Back When God Was A Lady

There is a lovely antiphon for the Benedictus at Morning Prayer for Trinity Sunday:

O Holy and Undivided Trinity, Creator and Ruler of all that exists, may all praise be yours now, forever, and for ages unending. 

I am well familiar with it.  Just read it yesterday morning.  But alas, I am lazy, I confess it,  and pray in English; little did I know the theological bombshell the English text was concealing.  That is the trouble with English, or rather with the imprecise, translations pushed by those Liturgiam Authenticam folk who are responsible for the current Liturgical texts and who use the liturgy to push their own sexist ideology.  I should have listened to Archbishop Lefebvre after all and kept to the lingua materna of the Church.  Well no, not actually, as that would be Greek.  But the wicked stepmother tongue.  Latin.

After my posting yesterday about the Maryland Maven rallying the torch and pitchfork crowd against Father Dan Fitzpatrick of Durham in England and his “heresy” of referring to the Holy Spirit in the feminine, a reader sent me an extraordinary comment pointing out that the Benedictus Antiphon for Trinity Sunday Lauds—in the pre-conciliar breviary (and of which our previously cited novus ordo vernacular antiphon is a translation, and a poor and misleading one at that)—is a truly remarkable exposition of the femininity not only of the Holy Spirit, but the Godhead Hims—whoops, Herself.  Get a load o’ this!

Benedícta sit creátrix et gubernátrix ómnium, sancta et indivídua Trínitas, et nunc et semper et per infiníta sæculórum sæcula.

I don’t even know where to begin!  Trust me on this, the Latin text is infinitely superior to the English Translation just on the literary level.  I mean, as Latin goes, it is exquisite. It just cries out to be melodiously chanted by virginal monastics who have been made eunuchs for the sake of the liturgy.  But, that aside, let’s unpack it theologically for a moment.

Trinitas in Latin is feminine.  I knew that.  But I presumed like nauta (sailor) and agricola (farmer) it is a feminine noun referring to a male being and therefore taking adjectives in the masculine form.  All languages have their idiosyncrasies.  But no, I should have remembered that it is a sancta et individua, that is to say, feminine Trinitas. Moreover, whoever composed this antiphon way “back in the day” went way overboard to push the feminine theme using the feminine creatrix rather than the masculine creator and the feminine gubernatrix rather than the masculine gubernator.  This antiphon then refers to God, Creator and Ruler of All –as a lady creator and a lady ruler.  I mean it is just incredible!!!  And Sister Joan Chittester had nothing to do with it!!!!  Neither did Elizabeth Johnson!!!!  In fact, almost certainly it was some guy who did it.   The Krazies will assure me that he was almost certainly gay.  Damn gender-benders!

Pope John XXII established the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity for the universal Church in the 14^th century, but the feast itself and the proper office to it is much older, having been composed by Stephen of Liege in the early 10^th century.  I don’t know that this particular antiphon referring to the Creator and Ruler of the universe in the feminine goes back that far—though as it appears in the Rite of York as well as in the Liege ceremonial, an indication that it is pretty ancient, undoubtedly long before Quo Primum and Pius V— it is certainly pre-12^th century.  Ol’ Steve of Liege and his buddies were way ahead of their time.  Can you imagine if they were to be members of the upcoming Synod???  Why those ol’ battle axes from Les Femmes and Restore DC Catholicism would be joining up with the ladies in lavender  from Rorate Caeli and New Liturgical Movement to bar access to the Synod Hall to these heretics.  Creatrix indeed!!!  I bet ol’God is going to hitch up the coleos divinos and smite a few of these liberal pansies who called him a creatrix et gubernatorix.  

Once Again, Sheldon Says It All

The (former) Basilica of the
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul--when
the Holy Spirit was Lady Wisdom

One of my favorite krazy-blogs is Restore D.C. Catholicism, an internet rant written by a dyspeptic suburban Maryland housewife in serious and immediate need of hormone restoration therapy.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I think that the blogosphere offers us a promising opportunity for the laity to enter into a fruitful conversation about our faith that can let the bishops tap the pulse of the consensus fidelium, but that doesn’t mean that the wild-eyed rants of every krazy with a keyboard merit to be given serious consideration.  Some people should just close their computers and volunteer for Candy-Stripe duty at the local hospital. Our Faith is not something that is a matter of one person’s opinion but is rooted both in the scripture and in centuries of faith.  One of my favorite quotes, attributed to the great 20^th century Patristic scholar, Jaroslav Pelikan is

 “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.” 

And while the rest of us look to the living faith that has been passed down from the Apostles through the Fathers of the Church and ultimately to us, the Grand Inquisitor of Gaithersburg clings to the dead faith learned from Sister Mary Christmas in the fourth grade at Saint Torquemada Academy for Aspiring Book Burners. 

The current tempest our kitchen theologian has conjured up in her teapot regards a priest from Durham in England.  She casts her net far and wide to hunt her heretics.  Father Dan Fitzpatrick, a popular preacher and a caring pastor posted on his twitter account

“The term “Holy Spirit” in Hebrew, ie the form Jesus would have learned in the first century, is feminine: “ruach”  So let us listen to her.” 

This sent the self-appointed Defensor Fidei  totally ass-over-teacups in a theological tizzy.  The problem is that Father Fitzpatrick is correct.  But then, who expects a middle-aged hausfrau from Germantown to know Hebrew?  What is more, when the Greek-speaking Fathers of the Church (including the Latin Fathers of the Second and Third centuries who wrote in Greek, not Latin) spoke of the Holy Spirit, they chose the word Sophia (Wisdom).  Thus we have the ancient basilica of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (now, Istanbul).  And guess what: the Greek Sophia, like the Hebrew ruach, is feminine.  And so the Eastern Church still speaks of the Holy Spirit as feminine.  Imagine that!!!  When the western Church moved from Greek to Latin, the western Fathers used the more literal translation of ruach, Spiritus.  Spiritus, in Latin, is masculine.  And so in the western Church we speak of the Holy Spirit in the masculine.  Being One Church in One Faith, however, there really is no problem in cross-referencing over to the other side of Tradition. 

Of course the pointlessness of the entire conversation is that the First and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity are neither masculine or feminine.  While Tradition does speak—for the greater part—of the First Person in the masculine, the Tradition is divided on the Third Person.  So there is lot’s of wiggle room here for Father Fitzpatrick—and for those 300,000,000 Christians who follow the Eastern Church Tradition.  As for the lady behind Restore DC Catholicism, to quote my much cherished Sheldon Cooper, “them bitches be krazy.”

What Price Freedom?

The Hagia Sophia--once a church, later

a mosque, now secularized and a museum

I recently was in Turkey.  I had been to Istanbul before but only briefly and was anxious to return and see it again and in more depth.  I didn’t think anything about this at the time, but while I saw women in a variety of dress from western fashions to the hijab to the burqa I never saw either an imam or a Christian (Catholic or Orthodox) priest.   When I returned home, a friend of mine who has ties to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate in Istanbul explained to me that other than the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, the Armenian Patriarch, and the Grand Mufti of Istanbul, all clerics of any religion may not wear ecclesial garb off the premises of their religious institutions.  Even archbishops and monastic abbots, while in public, must wear secular dress.   The Turks have no plans for a Fortnight for Freedom to protest this limitation on their religious freedom and it is far more restrictive than our alleged limitation in the United States to practice our Catholic faith fully and openly.        I told my friend that I saw this restriction on clerical apparel as an infringement of religious freedom, a persecution of the Church but he assured me that it was only part of the rigid secularization of Turkish society which is actually designed to protect religious minorities.  When the Ottoman Empire was dissolved after World War I, the new Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was insistent on secularization of the State.   Secularization in Turkey is extremely restrictive of religion in the public sphere.  Religions, whether Christian or Muslim, cannot run schools or universities other than those to train clergy.  Education is totally secular.  There are no religious emblems permitted in public.  While Islamic practice is on the rise in Turkey, so far this secularization policy has prevented the sort of disputes—often violent—that has set one Islamic sect against another.  It also has served to protect the Christian and Jewish minorities from persecution by the Muslim majority.
      Perhaps one of the strongest symbols of secularization in Turkey is the status of the Hagia Sophia.  Built as a Christian basilica by the Emperor Justinian in 562 (the third church of the name on the site), it was converted to a Mosque within days of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. (Constantinople fell Sunday, May 29^th and Mehmed II ordered the building to be readied for Friday Prayers by June 3^rd.)   The building remained a mosque until 1931 when it was closed and then reopened as a museum—which it is today—in 1935.  Muslims want it to be returned to Muslim worship; Orthodox Christians want it returned to status as the patriarchal Church of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchs.  Its secular status pleases no one but tourists yet it is a symbol in an intolerant world of tolerance, albeit imposed tolerance. 
      I would hate to see religious tolerance imposed on our society by such rigid secularization, but religious groups, if they value their freedoms, need to remember that they cannot dictate policies that restrict the liberties of others.  Our society does not have an accord on such volatile subjects as abortion, same-sex unions, gay adoption, embryonic stem-cell research, artificial insemination, surrogate parenting, voluntary sterilization, end-of-life choices.  These are difficult choices and while religions have the right to educate those of the public who are willing to be educated, they should not expect to have their moral positions imposed—even by a political majority—upon those whose doctrinal and  moral beliefs are different.  If the citizenry cannot discipline themselves sufficiently to allow a moral consensus that transcends religious particularity to evolve then we may find ourselves in a situation like Turkey where restrictions will be placed on the public role of religion to protect the harmony of the larger society.   I would hate to see that; it would be disappointing to those of our national founders who ideally thought that such processes would work in rational and democratic ways without the necessity of banishing religion to the private sphere, but it is our choice.  Freedom does not come without responsibilities.  

Shroud of Turin II--A Mysterious Provenance

The Hagia Sophia, or Church of 

the Holy Wisdom, one time seat of

the Patriarch of Constantinople 

Let’s get back to the Shroud of Turin.  In a previous entry (October 1) I said that the history of the shroud can only be traced with exactness from 1390 when the Bishop of Troyes wrote the pope with his (the bishop’s) opinion that the Shroud was a forgery and even claimed that the artist had confessed to his counterfeit.  The Shroud was in the possession of the family of the Counts de Charny and was passed on in that family until it was sold ot the Dukes of Savoy in 1453.  It remained in possession of the Savoy House until 1983 when the Savoys (the Italian Royal Family from 1861 until 1946) gave it to the Holy See.  During its time with the Savoys it was kept first in a chapel at Chambéry and was later (1578) transferred to the cathedral in their new capital, Turin.  It remains in Turin to the present.  That is all history.
     Now to reasonable conjecture.  Medieval documents allege that the shroud was in Constantinople from an unspecified date, probably as early as the seventh century, until the city was sacked by the Crusaders in 1204.  It disappears at that time until possibly (and even probably) 1353 when it shows up in Lirey.  (There is mention of it in 1353, but the earliest definitive record is 1390.)  How did it get from Constantinople to Lirey, and where was it from 1204 until 1353 (much less 1390).  The theory is (and it is a reasonable conjecture) that it had come into the possession of the Knights Templar at the time that Constantinople was sacked in 1204 and remained with them until the Order was dissolved in 1307.  A key figure in the Templars was Geoffrey de Charny who served as the Grand Preceptor of Normandy (the head of the Order in North-west France).  DeCharny was among the Templars burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay, the Master General of the Order.  When the shroud surfaces, it is in the custody of  his nephew, another Geoffrey de Charny.  There is a bit of a jump here, but it is reasonable. 
     Ok, but how did it get to Constantinoplein the first place?   Here there is some controversy.  There are coins from the reign of Justinian II—coins minted in 692—that purportedly display the image of Christ from the shroud?  Do they?  Hard to say.  Art historians differ and medieval representations are never exact.  If they do, it would indicate that the shroud was in Constantinople, Justinian’s capital, by the end of the seventh century.  There are other scholars who identify the shroud with “The Image of Edessa”—a representation of Christ on cloth that is mentioned by Saint John Damascene (675-749).  We will do a separate entry on the “Image of Edessa.”  The Image of Edessa was brought to Constantinople only in 944; there exists a sermon preached on the occasion by the archdeacon, Gregorios Referendarios.  Another reason not to associate the shroud with the “Image of Edessa,” also known as the Holy Mandylion, is that this image also was looted during the sack of Constantinople but was sold to Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France and kept in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris along with other relics of the Passion of Christ.  It was lost or destroyed during the French Revolution, but this testifies to the Shroud at Lirey- Chambéry-Turin existing separately from the Image of Edessa at Paris from 1390 (the point in time when we undisputedly have both relics) until 1789 when the Paris relic disappears.  The existence of the “Image of Edessa” is recorded at the very end of the sixth century though there are stories going back to the fourth which may refer to it.  All that is for a later entry.  We are still left with the problem: even if Justinian’s coins from 692 refer to the Shroud at Constantinople—where was it for the approximately 660 years between the burial of Christ and Justinian’s coins?  Frankly we don’t know.  All we can say is that from the time that Constantine transferred his imperial capital to Constantinople, the city and its churches became a repository for a huge number of relics of Christ, Mary, and the Saints.  There authenticity—at least form a historical perspective—cannot be proved.  It should not surprise us that a burial cloth purported to be that of Jesus—authentic or not—eventually found its way to what was until the Sack of Constantinople, the greatest treasure house of Christian holy objects in the world.  Is it the historical Shroud of Jesus?  I don’t know; the Church doesn’t say, but as a dear friend of mine, Dot Pittman (God Rest her) used to say: “never let the truth spoil a good story.”     

The East West Schism--more on that story

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  After

having served as the seat of the

Patriarch of Constantinople for

centuries, it was turned into a

mosque.  Since the secularizaiton

of Turkey at the end of World War I

it has been a museum. 

Well, I think we have looked enough, at least for awhile, at the problem of so many bishops not being up to the grade needed to meet the leadership challenges of the Church in the Modern World and we can return to the eleventh century.  I will have some entries to bridge the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century and the Innocentian Reform of the Thirteenth, but before we go there I would like to return to the topic of the East-West Schism.  You might want to check the entries for January 25 and August 23. 
     The first notion to get out of our heads is the idea that the Greek Orthodox Church “broke away” from the Roman Catholic Church.  Break they did, but the Greek and the Roman Churches broke away from each other, or rather, they broke with each other.  The Greek—and other Orthodox Churches—were never “under” the Pope.  As pointed out in the August 23^rd entry, the five patriarchs were recognized as equals and each was seen as supreme in his own jurisdiction.  The Roman Patriarch was the first among these equals, and recognized as such since the First Council of Constantinople.  The other Patriarchs ranked—according to the Council in Trullo (recognized as Ecumenical by the Eastern Churches but not the Western) Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.  Indeed, Jerusalem was recognized almost solely for its antiquity as the Mother Church; it really had no daughter Churches to speak of in its patriarchy.  Antioch on the other hand controlled the Churches of Syria, Iraq, Persia and down into India—a vast region.  Alexandria led the Churches of Egypt and North Africa as well as along the Red Sea with the Coptic Church of Ethiopia.  And then there was Constantinople.  The Patriarch claimed descent from Saint Andrew, the First-Called and elder brother of Peter.  These titles nudged the Bishop of Rome a bit about his position.  Yes, Peter was the leader, but it was Andrew who told Peter that he had met the Messiah and invited Peter to come along in discipleship.  (John 1:41).  Andrew the First-Called was a reminder that, well maybe, Constantinople should be first and Rome, Peter’s See, second.  After all, Constantinople was the capital of the Empire and Rome was now just a backwater town, abandoned and in ruins.  And the Emperor—the real Emperor, not that German fool in bearskins and with dirty feet—reigned in Constantinople.  And there was the great basilica of the Hagia Sophia and the splendid liturgies in Constantinople while in Rome Saint Peter’s was falling down around the congregation as the papal chaplains stood around yawning and scratching their backsides at Mass.
     The tension was building on a number of fronts.  Constantinople was sending out missionaries to convert the Slavic Peoples to the North and West in what is today Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania.  The Holy Roman Emperor was sending out missionaries with papal ties to the Slavic Peoples in what is today the Czech Republic, Poland, and Croatia.  What would happen when the western missionaries spreading papal ties met up with the eastern missionaries spreading dependency on Constantinople?  Meet they would in what is today Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and along the fault line between eastern and western Slavs. (I don’t mean to imply here that the Hungarians are Slavs—they are not—but they got caught in the mix, sort of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)  Actually in 862 the Greeks had sent the brother team of missionaries Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs but the brothers had been politic enough to first go to Rome and get the pope’s encouragement for their mission as well.  Both Catholic and Orthodox Slavs look to these brothers as their Apostles, but the peace the built between East and West and was not to last.     
      Greek missionaries had reached beyond the Black Sea up the Dnieper River to the site of modern Kiev where they had made progress in converting the local Rus people.  The Rus were of Viking extraction, peoples from modern Sweden, who had colonized along the Rivers of the Ukraine as the Norse had settled along the Seine and Loire in France.  There is an old story that Prince Vladimir the Great, the leader of the Rus, had wanted to introduce Christianity (the religion of his Grandmother, Saint Olga) to his subjects and so he sent an embassy first to Rome and then to Constantinople.  The ambassadors witnessed Mass in the Vatican Basilica. It was ok.   Proceeding on to Constantinople, they witnessed the Divine Liturgy in the Hagia Sophia.  “We did not know,” they claimed, “whether we were in Heaven or still on earth” for the beauty of the Divine Liturgy.  It is a lovely story, but the facts are that the ties of the Russian Church had always been to the Constantinople Patriarchate.  While the Roman Church never claimed authority over the Russian Church, the spread of Greek Christianity among the Slavic Peoples on the frontier between the two empires was an annoyance to both sides.
     Then came the Photian schism.  You can read about it in the August 23^rd entry.  Basically the Emperor deposed Patriarch Ignatios of Constantinople because he had offended the Emperor’s uncle.  The Emperor, Michael III, appointed a new patriarch, Photios, in Ignatios’ place.  The Pope, Nicholas I, felt that as senior patriarch he had to defend the cause of the Ignatios, claiming that an Emperor had no authority to depose a Patriarch.  In the end Ignatios was restored, the breach was healed and when Ignatios died Photios was elected in his own right and Pope and Patriarch played nice.  But it was remembered that the Pope had interfered in internal matters of the Greek Church.   The Greeks resented this.  The Latins, for their part, stopped claiming that Nicholas had done this as senior patriarch protecting the rights of his second-in-dignity confrere, and instead began to claim that the Pope had a universal jurisdiction over all Christians.  This was a considerable advance in the theory of papal authority.  And the Greeks would respond in kind—but that is for the next entry. 

The Glory that was Greece; the Grandeur that was Rome

Yesterday I mentioned Pope Theodore II who was the son of the Patriarch of Constantinope, Photius, and said that there is a very interesting—and important—story in the background here as it explains, in part, the split between the Western (Catholic) Church and the Eastern (Orthodox) Church. Of course in antiquity the entire Church, East and West, was one, holy, catholic (note the small “c”), and apostolic. And the Western Church (at least those parts of it in communion with the See of Rome) and the Eastern Church (at least those parts of it in communion with the See of Constantinople) were “orthodox” (note the small “o”). By catholic we mean part of the universal communion of Churches; by orthodox we mean accepting the doctrinal formulations of the ancient ecumenical Councils, especially in regards to the doctrines of the Trinity and regarding the two natures in One Person of Christ.
For centuries there was great harmony between the Sees of Peter (Rome) and Andrew (Constantinople). The sense of the Imperium Romanum (Roman Empire) persisted long after the fall of the Emperor in the West, Romulus Agustulus in 476; the Emperor in Constantinople considered himself to be the Emperor of the whole Roman world, East and West, and the Bishop in Rome acknowledged this even as the Emperor acknowledged the Bishop of Rome to be the first (among equals) bishop of the Church. Popes in Rome were often from the Greek half of the world, and while the liturgies developed very differently in the East and in the West, there was some cross-fertilization of practice, particularly a Greek influence on the Western Liturgies. The Kyrie is one example of this Greek influence on the Roman Liturgy. The orientation of the celebrant of the liturgy is another.
As the centuries went on, however, the harmony between east and west began to show some signs of discordance. Particularly after the rise of Islam and the loss of a large portion of the Empire in Syria-Palestine and North Africa, the Emperor in Constantinople was preoccupied with defending the borders with Islam and could not offer the military protection to Rome that was needed. Saracen pirates captured Sicily and parts of Southern Italy and threatened Rome. (Somewhat later they would even raid Rome and sack the Basilica of St. Peter, prompting Pope Leo IV to build the “Leonine Wall”—we discussed that in an earliar post—but that was just a few decades later than the period we are talking about.) Meanwhile from the north a Germanic tribe, the Lombards, were pressing down on papal lands in central Italy. When the popes could not count on the Emperor in Constantinople for help, they turned to a powerful kingdom in the West—the Franks—for support. Pepin, and then later his son, Charlemagne checked the Lombards. In return for protection that Charlemagne offered, Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor.
Historians argue whether Charlemagne wanted this title, or even knew about it before the pope brought out a crown and plucked it on his head December 25, 800. It was, one must admit, a pretty classy Christmas gift. Charlemagne always protested that it hadn’t been his idea. The Emperor in Constantinople certainly was not pleased. "Emperor? Excuse me, we have an emperor—right here in Constantinople. There is no room for two Emperors." But what was the fellow in Constantinople to do? He didn’t have the military power to go over to what is today France and Germany and teach this bearded upstart who couldn’t even write and wore a bearskin cape a lesson or two about emperors. He had to live with it—but he didn’t have to like it.
Nor did his subjects. They thought the people in the west were a joke. Rome was a has-been city. In the days when the empire was capitaled there, Rome had approximately two million residents; now it had about forty-thousand at best. And they lived in the bricked up ruins of old temples and amphitheaters, with cattle grazing in the forum. The neighborhood had certainly become run down. Constantinople, on the other hand, was a city of great wealth and culture. It had schools where philosophy and theology were taught. Its churches were magnificent. Its Patriarch presided at the Divine Liturgy in the gorgeous basilica of the Hagia Sophia surrounded by choirs and monks and bishops while in Rome the Pope had to step over cow dung on his way to the altar in the broken down ruins of Constantine’s basilicas. The west, they declared, had seen its day; its glory was finished. Leadership and power belonged in the city of Constantinople. Peter may be buried at Rome, but Andrew was Peter’s older brother and his Church was still something glorious.
The relationship of the Church to the Empire had developed differently in Constantinople than it had in Rome because of the presence of the Emperor in the one city and the relative independence of the Pope from civil authority in the other. Actually through most of this period the pope was both the civil and religious authority. When the power of the Byzantine Emperor declined in Rome in the sixth and seventh centuries it left a vacuum which the Bishop stepped in and filled. It wasn’t that the popes sought the responsibilities and privileges of civil government—it was just that there wasn’t anyone else on site who could provide for law and order, food distribution, military protection and other functions of government. So the Church stepped in and did it. By and large the papal administration wasn’t particularly good at this task—other than the distribution of grain and foodstuffs to the poor, or in times of famine to the general population—but it was the only leadership that took the initiative. Consequently the Bishop of Rome was used to being answerable only to God, while in Constantinople the Bishop was used to being required to give account to the Emperor. The Patriarch was little more than an officer of State, while the Pope was supreme authority. They each conceived their role very differently and this is where the conflict came in with Photius and the subsequent schism.
Pope Nicholas objected when the in 858 Emperor Michael III deposed the patriarch Ignatios and named a layman, Photius, to replace him. The problem was not that the new patriarch was a layman. True, Photius was not ordained but he was a theologian and had served the Church well in that capacity. His uncle had been patriarch at one time and his family was noted for service in the Church and their commitment to Orthodoxy. He was ordained through the various minor and major orders and then consecrated Bishop on Christmas day 858. Moreover in the Western Church laymen were occasionally elected bishops and even pope. (hmmm, that would be an interesting blog.) They were, of course, ordained to their new office once they had accepted. The problem for Nicholas was that a sitting bishop—indeed the patriarch—had been removed from office by Imperial authority. Ignatios had refused the Emperor's uncle (and power behind the throne), whom he suscpeted of adultery with his widowed daughter-in-law, entrance into the Church of the Hagia Sophia. For Nicholas the rights of the Church took precedence over the authority of the Emperor. The Church was supreme in power over government. The Emperor’s role was to protect the Church and to carry out the temporal directives of the Pope. For the Emperor, and Photius, the Emperor was the Vicar of Christ and therefore held authority over the Church as well as the secular domain. This would be a problem in the Western Church too in the eleventh century when various Emperors claimed jurisdiction over the Church. The Eastern Church—first under the Byzantine Emperors and later under the Russian Czars—always saw the Emperor as having authority over the Church and the Church serving under their protection and authority.
Nicholas excommunicated the Emperor and the Patriarch. The Patriarch returned the compliment and thus there was a break of communion—a schism—between the Eastern and Western Churches. The schism did not last. It ended with Ignatios was restored to his See in 867. Moreover Photius came to the Patriarchal throne legitimately after the death of Ignatios ten years later. But the precedent had been set and the wound never quite healed right. It would break open again in 1054 when the Patriarch Michael Cerularius and the Papal Legate, the Cardinal Humbert, exchanged mutual excommunications—but that is for later.
Notice that I wrote that there was a break of communion. It is historically inaccurate to say, as many Catholics do, that the Greek Orthodox Church broke off from the Roman Catholic Church or went into schism from the Catholic Church. (You could say schism with the Catholic Church, but not schism from the Catholic Church). It was an unhappy parting of brothers—of Peter and Andrew as it were—not a rebellion of a child from his father. The Churches had been in communion with one another, not the one subject to the authority of the other. The Bishop of Rome may have been “first” among the bishops of Christendom but he was not “over” them—that idea will develop a little later. In antiquity the bishops and Churches of Christendom were seen as equals with Rome being the first among the equals. Indeed it was the emerging sense of superiority of one over another, that led to the great schism of East and West. Popes and Patriarchs unfortunately had forgotten the words of Jesus to the disciples when they were arguing about which of them were first. There are times that Jesus must scratch his head and wonder if it had all been worthwhile.

The image today is the interior of a Greek Orthodox Church