regarded Latin customs as differences rather than heresies.

How the split hardened

At first many people hardly noticed the quarrel. Pilgrims, merchants and diplomats continued to travel, and popes and emperors kept negotiating. When Emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked the West for military help, Pope Urban II responded by preaching the First Crusade in 1095, partly in the hope of reuniting the churches.

The Crusades, however, also brought the two Christian worlds into direct and often bitter contact. Latin bishops were installed in Antioch and Jerusalem in place of Greek ones. In 1182 a massacre of Latin residents in Constantinople left deep anger in the West. The decisive blow came in 1204, when the army of the Fourth Crusade captured and plundered Constantinople. The Sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the installation of a Latin patriarch in the city turned a church dispute into a lasting popular hostility.

Two later attempts at reunion failed. The Second Council of Lyon in 1274 proclaimed union, but it was rejected by most Byzantine clergy and people. At the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439, the Byzantine emperor John VIII and leading Greek bishops accepted union in the hope of Western help against the Ottomans. Again the agreement was rejected at home, and it was overtaken by the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Myths and facts

Myth: in 1054 the pope excommunicated the entire Eastern Church. The bull was issued by legates, after the death of the pope who sent them, and named the patriarch and his supporters, not the Eastern churches as a whole.

Myth: the schism happened in a single day. The separation was a slow process lasting centuries. Historians such as Henry Chadwick and Steven Runciman emphasise that 1054 became a symbolic date only later.

Myth: the Filioque was the only real issue. Theology mattered, but questions of authority, culture, language and politics were at least as important.

Myth: Catholics and Orthodox have no contact today. Since the 1960s the two churches have held regular dialogue, and popes and ecumenical patriarchs have met many times.

Reconciliation in the modern era

In January 1964 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I met in Jerusalem, the first meeting between a pope and a patriarch of Constantinople since the 15th century. On 7 December 1965 they issued a joint declaration, read at the same time in Rome during the Second Vatican Council and in Istanbul, which expressed regret for the events of 1054 and lifted the mutual excommunications from the memory of the Church.

The declaration did not restore full communion. Differences over papal authority and other questions remain, and an official theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches has continued since 1980.

Timeline

• 589: The Third Council of Toledo adds the Filioque to the Creed in Spain.
• 863–867: The Photian Schism between Rome and Constantinople.
• June 1053: Pope Leo IX is defeated and captured by the Normans at Civitate.
• 1053: Latin churches in Constantinople are closed.
• 19 April 1054: Pope Leo IX dies.
• 16 July 1054: The legates lay the bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia.
• 24 July 1054: A synod in Constantinople condemns the legates.
• 1204: The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople.
• 1438–1439: The Council of Ferrara-Florence proclaims a union that soon fails.
• 7 December 1965: Paul VI and Athenagoras I lift the excommunications.

Why it matters

The schism that 1054 came to symbolise divided Christianity into its two largest traditions, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, which today together include well over a billion believers. It shaped the cultural boundary between Western and Eastern Europe, influenced relations between Rome, Byzantium and the Slavic world, and remains one of the central questions of Christian unity.