Lecture 21: The Great Schism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Idea of Holy War

The lecture, section by section

1. How popes were made, and what the office had become

   A student's question opens a window on the era: the papal chair was won through factional politics and often violence, because ever since the empire's christianization the church had become a ladder to secular power. Chamberlain's name for one stretch of the tenth century, the pornocracy, tells its own story. The popes of the age, heirs of Leo's doctrine of Petrine succession, regarded themselves as vicars of Christ, above kings and above every other Christian leader, and that conviction was about to collide with the east.

2. 1054: the great schism

   Pope Leo IX sent a delegation under Cardinal Humbert to the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, demanding he acknowledge the pope as head of all Christendom. The east had always regarded the five great sees as equals, Rome at most a leader among equals, and Cerularius refused; Humbert excommunicated the patriarch, and the patriarch excommunicated the delegation. West and east had excommunicated each other. Beneath the collision lay a century of drift: the filioque added to a creed the east held inviolable, a west that no longer spoke Greek facing an east that no longer spoke Latin, and Rome's isolation as the west's only great see, which had bred what Busenitz calls an inevitable superiority complex. Reunion attempts followed for centuries and all failed; the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204 drove the final nail.

3. Not to be confused

   A terminology note the lecture is careful about: the great schism properly names this east-west split of 1054. The later papal schism, when rival popes in the west excommunicated one another until a reforming council deposed them all, belongs to the late 1300s and early 1400s and is a separate story, taken up in a coming lecture along with the church's so-called Babylonian captivity.

4. Eastern Orthodoxy: mystery and tradition

   The lecture sketches four distinctives of the east, alive today in Greek and especially Russian Orthodoxy. First, mystery, a negative theology that treats ambiguity as beauty and produces almost no systematic theology, partly a reaction against the metaphysical hair-splitting of the later councils, but carried into outright mysticism. Second, tradition: Orthodoxy teaches that the Spirit descended on each of the seven ecumenical councils as at a new Pentecost, making the creeds effectively inspired, which is why the west's filioque insertion felt to the east like tampering with Scripture itself, and why sola scriptura is rejected. Busenitz reprises the telephone game: tradition without an unchanging standard wanders, which is exactly why Rome and Orthodoxy, claiming one tradition, arrived at different destinations.

5. Theosis and the icons

   Third, theosis, deification: what begins as the biblical truth that believers become partakers of the divine nature, in Peter's phrase, is stated in the east with unsettling strength, God became man so that man might become God, language Busenitz notes is eerily close to the cults. Fourth, the icons, settled in the east since the empresses' victories: figurines and images at church and at home, defended as aids to reverence and instruction for the illiterate, with the veneration-worship line as blurry as ever. Add justification through baptism and the sacraments, and the lecture's assessment matches Rome's: an apostate communion governed by tradition over truth, a judgment missionaries among Russian Baptists confirm firsthand.

6. The Crusades: why the topic matters

   The word crusade, coined centuries later, descends from the cross under whose sign these armies marched: two hundred years of expeditions, 1095 to the fall of Acre in 1291, to retake the Holy Land. The topic earns its place for three reasons: the geopolitics of west and Middle East still carry its scars, and Muslim perception of western armies still reads through it; it is a live apologetic issue, the atheist's objection Busenitz heard in high school, answered by showing that crusading Christianity was not Christianity truly applied; and it forces Christians to examine the very arguments still used to justify wars today.

7. The road to 1095

   Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since 637, but pilgrims were long permitted to visit the holy places, and pilgrimage had acquired, tellingly, a spiritual-credit value in medieval piety. In 1076 a new regime closed the routes, and pilgrims were ambushed, enslaved, and killed. Europe's leaders, secular and spiritual, began to speak of retaking the Holy Land, and Christians found themselves adopting their enemy's own category: holy war was a Muslim concept from Muhammad forward, and the Crusades, in Busenitz's blunt phrase, were Christian jihads, fighting fire with fire.

8. How the New Testament was bent

   Tyerman's observation frames the theological failure: Bernard of Clairvaux, preaching the Second Crusade, knew Paul's military metaphors intimately and wholly inverted their message. The peace commands, the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, turning the other cheek, were confined to the individual and local sphere, one's actual European neighbors, while kingdoms were free to war on kingdoms; and a church that saw itself as the new Israel borrowed Israel's Old Testament battle commissions as its own. Military metaphor became military mandate.

9. The just war checklist, fatally satisfied

   Augustine's four criteria for a just war, forged when a christianized empire first had to think about fighting, are these: a just cause; a defensive aim or the recovery of what was lost; sanction by legitimate authority; and right motives in those who fight. The crusading preachers ticked every box. Cause: the honor of Christ, whom the Muslims dishonor by denying his deity, cross, and resurrection. Recovery: the land had been Christian and Roman before it was taken. Authority: the pope himself, Europe's highest, commissioned the wars. Motives: the pope promised that a crusader's death brought immediate forgiveness of all sins and passage straight to heaven, purgatory bypassed. Sincere people were sincerely misled, and the same checklist, Busenitz notes, still frames how Christians argue about wars now.

10. Warrior monks

    The era's strangest institution completes the picture: military orders of monks, the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers of St. John, and later the Teutonic Knights, men vowed to chastity and purity who also took up the sword. With the checklist satisfied and the warriors consecrated, Europe launched two centuries of military chaos in the Middle East, whose four major expeditions the next lecture will walk through, including the crusade that turned its swords on Constantinople itself.

1. The crusade preachers passed every just war test and were still catastrophically wrong. What does that teach about checklists in ethics, and what was the deeper failure?

2. Orthodoxy guards mystery; the west systematizes. Where is each instinct's strength, and how does Scripture discipline both?

3. The peace commands were fenced off as merely personal. Which of Christ's commands do believers today quietly fence off from public or national life, and at what cost?