a layman's thoughts ~ More on the Old Testament and Anthropomorphism and God

Glory to God


   I have thought so much about the Old Testament and how tough it sounds, especially to our "new" world sentiments today. Many have thought about this, many have quoted about it both believer and non-believers. Statements from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins come to mind about God being "petty" and an "Ego-Maniac." Others say how could this god be the same God that we see walking around in the New Testament. These are tough questions. But as Fr. Photios once told me... there is no way to understand the Old Testament without the New Testament. Or the New without the Old. The books come together for a reason as one whole revelation.

    In reading the Old Testament we see God as different, sterner more like a totalitarian dictator raising-up fear and trembling. Then we see God walking the earth in the Person of Christ and we see acts of mercy and love unparalleled throughout history. Who is God exactly? Let's attempt to answer this a bit.

   God is spirit. God is love. God is never angry for that would change love into anger and God does not change. God is not jealous for that would change love into jealousy. God does not change. What should God be angry about? Does he lack anything? Does He need anything. Is he lonely that He needs man's love that He should be jealous? Remember that God is love and love by itself is in need of nothing. Love casts away fear. The Godhead is complete in a communion of love for eternity. The Godhead needs nothing. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father; The Father loves the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loves the Father; The Son loves the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loves the Son. God is and stands in need or in fear of nothing, no thing, no creature, etc.

   With this understanding comes the teaching style of the Old Testament. The Old Testament does not describe God nor cannot it describe God with human terms. The terms are used to teach, to teach in a human way or even how man sees God, but not how God REALLY IS. For there is no man-made word in the universe that can capture God, except to that which the Spirit can teach intuitively, at the nous level or through experience--- theosis. So if God is complete how could He be jealous? If God is love how can He get angry? Is God like man that He has these emotions? Love and jealousy in the same being is conflict. Love and justice in the same being is conflict, two opposite poles. Surely, is it wise to say these things about God? I think definitely not. If we make God in our image, we make God into an idol or mythology like Zeus, Saturn or the many other gods of man's imagination who were petty or more like man than divine.

   Let's step back in trying to rationalize God, reason Him out, or try to know Him from the Old Testament or from any man made words. Let's instead see Him in the eyes of the Apostles who walked with Him. Even here we can't fully know the divine, but we get a glimpse of what He is like as He walked among us. Only through experience can we know God via the nous (our heart), God's Uncreated energies. Any intellectual way or literal way will be anthropomorphic at best. God can share His 'energies' with whom He pleases at any time, The "Spirit blows where it wills." This is not by man's power or intellectual abilities (his reasoning faculties aimed at understanding God by letters or imagination) but by God's good pleasure. "Not of the letter but of the Spirit.1"

   So God is spirit and is known in spirit. Being there is no word or set of man-made words that can describe God in anyway. We are left to interpret those Old Testament words a bit differently, to see them as didactic, a teaching instrument that aims at a purpose for man so he may begin to know God more fully, but never to derive from the words or manner of words anything but a God of love. Never to let the words shape any framework for God's nature but only to lead men to Him in the way the Old Testament person could understand: remember this is not the words we use today in our world, but it was the choice of the people then and we have to understand those words set within that time-period in history, a warlike world of warrior gods made so by their victories in battle, the crushing of their enemies. Remember in your studies of the Old Testament who the audience was for these words and adjust accordingly. And remember that God transcends any human concept or lexicon of Him, he simply cannot be contained in any earthly form of expression, nor will it ever satisfy. He could not be contained in all the books of the universe even if every word in those books was specifically about Him.


1    (2 Corinthians 3:4-6New King James Version (NKJV))
⁴ And we have such trust through Christ toward God. ⁵ Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, ⁶ who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit;^[a] for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

  
However, when it comes to dealings with mankind and the creation, God does in fact act in very real terms and not just words or metaphor. Man feels God's love or God's anger in real terms but in the Godhead these realities of anger and jealousy do not exist. In the world of man and creation, they are real things. We must be clear that these are not just ways of speaking. We must also not over-emphasize one point of view and error in making fairy-tales of other realities. We can be too one-sided and affirming that one side at the expense of the affirmation of other things. In other words that other affirmation needs also to be affirmed so we do not fall to error as Church history has shown. Man has felt God's anger. It was real. But we must remember that the wrath of God is always for the purpose of correction, advancement in virtue and the goal of man becoming like-God unto eternal life and never for madness or purposeless vengeance. We would say the same to our earthly children about making your earthly father angry, which is true, you can change the state of your earthly father from peace to anger. Here the adjective modifies the noun; however, with God, there is no man-made adjective than can modify God who IS and always will be. But for the sake of pedagogy and the teacher/student dynamic and the history of teaching mankind, God condescends Himself to be spoken of in "human terms" --- but the words are exhausted rather quickly attempting to ascend that which is not ascendable.

...Since at least the time of Anselm's Cur deus homo, Western Christianity has been saddled with the notion that man's sin somehow affects God—it insults His infinite honor and calls forth His wrath. Such anthropomorphic notions are unacceptable to Orthodox theology, however, because they violate the first principle of theology, namely that there is no analogy of being between God and man. God is impassible and unchangeable. He has no pride to wound. Sin, therefore, does not affect God's ability to relate to man (as if God were an upper caste Hindu prevented from coming into contact with an Untouchable); it affects man's ability to relate to God.

the above posted on this blog:
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7389188445839022522#editor/target=post;postID=5390527568632566986;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=20;src=link



The law of non-contradiction by Aristotle does not apply to God, to Father, Son and Holy Spirit being One (unity) and plural (diverse). It has no meaning there. God appears to the creation in what would only appear in contradiction. We must remember that God is beyond all definitions and beyond categorization.

... and the Pseudo-Areopagite, St. Dionysius, in his Mystical Theology, would even say that there is real differentiation in the Godhead itself. On the one hand, God is beyond all change and is perfectly one, but the one is perfectly plural and the plurality is perfectly one. The many is real and the one is real, and in God those contradictions in created order are overcome, because God is not a creature and He is completely different.

We have to affirm both things. On one hand, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the great theologians of our time, quoting Cardinal Newman, a Roman Catholic, said, “Theology is a saying and an unsaying in a positive effect.” You say one thing, and then you negate it by saying something else, and both are true in different contexts.

It is almost like in modern science, when people ask, “Is electricity a wave, or is it a particle?” Well, it is both. Sometimes it is better to speak about it as a wave, and that is truer to what you are trying to talk about, and other times it is better to speak about it as a particle, because it is true to what you are trying to talk about. If you are trying to talk about God in God’s self, then you use all the super-duper-duper apophatic language. God is beyond everything transcendent, unknowable, inconceivable, ineffable, supra-non-knowable, and that is true. But when God acts, God speaks, God creates, God relates to creation, then you have to say that He really acts in such a away that His actions are real. God really does get angry. God really does forgive. God really does show mercy.

quoted from:
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_wrath_of_god_-_part_2

online source of quote:
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_6


moreover from Thomas Hopko on The Wrath of God part II:
Source:
radio and transcript:
http://ww w.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_wrath_of_god_-_part_2

transcript:

We reflected upon the wrath of God, and we said that the wrath of God is a reality, that the scripture is very clear that God gets angry with us, His wrath is upon us, He is not pleased with us, and He expresses that wrath upon us for the sake of our salvation, for the sake of our good. We said that the wrath of God proceeds from His very love, that God is love, that God loves us, and when you love someone and they do stupid things and foolish things and act wickedly, then it is very appropriate to be angry.
So we have in Scripture, again and again—anyone who would read the Bible cannot fail to see—the wrath of God. In fact, there are two words for it that are used in Scripture. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, you have two Greek words, one is orgi and the other is thymos.
Orgi simply means anger, or wrath. Thymos is a word that translates as wrath or anger, but actually, in Platonic literature, that was a quality of human beings called the irascible, the zealous, the fiery, that there is a kind of fiery element, a thymos that is within human beings, and in the Scripture this is applied to God himself, that God has this kind of fiery, we might even say, impassioned, relationship to us that is expressed in wrath, or in anger, or in delight, or in pleasure. These things are spoken about in the bible and they are spoken about very realistically.
Some of the folks who have emailed me about what I had to say about the wrath of God on the radio found some objections to it, particularly in some of the Church Fathers, where you have the teaching that anger and wrath do not really belong to Divinity, as such, that God is perfect, that God is unmoved, that God is impassable, that God cannot be acted upon, and that certainly within the Divinity itself, these kind of qualities have no meaning whatsoever. In fact, they simply do not exist. There is a sense in which that is definitely true, and I think that if we took the Bible and how the Church Fathers interpret the Bible, we would see that within Divinity itself, within the Godhead, within the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is no anger, there is no wrath, there is no passion, there are no emotions in a human sense.
But we have to be very careful here, because there is one sense, where folks would say that none of these things exist in God and they are not real for God at all, and they are not even real when God seems to show them to us. They base their idea on a Platonistic or Hellenistic view that a static, impassable, unchangeable, uncaused, pure being is perfection, and is perfection even for God, so that God then, is supreme being, that God is perfectly One, that God is unmoved, that God is impassable, and that comes from the Hellenistic tradition, reflecting philosophically on things, and coming to the conclusion that the perfect being would be immutable, impassable, unchanging, perfectly one, and this led to some very bad results for Christianity.
Namely, it led some people to claim that in the Trinity itself, in the Godhead itself, there is only the one God, and even Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are somehow ways of speaking about the one God who is perfectly one in Himself, that there is only relationship in God, but that the unity of God is so perfectly one that, even St. Augustine said in his book, De Trinitate that we only speak of three persons in the Godhead conventionally. We only speak about that because of the ways revelation speaks to us, but that God, in Himself, is not Trinity at all, He is perfectly one, and that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three modal expressions of the one God who is perfectly, arithmetically one, and so on.
Another bad result of this Hellenistic tradition was to just take all the elements of creation and to take being as opposed to becoming, unity as opposed to multiplicity, unchanging as opposed to change, immutable as opposed to mutable, and then saying God is the being, the one, the unchangeable, the immutable, the impassable, and that is divine perfection.
According to Christianity, following the Bible, that is just plain not true. The Christian view, and it had to be worked out over centuries, and perhaps it was only completely worked out in the 13^th century, 1300 years after Jesus, in the great controversy of St. Gregory Palamas with the West about the reality of the divine energies and the divine actions, which St. Gregory and his confreres, and the Councils that are accepted by the Orthodox Church as true and universally received and accepted, is that the actions and the operations of God toward us are as divine and are as real as anything we can possibly say.
When the Bible speaks about God being angry or being wrathful, or being delighted in us, or grieving over us, or taking pleasure in us, those are realities, when it says that God shows and reveals His glory, His power, His wisdom, His truth, His might, His goodness, His beauty. Those are realities, those are true things. They are not just analogies, they are not just metaphors. They are saying something really true, and the saints have experienced these things. The saints have experienced the love of God, the power of God, the beauty of God. Saints have even experienced the wrath of God. They have experienced God’s chastening upon them. So the claim is that these are real, and that they are as divine as whatever God is in His own divine realm, in His own divine existence and being.
And the tradition of the Church, following the Bible, that speaks about the holiness of God, the incomparability of God, the God who is totally different from anything in heaven and on earth, they would say, and certainly St. Gregory Palamas would say this, I’ve said this on the radio before, that if you say God is, or God is being, even that is somehow not true in relationship to God in God’s self. God reveals Himself to us as existing, but existence is a category that does not, strictly speaking, apply to divinity as such. God is beyond being, He is beyond existence, He is beyond being and becoming, He is beyond change and non-change, He is beyond mutable and immutable.  You cannot say he is immutable and not mutable.  You cannot say he is being and not becoming. God is none of those things. He is completely beyond them all.
You could ask the question, “How can you say this, how do you know this?” The answer would be, “We know this because God has revealed himself to us. God has shown Himself to us. He has acted in our world, and we know His divine actions, and we know these actions are really divine.”
But when we experience these actions, for example, when we experience God’s wrath, or when we know God’s beauty, or when we come to commune in God’s wisdom, and God’s knowledge, and even God’s power, we know that our very experience makes us confess that we know that these are the ways that God reveals himself to us which are truly divine, they are accommodated to us, they are made adequate to us, but they lead us into the conclusion that God Himself, in Himself, is beyond all of these things, that He is none of those things.
Probably, in the tradition of Christianity, one of the most memorable sentences that I can think of in my readings over the last 50 years or so, is a statement of St. Maximus the Confessor. I am sure that St. Maximus would have agreed totally with St. John Chrysostom’s liturgy that we serve in church, that God is ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, but God is also ever-existing and always the same, in the sense that He is not changing, and one day becoming one way, and one day becoming another, and being fickle, but that when you notice incomprehensible, unknowable, inconceivable God, what you know is that God is beyond everything. St. Maximus said, “When it comes to divinity, the best that we can do, the ultimate that we can do is to say that God is supra-non-knowable.” He is even beyond non-knowing. He is not only beyond knowing, He is beyond non-knowing. He is supra-non-knowable, and he can only be supra-non-known. You cannot know God, but you can supra-non-know God.
In other words, you could have this contact with God, this astonishment and awe and wonder, where you say God is even beyond unknowing. He is beyond knowing and unknowing both. God is the supra-non-knowable who can be supra-non-known through an act, as Maximus said, of supra-non-knowing, supra-non-knowledge. That is a quality human beings are capable of, that is, experiencing God. This was beautifully formulated by Dr. Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. All of the fathers would say, we know these things because we experience God, and it is really God that we are experiencing. When we claim to know God by experience, by vision, by reality, for example, in Palamism, the uncreated light of God, we would say that uncreated light is really divine. It is not like human light at all, it is not like created light at all. We call it light, but it is beyond light, because we do not have the words to speak of it, but we would still insist that it is real. The Western tradition, that really was Platonistic, Hellenistic, like Anselm of Canterbury, even like Thomas Aquinas, like the Council of Trent, they said no, these things are not real, that God is uncaused, He is supreme being, He is beyond everything, He is beyond passibility, He is incomprehensible in Himself, but what we have to say about Him is that He is the unmoved mover. He is the uncaused cause. He is the pure unity. There is no plurality, there is no dynamism, there is no action at all in God that is real—you just cannot say that.
As Anselm interpreted, he said every time the bible speaks about wrath, or about anger, or about delight, or about beauty, or about glory, or about wisdom, this is only metaphor. These are just metaphors, these are just analogies, they do not really exist in reality. So, the Barlamites attack the Palamites in the 14^th century by saying, you guys are nuts. You cannot really experience God. You cannot claim that you really know the light, and the beauty, and the glory of God. That is impossible. God cannot do this because God cannot change. God cannot act in that way. He is pure act. He is actos puros, he is pure act. And all this multiplicity is just analogy, or you could possibly say, that is just different ways of speaking about what in reality is one and the same thing.
So, the immutable, impassable God is sometimes experienced by us as love, sometimes as anger, sometimes as beauty, sometimes as power. But these are only our different ways of speaking about something which in and of itself is one and exactly the same thing. They are not really different. The point would be, there is no differentiation in the Godhead at all. There is no action or movement in the Godhead at all, and when we say that there is, we are only speaking in a metaphorical or analogical way.
The Palamites, and Orthodoxy now, as the universal Church, says that is not true. We endorse Palamism and say that St. Gregory Palamas is a saint, and we endorse his interpretation of earlier church fathers, like Maximus, like Gregory the Theologian, and like Gregory of Nyssa, particularly, who was very Hellenistic. Gregory of Nyssa, whom someone who emailed quoted, speaks about God having no anger and no wrath, because He is impassable and Immutable, and anybody who knows theology, at least a little bit, would say, well sure, that is true. God in Himself is beyond all of these things.
You still have to affirm though, that when God acts toward creation and acts in creation, the creation that He made and wants to be in real communion with, He acts toward us in these ways and these ways are real, and they are really divine, and they really come from God, and they do not destroy the unity and the simplicity and the impassability of God. They do not. They are expressions of it, but real expressions of the living God, who is not a Platonistic idea, but is really an I am, is a living God, who acts and breathes and speaks, and the claim is, following the bible, the church fathers would say, ultimately, that these things are real.
A word about the Church Fathers. Not every Church Father says everything absolutely correctly. And a lot of the earlier Church Fathers had to be corrected by later church fathers. For example, when you read about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the earliest patristic literature, it sounds like they do not really believe in the Holy Trinity as being absolutely divine in exactly the same way. They speak of the Son as a lesser God, or a second God. All of that had to be corrected, and it took 400 years to correct it, and even then it was not totally corrected, because there was an argument again about how the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and the Son, and this goes on forever in some sense.
The story is never over, but at the same time, we have to know that that happens. St. Maximus the Confessor, whom we just mentioned, wrote a whole treatise called De Ambigua, On the Ambiguities. He was straightening out the ambiguities in St. Gregory the Theologian. And we know that Gregory the Theologian, himself, was straightening out the ambiguities in the teaching of Basil the Great.
So you have this mutual correction and growth and development in theology through the centuries, and there is a sense in which you could say, this issue of how God can be, on one hand, and in one aspect, in Himself, supra-non-knowable, completely beyond, absolutely transcendent, not like anything in heaven and on earth, that you can only be totally silent in front of, and only be in astonishment and wonder and you cannot speak, and if you would speak about it, as Gregory of Nyssa said, quoting Psalm 116, every man is a liar. What you are saying is just plain not true.
On the other hand, you have God in action, you have God revealing Himself, God showing Himself, God manifesting Himself, God relating to His creation, and He does so in many different forms and in many different ways, and in fact, even Gregory of Nyssa said, every day God appears different to us and in some sense, He really is. There is real multiplicity, real differentiation, and the Pseudo-Areopagite, St. Dionysius, in his Mystical Theology, would even say that there is real differentiation in the Godhead itself. On the one hand, God is beyond all change and is perfectly one, but the one is perfectly plural and the plurality is perfectly one. The many is real and the one is real, and in God those contradictions in created order are overcome, because God is not a creature and He is completely different.
We have to affirm both things. On one hand, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the great theologians of our time, quoting Cardinal Newman, a Roman Catholic, said, “Theology is a saying and an unsaying in a positive effect.” You say one thing, and then you negate it by saying something else, and both are true in different contexts.
It is almost like in modern science, when people ask, “Is electricity a wave, or is it a particle?” Well, it is both. Sometimes it is better to speak about it as a wave, and that is truer to what you are trying to talk about, and other times it is better to speak about it as a particle, because it is true to what you are trying to talk about. If you are trying to talk about God in God’s self, then you use all the super-duper-duper apophatic language. God is beyond everything transcendent, unknowable, inconceivable, ineffable, supra-non-knowable, and that is true. But when God acts, God speaks, God creates, God relates to creation, then you have to say that He really acts in such a away that His actions are real. God really does get angry. God really does forgive. God really does show mercy.
On the one hand, the Bible will say, God has spoken, He will not change His mind, and on the other hand, you see God interacting with people like Hezekiah, where He told him he was going to die, and then He repents of it, and he does not die. Or Jonah, when He tells him to prophecy against the Ninevites, and then He forgives them. That is how a living God acts. We would say, in and of Himself, in Himself, none of this is contradictory.
Of course, what we would really say when we know God through Jesus Christ and in God’s revelation, is that the wrath of God and the anger of God is an anger and wrath that is appropriate to God. It is an anger and wrath that comes out of love, that comes out of truth, that comes out of care for us, and concern that we would be chastened, that we would learn, that we would grow, that we would not be fools. So we would say, yes, there is a real wrath of God and you have to say that it is really and truly real, but you can never say that it is in any way sinful. God even says in the Psalm to human beings, “Be angry, but do not sin” (Psalm 4:4).
Well, that would be a good definition of God. He is angry, but He does not sin. He does not do evil. The anger of God is never evil. God is never evil. It is real. It is chastening. It is for our salvation. It is an expression of love. It is ultimately even overcome in the crucified Christ, whose righteousness removes the wrath of God upon creation, upon humanity. Christ brings a new humanity, a purified, righteous humanity to the world, that we can believe in, and by grace we can participate in. And even if we sin against it and repent, God will forgive us every single time for the sake of Jesus. But at the same time, this wrath of God is the wrath of love, and it is never, ever evil. It is never punitive. It is never cruel. It is never vindictive. It is certainly not sadistic.
I had a friend once who said to me, “You know, Father Tom, in my opinion there are only three possibilities: One is that there is no God and all this is just total nonsense, and everybody is killing each other all over the place, and we all end up cursed and dead and rotten in the tomb, and I can’t accept that. The world is too beautiful, I have a sense of meaning, I can imagine a perfect world, and I can’t believe that all this is just for nothing.” But then he said, “But another possibility is that this world is a play-thing of God, that God is, in fact, a sadist, He is cruel. He lets Tsunamis come and smash all kinds of people. He delights in brimstoning Sodom and Gomorrah. He plays around with people. He lets their kids die.”
I just saw two very moving films. One was about an Ethiopian Christian boy who was going to be killed, but the Ethiopian Jews were being saved by the Jews and taken to Israel, so the Christian mother makes her little boy go with the Jews and he has to pretend that he is a Jew so that he does not lose his life, and it is so sad, I mean when this boy leaves his mother, and he is weeping. 
And then there is another movie about a little boy in Poland who, while hiding under the bed or somewhere, sees Nazi soldiers come in and shoot dead his father and his mother and drag off his 15-year-old sister to rape her, and he has to live with that his whole life. Some people would look at that and say, like Ivan Karamazov, said, “To hell with this world. God is God, but this world is impossible, and if God really made it this way, He is just a sadist, He is cruel, and if He is organizing everything, if He is directing everything, how can you possibly believe in that kind of a God? It looks like nothing means anything, everything is stupid and we are all just suffering for no good reason, and God is making it all happen, if there is a God.”
But then my friend said, there is a third possibility, and that is that God had no choice. If he was going to have a human world, he had to have the suffering and therefore His anger had to come into it; he had to show his wrath toward sinners, and ultimately, he had to act to save the world through Jesus Christ, who takes upon Himself the sin of the world, and assuages the wrath of God by His total righteousness, even in the most horrible situation, when He is forsaken by God and man and hanging dead on the cross.
So either there is no God, or there is a monster God, or there is Christianity. That seems to be the three choices, and unless you are just some spiritualist and say, “Well, the material world and my body means nothing anyway, I have an immortal soul, and it is going to go off into…” and that is Hellenism, that is even Hinduism. It is even, in a sense, Buddhism.
But anybody who would affirm history, and would affirm the material world and would look out the window, like I am looking out now at the beautiful fall colors of the leaves of the trees, and could weep over this Jewish boy who saw his family killed and his sister dragged off, you have to say when you are looking at that, you cannot just believe that all this can happen and, and this little boy has an immortal soul and he will be happy in his soul, and what happened physically and materially to his poor sister and his family didn’t mean anything. That would be absolutely ridiculous.
So the answer is Christ crucified, still. But if you believe in Christ crucified, and therefore you get involved with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, the God of the Babylonian captivity, the God of the Bible, then you have to say that this God is the real God., and He is interacting with the real world.
And then his wrath, his anger, his mercy, all these are realities—his joy, his beauty—and we would even say as the Palamites say, that there is a multiplicity of divine actions and energies, all adequately shaped and formed to each individual person on earth, and to each moment in history, each second of time—are real. The experience of God in those conditions is real, and therefore the wrath of God, the anger of God, always an expression of God’s goodness and love and beauty and truth, is never cruel, vindictive, sinful or wicked in any way.
Still, that wrath is absolutely real. So what you have to do is affirm both things. You have to affirm the supra-transcendent God, who is not simply impassable, or undifferentiated, or perfectly one and perfectly unchanging, that would be Hellenism. But you have to affirm the God who is beyond all of those things, who is really supra-non-knowable, beyond them all, and then you have to say, when that God creates a world and reveals Himself to human creatures who have a mind, and who have freedom, and who can understand, and who can see truth, and who are made in the image and likeness of God, then you have to say that when we speak about God toward us, yes, we would say, God cannot be acted upon against His own will, that you cannot harm God, you cannot make God suffer.
But on the other hand, you have to say, in His love for us, God is pained, God is angry, God is sad, and these things are really real, and they have to be accepted as real. The saints who have experienced them, they confess that this is real. When we know God, we know that these things, in fact, are real, and they are true.
We could add one more point here, thinking again about the wrath of God, and insisting, again, that it is an expression of God as good, God as loving, God as ultimately merciful. We can see the wrath as appropriate to God’s love and even as an expression of His love because He cares about us, and even as a tool in His hands to purify us, but we have to see, ultimately, that it all has to be completely and totally solved, we have to be saved from that wrath, and we are, in the crucified Christ.
We can look again at Jesus, and it is very, very important that we do so. When we look at Jesus, we remember that according to the Christian faith, Jesus is revealing God to us in human form. He really is revealing God to us in human form. And here we want to insist again, and I would like to insist on, just because of some of the emails that I have just received, that we really have to take seriously the incarnation, and I am afraid that some of us do not. We are so insistent that Jesus Christ is a divine Logos and He is absolutely divine and that He is God, that we do not believe, really at the same time, that He is really human. And here, again, following the fathers, and especially Cyril of Alexandria and all of them after, we have to say that Jesus’ humanity is as real as His divinity and we have to affirm both. And Jesus really is human.
As some person wrote to me and said, “Well, I can quote some Church Fathers who said Jesus as God was omniscient and He knew everything, so when He didn’t know, it was only kat economia, according to the economy, or for pedagogical purposes, and so on. Well, I would say, be more careful in the reading of the Church Fathers, and read all of the Church Fathers, not just some, and read those who directly, consciously address this particular issue.
For example, Cyril of Alexandria, who himself had to be corrected, was very clear. He would say that, in as much as He is God, Jesus is supra-non-knowable, beyond everything, and His divinity is exactly that of the Father and Spirit, as Nicea and the early Fathers said, those before Cyril.
But Cyril insists on the reality of the incarnation, so that when the Logos becomes flesh and really becomes a human being, then He suffers, He dies even, the famous Theopaschite formula. He hungers, He thirsts, He weeps, He grieves, and He gets angry. He has all the human qualities, and humanity is limited. So He is a Jew and not a gentile, He is a man and not a woman. He lived in the first century, not the 21^st. He knew certain things and did not know other things. He did not know Russian, for example.
You could say, well, as God he knew, as man He didn’t. Well, if you want to say that, fine, and that is the way some of the earlier Fathers spoke, but that had to be explained a lot better, and it is not even explained well enough, in my opinion, to this present day, though people have tried to do that through the centuries.
But there is a truth there. The simplistic truth is, yes, if you are God you know everything, and if you are man, you don’t. And Jesus is both. So in some sense He is omniscient, and in another sense, He is not. And the Fathers would say, in the economia, he is not.
But he really is not. He really is limited. He really is circumscribable. He really is contained. He really is in the body. He really has a human soul. Gregory the theologian fought for that against the Apollinarians. He really has a human will and human freedom. Maximus the Confessor was mutilated for holding that teaching.
So the same way that when we speak about God, when we say certain things about how God is in God’s own self, in God’s own divine realm, and how God is in acts toward us, and both are real, we have to say the same thing about Jesus, that in as much as He is divine, we affirm certain things, and in as much as He is human, we affirm certain things, and we hold together the mystery, and it is a great mystery, but nevertheless it is a truth. And the truth of the matter is, if you really believe in the incarnation, and really believe that Jesus is a real man, and the Council of Chalcedon insists on this.
By the way, speaking about the Council of Chalcedon, following St. Cyril in the Council of Ephesus, the Nestorians’ whole problem was that, they being Hellenistic, said that God is unchanging, and therefore God cannot become a man, even. They denied the reality of the incarnation on the basis of the immutability and impassability of God. So they said, the immutable, impassable, unchanging God can unite Himself to a human person, namely Jesus of Nazareth, but He cannot really become the human person, Jesus of Nazareth. That was rejected as heresy, and it really was heresy because they tried to make a Church on that basis, it wasn’t just a mistake.
And here, by the way, having been accused lately of heresy myself, I would like to say something. You have to be careful if you call someone a heretic. A heretic is a pretty great person who divides the Church and makes up a false church and opposes the true church. That is a heretic. And I would say, I’m not a heretic, that is for sure. I may be dumb. I may be stupid, I may be wrong, I may be mistaken, I may be incorrect, I may not understand things properly, but I’m certainly not a heretic. But I have to try to articulate the mystery, too. And I may not do it right in every case. And neither did any of the Church Fathers, by the way. I don’t want to put myself in their category.
Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that in some of their articulations, they were incorrect, or as my professor Verhovskoy used to say, the holy fathers are not holy spirits, they could be incorrect at times. And the professor used to say, also, that sometimes they are correct, but they are one-sided. He liked that expression, you can be one-sided. What you say may be correct, but if you just affirm it, while not affirming other things, then you deform it.
And that is what people did about God. If they just affirmed that He is one, and uncaused, and unchanging, and immutable, and impassable, and do not also affirm that He can really reveal Himself, and really show Himself, in many diverse forms, like angry, grieving, sad, merciful, then you are affirming one thing, but you are destroying the truth of it, because you are not affirming the other thing that also has to be affirmed.
When we look at Jesus and we affirm that He is both God and man, and that He is revealing divinity through His humanity, when it comes to the issue of wrath, we see that Jesus got angry. There are several places in Holy Scripture where Jesus clearly got angry.
In St. Mark’s Gospel in the third chapter, Jesus is getting angry. This is what it says in St. Mark’s gospel. It said, “He,” Jesus, “entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand, and they watched Him to see whether He, Jesus, would heal him on the Sabbath day, so that they might accuse him” (Mark 3:1-2). You see, they wanted to accuse Jesus. That is very important. They didn’t really want to understand, they just wanted to accuse.
And I am afraid we have a lot of that today in the Church. We don’t really want to understand each other, we just want to accuse each other. I don’t know, we may listen to Ancient Faith Radio to find out what mistakes are being said by the speakers, because we have a tendency and a desire to accuse, rather than to understand—“Oh, that’s not of God, that’s just of the devil.”
But it said they wanted to accuse him. “And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come here.’ And he said to them, ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good, or to do harm, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent.” They couldn’t answer Jesus—they just remained silent.
“And He looked around at them,” and it says, “with anger.” And then it says that he, “grieved at their hardness of heart.”  (it says in Greek—grieving). So Jesus is angered, and he is grieving, at their hardness of heart. And then He says to the man, “stretch out your hand, and He heals him, and the Pharisees go out immediately, hold counsel with the Herodians against Jesus, how to destroy Him, how to put Him to death.” (Mark 3:3-6)
What we want to see here is that, it says He spoke with anger, met orgis, that He spoke, grieving. And we know that Jesus grieved, He wept. He wept over Jerusalem, He wept over Lazarus, He wept in the Gethsemane garden.
We will talk about that again on the radio, Jesus’ weeping. In fact, some mystical writer said once, “God became man in order to weep”—that God, in himself, is beyond weeping, but he himself, in creating a world that He loves, not only gets angry, but he weeps. And Jesus shows the weeping of God in his humanity. He shows the anger of God in His humanity.
And of course, we know how Jesus spoke against the Scribes and the Pharisees and the lawyers and the hypocrites in St. Matthew’s gospel. He says in St. Matthew, ten to twelve times, “Woe to you, woe to you, woe to you.” He calls them all kinds of names. He calls them whitewashed sepulchres and hypocrites and all kinds of terrible things and that could really mean that He was kind of hot. He had a thymos.  A thymos was a zeal, an irascible quality. The claim is that God, Himself, has that quality, vis-à-vis creation, there is nothing for God to be irascible or angry about within the three persons of the Divine Trinity, but there is plenty for Him to be angry and irascible and wrathful about relative to creation, especially because He loves us.
Then you have the quintessential example of Jesus’ anger when He takes a whip, goes into the temple, knocks over all the tables of the money-changers, and with His whip, chases them out and says, “This temple is supposed to be holy, a place of worshipping God, and you make it a place of business and commerce” (e.g. Matthew 21:12). So He got really angry.
We know that in Jesus’ anger He never sinned. He didn’t sin. He didn’t do anything wrong. And he wasn’t just beating up on people for fun. And he wasn’t doing it because he enjoyed sadistically causing them pain. And he certainly didn’t do it just to be punitive and to punish them. Why did he do it? He did it to teach. He did it to show. He did it to reveal God’s will. He did it so that we would be purified, so that we would learn, that we would change.
The wrath of God is an instrument in his hands for our salvation, for our good. That is how Christians would understand the wrath of God. And it is absolutely appropriate, it is absolutely necessary. If God did not get angry against wickedness, what kind of God would He be? We would even accuse a human being, if they saw horrible wickedness, if they saw soldiers killing a little boy’s parents and dragging off his sister to rape her, if you weren’t angry and if you weren’t sad, there would really be something wrong with you, it would just be impossible. And we feel that way in human reality, and so we understand the same thing relative to God.
But our issue for today is, is the wrath real? Is the anger real? And are the other actions of God described in holy scripture and experienced by saints, for example when Moses says that God’s anger was kindled against him—was that really real? Or was just something happening that Moses was imagining but wasn’t really coming from God? We would say, no. So what we want to affirm today is that all the actions of God, all the qualities of God that we know in His action toward us, that we know through Jesus, even through the humanity of Jesus, are applicable to God. So orgi and thymos, anger and wrath, really belong to God. They are a part of divinity.
Within the divinity they are never expressed, because there is no need for them to be expressed. What kind of anger or wrath would exist between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? But once God creates a world knowing that it would be evil and wicked, and knowing that you have all the horrible things that we have among humanity, then you can say that it is totally fitting, proper, and befitting the very nature of God, as far as we know God, that He would act this way.
So we could even say that the wrath of God is a reality and, of course, the final point always has to be, that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, who is really God, Himself, became a real, actual human being. And in his humanity, he revealed God and he expressed anger and wrath, and sadness, and all those things.
But we also want to say that Jesus of Nazareth, because of his righteousness, because he does not get God angry at him at all, because there is no reason whatsoever, for God, His father, to show any kind of wrath or anger toward Jesus in any way—just the opposite: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” it says in Scripture (Matthew 17:5). And God is well pleased in His Son, Jesus, because the Son takes upon Himself the sin of the world, and assuages divine wrath and redeems humanity and saves creation, so that in the end, in the age to come, we would definitely say the following:
The wrath of God is removed from all of humanity for the sake of Jesus, and for those who believe in that, and who love it, and who pray to God to have it be for them, they are saved and redeemed and God’s wrath is off them. And those who do not accept it, do not want it, in some sense, the wrath of God remains upon them. But even those people are forgiven and mercy is shown on them because of Jesus. And therefore, their torment, their suffering, is not from the wrath of God, as much as it is from the mercy of God, for it is from the wrath of God that God, Himself, wanted to overcome by His own mercy, you might say.
This is not contradiction within God, this is just the way reality is and the way the truth is, and God is truth. Christ is the truth. This is the truth. So what we want to affirm more than anything today, and there are plenty of things to affirm, but today we really want to affirm both things, that in Himself, in what God is we cannot even imagine, but when God reveals Himself to us, we know that what He is in Himself is beyond anything in the created order, but what we want to affirm, as well, is that when He relates to the created order, his actions toward us are real. And among those many, countless actions and operations and revelations of God toward creatures as a whole, and toward each individual human being, and even each bird, each rock, each everything in creation, each moment of time, that those actions of God are real, and among those actions, at certain times, is the expression of divine anger, and divine wrath.

Glory to the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. With the intercession prayer of the Theotokos, St. Peter, St. Demetrios myrrh streaming, St. Paisios of the holy mountain and all the Saints. And to a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ to life eternal. Amen.

Once again thanks to:
The Church Fathers
Fr. Photios
Dr. Clark Carlton
Jordan Bajis
Lawrence Janic
and others I have forgotten... please forgive me.

Quote by Nigerian Proverb

However far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.

Nigerian Proverb

Quote by Albert Einstein

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

 

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Papal Reformation and the Great Schism: III

Welcome back. In the previous segment of this episode on papal reformation and the Great Schism, I discussed the papal reformation of Pope Leo IX. Leo was the most ambitious pope to reign for two centuries, since the time of Nicholas I in the ninth century, and his pontificate gave expression to the desire for many in Western Christendom to see an end to simony, the sale of Church offices, and what was called Nicolaitism, the continued practice of clerical marriage. Traveling throughout the West, Leo had convened synods where his reforming policies were enacted, but in the summer of 1053 the papal reformation was suddenly and unexpectedly called into question. Leo IX decided to take up arms against the Normans of southern Italy, and in the battle of Civitate that followed, his entire army was defeated and he himself, the pope of Rome, was taken prisoner. By the end of 1053, he was held as a prisoner in the city of Benevento, unable to continue his reforming travels throughout Western Christendom.
And it was exactly at this moment that a new challenge to the papal reformation appeared before Pope Leo’s mind, and this challenge came not from the West but from the East. In this final segment of the episode, I would like to turn to the events that came to be known as the Great Schism of 1054. In order to do that, it would be valuable to review some of the controversies that existed between Rome and Constantinople which would play out in the confrontation of that year.
One was jurisdictional. There was a jurisdictional controversy connected to relations between Rome and Constantinople, relations that were highlighted by Leo’s policy in southern Italy. What was the jurisdictional controversy? Well, it stretched all the way back to the beginnings of Church history. Rome and Constantinople had both developed distinct understandings of jurisdictional relations. Rome had come to identify with St. Peter who, of course, settled in Rome and died there as a martyr in the first century, though he had also spent time at Antioch, though no patriarchs of Antioch had historically made the claims that the popes would later on.
Well, Peter, who died in Rome, was seen as being one of the very earliest leaders of the Roman Church and provided it with a status of primacy in relationship to other centers of Church administration. Peter himself, of course, had been first among the apostles. One of the gospels lists all of the apostles, and then the author comes to Peter and states, “And then there was Peter, and Peter was first,” “primus” in Latin. Primacy comes from that word. So there was a kind of Petrine primacy that was visible in the New Testament, but nowhere is that primacy defined in a jurisdictional sense; nowhere does Peter clearly exercise any kind of authority over other apostles.
As a matter of fact, the only model of apostolic authority that’s really offered in the New Testament is that found in Acts 15, when a council of the apostles is held in Jerusalem. This principle, which becomes the dominant principle in the East, especially at Constantinople, is often called conciliarity, and in Acts 15 all the apostles come together and they make a decision about a heresy, something troubling the Church, the practice of circumcision, and they resolve, all of them weighing in, Paul included, but also Peter, who speaks against the requirement of circumcision there, they all weigh in and agree that circumcision is not required. The apostle who stands up to issue their statement, significantly, is not Peter, who was first among the apostles, but James, who seems to have exercised some sort of jurisdictional authority at the Church in Jerusalem at this time.
So Petrine primacy was certainly in the New Testament record, but it was never defined. Peter was never shown to actually exercise authority over the other apostles. Even the famous statement where Peter answers Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” correctly in Matthew 16, even at that point when Peter receives the keys to the kingdom and [is] told that what he binds and looses will be loosed accordingly in heaven, well, the same authority is given to all the apostles in John’s gospel, chapter 20, when Jesus breathes on all of the apostles. So Petrine primacy was there, but never defined; conciliarity was there and was described or defined in the New Testament.
But the fact is that in the life of the early Church, as the centuries passed, Rome was always assigned a primacy, being first among all the other centers of Church life, and this primacy consisted both of honor, namely that he was, because he was the descendent of Peter, first among the others, and also administrative centrality: Rome simply was, for three centuries, the capital of the empire in which the early Church grew and flourished. When Constantinople was founded, known as “New Rome,” it was assigned a status similar to Rome, at least by Eastern Christians at such Ecumenical Councils as Chalcedon. New Rome, Constantinople, was seen to be virtually equal to old Rome in its authority, though this was contested by such Church leaders as St. Leo the Great.
Then finally, in terms of this kind of history of jurisdictional tension or controversy, there formed by the fourth century a group of five patriarchs in the Church known as the Pentarchy, the rule of five, and this included Rome first, Constantinople second, and then the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Significantly in the time of Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century, this understanding, so cherished in the East, was repudiated when Nicholas I rejected, probably on very sound historical grounds, that any apostle had actually founded Constantinople, the Church there, and that furthermore, since the other three Eastern patriarchates—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—had all fallen under Arab and therefore Muslim domination, Nicholas I claimed that Rome was the only so-called apostolic see that was left in the jurisdictional life of the universal Church.
So there was, in other words, a kind of legacy, then, of East-West estrangement that was connected to jurisdictional controversies. Another important controversy that affected the outcome of Pope Leo IX’s Latinization of southern Italy in the eleventh century was an ecumenical controversy, that is to say, a controversy over the title in Greek “ecumenical,” which can be translated either as “pertaining to the civilized or inhabited earth,” as it literally means in the Greek language from which it comes or, in Latin translation, as having relevance for the universal Church, “ecumenical” sometimes being translated as “universal.”
Well, the title “Ecumenical” first became an issue in the sixth century, when the patriarch of Constantinople, John the Faster, declared himself to be “Ecumenical Patriarch.” This title was translated as “Universal Patriarch” into Latin, and was immediately challenged by Rome, whose pope at this time was St. Gregory the Great. Interestingly, we just commemorated Gregory the Great yesterday on the calendar of the Orthodox Church. I have a son named Gregory who’s named after him, so I take note of these things.
In any event, Gregory the Great objected to John the Faster’s use of the title, noting that Peter himself was never called a “universal apostle,” so how could any of the successors to the apostles claim to be a “universal apostle”? It’s quite interesting in this lively debate between the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople in the sixth century that St. Gregory the Great’s corollary to this argument was that any universal title should be rejected. He actually even rejected the title of “Universal Pope” for himself when one of the other patriarchs of the East, Patriarch Evlogius of Alexandria, called him that, and I can quote Gregory the Great whose statement about this is quoted by John Meyendorff in a book called Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450-680 AD, and this is what Gregory said, writing to Patriarch Evlogius about what he considers to be the unacceptable title of “Universal Patriarch” and “Universal Pope.”

I beg you (Gregory wrote), never let me hear that word again, for I know who you are and who I am. In position you are my brother, in character my father. I gave therefore no commands but only endeavored to point out what I thought was desirable. I said you ought not to use a title such as “Universal Bishop” in writing either to me or to anyone else, yet now in your last letter notwithstanding my prohibition, you have addressed me by the proud title of “Universal Pope.” I beg Your Holiness, whom I love so well—(It’s so beautiful how Gregory writes there, so gently)—not to do this again. (Very stern as well, right?)
I do not consider that anything is an honor to me by which my brethren lose the honor that is their due. My honor is the honor of the universal Church. My honor is the united strength of my brethren. Then and then only am I truly honored when no one is denied the honor which is justly his, but if Your Holiness calls me “Universal Pope,” you deny that you are yourself that which you say I am universally. God forbid! Far from us be the titles which inflate men’s pride and deal a wound to charity.

So a very beautiful and very powerful corollary is drawn there by St. Gregory of Rome, pope in the late sixth, early seventh century, in reaction to claims about universal jurisdiction by any single leader, patriarch, pope, or otherwise, of the Church.
So that was a kind of controversy over the title of “Ecumenical” and the status of “Universal.” And then one final third controversy that came into play when Leo IX began to Latinize southern Italy was the controversy more recent of the filioque. Of course, I reviewed this controversy in the episode entitled “Frankish Christendom and East-West Estrangement.” The patriarchs of Constantinople, along with their other Eastern patriarchs, steadfastly and consistently rejected the interpolation of the word filioque into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and were joined by the popes of Rome in this much of the time. Leo III had made silver shields on which the Creed, without the filioque, was inscribed and placed in St. Peter’s Basilica in the early ninth century. Later in the same century, Pope John VIII had likewise resisted the interpolation of the Creed and sent delegates to Constantinople who met at the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 879-880, known sometimes as the Eighth Ecumenical Council by some Orthodox authorities.
By the early eleventh century, as we saw, the papacy finally admitted the use of the filioque in the Creed, and this can be dated to 1014, when Emperor Henry II was crowned by the pope, Benedict VIII, in St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Creed thereafter included the filioque. That aggravated tremendously the relationship between Rome and Constantinople. Even a few years before that event, the popes of Rome had begun using the filioque when writing to the patriarchs of Constantinople, and that provoked, in the year 1009, a decision by the patriarch of Constantinople to remove the pope’s name from the diptychs, and that is the liturgical list of patriarchs throughout the Church that Constantinople recognizes. This removal of the pope from the diptychs did not represent a schism; there was still sacramental union East and West, but it showed that the patriarchs of the East were increasingly frustrated with the papacy’s decision to add to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
So that brings us, then, to the case of Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who was patriarch of Constantinople from 1043 to 1059, a contemporary of Leo IX of Rome and his counter-part in the East during the event known as the Great Schism of 1054. The first thing to say about Michael Cerularius was that he had a very remarkable character. He was Leo’s equal in ambition for reforming the Church. He in fact had undertaken efforts to reform the Armenian Church in the East that was partially incorporated into the Byzantine Church as a result of the expansion of the Byzantine Empire to the East. He proved to be Leo’s equal in ambition, but Humbert’s equal—Humbert being Leo’s papal advisor—in disdain for others and rudeness and temperament.
And when he, Michael, learned of Leo’s decision to begin Latinizing the Greek churches of southern Italy, he retaliated by Hellenizing the Latin churches in the Greek East. There were a number of Latin churches in Constantinople, and in the year 1052, Michael ordered the closing of those Latin churches in Constantinople as an act of retaliation against Pope Leo and his policy of Latinizing the Greek churches of southern Italy. He also commissioned a letter to be written to Leo IX by an associate bishop of his, Leo of Ochrid, attacking the Latin practices that were behind Leo’s Latinization. These practices included the introduction of unleavened bread, the origin of which I discussed in an earlier episode; fasting on Saturdays; and the exclusion of the “Alleluia” during Lent. Furthermore, Patriarch Michael, never one to show sensitivity toward other bishops, even the very pope of Rome himself, revived the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch.”
How would Pope Leo IX respond to this provocation? Leo’s papal reformation had hinged upon the conviction that the pope of Rome is the supreme head of the universal Church. Such had been the statement made at the Council of Rheims, the very year Leo came to power. Now, with Patriarch Michael of Constantinople reviving the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch,” translated into Leo’s Latin as “Universal Patrariarch”—and by the way, in his captivity, Leo actually undertook lessons in the Greek language, but historians think that he couldn’t possibly have advanced far enough really in just a few months to grasp the distinctions between the Greek “ecumenical” and the Latin “universal”—so probably he read the word exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gregory the Great, had read it. Like Gregory the Great, he rejected Constantinople’s right to use the title “Ecumenical,” but unlike Gregory, he now asserted Rome’s right to use the title “Ecumenical” or “Universal.”
And how could the papal reformation continue in the face of such a challenge? Enter Cardinal Humbert. Humbert had been promoted at the papal court in the first year of Leo’s pontificate and had become Leo’s leading advisor. He had been elevated to the cardinalate by Leo in 1051 and appointed papal secretary in 1053. He was an uncompromising advocate for papal supremacy over the entire universal Church. I can quote here an author named Tom Holland who wrote a book called The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West who writes the following about Humbert and his character and his vision of papal supremacy:

“The royal priesthood of the holy Roman See constitutes an empire both heavenly and earthly.” This vaunting claim (and he was quoting here Humbert) was made by a man renowned not for excitability but rather for his emotionless, indeed chilly, powers of reasoning. Humbert of Moyenmoutier was a monk from the same region of Lorraine in which Leo had served as a bishop, and the two men had long been confidants, summoned to accompany the pope to the Lateran (that’s the palace in Rome where the pope worked). The haughty and brilliant Humbert had soon emerged as his effective number two. Boldly he set about pushing Leo’s claims to leadership of the Church to ever more potent extremes. Stitching together musty precedents with a lawyerly dexterity, the Donation of Constantine not the least, Humbert found himself able to demonstrate with great conviction a most momentous conclusion: that the papacy had an ancient entitlement to rule the entire Christian world (all of Christendom).
Yet even that was not the limit of where his logic led him. For such is the reverence among Christians for the holder of the apostolic office of Rome, Humbert coolly insisted, that they preferred to receive the holy commandments and the traditions of their faith from the mouth of the head of the Church rather than from the Holy Scriptures or the writings of the Fathers. Here was justification in effect not merely for papal weight-throwing but for permanent revolution.

In this quote of Humbert which includes a statement that the pope of Rome actually has authority at least equal to if not preferred over the Scriptures and the Fathers—those are his words—listeners may hear an echo of the very thinking that accompanied arguments by Frankish theologians in the ninth century that the papacy of Rome had an actual right to alter the Creed, to add to it in the case of the filioque, by virtue of the fact that Rome had a supreme relationship to other patriarchates of the Church, of the universal Church, so that even Ecumenical Councils were not equal to the authority of Rome in making decisions about the content of the Creed.
Listeners will recall that it was a Frankish theologian named Ratramnus of Corbie whom I discussed in an earlier episode who actually asserted at the very commission of Pope Nicholas I, who broke communion with Patriarch Photius in the ninth century, Ratramnus actually asserted on behalf of Pope Nicholas I that just as the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381 had had the authority, as he put it, the right to add the clauses that it did to the Nicene Creed, so also did the pope of Rome, for, as Ratramnus argued, this same right was given to the Romans.
And, in fact, Cardinal Humbert asserted that the interpolation of the filioque in the Creed, which, as we know, dated to just about a generation earlier, 1014—of course, this time we’re talking about right now, Leo IX’s captivity is 1053—1014, just a generation earlier, and only then had the filioque been adopted by the papacy at Rome, and Humbert, though this had been done very recently, asserted that it was legitimate insofar as it was the decision of the universal pontiff, the pope of Rome. And that, he thought, settled it.
So Humbert was committed to the principle of papal supremacy, and that conviction now dominated what was left of the papacy of Leo IX. As papal administrator during Leo’s confinement, Humbert was given great authority to direct the affairs of the papacy. And it was he, Humbert, who received Bishop Leo’s letter, commissioned by Patriarch Michael Cerularius, during a tour of southern Italy in 1053. And he translated this letter, and his translation of this letter for the pope exaggerated further its uncompromising tone. Michael himself was, like Humbert, a very uncompromising person, and Humbert only magnified this in the translation he presented to the pope.
So Leo IX, languishing in his captivity, languishing as he was as a prisoner of war, decided to issue an ultimatum to Patriarch Michael Cerularius. In 1053 he wrote letters to Michael that asserted the superiority of Latin practices when they differ from Greek ones. He was probably ignorant of the fact that unleavened bread and the use of the filioque were in fact recent Western innovations, but nevertheless he asserted their superiority over the use of leavened bread and the absence of the filioque in the East. Leo also asserted papal supremacy, very much like how Humbert had framed it. And emphatically, in his letter to Michael Cerularius, Leo cited the Donation of Constantine. This is the very first known use of the Donation of Constantine to assert papal supremacy in history.
Having written these letters to Michael, Leo dispatched Humbert to Constantinople, ordering him to compose and to deliver there his ultimatum to Patriarch Michael Cerularius, early in the following year. And then, with Humbert’s embassy to Constantinople having departed Rome, in April 1054, Pope Leo IX died.
So we come finally to the event known as the Schism of 1054. There had been earlier excommunications between Rome and Constantinople in the history of the Church. Listeners will recall the Acacian Schism and the Nicolaitan, or known in the West as the Photian, Schism, but these were always healed. The Schism of 1054 was never healed.
In April 1054, the embassy of Cardinal Humbert arrived in Constantinople. It included not only Humbert but Frederick of Lorraine, who would become Pope Stephen IX later on. Arriving there, Humbert presented a letter that he had been commissioned to compose on behalf of the pope, a letter to Michael Cerularius. This letter asserted papal supremacy; it rejected the legitimacy of the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch” for Michael; and it defended Latin liturgical practices as being superior to Greek ones. Humbert, interestingly, also presented a letter to the emperor of Byzantium, Constantine Monomachos—he ruled from 1042 to 1055—in which he, Humbert, challenged the legitimacy of Michael as patriarch.
It is significant that this embassy, within days of arriving in Constantinople, lacked any canonical or legal legitimacy. It had become null and void as a result of Leo IX’s death. Nevertheless, Humbert, driven as he was to fulfill Leo IX’s commission, continued the embassy’s work. We know for sure that he knew of Leo IX’s death—[it] had been reported to him immediately—but he ignored it. It’s also interesting that the new pope, Victor II back in the West, was unaware of the details of the embassy as it was playing out in Constantinople and the letters that were being composed there on behalf of the pope. He may not even have known of the embassy’s very existence.
But what Cardinal Humbert found in Constantinople was a very confusing situation. On the one hand, Emperor Constantine Monomachos welcomed him and gave him a very warm reception in the capital. Michael, predictably and obnoxiously, refused even to meet him, and simply ignored his presence there. Patriarch Michael kept Humbert and the embassy waiting for many days, which was a great insult to their dignity as legates of the pope of Rome.
As the days advanced and Humbert’s temper grew more and more sour, a monk from the Studion Monastery in the capital (a monastery known for its long history of supporting the papacy, often against the heretical tendencies of not only the emperors of the East but also patriarchs who supported them), named Nicetas Stethatus composed a letter to Humbert which sought to soften and elaborate Constantinople’s concerns with Leo’s policy of Latinization, but in this letter written by Nicetas Stethatus, the same criticisms of Latin practices from a Greek point of view were repeated. Humbert’s response to it, rather than being placated or assuaged, was contempt and fury. He translated Nicetas’s second name, Stethatus, into Pectoratus, which means a “beast that crawls on its belly,” and he declared that the monk must not have come from a monastery but a brothel.
So having rejected any grounds for a compromise with this limited effort at compromise with Monk Nicetas Stethatus, Humbert continued to await Michael’s response, but sadly it never came. Patriarch Michael Cerularius himself was in no mood for charity. Michael continued to ignore the presence of Humbert, so finally Humbert had had enough. On July 16, in the year 1054, he organized a final confrontation with the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, at none other than the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and just as the clergy were preparing for the Divine Liturgy, Cardinal Humbert marched into the church, up to the altar table, and hurled down upon it, the very altar table of Hagia Sophia itself, a papal bull of excommunication. He turned, and he marched out of the cathedral.
He was chased by a Greek deacon who pleaded with him at the entrance to reconsider, telling him that such an act may have unexpected, unintended consequences and may be very difficult in the future to heal. Nevertheless, Humbert was unmoved by the deacon’s pleas and appeals to the principle of charity, and, shaking the dust from his feet, in allusion to Christ’s orders to the apostles to turn their back on cities that refused to accept the Gospel, Cardinal Humbert and his entourage returned to Rome.
Join me next time, when I begin a new episode in the rise and fall of Christendom by exploring the consequences of this event, what might be called Eastern Christendom’s and Western Christendom’s parting of the ways, or, how the excommunication of 1054 became great.


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Papal Reformation and the Great Schism: II

Welcome back to this episode on papal reformation and the Great Schism. It comes after a break of a couple of weeks in the podcast, for which I apologize. Here at St. Katherine College we are launching into our accreditation process, and that has been taking up a good deal of our time. But listeners will recall that in the previous segment of this episode, I introduced the papacy of Leo IX. He reigned as pope from 1049 to 1054, the very year of the Great Schism. And I noted how he came to power as pope in a time when Western Christendom appeared to many in a troubled state.
In response to the problems of that time, some Church leaders had introduced a policy of reformatio or reformation. I spoke about monks who led this reformation and also about emperors, especially Emperor Henry III, who was the one at the Synod of Sutri in 1046 who wrestled control of papal elections away from the Roman nobility and placed it in his own hands. And it was Henry III who saw Pope Leo IX elevated to the papacy in 1049. That papacy was remarkable because it ended with Leo as a prisoner of war, and in this segment of the episode, I would like to review the papacy of Leo IX and explain why it had such a remarkable outcome, and not just due to the fact that it resulted in Leo’s imprisonment, but, more significantly, because with its reforming agenda it resulted in the Great Schism.
Upon assuming office in 1049, Leo fulfilled those earlier efforts, first by monks such as those at Cluny and then by emperors such as Henry III, to reform the Church, and under Leo we can begin speaking about an actual papal reformation. The word “reformatio,” and “correctio,” had both a venerable history in the Western Church and related to efforts to correct the Church, to reform the Church, in a conservative direction rather than an innovative one. This fact is brought out by a modern historian of the papacy named Roger Collins, who wrote a book called Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy, and this is what he wrote about the reformation undertaken by Leo IX.

We may speak of Leo IX (Collins writes), his supporters and successors as reformers, but this was not how they saw themselves. They wanted to return the Church to a ‘golden age’ they thought had once existed. They saw themselves correcting errors and evil customs that had been allowed to develop unchallenged in recent centuries. The past they wished to recover was largely imaginary, being derived from such spurious texts such as the Pseudo-Isidoran Decretals (and I’ll talk more about those later) which provided seemingly authoritative evidence of papal supremacy.

So those are the words of Collins, writing about the papal reformation undertaken by Pope Leo IX.
To advance this reformation, Leo knew that he needed supporters and advisors in Rome, and thus he assembled a team of reformers, a very remarkable one. Virtually all of them had very strong monastic background. Peter Damian, for instance, played his own role. It was Peter Damian, listeners will recall, who had written that fiery letter to the wives of clergy in the West, attacking the continued existence on a very large scale of a married priesthood up into the eleventh century. These monks for the most part—Peter Damian would be an exception here—came from beyond Italy, from the north, from centers like Cluny and Burgundy or Lorraine. One member of Leo’s team was Frederick of Lorraine. He would be the future Pope Stephen IX who was such a monk. And Humbert of Moyenmoutier: he had been recruited to serve in Rome in 1049, the very year Leo arrived.
And it wasn’t just personalities that assembled in Rome to support Leo in his reformation, but also we see the use now of documents asserting papal leadership that had never been used before but now will be used in what is often described as the medieval papacy and its claims of papal supremacy. These documents were often forgeries—we know that now, although they weren’t known at the time by those who used them—such as the donation of Constantine. This had possibly been composed at the papal court in the eighth century in connection with the papacy’s alliance with the Frankish King Pepin III, and its effect had been to assert papal authority over royal but also Eastern patriarchal leadership in the Church: the donation of Constantine.
The Isidoran Decretals I mentioned earlier, or rather Collins mentioned them in the quote I gave earlier, were another such document. Their origin was possibly from Frankish bishops in the ninth century who were asserting papal authority over episcopal authority.
So documents like the Donation of Constantine, in addition to personalities like Humbert and Peter Damian, strengthened Leo’s resolve to advance reform, and the result was something like a revolution in papal authority that took place under Leo IX. The papacy was now elevated as the most important institution within the Western Church. The biographer of Peter Damian, who supported this movement, says the following about Peter:

If Damian, while working alone, had been an effective reformer of monastic, sacerdotal, and episcopal morals, his program became doubly effective when linked with the efforts of the papacy. He was fighting for a spiritual renaissance so badly needed in the eleventh century, and in his eyes the pope, possessing the highest spiritual authority, was the logical leader in restoring Christian morality.

The momentum that the Cluny reforms and the imperial reforms provided Leo enabled him to expand significantly the horizons of papal authority. I can quote here Christopher Dawson, to whose book, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, I referred last time. This is what Dawson writes about the impact of Leo’s advisors, especially those who came from beyond Italy and their ability to open up the horizons of papal authority throughout the West.

The introduction (Dawson writes) of this foreign element into the Curia (the papal court) had a revolutionary effect on the papacy, which became the hierarchical center and organ of leadership for the reforming movement. The reform of the Church was no longer the aim of scattered groups of ascetics and idealists. It became the official policy of the Roman Church. In his brief pontificate of less than five years, St. Leo devoted himself to the work of reform with super-human energy, crossing the Alps again and again to hold reforming councils in Germany and France as well as in Italy and establish direct, personal control over the churches of Western Christendom.

So now the horizons of the papacy were much broader than they had ever been before, and we can even speak about attendancy now, a transition in the papacy’s status, from patriarch of the West to supreme pontiff of the universal Church. Here we can refer to the Orthodox historian, Andrew Louth, who wrote a book called Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071. And this is what Andrew Louth writes about Leo IX’s reforms and their effect not so much of elevating the papacy but of fundamentally redefining it. This is what Louth writes:

The movement initiated by Leo IX created the very notion of the papacy. To speak of the papacy before the eleventh century is an anachronism, for the term “papatus” in Latin was coined only then, apparently used for the first time by Clement II in 1047 (that is, two years, only two years, before Leo came to power). Formed on the analogy of episcopatus, it suggests that the papacy, papatus, is a further order of ministry in the Church, transcending the episcopate. There seem to be two notions entailed here.
The first makes explicit something that had a long history, namely, that the Church of Rome exercised a primacy, primatus, over the other churches, a primacy that was not shared by any other church. This was defined more precisely: it meant that the Church of Rome was the mother of the churches, mater ecclesiarum, their head and hinge, all claims made by Nicholas I in the ninth century.

Listeners will recall that Nicholas I is that pope that is responsible for the Nicolaitan Schism, also called the Photian Schism, in his controversy with Patriarch Photius. Louth continues here:

Peter Damian (who of course was one of the leading advocates for papal authority at the time) advanced the idea that while all other churches have founders, Rome alone was founded by Christ. Damian may have taken this to mean that St. Peter had himself appointed the patriarchs in the East and the bishops in the West.
The other notion entailed focuses these claims not so much as traditionally on the See of Rome as on the pope in person. The title “universalis episcopus,” universal bishop, once rejected by Gregory the Great, is resurrected. The pope is not just a bishop with universal jurisdiction, but is personally the ruler of the whole Church. Universal jurisdiction might simply mean that Rome was a final court of appeal in the Church, as Nicholas I had claimed. The notion of universalis episcopus, universal bishop, going beyond universal jurisdiction, went further. The pope has become a pope for all Christians, with immediate, not just appelate, jurisdiction. He is more than a bishop; he is the pope.

So Andrew Louth [is] here now tracing the origin of what was considered to be a new understanding of the pope of Rome, personal head of the entire universal Church, and the coining of the very term “papatus,” or “papacy,” in connection with this development. And, as a matter of fact, statements made under Leo IX did assert this kind of universal authority. At a council in Rheims in 1049, the very year Leo came to power, the declaration was made that the bishop of Rome is the primate of the universal Church.
So with this self-confidence, this not just revived papacy but transformed papacy, Leo set about reforming the Western Church. He organized annual Easter synods at Rome. Every year, bishops would assemble in Rome under his leadership to advance the reforms that had long been demanded by people like Peter Damian and the abbots of Cluny and even emperors like Henry III. He also traveled beyond Italy throughout western Europe to the lands of France and Spain and Germany, organizing synods in which he likewise advanced the reformation.
And a noteworthy tendency that Leo IX showed was one toward confrontation with his opponents and with those who resisted this papal reformation. This can be seen in the case of Berengar, a theologian whose teaching about the Eucharist resulted in his excommunication in absentia by Leo IX; and also at that very council at Rheims to which I just referred, held in 1049, where a group of bishops who did not appear because they resisted the reforms Leo was advancing were summarily excommunicated from the Church. So Leo IX, inspired as he was by a new definition of the person of the pope inspired by the new conception of what the papacy was, as a matter of fact, the very coining of the term “papacy,” “papatus,” being used at this time, pursued a papal reformation of the West.
Then there came the case of southern Italy. Southern Italy represented in the eleventh century the jurisdictional nexus of the universal Church, that is to say, the connection between Rome and Constantinople, in a way very comparable to the Balkans in the ninth century, where a collision occurred between Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius over the question of the ecclesiastical and jurisdictional allegiance of the newly converted Bulgarians and the missionary activities of Cyril and Methodius among the Moravians.
Southern Italy, of course, was contiguous with Rome, which was now firmly under the authority of the papacy, but it had been taken from Roman jurisdiction centuries earlier by Emperor Leo III of Byzantium as punishment to papal resistance to the iconoclastic movement. Southern Italy was constituted by a large number of Greek-affiliated churches. The liturgies were in Greek and followed the pattern in Constantinople; the piety and the experience of Church life was largely Greek in character, but in the eleventh century now, southern Italy is conquered by a new presence in Europe: the Normans. And a group of Norman adventurers come to southern Italy and conquer it.
These Normans were under Roman jurisdiction, and they favored a policy there of Latinization, and in fact Leo now decides to introduce a policy of Latinization in southern Italy as part of his overall reformation of the Church. He imposed a Roman standard on the Greek churches there, and I can quote what is probably the best book on the whole history of the Great Schism. It’s by Steven Runciman; he’s a Western scholar and writes from a Western point of view, so you get that. The book is entitled The Eastern Schism, which shows his Western point of view. The subtitle is: “A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches During the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.” Written quite a long time ago, it remains just an excellent, excellent account of the Great Schism. Let me quote here Runciman’s account of the effort to Latinize the southern Italian churches, Greek-speaking churches. This is what he writes:

The Normans were, after all, Latins, and the districts that they occupied were thereby brought under Latin ecclesiastical domination. The pope had no intention of letting them revert to Byzantine rule, and he wished also to be sure that all the churches there should conform to Roman usages. Hitherto, the great churches of Christendom had not been greatly troubled over divergencies of usage. The Byzantines, devoted though they were to their own liturgy, recognized that other churches might follow other customs. There had been in the past many varied practices within the great patriarchate of the West, but the reformed papacy was anxious, in the interest of discipline and order, to introduce uniformity of usage.

So Leo now advances with Norman support the Latinization of southern Italy. He even goes so far as to organize a synod at the town of Bari in which he advocates the adoption among those Greek churches of the filioque, which, as listeners know now, was a tremendous issue by the eleventh century as a result of Frankish Christendom and the estrangement of East and West, the topic of an earlier episode of this podcast.
So by Latinizing these Greek churches, churches which had a very close connection with the patriarchate of Constantinople, Leo inevitably aggravated this legacy of East-West estrangement. But what is remarkable is that at the very moment he decided to take this provocative course, his very pontificate and the reformation it was designed to advance was thrown into crisis. He suddenly found himself a prisoner of war. How did such a thing occur? Well, one will need to recall that ever since before the time of Pope Stephen II in the eighth century, the papacy had been in possession of an actual state, the territory surrounding Rome. This had been obtained from the king of the Franks, Pepin, who, listeners will recall, had forged a close alliance with the papacy.
Pope Leo IX, though he had actually condemned the Western clergy’s participation in military affairs at the Council of Rheims, now decided in 1053 to raise an army and, as head of the papal states, to invade southern Italy. The campaign that resulted was a disaster. At the battle of Civitate in June 1053, the entire papal army, bearing the papal banner itself, was destroyed by the Normans. Pope Leo had remained in the city of Civitate to observe the battle, and when it was over, he was forced to surrender. He was subsequently imprisoned at Benevento from June of 1053 all the way until March of 1054. Those dates are rather significant, as we’ll see as we go forward here.
He was given honorable treatment at the hands of the Normans who were, for the most part, embarrassed by having such an illustrious prisoner in their midst, the pope of Rome, their ecclesiastical superior, but he was nevertheless a prisoner of war, and that meant that the papal reformation that he had been overseeing for four years now was in question. Would reform have to be suspended while he was a prisoner in southern Italy?
And it was under these circumstances that the ambitious and reform-minded and sometimes confrontational and now languishing in prison, deeply frustrated Pope Leo IX decided to confront the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius. The year was 1054.
Join me next time when I complete this episode on papal reformation and the Great Schism by describing the long-term background to conflicts between Rome and Constantinople and the way in which they culminated in this, perhaps the most tragic event in Church history.

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Papal Reformation and the Great Schism: I

It was the year 1053, and the pope of Rome was a prisoner of war. Leo IX, the most active and energetic and ambitious and self-confident pope in nearly two centuries, was languishing in prison exactly at the time when Western Christendom needed him most. In the middle of the eleventh century, Western Christendom was in great need of reform, of reformation, reformatio in Latin. For many in the West, the past two centuries had brought about the degradation of Western Christendom, this due in part to the impact of the Viking invasions which had begun in the ninth century, and the simultaneous dissolution of the Carolingian empire, the empire of Charlemagne.
Everywhere throughout Western Christendom, there were problems in Church life. For instance, the laity in the form of the nobility were in many places in control of the monasteries and parish churches, a condition called by German historians the Eigenkirche, the proprietary church under the control of local nobility. An expression of despair in the face of this lay control of monasteries and parish churches was given by a group of bishops early in the tenth century, the 900s, in the following statement:

The cities are depopulated (they wrote), the monasteries ruined and burned. The land is reduced to a solitude. As the first men lived without law or constraint, abandoned to their passions, so now every man does what pleases him, despising the laws of God and man and the ordinances of the Church. The powerful oppress the weak, the land is full of violence against the poor and the plunder of the goods of the Church. Men devour one another like the fishes in the sea. In the case of the monasteries, some have been destroyed by the heathen; others have been deprived of their property and reduced to nothing. In those that remain, there is no longer any observance of the rule. They no longer have legitimate superiors, owing to the abuse of submitting to secular domination. We see in the monasteries lay abbots with their wives and their children, their soldiers, and their dogs.

This is a statement by bishops in the West in the early tenth century, but in addition to lay control of monasteries and parish churches, there was also a phenomenon called simony, after Simon Magus in the book of the apostles, who seeks a church appointment in order to make money. What this meant in the vocabulary of the eleventh century was the practice of buying clerical office, often by noblemen, in order to make money. They would pay for a given office, expecting a return through their clerical office, usually as a bishop or an abbot.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a phenomenon called lay investiture. What this was was the control over the appointment of bishops by the ruler, especially the Holy Roman Emperor. Lay investiture: the emperor would control what bishops would serve in what diocese, according, usually, to his own political interests and needs. The result was to take the appointment of bishops out of the hands of fellow bishops and even out of the hands of the laity who, according to the canons of traditional Christianity, were supposed to participate in the election of bishops.
Another example of spiritual degradation in the West, at least one perceived by contemporaries, was what was something called Nicolaitanism. Nicolaitanism was the practice of Western clergy, especially parish priests, of keeping a wife or a concubine. From the earliest times, traditional Christianity had supported a married priesthood. Even Peter himself was said, in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, to have a wife; his mother-in-law is referenced there. But in the West, at a relatively early date—the early fourth century—there began to be a record of an effort to establish a celibate standard for priests.
In the 33rd canon of the Council of Elvira, which was a local Western council in about the year 305 or so—we don’t really know exactly when it took place, but about that time—there was a ban on priests who were already married—clearly most priests, or many of them, were married when they were ordained—there was a ban on them continuing to have conjugal relations with their wives after their ordination. In other words, if a priest was to be married, he was to be celibate in his marriage.
This presented, as can be imagined, all sorts of burdens on the priesthood in the West, a problem that was identified by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. Gregory the Great warned against ordaining men who were already married to the priesthood if they were expected to live by a rule of celibacy within that marriage, and therefore at about this time there began to be an effort to assure that no married priests existed in the West, that all men would live by a celibate standard of life.
But by all accounts there continued to be a mixture: some celibate, some non-celibate, of the priests serving in the West, especially in the countryside. All of this is striking from an Orthodox point of view, obviously, for in the Eastern tradition a married priesthood was always the norm, and furthermore one in which the priest was expected, assumed, to be living in a non-celibate relationship with his wife. As a matter of fact, the Council in Trullo, from the seventh century, contained a canon, canon 13 of that council, which emphatically defended the existence of a married priesthood, one in which the priests were not required or obligated to be celibate at all times.
So in a variety of ways, the Western Church was perceived by contemporaries to have gone into decline, spiritual decline, and there was no one to rescue it. Even the papacy itself was in paralysis during these centuries. In Rome, the aristocracy, the local aristocracy, had long controlled papal elections, since the time of the vigorous Pope Nicholas I, who in his controversy with Patriarch Photios of Constantinople caused the Nicolaitan schism, about which I spoke in an earlier episode. Since the time of Nicholas I in the middle of the ninth century, the papacy had largely fallen into spiritual obscurity under the shadow of Roman politics.
The most notorious example of the degradation brought to the papacy by these economic and political forces in Rome was the case of Pope John XII, who reigned from 955 to 964. Elected pope at the ripe old age of 18 years old, he was the product of Roman power politics. It was his father, a Roman magnate, who had assured with his political and economic influence that his son would be elected pope. John had scarcely assumed papal throne when his reputation became tarnished by all sorts of allegations of sexual immorality. In fact, according to many accounts of the time, he died in the act of an adulterous relationship with the wife of a Roman magnate.
Things didn’t get better after that. In the early eleventh century, a series of popes were elected on the basis of nothing more than that they came from an important part of Italy, Tusculum, and they were the counts of that region. So these counts from Tusculum who one after another managed to be elected pope, became known as the Tusculan popes, who dominated the entire first half of the eleventh century all the way until 1048.
So to summarize, the Western Church was facing huge difficulties in the middle of the eleventh century. Lay control of monasteries, monetary acquisition of clerical office known as simony, royal control of episcopal appointments known as lay investiture, deviation by the clergy from Western canons about morality especially those regarding marriage, and finally the papacy itself in a condition of paralysis. For some, there was only one response to make to this situation, and that was contained in the Latin word reformatio. Reformatio, reformation.
The term “reformatio” had been used by Latin Fathers of the early Church and always with emphasis on restoration rather than innovation in Church life. An effort to restore that which is pure and which finds expression in the earliest records of Christianity, dating back to the time of the apostles, and not innovation: changes to the faith. The emphasis was on traditional Christianity, the Tradition of the Church. And this tendency to reform the Church, to seek a reformation of it from time to time, had gained momentum during the reign of Charlemagne who, as listeners will remember, enacted a policy of correction, or in the Latin, “correctio,” during his reign, to assure that Church life would reform itself to a correct rather than incorrect pattern.
But perhaps the most powerful resource that would-be reformers of Western Christendom in the middle of the eleventh century might draw upon would be the legacy of St. Augustine. In his famous book, The City of God, which almost every leading theologian of the Western Church was familiar with over the course of centuries in the West, Augustine had put forward a vision of a sort of social dualism within the Church. For Augustine, Christendom was inevitably entangled by what he called the city of man, the earthly city, and therefore it was corrupted by that primeval force of evil in the history of man, and that was concupiscence, an inordinate love for that which is not God himself. But Augustine had said in The City of God that the city of God itself has a power to inspire and dynamically to transform the city of man.
Here I can quote one of the most impressive historians of Western Christendom, Christopher Dawson. I discussed him briefly in the introduction to this podcast, which I realized this week was launched just about a year ago now, and I’m just now getting to the Great Schism, but such is the experience of telling the history of such a vast and fascinating civilization as Christendom. Well, Christopher Dawson wrote a lot. He was a graphomaniac; he just wrote and wrote and wrote his whole life—a really amazing scholar—on a lot of things, but especially on the history of Christendom. Some of his essays were collected in a very nice little book—a rather big book, actually: it’s about 500 pages long—called The Dynamics of World History.
It’s got a lot of stuff in it, but among them are essays, articles, on history, on the study of history and especially the Christian study of history. Dawson can be called—one of his biographers recently called him an Augustinian when it came to his study of history, especially the history of the Church in the West. In one of those articles, entitled, “The Christian View of History,” Dawson argued that Augustine’s thought in The City of God, when drawn upon by Church leaders, became a kind of resource of reform. It possessed a kind of dynamic power insofar as it understood the city of God, as it were, standing transcendently over this world and offering it inspiration to transform it spiritually. So let me quote here, Dawson, from that essay.

This view of history (he wrote) found its classical expression in St. Augustine’s work, On the City of God, which interprets the course of universal history as an unceasing conflict between two dynamic principles embodied in two societies and social orders: the city of man and the city of God, Babylon and Jerusalem, which run their course side by side, intermingling with one another and sharing the same temporal goods and the same temporal evils, but separated from one another by an infinite spiritual gulf.

So for Dawson, Augustine’s theology of history, found within the city of God, offered an understanding of the cosmos and the place of Christendom within it as one in which there were two societies, two orders: the city of God and the city of man, and they were in conflict with one another, and through this conflict, the city of God could transform, could inspire and transform the city of man, raising it to higher and higher and more spiritual levels.
This is something that was inherited by the would-be reformers of eleventh-century Western Christendom, and those reformers were not slow to appear. As early as the tenth century, a new movement within monasticism in the West began to appear, and it was a movement specifically for reformation, a movement we can call a monastic reformation. It was inspired by the legacy of the Western Frankish monastic reformer, Benedict of Aniane, who died in 821 and who played an important role in the rise of Frankish Christendom. But it was centered in the monastery known as Cluny, which is located in modern France, a part of Burgundy.
At Cluny, a new form of monastic life appeared in the early tenth century. The monastery was placed when it was founded under the direct administration of the pope in Rome, according to the monastery’s charter of 910, and this precluded any noble domination of it of the kind that was described earlier in that document lamenting the noble and lay control of monasteries in the tenth century. Furthermore, Cluny attracted some very visionary and ambitious reforming abbots. One of these was named Odo, who was abbot there from 927 to 942, and Abbot Odo wrote works of moral exhortation that drew upon the Augustinian inheritance of Western Christendom and the social dualism that I described earlier. Let me quote here, again, Christopher Dawson, but this time from another work, a book called, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, about the Augustinian influence and inspiration of the monastic reformation at Cluny, led by Abbot Odo.

No doubt the monk was concerned primarily during this time with the salvation of his own soul rather than with any program of ecclesiastical reform. (These are Dawson’s words.) But Western monasticism always possessed a strong consciousness of its social responsibility and its missionary functions.

Perhaps at another time I can bring attention to Dawson’s fascinating distinction between what he considers Eastern monasticism and Western monasticism, the latter for him being much more dynamic in its relationship with surrounding society historically. Dawson continues here:

If on the one hand it was based on the tradition of the Fathers of the desert (he’s talking about Western monasticism here), it was inspired still more by the ideals of St. Augustine and St. Gregory (the pope of Rome). The Augustinian theology and philosophy of history, with their intense realization of the burden of inherited evil under which the human race labored and their conception of divine grace as a continually renewed source of supernatural energy which transformed human nature and changes the course of history—all this had become part of the spiritual patrimony of the Western Church and above all of Western monasticism, and Christendom had only to return to this tradition to recover its dynamic energy.
Thus, although the efforts of the reformers of the tenth century were primarily devoted to the cause of monastic reform, they involved far wider issues. These men were not mere self-centered ascetics, but prophets of righteousness who defended the weak and the oppressed and spoke boldly against evil in high places. We see this above all in the writings of St. Odo, the second abbot of Cluny who was one of the greatest of the early leaders in the reforming movement. His chief work is based on the Augustinian conception of the two cities, or rather of the two races: the children of Abel and the children of Cain, whose warfare must endure to the end of time. But while St. Augustine conceives this opposition primarily as a conflict between the Christian Church and the heathen world (after all, Augustine had been writing in the early fifth century, before the whole conversion of the empire had been accomplished), St. Odo was concerned above all with the forces of evil that flourish within the Church.

So for Odo of Cluny and other monastic reformers like him, inspired by Augustine’s City of God, the Church was facing a struggle against worldly, material, and sinful forces that could be overcome only through divine grace, only through contact with and the experience of the city of God, the transcendent city of God. And it can be said that this Augustinian inheritance of Western Christendom ranks—at least I would say it does—as the most theologically sophisticated expression of traditional Christianity’s transformational imperative. I spoke about this transformational imperative in the first episodes of the podcast, when traditional Christianity as a subculture was confronting the surrounding pagan world in the first centuries of the Church.
But in the case of Augustine, so different really than the case of Eusebius and other theologians of the Eastern Church, who saw through a principle that I called heavenly immanence, the manifestation of the kingdom of heaven in the existing, worldly order in a variety of ways, but especially in the experience of the statecraft, the Christian statecraft of Byzantium—well, so different from that is Augustine’s conception of a struggle even, in Dawson’s words, of a warfare that takes place between these two cities, these two forces within this world, within Christendom itself.
So armed with this conception, both of Christendom and of its place historically over time with the potential to be changed and transformed spiritually, monastic reformers like Odo developed a growing optimism, at least ambition, in confronting the degraded state of the Church of their time. Many of these reformers came from Cluny or one of its many daughter-houses that were established over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
As a matter of fact, by the end of the eleventh century, there were hundreds of monasteries planted by Cluny, and all of them incorporated within a very centralized and hierarchical network that traced its way back to the very abbot of Cluny himself, who represented a kind of monarch over the entire network of the Cluny monasteries. Some have even spoken about a Cluny empire throughout Western Europe, where all the lands of Western Europe, more or less, were penetrated by Cluny monasteries who themselves, living within Western Christendom, had a very separate identity from it, tracing their authority structure back to the abbot of Cluny himself, all of this offering a model to the papacy later on in its monarchical sense of supreme authority over Western Christendom, but we’ll talk about that development a little bit later.
For the time being, let me bring attention to one other leader of the monastic reformation of the eleventh century, and that’s Peter Damian. He was actually an Italian monk. He lived at a monastery called Fonte Avellana in northern Italy. He had come from Ravenna where he had early in his life been a teacher of rhetoric, and then he kind of repented of this worldly practice, of this worldly experience, quite successful at rhetoric, actually. As one reads his writings, they’re just incredibly powerful to read. Well, he entered a monastery, and he became a real proponent of a return to hermetic monasticism, monasticism emphasizing the individual experience of ascetical struggle. He was inspired by the Desert Fathers, for instance, of the early Church, very much in contrast with the Benedictine legacy in Western Christendom, which had emphasized the community experience of monastic life, as well as the monastic life described by St. Basil the Great in the East.
He introduced, Peter did, very severe standards of ascetical life, and propagated them, advanced them, promoted them, not only in his own monastery where he was abbot, but in other monasteries throughout the West. Among his practices were very strict fasting, fasting throughout the week, bread and water only on certain days of the week, fasting even during the Pentecost season, fasting, fasting at a level that was really uncommon in the typical monastic life of the West, certainly that following the Benedictine tradition which dominated there. So much so, actually, that when he came to Cluny itself one day and advised, I think, without being asked to, the abbot there, Abbot Hugh at that time—his name was Hugh—[Peter Damian] advised him to introduce stricter standards of fasting for his monks at Cluny, Abbot Hugh kind of reprimanded him and told him to mind his own business and asked him how can he possibly know what’s best for the monks at Cluny without having actually experienced life there and just stepping in from his own monastic background and proposing that that be adopted by another monastery.
So he sometimes ran into trouble because of his severity and intensity, and that severity and intensity really comes out in the writings that he produced. He produced a lot, all of them advancing monastic reform, and not just reform of monasteries, but the monk being the reformer of Christendom itself. Peter took it on himself to travel to different parts of Western Christendom and to confront what he considered to be the degraded state of Church life there.
For him, one of the most important problems was what I called earlier Nicolaitanism, that is, the practice of priests being married. Now in the East, of course, this was, and still is, the common practice. Most parish priests have a wife with whom they have a normal, conjugal relationship and with whom, if God blesses them, they produce children. For Peter, the severe monastic that he was, this was outrageous. This was nothing short of outrageous, an abomination before God, because in his Western context the practice of a married priesthood had been challenged for so many centuries. But the fact was, it was still being practiced in his time.
So on one particular case he came to a community in which the priests were largely married, and he confronted them. He kind of shook them up by proposing that they leave their wives, and their wives their husbands. What is interesting is that he actually addressed in a very eloquent—obnoxious from an Orthodox point of view, for sure, but in a very eloquent and powerful way, rhetorically speaking—he addressed the clergy wives, what we call in the Orthodox Church today the [presvyteres], the matushki, and the khouriyes, and so forth, the popadije. This is what he had to say to the married priests of the eleventh century West, writing to them.

And now, let me speak to you, you charmers of clerics, tasty tidbits of the devil, expulsion from paradise, venom of the mind, sword that kills souls, poison in the drink, toxin in the food, source of sinning, and occasion of damnation. I am talking to you, you female branch of the ancient enemy, hoopoes, screech-owls, night-hawks, she-wolves, leeches, nymphs, sirens, witches, vile tigresses whose cruel jaws can be sated only on human blood, harpies flying about the sacrifice of the Lord to snatch those who are offered to God and cruelly devour them, lionesses, sirens, furious vipers who by the ardor of your impatient lust dismember your lovers by cutting them off from Christ who is the head of the clergy.

So very, very powerful words by Peter Damian who, by the way, is a canonized Roman Catholic saint. Very powerful words against the wives of clergy in his program to reform Western Christendom from his monastic point of view.
Well, it wasn’t just monks who undertook the reformation of Western Christendom in the middle of the eleventh century. It was also, interestingly, the imperial authorities themselves, specifically the person of the emperor. And we can speak also of an imperial reformation, reformatio, that was underway in the early eleventh century. The Holy Roman Empire, as we traced its development from the time after the dissolution of Charlemagne’s empire through the actions of Otto the Great and then culminating by the end of the tenth century, the 900s, in the Emperor Otto III, whose vision of a Western empire had been inspired by Byzantium itself.
In fact, I called Otto III’s Holy Roman Empire a kind of New Byzantium insofar as it clearly was modeled upon the Byzantine state. Otto III was, after all, the son of a Byzantine empress, and because it was modeled on the Byzantine state, there was the principle of symphony at work, namely, that the emperor would take it upon himself to advance the interests of the Church, the Church leadership, working closely with and harmoniously with the bishops of the Church for the benefit of the Church. Symphony, a principle I described in an earlier episode on the rise of Christian statecraft in Byzantium, in part one of this podcast.
Well, Otto III had a very illustrious successor in the person of Emperor Henry II, who reigned from 1014 to 1024. Henry II lived his life in celibacy with his wife Cunigunde and therefore earned the reputation of being a very pious emperor, and it was partly for this reason that he was actually canonized a saint. He’s a Roman Catholic saint as well, Henry II, Emperor Henry II. He is noteworthy for having renewed the papal alliance that had been forged between, at its earliest stage Pope Stephen II and the Frankish King Pepin, and then, more dramatically demonstrated in the crowning on Christmas Day in the year 800 of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III.
Henry II likewise was crowned in St. Peter’s Basilica by the pope, but what’s significant is that, because of his influence in Church life, even with the pope himself, Henry II was able, finally, after a couple of centuries of struggle, finally able to achieve that long-term Frankish and German goal of having the pope in Rome adopt formally the filioque in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. That happened in 1014 at Henry II’s coronation. Henry II also distinguished himself in the leadership and reform of the Church by convening a reforming synod at Rome in that year, where he demanded clerical celibacy and an end to simony.
Henry II had left an important legacy that was taken up, fulfilled, in the person of Henry III, Emperor Henry III, who plays a very important and direct role in what we’re discussing in this episode, namely, the papal reformation and the Great Schism. Henry III reigned from 1039 to 1056. He had a very pious character, like Henry II. In fact, he married a descendant of the very founder of the monastery of Cluny, the founder having been William of Aquitaine, Duke of Aquitaine, in the early tenth century, while by the middle of the eleventh century a descendant of William was chosen as the wife of Henry III. And Henry III maintained a very close relationship with this monastic center of reformation.
Henry III practiced a very strict asceticism that earned the approval of monastic reformers like Peter Damian. He also had the practice of wearing monastic garments. He also, interestingly, discontinued, suspended to some degree, the imperial policy of using bishops for administration, a sign that he was willing to consider, at least to some degree, the demands being made for an end to lay investiture. He defended the practice of establishing independent ecclesiastical courts, and he campaigned vigorously against clerical simony, the sale of Church offices. It was actually this very issue which led him to convene a council at Sutri in 1046.
In 1046, the pious Emperor Henry III convened a synod of bishops in Sutri to address what he considered to be one of the chief problems of the degraded Christianity of Western Christendom: the paralyzed papacy. A recent pope had been accused of simony, so at Sutri Henry intervened and deposed three contending popes and established an imperial right of electing popes. So with this right he now was able to intervene in papal affairs and assure that popes of higher caliber could be elected free of the influence of local Roman magnates. This provided a definitive solution to the problem of the paralyzed papacy. Now the papacy would be liberated and freed to begin leading the reformation itself. Henry elected no fewer than four popes of Rome in sequence: Clement II, Damasus II, Leo IX with whom I’m mainly interested in this episode, and after Leo IX Victor II. The election of these popes played a very important role in the coming papal reformation. Let me quote again Christopher Dawson in his book, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.

The action of Henry III (he writes) had a far-reaching effect on the course of the reforming movement. At first sight it might seem that it would reduce the papacy to complete dependence on the imperial power, for the three popes whom he nominated in rapid succession—Clement II, Damasus II, and Leo IX—were loyal prelates of the empire from Germany and Lorraine, who had no Italian connections and were consequently forced to rely on the material support of the emperor. Nevertheless, the mere fact that the papacy was taken out of the control of the Roman nobles and their factions and brought into intimate relations with northern and central Europe, where the monastic reformation was occurring, had an immediate effect on its international influence.

The most important of these popes, by far, was Leo IX, and what an ironic thing, really, that Leo IX, who had launched nothing short of a papal reformation, would be chosen by Henry III, because it was the successors to Leo IX, in the later eleventh century, that would become the archenemies of Henry III’s very successor and son, Henry IV, in an epic conflict known as the Investiture Controversy. But for the time being, Leo IX was now Pope of Rome, and set about to reform not only the papacy but all of Western Christendom, and not only all of Western Christendom, but the entire universal Church herself.
Join me next time when we explore the papacy of Leo IX and the reasons why, by 1053, just four years into the most energetic and ambitious and self-confident pontificate in two centuries, Leo found himself a prisoner of war.


Thanks to Source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/paradiseutopia/papal_reformation_and_the_great_schism_I