The History of Christian Thought: The Byzantine Empire

I have one word here: schism.

The Westerners were increasingly irritated at the Easterners’ refusal to accept the total authority of the pope. The Easterners, for their part, were incensed by the West’s stubborn insistence that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father, an innovation that went back to Augustine. Not only did the Catholics hold this erroneous teaching, they had the audacity to insert it into the Nicene Creed, supposedly the very bulwark of their faith. The inferior scholarship of the West meant that the Latins, for their part, genuinely believed that the doctrine was in the Nicene Creed and that the Greeks had erased it. ~Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought.

There were a series of condemnations and counter-condemnations between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church that formed the core of the Byzantium Empire.

Influenced by mystics like Symeon the New Theologian, hesychast monks used breathing exercises to achieve mental calm, repeated short prayers over and over again, and adopted particular bodily positions. The practices were quite similar to Eastern meditation or yoga and resulted in a self-hypnotic state of heightened awareness in which the mystic could hope to see God. Opponents of the practice, such as Barlaam, argued that only the mind can come to see God. They appealed to the tradition, going back to Origen, that the mind is the true part of human nature, the part that is like God, and to see God we must rise above bodily things. Prayer should be a mental affair with no contribution from the body at all.

For Palamas, the body is not a discardable appendage to the mind, like a coat that can be removed at death. On the contrary, it is an essential part of human nature. Palamas therefore distances himself from the Origenist, and Neoplatonic, idea that the body is somehow the cause of sin. He is much closer to the Syrian, and biblical tradition of viewing human nature in an integrated way, without drawing a clear line of separation between body and soul. So it is entirely appropriate that the body should have a part to play in prayer, and Palamas points out that the Orthodox tradition regards bodily posture during prayer as an important matter. It reflects the presence of Christ in the person who prays, not just in their mind but throughout their whole person. ~Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought.

For us, we would think that the early Christians were arguing over small matters, just like how the early church fathers argued about whether Christ had two natures or one nature. And we often wonder why they even bothered to do it at all! But for them, these issues were very important matters because it affected the crux of their faith; their doctrines of salvation:

Hesychasm then, is central to Palamas conception not only of human nature but of salvation itself. He defends the practice so vigorously because he considers its opponents to be attacking the doctrine of the incarnation, a doctrine that for Palamas revolves around the body of Christ. ~Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought.

It would be like our doctrine of salvation by believing that Christ died for us was being attacked and debated! Of course, no one had such notions then. To them, they had an entirely different view of how salvation is to be obtained. These debates and arguments would cause huge schisms in the church. The first one arose during the time of the early church fathers between the Nicene church (churches that held firmly to the Nicene Creed) and the Coptic churches (churches that did not agree with the Nicene Creed). The second one was called the Great Schism, that saw the Roman Catholic Church break off from (or excommunicate, depending on which side you were on) the Orthodox Church in the East These schisms would pave the way for an unhealthy pattern that would plague the Church throughout its history.