In a previous article, I explained that the Eastern Orthodox churches have historically justified their severance from the Latin Catholic Church on the grounds that we use unleavened bread in the Eucharist rather than leavened bread. I then sought to defend the Latin tradition against its Orthodox critics by arguing that the Last Supper was indeed a Passover meal, and that this fact, along with other supporting evidence, proves that unleavened bread was the original matter of the Holy Eucharist. Obviously, if unleavened bread was used by our Lord Jesus and his apostles, then it cannot be considered invalid or illicit matter for the Eucharist, as Eastern Orthodoxy erroneously claims.
In this article, I’m going to argue for this same thesis by examining the following words from the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians:
When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (5:4-8).
To begin, it’s evident from the context that the apostle’s teaching here does not directly concern the matter with which the Holy Eucharist is celebrated. The eucharistic celebration is, in fact, secondary to the central point St. Paul is making, which is about casting unrepentant sinners out of the Church (i.e., excommunication). However, let’s nonetheless pause and deeply reflect on this passage.
Paul appears to be speaking here about casting an unrepentant sinner out of the Church during the eucharistic assembly. “When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus”—that is, when you are eucharistically gathered together as the body of Christ—you are to “deliver this man” (the unrepentant sinner) “to Satan,” which will “purge the evil from your midst.” This is how the Corinthians are to “celebrate the festival,” what I will argue is the Eucharist, “not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
It must be remembered that Paul is writing here to a primarily Gentile audience. As such, when the apostle writes to this audience that Christ is “our Passover lamb” who “has been sacrificed,” this seems to eliminate the possibility that the “festival” of which he speaks is literally the Jewish Passover.
Instead, recall that the old Passover festival involved eating the sacrificial victim. If, as Paul says, Christ is the sacrificial victim, then the festival that commemorates this victim must involve consuming him. This is a point to which Paul will return later in 1 Corinthians 10:14-22, when he draws a threefold analogy connecting the Eucharist, the sacrifices of Israel, and the sacrifices of pagans. The only thing all three of these have in common is that they involve the consumption of a sacrificial victim in propitiation of a respective deity.
It’s therefore hard to deny that Paul’s reference to a “festival” that Gentile Christians “keep” to remember “Christ, our Passover” is the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.
Now, in context, it’s true that the Corinthians casting out “the old leaven”—that is, the unrepentant sinner—in order to celebrate “the festival”—the Eucharist—with “the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” is meant to symbolically highlight that the Corinthians’ eucharistic celebration will be more pure without evildoers in their midst (something for Catholic hierarchs to consider). This imagery isn’t at all surprising, given that Jesus had warned of “the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod” (Mark 8:15), solidifying the connection between leaven and evil in the minds of first-century Christians. However, what would be surprising is if Paul was using this symbolism in a historical context where it was well known that the Eucharist was celebrated with leavened bread.
Think about it. If Paul and the other apostles really did start using leavened bread in the Eucharist, maybe sometime after Pentecost, wouldn’t we expect them to move away from Jesus’ negative comments on leaven (Matt. 16:5-6, Mark 8:15, Luke 12:1) and toward his more positive ones (Matt. 13:33, Luke 13:20-21)? Indeed, if the apostles intentionally chose to separate the Lord’s Supper from the feast of Passover by using leavened bread instead of unleavened bread, wouldn’t we expect the association between the bread of the Eucharist and the unleavened bread of Passover to be downplayed in the apostolic witness? I certainly would.
The fact that it’s in the very context of a discussion about the eucharistic celebration that Paul chooses to highlight both Jesus’ association between leaven and evil, and the association between the Eucharist and the unleavened bread of Passover,
thus serves as powerful evidence that the apostles were still using unleavened bread in the Eucharist well after Pentecost. To speak of “Christ our Passover,” the “assembly,” and a new Christian “festival” all in the same breath, and then invoke the imagery of “unleavened bread,” is simply too telling to ignore.
Indeed, if the “festival” in this context truly is the Eucharist, then why would Paul ever say, “Celebrate the Eucharist with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth,” if he and the other apostles intentionally replaced the unleavened bread of the Last Supper with leavened bread? Why would the symbolism of unleavened bread even mean anything to the Gentile Corinthians if they were taught to distinguish their Eucharist from the Jews’ Passover feast in this way? To me, that just doesn’t make sense.
If there was ever a time for St. Paul to make a point about leaven in the Eucharist symbolizing Christ’s “rising” to new life, this would have been it. Instead, he not only chooses to ignore that connection, but even emphasizes the association between unleavened bread and purity. That’s not a move that I could envision a modern Eastern Orthodox theologian making in a discussion of the Eucharist.
Depending on how you date 1 Corinthians, this means that the Apostolic Churches were still celebrating the Eucharist with unleavened bread years, if not decades, after the resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus. This also means that when we do see apostolic references to the eucharistic ἄρτον (e.g., 1 Cor 10:16, 11:23-28), that word, once again, doesn’t indicate that leavened bread was being used, as the strict linguistic separation of “common bread” from “unleavened bread” hadn’t yet developed.
Is it possible that, as the decades went on, some of the apostles did start using leavened bread in addition to unleavened bread in their Eucharistic celebrations? Sure, but that’s pure speculation for which there’s no direct evidence in either Scripture or the earliest Tradition. If we stick to the evidence at hand, we must admit that the use of leavened bread in the Eucharist was likely a post-apostolic innovation, albeit an early one that spread quickly. Theological justifications for it were likely created after the fact, and don’t reflect anything that was (provably) taught by Jesus and the apostles.
To make myself absolutely clear, I’m not saying that using leavened bread in the Eucharist is inherently invalid or illicit. Instead, I believe that this is an example of the divine authority and protection that the post-apostolic Church has when it comes to the administration of the sacraments. If you wish to maintain that the Church didn’t invalidly or illicitly celebrate the Eucharist during the centuries she universally used leavened bread, then you cannot fall back on Scripture, or even other writers or documents from the Apostolic Age. None of these sources can build a strong enough case to justify changing the Lord’s Supper from the way Jesus and the apostles celebrated it, with unleavened bread. Rather, the only possible justification for using leavened bread in the Eucharist is appealing to the Holy Spirit’s infallible protection of the Church from error. In modern Catholic theology, this is understood as the infallibility of the Church’s disciplinary laws and customs. More will be said about this in the next article about the Latin custom of denying the Chalice to the laity during the reception of Holy Communion.
Where does all of this leave the claims of Eastern Orthodoxy? As I pointed out in the previous article, the Orthodox historically cited the West’s use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist as one of the primary reasons for their schism. In Edward Siecienski’s words,
From the eleventh century, when the debate began, to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438/39, the Latins’ use of azymes appeared on almost every list of Latin errors and was considered by most to be the chief cause of the schism until later replaced by the Filioque and the primacy [of the pope]. It is true that at Florence Mark of Ephesus hoped the pope would ban the use of azymes, but by the end of the council most of the Greeks willingly conceded the legitimacy of the Latin practice without much debate. In fact, more time was devoted at the council to the (relatively) new debate about the moment of consecration than to the type of bread used. Azymes, after centuries of prominence, had receded into the background, but it had not gone away (8).
It seems that this is a debate the Eastern Orthodox simply lost. From Patriarch Michael Carelarius denying Communion to Latins on account of their acceptance of unleavened Eucharistic bread to Mark of Ephesus denouncing unleavened bread on the grounds that “a plurality of liturgical praxeis was in contradiction to ecclesiastical union,” the Orthodox really stuck out their necks on this issue. Yet when push came to shove at the Council of Florence, they had no serious response to the Latins’ defense of their custom.
To this day, the so-called “Azymite controversy” is a point of awkwardness in the history of Eastern Orthodoxy. Although it alone may not definitively “falsify” Eastern Orthodoxy, it should cause the inquirer to question what other issues the Orthodox may have gotten wrong when they schismed from the Catholic Church.