The Byzantine Church (4th–15th Centuries)

The history of the Orthodox Church within the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire: the ideal of symphonia between priesthood and empire, the iconoclast crisis and its politics, the Photian councils, the real and gradual chronology of the events of 1054, the catastrophe of 1204, the Hesychast renewal, the failed reunion at Florence, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This file is history; conciliar doctrine belongs to Section 02.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Symphonia: Church and Empire

The defining feature of Byzantine church life was the close partnership of Church and Christian emperor — an ideal the Byzantines called symphonia (“harmony” or “concord”). Its classic statement is the preface to Justinian’s Sixth Novel (535):

“The priesthood and the Empire are the two greatest gifts which God, in His infinite clemency, has bestowed upon mortals; the former has to do with things divine, the latter presides over human affairs and takes care of them. Proceeding from one and the same source, both adorn human life.”
(Justinian, Novel 6, preface; trans. S. P. Scott, The Civil Law, 1932)

The text continues that nothing is of greater concern to emperors than the dignity of the priesthood, “that they may always pray to God for them,” and that if the priesthood is blameless and the empire governs justly, “a happy harmony [symphonia] will result.” Crucially, symphonia is a theory of distinct but cooperating spheres, not of imperial supremacy over the Church. Orthodox writers therefore resist the older Western characterization of Byzantium as “caesaropapist” — a label that overstates imperial control over doctrine, which in the end was settled by councils and by the reception of the faithful, not by imperial fiat. Emperors who tried to impose heresy (the iconoclasts, the unionists of Lyons and Florence) were ultimately defeated by the Church’s resistance (Justinian, Novel 6; cf. G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Iconoclasm and Its Politics

The iconoclast controversy convulsed the empire for over a century in two phases (c. 726–787 and 815–843). It was at once a theological dispute over whether images of Christ and the saints could be venerated, and a political struggle bound up with imperial authority, military crisis, and the relation of Church to state.

The first phase opened under Emperor Leo III (an edict against images is dated to c. 726–730) and intensified under his son Constantine V, who convened the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754). The iconodule (image-venerating) cause was defended above all by monks — among them St. John of Damascus, writing from outside the empire in Umayyad territory, and later St. Theodore the Studite — and by the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787), convened under the Empress Irene, which defined the legitimacy of icon veneration (proskynesis) as distinct from the worship (latreia) due to God alone (cf. ecumenical-councils.md). A second iconoclast phase began in 815 and ended with the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” under the Empress Theodora in 843, commemorated annually on the First Sunday of Great Lent.

Historians have long debated the politics behind the theology: iconoclasm has been read as an attempt to centralize imperial authority against the power of the monasteries and the cult of relics, as a response to military defeats interpreted as divine punishment for “idolatry,” and as influenced by the aniconic example of Islam and Judaism. No single explanation commands consensus, and the older view that iconoclasm was primarily a cover for confiscating monastic wealth is now treated with caution (L. Brubaker and J. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). What is clear is that the controversy demonstrated the limits of symphonia: the Church, led by its monks, finally prevailed against a sustained imperial program.

The Photian Councils (867 and 879–880)

In the ninth century, the conflict between Constantinople and Rome flared in the affair of Patriarch Photios the Great. The quarrel had several roots at once: a disputed succession (Photios had replaced the deposed Patriarch Ignatios, and Rome backed Ignatios); a jurisdictional contest over newly converted Bulgaria, claimed by both sees; and Byzantine objections to Frankish missionaries propagating the Filioque in Bulgaria.

In 867, Photios convened a council in Constantinople that condemned the Filioque, censured Latin liturgical and disciplinary customs, and declared Pope Nicholas I deposed — the first formal Eastern conciliar condemnation of the Filioque addition (Britannica, “Photian Schism”). The political situation then reversed: Photios was himself deposed in a palace coup, and a council of 869–870 (later reckoned by Rome as the “Eighth Ecumenical Council”) condemned him. But Ignatios died, Photios was restored, and a further Council of Constantinople in 879–880, attended by legates of Pope John VIII, annulled the council of 869–870, restored Photios to communion with Rome, and reaffirmed the Creed without the Filioque (Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, ch. 1; OCA, “Saint Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople”).

The Orthodox tradition holds the council of 879–880 in high honor — some Orthodox theologians regard it as having an ecumenical character — precisely because papal legates there subscribed to the unaltered Creed. The episode shows that a serious rupture between the sees could still be healed in the ninth century; the “Photian schism” was, in the end, reconciled.

The Real Chronology of 1054

Popular accounts present 1054 as the moment “the Catholic and Orthodox Churches split.” Modern scholarship rejects this. The events of 1054 were a sharp but limited incident whose church-dividing significance was constructed only in retrospect.

The proximate cause was a dispute partly over the Latin use of unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist and over jurisdiction in southern Italy, set against renewed Western assertions of papal authority. Pope Leo IX dispatched a legation headed by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida to Constantinople. Negotiations with Patriarch Michael Keroularios (Cerularius) collapsed. On 16 July 1054, Humbert and his fellow legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia, directed against Keroularios and his named adherents; the patriarch responded with a synod that anathematized the legates in turn.

What this was not is as important as what it was. As Sir Steven Runciman and later Tia Kolbaba have stressed:

The excommunications were personal and mutual — legates against a patriarch and named persons, a patriarch against those legates — not a declaration that the Eastern and Western Churches as a whole were out of communion.
The legates’ authority was already legally doubtful: Pope Leo IX had died (April 1054) before they acted, arguably voiding their commission.
The events were scarcely noticed by contemporaries; chroniclers largely passed over them, and they did not register as an epochal “schism” at the time. Relations, negotiations, and even hopes of reunion continued for centuries.
The breach affected, at most, Byzantium and Rome; the other Eastern patriarchates were not parties to it.

Runciman concluded that the schism was a gradual estrangement, the history of which “continues” well past 1054; Kolbaba’s study of the Byzantine anti-Latin polemical lists drives “a final nail in the coffin of what is still erroneously referred to as the ‘eastern schism of 1054’,” arguing that the consolidation of Eastern and Western Christian identities as mutually exclusive was a long cultural process, not the product of one day (S. Runciman, The Eastern Schism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955; T. M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). This gradualist account is the prevailing scholarly consensus: no serious historian now treats 1054 as the date the Churches divided. The deeper drift — language, politics, the Carolingians, and the Filioque — is sketched in pre-schism-church.md and treated doctrinally in filioque.md.

1204: The Sack of Constantinople

If any single event made the schism real in the hearts of Eastern Christians, it was the Fourth Crusade. Diverted from the Holy Land, a Latin army stormed and sacked Constantinople in 1204, slaughtering inhabitants, desecrating Hagia Sophia, looting the city’s relics and treasures (many of which adorn Venice to this day), and installing a Latin Empire with a Latin patriarch. The legitimate Byzantine state survived in exile, chiefly at Nicaea, and recovered the city only in 1261 under Michael VIII Palaiologos.

The cultural wound of 1204 was profound and lasting. Where the events of 1054 had passed almost unnoticed, the sack of 1204 — and the imposition of a Latin hierarchy on Orthodox populations — converted theological disagreement into bitter, lived hostility. For the Orthodox Church, whatever the crusade’s strategic context, 1204 was and remains an atrocity committed against the Church herself. Historians widely regard 1204, far more than 1054, as the moment that made the East-West breach effectively unbridgeable in popular consciousness (J. Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004; cf. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3). Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for the sack in 2001 and 2004, and Patriarch Bartholomew received the apology — a measure of how deep the memory remains.

The Hesychast Era

The fourteenth century saw the empire shrinking and impoverished, yet it was a period of extraordinary spiritual and theological vitality centered on Hesychasm — the tradition of inner stillness (hesychia) and the Jesus Prayer cultivated on Mount Athos. When the practice of the hesychast monks was attacked by the Calabrian philosopher Barlaam, it found its defender in St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359), who articulated the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the uncreated energies of God, through which the saints truly partake of God and behold the uncreated Light. Palamas’s theology was vindicated at a series of councils in Constantinople (1341, 1347, 1351) and became normative for Orthodoxy (cf. Section 07: The Jesus Prayer; J. Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964). The doctrinal substance belongs to Orthodox theology proper; what matters here historically is that the dying empire produced one of Orthodoxy’s greatest theological flowerings.

Florence and the Failure of Union

As the Ottoman noose tightened around Constantinople, the desperate emperors sought military aid from the West, and the price the papacy named was church union on Roman terms. After the abortive Union of Lyons (1274), a far more serious attempt was made at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1439), where the Byzantine emperor, the patriarch, and a large delegation negotiated for months. The resulting decree Laetentur Caeli (1439) proclaimed union, conceding the Filioque, Roman primacy, purgatory, and the use of azymes.

The union collapsed at home. The Byzantine populace and most of the clergy rejected it as a betrayal; the one delegate who refused to sign, St. Mark of Ephesus (Eugenikos), became the hero of Orthodox resistance and is venerated as a pillar of Orthodoxy (cf. J. Gill, The Council of Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). The promised Western aid never materialized in sufficient force. The bitter slogan attributed to the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras — “better the Sultan’s turban than the Latin mitre” — captures, whether or not he said it exactly so, the depth of anti-unionist feeling in the city’s final years (the saying is reported by post-Conquest sources and is best treated as emblematic rather than verbatim).

1453: The Fall of Constantinople

On 29 May 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks, the forces of Sultan Mehmed II breached the walls of Constantinople. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died in the fighting. Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque, and the thousand-year Christian empire of New Rome came to an end.

The Fall was experienced across the Orthodox world as a cataclysm of cosmic proportions — the loss of the “God-guarded City” and of the empire that had embodied the symphonia of Church and state. Yet the Church itself did not perish. Within a year the Sultan installed a new patriarch, Gennadios II Scholarios, as head of the surviving Christian community, inaugurating a new and very different chapter: the Great Church under Islamic rule, treated in ottoman-period.md.

References

Brubaker, Leslie, and John Haldon. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Dagron, Gilbert. Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.
Justinian. Novel 6 (535). In The Civil Law, trans. Samuel P. Scott. Cincinnati: Central Trust, 1932.
Kolbaba, Tia M. The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994.
Phillips, Jonathan. The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Runciman, Steven. The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches during the XIth and XIIth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.