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Essay on Babylonian Captivity and The Great Schism
Babylonian Captivity is the term applied to the age flanked by the exile of the Jews from Palestine to Babylon by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II and their discharge in 538 BC by the Persian king Cyrus. Two most important deportations are recorded: one in 597 BC, when Israelite nobles, warriors, and artisans were elated; and one in 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar's army destroyed Jerusalem and the major part of the remaining Israelite community was taken to Babylon.
At the time of the second deportation an important group of Israelites fled to Egypt; subsequently, simply the poorest peasants were allowed to remain in Palestine, and the political dissolution of independent Israel was an accomplished fact. The majority of the Jews living in Babylon did not return to Palestine at the end of the exile period, but became a part of the Diaspora, or body of Jews dispersed among nations outside Palestine. In the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the term Babylonian Captivity is frequently applied to the residence of the popes in Avignon, France, from 1309 to 1377.
Whereas The Great Schism is the term used in the history of the Christian church to refer to both the break flanked by the Eastern and Western churches, conventionally dated 1054, and the period (1378-1417) in the Western church when two (and then three) popes simultaneously claimed to be legitimate. The term schism means any official and headstrong division from the unity of the Christian church; unlike heresy, with which it is often linked, it does not of itself denote doctrinal deviations.
The alienation between the Eastern and Western churches had deep cultural and political roots and evolved over the course of many centuries. As Western culture was slowly but surely malformed, for instance, by the influx of Germanic peoples, the East sustained an unbroken tradition of Hellenistic Christianity.......
