Breaking Βread and Βreaking Churches

Breaking Βread and Βreaking Churches

By Associate Professor Robert Nelson, Melbourne University

In the eleventh century, feelings ran high over an issue that seems relatively trivial today: should the church celebrate holy communion with sourdough bread or a wafer? Sourdough bread had been used since the earliest times; but perhaps around 1,000 CE—following the earlier convention in Armenia—the Latin church opted for unleavened bread. The adoption of a wafer as opposed to a spongy leavened bread disgusted and enraged certain clerics in Byzantium. Sharp letters were written. The Latin church was highly offended; and polemical tracts of a fierce and toxic kind followed.

It is hard to understand why it mattered so much. There are plenty of theories. Some believe that the Greek provocation was politically motivated. Others see a personal motif of jealous ambitions within Byzantium and its tentacles on the Italian peninsula. Most scholars appreciate that there were also theological grounds of substance in medieval terms, even though they seem inconsequential to us. Whatever the theory, the polemic is understood to have been damaging to the rapports between east and west. Some believe that the azyme controversy was a large part of the schism that separated Byzantium and Rome, alongside other matters of limited concern today, such as the procession of the Holy Spirit (filioque).

When I started wondering about what could possibly motivate such a pointless debate, I discovered that the matter at issue was even older than the dispute with the Armenians in the ninth century, because Athanasios had already reproached the Apollinarian heresy in the fourth century for its use of unleavened bread in the sacrament. With much scorn, Athanasios uses some of the tough language that would later be used against the Armenians and then finally the Latins in the eleventh century.

The fact that it was more of a long-standing issue than one has previously thought suggested that perhaps the debate that erupted in 1053 was not sparked by random political or personal factors but a deeper subjective cultural horror of using a wafer instead of sourdough bread to symbolize the body of Christ.

So I started to think that perhaps we are asking the wrong questions about such an obscure and unrewarding debate, where headstrong cantankerous men exchanged insults that fatally damaged not only the unity of the church but their own creativity in thinking about the eucharist.

It therefore occurred to me that perhaps the more interesting question to ask is not what we can say about the debate but what the debate says about bread. How do the several intuitions expressed on either side of the Adriatic help us understand how bread was understood in its deeper cultural (and of course religious) meanings?

This curiosity also made me wonder when and how bread was used in domestic circumstances for a sacramental purpose. If it was used by the first Christians in a charismatic phase of the religion, when did it stop? How long may households have persisted in seeing their daily bread in reverential terms? When did it become illegal for informal households effectively to restage the Last Supper according to Christ’s instructions?

Above all, though, what attitudes to bread might have changed from one epoch to another on either side of the azyme controversy? And how do attitudes to bread relate to attitudes to other fermented products (because the leaven of sourdough depends on fermentation) like beer and sauerkraut?

And what of wafers? Many people make jokes about how tasteless they are and what a boring texture they have; but it also seemed necessary for me to observe that wafers also took on an unexpected prestige through the industrial period, as in the international appeal of Manner bars today. So it seems unwise to accept that there is anything intrinsically unappealing about such unleavened breads, even if they do not enjoy the elasticity that one might associate with flesh.

It seemed from all of this that a book on bread might be more valuable than a book on a war-of-words. Bread has other meanings that are interesting to trace in other epochs, where it appears that one culture cannot accept that another culture could possibly have had bread, or not bread of a sophisticated kind. This story might begin with the very origins of bread, which can be traced to Australia scores of millennia ago.

Unfortunately, thanks to the obliteration of much First-Nations culture by colonization, we know little of the bread that the British explorers reported seeing and eating. But such lack of information is not so much a problem for bread in Byzantium. From the early centuries to the fall of Constantinople we have an excellent spread of bread-stamps (σφραγίδες) that are an important part of the ritual of baking for the sacrament.

In Byzantium—as in Greece still today and the Greek diaspora wherever there are Orthodox churches—bread for holy communion is baked by pious members of the congregation, who bring their oblation (πρόσφορο) to the church. This practice presents a considerable difference from the circumstance in the west, where the production of the wafer was entirely in the hands of clergy and lay involvement was not invited.

The ritual of baking was uniquely both private and communal, private in its production and communal in its religious use. Lay people had great personal investment in the sacrament. Its meaning in social terms is different from that in the west; and it is hard to imagine that the love of domestic baking for the church would not have informed the horror experienced by Greeks on apprehending that a wafer was used by the Latins.

My expression for their reaction is that the Greek contempt for the wafer was ‘visceral’, a term invoked from the outset by Leo of Achrida who complains from the guts (σπλάγχνα) about the Latin practice. To me, therefore, it is not so strange that the debate blew up the way it did. It was never conducted along diplomatic lines but rather it was moved by sentiment from the guts.

In their squabble over the superior bread for the eucharist, both the Latins and Greeks brought up many curious features inherent in both kinds of bread. But it is also curious to contemplate what they do not mention. For example, as far as I can tell, the Greeks did not appeal to the obvious motif that the rise of sourdough could symbolize the resurrection. The connexion would have occurred to them, surely; but there must have been certain sensitivities that made an allusion to the resurrection a dangerous move in the hostile context of mutual excommunications.

I cannot say that my answers are satisfactory but I am confident that my treatment of this fraught moment at least opens up certain questions that will remain fruitful to investigate further. My book A Visceral History of Bread: From First-Nations Australia to Byzantium is open access.

https://www.academia.edu/104057468/A_visceral_history_of_bread_from_First_Nations_Australia_to_Byzantium

Prosforo, image by the author