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One summer afternoon in the year 1054, as a service was about to begin in the great Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert and two other legates of the Roman pope entered. They made their way to the sanctuary. They placed a sealed papal document called a "bull" on the altar and marched out. The bull proclaimed the patriarch of Constantinople and his associates excommunicated, no longer in communion with the church, no longer allowed to receive the grace of God through the sacraments.

When the cardinal passed through the western door, he shook the dust from his feet and said, "Let God look and judge." A deacon, guessing the contents of the bull, ran after Humbert in great distress and begged him to take it back. Humbert refused, and the deacon dropped the document in the street.

This incident is usually portrayed as the key moment in the Great Schism between the Orthodox East and the Latin West. But this incident is but one of many on the path to permanent schism though surely the bloody events of 1204 put a seal on a break that lasts to this day.

The schism's causes are manifold and complex, and they reveal much of the uniqueness of what we now call the Eastern Orthodox Church and how the Orthodox understand this chapter of Christian History.

During the time of the apostles, the Roman Empire was a close-knit political and cultural unity. The empire embraced a variety of ethnic groups who spoke a variety of languages and dialects. Yet all were governed by the same emperor; all shared in a broad Greco-Roman civilization. Either Greek or Latin was understood almost everywhere, and Latin was commonly used as the political language of the empire.

Beginning in the late 200s, the empire was still theoretically one but was usually divided into two parts, an eastern and a western, each under its own emperor. Constantine even founded a second imperial capital, in the East Constantinople, the "New Rome." Then came the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, and the West was carved up among the Goths, Lombards, Franks, Vandals, and other Germanic tribes. The Byzantines in the East still regarded the Roman Empire as universal, but, in fact, the political division of the Greek East and the Latin West was now permanent.

Then the Avars and Slavs occupied the Balkan peninsula. Illyricum, which used to serve as a bridge between Byzantium and the West, instead became a barrier. With the rise of Islam in the 600s, the Mediterranean now passed largely into Arab control. Cultural contacts between the eastern and western Mediterranean became far more difficult.

Geo-political realities complicated things. For centuries, the popes had turned naturally to Constantinople and its emperor for military and economic help. But in 754, Pope Stephen II, cut off from the East and in need of help to defend his papal states from attacks by the Lombards, turned north and sought help from the Frankish ruler, Pepin. Henceforth, the papacy began to pass increasingly under Frankish influence.

A half-century later, a more symbolic and dramatic event took place. On Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as emperor of the "Holy Roman Empire." Charlemagne immediately sought recognition from the emperor at Byzantium. The Byzantine emperor, however, considered himself ruler of a still united Roman Empire. Charlemagne he regarded as an intruder, and the papal coronation, an act of schism. He didn't recognize Charlemagne for years.

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