The Synodal Edict
Michael Cerularius, Synodal Edict against the Latins (1054)
Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople
A year of preparation, a fortnight of fury, and two hundred years of older grievance stitched in at the back.
- Catch rate
- 14 / 255
- Base research
- 184
- Stat total
- 318
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.
It reissued Photius’ Encyclical of 867 entire. Two centuries of grievance, bound in one document and still standing.
It answers a sentence against one man with an anathema against a whole half of the church. Wider than what it replies to, on purpose.
Argued from custom and from the fathers, which is genuinely hard ground — the East really had kept the older usage in several of these.
Assembled at speed by a patriarch who had been preparing the ground for a year.
Cited for this book
Cerularius answered the bull within days, and answered it wider: where the legates had named one patriarch, the synod anathematised the Latins as such and reissued Photius’ Encyclical of 867 whole. He then told the other Eastern patriarchs to strike the pope’s name from their diptychs. Peter of Antioch, who had begged him not to, complied.
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.
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.
The charge lists are real and they are mostly about custom: unleavened bread, fasting on Saturday, married priests, beards, bishops’ rings, salt in the mouth of the baptized. The Creed came up later, once the fight was already running. But a quarrel that has to hunt for something to be about is still a quarrel — and under the bread lay the question of who had the right to settle it for everybody else.
Schaff, History of the Christian Church IV §71, of Cerularius’ opening letter: “Nothing was said about the procession of the Spirit.”
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.