Historical Timelines

The First Centuries

The Great Schism:

The Orthodox Patriachate of Rome and the Origin of Roman Catholicism

Note: Before the Great Schism separating Rome from the Orthodox Church, five major ancient jurisdictions, called Patriarchates, existed. These five Patriarchs were Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. (The other four ancient Partriachates, excluding Rome, remain within Orthodox Church.) The bishop of Rome enjoyed primacy among his brother bishops. Primacy traditionally meant that the bishop of Rome was given the honor, as an elder brother, to be the first among equals in relation to his brother Patriarchs. The Patriarch of Rome, however, possessed no authority outside of his own territorial jurisdiction and could not interfere in the jurisdictions pastored by his brother Patriarchs. This model of conciliarity among brother bishops, in which all bishops – including Patriarchs – are responsible to a synod of brother bishops, contrasts with the understanding of papal monarchy claimed by the Patriachate of Rome in the West. Rome’s sister churches in the East rejected such papal claims since they constituted innovations contrary to Apostolic tradition. This led to the separation of the Patriachate of Rome from the Orthodox Church, thereby creating the “Roman Catholic Church.”

Letter of St. Gregory the Great (Patriarch 590-604), Orthodox Patriarch and Pope of Rome, to his brother Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, in which he condemns use of the title Universal Bishop:

“Gregory to Eulogius, Bishop of Alexandria, and Anastasius, Bishop of Antioch.

When the excellent preacher says, As long as I am the apostle of the Gentiles I will honour my ministry (Rom. xi. 13); saying again in another place, We became as babes among you (1 Thess. ii. 7), he undoubtedly shews an example to us who come after him, that we should retain humility in our minds, and yet keep in honour the dignity of our order, so that neither should our humility be timid nor our elevation proud. Now eight years ago, in the time of my predecessor of holy memory Pelagius, our brother and fellow-bishop John in the city of Constantinople, seeking occasion from another cause, held a synod in which he attempted to call himself Universal Bishop. Which as soon as my said predecessor knew, he despatched letters annulling by the authority of the holy apostle Peter the acts of the said synod; of which letters I have taken care to send copies to your Holiness. Moreover he forbade the deacon who attended us the most pious Lords for the business of the Church to celebrate the solemnities of mass with our aforesaid fellow-priest. I also, being of the same mind with him, have sent similar letters to our aforesaid fellow-priest, copies of which I have thought it right to send to your Blessedness, with this especial purpose, that we may first assail with moderate force the mind of our before-named brother concerning this matter, wherein by a new act of pride, all the bowels of the Universal Church are disturbed. But, if he should altogether refuse to be bent from the stiffness of his elation, then, with the succour of Almighty God, we may consider more particularly what ought to be done.

For, as your venerable Holiness knows, this name of Universality was offered by the holy synod of Chalcedon to the pontiff of the Apostolic See which by the providence of God I serve. But no one of my predecessors has ever consented to use this so profane a title; since, forsooth, if one Patriarch is called Universal, the name of Patriarch in the case of the rest is derogated. But far be this, far be it from the mind of a Christian, that any one should wish to seize for himself that whereby he might seem in the least degree to lessen the honour of his brethren. While, then, we are unwilling to receive this honour when offered to us, think how disgraceful it is for any one to have wished to usurp it to himself perforce.

Wherefore let not your Holiness in your epistles ever call any one Universal, lest you detract from the honour due to yourself in offering to another what is not due. Nor let any sinister suspicion make your mind uneasy with regard to our most serene lords, inasmuch as he fears Almighty God, and will in no way consent to do anything against the evangelical ordinances, against the most sacred canons. As for me, though separated from you by long spaces of land and sea, I am nevertheless entirely conjoined with you in heart. And I trust that it is so in all respects with your Blessedness towards me; since, when you love me in return, you are not far from me. Hence we give thanks the more to that grain of mustard seed (Matth. xiii. 31, 32), for that from what appeared a small and despicable seed it has been so spread abroad everywhere by branches rising and extending themselves from the same root that all the birds of heaven may make their nests in them. And thanks be to that leaven which, in three measures of meal, has leavened in unity the mass of the whole human race (Matth. xiii. 33); and to the little stone, which, cut out of the mountain without hands, has occupied the whole face of the earth (Dan. ii. 35), and which to this end everywhere distends itself, that from the human race reduced to unity the body of the whole Church might be perfected, and so this distinction between the several members might serve for the benefit of the compacted whole.

Hence also we are not far from you, since in Him who is everywhere we are one. Let us then give thanks to Him who, having abolished enmities, has caused that in His flesh there should be in the whole world one flock, and one sheepfold under Himself the one shepherd; and let us be ever mindful how the preacher of truth admonishes us, saying, Be careful to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace (Ephes. iv. 3), and, Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see God (Hebr. xii. 14). And he says also to other disciples, If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, having peace with all men (Rom. xii. 18). For he sees that the good cannot have peace with the bad; and therefore, as ye know, he premised, If it be possible.

But, because peace cannot be established except on two sides, when the bad fly from it, the good ought to keep it in their inmost hearts. Whence also it is admirably said, As much as lieth in you; meaning that it should remain in us even when it is repelled from the hearts of evil men. And such peace we truly keep, when we treat the faults of the proud at once with charity and with persistent justice, when we love them and hate their vices. For man is the work of God; but vice is the work of man. Let us then distinguish between what God and what man has made, and neither hate the man on account of his error nor love the error on account of the man.

Let us then with united mind attack the evil of pride in the man, that from his enemy, that is to say his error, the man himself may first be freed. Our Almighty Redeemer will supply strength to charity and justice; He will supply to us, though placed far from each other, the unity of His Spirit; even He by whose workmanship the Church, having been constructed as it were after the manner of the ark with the four sides of the world, and bound together with the compacture of incorruptible planks and the pitch of charity, is disturbed by no opposing winds, by the swelling of no billow coming from without.

But inasmuch as, with His grace steering us, we ought to seek that no wave coming upon us from without may throw us into confusion, so ought we to pray with all our hearts, dearest brethren, that the right hand of His providence may draw out the accumulation of internal bilgewater within us. For indeed our adversary the devil, who, in his rage against the humble, as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet. v. 8), no longer, as we perceive, walks about the folds but so resolutely fixes his teeth in certain necessary members of the Church that, unless with the favour of the Lord, the heedful crowd of shepherds unanimously run to the rescue, no one can doubt that he will soon tear all the sheepfold; which God forbid. Consider, dearest brethren, who it is that follows close at hand, of whose approach such perverse beginnings are breaking out even in priests. For it is because he is near of whom it is written, He is king over all the sons of pride (Job xli. 25)—not without sore grief I am compelled to say it—that our brother and fellow-bishop John, despising the Lord’s commands, apostolical precepts, and rules of Fathers, attempts through elation to be his forerunner in name.

But may Almighty God make known to your Blessedness with what sore groaning I am tormented by this consideration; that he, the once to me most modest man, he who was beloved of all, he who seemed to be occupied in alms, deeds, prayers, and fastings, out of the ashes he sat in, out of the humility he preached, has grown so boastful as to attempt to claim all to himself, and through the elation of a pompous expression to aim at subjugating to himself all the members of Christ, which cohere to one Head only, that is to Christ. Nor is it surprising that the same tempter who knows pride to be the beginning of all sin, who used it formerly before all else in the case of the first man, should now also put it before some men at the end of virtues, so as to lay it as a snare for those who to some extent seemed to be escaping his most cruel hands by the good aims of their life, at the very goal of good work, and as it were in the very conclusion of perfection.

Wherefore we ought to pray earnestly, and implore Almighty God with continual supplications, that He would avert this error from that man’s soul, and remove this mischief of pride and confusion from the unity and humility of the Church. And with the favour of the Lord we ought to concur, and make provision with all our powers, lest in the poison of one expression the living members in the body of Christ should die. For, if this expression is suffered to be allowably used, the honour of all patriarchs is denied: and while he that is called Universal perishes per chance in his error, no bishop will be found to have remained in a state of truth.

It is for you then, firmly and without prejudice, to keep the Churches as you have received them, and not to let this attempt at a diabolical usurpation have any countenance from you. Stand firm; stand secure; presume not ever to issue or to receive writings with the falsity of the name Universal in them. Bid all the bishops subject to your care abstain from the defilement of this elation, that the Universal Church may acknowledge you as Patriarchs not only in good works but also in the authority of truth. But, if perchance adversity is the consequence, we ought to persist unanimously, and show even by dying that in case of harm to the generality we do not love anything of our own especially. Let us say with Paul, To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Philip. i. 21). Let us hear what the first of all pastors says; If ye suffer anything for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye (1 Pet. iii. 14). For believe me that the dignity which we have received for the preaching of the truth we shall more safely relinquish than retain in behalf of the same truth, should case of necessity require it. Finally, pray for me, as becomes your most dear Blessedness, that I may shew forth in works what I am thus bold to say to you.”

St. Gregory the Great, Epistle XLIII, To Eulogius and Anastasius, Bishops, NPNF, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf212.iii.v.v.xxii.html

Letter by St. Gregory the Great, Orthodox Patriarch and Pope of Rome, to his brother Patriarch of Alexandra, explaining that three Patriarchs (of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch) all sit on the Throne of Peter:

Gregory to Eulogius, Bishop of Alexandria.

Your most sweet Holiness has spoken much in your letter to me about the chair of Saint Peter, Prince of the apostles, saying that he himself now sits on it in the persons of his successors. And indeed I acknowledge myself to be unworthy, not only in the dignity of such as preside, but even in the number of such as stand. But I gladly accepted all that has been said, in that he has spoken to me about Peter’s chair who occupies Peter’s chair. And, though special honour to myself in no wise delights me, yet I greatly rejoiced because you, most holy ones, have given to yourselves what you have bestowed upon me. For who can be ignorant that holy Church has been made firm in the solidity of the Prince of the apostles, who derived his name from the firmness of his mind, so as to be called Petrus from petra. And to him it is said by the voice of the Truth, To you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And again it is said to him, And when you are converted, strengthen your brethren. And once more, Simon, son of Jonas, do you love Me? Feed my sheep. Wherefore though there are many apostles, yet with regard to the principality itself the See of the Prince of the apostles alone has grown strong in authority, which in three places is the See of one. For he himself exalted the See in which he deigned even to rest and end the present life. He himself adorned the See to which he sent his disciple as evangelist. He himself established the See in which, though he was to leave it, he sat for seven years. Since then it is the See of one, and one See, over which by Divine authority three bishops now preside, whatever good I hear of you, this I impute to myself. If you believe anything good of me, impute this to your merits, since we are one in Him Who says, That they all may be one, as You, Father, art in me, and I in you that they also may be one in us. Moreover, in paying you the debt of salutation which is due to you, I declare to you that I exult with great joy from knowing that you labour assiduously against the barkings of heretics; and I implore Almighty God that He would aid your Blessedness with His protection, so as through your tongue to uproot every root of bitterness from the bosom of holy Church, lest it should germinate again to the hindrance of many, and through it many should be defiled. For having received your talent you think on the injunction, Trade till I come Luke 19:13. I therefore, though unable to trade at all nevertheless rejoice with you in the gains of your trade, inasmuch as I know this, that if operation does not make me partaker, yet charity does make me a partaker in your labour. For I reckon that the good of a neighbour is common to one that stands idle, if he knows how to rejoice in common in the doings of the other.

Furthermore, I have wished to send you some timber: but your Blessedness has not indicated whether you are in need of it: and we can send some of much larger size, but no ship is sent hither capable of containing it: and I think shame to send the smaller sort. Nevertheless let your Blessedness inform me by letter what I should do.

I have however sent you, as a small blessing from the Church of Saint Peter who loves you, six of the smaller sort of Aquitanian cloaks (pallia), and two napkins (oraria); for, my affection being great, I presume on the acceptableness of even little things. For affection itself has its own worth, and it is quite certain that there will be no offense in what out of love one has presumed to do.

Moreover I have received the blessing of the holy Evangelist Mark, according to the note appended to your letter. But, since I do not drink colatum and viritheum with pleasure, I venture to ask for cognidium , which last year, after a long interval, your Holiness caused to be known in this city. For we here get from the traders the name of cognidium, but not the thing itself. Now I beg that the prayers of your Holiness may support me against all the bitternesses which I suffer in this life, and defend me from them by your intercessions with Almighty God.

St. Gregory the Great, Book VII, Letter 40, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360207040.htm

** Note: Although the Patriarch of Rome had been given the honor of primacy as “first among equals” among the Patriarchs, St. Gregory recognized that the Apostle Peter served as Bishop in Antioch for seven years and sent his disciple, Mark, to Alexandria, thereby making Alexandria, by extension, also a Chair of St. Peter. (It is proper also to consider St. Peter only an Apostle, not a Bishop, which is a distinct ministry. Therefore, St. Ignatius of Antioch is typically considered the second Bishop of Antioch. If St. Peter is counted as the first bishop, St. Ignatius would be counted as the third.)

Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, The Orthodox Church:

“One summer afternoon in the year 1054, as a service was about to begin in the Church of the Holy Wisdom at Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert and two other legates of the Pope entered the building and made their way up to the sanctuary. They had no come to pray. They placed a Bull of Excommunication upon the altar and marched out once more. As he passed through the western door, the Cardinal shook the dust from his feet with the words: ‘Let God look and judge.’ A deacon ran out after him in great distress and begged him to take back the Bull. Humbert refused; and it was dropped in the street.”

Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy Ware) of Diokleia, The Orthodox Church, new edition (New York: Penguin Books), 43.

The following document, the Dictatus Papae or “Dictates of the Pope,” shows how far the Rome drifted from the Holy Tradition of the Church with regard to its understanding role of the bishop of Rome, the Pope, in relation to the Church. This document was written and published by the Pope within a few decades after the Great Schism (AD 1054):

That the Roman church was founded by God alone.
That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal.
That he alone can depose or reinstate bishops.
That, in a council his legate, even if a lower grade, is above all bishops, and can pass sentence of deposition against them.
That the pope may depose the absent.
That, among other things, we ought not to remain in the same house with those excommunicated by him.
That for him alone is it lawful, according to the needs of the time, to make new laws, to assemble together new congregations, to make an abbey of a canonry; and, on the other hand, to divide a rich bishopric and unite the poor ones.
That he alone may use the imperial insignia.
That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet.
That his name alone shall be spoken in the churches.
That this is the only name in the world.
That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors.
That he may be permitted to transfer bishops if need be.
That he has power to ordain a clerk of any church he may wish.
That he who is ordained by him may preside over another church, but may not hold a subordinate position; and that such a one may not receive a higher grade from any bishop.
That no synod shall be called a general one without his order.
That no chapter and no book shall be considered canonical without his authority.
That a sentence passed by him may be retracted by no one; and that he himself, alone of all, may retract it.
That he himself may be judged by no one.
That no one shall dare to condemn one who appeals to the apostolic chair.
That to the latter should be referred the more important cases of every church.
That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.
That the Roman pontiff, if he have been canonically ordained, is undoubtedly made a saint by the merits of St. Peter; St. Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, bearing witness, and many holy fathers agreeing with him. As is contained in the decrees of St. Symmachus the pope.
That, by his command and consent, it may be lawful for subordinates to bring accusations.
That he may depose and reinstate bishops without assembling a synod.
That he who is not at peace with the Roman church shall not be considered catholic.
That he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.

Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, trans. by Ernest F. Henderson (London: George Bell and Sons, 1910), pp. 366-367. This document may be retrieved from the Internet Medieval Source Book (http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/g7-dictpap.asp)

A letter by an Orthodox bishop in the East to the Rise of the Papacy in the West:

Note: This is a 12^th century letter from Archbishop Nicetas of Nicomedia, an Orthodox bishop in the East, to the Pope of Rome. The letter demonstrates reaction of the Eastern bishop when their brother bishop in Rome attempted to assert authority over them contrary to the Tradition of the Church:

“My dearest brother, we do not deny to the Roman Church the primacy amongst the five sister Patriarchates; and we recognize her right to the most honourable seat at an Ecumenical Council. But she has separated herself from us by her own deeds, when through pride she assumed a monarchy which does not belong to her office . . . How shall we accept decrees from her that have been issued without consulting us and even without our knowledge? If the Roman Pontiff, seated on the lofty throne of his glory wishes to thunder at us and, so to speak, hurl his mandates at us from on high, and if he wishes to judge us and even to rule us and our Churches, not by taking counsel with us but at his own arbitrary pleasure, what kind of brotherhood, or even what kind of parenthood can this be? We should be the slaves, not the sons, of such a Church, and the Roman See would not be the pious mother of sons but a hard and imperious mistress of slaves.”

Met. Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, The Orthodox Church, New Edition (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 50.

Selections from H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics:

“The West came to a quite different understanding of theology, and therefore to a quite different understanding of bioethics, especially Christian bioethics. It sought foremost to understand more through discursive reflection and less by noetic knowledge. This difference became accented as an innovative theology took a central place in the emerging self-consciousness and identity of the West. There are many historical roots of this difference. One of them is the influence of Blessed Augustine of Hippo (354-430), whose understandings of doctrine and whose aspirations to intellectual knowledge were not the same as those of the Church that produced the Councils. A few initial divergences grew within deviant approaches to the fast and to clerical celibacy. These, combined with a number of significant theological errors (e.g., claims of universal papal jurisdiction, of the filioque, of the Fall as bequeathing an original sin as a matter of personal guilt, or a precedence given to discursive over noetic theology out of failing to recognize that the Fall clouded nous, of the Fall as making the human will unable to turn initially on its own to God, of all grace as created, or purgatory, or indulgences, of the Immaculate Conception, and of papal infallibility), grew in force…. The West became theologically underdeveloped. Rather than encouraging union with God, it focused instead on developing the intellectual framework that became scholasticism. The West lost the central mystical focus core to traditional Christianity.”

“Changes in the meaning of theology in the West were tied to other developments. In the West, theological education moved in steps away from monasteries to the cathedral schools and then, in the 13^th century, to the universities. The sense of theology, theological education, and theological experience changed. Among other things, theology took on an academic character…. In this century of intellectual energy, theology came not longer to be regarded primarily as the fruit of holiness. Theology came instead to be understood more centrally as the fruit of scholarship.”

Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Lisse, TheNetherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000), 202-203.

The Origin of Protestantism

The above image points out that, in some sense, the Popes of Rome responsible for the Great Schism were the first Protestants in the West.

Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., At the Roots of Christian Bioethics:

“Where he goes wrong is where all Protestants as Protestants must go wrong—namely, in their appreciation of the Church. Or rather, to put the point a bit more stridently, Protestants cannot get the notion of Church right. Or to put the matter even more starkly, Protestants lack the meaning of Church around which early Christianity was built. Protestants in rightly protesting against the heresies of the medieval Western church (e.g., universal papal jurisdiction, purgatory, indulgences, etc.) thought that, in order to ground their critical position, they had to presume that one could start the Apostolic church anew in the 16^th century. So they made the Bible into the basis of the church, rather than recognizing the Church as having accepted and authorized the content of the Bible. After all, early creeds stressed belief in one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic Church, not belief in a particular Bible. Once everyone was left to read the Bible on his own, as the old saw goes, the result was that the Protestants traded having one man as pope for having every man as people. As a consequence, Western Christianity is scandalously fragmented due to attempts again and again to reform and restart Christianity anew on the basis of a new reading of the Bible. On the basis of the Bible alone and without continuity with the visible Church that is one with the Church of the Apostles, Protestantism has effected its own reductio through its constant fragmentation.

The difficulties with the Protestant project are in fact manifold: first, Christ promised to preserve His Church against the gates of hell (Matt 16:18), and God is not an underachiever. The Church He founded cannot cease to be. Second, as the Reformers were protesting against the church in Western Europe, the original Church was alive and well in Palestine, as well as elsewhere. Protestants did not need to try to establish the Church anew. Third, it is only within the theology of the unbroken Church embedded in right worship and right belief that one gets doctrinal points rightly. It is the Church, not the Bible outside of the Church, that supplies the privileged epistemological viewpoint for Christian theology….”

“Fourth, one does not have good grounds for regarding the reign of St. Constantine (A.D. c.274-337) and the establishment of Christianity as constituting a rupture in the history of Christianity….. Fifth, the Church had understood and still understands that the Church affirmed in the creeds as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church can only be recognized in that Church that has both a succession of bishops from the Apostles, along with the maintenance of Apostolic belief. The Church is an actual visible assembly in right worship and right belief. There is no invisible Church, although one should pray that many who are not now in the Church will be in the Church after the Judgment on the Last Day.”

Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “Rereading Rereading Engelhardt,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., ed. by Ana Smith Iltis and Mark J. Cherry (Salem, MA: Scrivener Press, 2010), 300-301.

The Rise of Secularism in the West

Selection from Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “Christian Bioethics after Christendom: Living in a Secular Fundamentalist Polity and Culture”:

“After the bloody religious wars of Western Europe, in particular after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the British Civil War (1642–51), Western culture came to deflate faith and embrace a robust account of secular discursive rationality. Reason, it was thought, would bring unity where faith had divided. In science, technology, and medicine, the turn to discursive reason, when combined with empirical observation, was widely successful, indeed transformative of Western Europe and eventually of the world. In the domain of philosophy, discursive rationality embraced a faith in reason as the master of religious faith, while faith became at most a propaedeutic to a morality grounded in reason. The view was that this commitment to rationality would unite all in the affirmation of a common morality. Prior to the French Revolution, the carnage of the Napoleonic wars, the slaughter associated with the Paris Commune, the first world war, and the millions killed by Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot, this new secular moral view was taken by many to promise an age not only of enlightenment but also of enduring peace. These hopes proved radically false, but nevertheless able to motivate masses of persons.

The secularization of culture and discourse in the West has involved not just the marginalization of Christianity, but the deflation and secularization of Western Christianity, along with its bioethics. Given the bond between faith and reason in much of Western Christianity, mainline Western Christianity was transformed by the philosophical rationality that it introduced into the roots of its theologies and its subsequent bioethics. Because Western Christian theologies incorporated philosophy at their core, as philosophy changed or at least the dominance of a particular philosophical vision changed, their theologies, moralities, and bioethics changed as well. One might think of how liberal Christianities have come to accept abortion, homosexual acts and liaisons, as well as a feminist recasting of the relationship of men and women as they incorporated the Enlightenment’s liberal-philosophical emphasis on individual autonomy and a sense of human dignity severed from a recognition of God. Persons qua persons came to be considered as free to choose their own reproductive and sexual life styles in being possessed of a dignity sui generis, that is, apart from God.”

Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “Christian Bioethics after Christendom: Living in a Secular Fundamentalist Polity and Culture,” 80-81, Christian Bioethics (Oxford University Press, 2011), 17(1), 71-72.

Selection from H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “The Culture Wars: Orthodox Christians in the Trenches”:

“Our contemporary culture wars are the consequence of the choices that produced Western heterodox Christianity, which then eventually led to the emergence of a post-Christian culture. If one were to identify one event in this complex history that represented the first major official turn in the West clearly in the wrong direction, it can be found after the third Mass in Rome on Christmas, 800. Surely there were already many wrongheaded, heretical changes in the West, namely, false teachings by Blessed Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430) and others, that pointed Western Christian culture in wrong directions. But on that Christmas Day, 800, a truly decisive event occurred that directed the culture of the West away from the united Christianity of the Fathers. Pope Leo III of Rome crowned as emperor King Charles of the Franks, although the Christian empire of the East, rooted in the conversion of St. Constantine the Great (A.D. 280-337), was still alive and well. This act was not merely a political act, but an ecclesiological manifesto. It implicitly asserted universal papal jurisdiction. It indirectly affirmed as well the West’s growing heretical misadventures with the filioque and its proclivity to changing traditional Christian fasts. The West turned away from regarding papal authority as the authority of a presiding bishop, as the authority of a first among equals, to a new doctrine, namely, one that falsely regarded the papacy as having universal jurisdiction. This development changed the meaning and character of the Western church. Ecclesiology is sufficient to define what a church is. In crowning Charles emperor, Pope Leo III created a political, cultural, religious, and moral identity that was in opposition to the political, cultural, religious, and moral identity of Orthodox Christianity, which was rooted in the Apostles and the Fathers. Pope Leo III began the creation of a new church.The new culture of the Carolingian renaissance was anchored i

In a novel account of the role of philosophy for theology, an account at odds with the Christianity of the Fathers. This new Western Christianity in the end became confident that, without an experience of God, and with the help of philosophy, it could think and reason its way to the existence and nature of God as well as to the character of human moral obligations. Moral obligations were approached through a Scholastic recasting of Stoic and Aristotelian concerns that produced the Western church’s account of natural law. This new culture aspired to lay out an account of morality and human flourishing through engaging a theology foundationally rooted in the capacities of the philosophy of the pagans, rather than in an epistemology rooted in right worship, right belief, and Orthodox Christian asceticism.

Because Orthodox Christianity is anchored in the experience of the uncreated energies of the fully transcendent God, as David Bradshaw a convert to Orthodoxy observes, Orthodox Christianity “has no concept of God. [Orthodox Christianity] views God not as an essence to be grasped intellectually, but as a personal reality known through His acts, and above all by oneself sharing in those acts.” Think about it: I do not have a concept of my wife. I experience my wife as a person, I do not know her as a concept. If my wife and I begin to treat each other as concepts, as conclusions to be proven by arguments, rather than as persons to be experienced, our whole relationship with each other will have radically changed. For instance, if I come home from one of my many trips and my wife tells me she has five proofs for my existence, either she has gone crazy or she is telling me that we need a better relationship.

When the West took the philosophical turn to proving the existence of God rather than experiencing the existence of God, its very understanding of God began was recast. The West in the process fashioned an understanding of God that was grounded as much in philosophy as in theology. Indeed, theology in the strict sense ceased to be set within a life of asceticism and rightly-directed life of prayer leading to union with God. Theology instead became primarily an academic discipline. The result was that the god of the West ceased to be the living God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. In a series of steps through the High Middle Ages, the Second Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, the god of the West came to be an intellectual construct. In this light, one can understand how everything went wrong. Looking back from a culture that has become post-Christian, we can with David Bradshaw now ask “whether the God Who has been the subject of so much strife and contention throughout western history was ever anything more than an idol.”

The developments that led to this point are complex. Here I can only gesture to some of the more important. First, the West in the Middle Ages came to have as much faith in reason, as faith in the transforming and noetically informing power of God’s energies, God’s grace. As a consequence, philosophically-directed academic reflection began to develop the many new dogmas that characterize Roman Catholicism, such as purgatory, indulgences, and finally much later the novel teaching of the immaculate conception. These and other dogmatic changes, when combined with claims of universal jurisdiction and the imposition of clerical celibacy, produced a church radically apart from the mind of the Fathers.

Such developments finally set loose the energies of a revolution against the Western Christian medieval edifice, which revolution became the Protestant Reformation. When the Protestants rightly reacted against the Roman Catholic heresies of universal papal jurisdiction, purgatory, and indulgences, as well as the false imposition of clerical celibacy, the political and social unity of the empire established with Charles the Great in 800, and re-established with the coronation of Otto the Great by Pope John XII on the second of February, 962, fragmented in bloody wars. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and the British Civil War (1642-1649) provoked complex intellectual reactions against faith in general, and Christianity in particular. The result was the Western European Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, a period one can think of as spanning from the Great and Glorious and Bloodless Revolution in England (1688) to the French Revolution (1789), was a multi-dimensional phenomenon marked not only by anti-clericism and by anti-Christian sentiments voiced by persons such as David Hume (1711-1776). There was an affirmation as well of a faith in reason, rather than in faith. It was faith in faith, so many Enlightenment figures held, that had led to the bloody slaughter of the Thirty Years’ War and the British Civil War. Faith in reason, so they thought, would lead to progress, liberation, and enlightenment, all without the bloodshed of the past. Of course, most did not at all foresee that faith in reason would lead not just to the bloody terror of the French Revolution, but even worse to the October Revolution and then to Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot, who would kill tens of millions. ”

Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “The Culture Wars: Orthodox Christians in the Trenches,” available on the website of St. George Orthodox Church, Kearney, NE: http://www.saintgeorgekearney.com/load.php?pageid=35