Transcript

Okay, so welcome back to our last night of class, and in our first hour we're talking about the split between the East and West.

In other words, what finally led to the schism, you know that word already, but it bears putting on the board because it's spelled with an H. The schism between the Eastern Church, that's come to be called the Eastern Orthodox Church or churches, and the Western or Catholic or Roman Catholic Church.

Now, you already know that this is not the first permanent split of the Church, because in 451, after the Council of Chalcedon, we had the departure of the Coptic Church and the Assyrian Church, which, you know, that split is still in effect today as well.

But tonight we're going to be talking about the probably more well-known major split between East and West.

A couple of things we have to talk about first in terms of topics or concepts that contribute to the split.

I mean, one of which we talked about last week, and that was the emergence of the increasing authority of the Bishop of Rome as the Western Pope, right?

And so we talked about that, we covered that.

Another issue that I've touched on A few times that I'm going to talk about in a little bit more detail now, that you see the big picture, is the controversy over the filioque clause.

This Latin word, filioque, is actually a compound word.

The suffixque is one of the ways that you can say and in Latin.

Enfilion is the word for son.

You don't need the word the here, but it means and the son.

And as you know, that got tacked onto the line in the Creed, the line about the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, that's where the Eastern Creed stops.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

That's how the Western Creed says it.

And while this may on the surface seem like it's It's having to do with the Holy Spirit, and it is.

It's really more about Christology than pneumatology, in the sense that the clause is added to the phrase about the Spirit, but in order to say something specific about the Son.

So you remember that the Creed, as it came out of Nicaea and even Constantinople, originally only said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.

The Cappadocians had said in their writings that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.

So that idea is acceptable in the East as well.

But there were various theologians who talked about what we call the double procession of the Spirit.

So double procession is the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son equally.

And we see that even as early as the third century, even as early as Novation, where we have this idea of inseparable operation.

Inseparable operation says that all divine activity is a product of all three persons of the Trinity.

If the procession of the Spirit is divine activity, then the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father.

This idea results in theologians, especially in the West, coming to believe that double procession is required.

that the Spirit must proceed both from the Father and the Son, because otherwise that would be a distinction between the Father and the Son that would be somehow unacceptable, in part based on inseparable operation.

You also already know that after the Arian controversy in the East, and well really in some ways while it was still going on, Arianism moves west.

And after That kind of subsided.

One of the ways the Western theologians had hoped to make sure that Arianism never reared its ugly head again in the West was to emphasize the equality of the Father and Son.

So this emphasis on the equality of the Father and Son and on the double procession of the Spirit as from both the Father and Son became an emphasis that was seen as necessary to safeguard against Arianism.

In order to emphasize the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, this gets emphasized.

If you think about, in terms of the New Testament, Romans chapter 8, the Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of God.

The way Paul is using those phrases, you can see that the Holy Spirit is described both as the Spirit of God, i.e. the Father, and also as the Spirit of Christ.

So there seems to be no sense in which the Holy Spirit is any less the Spirit of Christ than he is the Spirit of the Father.

Also in 1 Corinthians, we get the sense that the gifts of the Spirit come from both the Father and the Son.

In the Gospel of John, the coming of the Spirit is stated in a couple of different ways.

In one way, the coming of the Spirit is described as the Son asking the Father to send the Spirit.

You can sort of, I suppose, relate that to what the Cappadocians were saying, that the Spirit comes from the Father through the Son.

But in other places in the Gospel of John, the Spirit is described as being given by the Son.

And so, again, these are biblical A biblical basis for understanding the procession of the Spirit as a double procession from both the Father and the Son.

After the Council of Nicaea, you remember that some of the Arians or semi-Arians eventually got on board with the Nicene Creed and with the idea of the consubstantiality of the Son.

But some of them were uncomfortable with extrapolating that to the Holy Spirit.

In other words, saying that, well, you know, okay, we'll give you the divinity of the Son, the equal divinity of the Son and the Father, but we can't accept the same about the Spirit.

And so, some of the same arguments over the Son that were part of the Arian controversy now get applied And, you know, we've talked about this, but it helps, it's worth repeating.

The group that is perceived as fighting against the Spirit, called the Numatomachians, the word literally means spirit fighters, but it implies that they were fighting against the Spirit.

In other words, these are the people that argued against the full divinity of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes also called Macedonian.

But the point is that these folks argued against the full divinity of the Spirit.

So you have this going on in both the East and the West.

And we get a clear description of the Holy Spirit from Ambrose of Milan.

Now you may remember that Ambrose The Holy Spirit was the mentor of Augustine.

And Ambrose tells us that the Holy Spirit is divine and worthy of worship.

Same kind of thing that we get from the Cappadocians.

Both East and West are coming to the same conclusions about the divinity of the Spirit.

The Spirit is fully divine, consubstantial with the Father and Son, and therefore worthy of worship.

The word that's often used in the Old English translations is adorable.

The Holy Spirit is adorable.

In other words, it's appropriate to adore or worship the Holy Spirit.

Again, just like in the East with the Cappadocians, Ambrose will then have to clarify, but the Trinity is not three gods.

So even though we argue in favor of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, that does not make the Holy Spirit a separate God, we're not going down the path of polytheism, we're still monotheists, the Trinity is one God.

And so, in the year 381, same year as the Council of Constantinople, Ambrose is writing a document on the Holy Spirit.

And in that document he says that the Holy Spirit is the gift, the gift of both the Father and the Son.

And again, the guiding principle here is inseparable operation.

Because if you say that the Holy Spirit comes from the Father but not the Son, then you've got the Father and Son doing two different works.

And so you compromise the idea of inseparable operation.

So remember, inseparable operation is intimately tied to the concept of consubstantiality, right?

because if the three persons of the Trinity are consubstantial, and they are, one in substance, then the three persons of the Trinity must also be operating inseparably.

So, along comes Augustine then, and he formulates what we might call as the real doctrine of filioquy.

At least he usually gets credit with it.

But it seems like it was just a matter of time.

And there are even some Eastern authors who seem to go down this path, saying that ultimately we can only conclude that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son.

And so, as I said, Augustine is usually given credit for this.

And because The Arian controversy was moving west, because Arianism was moving west.

Remember that the Arian bishops of the east, like Eusebius of Nicomedia, were the ones to commission missionaries who went into northern and eastern Europe, converted the barbarian tribes to Arian Christianity, and then the barbarians move into Europe.

And so there's this double threat.

They're Arians, they're barbarians, and And now, at certain times, we even have emperors in the East who lean toward Arianism and who are trying to install Arian bishops in the West, trying to create Arian churches in the West.

So all of this creates a kind of a pressure and an urgency in the theologians of the West to emphasize the equality of the Father and Son to guard against Arianism.

And so the best way they felt they could do this was by emphasizing the double procession, that the Spirit proceeds equally from the Father and the Son, that the Son is equally the sender of the Spirit along with the Father.

And so apparently some started adding this idea into the creed, maybe as early as the late 4th century.

that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

In the 6th century, in Spain, when Arianism is finally sort of overcome by, you know, the barbarian tribes move in and they're Arian, but they're the minority.

So they conquer an area, And the conquering tribe is Aryan, but the majority of the population is Orthodox.

And so eventually, the majority converts the minority.

And eventually, Aryanism kind of phases out in the West.

But again, there's going to be an attitude of, well, let's not let that happen again.

In year 589, at a council in Toledo, The council mandated the filioque clause to be added to the creed, made it mandatory.

Now, this is a regional council, it's not considered an ecumenical council or anything, so it's a regional council, so the idea is that its authority is limited to the sphere of that region, but it spreads from there.

Gregory I, Gregory the Great, remember we talked about him last time, who was Bishop of Rome, At the end of the 6th turn of the 7th century, he endorsed it.

He didn't make it official or mandatory, and possibly in deference to the East, he did not make it mandatory to add to the creed.

But the creed wasn't even a regular part of the Roman mass yet anyway.

But he did endorse it, he did support it.

From Spain, the tradition moved to other parts of Europe, like Ireland and England.

And in England in 679, the synod of Hatfield, spelled just like a sound, Hatfield, there the filioploy clause was affirmed to be used in the creed there.

And so it spread throughout Europe.

And eventually, Charlemagne himself took it up as a banner, as part of his program to standardize the liturgy in the West.

Now, the other thing, though, is that Charlemagne wanted to use it as a banner to sort of wave it in the faith of the Eastern Church.

Remember I told you that when the Holy Roman Empire was created, the Eastern Empire saw that as a bit of an affront.

Here is the Western Pope creating a Holy Roman Empire in the West, and the Eastern Byzantine Empire still exists.

So that was considered a bit of an offense to them.

And Eastern Christians started to notice that the Western Christians had added this phrase to the creed.

And then, you know, we talked about the controversy over icons.

We've talked about that already.

So this is about the same time that that's going on.

So it only makes the problem worse.

So remember at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, where we talked about, in the context of the controversy over icons, where the appropriate use of icons was clarified at that council in 787. The Bishop of Rome actually agreed that it was better to stick with the Eastern Creed.

And Charlemagne Criticized him for it.

Criticized him for accepting the heresy of single procession.

If you didn't see that, I put the word heresy in air quotes.

Because, I mean, just stepping out of the historical story for a second, giving you my own opinion, there is nothing heretical about either one of these.

Single procession or double procession.

You could argue that single procession questions inseparable operation, but in reality, there's nothing wrong with saying the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, as the Eastern Christians do in their creeds.

There's nothing wrong with saying the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, and I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, as we do in the Western creed, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

But Charlemagne criticized the Pope for being too easy on the Eastern version which he called heresy.

The Pope responded by saying the Eastern creed is not a heresy and in fact it's not as though everything we believe has to be in the creed.

But then at the end of the 8th century in Spain, there's a resurgence of a form of adoptionism that looks And so, this eventually led to an even wider acceptance of the western version of the creed, with the addition of filioque in it, and the wider use of the creed in the liturgy.

Now meanwhile, the East is becoming aware of this and is complaining that the Western Christians had no right to change the creed that was written at ecumenical councils in the East.

And, in a way, they kind of have a point.

Eastern theologians would argue that they were only doing what the Council of Constantinople did As time goes on, more and more Easterners become aware that the Western Christians have changed the creed.

Jerusalem is a city, back then as it is now, that was divided and shared by different kinds of Christians.

And so in the 9th century, the Eastern monks in Jerusalem noticed that the Western monks have this additional clause in their creed, and Charlemagne got involved in that as well.

Now what authority does Charlemagne have to get involved in what's going on in Jerusalem, you might ask?

Well, because he is the self-proclaimed protector of Christians in the Holy Land, Charlemagne claims to be the protector of Christians in the Holy Land, But by entering into this debate over the filioque clause, he seems to be trying to protect Christians from other Christians.

He seems to be trying to protect the position of the Western Christians against the East.

So at a synod in Charlemagne's court city of Aachen, remember this place, the synod of Aachen in 809, The Filioque Clause was affirmed as an addition to the Creed, and it would become mandatory for churches to use this version of the Creed.

The next year, Charlemagne sent delegates to the Bishop of Rome, who was Pope Leo III at this time, and they tried to convince him to To use this version of the creed in liturgy at Rome, Leo III, same one that crowned Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor.

But Leo refused to add the creed to the liturgy, again saying not everything we believe has to be in the creed, and so didn't want to make it official in that sense.

The Roman Church doesn't have a creed as a regular part of the liturgy until the 11th century, probably.

And so in the 11th century, when one of the Holy Roman Emperors came to Rome for his coronation, he was surprised to find that there's no creed in the liturgy.

And the Bishop of Rome at that time says, well, it's because Rome has never had a heresy to refute.

Question?

Just saying that the Roman Church didn't use the Creed in its liturgy.

Was the Eastern Church using the Creed in its liturgy regularly?

The Eastern Church is using the Creed, although, again, it's not necessarily happening everywhere.

Because, technically speaking, what any church does or doesn't do is up to its bishop.

So, you know, when you say, you know, and I'm already going on a limb by saying the Eastern Church does this and the Western Church does that, but, you know, you've got to generalize at some point.

But in truth, I mean, you know, some were and some probably were not because this is up to the bishop.

So when I say the Roman Church specifically was not using the creed in that, I mean the church in and around the city of Rome.

Whereas many churches, many cities in the West were using the creed, Rome simply was not until the 11th century.

When we get to the 11th century, we're coming up to the final split between East and West, and so this becomes an issue of one of the major differences between the two, first here and then there.

I just want to clarify for myself, when you say using it in a liturgy, you're talking about at a regular, every time you have a Mass, rather than just a confirmation.

Right.

Well, I mean, it would be used in other liturgies too, but I'm talking about regular Mass.

Let me give you an example.

We talk a lot about the Nineteen Creed in here, and we don't talk much about the Apostles' Creed.

Sometimes people ask, but what about that?

And part of the reason why we don't talk much about it is because its history is much more obscure.

But as it played out, eventually what happened was the Apostles' Creed was the one that would come to be associated more with baptism.

And I'm talking about the Roman Western Church, and the 19th Creed would be the one more associated with Sunday Mass.

So that's just kind of how it fell out.

Question over here.

Yeah, I think I missed something.

So in Adonai and Aachen, is that a councilman or not?

Synod of Aachen, yeah.

So then that was then made...

Well, no, I mean, it's not an ecumenical council, and we're getting to the point where that's not going to happen anymore.

But what you have here, and it's good that you clarify this, because the Synod of Aachen is interesting because it's technically, by church standards, a regional synod.

But here's Charlemagne, trying to extend its reach throughout all of Europe.

So whenever I'm talking about Charlemagne, what he's trying to do is try to standardize and unify church practice across what we now know of as Europe, basically.

Well, yeah, or he's issuing proclamations and sending the documents around.

Charlemagne's whole agenda is to create an empire where there's no difference between church and state.

There's no difference between citizen and baptized church member.

That's what he's really trying to do.

All of that is to say that this controversy over the addition of this filioque clause In addition to that, there are other things that already divide the church.

And I'm going to run down a list of things, so tell me to repeat myself if you want me to, but a lot of these things you already know.

We've covered them.

But just as a review, obviously The rise of the papacy as a singular point of authority.

The increasing authority of the Bishop of Rome, even over against the bishops of other metropolitan cities.

Obviously, the language of the Church is different now in the East and the West.

Once upon a time, the language of the Church was Greek across the board.

But by the third, fourth century, the Western Church shifts to Latin, which, as we all know from the Christmas song, is the language of the ages.

But the East never changes, right?

The East is always Greek, and so by now we have a serious language difference, which you've already seen has created problems in translating words like substance, So, West is Latin, East is Greek.

Some have argued that there are some differences in the way the East and the West understand or at least speak about the Trinity.

In some books you will read that The Western Church tends to emphasize the oneness over the threeness in the Trinity, and the Eastern Church tends to emphasize the threeness over the oneness.

And that really isn't entirely true.

It's a bit of a caricature, because the Eastern Church, I think, would agree completely with Tertullian that there is a certain precedence of the oneness over the threeness, because after all, God is one.

And if anything, The Eastern Church would prefer to take an apophatic approach.

You know that word, apophatic, meaning it's better to say what we know God isn't than what we think God is.

So there are some differences, and theologically I think that in some respects, if you lump Alexandria in with the West, in some respects you can say, The West is going to err.

It's going to err on the side of too much unity and maybe lean more towards a Sabellian Trinity or a Monophysite Christ or something like that.

And if the East, excluding Alexandria, if the East were going to err, they might be more inclined to lean towards an Adoptionist Trinity or an Nestorian Christ.

But, you know, again, I hesitate to say that with too much certainty because I don't want to go too far with it.

But there are certain emphases in terms of talking about God.

Another big difference is, this goes all the way back to Constantine moving the capital out of Rome to New Rome, Constantinople, right?

Because in doing that, not only does he leave this power vacuum in Rome, where the bishop of Rome steps into that vacuum and becomes the most important man in the city of Rome, but by transporting the emperor to the east, now there is no bishop in the east who can be that one most important man because the emperor is there.

And what that amounts to is this.

In the east, the state will always rule over the church.

In the West, it's the other way around, at least as much as the bishop of Rome can enforce it.

In the West, the church has an authority over the state.

It's very different.

In the West, clergy are supposed to be celibate.

In the East, The bishops are generally celibate, but not necessarily the presbyters, the priests.

In the East, they can be married and have families.

They don't have to be, and they could be monastic.

And the way it plays out is that if they ever hoped to be a bishop, they would be monastic because the bishops come out of the monastic order.

But you get the idea.

And you know this is true to this day.

Eastern Orthodox priests can be married There were also some differences as far as how much authority was given by the bishops to the priests.

Originally, and theoretically, it is the bishop who has the authority to preside over the sacraments.

And this is true of any denomination that has bishops.

The bishop who has this authority, and if any presbyter has the authority to preside over the sacraments, it's because that authority is granted by the bishop.

Well, in the East and the West, it sort of evolves at different rates in terms of how often the priests are allowed to celebrate the Eucharist as opposed to the bishops.

It evolves differently based on population.

In other words, how likely is it that one bishop can serve the Eucharist to everybody in the city, etc. Another aspect, of course, is the bread.

The bread that's used for the Eucharist.

The West uses unleavened bread.

The East uses leavened bread.

You can probably imagine good theological reasons for both.

Use unleavened bread because that's what Jesus used and it connects it to the Passover.

That sounds good.

Or use leavened bread because of the parables about the leaven and about rising bread reminds us of Jesus rising from the dead.

So also good theological reasons, it's just that they develop differently.

I'm sure you also know that the East and West celebrate Easter on a different date, usually.

I mean, if it comes up on the same day, it's a coincidence.

And that doesn't happen very often.

We haven't talked too much about this issue.

I've touched on it a little bit in terms of the way that the dates for Easter are calculated.

But you may remember that at the Council of Nicaea, one of the canons of Nicaea says, and this is ecumenical council in the East worldwide, one of the canons of Nicaea basically says everyone should celebrate Easter on the same date that the Church of Rome does.

But nobody got on board with that.

Or, you know, nobody in the East, anyway.

And so to this day, the Eastern Church calculates the date for Easter differently and ends up with Easter on a different day.

There are some different traditions with regard to baptism.

In the Western Church, confirmation got separated from baptism as a separate rite.

We talked a little bit about this.

But also First Eucharist.

So like for example today in the Roman Catholic Church, you'd be baptized as an infant, You would have your first Eucharist somewhere around second grade, and you would be confirmed maybe in junior high or something like that.

In the Eastern Church, all that happens at once.

And in many traditions, a baby is baptized, confirmed, and given a little taste of the Eucharist right then.

So different traditions.

In the West, we talked about this.

Remember when we were talking about the Eucharist and how the heightened sensitivity to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist led to a fear of desecrating it, which led to the fact that in the West they stopped offering the cup to the laity for a while.

I mean, it came back in the 20th century, but for a long time Lay people only got the host, the breath.

Now, theologically this is not a problem because of the doctrine that both elements are present in each element spiritually, but that's another difference between East and West, that the East would look at the West with skepticism about their traditions.

We also talked about the icon controversy.

That left a bad taste in everyone's mouth and a mutual distrust, even though the controversy was theoretically concluded in a way that both sides could agree on.

You still have this issue that the West has statues and the East shies away from three-dimensional representation.

You still have those differences.

I also mentioned that the creation of the Holy Roman Empire was taken as a rejection of the Eastern Byzantine Empire.

So, all of this stuff is feeding into the sausage grinder of the 11th century.

And on top of all of that, the Eastern Church is noticing and criticizing certain practices, certain abusive practices among the clergy of the West.

Now, I'm not saying that the Eastern clergy didn't have their own issues, but there are particular clergy abuses that emerged in the West that I think are relevant for you because these are also going to be some of the criticisms of the Protestant Reformers.

For example, Simon, Simony, who knows what simony is?

Who likes the word that means silent little life?

Remember silent magus in the book of Acts?

What does he do?

He sees the healing power of the Apostles and he says what?

Yeah, how much for that cool power, right?

And of course that's missing the point.

Simony is the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices.

This is, you know, also connected to the concept of lay investiture.

Remember lay investiture, where lay people, like secular royalties, were choosing who the bishops would be in their realms.

Well, one of the ways you could choose who the bishop was going to be in your realm was by putting the office up for sale with the highest bidder.

Another one is known as Nicolaitanism.

Now, this is really obscure.

But there's a mention of this in the book of Revelation.

And in that context, nobody really knows what the author of Revelation is talking about.

But there's something about Nicolaitanism going on in a couple of the churches mentioned in the book of Revelation.

As time goes on, though, the name gets associated with a particular practice, and that is the practice of clergy keeping, I don't know, do I want to use the word concubines or mistresses?

I'm not sure.

But the idea is that in the West, clergy are supposed to be celibate, but they start having housekeepers, live-in housekeepers, right?

Now, you can see how, you know, looking at that from the outside, one might consider that a bit of a hypocrisy.

Well, you're supposed to be celibate, but what you really are is just not married.

You know, so there's that.

Another one is known as absenteeism.

Now, imagine if you can Buy.

Let's say you can buy an Episcopal seat.

You want to be a bishop.

Not because you have any spirituality to yourself or care about God's people, but you want to be a bishop because there's money in it.

And you want to control the land and the army that goes with it, etc. So what do you do?

You buy that office from the king of the realm, and then you have the freedom to skim the offerings or whatever.

Well, gee, if it's lucrative to have one Episcopal see, why not two?

So we have situations where the same person is bishop in multiple places and doesn't bother to ever show up in any of them.

That's absenteeism.

Being clergy someplace and never actually going there.

Ascenteeism is not ever showing up there.

So specifically, ascenteeism is clergy who don't go to where their church is supposed to be.

So obviously they're not serving the people, they're holding that church office for some other reason.

Okay, so you get the idea.

There's mutual criticisms going on back and forth between East and West.

In addition to that, by the 11th century, Islam is pressing in on the Christian East, and Islam is threatening the borders of the Byzantine Empire the way the barbarians had in the West.

And so in the East, Islam is considered a great threat.

And so when we come into the 11th century, that's the situation we find.

And one other thing you have to keep in mind, and that is that, you know, the East and West are not all that separate.

I mean, I was talking a minute ago about Eastern monks and Western monks who know each other in Jerusalem.

Keep in mind that there are Western Latin-speaking churches in the East, and there are Eastern Greek-speaking churches in the West because people moved.

And so you have these communities.

You have these Eastern communities living in the West, Western communities living in the East.

You have Western Latin Christians living in Constantinople.

You have Eastern Greek-speaking Christians living in Rome.

In fact, I may have mentioned that when we were talking about the Eitan controversy, that there's a church in Rome that, you know, at that time in the 8th century, The Pope gave that church to the Greek-speaking Eastern Christians so that they'd have a place to worship.

So that's the situation, then, as we come into the 11th century.

And at this point, the Eastern emperor wants to create an alliance with the West, solidify or reunify the two empires in part to help protect the East against Islam.

And so an alliance begins to form.

And so let's put the players on the board here.

West and East.

So in the East you have the Eastern Byzantine Emperor, whose name is Constantine, by the way.

This is Constantine the Ninth.

And under him you have the Bishop of Constantinople, who is the Patriarch Michael.

He's the Bishop of Constantinople, but I put them this way to show you that in the East, it's the Emperor who has the higher authority.

In the West, the Bishop of Rome has the higher authority.

This is Leo IX. So, we'll say Pope Leo IX, and we have the Western Emperor, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III. Now, again, the Holy Roman Emperor Henrys are not the same as the England Henrys, so if you're familiar with Shakespeare or any of that, put that out of your mind.

It's a whole different bunch of Henrys.

Holy Roman Emperor, H.R.E., sorry.

So these are the players.

And the problem is that the Patriarch seems to fear that this alliance could only hurt him and his authority, his power.

He wanted to strengthen his power in two directions.

He wanted to strengthen his power, the power of the Eastern Church over the state, and he wanted to strengthen the power of Constantinople over Rome.

And so, he believed that the alliance could only hurt him.

And so, because of all the things I've been talking about tonight so far, we find ourselves on the edge of the split, and it isn't going to take very much to push the Church over that edge.

And so, the patriarch, Michael, began what amounts to a propaganda war against Rome and the West.

and used any incriminating evidence he could find to discredit the Western Church.

And, you know, we have the clergy abuse, and we have some of these other things, but as I said earlier, his sort of trump card, or the last straw, was the filioquia.

The Eastern Church felt, and many Easterners to this day still feel, that filioque is a heresy, because to the Eastern ear, it sounded like Sibelianism.

It sounded like too much unity in the Trinity.

It sounded like confusing the persons of the Trinity.

On top of that, it was taken as an act of disrespect toward the Eastern ecumenical council.

Again, you know, as if to say, what right do you, Western Church, have To change the creed that was created at Nicaea and Constantinople.

So, we're calling it filioque controversy, but the Eastern Church would have used a different word, right?

They would have used no word at all.

In other words, their creed ends with the Holy Spirit proceeds From the Father, period.

So the filioque is just the addition that the Western church puts in.

But the fact that it's Latin versus Greek, is that part of the issue?

Not really.

I mean, it wouldn't have mattered if the Western church had written it in Greek.

It's the fact that the extra word or words was added that's really it.

And so, In the year 1054, and this is one of those years everyone really should have memorized, 1054, the patriarch Michael orders the closing of the Latin churches in Constantinople.

So Pope Leo gets wind of this and sends a an ambassador to Constantinople, Cardinal Umberto, or in some books, Humbert.

And he sends Umberto to Constantinople to try and negotiate a solution to this problem.

But when Umberto gets there, he gets the cold shoulder from the patriarch and his people, And so he responds by verbally attacking the Greek church.

The patriarch returns the favor and verbally attacks the Western church.

And so Umberto decides to settle the matter, and during a worship service, he walks into Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, the flagship church of Constantinople, walks up the aisle and places on the altar a papal bull.

Remember, a papal bull is like a pronouncement.

It's like you have an imperial edict, the edict comes from the emperor, the bull comes from the pope.

I don't know if I explained it, but it just comes from the Latin word for the seal that's placed on the document.

But anyway, so a papal bull is an official pronouncement from the bishop of Rome, and Umberto walks in Leo's been dead for a while, so this is not really from Leo.

It's from Umberto taking matters into his own hands and writing on behalf of the Pope.

But the bull is a bull of excommunication, excommunicating Patriarch Michael.

And so, when the bull is read by the patriarch and the emperor, it's interpreted or taken as if it excommunicates the whole Eastern Church.

And so the Greeks, of course, return the favor and excommunicate the whole Western Church.

And of course, that's the end of the alliance.

So notice how the split between the two halves of the church causes a political split, or at least prevents any reunification of the empire.

That mutual excommunication remained in effect until the 20th century.

Each side finally recognized each other as valid in 1964. The mutual excommunications were dropped and each side recognized the other as a valid expression of Christianity in 1964. There is still no Eucharistic unity between East and West.

Depending on who you ask, there may be some cases in emergency situations where one could receive the Eucharist from the other, but technically speaking, no.

And so, there's still that.

And talks continue, and every once in a while, you hear rumors about another possible ecumenical council that would include East and West.

But the problem is, and the thing that holds that back is that, ironically, is that there is no Orthodox cult.

In other words, you might criticize the idea of one person at the top of a pyramid of authority in the West, that all of the authority rests in one person.

But the fact that that doesn't exist in the East is making a lot of the talk typical, because the Easterners aren't necessarily all on the same page among themselves.

And so there is no one person who can walk into a meeting with the Western Pope and talk about anything with the authority of speaking for the whole Eastern Church.

Is that a question?

Yeah, I thought in 1964, though, when they gave up the split, or however you want to say it, that the Pope then went and was over the Eastern Church as well.

No, the Eastern Church has not recognized the authority of the Bishop of Rome as being over them.

In fact, in some ecumenical talks, some people would say that that's the one thing that could reunite the Church, but then some in the East will say that's the one thing they'll never agree to.

The irony here is that one of the things that caused the schism in the first place is also one of the things that would be needed to repair it.

Yeah, question back here.

I was just wondering, when did the seven main patriarchs finally kind of crystallize into a tradition?

Well, you mean in terms of the authority of the seven metropolitans?

Yes.

Yeah, well, I mean, that happens over time, and at certain councils, the affirmation of certain metropolitans and their pecking order is kind of spelled out.

So we saw how in the 4th century, you know, Constantinople becomes declared as the second most powerful metropolitan, but in doing that, the East has to admit Rome is the most important.

And so that plays out.

But after the split in the 5th century, it becomes more difficult The Coptic Church leaves, right?

Well, most of the Coptics are in Egypt, so Alexandria becomes the headquarters of the Coptic Church.

But of course there's still Chalcedonians in Alexandria too, and so now you have a split city, where you've got two different bishops.

In the same city, one for the Chalcedonians, one for the non-Chalcedonians.

So it becomes very difficult to talk about power in the sense of any straightforward way, I guess.

Question here?

You said the irony is that the one thing that causes racism in the first place would be the one thing they would need to repair.

Can you say more about that?

Well, that was just a reference to what I was saying earlier in the sense that If there was a pope in the East, it would be easier for the East and West to sit down, because the two popes could sit down in the same room and talk.

So the Eastern critique that there shouldn't be one person with that much power, that was part of what split the Church.

That's also why it's more difficult, because there is no one person with the authority to speak for a whole side of the issue.

So basically, any other questions at this point?

What we have here then, by the end of the 11th, did I see one?

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm sorry, just going off of that last comment, so if the East would put in a Pope as such, would it be in some sense noble, or where would, I mean, I can't answer that for them, I mean, that would seem to make sense.

If they asked me my opinion, I would say, let's get us an Eastern pope in Constantinople, let's get us a non-Chalcedonian pope in Alexandria, and we'd have a triumvirate of popes.

Erase that part for us.

That would seem to make sense, but I don't know, because the problem becomes more complicated by the national, what we call autocephalous churches, meaning they What was it called when the West stopped offering the cup to the ladies?

Doctrine of what?

That doesn't really have a name.

It's just that they stopped offering the cup to the lady out of fear that someone might spill it.

Okay.

And Humberto walked in where?

Oh, yes.

The church in Constantinople, where he put the papal bull on the altar, is Padre Sofia.

It's Greek for holy wisdom.

And this would become the The main church of Eastern Christianity, and now the building is a mosque.

It is the what?

Somebody help me out.

There's a name for it.

It's a mosque now.

And I don't even know if they use it as a mosque, it's basically a museum.

It is used, okay.

But anyway, so it's still there, but that was what you call the flagship church of the East.

It was the cathedral of Constantinople.

Okay, so the situation is then, as we have it, and as we are going to leave it, for the most part, with this course, we have one more lecture after a break, but this is the situation as it is when you leave this course and go to your second Church History course, and that is there are four main branches of Christianity.

There is the Western Church, which most of us here are a product of the Western Church in one way or another.

Not all of us, but most of us.

And so the Western Church is the church whose headquarters is in Rome at this point, as you know.

So we call this the Roman Church.

But obviously we don't mean just the city of Rome, we mean the West.

And the Roman Church takes the name Catholic as initially as a way of excluding the others.

So, you know, after the schism, the Romans would say, you know, we're Catholic and you're not.

We have the Eastern Church, which takes the name Orthodox as a way of saying we're Orthodox.

Of course, you know, you already know that this eventually will be made up of several different groups, including the national churches, But for ease right now, I'm just going to say Eastern Orthodox.

But again, you see how these terms, we've been looking at the use of these terms throughout the course.

Orthodox means correct doctrine.

Catholic means universal.

When you use them now, think about what you mean if you use these terms, and think about how you capitalize them, because the word Catholic, with a small c, refers to the universal church.

That's why, for example, in the United Methodist Hymnal, the word Catholic is still in there in the Creed, it's just got a small c and a little asterisk.

It's universal, you all know that.

Catholic with a capital C now usually refers to the Roman Catholic Church.

The word Orthodox, same kind of thing, with a small o, It refers to that which is consistent with traditional orthodoxy.

Whereas with a big O, this capital O usually means the Greek or Eastern Orthodox Church.

And every once in a while you'll go to a conference or something and you'll hear people refer to themselves by big C, all O, you know, so like if someone is Roman Catholics would consider themselves theologically Orthodox.

That person might say, I'm big C, small O. So then, in addition to those two, we have the two non-Chalcedonian churches, the two groups that split after the Council of Chalcedon.

We have the Coptic Church, Which technical term is the Oriental Orthodox.

And we have the Assyrian Church of the East.

So the Catholic Church was originally the product of the Monasticite movement.

Although, again, they would not call themselves monotheistic today.

The Assyrian church was the product of the Nestorian movement, but they also probably would not want to claim Nestorius as their founder.

And as we talked about it back when we were on that subject, those churches, these churches also have been recognized as valid expressions of Christianity, and these excommunications have been dropped against those finds as well.

But again, that's all 20th century stuff, so pretty recent.

But this is the way the church looked then after the 11th century.

Any final questions?

I think so, but I've never actually asked that question.

Anybody know?

The question was, is there Eucharistic unity between the different Eastern Orthodox churches?

I believe so, but I'm not entirely sure.

But I do know that there is not, for example, between, you know, the Eastern Orthodox and the non-Palestinian churches.

And some folks who maybe, you know, are from the Aetherian church, I mean, I know this because a Greek Orthodox priest has told me that, you know, sometimes the Aetherian folks will come to his church and they don't quite get to, they're not supposed to, you know, get communion there and he has to explain it to them.

So again, between these four groups there is not Eucharistic unity.

Any other questions?

Okay, well then let's take a break.