The Great Schism

For the first thousand years of Christian history, the religion held together despite nearly everything working against it. Distances were vast. Languages differed. Emperors rose and fell and sometimes burned churches for sport. Heresies tore congregations apart and sent bishops into bitter exile. Yet the church endured, at least officially, as one body.

What finally broke it was not persecution or heresy. It was success.

By the eleventh century, Christianity had become the organizing principle of two distinct civilizations, each prosperous, each confident, each persuaded it had preserved the faith correctly while the other had wandered into error. The church in Rome and the church in Constantinople had been drifting apart for centuries — speaking different languages, following different liturgical rites, governed by different assumptions about who was in charge. The mutual excommunications of July 1054 did not cause the split. They ratified something that had already happened.