The fifth century church historian Socrates Scholasticus made a misleading comment on the dissolution of the council of Serdica in these words: from that time on the western church was severed from the eastern and the boundary between them was the mountain called Soucis that divides Illyrians from the Thracians (Socrates, HE, 2.22) His contemporary Sozomenus repeated the same comment. (Sozomenus, HE, 3.13).
The observations of the church historians led the modern historians to interpret the council of Serdica as the begining of the dramatic separation of the western and eastern churches that culminated in 1054. Apparently to discover an exact turning point of the great division in the church history is very tempting, as it has been done by Leslie Barnard about thirty years ago. In his monograph on the council of Serdica, Barnard remarked that "the formal schism between the Eastern and Western Churches which occurred in 1054 had profound consequences... the present writer believes that the Council of Serdica, which was held in 343, marked the beginning of this process for there East and West separated by conciliar decision for the first time". The late Henry Chadwick also reckoned the council to be one of the events that paved the way to the rift between East and West.
This paper is an attempt to examine the episcopal representation at the council, and by doing so I aim to demonstrate whether the council can be taken as the cultural and theological dividing points between east and West.
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