Azymes At The Altar
The Greek charge against the Latins had a sharp word: azymes (ἄζυμα), unleavened things.
Latin Christians used unleavened wheat bread in the Eucharist. Greek Christians used leavened wheat bread. By the eleventh century, that difference had become a confessional marker.1
The word mattered because it touched Passover, Last Supper chronology, and the meaning of the risen body. Was the eucharistic loaf best marked by Jewish unleavened bread, or by leaven as the sign of living fullness?
That is a real theological dispute. It should not be flattened into a food preference.
It is also not a modern nutritional dispute. Nobody in the argument is asking whether wheat is healthy. The assumed question is how wheat bread should bear sacramental meaning.
This is the old pattern in a new key. Bread has become so sacred that its preparation can become a line of communion.
See also This Is My Body and The Cultic Vocabulary.
Related sections: The Gluten Problem Foreshadowed; Not Bread Alone In 1054.
Footnotes
-
Leo of Ohrid, with the support of Michael Cerularius, letter to John of Trani, 1053, in Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig, 1861), 56-66. Primary source; see Kolbaba, “Rethinking the Schism of 1054,” for the Latin-rite context. ↩