Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Swimming the Bosporus 7: Of Popes and Patriarchs
Six posts in and there’s a question I keep getting: “We get why you left evangelical protestantism for Orthodoxy. But why didn’t you just choose the Catholic Church?” For a Westerner, swimming the Tiber is simpler than swimming the Bosporus based on cultural affinities alone. And, according to Google Maps, the drive from Wittenburg to Rome is 400 miles shorter than Wittenburg to Constantinople. So what gives?
To answer, I first need to give some historical context.
You can find all the Swimming the Bosporus posts here.
The Church was established on the Day of Pentecost, 33 AD, and quickly spread around the Mediterranean. Every church was in agreement with each other as one big, happy family. Well, churlish at times, but what’cha gonna do? False teachers popped up here and there promoting doctrines contrary to Christianity. Councils were convened to discuss foundational beliefs and to condemn heresies.
The first ecumenical council was in Nicaea (325 AD), agreeing upon the first part of the Nicene Creed. The second council (381) agreed upon the second part of the Nicene Creed, which remains accepted by the Orthodox, Catholics, and most Protestants today (with one exception mentioned below).
Ecumenical councils drew leaders from all over Christendom to discuss these matters, sometimes from as far away as England and Persia. Bishops and delegates from Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Rome, etc., discussed and prayed about the issues. Once they reached a consensus, an agreement was released. The Bishop of Rome was considered “first among equals” but, according to the churches of the East, that was a place of honor rather than authority. Rome ultimately considered it to be a place of honor and authority.
In 476, the Western Roman Empire collapsed while the Eastern Roman Empire kept going for another millennium. This cut off Rome from Constantinople administratively; they were already cut-off culturally since one spoke Latin and the other Greek. As western Europe descended into chaos, the Pope was one of the only regionally recognized leaders who could keep things afloat.
After a few centuries of this separation, Rome tweaked the Nicene Creed. The original stated:
[I believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.
The Pope’s new version was:
[I believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.
The added clause “and the Son” (“Filioque” in Latin) was not well received among the churches in the East. They disagreed with the doctrine, insisted the council-approved creed could not be changed, and said the Bishop of Rome couldn’t unilaterally redefine the faith on the fly.
Add that to the separate languages, estranged cultures, and wildly different political realities — the East and West were growing apart. In 1054, matters came to a head.
Just before a liturgy at Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, a papal delegation strode to the altar and excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Patriarch then excommunicated the delegates. There wasn’t even a sitting Pope at the time since one had died and the next hadn’t taken office.
At the time, officials on both sides thought it would blow over, but it never did. The Great Schism stuck.
About 500 years later, a German monk named Martin Luther caused a bit of a stir. Intending to reform the Catholic church, he inadvertently created Protestantism. John Calvin had a different idea and started another church. Then more followed. Now we have approximately 90 bazillion Protestant denominations with new ones forming every other Sunday.
I spent many years in wonderful Baptist churches so I’ll use them as an example. In the US alone, there are 60 different Baptist denominations. If you don’t like the Southern Baptists, you can go with American Baptists, Conservative Baptists, or Free Will Baptists. Too modern? How about the Old Regular Baptists, Old Time Missionary Baptists, or the Original Free Will Baptists. Still too modern? Check out the Primitive Baptists — but don’t get them confused with the Primitive Baptist Universalists or the National Primitive Baptist Convention of the USA.
We’ve fallen far from “One Lord, one faith, one baptism,” so it’s no surprise evangelicals increasingly attend non-denominational megachurches. Who can keep up with this?
Back to Catholicism and Orthodoxy, all their differences stem from the question of papal authority. Rome thinks the Pope is the chief human authority for the universal church; Orthodoxy thinks the patriarchs around the world are, each for their group. After Rome left, the Orthodox named the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople the new “first among equals” as a place of honor, not authority. This continues today.
Since the Great Schism, the Vatican has altered all sorts of doctrines under the Pope’s authority. As a result, there are many differences between the two churches. Here’s a helpful explanation of a few:
After reading up on these issues, I personally thought the Orthodox had the better part of the argument. This obviously doesn’t mean I think Catholics or Protestants are totally on the wrong track. But, to me, Orthodoxy seemed like the best representation of the Church that Christ left to His Apostles.
Outside of these sticking points, what really struck me in reading the Church Fathers was the emphasis on experiencing God rather than just reasoning about Him. My default state is to be hyper-logical and I’ve spent most my life thinking about God instead of spending time with Him. Or, you know, actually doing what He says.
Scholasticism began to dominate the Catholic Church just after the Great Schism, putting reason in the driver’s seat. The West tried to logically understand God and treat theology similar to philosophical inquiry.
The East instead pursued hesychasm, a mystical tradition of contemplation and prayer. They love reading about God, but the goal is to obey and experience Him. Since my entire life has focused on my head instead of my heart, I thought this approach would supply more of the things I lack.
As a final note, Catholic and Orthodox Christians have diligently worked toward a rapprochement, an effort that has increased in recent years. We can all pray that one day the 1,000-year-old schism is finally healed.
Chapter 8 here.
This is seventh in the series “Swimming the Bosporus,” on my journey from the megachurch to the Orthodox Church. Installments every Sunday morning. Click here to see all the posts.
Published in General
It’s amazing to me how diverse the lifestyles of Christians can be. There are some Christians who refuse to listen to any modern-popular music. They refuse to listen to Christian rock music in addition to excluding mainstream rock music.
But then you have Christian theologians who enjoy heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Slayer, AC/DC and all the rest.
Some abstain from alcohol. Others drink hard liquor quite frequently.
Even as an agnostic/atheist I can observe that there is probably a church out there for everyone.
In Roman Catholicism, priests and deacons who discover their circumstances/personalities are incompatible with their vow of celibacy can be laicized, and released from their vow. Preferably before scandal ensues. I’m personally acquainted with two such cases, one a deacon, and one a priest. Their authority to publicly perform any sacraments is withdrawn. Ordination itself cannot be reversed.
The Eastern Empire carried on the Roman skills in engineering for a very long time (Hagia Sophia being a prime example), but you have to remember that perhaps as much as a quarter of its population was wiped out in a plague not long after that cathedral, and before it sufficiently recovered found itself first in a 30 year existential war with Persia, one that raged from Egypt all the way into modern Iran and the Caucuses, and when that was over was immediately invaded by the Islamic armies. We are looking at a series of existential crises from the late 500s through the early 900s, when the Empire finally began to gain some breathing room, which had to be consolidated over the next century, and was then lost again.
So the notion that it was somehow more stable has to be set back into late antiquity. From the late 500s through the most of its existence, with a few respites, the Empire was in a near constant state of defensive war.
So are faith and reason not complimentary, or meant to be in our understanding of God and His Word? On another note, it seems that some of the Orthodox leadership are at odds with each other. I think of the Russian Church, who has corruption within it, and is odds with the Ukrainian Church, etc. It seems they are not using the reason part, and it could be useful. (I’m not being flippant, just a pinch of humor)…
You might enjoy receiving Inside The Vatican and the Moynihan Letters. He reports on Orthodox and they have traveled to these holy sites as part of the Travel Pilgrimages, which in light of the virus, has gone virtual, which I am enjoying. There is a live discussion each week and people from all over the world join in. You can request programs to specific areas, so an Orthodox one would be interesting.
Yeah, I probably should have clarified that they could not remarry and remain a priest or deacon.
The universities were not “invented” due to a “commitment to faith and reason” – that is backwards reasoning. They were places to gather together the learned and so replicate and pass on knowledge and train clergy. Charlemagne, for instance, was horrified when he sent out bishops to check on priests, to find how out of touch they were (there are some amusing anecdotes about finding remote rural priests who, having no Latin training, were saying, without knowing it, things like “Father, Sister, Holy Sheep”, while others were teaching some rather inventive doctrines), and set about making clerical education mandatory.
Now this happened to evolve into what became the great Universities, but to suggest they were invented on a commitment to faith and reason is to read that backwards into a founding myth – they were not invented, they evolved out of the situation.
Like so many other inventions, they were products of their times and places, and were able to propagate because they had the time and space to do so.
The horse-collar, for instance, was revolutionary in agriculture, but it was never going to be invented where the soils were thinner, horses were too scarce to be allowed to farmers, the crops grown did not need that added level of sophistication, and an invading army could show up at any minute to burn your fields, so you kept your fields smaller. To ascribe that to some “faith and reason” situation is to again use backwards reasoning.
Inventions also have a multiplying effect – you solve one thing and suddenly people have the space to solve other things. If, by contrast, you can never get past some massive obstacle, you may not have the wherewithal to then solve knock-on issues, so a lack of inventions also has, in its way, a lack of multiplying effects.
Actually neither impression is accurate. The Christians of the east by no means were setting about in a great iconoclasm against the Classical world – in fact the opposite is true. Gibbon was, frankly, a nasty bigot who was convinced the East was somehow effete and effeminate in its own right, while Christianity was horrid.
St. Basil the Great, for instance, wrote extensively on the value of studying pagan writings for learning grammar, and rhetoric, and for seeing in their mythologies types and parallels with Christianity. Constantine, in building Constantinople, had the Temple of Zeus moved to his new city (though what later happened to it is now forgotten). The great Roman, Greek, and other works were preserved and studied, copied, replicated, imitated, underwent various revivals of interest, and remained a fundamental part of Byzantine society right until the end.
As for the rest about ideological identities and tribal affiliations? Sure, you had great theological disputes, and yes there was even a prolonged iconoclasm (against Christian art, I should note), but this notion that somehow the imperial cosmopolitan identity was discarded is erroneous.
And it’s not true of the Catholic West either – the Western Empire was simply never as urbanized in the first place, but what caused the losses there was a different matter, and it was by no means willful.
Why yes they are. And they always have been. That is actually one of the strengths of the Orthodox church. One part can go astray, while the other parts continue on. The different sections fight with each other, and after time God in his fullness reveals His will, and problems get corrected.
Even the Patriarch of Constantinople can err. (See the Iconoclasm.) But because even Constantinople cannot dictate to the rest of the Church, those errors get corrected. My analogy to the various forms of Christianity is that Orthodoxy resembles a republic, Catholicism a monarchy, and Protestantism pure democracies, with the strengths and weaknesses of those three systems.
Well, yeah. People with a commitment to faith and reason find places to gather the learned and replicate and pass on knowledge.
Sounds like Charlemagne had a commitment to faith and reason. Why should Charlemagne care if priests in some far off district were ignorant or passing on weird religious doctrines? Your typical Roman Emperor didn’t give a damn about those things, let alone a barbarian warlord. For some reason Charlemagne cared a great deal about what specific theology priests in the hinterland were teaching.
Of course, all inventions are products of times and places, because men exist in times and places rather than in the abstract. That doesn’t mean they were merely the product of happenstance. Men do things for specific reasons. And their priorities and imaginations are shaped not merely by geography or immediate circumstance, but even more so by culture and especially religion. It is not “backwards reasoning” to find causation in these cultural and religious priorities.
So Western Europe was the only place in all of the world, in all of history, where the horse-collar would have been useful? Or waterwheels or eyeglasses useful? Or institutions of learning useful? Or the stirrup useful? Or myriad other European inventions? Your arguments are excuses why other cultures did not have the creative developments of the West, not reasons why the West actually did develop them. The fact that the soil in Europe is better suited to animals with horse-collars does not immediately cause the development of horse collars, or anything else. If it did, the horse-collar would have been developed in plenty of other places.
Good comparison. And I’d note Christ came to establish the Kingdom of G-d. Not the Republic or Democracy of G-d.
You keep sticking to this “faith and reason” bit, but honestly this is historicism – applying a later mode of thought to people who simply did not think in those terms. Had you used such a phrase with Charlemagne he would have given you a funny look. He just was not thinking (or reasoning, natch) in those terms. He was immediately concerned that the HRE’s clergy were ignorant of what they were teaching and doing and very keen to use his authority to fix it, by force if necessary.
Because Charlemagne was a man of deep, and frankly militant faith, and didn’t want a bunch of heretics out there promulgating heresies, which would necessarily lead to religious schisms in general, and would lead their congregations to damnation if not corrected. If you are teaching your flock things that are flatly untrue, and engaging in false worship, then you and your congregation are damned – this is why Charlemagne sought to regularize the clergy.
Really? Are you sure of that? Have you studied the religious controversies of the Byzantine empire? The emperors were always involved because the Emperor was seen as the Vice-Regent of God – a model which Charlemagne emulated. It was emperors who led the Iconoclasms because they were deeply concerned their people were veering into heresy, and it was other emperors and emperesses (sp?) who fought that iconoclasm on the same grounds. Even into the last days in the 1400s, the emperors were deeply involved in the faith of their people.
Moreover, to somehow say that the West embraced “faith and reason” while the East somehow did not is to both set up a false paradigm of treating faith and reason as somehow in tension (they are not, and never have been in Orthodoxy), and to pass over the enormous works of Byzantine theology, philosophy, history, and engineering. You can, for instance, match Thomas Aquinas’s Summa against Gregory Palamas’s Triads (of which Pope John Paul II was very fond) in terms of influence, scope, and indeed reasoning.
No. I am saying that its invention was most likely there because in the East the conditions simply were not favorable to the use of horses in agriculture, nor was the sort of agriculture there of the type where the large-scale tilling of the massive lands of France and Germany would have led a local farmer to think “You know, horses would do this work so much faster than these oxen…”
It’s easy to point to something like a horse collar and say “Aha! Evidence of Western superiority!” But that would be drawing the wrong lesson – a better lesson might be “Aha! The superiority of Western agricultural lands!”
The stirrup, it seems, came from China – and likely began as a sort of accidental improvement on what started as a loop for making it easier to mount a horse, with the utility for riding evolving from that. Is the stirrup, by your reasoning, evidence of Chinese cultural superiority?
So what? All that means is that we understand what Charlemagne was doing better than Charlemagne did himself. Your argument is that because Charlemagne may not have been self-aware of the historically unusual path he was taking, he couldn’t have been taking it. That’s putting on artificial historical blinders to avoid a conclusion you don’t want to arrive at. Things look very different from the perspective of history than they do at the time, but that doesn’t invalidate historical analysis.
So Charlemagne had a deep commitment to faith. Check.
I was referring to pre-Christian Roman Emperors.
You brought Charlemagne into the discussion to provide the reason why the West developed universities. Now you are saying Charlemagne was merely emulating Eastern emperors in his religious concerns. That undermines your reason for why the West developed universities and the East didn’t.
That was Jon Gabriel’s claim, not mine. I just argued against his claim as given. I agree with you there is no necessary tension between faith and reason. So anyone going to Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism for that reason has done so based on a misunderstanding.
I’m not denying that things were more complicated than the admittedly oversimplified sketch that I laid out. Of course there were Hellenophile Christians in the East and anti-classicists in the West. And, yes, Gibbon was writing with his own secular set of prejudices, but for me at least it’s hard not to be a little horrified when reading about the forced closure of the schools of Athens or the Oracle of Delphi. The religious laws of the Theodosius I and his successors against pagan worship were the equivalent of radical atheists in the US gaining power and banning Christmas. In the West, where union with Theodosius’s domain was sporadic things were different. The pagan nobility remained strong and a number of pagan or crypto-pagan usurpers were put forward in Rome well into the 5th century. This lead to an atmosphere of tolerance and detente as Stilicho and Symmachus allied to combat Rome’s external enemies. It’s hard for me not to think that that history did not influence the future course of Latin and Greek Christendom.
Why did the Monophosyte population of Alexandria then welcome their “liberation” from the Orthodox of Constantinople by their Muslim conquerers, if they had not abandoned their identification with the empire for a sectarian ideological identity? Similarly, after the Yarmouk, Byzantium itself began to conceive of its own civilization as more of an analogy to ancient Israel than the old Roman imperium, that is a people set apart, rather than an universalist system ruling over many peoples. Their reluctance to administer muslim or even non-orthodox majority lands was a major impediment to the Eastern empire taking back more of the Near East than they did after the collapse of the Arab Caliphate.
I understand what you are saying. But the you seem to only allow material factors in your “likelihood of invention” calculation. I think there are also cultural, philosophical and religious factors as well. When I cite those factors, you dismiss them as “backwards reasoning.” I simply disagree with that. Philosophical and religious causes are real.
Absolutely. I wasn’t aware of that. The stirrup then, I’m happy to concede, is an example of Chinese innovation that is a tribute to their culture. I wouldn’t attempt to undermine that tribute by writing it off as an historical accident or due merely to geographical factors. The Chinese were brilliant people who invented gunpowder and paper among other things.
And what conclusion would that be? Do tell.
How? I’ve actually said nothing about why the East did not develop universities, only on how and why they evolved in the West – which was a response to the unique circumstances of the West (badly educated clergy, widely dispersed and disorganized learning).
In any case it would be a mistake to assume that there was somehow a lack of a large educational system in the East – there very much was one. Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Nicea, Adrianople – they all had many different schools, as well as abundant private tutors, and a high literacy rate.
I’m wondering: You’ve cited Charlemagne’s commitment to faith as an historical cause for the development of universities. So “Commitment to faith” is a legitimate historical cause. But when I use “commitment to faith and reason”, I am condemned for backward reasoning and historicism. Why is “commitment to faith” a legitimate cause but “commitment to faith and reason” necessarily a fallacy?
Willful may be the wrong word, but it’s worth asking why Rome’s famous engine of assimilation broke down when it did. It stands to reason that it was hard to convince Romanizing Goths to think of themselves as heirs to Romulus and Augustus at a time when Roman society was going through a–needed!–moral revolution in which the past was suspect. A sectarian identity as Arian Christians was much more accessible, leading to a division which was a primary contributor to the fall of the West. And while the Goths were rampaging through the Western Empire, the Pagans and Christians of the Roman aristocracy were busy debating whether the altar of victory should be removed from the senate house. Are we really supposed to believe that the insistence of some Christians on the erasure of pagan worship and iconography, didn’t create internal divisions contributing to civilizational collapse?
Not exactly. By the time of Theodosius the allegiance to the pagan cults was in freefall, and the temples and schools were very often state-supported cults in the first place. His closing them would be more akin to a situation where, as in Europe today, the national governments often own the churches and pay the clergy as state employees, but decide to just shut them down due to lack of interest from the populace. It would be like if the UK were to shutter all the churches they own, sell off a bunch, and then fire all the clergy who are employees of the Crown.
Charlemagne was trying to construct an organized state, and saw the guardianship and control of the church as vital to that project (this set up the tremendous battles that later emperors, like Otto, would have with the Papacy, but that’s another matter). Regularizing clergy education, knowledge, and practice was the explicit goal – the notions that organized universities would later become places of free inquiry and additional learning was a much later development. Charlemagne was intent on correction of the faith, and nothing more, and the sorts of free inquiry implicit in “reason” would actually have been a problem at that time – he wanted to make sure the clergy were doing their jobs. That it later came about is a happy development, but was never the intent, and the early universities are best seen as a kind of state-sponsored high-end vocational school.
Much of the collapse I think should really be laid at the overall system of Roman governance, where armies could raise emperors by acclamation, where emperors survived by rewarding the troops who raised them, or were then deposed again if they found the coffers empty, etc. This same problem also bedeviled the Eastern Empire, especially after Basil II, and that empire’s demise is very very similar to the demise of the Western Empire – civil war after civil war, made worse by invading Germans in the West, Turks in the East, with endless fights and betrayals over ever shrinking boundaries, and warlords and petty kings carving out independent realms in the absence of any imperial army to ever stop them.
In the period between the Edict of Milan ending widespread, official persecution of Christians in 313 and the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the power and authority of the Western Church grew a great deal. It wasn’t the Emperor who stopped Attila’s invasion of the West in 452, it was Pope Leo the Great. From the fall until Charlemagne’s coronation (by Leo III) in 800, the Church was the only international authority and the only morally restraining one, in the West. By then, they had gotten into the habit of telling kings what to do.
The conclusion that arc of the history of the West might best be explained by philosophical and religious commitments peculiar to the West, and not merely from historical happenstance.
You’ve described certain circumstances, and then jumped to the conclusion that those circumstances themselves caused the cultural development that ensued. That’s a fallacy. The circumstances provide the opportunity for development, but development only then occurs if other factors are in place: The motivation to make the change, the wisdom and knowledge to do it, at least. We’ve made progress on this score: You’ve described the circumstances (badly educated clergy, widely dispersed and disorganized learning), but then brought in Charlemagne’s commitment to faith as a necessary factor to actually make the change happen. This is true in all the other cases: The horse collar doesn’t just happen because people need it because of the particular soil they have. They have to have the innovative culture already in place to respond creatively to those circumstances.
Sure. And they are a testament to Eastern culture. Not something to be written off as an historical accident of geography.
That is complicated – but comes down in no small part to a lot of chauvinism on the part of the Empire, and several emperors attempting to “fix” the schism by rather forceful means. The Copts soon came to regret their “liberation”, however.
Manpower was a bigger impediment, not to mention the periodic internal civil war, and the frequent wars in the Balkans. The Macedonian Dynasty was fighting to establish defensible frontiers, and extending further into Syria was simply beyond their means. By Basil II’s death, the Empire had established quite the network of client states along its southern border. The failure of Basil to establish a clear successor, and the failure of the various follow-on emperors to solve the problems Basil left, led to the collapse of that system, and of Anatolia entirely.
Civilian Control of the military was the problem of Roman civilization going back to the Monarchy. Rome’s success was largely the story of each generation finding solutions to that problem based on the particular circumstances of their era. The question is why no solution could be found in the late 4th and early 5th centuries.
The Byzantine policy of deporting the former Arab subjects from the newly reclaimed frontier and in order to replace them with Orthodox colonists from the capital and heartland of Anatolia certainly contributed to the manpower problem.
Such a claim to the “arc of history” (a term I would argue anyway) is overstated. You cannot isolate modes of thought and societal values from geography and historical happenstance – they are deeply intertwined at all levels. A society which relies heavily on fishing, olives, and wine cannot be faulted for not developing a better plow, and likewise a society which relies on massive agricultural efforts for crops and livestock cannot be faulted for somehow not taking more of an interest in nautical engineering improvements. A society fighting a millennia-long series of defensive wars cannot be completely faulted for somehow not developing along the lines of one more secure and in charge of its destiny. There is always a give and take to these things.
Maybe, but at the same time, how reliably could you expect to hold a city where the populace is hostile to you? The Arabs did much the same thing – deportation, slavery, forced conversion – every time they flipped a city too.
So we started with Charlemagne’s commitment to faith as planting the seed of the university. Then, later, these developing universities became more than just high-end vocational schools and became centers of rational inquiry – a “happy development” you call it, with a hint at historical accident as cause of development.
When I say the West had a commitment to “faith and reason”, I don’t mean that every single person in the West had a balanced commitment to faith and reason. Far from it. Individuals are often unbalanced, sometimes emphasizing faith and sometimes reason. It’s the rare individual, like Thomas Aquinas, who might have a truly integrated life of faith and reason. What I mean is that the cultural history of the West can be usefully understood as a commitment to both faith and reason. You are correct that universities started as religious vocational schools, but they didn’t stay that way. I suggest there were cultural reasons for that.
Certainly, but why did the Byzantines assume obdurate hostility when their Roman forbearers made the opposite assumption, that the conquered populations would be loyal subjects of the empire a couple generations.