East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church from Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (History of the Christian Church) by Henry Chadwick

East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church from Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (History of the Christian Church) Reviews

• 
  Vagabond of Letters, DLitt

  6/10
  
  Five stars for information, 4.5 for even-handedness, 2 for writing, 1 for organization and ending: the brief may just have been too big to fit in to 300 pages, but the task is in no way helped by Chadwick's scattered and sometimes annalistic style.
  
  The history drops off at Florence with the words 'The Roman Curia would then treat them as Uniates' (final sentence in the book, and indicative of its lack of organization or narrative sense).
  
  The main thrust of the book is that of geography turned in to theology (denounced by Plested in his 'Orthodox Readings of Aquinas') - here, the case of the centripetal West and centrifugal East. Thus Chadwick argues:
  
  In the West: the fall of empire leading to the rise of the Church as an autonomous and overarching political authority, consisting of a slow trend towards centralization under the autocratic rule (and great temporal influence) of the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Old Rome, founded on the Western political situation and the Donation, and buttressed by centuries of decretals and canon law and his reception at various councils, especially in the Tome of Leo, and the tendency of some (like Cyril and others) to appeal to Rome as a court of last resort.
  
  In the East, the existence but slow decay of empire; Imperial meddling in ecclesiastical policies and debates, and a sort of trend towards the devolution of power on several sees (at first, three of the patriarchates falling to the Hagarist armies by 700), the Constantinopolitan one usually having the Imperial backing (but sometimes not: sometimes the Pope allied with the Byzantine emperor against the Patriarch, sometimes the Pope and Patriarch allied against the emperor). In short, the existence of empire in the East and caesaropapism kept the church in the East from gathering to itself the autonomous exercise of temporal political power and even complete autonomy in spiritual matters taken for granted by the Patriarchs of the West, who were the Popes of Rome and the Princes of the Papal States.
  
  This created two divergent church-political cultures, inversely mirroring their respective secular-political ones.
  
  Now the schism: The Pope, used to autonomy and political authority (not to mention growing ecclesiastical autocracy) in the West, tried to extend his religious authority to the East (where caesaropapism and figurehead patriarchs of Constantinople meant this also was meddling in political authority); the emperor of Byzantium, used to imperium in the East, tried to extend his political authority to the West and 'regain the Western provinces' on several occasions. Since the Pope was also a prince and directly ruled many of these lands, and was used to spiritual and political autonomy, the Byzantine emperors' meddling in Western politics also meddled in religious authority.
  
  Add to this a farce of errors with councils attempting to impose Eastern usages on the West and vice versa; several rounds of mutual excommunications; a lack of shared language and intercourse causing Western and Eastern religious usages to progressively diverge along with culture and national feeling; and at last a crusade which sacked Constantinople in 1204 and enforced the Latin usages in the Byzantine capital, and the schism - Chadwick admirably points this out, that the schism was a process, not an event: as known to every student of church history, the date of 1054 is a meaningless component of hagiographies and demonologies - which was 500 years in the making (from before the time of Leo the Isaurian) was consummated irreperably (though the hierarchies didn't acknowledge this in full until the failure of the Union of Brest/the Unia and the failure of the council of Basel-Florence-Ferrara): a schism which was political more than theological. A schism based in a clash of imperial politics with Petrine supremacy, a clash of a secular/caesaropapist Eastern empire with the temporal and political authority of the Pope in the regions of the former Western empire, with azymes, filioque, icons and statuary, epiclesis, etc. functioning more as pretexts, and with theological differences (in theology as opposed to customary usage) purposefully exaggerated for political purposes by both sides.
  
  Note:
  
  If you can't at least identify the main Western and all of the Alexandrine and Cappadocian fathers, trends in early theology, the organization, major events in, and trends in late Roman (ca 300 to 450) and Byzantine (ca 640-1450) imperial and military politics (cf Komnena, Procopius), the first seven councils (especially the Trinitarian and Christological ones), characters of the Fourth Crusade and its impact on Byzantium, Gennadius Scholarius, Demetrius Cydones, John Cantacuzene, the Photian schism, its personalities and causes, the Acacian schism, the controversies of the icons, azymes, and filioque - if these things and men are foreign to you, skip this for now and go read John Julian Norwich, Leo Donald Davis, the 2nd through 3rd volumes of Jaroslav Pelikan, Duchesne, and the 3rd volume of Runciman's history of the fourth crusade first.
  
  The thesis of this book is dependent on that history, and is continually cited by Chadwick - who, however, never gives more than a few-sentence precis of the events: the reader must already understand them, for Chadwick chains them together in new ways. The development of canon law, the decretals, Gelasius, etc. is elucidated here so you don't need to know much more about canon law than what it is; many but not all of the relevant political developments are also treated, though with a great variation of depth (limited by compressing 1500 years in to 300 pages), so you don't need to be an expert in medieval, papal, and Byzantine politics to follow the argument. Nevertheless, caveat lector.
• 
  Katie

  3.5 stars
  
  This book was both fascinating and poorly presented. I'd like to have given it more stars: it's a really interesting topic, and Henry Chadwick clearly cares about it. But it can be immensely frustrating in its organization and I'm still rather confused about who its audience is supposed to be. On one hand it serves as an overview, covering a solid 1500 years of history in about 270 pages. But at the same time it can be immensely detailed, and assumes the reader has a very broad range of knowledge about early medieval politics, ecclesiastical structure, and especially the intricacies of early Trinitarian and Christological heresies. It's an understandably hard balance to hit - you want a book like this to be accessible, but not talk down to people - but Chadwick's work is unnecessarily confusing at points, especially near the beginning. The chapters are very short, but will jump around seemingly at random.
  
  That said, if you can make it through the first 40-50 pages, you don't mind slow and careful reading, and you start to adapt yourself to Chadwick's style, its a really interesting subject to dive into. The split between the eastern and western Churches manages to seem both inevitable and absolutely ridiculous: clerics argue for literally hundreds of years about whether Eucharistic bread should be leavened or unleavened, and whether a single word should be added to the profession of the faith (even when most clerics seemed to agree that when you accounted for linguistic and exegetical differences, they were both pretty much arguing the same thing anyways). It can seem like nit-picking taken to extreme and kind of mind-boggling lengths.
  
  But the best part of Chadwick's book - moreso than all the quick, dense, detailings of individual events like the Acacian Schism, the Three Chapters Controversy, or the Photian Schism - is his emphasis on how all of these problems stemmed from fundamentally different views of ecclesiology that grew up in the east and the west. Where the Roman pontiffs increasingly trended towards a centralized, monarchical church, based in part off of the forged Donation of Constantine and founded on the ultimate authority of the Pope as the successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, the eastern church saw the ultimate authority of the church resting in a Pentarchy of patriarchs: Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with Rome being simply the first among equals. It was a deep difference, and unsurprisingly resulted in almost constant sniping between the two sides. It's hard to argue effectively when no one is sure where authority ultimately lies. It wasn't until the high to later middle ages, though, that a split became permanent. By that point it wasn't so much doctrinal differences as centuries of mounting resentment and distrust, exemplified best by the lingering anger in the east over the 1204 sack of Constantinople by western crusading armies (oops).
  
  It's a hopeful book, and Chadwick is an ecumenist at heart who is nearly always very, very fair to both sides. And because of that it's kind of a lovely work and overall I have fond feelings for it. I just wish it was written / organized in a more accessible and helpful way.
• 
  Adam DeVille, Ph.D.

  Not an easy read for those without extensive background in doctrine and history, but this is one of the finest, most sober, balanced, and objective treatments of the East-West split. Highly recommended.
• 
  Maximilian Nightingale

  An excellent treatment of the conflict! It starts from the beginning and goes to the fall of Constantinople (1453), and treats with skill the theological, cultural and other issues that historically placed a wedge between the East and West. Special detail is put into the Photius controversy (9th century) and the earliest conflicts are considered with attention to how they will affect future conflicts. The book constantly surprises by how close the sides were when otherwise divided, but also how divided when apparently united. If the book seems repetitive at parts, this is because many issues reappear over the centuries. The author is an Anglican, and so while interested in the unity of Christians, is sufficiently distant from either side of this conflict so as to present the sides without an obvious preference. Similar to his description of Anselm at the Council of Bari in 1099, who "seemed like a pope from another world."
• 
  Tyson Guthrie

  Chadwick uses the East-West division as a cautionary tale, urging a tolerant ecumenism on his contemporary readers. As such he is wont to downplay doctrinal distinctions between the East and the West. For example, the Filioque appears almost as an afterthought, used by the Orthodox to justify an otherwise petty squabble.