Language, Rite, and Law: The Cultural Roots of the Estrangement

Before any anathema was pronounced, Greek East and Latin West had ceased to understand each other — literally. This file traces the linguistic drift that left the two halves of Christendom unable to read each other’s theology, the divergence of liturgical rite and discipline (fasting, clerical marriage, and above all the azymes), and the growth of two separate canonical traditions — the soil in which the doctrinal quarrels of Sections 03–06 took root.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Loss of a Common Tongue

The early Church was functionally bilingual at its Roman center — the Roman liturgy itself was Greek into the third century — but from the fourth century the two linguistic worlds pulled apart. Augustine, the greatest Latin theologian, confessed his weak Greek (Augustine, Confessions 1.13–14; trans. Chadwick, Oxford World’s Classics, 1991); by the sixth and seventh centuries a Latin able to read the Cappadocians in the original, or a Greek able to read Augustine at all, was a rarity. Gregory the Great served as papal apocrisiarius in Constantinople for some six years without, on his own testimony, learning Greek (Gregory the Great, Registrum 7.29 and 11.55 on his ignorance of Greek; discussed in Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Henry Chadwick’s survey makes the philological estrangement a structural cause of the schism: key terms did not map — ousia/substantia, hypostasis/persona, and fatefully ekporeusis (the Spirit’s hypostatic procession from the Father alone) against the broader Latin processio — so that East and West could recite formulae at each other and each hear heresy in the other’s orthodoxy (Chadwick, East and West, 2003; Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, on ekporeusis/processio; see Filioque and Papal Primacy).

Philip Sherrard pushed the analysis beneath vocabulary to theological method, arguing that the Latin West, especially after the scholastic turn, came to do theology in a rationalizing register foreign to the Greek patristic mind, so that the named disputes (Filioque, primacy, grace) express a deeper divergence of vision (Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition, London: Oxford University Press, 1959). Sherrard’s full thesis is a strong claim not shared by all scholars — Chadwick and Kolbaba explain the estrangement in more contingent terms — but the documented fact beneath it stands: by the eleventh century, almost no one on either side could check the other’s citations (Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, on Byzantine ignorance of Latin usage; Runciman, The Eastern Schism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, ch. 1).

Two Rites, Two Disciplines

Difference of rite is not division of faith — the Church had always held liturgical diversity within one communion, and the East said so explicitly when it mattered (see Peter III of Antioch’s moderation in The Scope of the Anathemas). But accumulated difference, in an age of mutual ignorance, became mutual scandal. Tia Kolbaba’s study of the Byzantine “lists of Latin errors” shows what actually exercised Greek churchmen: overwhelmingly matters of rite and discipline — Saturday fasting, eating of strangled things and (allegedly) unclean animals, clerical shaving, kneeling practices, single immersion in baptism, clerical celibacy — with the azymes (the Latin use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist) at the head of the list, and the Filioque, though present, by no means dominant in bulk (Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists, 2000, esp. the catalogue of accusations and her analysis of their weighting).

The azymes deserve their own word, because in 1054 they, and not the Filioque, were the presenting complaint. The Greek argument, given classic form by Leo of Ohrid’s letter of 1053 to John of Trani and by Niketas Stethatos, held that unleavened bread was Judaizing — the bread of Moses, not the living bread of the risen Christ — and that leaven signifies the animating soul, so that azyme bread is “lifeless” (Leo of Ohrid, Letter to John of Trani [1053], in Will, ed., Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant, Leipzig/Marburg, 1861; Niketas Stethatos’ anti-azyme treatise, in Will, Acta et scripta; the fullest modern study is Smith, And Taking Bread… Cerularius and the Azyme Controversy of 1054, Théologie historique 47, Paris: Beauchesne, 1978). Mahlon Smith’s monograph shows how the azyme question, seemingly a rubrical trifle, functioned as a genuine symbolic clash — two sacramental instincts, each side convinced the other had corrupted the Eucharist itself (Smith, And Taking Bread, 1978). Humbert answered the Greek polemic in kind and worse; the exchange is narrated in Humbert and Cerularius, and the doctrinal weighing of the azymes question in Azymes, Purgatory, and Created Grace.

Discipline diverged in parallel. The Quinisext Council (692), which the East receives as ecumenical in its canons and Rome never accepted in full, explicitly corrected Roman practices: its Canon 55 forbade the Roman Saturday fast, Canon 13 defended married priests against the Roman demand of continence, and Canon 82 ordered Christ depicted in human form rather than as a lamb (Quinisext Council, 692, Canons 13, 55, 82; trans. NPNF II/14). Here already, four centuries before Humbert, is the shape of the later quarrel: two disciplines, each claiming apostolic warrant, and a Roman refusal to receive an Eastern council’s correction (Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., Penguin, 1993, ch. 3; Chadwick, East and West, 2003, on Quinisext).

Two Canonical Traditions

Beneath rite lay law. The East built its canon law on the councils — the “canon of the canons” being the corpus received at Quinisext Canon 2 and interpreted by the great twelfth-century commentators (Zonaras, Balsamon) — with the Church’s order understood as a communion of patriarchates governed synodally, the emperor as guarantor, and Rome as first see in honor within, not over, the taxis (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, on the pentarchy; L’Huillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, on the conciliar canons). Its charter texts are Apostolic Canon 34 (“the bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them… but neither let him do anything without the advice of all”), Nicaea I Canon 6 (the ancient customs of the great sees), and Chalcedon Canon 28, which grounds Constantinople’s privileges — and by parallel Rome’s — in the cities’ imperial rank (Apostolic Canon 34; Nicaea I, 325, Canon 6; Chalcedon, 451, Canon 28; trans. NPNF II/14).

The West’s canonical development ran otherwise. From the fifth century the popes issued decretals with legislative force; the collections that carried Western law (Dionysius Exiguus, then the pseudo-Isidorian corpus of the ninth century) increasingly organized the Church juridically around the Roman see; and Chalcedon Canon 28 was rejected by Leo the Great precisely because it derived precedence from imperial rank rather than Petrine foundation (Leo the Great, Letters 104–106, to Marcian, Pulcheria, and Anatolius, on Canon 28 [trans. NPNF II/12]; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, introduction; on the forgeries and the Gregorian reform see Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor). Two legal grammars were forming: communion expressed in synod, and communion expressed in subordination to Peter’s successor. When the eleventh century forced the question, each side found the other’s grammar not merely different but unintelligible — Humbert could read Constantinople’s autonomy only as rebellion, and Constantinople could read Humbert’s claims only as arrogance (Runciman, The Eastern Schism, 1955, chs. 1–2; Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

An Orthodox Assessment

Assessed from within the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1), this deep-roots layer yields two sober conclusions. First, much that Byzantine polemic attacked in the Latins — fasting customs, beards, azymes as such — belonged to legitimate local diversity, and the greatest Eastern voices said so at the time: Peter III of Antioch reproved Cerularius’ maximalism and would have tolerated nearly all Latin usages if the Filioque were corrected (Peter III of Antioch, Letter to Michael Cerularius [1054], in Will, Acta et scripta, 1861; Runciman, The Eastern Schism, 1955, ch. 2). The Church’s quarrel with Rome is not, at bottom, about unleavened bread. Second, the two developments that were not legitimate diversity — the interpolation of the Creed and the transformation of Roman primacy into a doctrine of universal jurisdiction — both matured in the West during precisely the centuries of mutual incomprehension, unchecked by the correction that a functioning common conciliar life would have supplied. The estrangement of language and law did not itself divide the Church; it disabled the immune system by which the one Church had always corrected local error, and so let the real diseases grow (cf. Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. 3; Siecienski, The Filioque, 2010, on the Carolingian development proceeding without Greek interlocutors).

See Also

References

  • Augustine. Confessions 1.13–14. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991. (His weak Greek.)
  • Gregory the Great. Registrum epistularum 7.29; 11.55. (His statements of ignorance of Greek; discussed in Chadwick 2003.)
  • Chadwick, Henry. East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. (The linguistic estrangement; Quinisext; terminological mismatch.)
  • Sherrard, Philip. The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. (The divergence of theological vision.)
  • Kolbaba, Tia M. The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. (The catalogue and weighting of Byzantine complaints.)
  • Runciman, Steven. The Eastern Schism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Chs. 1–2. (Mutual incomprehension; Peter III’s moderation.)
  • Smith, Mahlon H., III. And Taking Bread… Cerularius and the Azyme Controversy of 1054. Théologie historique 47. Paris: Beauchesne, 1978. (The azyme controversy in full.)
  • Will, Cornelius, ed. Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant. Leipzig/Marburg: Elwert, 1861. (Leo of Ohrid’s letter; Niketas Stethatos; Peter III’s correspondence.)
  • Quinisext Council (692), Canons 2, 13, 55, 82. Trans. NPNF II/14. (Eastern canonical corrections of Roman practice.)
  • Apostolic Canon 34; Nicaea I (325), Canon 6; Chalcedon (451), Canon 28. Trans. NPNF II/14. (The Eastern canonical grammar of primacy.)
  • Leo the Great. Letters 104–106 (on Chalcedon Canon 28). Trans. NPNF II/12. (The Roman refusal of the imperial-rank principle.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989. (The pentarchy and synodal order.)
  • L’Huillier, Peter. The Church of the Ancient Councils. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (The conciliar canons.)
  • Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. (The two canonical grammars.)
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; and The Papacy and the Orthodox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. (Terminology; the primacy debate.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. Ch. 3. (The standard synthesis.)