Graham Fuller: 1054, thank you sir. I knew there would be somebody. I write the books but I forget them pretty fast 1054. I think all of you know the immediate cause of this break apart, of this break up was the extraordinary argument over the nature of the Holy Spirit. Now I think we know ourselves that the Holy Spirit is a difficult concept in the Christianity and it’s, people, there are many different ways to think about what the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost represents. But the debate was essentially was the Holy spirit or holy ghost, did the holy ghost descend from God the father directly or was it, did the Holy Spirit descend from God the father and God the son namely Jesus Christ. And the Roman church insisted it was both God the father and God the son and over this issue which is even today extraordinarily difficult to understand if at all these two empires burst apart shattering Christianity between East and West forever after. And to this day there are great anger and bitterness between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in a number of respects. Though Pope John Paul tried to heal some of these wounds but it was only to a partial degree.

So when you consider that this was the issue on which things split apart and was supposedly a religious break up and each side declared the other an anathema and basically [attacked fear]. You know that something else is going on here, it’s like when you go to a friend’s house and the husband and wife fly into a rage and start throwing dishes at each other at the dinner party because the pasta was not cooked enough. You know that something else is going on in that household that is more than just the pasta. Obviously in the case as there were two empires, the East and West and with Rome a great deal also was going on and it was geo political but conducted in the name of religion and religious orthodoxy in one way or another. There were others outrages too between these two churches. I mean it’s the whole crusades let’s talk about that just briefly. You would think the crusades classically are the issue of religious struggle. But anybody who takes the time to read the fascinating history of the crusades rapidly learns that there are any number of secular reasons why the crusades began. Economic and political and social and the pope was highly ambitious Pope Urban II and there were too many people young people running around because the black death had died out and there were too many young people and they were marauding around the Europe. And the Pope wanted to send them off to do something useful and get rid of them. And the [march] there were a lot of military industrial complex of Venetian boat makers and weapons makers who were happy to sell weapons to all the sides. There was it was a huge social and political and economic movement.

But in any case, so that’s how the crusades basically began and it was essentially a justification to say well we’re there to rescue the holy places. When did Jerusalem actually fall to Muslim armies? It was in the 7th Century so it took them 500 years to find out about this before they would have a crusade to turn the tables on it? Again you can see that more than purely religion is involved in the subject. Finally just on this business of religious struggles between east and west, in the fourth crusade as many of you may know. These crusaders came down; they usually came down through the Balkans from Europe. This time they stopped in Constantinople permanently and sapped and destroyed the city to a large extent killed hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians; destroyed the holy places in [IB] Sophia relics and it was an orgy of blood for a long time. And they forcibly converted the area for 50 years to Roman Catholicism, away from Eastern Orthodoxy. That is what the church, the Eastern Orthodox Church has never forgotten. So you can see here even within the same faith, we are talking about geopolitical struggle between east and west within Christianity, within Christianity.