The Great Schism: With Emphasis on the Filioque as Cause of

  St. Augustine’s The City of God reads as a tale of two cities, the city of God and the city of man. However, it is too, the object of scholars from several studies: theology, philosophy, politics, and history. St. Augustine wrote The City of God in refutation to the accusations the Romans made against the Christians as concerns the fall of Rome to the Goths. As the object of study, for St. Augustine does not offer a book for pleasure, its ideas are universally set, so as not to refute just the Romans but those men who are part of the city of man in any age. For the same reason the Christians read The City of God 1500 years ago we can read The City of God today. We must, then, review The City of God under the principle by which it was written. St. Augustine sums up the theme of his book in this way, “two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a wo

The Great Schism is neither an event that happened over night nor the product of a single disagreement. The Great Schism is the name of the climax of the growing chasm between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. Schreck, an historian writes, “The events immediately surrounding it are only symptoms of difficulties that had been brewing for centuries.” [1] There were many disagreements between the East and the West (East in reference to the Orthodox Church and West in reference to the Roman Catholic Church). The points of the break between East and West can be defined as cultural, political, and religious. The most powerful of these three influencers was religion. The tension surrounding unleavened bread and, more prominently, the filioque lead to the final break between East and West.   The cultural split between the East and the West did not take long to develop. It grew when the head of the Roman Empire moved to Constantinople, under Emperor Constantine. The empir