Did the orthodox separate from the Catholics church, or did the Catholics seperate from the Orthodox Church?

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DictatorCzar

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I’m very confused because there are two sides in this argument. The Orthodox Church says that the Roman church split from the orthodox. While the Catholics say that the Orthodox Church split form them. Which one is true?
 
Yes.

(how’s that for an Eastern answer?)

In all seriousness, it took hundreds of years and pig-headed pride on both sides.

There had been issues for a couple of hundred years before the excommunication, and it took another couple of hundred years before lack of communion became the norm.

It’s more a long-time family feud between siblings than one or the other leaving the other.

hawk
 
My understanding is there is no one Eastern Orthodox Church but individual ‘national’ Orthodox Churches which mostly don’t recognize a single head or ‘Patriarch’ but national heads only. Unity is a mark of the true church.
 
I’m saying that they believe that the other church separated from them. Like Catholics believing that the Orthodox separated from them, while in an Orthodox point of view is the opposite.
 
Rome had primacy over all the other churches. All of the early church fathers who have commented on this subject say that the order of primacy and importance goes to 1. Rome, 2. Alexandria and finally 3. Antioch. Byzantium/Constantinople was not important until Constantine moved the capital there.

Hence, it is not possible for Rome to separate from Constantinople. Constantinople separated from Rome.

Does the Orthodox Church predate the Catholic Church?

http://catholicbridge.com/orthodox/timeline-history-of-catholic-orthodox-relations.php

The split of 1054 between the Orthodox and Catholics
 
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If I remember correctly, technically, both sides excommunicated the other. Neither side decided to formally split from the Church, and both sides still maintain an unbroken succession that allows them to trace their origin to Christ. This is unlike, for instance, Protestants who formally broke from the Church and can’t trace their origin to Christ.

That said, as Catholics, we obviously don’t think someone can excommunicate the Pope, so obviously we don’t think an attempted excommunication of him by the Eastern bishops meant anything.
 
ZMystiCat said:
That said, as Catholics, we obviously don’t think someone can excommunicate the Pope, so obviously we don’t think an attempted excommunication of him by the Eastern bishops meant anything.
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According to the website quoted above, the Patriarch of Constantinople only excommunicated the Papal legates who brought him the bad news of his excommunication by the Pope. So it wasn’t a mutual excommunication. The Pope excommunicated the Patriarch, but the Patriarch only excommunicated the papal legates. I’m not an expert here, but that is my understanding.
 
The Great Schism was not a single event with the excommunications of 1054. Tension between Rome and Constantinople, “the New Rome,” had been an issue for centuries. The schism only became permanent when the Turks conquered Constantinople and the Patriarch came under their control.
 
Two good books to read are The History of Christianity by Jonathan Hill and The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity by John McManners.

In 1054 when kardinal Humbert placed the papal bull with the excommunication on the altar in Hagia Sofia in Konstantinopel he acted on his own account as pope Leo had already died of malaria early in 1054. Yet pope Leo is the pope remembered as the one who split the Church even though he even learnt Greek to understand the Eastern part of the Church better.

Many of the problems are connected to the use of Latin in West and Greek in the East as the two languages have words that don’t mean the exact thing. The rise of Islam in the 7th century is also a cause that added to the split. Barbarians invading the Western part of the Roman empire in the 5th century etc etc etc. You need to learn a lot of history to understand what caused the split and why it came. There have been so many councils in the Church´s history that have dealt with many, many problems. Most are because of different traditions developing over time in East and West and language problems. Then we have the people who ruled the different countries, regions and cities.
 
Do we really need yet another Eastern Orthodox thread when there are multiple active threads as it is?
 
It depends on what you mean.

Usually people asking that question are implicitly asking: Which is the true Church?

Catholics say the true Church is that which is in communion with Peter, on whom Christ build the church. Peter’s historic successor is in Rome. So those communities in communion with Rome belong to the fullness of Christ’s Church.

So in this way, all particular churches that break communion with Rome (like Constantinople) are leaving the fullness of Catholic unity. And yet, these same particular churches may have had ancient — even apostolic — origins.

For example, the apostolic church of Antioch, whose origins are described in the New Testament, eventually broke communion with Rome. Depending on how you sort it out, this occurred as early as the early AD 400s, when the Syriac Christians followed Nestorianism, forming what became know as the Church of the East. Ever after, the Antiochene Christians more or less followed the Byzantine Greeks, which, too, would eventually lose communion with Rome after the Great Schism.

So the history is complex.

Now the Orthodox, in turn, generally see Rome as a particular church* that went into schism for various reasons, depending on who you ask. To be fair, at most you could say that Rome went into schism with Constantinople, and eventually the Byzantine (Constantinople)-based churches in communion with it.

But even from this view, Orthodox have to admit that the Roman church was in existence from apostolic times — just as Catholics have to admit that various Eastern churches that went into schism also existed from ancient times.

*All my use of “particular church” just means a community of Christians gathered around their head bishop. The bishop represents the church in local sense.
 
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Also, when we are asking this question, you have to realize the two options are not equivalent.

Orthodox leaving the Catholic Church means Eastern churches breaking communion with the Church of Rome, where Peter is the focal, visible point of communion with Christ’s Church.

Catholics leaving the Orthodox Church is not equivalent. For the Orthodox, the Catholics did not break communion with a head church that acts as a source of global unity and communion (How could it, sense Rome held the primacy?). Rather, for Orthodox, the Roman Church fell into schism from the communion of Orthodox churches.

(That being said, Constantinople DID want to gain prestige, and had been evolving in a power struggle with Rome since its inception, so it surely saw itself as enacting a role of leadership in the excommunication of Rome as well)

But remember that the schism was chiefly between Rome and Constantinople. So even then, if we’re coming form the Orthodox perspective, it would be more fair to say that Rome lost communion with Constantinople — and then also the churches influenced by and in communion with Constantinople. But remember, by this time, the other major churches (like Antioch) had a Byzantine-based faction anyway, in addition to other rival churches (like the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox, schisms that started in the fifth century).
 
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BoomerangToo said:
Hence, it is not possible for Rome to separate from Constantinople. Constantinople separated from Rome.
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This is in no way implied by your premises . . . primacy does not prevent separation [absolute supremacy might, though, making failure to comply with the slightest whim a separation.]

(and even if we only look at the one moment, instead of a couple hundred years each way, when speaking in ecclesiastic terms, communion is between the heads of particular churches [to use Rome’s terminology]. One head excommunicating [literally, breaking the communion] is initiates a schism ipso facto.)
ZMystiCat said:
That said, as Catholics, we obviously don’t think someone can excommunicate the Pope, so obviously we don’t think an attempted excommunication of him by the Eastern bishops meant anything.
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Another head certainly can’t separate the pope from communion with the diocese of Rome, so in that sense, it’s not possible.

On the other hand, he could removed the pope from communion with the church he heads, which is an excommunication.

hawk
 
DictatorCzar said:
I’m very confused because there are two sides in this argument. The Orthodox Church says that the Roman church split from the orthodox. While the Catholics say that the Orthodox Church split form them. Which one is true?
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If one’s limb is amputated does one say, “My leg amputated itself from my body” ? No, the part that retains its head does the amputating.

The theological differences between the two are trivial but were escalated by various actors to mask the real difference that was and is political – who heads the Catholic Church.
 
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