Geo-political realities complicated things. Cultural contacts between the eastern and western Mediterranean became far more difficult. With the rise of Islam in the 600s, the Mediterranean now passed largely into Arab control. Illyricum, which used to serve as a bridge between Byzantium and the West, instead became a barrier. Then the Avars and Slavs occupied the Balkan peninsula. The Byzantines in the East still regarded the Roman Empire as universal, but, in fact, the political division of the Greek East and the Latin West was now permanent. Constantine even founded a second imperial capital, in the East Constantinople, the 'New Rome.' Then came the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, and the West was carved up among the Goths, Lombards, Franks, Vandals, and other Germanic tribes. Either Greek or Latin was understood almost everywhere, and Latin was commonly used as the political language of the empire.īeginning in the late 200s, the empire was still theoretically one but was usually divided into two parts, an eastern and a western, each under its own emperor. Yet all were governed by the same emperor all shared in a broad Greco-Roman civilization. The empire embraced a variety of ethnic groups who spoke a variety of languages and dialects. Geo-political realitiesĭuring the time of the apostles, the Roman Empire was a close-knit political and cultural unity. The schism's causes are manifold and complex, and they reveal much of the uniqueness of what we now call the Eastern Orthodox Church and how the Orthodox understand this chapter of Christian History. But this incident is but one of many on the path to permanent schism though surely the bloody events of 1204 put a seal on a break that lasts to this day. This incident is usually portrayed as the key moment in the Great Schism between the Orthodox East and the Latin West. Humbert refused, and the deacon dropped the document in the street. When the cardinal passed through the western door, he shook the dust from his feet and said, 'Let God look and judge.' A deacon, guessing the contents of the bull, ran after Humbert in great distress and begged him to take it back. The bull proclaimed the patriarch of Constantinople and his associates excommunicated, no longer in communion with the church, no longer allowed to receive the grace of God through the sacraments. They placed a sealed papal document called a 'bull' on the altar and marched out.

One summer afternoon in the year 1054, as a service was about to begin in the great Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert and two other legates of the Roman pope entered.

The great divorce