Relations with the West
The Council of Chalcedon was accepted equally by Old Rome and New Rome. But relations between the western and eastern parts of the Church gradually became more and more strained.
The East, while usually tacitly accepting papal claims from Leo the Great (440-61) onwards, increasingly resented them. The insertion of the Filioque (the Spirit proceeds from the Father the Son) in the Creed of Nicea-Constantinople in the West, though resisted in Rome itself until the early eleventh century, provided potential material for dogmatic conflict. The collapse of the Western Empire under barbarian attack in 476 and the consequent political separation of West and East contributed to the further alienation of the two parts of the Church, which the growing preoccupation of the Empire with the East after Justinian only intensified. Developing in very different political and cultural circumstances, East and West gradually ceased to communicate much with each other. The establishment of the Carolingian Empire with the support of Rome in 800 increased the political rivalry between the two different worlds, which were becoming self-contained and self-sufficient. A major conflict broke out between them in the ninth century, when in the course of the so-called Photian Schism Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote in 867 a letter setting out Eastern objections to the Filioque and pointing to the divisive nature of the papal claims. Later contacts between East and West were the result, from the eleventh century, of the Byzantine Empire’s need for Western help in resisting the Turks, and the Papacy’s need for Eastern help in dealing with the Normans. Negotiations for union, focused on the Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1438-9, continued until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The formal schism of 1054, when the Roman legate Cardinal Humbert excommunicated Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who in turn anathematised Humbert, took place against the background of negotiations for mutual political assistance. The arguments revolved around ritual rather than doctrinal divergences. The schism was neither complete nor final. Complete separation and irreconcilable hostility came about only as a consequence of the Crusades, and the capture and sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. From then on, whatever agreements between East and West were reached by church leaders under the pressure of political necessity were rejected by the instinctive hostility and mistrust of the mass of the Orthodox people towards Rome. Orthodoxy became finally Eastern, and turned its back on the West.
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