The Divided Soul of Christianity

When I asked a local in Brașov to explain the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, he didn’t quote scripture or mention rituals. He smiled and said simply, “We didn’t have crusades, the Inquisition, or witch trials.”

It was such an abrupt answer that I have remembered it ever since. I had expected something about the pope, perhaps, or icons, saints, liturgy, or the theological dispute over the filioque. Instead, he answered a question about religion with history. More specifically, he answered it with a memory of violence.

His answer was not entirely historically accurate. The Orthodox world has its own history of religious persecution and political violence, and witch trials did occur in territories that are now Romania, particularly in Transylvania. But I have come to think that the imperfections in his answer make it more interesting rather than less. He was not giving me a lecture in comparative church history. He was telling me how two branches of the same religion can remember themselves differently.

Two Churches from the Same World

Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy grew from the same early Christian world. They share scriptures, saints, sacraments, ancient councils, monastic traditions, and centuries of history before the division between eastern and western Christianity hardened into what became known as the Great Schism. The conventional date of 1054 is useful, but the separation was a long process shaped by theology, language, ecclesiastical authority, politics, and the growing distance between Latin West and Greek East.

Over time, the institutional structures of the two traditions developed differently. In Western Christianity, the papacy acquired increasingly expansive claims to authority, while canon law and a powerful ecclesiastical bureaucracy helped create a church capable of exercising influence across political boundaries. Eastern Christianity remained organized around multiple patriarchates and regional churches, without an equivalent to the centralized authority of the pope. Byzantine emperors nevertheless exercised enormous influence over religious life, and Orthodox Christianity was hardly separate from political power. The difference was not between a political Western church and an apolitical Eastern one, but between different ways of organizing sacred and secular authority.

Those differences eventually shaped Christian cultures that can feel strikingly different even when they profess much of the same faith. Western Christianity developed powerful traditions of systematic theology, canon law, missionary expansion, and institutional reform. Eastern Christianity placed particular emphasis on liturgy, continuity, contemplative practice, and theosis, the gradual transformation of the human person toward union with God. Neither tradition can be reduced to a single temperament, but their histories gave them different institutional habits and different stories about themselves.

The History Behind His Answer

The three things my acquaintance named were not arbitrary. The medieval Crusades were overwhelmingly initiated and organized within Latin Christianity, beginning with Pope Urban II’s call in 1095. Their history became especially significant to Orthodox memory during the Fourth Crusade, when Latin crusaders captured and brutally sacked Constantinople in 1204. Christians who had ostensibly taken the cross for a holy campaign had turned their weapons against one of Christianity’s greatest cities.

The inquisitions were also institutions of the Latin Christian West. Beginning in the Middle Ages and developing in different forms over subsequent centuries, they created formal mechanisms for identifying and prosecuting heresy. The Orthodox world had heretics, doctrinal conflicts, excommunications, punishments, and episodes of persecution of its own, sometimes carried out with the cooperation of imperial authorities. What it did not develop was an institution directly equivalent to the papal inquisitorial systems of Western Europe.

Witch trials make the comparison more complicated. The great European witch hunts were concentrated particularly in Western and Central Europe, and Orthodox regions generally experienced much lower levels of prosecution. Moldavia and Wallachia, in particular, did not experience witch hunting on anything approaching the scale found in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Their laws and religious authorities could condemn sorcery, and prosecutions did occur, but systematic witch hunting remained limited.

Transylvania complicates the story because its religious and political history was different. Witchcraft trials there were considerably more numerous, and people were prosecuted and executed. Transylvania sat at the meeting point of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hungarian, German, and Romanian worlds, and its witch trials reflected many of those Central European influences. So when a Romanian says, “We didn’t have witch trials,” the historian in me has to add a footnote. But the broader distinction he was reaching for is not imaginary: the Romanian principalities east and south of the Carpathians did not develop the intensive witch-hunting cultures seen in some parts of Western and Central Europe.

A Different Memory of Power

The more interesting difference may lie in what each tradition remembers as its defining historical experience. Western Christianity spent centuries associated with institutions that claimed authority across kingdoms and, eventually, across oceans. Catholicism became deeply entangled with European state formation, missionary expansion, colonialism, education, law, and empire. Protestant traditions that emerged from the Western church rejected papal authority but inherited other aspects of that world, including their own histories of confessional persecution and witch hunting.

Orthodox Christians developed a different historical memory. The Byzantine Empire was itself an enormously powerful Christian empire, so it would be false to portray Orthodoxy as a religion that only suffered and never ruled. But after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Orthodox populations spent centuries living under Ottoman sovereignty. In the Romanian principalities, the situation was more complicated: Wallachia and Moldavia remained tributary states with their own rulers and institutions rather than being absorbed straightforwardly into the empire. Nevertheless, Orthodox churches often became important guardians of language, ritual, communal memory, and identity through centuries of political uncertainty and foreign pressure.

That experience helps explain why endurance occupies such a powerful place in Orthodox self-understanding. Icons, monasteries, liturgy, fasting, feast days, and traditions repeated across generations could preserve continuity even when political orders changed around them. The church was not innocent of power, and its leaders could be deeply entangled with rulers. Yet the historical story many Orthodox communities tell about themselves is less often one of carrying Christianity outward through conquest and more often one of keeping Christianity alive through invasion, occupation, political upheaval, and repression.

Perhaps that was the story contained in the answer I received.

Romania at the Meeting Point

Romania makes the comparison especially interesting because it has never belonged neatly to only one European world. Its majority faith is Orthodox, but Transylvania spent centuries connected politically and culturally to Central Europe. Catholic Hungarians, Protestant Hungarians, Lutheran Saxons, Orthodox Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greek Catholics, and others created a religious landscape far more complicated than a simple division between Christian East and West.

You can still walk through that history. In Brașov, Gothic churches, Orthodox churches, Catholic churches, and synagogues occupy the same relatively small urban landscape. Their architecture records different communities and different relationships to the powers that governed the region. Cross the Carpathians historically, and the political and religious landscape changes again.

That complexity is precisely why the simple answer I received has stayed with me. “We didn’t have the Inquisition” is not an adequate history of Eastern Christianity. But cultural memory rarely arrives with footnotes. People inherit stories about what happened to their communities, what their ancestors survived, what others did to them, and what distinguishes “us” from “them.” Those stories become part of religious identity just as surely as doctrine does.

What His Answer Actually Taught Me

I originally asked that man to explain the difference between two churches. Without realizing it, I had asked a much larger question.

His answer taught me something about Orthodoxy, but not quite what he intended. The important lesson was not that Eastern Christianity was gentle while Western Christianity was violent. History will not sustain that distinction. Both traditions have lived alongside political power, benefited from it, suffered under it, and sometimes participated in coercion themselves. Neither possesses a monopoly on contemplation or conquest.

What his answer revealed instead was the enormous role historical memory plays in religion. Christianity divided not only into different doctrines and institutions but into communities carrying different memories of what it meant to be Christian. One remembers Rome, papal authority, reformations, crusades, inquisitions, missions, and global expansion. Another remembers Constantinople, icons, monasteries, invasions, Ottoman domination, national churches, and survival. Those memories are selective, as collective memories always are, but they still shape how people understand the faith they inherited.

I still love the bluntness of his answer. In one sentence, he collapsed a thousand years of history into a distinction that was incomplete, biased, and nevertheless revealing. He reminded me that when people explain their religion, they are not always telling us what the religion objectively is. Sometimes they are telling us what their community has needed to remember about itself.

And that may be a far more interesting answer than the one I originally asked for.

Sources and Further Reading

Chadwick, Henry. East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hitchins, Keith. A Concise History of Romania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016.

Madden, Thomas F., ed. The Crusades: The Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983.

Pop-Curșeu, Ioan, and Ștefana Pop-Curșeu. Witchcraft in Romania. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin Books, 1993.