Theopedia

Great Schism

“I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.”

— 1 Corinthians 1:10

Definition

The Great Schism, also called the East-West Schism, is the formal division between Western (Roman) and Eastern Christianity, conventionally dated to 1054.1 It followed centuries of estrangement between the churches of Rome and Constantinople over the Bishop of Rome’s claim to universal jurisdiction and the Western church’s addition of the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed.2 The split produced the two communions now known as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, each of which still regards itself as the historic church from which the other departed.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the schism itself, but its own doctrine bears directly on the dispute that caused it. Reformed Baptist ecclesiology rejects Rome’s claim to universal headship outright: “The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, in whom by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or Government of the Church, is invested in a supream and soveraigne manner; neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof, but is that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ.”3 On this point the confession sides with the historic Eastern objection to Roman primacy, even though the Reformed confessions were written more than five centuries after 1054 and address the papacy on its own terms rather than the schism directly.

On the schism’s other cause, the confession sides with Rome rather than Constantinople. It states that “the Holy Spirit eternally proceed[s] from the Father and the Son,”4 affirming the double procession the filioque clause confesses, against Eastern Orthodoxy’s rejection of it. Filioque Clause treats that doctrinal question, and the manner of the clause’s insertion, in full; the confession’s agreement with the West on the doctrine does not settle whether the clause was properly added to an ecumenical creed without an ecumenical council’s consent, a separate objection some Reformed theologians have themselves acknowledged carries real force.

Historical Development

Patriarchs, councils, and the rise of Roman primacy

The dispute over headship predates the schism itself by centuries. The Council of Nicaea (325) assigned the Bishop of Rome first place among the Patriarchs, giving him charge of the suburban churches, but Calvin reads the decree as ranking Rome first among several chief sees rather than setting him over all of them.5 At the Council of Chalcedon (451), the Emperor granted Rome’s legates the presiding place, but Pope Leo I himself, in requesting it, argued only that the Eastern bishops who had presided at the prior Council of Ephesus had discredited themselves, not that the honor was Rome’s by right; his own successors did not receive the same concession again.5

Rome’s claim hardened over the following century and a half. Bavinck describes the underlying asymmetry: Constantinople, as the empire’s new capital, understood itself as one see among equals, while “Rome… asserted itself, not as a political city alongside Constantinople, but as apostolic seat (sedes apostolica)… basing its claims and rights on Matthew 16:18 and demanding a universal (or catholic) place.”2 The conflict came to a head under Pope Gregory the Great, when John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, took the title “universal Patriarch.” Gregory opposed the title as strongly for himself as for John, writing to Eulogius of Alexandria: “If your holiness calls me universal Pope, it denies itself to be this whole which it acknowledges me to be,” since to elevate one bishop’s honor “is withdrawn” from all the rest.6 Gregory’s own successors did not share his restraint. Phocas, who had murdered the Emperor Maurice and seized his throne, granted Pope Boniface III in 607 what Gregory himself had refused to claim: that Rome should be head of all the churches.7 Roman jurisdiction over the Frankish churches followed later still, when the Roman Pontiff Zachary backed Pepin’s seizure of the Frankish throne in 751 in exchange for the Frankish crown’s own backing of Rome, an arrangement Charlemagne’s later patronage of the papacy confirmed.7

The filioque and growing estrangement

A doctrinal dispute compounded the political one. The Nicene Creed, as completed at the Council of Constantinople in 381, confessed the Holy Spirit as proceeding “from the Father.” The Western church later inserted filioque (“and the Son”) into that clause; Hodge dates the insertion to the Synod of Toledo in AD 589 and names it directly as “one of the causes which led to the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches.”8 The addition spread through the West only gradually and did not receive Rome’s own formal sanction until 1017, under Pope Benedict VIII.9 In the ninth century, the Byzantine patriarch Photius objected publicly to the clause, on both ecclesiastical grounds (that it had been added to an ecumenical creed without an ecumenical council’s consent) and theological ones (that it compromised the Father’s sole role as the Trinity’s source);10 Filioque Clause treats the doctrine and Photius’s argument in full. Rome’s adoption of a wording that Constantinople had never accepted, layered onto the still-unresolved dispute over papal headship, left the two churches with less and less common ground.

The break of 1054 and later reunion attempts

Bavinck names 1054 as the year “differences in usages, rites, and especially with respect to the filioque, led to the final schism,” but treats the break itself as the culmination of a much older divergence rather than a single event: “Since this difference was present from the beginning, the coming of the schism was only a matter of time.”2 After 1054 it became “inappropriate to speak of Roman Catholic theology” as distinct from a shared Eastern and Western inheritance; the two traditions had become separate subjects.11

Two later councils attempted to reverse the break. The Second Council of Lyon, in 1274, was “a first attempt at reconciliation with the East” that produced a formal agreement on the filioque, though one that rejected Photius’s own interpretation of the clause.12 The Council of Florence, in 1439, revisited and further defined the same dogma.12 Neither reunion held: the wider Eastern church repudiated both agreements as exceeding what its own delegated bishops had authority to concede on its behalf.12

Opposing Views

Rome: a primacy inherent from antiquity, not a later innovation. Rome’s own historic claim, as Bavinck records it, rested on Matthew 16:18 and treated the bishopric of Peter’s own city as holding an apostolic authority no other see possessed, a “universal (or catholic) place.”2 On this reading, Constantinople’s later resistance to papal jurisdiction was a departure from an authority already inherent in Rome’s apostolic foundation, not an infringement on rights Constantinople had always held.

Constantinople: an office never meant to be a monarchy over the whole church. The historical record Calvin recounts cuts against that Roman self-understanding on its own terms: when the Patriarch of Constantinople himself claimed the title “universal Patriarch,” Pope Gregory the Great rejected the title as “wicked, impious, and nefarious” even as applied to his own office, insisting that elevating any one bishop above the rest diminished the honor “of my brethren.”6 On this account, the several patriarchates were originally conceived as sharing honor among equals, and the later Roman claim to sole headship, secured only after Gregory’s death through Phocas’s usurpation and the Frankish political alliance, was itself the innovation.7

Objections and Responses

Wasn’t 1054 just the date of one diplomatic incident, no different from the several earlier ruptures between Rome and Constantinople that were later healed? Bavinck’s own account treats 1054 as the point past which estrangement no longer resolved, not as an isolated diplomatic accident: the theological and liturgical differences between East and West had been building “from the beginning,” and 1054 was “only a matter of time.”2 What distinguishes 1054 from the earlier Photian rupture of the ninth century is precisely that it did not heal: the later reunion councils at Lyon (1274) and Florence (1439) both tried and failed to restore communion, each rejected by the wider Eastern church as exceeding its delegates’ authority.12 The schism’s durability, not any single legal act in 1054 itself, is what marks it as the final break rather than another temporary rift.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩

  2. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 7, 366-367. ↩ ↩2

  6. Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 7, 377. ↩ ↩2

  7. Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 7, 378. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 457. ↩

  9. John Thomas English III, “The Procession of the Spirit and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 142. ↩

  10. Samantha Ming Sum Cheng, “The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s Eternal Procession in Church History,” in “Retrieving Eternal Procession: A Dogmatic Western Account of the Holy Spirit’s Relation to the Father and the Son in the Triune God’s Divine Life” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2025), 18-114, citing A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 101-104. ↩

  11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2. ↩

  12. Cheng, “The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s Eternal Procession in Church History,” 18-114, citing Bertrand de Margerie, The Christian Trinity in History (Still River, MA: St. Bede’s, 1975), 166-67. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4