AHC: United Christianity, or at least no Reformation

How could Christianity remain/become united? Or if unifying Catholicism and Orthodoxy is too difficult, how could the Reformation be prevented?

And what would the effects of this be?
 
How could Christianity remain/become united? Or if unifying Catholicism and Orthodoxy is too difficult, how could the Reformation be prevented?

And what would the effects of this be?

Keeping east and west at least nominally united may be easier than preventing the reformation, actually. Not that either is ,,easy,,

To keep the east and west united, i think you need one of two things. Either the papacy is kept weak, so the pope never claims abolute rule, which would allow a european wide ,,orthodox,, style system of independant national churches.

Or you could have one side or the other faced with such imminent peril that accepting the other side with minimal concessions was the lesser of evils. E.g. constantinople becomes uniate to stave off Muslim invasion.

A variant on the first is if the Roman empire never falls, or Justinians reconquest of the west works.


As for heading off protestantism, you might need to prevent either the printing press or the rise in power of the merchant middle class. Or keep all of europe actively threatened by e.g. Islam.
 
Keeping east and west at least nominally united may be easier than preventing the reformation, actually. Not that either is ,,easy,,

To keep the east and west united, i think you need one of two things. Either the papacy is kept weak, so the pope never claims abolute rule, which would allow a european wide ,,orthodox,, style system of independant national churches.

Why would that happen with a weak Papacy? The Pope is still Patriarch over most of Europe.

Or you could have one side or the other faced with such imminent peril that accepting the other side with minimal concessions was the lesser of evils. E.g. constantinople becomes uniate to stave off Muslim invasion.

"Better the sultan's turban. . ."

Accepting the other side is, by definition, not minimal concessions.
 
Why would that happen with a weak Papacy? The Pope is still Patriarch over most of Europe.
But the Patriarch of Bulgaria is Patriarch of chunks of the Balkans. Or, earlier, the Patriarch of Alexandria was Patriarch of Egypt.

The fact that the Pope is a Patriarch isn't very meaningful, IMO, if he can't order anyone around. Just as autocephalous churches sprung up in the East, so you might have the same in the West. Even if the West stays united under the Patriarch of Rome, if it's a Conciliar rule rather than a Papal one, there's going to be a lot less that divides East from West.


"Better the sultan's turban. . ."

Accepting the other side is, by definition, not minimal concessions.
True, to some extent. Some large extent, even. I should certainly have said something more like "minimal possible". It would be easier, in many ways, for the East to rescue the West as a method of reunion. The OTL claim of the Papacy of supreme power was a HUGE stumbling block.

Obviously, too, the later in history, and the longer the divide lasts and the more anathemas hurled in both directions, the harder it would be to reunite the two.



Note, I never said it would be easy, because it wouldn't be. Nor even a good thing, possibly. But keeping the bulk of Christendom together for another 5-8 hundred years is probably doable.
 
But the Patriarch of Bulgaria is Patriarch of chunks of the Balkans. Or, earlier, the Patriarch of Alexandria was Patriarch of Egypt.

The fact that the Pope is a Patriarch isn't very meaningful, IMO, if he can't order anyone around. Just as autocephalous churches sprung up in the East, so you might have the same in the West. Even if the West stays united under the Patriarch of Rome, if it's a Conciliar rule rather than a Papal one, there's going to be a lot less that divides East from West.

The problem is that the Pope is the ONLY Patriarch in the West. That by definition means he can order people around, even if that's only in his sphere and not as "Head of the Whole Church".

Autocephalous churches sprung up because Byzantium was either unable to do anything about it or supported it - for instance, Romanus II humoring a Bulgarian Patriarchate to keep the Bulgars from using the "we'll turn to Rome instead of Constantinople".

Note, I never said it would be easy, because it wouldn't be. Nor even a good thing, possibly. But keeping the bulk of Christendom together for another 5-8 hundred years is probably doable.

Given how strained tensions are even if the events of 1054 are put in the "reality doesn't have to make sense, fiction does." pile, I doubt you could get even a century without some serious effort.

Doesn't mean an openly hostile split, but certainly not any real union when the quarrels pre-date the Investiture controversy (and thus that going the other way isn't going to change the problems the East has with the West).
 
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