The Schism

THE DATE OF THE SCHISM

4~rMo~rr~x~rKtxixs of church history aiiditiliteratttrt on the p~ob1ems o~isti~n mtfty the date of the schism tet’c~reen past and West is g~4.-~e54..fr’The sting of the day almost nine hundred years ago still hurts the one Church of Christ: on the altar of St. Sophia the Papal legates laid the letter of excommunication: ‘You have received the anathema? The Emperor preferred to side with the legates, but the people preferred the Patriarch. After July 1Q54 there were no more illusions and few more hopes of the one Church’s retaining a semblance of unity.”’ But in the last thirty years renewed study of the sources, especially but not only the Byzantine sources, has led a number of writ’ers to a new view of the schism avf!a gradual, fluctuating, disjointed process, perhaps not consummated until the end of the fifteenth~ century, and perhaps only reaching its present form about
165o.?

The ~Vfference need not be exaggerated; in the older books the ...