The Great Schism
East and West formally divide
On July 16, 1054 AD, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida walks into the Hagia Sophia during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, approaches the altar, and places a bull of excommunication on it.
The bull excommunicates Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and his supporters.
Cerularius responds by convening a synod that excommunicates Humbert and the papal legates.
The Great Schism has begun.
Or rather: it has become official. The actual division is centuries in the making — different liturgical practices, different theological emphases, different understandings of papal authority, the filioque controversy about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone. All of it accumulated over centuries into a mutual incomprehension so deep that the insult of the moment — Humbert placing a document on the altar during the liturgy, Cerularius's contemptuous response — is enough to snap the fraying thread.
The Eastern church and the Western church have been drifting apart since the fifth century. In 1054 they formally acknowledge what has been true for a long time.
Both sides will spend the next nine and a half centuries insisting the other side caused it.
Both sides will spend the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in careful ecumenical dialogue, discovering that the anathemas of 1054 were mutually lifted in 1964 — by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, in Jerusalem, at the same church where the separation of East and West began to form.
“Let there be no more walls between us.”
— Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, joint declaration lifting the mutual excommunications, Jerusalem, 1964
“For he is our peace, who made both one, and broke down the middle wall of partition,”
The Great Schism of 1054 took nine centuries to partially heal. The healing began in Jerusalem in 1964, in the same city where the separation began to form.
Nine centuries. Two patriarchs meeting in Jerusalem to undo what two patriarchs' stubbornness began.
The lesson is not that reconciliation is easy. It is that reconciliation is possible — that the walls that seem permanent are not. That two men can meet in a city and lift a nine-century burden if they choose to.
What wall in your life or your community has seemed permanent for so long that you have stopped believing it can come down? And what would it take for two people to meet and begin the lifting?