The Bull of 1054
Humbert of Silva Candida, Bull of Excommunication (16 July 1054)
Cardinal 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
Laid on the altar of Hagia Sophia at the third hour on Saturday 16 July 1054, during the preparation of the Liturgy. It excommunicated Michael Cerularius and his party — not the Eastern church, which it called most Christian and orthodox in its own opening. Pope Leo IX had died three months earlier, which leaves a real question about whose authority his legates were spending.
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 argument, and why.
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.
“Peter and his successors [the popes at Rome] have an unfettered jurisdiction over the whole church.” That is what the legates carried to Constantinople, and it is the claim this game answers — not because the East was right about everything, it was not, but because no bishop holds that office. The supreme judge of controversies is the Holy Spirit speaking in the 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).
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.