The eastern Orthodox churches finally split with the Roman Catholic western church in 1054, though the differences had been building up long before and have continued ever since. Among these, the eastern churches retained the Julian calendar – which is why, this year, Orthodox Easter falls on Sunday 12 April, a week later than for the western churches. More significantly, because of this great schism, eastern churches such as the Greek Orthodox church didn’t fall under the sway of a theory of salvation developed by St Anselm of Canterbury and his massively influential Cur Deus Homo of 1089, a book that radically altered the western understanding of Easter and, with it, a great deal of our moral hinterland. Indeed, the respective current attitudes towards debt of the Greek and German governments can be seen, to a remarkable extent, to track the eastern-western split over the meaning of Easter.
According to Anselm, and the Reformation thinkers that followed him, the story of Easter is basically God’s response to a debt crisis. The argument is this: human beings have sinned against God, thus incurring a debt that has to be paid. (If you think this shift from sin to debt is odd – and it is – remember we still speak of criminals as “paying back” their debt to society.) On this model, the scales of justice have to be balanced. Crimes must be paid for, with the level of punishment being proportionate to the level of offence. But the theological problem is that human debt is way too high – us being miserable sinners and all that – which means that we are totally incapable of paying back the required amount.
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