The Great Schism of 1054

On a summer afternoon in 1054, as the clergy of Constantinople prepared for the liturgy in Hagia Sophia, three visitors from Rome walked up to the altar. Their leader, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, laid a document upon it and left the church, reportedly shaking the dust from his feet. The document excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, and his supporters. A deacon is said to have run after the legates, begging them to take it back. They refused, and soon left the city.

The legation had come to settle a dispute, not to start one. The year before, letters from the Greek side, including one by Archbishop Leo of Ohrid, had attacked Latin customs, and the sources say that Cerularius had closed the Latin churches in the capital. Pope Leo IX sent Humbert, together with Frederick of Lorraine and Peter of Amalfi, partly to secure an alliance with the Byzantine emperor against the Normans in southern Italy. Humbert was a learned and combative reformer, and Cerularius an ambitious and proud prelate. Neither was inclined to give way.

The setting mattered as much as the personalities. In southern Italy the Normans were seizing lands that had belonged to Byzantium, and Greek-rite churches there were coming under Latin bishops who imposed Latin customs. In return, Latin communities in Constantinople, many of them merchants from Amalfi and other Italian cities, came under pressure to follow Greek usage. Questions of ritual thus became questions of jurisdiction: whose bishops ruled where, and whose customs were correct. Both sides believed they were defending ancient tradition, and both suspected the other of innovation.

Within days a synod in Constantinople answered. It condemned the legates and those who had helped them, and the bull was publicly burned. The patriarch did not excommunicate the pope, who had in fact died in April, three months before the legates acted. Strictly speaking, their mission may have lapsed with his death, a point canon lawyers and historians have noted ever since.

The arguments of 1053–1054 sound technical, but they touched what each side held most sacred. The Greeks objected to the Latin use of unleavened bread, the azymes, in the Eucharist, which they saw as a Jewish practice unsuitable for the new covenant. They also criticised Latin fasting on Saturdays and the shaving of beards by priests. Humbert’s bull answered with its own charges, among them the claim that the Greeks had removed the filioque from the Creed, when in fact the West had added it.

The filioque, ‘and the Son’, was the deepest theological issue. The Creed agreed at the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. In Spain and the Frankish lands the words ‘and the Son’ were added, and by the early eleventh century the expanded Creed was sung in Rome itself. For Greek theologians the addition upset the balance of the Trinity, and it had been made without the agreement of the whole Church.

Behind both lay the question of authority. Rome held that the pope, as successor of Saint Peter, had jurisdiction over the whole Church. Constantinople honoured Rome as the first see but saw the patriarchs as governing the Church together through councils. The reforming popes of the eleventh century, Leo IX among them, pressed Roman claims harder than ever, and the clash with Cerularius was one result.

Historians now stress that 1054 was not a clean break. There had been earlier ruptures, such as the quarrel between Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius in the 860s, and they had been healed. The two halves of Christendom had been growing apart for centuries: the West spoke Latin and the East Greek, few scholars read both, and after the eighth century the popes looked to Frankish rulers rather than to the emperor in Constantinople. Customs, theology and church law developed separately, and each side grew less familiar with the other.

After 1054 contacts continued. Patriarch Peter III of Antioch urged moderation, and in the 1090s the Byzantine emperor Alexios I asked the West for military help, an appeal that helped launch the First Crusade. The Crusades, however, brought Latins and Greeks into close and often bitter contact. In 1204 the army of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from its goal, stormed and sacked Constantinople, looted its churches and set up a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch. For many Orthodox Christians this, rather than any document of 1054, was the moment the division became personal and lasting.

Later attempts at reunion failed. At the Council of Lyon in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1439, Byzantine delegations accepted union, largely in hope of Western help against their enemies, but clergy and people at home rejected the agreements. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and Orthodox and Catholic Christians went their separate ways.

The date 1054 became a convenient symbol, and later writers on both sides read the whole separation back into that summer. In January 1964 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I met in Jerusalem, the first such meeting in centuries. On 7 December 1965 they issued a joint declaration, read at the same moment in Rome, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, and in Istanbul. It expressed regret for the offensive words and actions of 1054 and removed the sentences of excommunication ‘from memory and from the midst of the Church’.

The declaration did not restore communion. The questions of papal authority and the filioque remain under discussion in official Catholic–Orthodox dialogue. Popes and patriarchs have since met regularly, and in 2004 Pope John Paul II apologised for the sack of 1204. The quarrel of 1054 is now remembered less as the cause of the schism than as a sign of how far apart the two churches had already grown.