Within the Roman Empire, from the time of Constantine to the fall of the empire in 1453, universal ecclesiology, rather than eucharistic, became the operative principle. The view prevailed that, "when the Roman Empire became Christian the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign and coterminous with it was the one universal church". Early on, the Roman Church's ecclesiology was universal, with the idea that the Church was a worldwide organism with a divinely (not functionally) appointed center: the Church/Bishop of Rome. These two views are still present in modern Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism and can be seen as foundational causes for the schisms and Great Schism between East and West.