Tag: Great Schism

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Pinpointing the Great Schism

If there’s anything I hope to have conveyed via the handful of articles that I’ve written on the subject, it’s that no definitive rupture occurred, or was perceived to have occurred, between the Greek and Latin churches in the year 1054. Indeed, I don’t know of any historian or theologian over the last hundred years or so who’d be willing to defend that year as the date of the Great Schism. So why does it persist in popular historical accounts of the split? In part, I think that there’s no denying the dramatic image of a cardinal of the Roman Church marching into the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia and slapping a bull of excommunication on the altar. In part, the weight of much older, Western historiography gives gravitas to the date. But I think that most of the reason we continue to use 1054 as a point of reference is that we simply haven’t come up with anything better. So, if not then, when?

Of course, assigning a date to the schism demands a more precise definition of what a schism is. Broadly speaking, it might generally be taken to signify a breakdown in liturgical concelebration, particularly of the Eucharist, but even this is subject to a wide variety of interpretations, and therefore, of dates. For Anton Michel, one of the great scholars of 11th-century, Eucharistic unity was symbolized by the inclusion of the pope’s name in the diptychs, a set of tablets in which were inscribed the names of the various patriarchs with whom the Church of Constantinople was in communion [1]. These names would have been read aloud following the Great Entrance during the celebration of the Eucharistic service, serving as a very public statement of intercommunion [2]. But even if we’re to look only at the diptychs of Constantinople (ignoring the other patriarchal sees of the East), we already run into problems of communication breakdowns, occasional lapses into heresy (on both sides: Iconoclasm, Monothelitism, Nestorianism, etc.), and interference from political authorities, none of which can be taken to indicate a break between the churches as a whole. Indeed, the last mention of a Roman pontiff in the diptychs of Constantinople occurred sometime around the year 1009. If the documents of 1054 so clearly indicate the absence of a generally-felt schism, it certainly can’t be dated to before then.

Conversely, it’s become more popular over the last few decades to point to the year 1204 and the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade as the point of definitive rupture. Defenders of this view typically acknowledge that some level of division existed beforehand, but maintain that the final nail in the coffin, as it were, was the considerable (and justified) animosity generated against the Latins by their behavior during the crusade. I think that this appeal to what we assume was popular sentiment still misses the mark: there is good evidence from the time that the churches already considered themselves in a state of schism, and the barbarity of the Latin army might be better explained as result rather than cause.  It was this longstanding “disobedience” on the part of the Greeks that motivated Pope Innocent III eventually to accept the results of the crusade, in hopes of returning Constantinople to obedience to Rome [3]. If we can say, then, that no schism yet existed in 1054, but that it already existed by 1204, that leaves us a 150-year window to search for something that can be defended as a point of definite rupture.

My own preferred date for the Great Schism is the year 1099. Before discussing the events of that year, though, we need to explore a little bit of canonical history, that is, the development of the laws that guided the internal functioning of the church. The canons promulgated by the ecumenical and regional councils during the first few hundred years of Christianity have generally been understood to indicate a principle of one bishop per city or diocese. This rule was applied even to the point that bishops were prohibited from performing ordinations, liturgical functions, teaching, or even sometimes traveling in another diocese without the express permission of the local hierarch [4]. It is also the violation of this rule, in which two different members of the clergy claimed the same episcopal see, that defined schisms in the early church. To take a particularly well-known example, the Christian community in Rome during the middle of the third century was divided in its support for Novatian, on the one hand, who held that Christians who had sacrificed to idols during periods of persecution could not be readmitted to the community, and Cornelius, who took a more lenient view. Both men were proclaimed as the bishop of Rome by their supporters, and therefore, by virtue of the fact that it was impossible for there to be two bishops of the same diocese, each was compelled to deny the validity of the other. It was only after Cornelius had secured more support (particularly from the influential Cyprian of Carthage), that he could retroactively have been seen to have secured the episcopal office.

Returning to the end of the eleventh century, we find the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, established by the military success of the First Crusade [5]. The (Greek) Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symeon II, who had represented the Chalcedonian Christian community, had been compelled by the Artuqids to live in exile some years before. Although he had been in communication with the Latin military leadership prior to their capture of the city — indeed, even supportive of their cause (presumably with the expectation that he would be restored to his cathedral in the event of their success) — the Crusaders immediately elected Arnulf of Chocques as the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Something analogous happened in the city of Antioch the following year. Antioch had been captured by the Crusaders from the Seljuk Turks in 1098. The city had previously been under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire (until 1084), and so the population was heavily Greek and Greek-speaking, including John Oxeites, the Patriarch of Antioch. Initially tolerated by the Crusader authorities, he was eventually compelled to flee the city, and, in his absence, the Crusaders nominated and had consecrated a second Patriarch of Antioch, Bernard of Valence, in 1100.

The election of Arnulf of Chocques as Patriarch of Jerusalem. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 9084 fol. 101r (13th c.). Open license.

In both cases, the Latins attempted to replace the Chalcedonian patriarchs, whom they had previously recognized as holding legitimate office, with prelates of their own choosing, thereby setting up parallel hierarchies. This, as we can see in the history of the early church, is the very definition of schism. Moreover, this state of affairs persisted: the Greek community continued to choose Greek successors for these patriarchates, although they typically resided in Constantinople while the Crusaders controlled their sees, and the Latins maintained their own patriarchal structure, which relocated to Rome after the fall of the Crusader states. The Latin church retained a titular Patriarch of Antioch until the middle of the 20th century; it retains a titular Patriarch of Jerusalem to the present day. And if, as the tradition holds, the one church cannot have two bishops in the same episcopal see, then the presence of two bishops necessarily indicates that there are two, and separated, churches.

Nick Kamas

PhD in Medieval Studies

University of Notre Dame

  1. Anton Michel, Humbert und Kerullarios, vol. 1, Quellen und Forschungen 21 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1924), 20–24.
  2. Robert Taft, The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1975): 227–228.
  3. Innocent III, Registrorum Lib VIII, Ep. 274. PL 215.636–7.
  4. See Canon 8 of the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325), Canon 2 of the Second (Constantinople, 381), Canon 12 of the Fourth (Chalcedon, 451), and Canon 20 of the Sixth (Constantinople, 680–1), among others. The Rudder, edited and translated by Ralph J Masterjohn (West Brookfield, MA: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 2005), 438–9, 509–10, 608–9, 701.
  5. Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States (London: Routledge, 1980), 12–17.
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Laycus of Amalfi on the Azymes

As a continuation of sorts to my last post, on Peter Damiani’s reaction to the events of 1054, I’ve decided to take a look at another churchman writing on the same topic a few years later, a certain Laycus of Amalfi, who undertook to compose a defense of the use of unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist around the year 1070 [1]. His work took the form of a letter, addressed to Sergius, a Latin-rite abbot living in Constantinople. According to the text, Laycus had been motivated to write by reports from his correspondent and from other Latins that they had been completely surrounded by those who were trying to persuade them to abandon the Latin liturgical usage in favor of the Greek [2].

Other than his name, virtually nothing else is known about the author of the text. The sole surviving manuscript witness (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale 1360 / 9706-25, 116v-119r) gives only the identification “a letter of Laycus, cleric” (“epistola layci clerici”), a seeming contradiction in terms that leaves us with the assumption that “Laycus” is a given name. Anton Michel, who edited the text in 1939, notes further that monastics of the time tended to identify themselves as such: the absence of a word like “frater” in self-reference suggests that the author was not in monastic orders [3]. Even the origins of the author in the city of Amalfi are conjectural, and they are based more on his presumed links to Abbot Sergius, who was likely the leader of the monastery of St. Mary of the Amalfitans in Constantinople, an establishment attested by Peter Damiani around the same time[4].

The famous bronze doors of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Amalfi, manufactured in Constantinople around the year 1060. Photo credits Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The manuscript that preserves this text is also one of the few early copies of the work of Humbert, Cardinal of Silva Candida, and, as it happens, it is from Humbert’s writings that our Laycus drew most of his arguments in favor of the azymes. The core argument, in Laycus as in Humbert, was an appeal to the example set by Christ at the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper. According to the argument, Christ, who came to fulfill the Law of Moses, would have used unleavened bread at the Last Supper since the synoptic Gospel accounts place the event on the first day of the celebration of Pascha (Pesach), when leavened bread was prohibited in observant Jewish households. This act of institution was reinforced during the supper at Emmaus, which likewise occurred during the days of Pascha and is regarded in the text as a celebration of the Eucharist [5]. This practice was preserved by the Roman Church, according to Laycus, who cited Popes Anacletus, Clemens, and Sylvester as uniquely instrumental in this effort [6].

Especially for the period of the pre-Gregorian Reform, the tone of the text is fairly mild. The introductory paragraphs make reference to the “most pious, holy, and wise fathers and doctors [of the Greeks]” who themselves used leavened bread in the Eucharist (but who didn’t, though, attack the Latin use) [7]. And the letter of Laycus appears all the more gentle in comparison with the source material: gone is the spirited, “listen up, stupid” (“audi, stulte”) style of invective found in Cardinal Humbert [8]. Instead, we find almost a plea to avoid rending the garment of Christ by provoking division between the two rites, coupled with an emphatic statement that the one faith could contain various customs within the churches [9].

Does the work of Laycus of Amalfi change our understanding of the azyme debate or the conflict between the Eastern and Western churches more broadly? In terms of theological content, to put it bluntly, not really. The arguments advanced by Laycus were the same as those put forward by Humbert some fifteen years prior, and, while the text written by Laycus was itself copied by Bruno of Segni in another epistle in the early twelfth century, this branch of the post-Humbertine literary tradition does not leave any substantial mark in the theological framework of the Latin church. On the other hand, the very existence of this letter, along with the fact that a Greek prelate took the time to respond to it, does indeed broaden our insight into the East-West conflict more generally [10]. It emphasizes, first of all, that the Humbertine legation in 1054 was not a one-off attempt to open lines of communication between the two churches. Rather, communication was happening, even without the intervention of popes and patriarchs, and it was based on pre-existing and well-established ties connecting East and West. A Latin-rite monastery in Constantinople, staffed by Amalfitans, would naturally be in contact with friends, relatives, and fellow clerics back home.

Second, to return to a point that I’ve made before, this letter makes clear that there was no general sense of schism between East and West in the aftermath of the 1054 legation. Indeed, as noted above, the tone of this letter is notably more civil than the polemics of Humbert. Although Laycus was certainly more of an azyme partisan than was Peter Damiani, the work and its date of composition points to an extended window in which ecumenical dialogue, in the sense that both sides still saw each other as part of the same community, was still possible.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Anton Michel has published the only substantial scholarly treatment of the material and the only edition of the text. Amalfi und Jerusalem im Griechischen Kirchenstreit (1054–1090): Kardinal Humbert, Laycus von Amalfi, Niketas Stethatos, Symeon II. von Jerusalem und Bruno von Segni über die Azymen (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1939. See also a short summary in Jonathan Shepard, “Knowledge of the West in Byzantine Sources, c.900–c.1200” in A Companion to Byzantium and the West, 900-1204, ed. Nicolas Drocourt and Sebastian Kolditz (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 67.
  2. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 1, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 35.
  3. Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 21.
  4. Peter Damani, Letter 131, trans. Owen J. Blum, The Letters of Peter Damian Peter Damian, Vol. 5, Letters 121–150, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation 6, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 55. For an assessment on why this monastic house in particular, see Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 18–19.
  5. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 5–11, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 37–42.
  6. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 14–15, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 44–45.
  7. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 2, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 36. “Licet illorum [Graecorum] religiosissimi, sanctissimi atque sapientissimi patres ac doctores fuerint et studuerint ex fermentato pane omnipotenti domino sacrificium offerre, tamen numquam invenimus illos nostram oblationem evacuantes aut deridentes […].”
  8. Humbert, Cardinal of Silva Candida, Responsio sive Contradictio adversus Nicetae Pectorati Libellum, cap. 13, edited in Cornelius Will, Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861), 141.
  9. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 3, Michel, 36–37. “Numquid divisus est dominus in corpore suo, ut alius sit Ihesus Christus in Romano sacrificio, alius in Constantinopolitano? Quis hoc orthodoxus dixerit nisi ille, qui dominicam non veretur scindere vestem? Nos veraciter tenemus, immo firmiter credimus, quia, quamvis diversi mores ęcclesiarum, una est tamen fides […].”
  10. Probably Symeon II of Jerusalem. Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 25–28.
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Greco-Latin Polemic and the Problem of the Single Immersion Baptism

Of the many issues that rose to the fore in the course of the conflicts between the Latin and Greek churches during the Middle Ages, one of the most consistent, and to me, surprising, was the repeated accusation that the Greeks rebaptized Latin Christians when they, for whatever reason, wished to switch their ritual use (what we would now understand as a “conversion” between different denominations). Although the veracity of these claims has been debated, I think, as I have written elsewhere, that there is good reason to believe that the Greeks really did rebaptize Latins. Complaints about the practice began in the mid-11th century with Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, who was elsewhere highly accurate in his claims about liturgical practice, and continue well into the 13th century, including an honorable mention in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III.

What is less clear, though, is why the Greeks were so keen to rebaptize their Latin cousins. It is tempting to see rebaptism as symptomatic of more ethereal theological topics, in which the perceived differences between the two churches was sufficiently great that the Greek clergy (or at least a subset of them) felt the need to mark the reception of these “converts” from heresy by means of the administration of the sacrament. Certainly this understanding had precedent: as early as 325, the canons of the First Council of Nicaea mandated the reception of Paulianists, who were nontrinitarians, by means of baptism. But I think that this understanding is a mistake with reference to the Latin/Greek conflict. Especially in its earlier phase, in the 11th century, there was no general sense of lasting division: the Greeks generally viewed the Latins as wayward brethren to be corrected, not as heretics utterly outside of the Church, and therefore rebaptism can’t be understood as a requirement resulting from serious deficiencies in the faith on the scale of nontrinitarianism.

Rather, I think that these rebaptisms were because of perceived ritual deficiencies in the Latin rite of baptism, and particularly, in the idea that the Latins were prone to using a single immersion when administering the sacrament. And when looking at this possibility we find a much greater incidence of Latin complaint and Greek explanation. Shortly after Cardinal Humbert complained about rebaptisms, Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Peter, the Patriarch of Antioch, that the Latins performed baptism with a single immersion [1]. The two centuries that followed saw repetitions of both: Odo of Deuil, Leo Tuscus, an anonymous Dominican author writing from Constantinople in the mid-13th century, and Jerome of Ascoli (i.e., Pope Nicholas IV) all noted that Latin Christians were being rebaptized. The “Byzantine Lists”, a genre of polemic that enumerated liturgical and cultural “errors” committed by the Latins, again and again returned to the notion that the baptism of the Latin rite was performed through a single immersion [2]. In doing so, the authors of these lists were implicitly invoking another of the canons of the early church, this time from the so-called Apostolic Canons (no. 50): “If any Bishop or Priest does not perform three immersions in making one baptism, but only a single immersion […], let him be deposed” [3]

Assuming that my conclusion is correct, that Greeks rebaptized Latins with some degree of frequency because they believed their form of the sacrament to be ritually defective, the question that next arises is how the Greeks came to hold that belief. Prior to the widespread adoption of affusion or aspersion in the Latin West, the form of baptism appears to have been similar to that of the Greek East: a full triune immersion, done together with the invocation of the persons of the Trinity. We see this clearly referenced as late as the early 13th century, when Pope Innocent III, writing to the Maronite Church, instructs them to invoke the Trinity only once “while completing a triple immersion” [4]. The great exception to the standard Latin practice was the famous license given by Pope Gregory the Great to the church in Spain to baptize with a single immersion as a way to signify the oneness of the Trinity and thereby to combat Arianism. This practice was further codified by the 633 Council of Toledo and its existence confirmed in the works of Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus of Toledo [5]. The practice is referenced twice more, toward the end of the eighth century, in the letters of Alcuin of York, who acknowledged that the practice existed in certain parts of Spain only long enough to condemn the people who baptize in this way as “neglecting to imitate, in baptism, the three-day burial of our Savior” [6]. They maintain this custom, according to Alcuin, “contrary to the universal custom of the holy Church” making Spain the “wet-nurse of schismatics” [7].

Gregory the Great, the source of the conflict? Antiphonary of Hartker of the monastery of Saint Gall (Cod. Sang. 390, 13 (paginated). Creative Common licensing.

Returning, then, to the polemics of the Greeks, is it possible that their complaints about a Latin single-immersion baptism stemmed from the Spanish practice? I see no other possible cause, although this feels unsatisfactory as an explanation. At most, the single-immersion baptism was a regionalism confined to the Iberia, and the opposition of Alcuin, the great champion of Romanization in the West, makes it unlikely that it would ever have spread further than its native peninsula. Indeed, the gradual imposition of the Roman rite throughout the Christian West likely reduced the frequency of single-immersion baptisms within Spain itself in the centuries following the initial permission of Pope Gregory. If the practice survived at all by the mid-11th century, when Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael wrote their respective complaints – and I haven’t found any evidence from that time for or against – it would probably have been a very rare indeed for someone baptized “incorrectly” to have been found in Constantinople.

Pending further evidence, then, we are left with the Greeks reacting at most to an improbability, and more likely to outdated information. While I fully acknowledge that it’s no more than supposition on my part, my best guess is that the works either of Gregory the Great or of Isidore of Seville (or of both, or of someone else entirely) were received in the theological circles of 11th-century Constantinople, leaving the mistaken impression that the practice of single immersion baptism was common in the West. From there, the notion that the Latins performed this sacrament incorrectly, along with most of the others, proved hard to dislodge.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1.  Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861), 153 (Humbert) and 182 (Michael).
  2. Tia M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000), 192.
  3. The Rudder, trans. Ralph Masterjohn (West Brookfield, Massachusetts: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 2005), 179.
  4. “in trina immersione unica tantum fiat invocatio Trinitatis”. No. 216. Acta Innocentii III, ed. P. Theodosius Haluščynskyj (Vatican, Typis Polyglottis, 1944), 458.
  5. J.D.C. Fisher, Christian Initiation, Baptism in the Medieval West (London: S.P.C.K., 1965), 91.
  6. “triduanamque nostri salvatoris sepulturam in baptismo imitari neglegentes”. Ep. 139. Ed. Ernest Duemmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin: Weidmannos, 1895), 221.
  7.  “[…] Hispania – quae olim tyrannorum nutrix fuit, nun vero scismaticorum – contra universalem sanctae ecclesiae consuetudinem […].” “Adfirmant enim quidam sub invocatione sanctae Trinitatis unam esse mersionem agendam.” Ep. 137. Ibid., 212.