The Great Schism of the Church of Christ into Latin and Greek

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 8 pages

Eight pages built around an exchange, which is what makes it readable. A correspondent signing herself Discipula wrote to Lucifer in June 1888 objecting to a Theosophical pamphlet's account of Christianity, and defending the Roman Church as the Mother and Mistress of all Christian Churches from which the rest derive. The letter is printed in full before the reply, so the reader can judge the provocation as well as the response.

Blavatsky's answer runs on two lines. The first is historical: the Church began, on her account, as a colony of Greek Christians and Hellenised Jews, and the great schism of 865 divided a body that had made no such claim to primacy before it. The second is logical, and is the sentence the piece is remembered for — assumption of authority is no proof of it. She traces the hardening of the claim through the eleventh century, when, as she puts it, the renegades glorified themselves as the One Universal Apostolic Church and anathematised all other Christians as schismatics and heretics, and reads the doctrine of Infallibility as the end of that road rather than a departure from it.

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