Author: Nick Kamas

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Laycus of Amalfi on the Azymes

As a continuation of sorts to my last post, on Peter Damiani’s reaction to the events of 1054, I’ve decided to take a look at another churchman writing on the same topic a few years later, a certain Laycus of Amalfi, who undertook to compose a defense of the use of unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist around the year 1070 [1]. His work took the form of a letter, addressed to Sergius, a Latin-rite abbot living in Constantinople. According to the text, Laycus had been motivated to write by reports from his correspondent and from other Latins that they had been completely surrounded by those who were trying to persuade them to abandon the Latin liturgical usage in favor of the Greek [2].

Other than his name, virtually nothing else is known about the author of the text. The sole surviving manuscript witness (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale 1360 / 9706-25, 116v-119r) gives only the identification “a letter of Laycus, cleric” (“epistola layci clerici”), a seeming contradiction in terms that leaves us with the assumption that “Laycus” is a given name. Anton Michel, who edited the text in 1939, notes further that monastics of the time tended to identify themselves as such: the absence of a word like “frater” in self-reference suggests that the author was not in monastic orders [3]. Even the origins of the author in the city of Amalfi are conjectural, and they are based more on his presumed links to Abbot Sergius, who was likely the leader of the monastery of St. Mary of the Amalfitans in Constantinople, an establishment attested by Peter Damiani around the same time[4].

The famous bronze doors of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Amalfi, manufactured in Constantinople around the year 1060. Photo credits Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The manuscript that preserves this text is also one of the few early copies of the work of Humbert, Cardinal of Silva Candida, and, as it happens, it is from Humbert’s writings that our Laycus drew most of his arguments in favor of the azymes. The core argument, in Laycus as in Humbert, was an appeal to the example set by Christ at the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper. According to the argument, Christ, who came to fulfill the Law of Moses, would have used unleavened bread at the Last Supper since the synoptic Gospel accounts place the event on the first day of the celebration of Pascha (Pesach), when leavened bread was prohibited in observant Jewish households. This act of institution was reinforced during the supper at Emmaus, which likewise occurred during the days of Pascha and is regarded in the text as a celebration of the Eucharist [5]. This practice was preserved by the Roman Church, according to Laycus, who cited Popes Anacletus, Clemens, and Sylvester as uniquely instrumental in this effort [6].

Especially for the period of the pre-Gregorian Reform, the tone of the text is fairly mild. The introductory paragraphs make reference to the “most pious, holy, and wise fathers and doctors [of the Greeks]” who themselves used leavened bread in the Eucharist (but who didn’t, though, attack the Latin use) [7]. And the letter of Laycus appears all the more gentle in comparison with the source material: gone is the spirited, “listen up, stupid” (“audi, stulte”) style of invective found in Cardinal Humbert [8]. Instead, we find almost a plea to avoid rending the garment of Christ by provoking division between the two rites, coupled with an emphatic statement that the one faith could contain various customs within the churches [9].

Does the work of Laycus of Amalfi change our understanding of the azyme debate or the conflict between the Eastern and Western churches more broadly? In terms of theological content, to put it bluntly, not really. The arguments advanced by Laycus were the same as those put forward by Humbert some fifteen years prior, and, while the text written by Laycus was itself copied by Bruno of Segni in another epistle in the early twelfth century, this branch of the post-Humbertine literary tradition does not leave any substantial mark in the theological framework of the Latin church. On the other hand, the very existence of this letter, along with the fact that a Greek prelate took the time to respond to it, does indeed broaden our insight into the East-West conflict more generally [10]. It emphasizes, first of all, that the Humbertine legation in 1054 was not a one-off attempt to open lines of communication between the two churches. Rather, communication was happening, even without the intervention of popes and patriarchs, and it was based on pre-existing and well-established ties connecting East and West. A Latin-rite monastery in Constantinople, staffed by Amalfitans, would naturally be in contact with friends, relatives, and fellow clerics back home.

Second, to return to a point that I’ve made before, this letter makes clear that there was no general sense of schism between East and West in the aftermath of the 1054 legation. Indeed, as noted above, the tone of this letter is notably more civil than the polemics of Humbert. Although Laycus was certainly more of an azyme partisan than was Peter Damiani, the work and its date of composition points to an extended window in which ecumenical dialogue, in the sense that both sides still saw each other as part of the same community, was still possible.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Anton Michel has published the only substantial scholarly treatment of the material and the only edition of the text. Amalfi und Jerusalem im Griechischen Kirchenstreit (1054–1090): Kardinal Humbert, Laycus von Amalfi, Niketas Stethatos, Symeon II. von Jerusalem und Bruno von Segni über die Azymen (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1939. See also a short summary in Jonathan Shepard, “Knowledge of the West in Byzantine Sources, c.900–c.1200” in A Companion to Byzantium and the West, 900-1204, ed. Nicolas Drocourt and Sebastian Kolditz (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 67.
  2. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 1, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 35.
  3. Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 21.
  4. Peter Damani, Letter 131, trans. Owen J. Blum, The Letters of Peter Damian Peter Damian, Vol. 5, Letters 121–150, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation 6, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 55. For an assessment on why this monastic house in particular, see Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 18–19.
  5. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 5–11, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 37–42.
  6. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 14–15, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 44–45.
  7. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 2, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 36. “Licet illorum [Graecorum] religiosissimi, sanctissimi atque sapientissimi patres ac doctores fuerint et studuerint ex fermentato pane omnipotenti domino sacrificium offerre, tamen numquam invenimus illos nostram oblationem evacuantes aut deridentes […].”
  8. Humbert, Cardinal of Silva Candida, Responsio sive Contradictio adversus Nicetae Pectorati Libellum, cap. 13, edited in Cornelius Will, Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861), 141.
  9. Laycus of Amalfi, c. 3, Michel, 36–37. “Numquid divisus est dominus in corpore suo, ut alius sit Ihesus Christus in Romano sacrificio, alius in Constantinopolitano? Quis hoc orthodoxus dixerit nisi ille, qui dominicam non veretur scindere vestem? Nos veraciter tenemus, immo firmiter credimus, quia, quamvis diversi mores ęcclesiarum, una est tamen fides […].”
  10. Probably Symeon II of Jerusalem. Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 25–28.
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(Pseudo-) Peter Damiani and the Reception of the Schism

In stark contrast to the almost non-reception of the events of 1054 in the literary Byzantine world, discussed here, on the Latin side of the equation, the report of the legation penned by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida quickly found its way into various historical chronicles and into theological literature. Two particularly fascinating examples that appear in Patrologia Latina 145 are both published under the name of Peter Damiani, who was, together with Humbert himself, one of the leading members of the papal curia in the mid-eleventh century. Although he would not be elevated to the cardinalate until 1057, under Pope Stephen IX, by the time of Humbert’s legation to Constantinople he was already active in attending various synods and had written the deeply influential Liber Gomorrhianus (addressed to Pope Leo IX). What makes these two works interesting, in light of their purported joint authorship, is that they take views of the azyme conflict (the use of unleavened bread in the celebration of the Eucharist) that are at odds both with each other and with the stance adopted by the Humbertine legation.

Photograph of a bust of Peter Damiani taken from the Florentine church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Credit to Srnec at English Wikipedia. CC 2.5.

The first example is a letter fragment written by Peter Damiani to Henry, the Archbishop of Ravenna, most likely between 1052 and 1058 [1]. The text is eye-opening both for the historian and for the contemporary canonists, so I’ll cite the full text of Fr. Blum’s translation:

…Just as it makes little difference whether at Mass we offer wine or unfermented grape juice, so, it seems to me, it is all the same whether we offer leavened or unleavened bread. For that “living bread that came down from heaven,” just as he wished to manifest himself under the appearance of wheat, he did so also under the form of the vine. “Unless,” he said, “a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a solitary grain.” And again, “I am the real vine.” Therefore, it suffices for me to offer either whatever is made from grain or whatever is produced by the vine. Nor am I too careful to inquire whether the bread was preserved in an immature dough until it could ferment, or also whether the grape juice was kept in a vat until it could turn into what one calls wine. But since it is not my purpose here to discuss these matters, I leave them to be handled by others…. [2]

Peter Damiani here showed himself to be vastly more permissive than most of the mainstream Latin West when it comes to the correct materials for confecting the Eucharist, and even more tolerant than the legates to Constantinople. Humbert, while he tacitly acknowledged that the Greek practice of using leavened bread was permissible, also had a clear preference for the unleavened Latin host. Peter, interestingly, does not here even mention the Greek practice: his letter is entirely within the context of the Latin rite, addressed to an archbishop of an (admittedly Byzantine-influenced) Latin see. This text allows us to see an approach very different from the one that appears in the aforementioned Liber Gomorrhianus. Given the fact that this was a topic of considerable polemics when he wrote the letter, Peter Damiani appears as a moderating, or even progressive, voice in the conflict.

What a surprise, then, when we examine the second text, taken from the Expositio canonis missae. The work as a whole falls into the genre of Mass commentaries, theological treatises that explain the various ritual components of the eucharistic celebration with historical or scriptural parallels and allegory. Fairly early in this treatise, while discussing the phrase “He took bread” (“accepit panem”) the author complains:

Leavened bread should not be offered in the sacrifice, both by reason of deed and by reason of the mystery. As is read in Exodus: “Leaven signifies corruption”, and as the Apostle witnesses: “A little leaven corrupts the whole lump”. But the Greeks, persisting in their error, celebrate [the Eucharist] from leaven. [3]

Now present is a direct mention of the conflict with the Greeks, using scriptural references that were first applied to the debate by the Humbertine legation. And gone is the tolerance of the previous passage, in which the matter of the Eucharist – so long as it comes from grapes and wheat – is a matter of indifference. Instead, for the author, the use of leavened bread violates the spiritual message of the scriptures, signifying corruption, and is therefore wholly unsuitable for the celebration of the Eucharist. 

The wildly divergent views, of course, lead the reader to question the traditional attributions of authorship for one or both of the passages, and indeed, the Expositio canonis missae has caught the attention of several scholars for containing passages that seem out of place in the literary corpus of Peter Damiani. In particular, the text uses the word “transubstantiation” (“transubstantiatio”), which would be the first appearance of this terminology if it could, in fact, be dated to the middle of the eleventh century. It is this terminological incongruity that caused Joseph de Ghellinck to conduct a line-by-line comparison with other commentaries on the Mass and to conclude that the Expositio postdates not only the De sacramentis of Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) but also the De sacro altaris mysterio of Lothar of Segni (later Pope Innocent III), which was written in 1198 [4]. The true date of composition, then, would fall somewhere around the turn of the thirteenth century, about a hundred and fifty years after originally supposed.

When applied specifically to the passage about leavened bread, this reattribution to an anonymous author of the thirteenth century clears up a couple of difficulties. In the first place, the notion of the Greeks persisting “in their error” makes much more sense with the later dating. The use of un/leavened bread in the Eucharist didn’t arise as a point of contention until the 1050s, so the Greeks couldn’t have persisted in the error for very long if it had been Peter Damiani admonishing them. By the year 1200, of course, Latin polemicists could much more reasonably suppose that the Greeks had been given sufficient warning, and therefore that their continued use of leavened bread qualified them as “persisting” (“pertinaces”). Similarly, the hard-and-fast rule that “leavened bread should not be offered” is much more typical of the later period, in contrast with the more permissive attitude found in the eleventh century. We see, for example, an identical notion, in nearly identical phrasing expressed in Lothar’s De sacro altaris mysterio: “Not leavened bread, but rather unleavened, should be offered in the sacrifice, both by reason of deed and by reason of the mystery” [5].

But I want to conclude with an emphasis on the relative openness and permissiveness of the mid-eleventh century. Contrary to the reputation that the events of 1054 have developed in the centuries since, the Latin Christians at that time had only begun to develop their stance on the various points under discussion, un/leavened bread being maybe the most important among them. Had the more irenic figures like Peter Damiani (and even Humbert!) exercised a little more influence on this topic, the West might have maintained a more permissive tone by the time of the authorship of our Pseudo-Peter, and indeed, perhaps a different approach taken under the leadership of Innocent III, who had clearly been swayed by a century and a half of increasing aggressive liturgical polemics in his approach to the Greek rite. Whether openness to a variety of liturgical forms could have prevented the entirety of the calamity of the Fourth Crusade is doubtful, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. For the Latin text and date, see Kurt Reindel (ed.), Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, MGG Briefe d. dt. Kaiserzeit 4.2, (München, 1988): 1–2.
  2. Owen Blum (trans.), Peter Damian, Letters 31–60, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation, (CUA Press, Washington, D.C., 1990): 215.
  3. (Ps.) Peter Damiani, Expositio canonis missae, PL 145.88. “Panis fermentatus non debet offerri in sacrificium, tum ratione facti, tum ratione mysterii. Sic legitur in Exodo. Fermentatum etiam corruptionem significat, teste Apostolo: modicum fermentum totam massam corrumpit. Graeci tamen in suo pertinaces errore de fermento conficiunt.”
  4. Joseph de Ghellinck, Le mouvement théologique du XIIe siècle: études, recherches et documents (Paris: Librairie Victor LeCoffre, 1914), 355–359.
  5. Lothar of Segni (Pope Innocent III), De sacro altaris mysterio, PL 217.854. “Panis autem non fermentatus, sed azymus debet offerri in sacrificium, tum ratione facti, tum etiam ratione mysterii.”

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Greco-Latin Polemic and the Problem of the Single Immersion Baptism

Of the many issues that rose to the fore in the course of the conflicts between the Latin and Greek churches during the Middle Ages, one of the most consistent, and to me, surprising, was the repeated accusation that the Greeks rebaptized Latin Christians when they, for whatever reason, wished to switch their ritual use (what we would now understand as a “conversion” between different denominations). Although the veracity of these claims has been debated, I think, as I have written elsewhere, that there is good reason to believe that the Greeks really did rebaptize Latins. Complaints about the practice began in the mid-11th century with Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, who was elsewhere highly accurate in his claims about liturgical practice, and continue well into the 13th century, including an honorable mention in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III.

What is less clear, though, is why the Greeks were so keen to rebaptize their Latin cousins. It is tempting to see rebaptism as symptomatic of more ethereal theological topics, in which the perceived differences between the two churches was sufficiently great that the Greek clergy (or at least a subset of them) felt the need to mark the reception of these “converts” from heresy by means of the administration of the sacrament. Certainly this understanding had precedent: as early as 325, the canons of the First Council of Nicaea mandated the reception of Paulianists, who were nontrinitarians, by means of baptism. But I think that this understanding is a mistake with reference to the Latin/Greek conflict. Especially in its earlier phase, in the 11th century, there was no general sense of lasting division: the Greeks generally viewed the Latins as wayward brethren to be corrected, not as heretics utterly outside of the Church, and therefore rebaptism can’t be understood as a requirement resulting from serious deficiencies in the faith on the scale of nontrinitarianism.

Rather, I think that these rebaptisms were because of perceived ritual deficiencies in the Latin rite of baptism, and particularly, in the idea that the Latins were prone to using a single immersion when administering the sacrament. And when looking at this possibility we find a much greater incidence of Latin complaint and Greek explanation. Shortly after Cardinal Humbert complained about rebaptisms, Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Peter, the Patriarch of Antioch, that the Latins performed baptism with a single immersion [1]. The two centuries that followed saw repetitions of both: Odo of Deuil, Leo Tuscus, an anonymous Dominican author writing from Constantinople in the mid-13th century, and Jerome of Ascoli (i.e., Pope Nicholas IV) all noted that Latin Christians were being rebaptized. The “Byzantine Lists”, a genre of polemic that enumerated liturgical and cultural “errors” committed by the Latins, again and again returned to the notion that the baptism of the Latin rite was performed through a single immersion [2]. In doing so, the authors of these lists were implicitly invoking another of the canons of the early church, this time from the so-called Apostolic Canons (no. 50): “If any Bishop or Priest does not perform three immersions in making one baptism, but only a single immersion […], let him be deposed” [3]

Assuming that my conclusion is correct, that Greeks rebaptized Latins with some degree of frequency because they believed their form of the sacrament to be ritually defective, the question that next arises is how the Greeks came to hold that belief. Prior to the widespread adoption of affusion or aspersion in the Latin West, the form of baptism appears to have been similar to that of the Greek East: a full triune immersion, done together with the invocation of the persons of the Trinity. We see this clearly referenced as late as the early 13th century, when Pope Innocent III, writing to the Maronite Church, instructs them to invoke the Trinity only once “while completing a triple immersion” [4]. The great exception to the standard Latin practice was the famous license given by Pope Gregory the Great to the church in Spain to baptize with a single immersion as a way to signify the oneness of the Trinity and thereby to combat Arianism. This practice was further codified by the 633 Council of Toledo and its existence confirmed in the works of Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus of Toledo [5]. The practice is referenced twice more, toward the end of the eighth century, in the letters of Alcuin of York, who acknowledged that the practice existed in certain parts of Spain only long enough to condemn the people who baptize in this way as “neglecting to imitate, in baptism, the three-day burial of our Savior” [6]. They maintain this custom, according to Alcuin, “contrary to the universal custom of the holy Church” making Spain the “wet-nurse of schismatics” [7].

Gregory the Great, the source of the conflict? Antiphonary of Hartker of the monastery of Saint Gall (Cod. Sang. 390, 13 (paginated). Creative Common licensing.

Returning, then, to the polemics of the Greeks, is it possible that their complaints about a Latin single-immersion baptism stemmed from the Spanish practice? I see no other possible cause, although this feels unsatisfactory as an explanation. At most, the single-immersion baptism was a regionalism confined to the Iberia, and the opposition of Alcuin, the great champion of Romanization in the West, makes it unlikely that it would ever have spread further than its native peninsula. Indeed, the gradual imposition of the Roman rite throughout the Christian West likely reduced the frequency of single-immersion baptisms within Spain itself in the centuries following the initial permission of Pope Gregory. If the practice survived at all by the mid-11th century, when Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael wrote their respective complaints – and I haven’t found any evidence from that time for or against – it would probably have been a very rare indeed for someone baptized “incorrectly” to have been found in Constantinople.

Pending further evidence, then, we are left with the Greeks reacting at most to an improbability, and more likely to outdated information. While I fully acknowledge that it’s no more than supposition on my part, my best guess is that the works either of Gregory the Great or of Isidore of Seville (or of both, or of someone else entirely) were received in the theological circles of 11th-century Constantinople, leaving the mistaken impression that the practice of single immersion baptism was common in the West. From there, the notion that the Latins performed this sacrament incorrectly, along with most of the others, proved hard to dislodge.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1.  Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861), 153 (Humbert) and 182 (Michael).
  2. Tia M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000), 192.
  3. The Rudder, trans. Ralph Masterjohn (West Brookfield, Massachusetts: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 2005), 179.
  4. “in trina immersione unica tantum fiat invocatio Trinitatis”. No. 216. Acta Innocentii III, ed. P. Theodosius Haluščynskyj (Vatican, Typis Polyglottis, 1944), 458.
  5. J.D.C. Fisher, Christian Initiation, Baptism in the Medieval West (London: S.P.C.K., 1965), 91.
  6. “triduanamque nostri salvatoris sepulturam in baptismo imitari neglegentes”. Ep. 139. Ed. Ernest Duemmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin: Weidmannos, 1895), 221.
  7.  “[…] Hispania – quae olim tyrannorum nutrix fuit, nun vero scismaticorum – contra universalem sanctae ecclesiae consuetudinem […].” “Adfirmant enim quidam sub invocatione sanctae Trinitatis unam esse mersionem agendam.” Ep. 137. Ibid., 212.