The Great Schism

The Great Schism : The Break of East and West

The Great Schism of the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church is usually described as the period that the One Christian Church at that time severed their relations with each other . The Greeks in the east and the Latin-speaking peoples in the West of the then Roman Empire , after years of wrangling in the contexts of social , political and cultural differences , finally separated themselves from each other in the year 1054 , after a long and tumultuous period . We strive to know

if the Schism was arrived at in a short period of time , or was the separation of the two churches built up for a period before the actual separation took place . We also should ask what made them separate , the factors that decided the fate of these two religious bodies to separate In understanding and why the communion of Christendom was broken , we must start with this fact of increasing estrangement

Definition

The Great Schism , in the history of the Christian Church , is the term used to refer to both the break between the Eastern and Western churches , traditionally dated between 1054 , and the period (1378-1417 in the Western church when two (then three ) popes claimed simultaneously claimed to be Pope , beginning after the death of Pope GregoryX , who had finally moved the papacy from Avignon back to Rome

History of the Schism

But the schism , as historians now generally agree , cannot be traced to a single date that can be recognized as the actual start . It was something that came about gradually , as the result of a long and complicated process , starting well before the eleventh century until some time after . As early as the fourth century , there were cultural political factors and linguistic differences between the Christians of Eastern and Western Europe which eventually led to the eventual separation in the Church , yet its fundamental cause was not secular but theological in the last resort it was over matters of doctrine that East and West quarreled-two in particular , the Papal Claims and the Filioque (The Filioque , Credo in Spiritum Sanctum qui ex patre filioque procedit , the term used in the Nicene Creed to indicate that the Holy Spirit , in the Holy Trinity , stems from the Father AND the Son , which runs counter to the belief of the Orthodox Church that the Holy Spirit is from the Father alone . Basically , it refers to the procession of the Holy Spirit . It was assailed vehemently by Photius , the patriarch of Constantinople in 867 and 879

Linguistic and other factors

The Eastern Christians spoke Greek , shared a common language and cultural background , where the Western Christians spoke Latin . The Eastern Church 's hierarchy was ruled by a group of bishops that ruled collegially the body of the Church in that part of the Empire . Each ruled a jurisdictional area or patriarchate , located in Antioch Alexandria , Jerusalem and Byzantium , which all spoke the Greek language .From the fourth century onwards the...