Looking back on past centuries of the Church’s history, one would not see unity and seamless harmony. Political conflicts, religious controversies, invasions, destructions, hatred, and condemnation tore the Church apart bit-by-bit, so that what was once the Church of all Christians slowly became something much more confined (Cynthia Stewart, 2008). In this essay, I will discuss how tensions got progressively worse in the period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, as well as all the different things that influenced the division of the Church into what is now known as Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Symbolizing the division
In return for being anointed by Pope Stephen, Pepin donated territories of land …show more content…
: Greek in the East and Latin in the West. This had always been problematic from a communication stand pointsomething of a problem,, and it caused but as the gap to greow even greater. Invasions caused and travel to becaome more difficult, and these things combined contributed to due to all the invasions, it becoameing less common for scholars of either area to read the language of the other. Ultimately, Tthis meant that in the East and West, they were not using the same books nor were they developing the same ideas as their brethren on the other side of the Church. (Cynthia Stewart, …show more content…
division. Theis issue was centered on the question of whether who sent the Holy Spirit–was sent by the Father, or the Father and Son .? The great 5th century theologian Augustine ( 354-430) argued strongly that the Spirit was sent (“proceeded from”) both the Father and the Son. In 589, at Western council that met in Toledo, Spain, Western theologians added to the Nicene Creed of 381 the language that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son (in Latin, filioque, “and from the Son”). This controversy is hence called the filioque controversy. (Eckham,