Church History
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EssentialChurch HistoryGreat Schism (1054)The division between the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Churches of the East, dated to 1054 but made over centuries. In July of that year Cardinal Humbert laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and a synod in Constantinople anathematised the legates in turn. The quarrel beneath was older: the Filioque added to the Creed in the West, the claim of the Roman see to jurisdiction over the whole Church rather than a primacy of honour among the patriarchs, and differences of practice such as the unleavened bread. What made the schism real in the lives of the faithful was the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204 and set a Latin patriarch in it. The unions proclaimed at Lyons in 1274 and at Florence in 1439 were refused by the Orthodox people, and St Mark of Ephesus would not sign. In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras removed the anathemas of 1054 from memory; communion was not restored, because the questions that caused it remain.EssentialChurch HistoryPentecost & the Birth of the ChurchFifty days after the Resurrection, on the Jewish feast of Weeks, the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles in Jerusalem as a rushing wind and tongues of fire, and they spoke so that pilgrims from every nation heard them in their own language. The Church reads it as Babel undone: when the Most High confused the tongues He divided the nations, sings the kontakion of the feast, but when He distributed the tongues of fire He called all to unity. St Peter preached the prophecy of Joel fulfilled, and about three thousand were baptised that day. Acts describes the community that followed in one sentence the Church has never stopped quoting: they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers. In the icon the apostles sit in a half-circle, St Paul among them though he was not yet called, and beneath them in a dark arch sits an old king holding twelve scrolls: the world, waiting to be told.EssentialChurch HistoryThe Baptism of Rus (988)Prince Vladimir of Kiev, a pagan with a reputation the chronicles do not soften, sent men to examine the faiths. The account they brought back from the Great Church at Constantinople is the one everyone remembers: they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth, for on earth there is no such beauty, and they could not describe it, they only knew that God dwells there among men. He was baptised at Cherson, married the emperor’s sister, threw the idols into the Dnieper and had Kiev baptised in it. What followed was not a Greek colony: Slavonic letters were already made, so the Church there read and sang in its own tongue from the beginning, which is why Orthodoxy took root in Rus as something native.ImportantChurch HistoryApostolic Age (30-100 AD)The first Christian generation, from Pentecost to the death of St John, the last of the Twelve, around the end of the first century. In it the Gospel went from Jerusalem to Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians, and to Rome; the Council of Jerusalem decided around 49 that Gentiles need not be circumcised; St Paul made his journeys and wrote his letters; St James the son of Zebedee, St James the brother of the Lord, St Peter and St Paul were martyred; and in 70 the Temple was destroyed. By the end of it the New Testament had been written, the Eucharist was kept on the first day of the week, and the Church was ordered as it still is. St Clement of Rome, writing around 96, says the apostles appointed bishops and deacons and provided that others should succeed them, and a decade later St Ignatius of Antioch writes of the bishop, the presbyters and the deacons in every church, and of nothing done without the bishop.ImportantChurch HistoryEdict of Milan (313 AD)The agreement reached at Milan in 313 between Constantine, emperor in the West, and Licinius, in the East, to grant Christians and everyone else the freedom to worship as they chose, and to give back the churches, cemeteries and property that had been seized. It was not strictly an edict, and it was not issued at Milan: the text survives as a letter Licinius sent to the governors from Nicomedia, preserved by Lactantius and by Eusebius. Galerius had called off the persecution by an edict of toleration in 311, grudgingly, on his deathbed, and Maximinus Daia took it up again in the East. What was new in 313 was that freedom was given not grudgingly but as policy, and to everyone. Within a lifetime the Church went from the arena to the councils of the empire, with all that the change brought, for good and for ill.ImportantChurch HistoryEmperor Constantine the GreatThe first Roman emperor to be a Christian, and honoured by the Church with his mother Helen as Equal-to-the-Apostles on 21 May. Proclaimed at York in 306, he defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312 after the sign of the cross was shown to him with the words, in this sign conquer, as Eusebius heard it from his own lips. In 313 he and Licinius gave the Church its freedom, in 325 he summoned the bishops to Nicaea, and in 330 he dedicated Constantinople, the New Rome, which would be the heart of Orthodox Christianity for eleven centuries. The Church does not hide what else is true: in 326 he had his son Crispus and his wife Fausta put to death, and he was baptised only as he was dying, in 337, by Eusebius of Nicomedia, a friend of Arius. Deathbed baptism was common then, and the Church honours him for the baptism that washed away what came before and for what he did for the Church, not as a model of private life.ImportantChurch HistoryEra of Persecutions (64-313 AD)The two and a half centuries between Nero and Constantine in which to be a Christian was a crime that could cost a life. It came in waves rather than without pause: under Nero, who blamed the Christians for the fire of Rome in 64 and under whom Sts Peter and Paul died; under Trajan, who ruled that Christians were not to be hunted but were to die if accused and unwilling to sacrifice; under Decius in 250, who demanded a certificate of sacrifice from everyone; and last and worst under Diocletian, from 303, whose persecution lasted in the East until 313. Most of the great martyrs of the calendar are from these years. The Church learned then what it has kept: that a martyr’s death is his birthday, kept as a feast; that his bones are, as the Smyrnaeans wrote of St Polycarp’s, more precious than jewels; and that the Eucharist is offered over them, which is why every altar still holds relics. The blood of the Christians is seed, wrote Tertullian, and the growth of the Church under the sword bore him out.ImportantChurch HistoryFall of Constantinople (1453)The capture of the city by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II on Tuesday 29 May 1453, after a siege of seven weeks, which ended the Roman empire in the East. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting at the walls, and his body was never identified. On the night before, Greeks and Latins prayed together in Hagia Sophia, which most of the people had shunned since the union of Florence was proclaimed there the December before. The city was sacked, and the Great Church became a mosque. Mehmed then made St Mark of Ephesus’ disciple Gennadios Scholarios, an opponent of the union, patriarch in 1454 and head of all the Orthodox of the empire, so the Patriarchate survived as the Church of a subject people for nearly five centuries. Greeks still count Tuesday an unlucky day. Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934 and a mosque again in 2020.ImportantChurch HistoryHesychast Controversy (14th c.)The dispute of the 1330s to the 1350s over the prayer of the monks of Athos and the light they said they saw. Barlaam of Calabria, a learned Greek from Italy, mocked their bodily method and argued that no created eye could see God, so the light must be a created thing. St Gregory Palamas answered in the Triads with the distinction the Fathers had assumed and he made explicit: God is unknowable in His essence and truly known in His uncreated energies, and the light of Tabor was the glory of God Himself. The monks of Athos signed the Hagiorite Tome in his support. A council in 1341 condemned Barlaam, who left for Italy and became a Latin bishop; the quarrel then became entangled with a civil war, and Palamas spent years in prison before the councils of 1347 and 1351 vindicated him and condemned Akindynos and Gregoras. The decisions entered the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, and the Church keeps St Gregory on the Second Sunday of Lent.ImportantChurch HistorySoviet Persecution of the ChurchThe seventy years in which the Soviet state set out to end religion in Russia, and came close. From 1918 the Church lost its property and legal existence; in 1922 the confiscation of church valuables, under the pretext of famine relief, brought the first mass trials and executions, beginning at Shuya; Patriarch Tikhon was imprisoned and the state backed the Renovationist schism against him. In 1927 Metropolitan Sergius declared the Church loyal to the Soviet state, a step that divided the faithful then and is argued over still. The Great Terror of 1937 and 1938 was the worst of it: of some fifty-four thousand parish churches open in 1917, a few hundred were open by 1939. Tens of thousands of clergy, monks and nuns were shot or died in the camps, and the Russian Church has glorified more than a thousand of them by name as the New Martyrs and Confessors. Stalin allowed a revival in wartime, in 1943, Khrushchev closed half the churches again, and only the millennium of 1988 brought freedom.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Byzantine Empire & OrthodoxyThe Roman empire in the East, from the dedication of Constantinople in 330 to its fall in 1453, whose people never called themselves anything but Romans. It was the world in which Orthodoxy took its shape: the emperors summoned the Ecumenical Councils, Justinian built Hagia Sophia and set out in his sixth Novel the ideal of a symphony between the priesthood and the empire, two gifts of God from one source, each with its own work. The ideal was often betrayed, by iconoclast emperors and by emperors who forced unions on the Church, and the Church more than once resisted the throne. The empire sent Sts Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs, and the rite of its Great Church became the rite of the whole Orthodox world. Its end did not end its Church: under the Ottomans and in the Slavic lands, it lived on in what has been called Byzantium after Byzantium.ImportantChurch HistoryThe New Martyrs and Confessors of RussiaThe Russian Church lost more people to the twentieth century than the whole Roman Empire took in three hundred years. Bishops, priests, monastics and laity were shot or worked to death from 1918 onward, with the peaks in 1922, 1929 and above all 1937, when more than a hundred thousand were arrested on religious charges and tens of thousands shot; at Butovo outside Moscow alone the firing lists name over a thousand killed for the faith. In 2000 the Council of Bishops in Moscow glorified the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, naming over a thousand and leaving the rest known to God. The imperial family was glorified in the same act as passion-bearers, a distinct Russian category for those killed without resistance, having been glorified as martyrs by the Church Abroad in 1981.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Russian Church: A Thousand YearsA thousand years in outline. The Church of Rus was born at Kiev in 988 under a metropolitan sent from Constantinople, and survived the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth, St Sergius of Radonezh and his disciples filled the northern forests with monasteries. When the Greeks accepted union with Rome at Florence, Moscow refused it and in 1448 chose its own metropolitan, and in 1589 the Patriarch of Constantinople made Moscow a patriarchate. Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the books to the Greek model split off the Old Believers in the 1660s; in 1721 Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate and put the Church under a Holy Synod and a lay procurator. The great council of 1917 restored the patriarchate and elected St Tikhon in the same weeks the Bolsheviks took power, and the Church then went through the worst persecution in its history. Freed in 1988, it rebuilt at a speed no one foresaw, and it is by far the largest of the Orthodox Churches.ImportantChurch HistoryCouncil of Florence (1438-1439)A failed attempt at reunifying Eastern and Western Christianity. Under pressure from the Ottoman threat, the Byzantine Emperor and most Eastern bishops signed a decree of union accepting papal primacy and the Filioque. Of the Greek bishops present, only St. Mark of Ephesus refused to sign. The union was rejected by the Orthodox faithful and most Eastern clergy upon returning home.ImportantChurch HistoryFourth Crusade & Sack of Constantinople (1204)Western Crusaders diverted to Constantinople and sacked the Christian capital for three days: looting churches, desecrating altars, melting sacred vessels, and establishing a Latin Empire (1204-1261). This devastation deepened the East-West schism irreparably. Many Orthodox consider 1204 more historically decisive than 1054. Countless relics and artworks were stolen.ImportantChurch HistoryOrthodoxy Under Ottoman RuleThe four centuries and more in which the Orthodox of the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Middle East lived under the Ottoman Sultans, from the fall of Constantinople until the Balkan nations won their freedom one by one, through the nineteenth century and the Balkan wars of 1912. The Sultan made the Ecumenical Patriarch head of all the Orthodox of the empire, the Rum millet, answerable for them in civil matters as well as spiritual, which gave the Church both a protected place and a political burden: patriarchs were deposed at will, and Gregory V was hanged in 1821. Christians paid heavier taxes, could not bear arms, and in the Balkans gave up boys to the child levy. Those who were killed for refusing Islam, or for returning to Christ after denying Him, are the Neomartyrs. The Church kept the faith, the language and the schools, and at its end the Kollyvades, St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth among them, gave it the Philokalia.ImportantChurch HistoryThe New Martyrs under the OttomansBetween the fall of Constantinople and Greek independence, several hundred Christians were put to death for the faith under Ottoman rule, and the Church calls them the New Martyrs to distinguish them from the martyrs of the first three centuries without ranking them below. Many were people who had converted to Islam, often as children or under duress, and then returned to Christ publicly knowing what the law prescribed for it. St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Macarius of Corinth collected their accounts in the New Martyrologion of 1799, partly to answer Western writers who said the Greek Church was dead. The collecting was itself an act of resistance.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Old Believer SchismPatriarch Nikon set out in 1653 to correct the Russian books and usages against the contemporary Greek ones: three fingers for the cross instead of two, three alleluias instead of two, a different spelling of the Saviour’s name, a procession the other way round the church. The council of 1666 and 1667 approved the changes and anathematised those who kept the old rites, and a large part of the Russian people would not. The state enforced it. The Archpriest Avvakum was burned in 1682, communities burned themselves rather than submit, and the schism has lasted to this day. In 1971 the Local Council of the Russian Church lifted the anathemas and declared the old rites equally honourable, which is an admission that what was imposed by force had not needed imposing at all.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Union of Brest (1596)Most of the Orthodox bishops of the metropolitanate of Kiev, then inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and under heavy pressure, submitted to Rome at Brest while keeping the Byzantine rite, married clergy and Slavonic services. Two bishops refused, and with them the brotherhoods, most of the monasteries and a great part of the laity, who were left without a hierarchy until one was restored in secret in 1620. The result was two churches using the same rite in the same towns, and four centuries of bitterness. The Orthodox objection has never been to the rite but to the method: a communion joined at the top, by the bishops, over the people, in a jurisdiction where the state rewarded it.Church HistoryGreek Independence & Church AutocephalyThe war the Greeks began in 1821 against Ottoman rule, which ended in an independent kingdom by 1830. The Church was in it from the first: the nation remembers Metropolitan Germanos of Patras raising the banner of the Cross at Agia Lavra on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, and the day is still kept as both, though historians argue over the details. In Constantinople Patriarch Gregory V was hanged from the gate of the Patriarchate that Easter in reprisal. The new state, under a Bavarian regency, declared its Church independent of Constantinople by its own act in 1833, on the model of the Russian Synod, and the rift was healed only when the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly by its Tomos of 1850.Church HistoryHoly & Great Council (Crete, 2016)Planned as the first pan-Orthodox council in over a millennium, held in Crete in June 2016. Addressed: the Orthodox diaspora, autonomy, the relationship with other Christians, fasting, marriage, and the mission of the Church. Four autocephalous churches (Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch) did not attend, limiting its authority.Church HistoryThe Martyrs of Persia (4th-5th c.)When Constantine made the Roman empire Christian, the Christians of the Persian empire, many of them in Mesopotamia along the old frontier, became suspect to their own king as friends of Rome, and Constantine’s own letter to Shapur II commending them to his care did them no good. From about 340 until his death in 379 Shapur waged the longest persecution of the early Church. Symeon bar Sabbae, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, was put to death with a hundred of his clergy, and Sozomen, writing a century later, knew the names of sixteen thousand martyrs and knew there were more. Persecution returned under Yazdegerd I and Bahram V in the 420s, when James, a courtier who had denied Christ and repented, was cut apart limb by limb. The Orthodox Church keeps these martyrs through the year, beside those of Rome.Church HistoryThe Oriental Orthodox ChurchesThe Coptic, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara churches, which separated from the Orthodox Church over the Council of Chalcedon in 451. They confess one nature of the incarnate Word and refuse Chalcedon's "in two natures". They receive the first three Ecumenical Councils and reject the fourth and the three after it, and the Coptic and Syriac churches venerate as saints Dioscorus of Alexandria, whom Chalcedon deposed, and Severus of Antioch, whom the Sixth Ecumenical Council named beside Apollinaris as impious. The Orthodox Church holds Chalcedon and the councils after it as binding as the first three, and counts these churches as heterodox: St. John of Damascus lists them among the heresies, as Monophysites who cut themselves off from the Orthodox Church on the pretext of Chalcedon, orthodox in all else. The joint commission of the theological dialogue, meeting between 1989 and 1993, found the two christologies agreed in substance, but the Orthodox Church as a whole has never received its statements: the Sacred Community of Mount Athos rejected them, and communion has not been restored.Church HistoryThe Three Chapters ControversyThree items condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553: the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against St. Cyril, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Mari the Persian. All three had been left standing at Chalcedon, and that is what made the question hard: condemning them looked like a retreat from Chalcedon, and leaving them looked like a licence to read Chalcedon as Nestorius would. Justinian condemned them by edict in 544 and the council confirmed it, holding that Chalcedon is to be read through St. Cyril and not beside him. The Latin West took the condemnation as an attack on Chalcedon itself, and the sees of Milan and Aquileia broke communion with Rome over it, Aquileia for more than a century.