It has been observed that the Church has gone through a major upheaval roughly every 500 years. We discussed two of them a few months ago: the Reformation roughly 1500, and Constantine and the Council of Nicaea roughly 300. The last to consider is the “Great Schism” which occurred in 1054.
As we have observed, things weren’t going so well for the Roman Empire around 300, and Emperor Constantine saw in the booming guerilla Church an ally instead of an enemy. So Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, and convened the “Council of Nicaea” in 325 — a council of Christian leaders from around the empire to ensure that all Christians were on the same page theologically, and dutifully obedient to One Unified Church Leadership. “Catholic” means “universal”, and thus began the Roman Catholic Church.
At the time there were five major congregations with important bishops in the Roman Empire: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. So for purposes of practical governance the early Catholic church divided itself into these “patriarchates”. However, things in the Roman Empire continued to degrade, and in 395 the Roman Empire officially divided in two, with the Western Empire consisting of greater Italy with Rome as its capital, and the Eastern Empire consisting of everything east, with Constantinople as its capital. In theory the Pope in Rome still governed all five patriarchates, but as things became steadily more acrimonious between the Western and Eastern Emperors, trade, communication, and governance between the West and East became steadily more problematic. And so the patriarchates in the East gradually became independent of the Pope.
Meanwhile, Rome’s last emperor was dethroned by barbarians in 476, effectively putting an end to the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, however, kept on going strong until 1493 when it was finally conquered by Islamic forces. In other words, the Eastern Roman Empire lasted almost 1000 years longer than the Western. And so did the Church there.
As the Western and Eastern churches became more independent of each other, they each developed different emphases in the Life of Faith as they understood it. The church in Rome was very much involved in the wielding of political power — that’s why Constantine founded it. Although Greek was the common language throughout the Roman Empire (thanks to Alexander the Great’s conquests), Latin was the language of Roman governance, so of course the Roman church adopted that as their language too. This ultimately put a separation between the Church leadership who all knew Latin, and the lay person in the pew who didn’t.
Furthermore, the wielding of power requires learning, and intelligence, and so it’s not surprising that the Catholic Church would emphasize these qualities. It was believing wrong doctrines (and failing to acknowledging the Pope’s sole authority about those) that would get you branded as a heretic. We also see the Catholic churches emphasis on the ‘life of the mind’ in the flowering of the Medieval Scholastics (inspired by Aristotle) — an approach to Christianity that emphasized starting with axioms of faith and using Reason to deduce all you could want to know about God, the Universe and Everything. It’s not hard to connect the dots from the Medieval Scholastics’ “Sacred Reasoning,” to the dawn of “Secular Reasoning” in the Renaissance, to the “Triumph of Reason” in the Enlightenment.
The Church in the Eastern Empire, however, didn’t have to worry itself with secular governance in the same way. And the Eastern Empire continued to use Greek not only for everyday use, but also for governance, and for the Church, so they didn’t have the same kind of separation between Church leadership and laity. This is an oversimplification, but the Eastern Church put more emphasis on folks having an experience of God. Certain modern Christian practices in what is now known as “contemplative Christianity” find their roots in the Eastern Church (such as the “Jesus Prayer”).
The Western and Eastern churches evolving in different directions — as well as the enormous political and economic gulf that had grown between them — came to a head in 1054 when the Western and Eastern churches formally split. This has come to be known as the “Great Schism”.
In previous Music Boxes we’ve said something about the patriarchate of Constantinople and that of Rome (from which we Presbyterians ultimately descend). We haven’t said anything about the stories of the three remaining ancient patriarchates in Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria, each of whom has their own story and their own slightly different take on the Gospel message. And then there’s the rest of the world outside of Europe and the Mediterranean! The Big Tent which is Christianity grows larger to me every time I learn more about its history.