For anything that happens next to make sense, I need to make sure that y’all understand a very important detail. I brushed over it in my previous article, but I think it's important to drive this point home before we continue into any of this super complicated sh+t. The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches used to be one church. They were a unified front for nearly a thousand years. It’s hard to imagine now, almost a thousand years after the division. Still, there was once upon a time when people couldn’t have ever thought that the Church would be splintered into hundreds of thousands of little particles called denominations.
Billy Graham, Joel Osteen, Tucker Carlson, Chick-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, The Duck Dynasty dudes, and those knuckleheads who wrote the Left Behind Series all exist because a thousand years ago, two bishops got into a pissing contest. Nothing that we deal with now as far as the religious world is concerned would exist if the Church had done what it always did whenever it had little squabbles and disagreements: disemboweled the heretics! No, if they had convened a goddamn council. But that isn’t what happened. Oh no, they couldn’t just put on their big boy robes and act like f+cking adults. Instead, they had a “my bishop’s crook is bigger than your bishop’s crook” contest, and the world has suffered tremendously for it.
And I’m not just talking about all the silly shenanigans the protestants have pulled, either. The Crusades only happened because the Pope now had unilateral authority. Under the old system, he would have been required to get consent from the other bishops before launching a full-scale attack on the entire known world.
Now, I’m not delusional. Atrocities would have still happened in the world without question. I’m just saying they would have been unified atrocities instead of haphazard ones. People still suck even when they are getting along.
By the time the First Ecumenical Council was convened, you had five original Patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Think of a Patriarchate as if the Church is comprised of five business partners who all have equal shares in the business. Nothing can happen without the other. They have occasional partner meetings where they make big decisions about the direction of the company. Sure, there are minor differences between each partner, but all in all, these original five partners were considered equal in authority and prominence. Each of them had territories with bishops, priests, and deacons under their authority, and at the time, other than minor disputes and quibbles, they were one unified Church. There are little differences in liturgical attire and expression, but the basics are the same, and that’s what is important. The thing holding them all together is this Mission Statement known as the Nicene Creed.
The problem is the creed was written hundreds of years ago by their predecessors, and the world is just getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, they are bringing on more partners and setting up satellite sites all over the place. The Church is using the Starbucks model of globalization, but they are having difficulty ensuring everyone gets their order right. Some churches are using leavened bread, others unleavened bread. Some are serving wine; others aren’t. Things are getting out of hand.
Over time, these differences become more and more pronounced. See, there isn’t the same ability we have now for quick communication. If something wasn’t going well, and you didn’t have the time on your schedule to convene yet another council, it could take months and years to chat with each other because you’d have to write a whole ass letter, send that letter across regions by way of another person literally having to travel by foot, animal, or boat, and then wait for them to come back with a response. This is also presuming that the dude is going to actually live, and the letter even arrives.
After the Council of Nicaea, they held a couple more councils to try and clear things up, like the much anticipated Council of Nicaea II but like most sequels, it wasn’t nearly as cool. They didn’t even have an epic fight scene or anything. Within all Churches at the time, a service known as the liturgy is used. For those of you who grew up, like me, in the protestant churches, this might seem a bit foreign. The makeup of a Protestant service hinges basically on the sermon. You open with the service with a few hymns of the old or modern variety. Then the pastor gets up and rants on about everything you’ve ever done wrong for about an hour or so, and then you pass the offering plate, and you’re now released to go yell at the waitress at Cracker Barrel about how your $8 steak is undercooked. Amen.
That is absolutely not how it works within the Orthodox or Roman Catholic Churches. There is a uniform practice of worship known as the liturgy; the central focus is not the sermon (and sometimes there isn’t even one), but the main focus is on Eucharist, also known as Communion, or the Body of Christ if you're nasty. By the 5th century, the churches in the East had developed two major liturgies: The Liturgy Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil and the Liturgy Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom. Way over in Rome, the liturgical practice was the Ambrosian Rite or the Latin Rite Liturgy, which was developed during the 4th century along with Saint Basil. These competing liturgical practices had distinct essences of the cultures from which they were birthed, and people got pretty attached to them. But the Church of Rome and the Churches of the East took a wildly different approach to evangelism as their territories began to expand when it pertained to the liturgy.
In Rome, the language of the Church was Latin, and during the time of the Roman Empire, that was totally fine because, well, everyone spoke Latin, so people understood Latin when they went to church because that’s the language they spoke. Easy-peasy. Well, as it turns out, the Roman Empire didn’t last forever, and by 476 A.D, the whole thing had been divided up into little pieces, and the fall of Rome was complete. Bummer for the Romans, and as it turns out, without a centralized Roman Empire and people being all scattered about, language did that thing it does and evolved over time. Latin eventually became a dead language by the 6th century. Well, dead everywhere else except within the Church of Rome, which still stood despite the empire being gone, and being the old-fashioned kinda guys they were, they stuck with Latin. Eventually, this resulted in people having zero f+cking clue what was happening at church on Sunday, considering that the worship service and the gospel readings were in Latin and they didn’t speak Latin. But they still had to go to church because, by this point, that’s just what you did or whatever, so they continued to go even though they didn’t have a goddamn clue as to what was going on. Not only was the laity wholly lost, but many of the priests knew f+ckall about what they were talking about, either. Many of them could speak the language by way of learning to parrot the words, but they didn’t understand their meaning any more than anyone else. As you can imagine, that wasn’t super helpful, as it turns out.
Meanwhile, the Churches of the East are keeping it real by having their church services and bibles written in the vernacular (for the most part). As they begin to evangelize and expand out, opening up new churches throughout the world, they are translating the worship services into the language of the people in these new territories. This makes for a far more accessible church for the laity, and as a result, some of the issues that began to arise in Rome aren’t happening in the Eastern Churches. Basically, if Martin Luther had been born in the East as opposed to the West, he would have led a notably boring life and probably wouldn’t have even written one thesis, much less ninety-five of them.
Not all of these differences happened at once, and many of them became far bigger gaps after the split between the East and the West (we will get to that later). Still, these ideologies and theological disparities began centuries before they were cemented in time. Let’s take a brief moment here to stop and look at some of the notable differences in how the Churches of the East and the West began to develop theologically:
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Priestly Celibacy
As Dean Martin used to croon, “everybody loves somebody sometimes,” and that’s true even for priests. Starting all the way back with Paul, the idea of celibacy was part of the conversations within the Church, but even Paul, for all of his innumerable faults, admitted that people should be allowed to get married. Sure, he did so under duress of our lustful nature and saying it was better to take a wife rather than bone indiscriminately (1 Corinthians 7:1-40). But even if he didn’t 100% get behind the idea, being as he was celibate and thought that was way cooler for whatever reasons, he still allowed it. But the Church of Rome took the whole issue to a hardcore level.
There is priestly celibacy in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but it does not operate in the same way as in the Roman Catholic Church. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches, priests and deacons can be married (just not to each other) as long as the marriage takes place before their ordination. In Eastern Orthodox Churches, most parish priests are married because its obviously easier to get everyday advice on subjects like sex, marriage, raising children, divorce, miscarriage, pregnancy, and, well, basically anything about life from someone who has experienced the myriad of challenges that come with being alive.
There are still celibate clergy within the Orthodox Church. For example, all monks and nuns are unmarried, though they can be widowed. There are unmarried monks who are also priests, and these are known as hieromonks, and there are also just celibate priests in general. Additionally, almost all of the bishops in the Orthodox Church are pulled from the unmarried class of priests. However, there have been examples of bishops who have been married. Because most bishops are older, many of them have been widowed and were then elevated as bishops. Also, the Orthodox Church does not hold the same views on divorce as the Roman Catholic Church, meaning being divorced does not come with an automatic excommunication. There have been examples of divorced priests and even divorced bishops. A notable example is Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow, who was married for one year to Vera Alekseeva. The reasons surrounding their divorce have been clouded in secrecy, and he was ultimately elevated through the ranks until he became the most powerful religious leader in Russia.
As a little side note: the Roman Catholic Church has eventually tried to bring the church back together piecemeal style, receiving in a number of Eastern Orthodox Churches back under the authority of Rome. However, these priests, even though they are considered Roman Catholic, are still allowed to be married. Because priests getting it on with their wives is as Orthodox as baklava.
Iconography
For Orthodox Christians, icons are kind of like a less cool version of the paintings in Hogwarts. Sure, they don’t move, but many that they are portals to another dimension where those they represent are close to us through the image. This makes a lot of sense because JK Rolling has borrowed many things from the Russian Orthodox Church, like the robes, the leadership always having beards, and transphobia.
It is not impossible to find statues in the homes of Orthodox Christians or even inside some Orthodox Churches, but it is definitely not common. Icons have a similar purpose within the Orthodox Church as the devotional statues do in the Roman Catholic Church. Icons are considered a bit more than just a painting or artwork within the Church, and for this reason, they are referred to as being “written” and not “painted.” The legend goes that the first icon was written by Saint Luke during his interview with the Theotokos for his version of the Gospels. The belief is that Luke did a portrait of the Virgin Mary on a wooden table in her home, presumably built by Joseph. Iconography became a huge part of the Eastern Church, and the fact that they weren’t three-dimensional was often used to excuse away that they couldn’t be graven images because they weren’t engraved or etched from stone or wood. There was a massive iconoclast movement that happened within the Byzantine empire, and many icons and statues were destroyed, but ultimately the iconoclasts lost the argument, and now it's a sin to destroy an icon.
There have been varying levels of devotion to icons within the church that have been as limited as believing they are windows into Heaven (that’s sweet) to thinking that in the absence of a priest, the icons can perform the divine liturgy (less sweet). But no matter which extreme you land on, iconography is a central and integral part of Orthodox Christianity, and many homes have what is known as icon walls or icon corners where people place icons, candles, and other devotionals in remembrance of patron saints or lost loved ones.
Divorce
In the Roman Catholic Church, getting divorced is a real son of a bitch. First off, if you get divorced, you are de facto excommunicated and can no longer receive communion ever again. It's one of the big no-no sins, and you are in a lot of trouble for it. If you want to get married again and still be able to receive communion, get married in the church, or go to Heaven when you die, you’ve got to have your marriage annulled, which is a lengthy and expensive process. Plus, it's difficult to prove annulment is necessary because you’ve got to show that there was a reason the marriage was illegitimate from the onset and should have never happened. And if you had children together, they are now bastards. Thanks, Dad.
Jump on over to the East, and you’ll find that divorce is still considered a sin, but, like, what the f+ck isn’t? So you just say you are sorry like you would for any other sin when you go to confession, and you are pretty good to go. Sure, you might deal with the occasional side eye from the Babushkas, but also, who doesn’t? So whatever. You can get divorced and re-married up to three times before you are cut off. Obviously, there are cultural and societal consequences, and each bishop or priest could put a damper on your day about it, but generally speaking, you are allowed to get divorced with limited levels of being in trouble. And you don’t have to go through all the nasty business of bastardizing your children just so you can marry your secretary, Don Draper.
Imagine all the heads that wouldn’t have rolled had Henry VIII been Orthodox instead of Roman Catholic… or Mormon.
Original Sin
The Roman Catholic Church and Protestants don’t agree on a whole lot of things, but they kinda do on the issue of original sin. The general Western belief on original sin is basically that Adam and Eve were just doing their thing in the garden, a snake was all, “I don’t know about you, but that is one delicious looking f+cking apple, yo” and then Eve was like, “idk God said we shouldn’t eat it” and then the snake is like, “the fuck cares what God says, he just doesn’t want you to be as smart as him.” So Eve eats the apple, then gives it to Adam, promising that he’ll be able to see her boobs if he eats it. Then the snake just laughs and laughs until he gets his legs taken away (which I figured the defining feature of a snake was not having legs and that would make him a lizard turned into a snake, but it turns out that’s not true, even in science, because there are actually legless lizards and also snakes did have legs at some point but dropped them). Anyways, next thing you know, God comes in all pissed about the stolen fruit, and now we have bugs, death, and periods. So that sucks.
But the Roman Catholic Church took this a bit further and basically said that on top of bugs and periods, we also have original sin, which means we are all paying for the sin Adam and Eve committed by eating the fruit (which it turns out was probably not an apple. I’m going with that it was probably a pomegranate because I would commit some f+cking sins for a good pomegranate, but I have zero theological basis for this theory.) But yeah, our like ancient great-great-great-infinity-great grandparents did something stupid (which, how were they supposed to know its wrong if they didn’t have knowledge of good vs. evil, but whatever), and bam, we are all sinners now because of that. F+cking sucks.
The Roman Catholics then have to invent all kinds of theologies to justify this theology, and so we end up with things like purgatory, limbo, and indulgences which eventually leads to that whole Martin Luther nasty tweets to @Pontifex. It's a whole ass mess.
The Orthodox Churches don’t buy that theory and instead say, “Adam and Eve did a bad thing, and so death entered the world, but every single individual is responsible for their own sins.” So you aren’t born sinful you just get around to it later in life so either way, it's probably good Jesus died for your sins, but they are your sins and not the sins of your original grandparents. Anyways, death and bugs and periods are a bummer, but we also didn’t know we were naked until Adam and Eve ate the fruit, which means we had zero knowledge about titties, and so there is always an upside to everything; I suppose.
Hell and Purgatory
Also, there is kinda no Hell in Orthodoxy. It’s a bit more complicated than all of that, but let's just say they didn’t sell many copies of Dante’s Inferno in Greece. Hell is not a physical place different from Heaven in Orthodoxy. Everyone who has ever lived is kind of sucked up into the presence of God, and we just experience that differently. For example, if you were a relatively good person and loved Jesus and went to Church and stuff, being around God is pretty awesome for you. But, let's say you are Hitler, and you get to the presence of God, and you realize that God is, in fact, a Jew; well, that presence of God thing is going to hit a bit differently.
There is no purgatory within the Orthodox Church either, but that doesn’t mean your Heaven is actually your own personal Hell thing is necessarily permanent either. You could, in theory, get better over the course of a few billion years, and maybe the experience won’t be as torturous for you.
The Orthodox Church has a pretty even split on another afterlife theology known as Aerial Toll-Houses. The idea is that when you die, but before you make it to Heaven, you will be tempted and tormented by several demons who are stuck outside of the gates of Heaven in a perpetual state of “oops, I f+cked up” and so they try and trick you into screwing up at the last minute. But there are ways to also appease your previous failures while going through to toll-house experience and maybe get on the better side of the Big Guy before actually making it into Heaven. So that’s also fun.
Transubstantiation
The Romans just have to complicate everything, sorry y’all, but it's true. In the earliest days of Christianity, everyone celebrated communion or the Eucharist. It is the pentacle of the Divine Liturgy, and it has always been the belief of the Church, both in the East and the West, that the bread and the wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Now, the how differs dramatically from there.
The Roman Catholic Church decided to adopt the now-defunct theory of substance and accidents from Aristotle as the basis for their argument of transubstantiation. Essentially, even though the substance of a thing has not changed, its actual properties may have. So a thing can look like another thing but might be something else entirely. Which, I might add, is totally in no way like magic or anything. The Catholic Church teaches that even though it looks like bread, smells like bread, and feels like bread, it's not bread but something else because the outside appearance hasn’t changed, but it is totally different, we promise. They also use unleavened bread.
The Orthodox Church has no defined doctrine concerning the how. They do believe that it becomes the Body and Blood of Jesus but that it is a mystery, and mysteries don’t have to be explained, or they stop being a mystery, by definition. So we don’t need a majorly logical explanation because it's alright not to understand everything. Sometimes God says things that don’t make sense and defy logic, reason, and science, and well, that’s kind of the whole basis of a miracle, isn’t it? So if it's a miraculous event, we don’t have to explain it down to its finest point, do we? And that is the end of that. It's the Body and Blood of Jesus because, well, it says so in the Bible, and that's enough. They also use leavened bread and have a special set of bread set aside for those who are not baptized. It isn’t communion, but it's made from the same loaf, and so everyone gets to participate together, even if they aren’t baptized, and that’s kind of nice.
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Those are not all of the areas where the Eastern Orthodox Church differs from the Roman Catholic Church, but it's some of the major ones, and this is supposed to be a short book that sort of wets your whistle a bit and gets you caught up on the basics. But I can assure you if you want to know more about these topics, there is a literal fuckton of books written about these subjects ad nauseam, and so you can just knock yourselves out with that later.
But if there is one issue, a defining issue, that stands at the bottom of the pyramid of dissent between East and West, it is the issue of the power of the Pope. This issue has led to one of the greatest divides in the history of the world and has become the source of so much conflict that many major wars can be linked back to this one dispute. So now we are at the front door of one of the most defining moments in Christian History and maybe one of the first “you're fired, I quit” events in reordered history: The Great Schism.
Nathan Monk is a former Russian Orthodox priest and the author of the novel Russian Sleeper Cell. These essays are part of his original research for his bestselling novel which you can get here.
I really enjoyed this read, particularly the ongoing overlap between this series and my work (I'm not being a copycat, I promise!)
I liked your observation regarding the identity of the fruit in the Garden of Eden, especially your hunch that "pomegranate" is as good a fit as any for top candidate. Of course, since I just got done writing about the Tarot today, my mind gravitates immediately toward The High Priestess, Trump No. II in the Major Arcana. She is the archetypal virgin (in the classical sense of being singularly devoted to her calling, in this case as a vessel for the gods). Traditionally, the two columns behind her (marked with the letters B&J) are joined by a symbolic cloth symbolic of the Veil of Isis that is traditionally decorated with images of pomegranates. I like the idea that pomegranates are a tastier, more interesting (and more messy to eat, in a fun and carnal sort of way) fruit than the apple. I also think the relationship between pomegranates and the Fruit of Knowledge may be found in the myth of Persephone's annual descent into the underworld, abducted by Lord Hades. She was doomed to repeat the trip every year because she just had to eat while she was down there (she had been warned about this). Of course, both this myth and the general image and role of High Priestess can also be traced to the Cult of Ishtar/Inanna that once flourished in the region of Babylon.
I'm interested in hearing about this Schism. Can you imagine if the issue at hand were that of God's gender? Wow, what a mess that would be.
“Instead, they had a “my bishop’s crook is bigger than your bishop’s crook” contest, and the world has suffered tremendously for it.” So it has. That was epic! Great read! This is so much more enjoyable than the religion class I took in college. 😘