Download PDF | Steven Runciman - The eastern schism _ a study of the papacy and the eastern churches during the XIth and XIIth centuries-At the Clarendon Press (1956).
196 Pages
PREFACE
THIS book is based on seven Waynflete lectures given in the University of Oxford in the Hilary term of 1954 at the invitation of the President and Fellows of Magdalen Col- lege. I am deeply grateful for the honour of that invitation and for the opportunity with which I have thus been pro- vided for a discussion of one of the most controversial and unhappy chapters in the history of Christendom.
A full and detailed account of the division between the great Churches of the East and the West could only be covered in a work of many volumes. The pages that follow are intended to offer a brief presentation of those facts which I believe to be essential for the understanding of the story. The history of the controversy has usually been left to the pens of theologians, not without reason; for the battlefield on which Church leaders challenge each other is one of doctrine and of religious usage.
But wars are not started on the battlefield; and, just as it would be unwise to employ soldiers alone to write the history of a war and its causes, so it is useful to regard a schism from a viewpoint that is not purely theological. It is my aim to show that the Eastern Schism was not fundamentally caused by differing opinions on the Procession of the Holy Ghost or the Bread of the Sacrament but by the conjunction of political events and the prejudice and bitterness that they aroused with a growing divergence in basic ideology, which the political events forced on to the notice of the world.
It used to be generally held that, after the solution of earlier quarrels between the great Patriarchates, schism was started anew in a more dangerous form by Photius, Patri- arch of Constantinople, and that though the division that he caused was patched spatched up after his death it broke out again in a final and irrevocable form owing to the Patriarch Michael Cerularius. The writings of Professor Dvornik and Father Grumel have taught us that the traditional view of Photius must be greatly modified; and scholars are now reaching the conclusion that the year 1054, the date of the breach between Michael Cerularius and Cardinal Hum- bert, can no longer be held to mark the final separation of their Churches.
The separation came more slowly and more unevenly, when the Norman invasion of Italy, the greater invasions of the Crusaders, and the vigorous actions and ideas of the reformed Papacy gradually forced on to the notice of Eastern Christendom the extent to which the Eastern and Western point of view on the Universal Church had moved apart. I am deeply in debt to the distinguished scholars whose works have helped to clarify the history of the Schism. It was M. Jules Gay whose history of Byzantine Italy was the first book to put the events of 1054 in a clearer per- spective. The publications of Professor Michel and of the Catholic ecclesiastical historians Armann, Jugie, and Leib, as well as the Anglican writer George Every, have further enlarged our understanding of the whole episode.
The references in my footnotes will show how much I owe to them in detail, but I should like to acknowledge herewith my larger obligations to them. It is difficult to treat of a controversial subject without rousing disagreement and resentment. But I hope that none of my words will cause offence to followers of either the great Church of Rome or the Churches of the East. If my personal sympathies incline towards Byzantium, it is be- cause I have tried to understand the Byzantine point of view. Most of the writers who have dealt with the unhappy question have belonged to the Latin world; and though nothing could be more scrupulously fair-minded than the writings of such Catholic scholars as Father Jugie or Father Amann, the full Byzantine case has often been allowed to go by default.
It is my belief that only by a fuller understanding of each other's feelings and traditions can the Churches be brought into closer friendship; and though I do not think it possible that terms can now be found on which the breach can be healed, it is my hope that this book will in no way embitter the problem but may help a little to lessen ill will. London 1955 S. R.
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