ULC Seminary: Master of Christian History Paper
Lesson 20
- What was the nature of and what things contributed to a renewal in the Western church in the period immediately prior to the Great Schism of 1054?
Answer:
Western Christianity was under the influence of the Holy Roman Empire in the latter half of the time period between A.D. 800 and 1054, while Eastern Christianity at that time was more acknowledging of its differences with Western Christianity, and it ended with a great schism wherein the Western and Eastern churches went off on their separate ways. However, a lot of factors which was not always spiritual but instead many times a renewal of power that assisted in the Western church's fights with the state as signified by the Holy Roman Empire contributed to a renewal in the Western church in the period immediately prior to the Great Schism of 1054. Such factors include:
· Pro-Papal Documents:
False decretals were used to bolster papal power within the church. The "Donation of Constantine" was the basis for papal land possession, and the biggest land grant that this document was used to justify was the Donation of Pepin the Short in A.D. 756. Pope Nicholas I in A.D. 865 was the first pontiff to use a collection of decrees from various Roman pontiffs. This collection was the False Decretals or Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. This included the Donation of Constantine along with real and fake decrees of Roman pontiffs dating from the era of Clement of Rome and some canons of the great church councils. This collection was appropriated to Isidore of Seville (c. A.D. 560-636) who was head of the Spanish church in the early 7th century A.D. These documents were important to the Roman pontiff's supremacy claims.
These false decretals were used to bolster papal power within the church. The Roman pontiff was superior over all ecclesiastical leaders of the church. Any bishop had the right to appeal directly to the Roman pontiff over the head of his archbishop. The church was also free of all secular control. Many popes made use of this collection of documents to maintain their superior power.
· Scandinavia Becomes Christian:
The conversion of the Scandinavians made The Roman pontiff became more powerful. Scandinavian, a native of Amiens, France, Anskar (A.D. 801-865) is mostly responsible for The Roman pontiff's becoming more powerful. When the Jute (Danish) king Harald Klak asked for a missionary in A.D. 826, Anskar went. Anskar devoted his life to missions in northern Europe.
· Doctrine of the Mass:
The row over how Christ was present in Holy Communion plagued the Western church in the early 9th century A.D. If it was believed that Holy Communion was a sacrifice anew by the priest, that would enhance papal power because the Roman pontiff was at the head of the hierarchy of clergymen who were the only ones who had the power to perform this miracle of the Mass. Around A.D. 831 Paschasius Radbertus (c. A.D. 785-860), abbot of the Corbie monastery near Amiens, started teaching that by a divine miracle the substance of the bread and wine were actually transformed into the body and blood of Christ. This view was delineated in a book issued in A.D. 831 called Of the Body and Blood of the Lord. This view strengthened the priest and the Roman pontiff though the Roman Catholic Church did not officially accept transubstantiation until 1215, and it was not fully defined until the Council of Trent in 1545.
Reforming the Monastery:
Monastic reforms done by the Cluniac monasteries in the 10th and 11th centuries really helped the power of the Roman pontiff. By the 10th century the monasteries had become wealthy and corrupt. Service had been replaced with individual salvation joined with an easy life in a wealthy monastery. The reforms coming from Cluny were the first of several reforms of Roman Catholic monasticism.
Original monasticism called for each monastery to have its own abbot and was independent of the other monasteries of the same order. The Cluny abbot appointed priors of new monasteries founded by him or others and made them subject to him. This new way of doing things fostered a new order centered on one head, the Cluny abbot who was in harmony with the Roman pontiff. By the 12th century over 1100 monasteries were under the leadership of the Cluny abbot.
The Cluniac leaders called for clerical reform. They condemned simony [buying/selling church offices for money] and nepotism [showing favoritism to relatives in appointments to office]. They also advocated celibacy for the clergy. Clergymen were neither to marry nor keep concubines so that they could keep their entire attention toward church affairs. They also insisted that the church be free of all secular control by kings, emperors, or dukes. Self-denial was also reemphasized.
The Cluniac reforms went further. Good monastic schools were created, and they helped make Latin the common language of the Middle Ages. They may have been ultimately responsible for the Crusades. Cluniac monasteries on the frontiers became headquarters for missions. The order came to a legal end in 1790.
Able Leaders:
Many of the Roman pontiffs between A.D. 800 and 1054 were corrupt or incompetent. Yet there were several able leaders who consolidated papal power. Pope Nicholas I (reigned from A.D. 858-867) was the most able of these men. He stressed papal supremacy within the church as one who was responsible for the spiritual welfare of the faithful and is supreme over earthly rulers when dealing with morality and religion.
Pope Nicholas I exerted his power over bishops and earthly rulers like in the situation with Lothair II of Lorraine. Lothair II had married Teutberga for political reasons. He later fell in love with Waldrada and put aside his legal wife. He got a divorce from Teutberga by calling a synod at Aachen in which the bishops granted him a divorce. Pope Nicholas received appeals from both parties, but during that Lothair II married Waldrada. The pope was determined to bring the bishops who had acted so hastily to heel, and he wanted to punish Lothair II for his immorality. The pope forced Lothair II to set aside Waldrada and restore Teutberga to her place as his rightful wife.
Pope Nicholas I was also successful in upholding direct papal appeals. When Hicmar, archbishop of Rheims, removed Rothad, bishop of Soissons, from his position, the pope reversed Hicmar's action and forced him to restore Rothad to his bishopric.
Pope Nicholas I also tried to assert his authority and power over the patriarch and Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Emperor Michael III "the Drunkard", corrupted by his uncle Bardas, got rid of the patriarch Ignatios when he refused to administer the sacrament to Bardas. The emperor in A.D. 858 appointed Photius in his place as patriarch. Ignatios asked Pope Nicholas I for help. The pope declared Photius deposed, but an Eastern synod led by Photius accused the Western church of heresy for adding the filioque clause to the Western version of the Nicene Creed saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Animosity between the Eastern and Western churches increased. Pope Nicholas I, though successful over earthly and ecclesiastical rulers in the West, failed to be successful in like manner in the East.
From Pope Nicholas I to Pope Leo IX there were not many acceptable leaders on the Roman cathedra. A terrible scandal occurred in the mid-11th century. Pope Benedict IX was driven from Rome. Pope Sylvester III assumed the Roman cathedra. Benedict IX returned to Rome and sold the papacy for a lot of money in 1045 to a man who became Pope Gregory VI. Yet Benedict IX refused to give up the papacy. This resulted in three popes claiming the Roman cathedra. Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (c. 1017-1056) called a synod at Sutri in 1046. Benedict IX and Sylvester III were kicked out, and Gregory VI was forced to resign in favor of Pope Clement II. Pope Clement II soon died. His successor, another Henry III appointee, did not live long. Henry III later appointed his cousin Bruno as Pope Leo IX.
With Pope Leo IX this time of corrupt popes ended because he and his successors were strong men who wanted reform in the style of the Cluny monastery. The Synod of Sutri was the lowest for papal power in the Middle Ages. Under Pope Nicholas II, helped by Humbert and Hildebrand who later became Pope Gregory VII, papal election was taken out of the control of the Roman population and put in the control of the church leaders in the College of Cardinals in 1059. From then until the zenith of papal power under Pope Innocent III, the constant advance of papal influence continued in European affairs.
- What things made the Great Schism of 1054 almost inevitable? What event became the "straw that broke the camel's back"?
Answer:
The Great Schism of 1054 became almost inevitable because the Eastern Church was bogged down with keeping the Muslim hordes from overrunning the Byzantine Empire. It was weakened by the control of its affairs by the Byzantine emperors. It was plagued with theological decline after the work of John of Damascus. (The Eastern Church was not able to put up much opposition to the increasing earthly and spiritual power of the bishop of Rome. The growing animosity between Western and Eastern Christianity, coming from historic origins, led to schism in 1054) Due to this Western and Eastern churches rowed over theology. In A.D. 867 Patriarch Photius accused Pope Nicholas I and the Western church of heresy because of the West's addition of the filioque clause to its version of the Nicene Creed. The West accepted the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. The East did not.
Another series of rows worsened the relationship between the Western and Eastern churches. From the mid-2nd century A.D. the problem of when to observe Easter caused big headaches. Iconoclasm in the Eastern Church in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. increased the animosity. In A.D. 726 Byzantine Emperor Leo III outlawed any kneeling before pictures or images. In A.D. 730 he ordered all images except the cross to be stripped from churches and destroyed to limit the power of the monks and to answer Muslim accusations of idolatry. This lay revival in the Eastern Church went against the parish and monastic clergy. In the West the Roman pontiff and Emperor Charlemagne were in favor of using visible symbols of the divine. The Eastern Church did not like this interference by the West in its internal affairs. The West continued to use pictures and statues in worship. The East got rid of statues but kept icons usually those of Christ which received reverence but not worship.
The Eastern Church was deeply resentful of Pope Nicholas I's attempt to meddle in the selection of the patriarch though it may have been justified for moral and ecclesiastical law reasons, reasons the Eastern Church did not accept. Pope Nicholas failed, but his meddling in a perceived Eastern matter only further increased the animosity between the Eastern and Western churches.
The "straw that broke the camel's back" was a minor issue. In 1054 Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople from 1043 to 1059, condemned the Western church for using unleavened bread in the Eucharist. The Western church had been doing it increasingly since the 9th century A.D. Pope Leo IX sent Cardinal Humbert and two other legates to the East to settle the row. The differences widened as discussions continued increasingly entering into more and more issues. On 16 July 1054 the Roman legates placed a writ excommunicating the patriarch on the high altar of the Hagia Sophia church. The patriarch was furious. The patriarch in turn proclaimed the Roman pontiff and his legates to be anathema. This event is intriguing because the writ of excommunication might not have been valid because Pope Leo IX had never seen it or signed it, and the pope had already died three months previously thus causing the papal legates' authority to cease. Also the patriarch's consequential anathema was originally restricted to the pope and the papal legates personally. Regardless this ruined the unity of the church. From now on the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church went their own ways. The excommunication of each other would not be lifted until 7 December 1965 by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in the Catholic-Orthodox Joint Declaration of 1965 during Vatican Council II though this action did not officially end the schism but did bring the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches much closer to reconciliation.
- What were the consequences of the Great Schism of 1054, especially as it related to Eastern Christianity?
Answer:
Schism kept the Eastern Church from the vitalizing influences that benefited the Western church. The beginning of towns, nations, and the middle class; the culture of the Renaissance; and ultimately the Reformation missed the Eastern Church. The Roman Catholic Church came under these things and made stronger either by accepting the helpful things or reacting against perceived detriments.
The Eastern Church did have missions at this time. Boris the Bulgarian ruler accepted the faith of Constantinople in A.D. 864. Cyril and Methodius brought Christianity to Moravia, but Moravia later fell under Roman jurisdiction instead of Constantinople. Russia was a better success story. A princess named Olga became a Christian in A.D. 955 and was able to get her grandson Vladimir (A.D. 956-1015) to become a Christian in A.D. 988. This was the beginning of Christianity in Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia and most of eastern and southern Europe went under the patriarch of Constantinople as well as the Magyars.
The surprise of the spread of Islam in the 7th century A.D. and the loss of people and real estate to the Muslims along with two centuries of chaos caused by iconoclasm left Eastern Christianity in a state of shrinkage. There was little change in liturgy, polity, or theology until modern times. It did not have the influence on the world as the Western church has had. Yet in the ancient period of Christian history the Eastern Church had been on the forefront in forming Christian theology.
Thanks,
Yours in Him,
Ikpenwa, Chizoba Gabriel
