The Bull of 1054
Humbert of Silva Candida, Bull of Excommunication (16 July 1054)
Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida
More about Humbert of Silva Candida →
Two pages of Latin, face-up on an altar, in a church full of people who had not been told what it said.
- Catch rate
- 14 / 255
- Base research
- 186
- Stat total
- 322
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Two pages of Latin laid on an altar. Short, and it has outlived every building it was carried through.
It does not reason. It sentences — and the men who wrote it believed they held an office that made sentencing enough.
A legal instrument drawn by a canonist. Attacking its wording is hard; the question is whether anyone had the authority to write it at all.
Slow. Leo IX had been dead three months when his legates used his authority, which is the flaw at the centre of it.
Cited for this book
Cardinal Humbert laid this bull on the altar of Hagia Sophia on Saturday 16 July 1054. It excommunicated Patriarch Michael Cerularius and his supporters, not the Eastern church, which it called orthodox. Pope Leo IX had died three months earlier, so it is unclear whose authority his envoys were using.
Moves learned
This book learns nothing new by levelling — everything it knows, it knew from the start or brought with it through development.
What answers it
The specific move or chapter of Scripture that cuts through this one, and why. The number is how much harder it hits than usual — ×4 is four times the normal force.
A pope who believed the doctrine still would not touch the Creed. The office in whose name this was written did not always think it reached this far.
Rome did not put the Filioque into the Creed. Spain did, at Toledo in 589, and Charlemagne’s Franks pressed it on everyone. Around 810 Pope Leo III refused it: he held the doctrine true and held that he had no standing to edit a creed the whole church had ratified. So he had the Creed cut into two silver shields, Greek and Latin, without the addition, and set up at St Peter’s. Rome admitted the word in 1014 — two centuries later.
Schaff, History of the Christian Church IV §108: the addition was made “by churches (in Spain and France) which had nothing to do with the original production.” The shields are recorded in the Liber Pontificalis.
Somebody did beg them. It is in the correspondence, and it changed nothing.
“Peter and his successors [the popes at Rome] have an unfettered jurisdiction over the whole church.” That is the claim the papal envoys carried to Constantinople. The East was not right about everything, but no bishop holds that office. The final judge of every dispute is the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture.
The legates’ claim as quoted in Stephen Nichols, “The Great Schism of 1054” (Ligonier). Westminster Confession I.10 and XXV; Second London Baptist Confession (1689).
The reasonable answer was already written down, by a Latin, and nobody read it out.
Somebody said the sane thing, in writing, at the time. Dominic of Venice wrote to Peter of Antioch that leavened and unleavened bread were both lawful and both holy, and added the line that should have ended it: if unleavened bread is not the body of Christ, then the whole West is cut off from the source of life. Both sides ignored him.
Dominic of Venice to Peter of Antioch, as translated in Adrian Fortescue, The Orthodox Eastern Church (1907), from Cornelius Will, Acta et Scripta (1861). Fortescue is a Latin partisan and says so.
Arguing about bread with a document that has stopped arguing. It only repeats the sentence.