Chapter 58. Two Romes: Papal Primacy, Byzantine Caesaropapism and the Schism of 1054

The break between Latin and Greek Christendom is usually dated to one summer day in 1054, when papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia. The sources in the library agree that the date stands for a much longer process. They disagree, often sharply, about who caused it and what it meant. Three Romanian-language accounts form the core of this chapter, and each argues a side. The Greek-Catholic historian Clemente Plaianu writes in defence of Roman primacy. The Orthodox traditionalists Archimandrite Philarete, Bishop Photios and Father Patric reject the post-Carolingian papacy outright. Emanoil Babuş gives an academic Orthodox survey of Byzantium. Paul Lemerle’s history of Byzantium, Wladimir Guettée’s nineteenth-century polemic and Anna Grzymała-Busse’s political-science study fill in the background. Throughout, the quarrel over doctrine and ritual cannot be separated from the politics of empire: the founding of a second capital, Norman expansion in southern Italy, the Seljuk advance and, at the end, the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204.

The New Rome and the canons that raised it

Plaianu begins his second chapter, “Cezaropapismul. Fatalul destin al istoriei” (Caesaropapism: the fatal destiny of history), with the empire’s administrative map. In 292 Diocletian divided the empire into four prefectures (Italy, Gaul, Illyricum and the Orient). On 11 May 330 Constantine raised the Greek colony of Byzantion to the rank of imperial capital under the name Constantinople [Plaianu, Catolicism si ortodoxie romaneasca, #21843, “Capitolul II”]. Plaianu argues that the church’s ranking of sees then began to follow the empire’s ranking of cities. Canon 3 of the Council of Constantinople (381) decreed that “the bishop of Constantinople shall have precedence after the bishop of Rome, because it is New Rome”. Canon 28 of Chalcedon (451) reaffirmed this, gave the archbishop of Constantinople the right to ordain the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia and Thrace, and granted the see “honour equal to Old Rome… being reckoned in second place”. Plaianu treats canon 28 as the seed of the dispute: “This canon generated interminable controversies, down to our own days, between the two patriarchal sees” [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul II”]. He notes that the pope’s protests against it “remained without result”. He also argues that the canon put Constantinople after Rome and so did not limit the rights of the Apostolic See, and that it was the Byzantines, “who intervene through the emperors everywhere”, who read it otherwise.

According to Plaianu, the Byzantine claim rested on two premises: that the church must be subordinate to the state, so that a city’s rank in the church follows its rank in the state; and that Rome’s primacy came “not from divine right but only from the quality of capital” of its city. If both premises held, two capitals meant two primacies [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul IV”]. He rejects the second premise as “the total negation of papal primacy as an institution of divine right”.

Caesaropapism: indictment and defence

Plaianu’s fourth chapter names three main causes of the schism: caesaropapism, the ambition of the patriarchs of Constantinople, and ethnic antagonism between Greeks and Latins. He adds that the theological arguments served “more to justify the rupture than to provoke it” [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul IV”]. On caesaropapism he is blunt. It “showed its fangs” already in the fourth century through Constantine himself: “He wanted to be head of the Christian Church, just as, in paganism, the emperor was the supreme head of the cult, pontifex maximus.” Constantine called himself “bishop of those outside”, and courtier bishops hailed the basileus as “equal to the apostles… priest and king”. Quoting a French Catholic source, Plaianu writes that the emperor “convokes, presides over, directs and confirms synods” and controls episcopal elections so tightly that they become “a simple formality”. He also claims that nearly all the great heresies between 325 and 787 were “patronised, supported, sometimes even invented by emperors”. Of the sixty patriarchs of Constantinople between the two councils of Nicaea, he says 27 were “notorious heretics”, and in 506 years the two churches were in open rupture for 248 [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul IV”].

Babuş describes the same institutions in very different terms. He writes of “the originality and profundity of the solution brought by Byzantium to the problem of the relationship between Church and State”. In that solution the earthly empire was seen as the image of the Kingdom of God and the emperor as God’s lieutenant, with church and state completing and interpenetrating each other [Babuş, Aspecte ale istoriei si spiritualitatii Bizantului, #13066, part 59]. As Rome grew distant and the eastern provinces were lost, the patriarch of Constantinople became the empire’s leading hierarch and “gradually acquired the title of ecumenical”, while “the emperor, whose power was of divine origin, intervened officially” in the life of the church [Babuş, #13066, part 265]. Babuş also records the limits the church set. In matters of dogma it condemned all imperial interference, and Theodore the Studite held that church affairs belong to priests and profane affairs to the emperor [Babuş, #13066, part 281]. In footnotes Babuş points readers to the French literature on Byzantine political ideology: Bardy, Ahrweiler, Clévenot and Setton [Babuş, #13066, notes].

Justinian and the Illyrian question

Justinian appears in all three accounts. Lemerle writes that Justinian’s “‘Roman’ conception of the Empire” and his western policy “naturally pushed” him toward agreement with the papacy. Already at Justin’s accession in 518, under Justinian’s influence, the emperor “made peace with Rome and put an end to the schism of Acacius, accepting the conditions formulated by the pope” [Lemerle, Istoria Bizantului, #19180, “Politica religioasă”]. Babuş adds that by trying to keep the Monophysite East, Constantinople had “lost the Orthodox West”, and that the Acacian schism was one of the disagreements that eventually led to the final separation [Babuş, #13066].

Plaianu uses Justinian as evidence of Rome’s old jurisdiction over the Latin-speaking Danube lands. In 533 Justinian adopted Pope Hormisdas’s formula and repeated in his code and novels that “the bishop of Rome is the head of all the Churches” [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul IV”]. By Novel XI of 14 April 535 he founded the archbishopric of Iustiniana Prima at his birthplace, Tauresium, with authority over Dacia Mediterranea, Dacia Ripensis, Moesia Prima, Dardania and part of Pannonia Secunda, including points north of the Danube. Quoting Dimitrie Onciul, Plaianu stresses that this archbishopric was “Latin and subordinate to Rome”. He argues that Byzantine jurisdiction over Illyricum came only through imperial acts: Theodosius II’s edict of 14 July 421 and Leo III the Isaurian’s transfer of 733, which in Plaianu’s words “had no canonical sanction” [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul II”]. For Plaianu, the later slavonisation of Romanian church life through Bulgarian mediation was “the fatal destiny of history”.

Photius, Cerularius and 1054

Babuş places the decisive turn after the patriarch Photius: “After Photius there followed a new period of separation. This time political considerations were decisive.” The death of Basil II in 1025 began “a profound decadence of the Byzantine Empire”, and in the midst of the internal crisis the threat of the Seljuk Turks “took on worrying proportions” [Babuş, #13066, part 227]. He describes how the Normans, who reached southern Italy in 1012 and refused to serve as Byzantine mercenaries, became a “formidable adversary” of the empire [Babuş, #13066, part 231].

Plaianu tells the events from the Roman side, and his portrait of the patriarch is hostile. Michael I Cerularius (1043–1058) was “ambitious, energetic and authoritarian, but full, beyond measure, of love of self and of his Greek nation”. Plaianu says Photius had fought on doctrine (the Filioque), while Cerularius moved the fight to liturgy and discipline, which was “more suited to impress the common people”. The occasion, as Plaianu presents it, was the synods of Siponto (1050–1053), which placed Byzantine-rite dioceses in southern Italy under the Latin archbishopric of Benevento. “In collaboration with Bishop Leo of Ohrid and the Constantinopolitan monk Niketas Pectoratus (Stethatos), docile instruments of the patriarch”, Cerularius accused the Latins of judaising: they used unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist, fasted on Saturdays, ate strangled meat, did not sing Alleluia in Lent and forbade clerical marriage. “In 1053 he closed the Latin churches of Constantinople” and anathematised those who refused the Greek rite as “azymites” [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul IV”]. Pope Leo IX replied with the letter In terra pax hominibus of 2 September 1053, which ignored “the petty accusations of the Greeks” and set out the primacy of the Roman church. “Insincere and cunning, the patriarch pretended at first to yield,” Plaianu writes.

Plaianu continues the narrative. The emperor Constantine IX Monomachos needed church unity for political reasons, and at his request the pope sent Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi in January 1054. Plaianu calls them persons “not very happily chosen”, given the cardinal’s “violent temperament”. Leo IX died on 19 April 1054, which ended the legates’ mandate. They nevertheless laid the bull on the altar of Hagia Sophia on Saturday, 16 July 1054. A synod of 24 July, attended by twelve metropolitans and two archbishops, answered with an anathema against the legates and the Roman church [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul IV”]. Plaianu admits that the legates “exceeded their attributions”. The neutral reference account agrees on the main points. It records the closure of the Latin churches in 1053 as “the first action that led to a formal schism”, says the legation was also seeking imperial help against the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and states that the validity of the legates’ act “is doubtful because Pope Leo had died” [Wikipedia: East–West Schism]. The anathemas were lifted in 1965 by Paul VI and Athenagoras I, which the article calls “merely a gesture of goodwill” [Wikipedia: East–West Schism]. Kerrigan’s popular account says the differences ranged “from the distribution of divinity among the ‘Holy Trinity’ and the right of the clergy to marry, to (quite seriously) the pros and cons of leavened” bread, and follows them to the legate’s bull against “Michael Kerullarios” [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131, “The East-West Schism”].

The Orthodox counter-thesis: a schism made in the West

Philarete, Photios and Patric wrote against the 1992 Catholic Catechism, drawing on lectures given in Paris in 1983. They reject the framing of the schism as a quarrel between Greeks and Latins. In their view, the Roman population of the West lost its independence and “a new ecclesial structure, totally foreign to the old one and bearing all the characteristics of feudalism, replaces the Orthodox papacy of Romanity, the papacy of a Leo I, Gregory I, Martin I, Agatho, Hadrian I and John VIII. The incident of 1054 at Constantinople, which gives its name to the ‘schism’ itself, is nothing but the burial authorisation” [Philarete, Photios & Patric, Noul catehism catolic contra credinței Sfinților Părinți, #18909, part 15]. They locate the decisive act in the year 800. Leo III resisted on doctrine but allowed Charlemagne “a decisive victory on the political plane” by crowning him “Emperor of the Romans”, which in effect let him usurp the Constantinopolitan emperor’s legitimate rule over the Romance peoples of the West [#18909, part 10]. They criticise Western historians for psychologising the event, for example Olivier Clément’s portrait of Cerularius as “an abrupt spirit” [#18909, part 7], and for confusing “Byzantines”, “Greeks” and “Easterners” when describing an empire that called itself Roman. On primacy they are explicit: “This primacy was of imperial and ecclesiastical right and not of divine right, and it did not imply universal power over the Church” [#18909].

Guettée, a nineteenth-century French convert to Orthodoxy translated into Romanian, puts the anti-papal argument in ecclesiological terms. He defines the catholic church as the one that “preserves the revealed doctrine in its entirety (per totum cath’olon)”, with Christ as its only head. A note in the Romanian edition sums up his charge: “the papists replaced the Head of the Church, Christ, with the pope and transformed the Roman Catholic Church from the Church of Christ into the church of the pope” [Guettée, Papalitatea eretica, #24205].

From words to permanent conflict: Lyon, Florence, 1204

Babuş argues that the attempts at reunion made the break worse: “The attempts at union that followed (Lyon, Ferrara-Florence) completed the schism, opening a true chasm between the two Churches. From the cessation of official relations and a dispute over words, the schism became a state of permanent confessional conflict.” Meanwhile new differences were added to the old: “the teaching on purgatory, indulgences, the solemn proclamation of primacy” [Babuş, #13066, part 229]. On the eve of the Ottoman conquest, Babuş says, the Byzantines faced a hard choice: accept Latin conditions to save the empire, at the risk of dissolving into a Christianity that had become foreign to them, or keep their spiritual tradition and give up hope of preserving the state [Babuş, #13066, part 291].

Plaianu also sees the crusades as the event that deepened the separation: “instead of contributing to rapprochement between Orient and Occident, they widened the gulf” [Plaianu, #21843, “Capitolul V”]. The collective French volume Cruciadele gives the chronology of the turning point. In 1202 the crusaders contracted with Venice for a fleet in exchange for helping to besiege Zara, and Alexios (IV) Angelos asked for their help to restore his father Isaac II. In April 1204 the crusaders took Constantinople and a Latin empire replaced the Byzantine one [Balard et al., Cruciadele, #17927, chronology]. The neutral reference account says the schism “culminated” in that sack and the imposition of Latin patriarchs [Wikipedia: East–West Schism]. Chapter 60 gives the full account.

Grzymała-Busse describes the political divergence that followed: “After centuries of control by temporal rulers, the Church asserted its autonomy in the 1050s. The eastern and western churches split in 1054, and the history of Byzantium diverged from that of Rome.” The western church then went through centralising reforms under an elected pope [Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations, #62062]. Her argument that this reformed papacy gave European states their institutional models is the subject of Chapter 59.

Key points

• Constantinople was founded as capital on 11 May 330. Canon 3 of Constantinople (381) and canon 28 of Chalcedon (451) raised its see to second place with “honour equal to Old Rome”; Plaianu treats canon 28 as the start of an interminable controversy.
• Plaianu (Greek-Catholic) names caesaropapism, patriarchal ambition and Greek-Latin hostility as the three causes of the schism, and says Constantine “wanted to be head of the Christian Church”. Babuş (Orthodox) describes the same system as an “original and profound solution” with an emperor of divine origin.
• Justinian ended the Acacian schism on papal terms (518), called the bishop of Rome “head of all the Churches” (533) and founded Iustiniana Prima (535), which Plaianu cites as a Latin archbishopric subordinate to Rome.
• Babuş holds that after Photius, political factors decided the break: decline after Basil II (1025), the Seljuk threat and the Normans in Italy.
• Plaianu’s narrative of 1053–1054: Leo of Ohrid and Niketas Stethatos attack the azymes, Saturday fasting, strangled meat and celibacy; the Latin churches are closed; In terra pax hominibus (2 September 1053); the bull of 16 July 1054, laid by legates whose mandate had lapsed. He portrays Cerularius as “insincere and cunning”.
• Philarete, Photios and Patric see 1054 as only the “burial authorisation” of an Orthodox Roman papacy displaced by a feudal Frankish one, and call Rome’s primacy imperial-ecclesiastical, not divine.
• Babuş argues that Lyon and Ferrara-Florence “completed” the schism and that purgatory, indulgences and primacy became new grounds of division; the sack of 1204 made the break visible on the ground.