True Bread: Medieval Patriarchs, Ancient Rabbis, and the Modern Magisterium on Leavening, Fermentation, and Gluten Thanks to my ISM colleagues for the invitation to give a plenary lecture at the conference, to those present who discussed it, and to various colleagues who have helped with information and advice or read drafts, particularly Antonio Alonso, Jordan Rosenblum, Karima Moyer-Nocchi, Felicity Harley-McGowan, and Aidan Stoddart Andrew McGowan The Azymes Controversy Mahlon H. Smith, And Taking Bread...: Cerularius and the Azyme Controversy of 1054 (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1978); Chris Schabel, “The Quarrel Over Unleavened Bread in Western Theology 1234-1439,” in Greeks, Latins, and Intellectual History 1204-1500, ed. Martin Hinterberger and Chris Schabel, Bibliotheca 11 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 85–127; A. Edward Siecienski, Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory: The Other Issues That Divided East and West (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023). On the 16th of July in 1054, the Cardinal legate Humbert of Silva Candida laid a papal bull of excommunication on the altar of the great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, symbolizing the formal split that would become known as the Great Schism. The disagreements between East and West famously included papal authority and the vexed filioque clause of the western Creed, yet standard accounts of historical theology have often seemed embarrassed to admit that, initially at least, the most acute focus of argument was the character of eucharistic bread. Fully acknowledged in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition; a History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 176–77; mentioned only in passing in Justo L. González, A History of Christian Thought, Revised. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987), 2.207; omitted from a list of causes of the schism in Mark Ellingsen, Reclaiming Our Roots: An Inclusive Introduction to Church History (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), 188–89. While the Latin Church had become insistent on the use of unleavened bread at the Eucharist, the Greeks recognized only leavened bread as valid. The Greek position, championed in this dispute by the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius, was the more dogmatic, and derided the use of unleavened bread as an anathema; the Westerners expressed a strong preference for unleavened bread, yet did not deny the validity of eastern practice. The West was also intolerant of Greek intransigence, however; as late as 1231, a dozen Greek monks were martyred in Cyprus for refusing to recognize the western Eucharist as valid because of its unleavened bread. Schabel, “The Quarrel Over Unleavened Bread,” 85. The origins of the divergent practices remain uncertain. The evidence is scant, but there is a common view even among western scholars that insistence on unleavened bread was a late development there, dating perhaps from the ninth century. See, for a summary and further references, Siecienski, Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory, 108–9, 111–14. These positions however are speculative; they arguably make too little of the more ancient but similar Armenian practice, as well as of the fact that unleavened breads were (and are) common beyond use at Passover. The dispute itself seems to have arisen only when the difference between East and West came to greater awareness circumstantially, catalyzed by more prosaic disputes over ecclesiastical as well as political jurisdiction in the central Mediterranean. Both Greeks and Latins invoked the practice of Jesus at the Last Supper as their authority, but chose the New Testament chronologies that suited them: westerners preferred the Synoptic identification of the Supper as a Passover meal, while eastern theologies followed the Gospel of John in having Jesus die at Passover, the fateful meal hence not requiring the azumon. Siecienski, Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory, 85–107. Yet there were other issues too, especially regarding the property that allows a wheaten dough to rise when leavened. The Greeks, in particular, theologized on leavening as a symbol. Leavened bread was “living” because fermented, and their theology of eucharistic sacrifice suggested a victim—even a loaf—could not be inanimate. The Patriarch of Antioch Peter III thus wrote in 1054 in rebuke to the Venetian Bishop Dominic of Grado: …bread (artos) is proclaimed to be the body of the Lord, because it is complete and full (artios), but not unleavened (azumos). For what is unleavened is dead and lifeless and altogether incomplete. But when the leaven is introduced to the wheaten dough it becomes, as it were, life (psyche) and substance within it. PG 120:764C, my trans. In Peter’s logic leaven, zumē, provides a kind of ensoulment for the bread. Eastern liturgical and sacramental theology reflected this cultic understanding where leavened bread was not merely a figure of the raised body of Christ, but itself a quasi-animal substance, fit to become the amnos or lamb of the Greek Eucharist. The “dead offerings” of the Latins were rhus deemed not only deficient but revolting, a sort of liturgical road-kill. While “unleavened bread” may primarily suggest matzah for Passover, and the eastern rhetoric of the Azymes controversy included predictably unfavorable comparisons between breads of the Old and New Covenants, even these supersessionist discourses rely on a more basic economic and social coding of bread. Unleavened breads were, and are, common where economic conditions require the simplicity of a bread that can be made in a few minutes. The omission of leaven is not necessarily a matter of symbolism or even choice, but can be determined by the time-consuming and potentially expensive technology of leavening. Despite the almost instant results obtained by modern bakers using brewer’s yeast, leavening has usually been a process that takes days, not minutes, and thus requires not only a greater complexity of preparation but some degree of economic surplus, with sufficient flour to have the meals of the next day, as well as the present one, in preparation. Since unleavened breads can—and often must—be made and eaten almost instantly, they are more accessible to those living at subsistence who may obtain money (and hence grain or meal) only from day to day, and who may have the limited fuel necessary to fire a small hearth but not the more sophisticated ovens which tend to be used for leavened breads. In the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, leavened bread was thus regarded as superior, and preferred by those who could afford it; this common view is reflected in the biblical designation of matzah as the “bread of affliction” (Deut 16:3). Arguments about leavening as essential to eucharistic presence or efficacy may seem baffling, but the connection with economics and diet reminds us that we should not confuse disdain for the trivial with a lack of interest in the material. The ready prioritization in the 21st century West of “spiritual” meanings for the bread of the Eucharist—whether real presence, or just symbolism of community—without attention to the material forms under which it is celebrated, is neither theologically or politically neutral nor necessarily enlightened. When nearly 40% of food produced in the USA is wasted, These authors demonstrate “a threshold level of consumer affluence beyond which food waste rises rapidly”; Monika van den Bos Verma et al., “Consumers Discard a Lot More Food than Widely Believed: Estimates of Global Food Waste Using an Energy Gap Approach and Affluence Elasticity of Food Waste,” PLoS One 15.2 (2020): e0228369. even while food deserts and inadequate diet are very common, and where the quality of bread most can buy is nutritionally and environmentally compromised, indifference to eucharistic elements is entirely to be expected. Likewise, the sacramental theologies of the medieval Greeks and Latins cannot be separated from how they encountered bread every day. If aspects of the Azymes controversy are unedifying, this is not just because of the materiality of food, but owes something to other dimensions of sociability and of power. So also, a more contemporary case that is certainly punctilious—the insistence of the Roman Catholic Church on gluten in eucharistic bread—invites scrutiny, not because concern for the nature of bread is misplaced, but because of the specific ways in which this concern has arisen and been applied. God and Gluten While the Latins were the more accommodating side in the Azymite controversy, in the modern case of gluten in eucharistic bread the Roman Catholic Church has taken an uncompromising stand. In 1994 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith agreed on and published a set of norms concerning the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Notitiae 31 (1995), 608-10. This was the first of a series of documents from the teaching office of the Church over recent decades asserting that eucharistic bread must contain at least some gluten. For background and documents see especially Aidan McGrath, “Coeliacs, Alcoholics, the Eucharist and the Priesthood,” Irish Theological Quarterly 67.2 (2002): 125–44. The central declarations concerning bread were these: (1) Special hosts quibus glutinum ablatum est are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist; This Latin phrase appears as a quotation in all the vernacular versions, but I find no trace of it in documents before 1995. The turn of phrase “ablatum est” may have a ponderous connotation; see the Vulgate of 1 Macc 13:41 and Is 38:12. (2) Low-gluten hosts are valid matter, provided that they contain the amount of gluten sufficient to obtain the confection of bread, that there is no addition of foreign materials, and that the procedure for making such hosts is not such as to alter the nature of the substance of the bread. Notitiae 31 (1995), 608-10. This pronouncement, followed by further but similar statements in 2003 and 2017, could only have arisen because of the two quite modern discoveries of gluten itself, and of celiac disease. The second century CE medical writer Aretaeus of Cappadocia had already identified a condition he called, prosaically enough, koiliakē diathesis, a “disposition of the bowel.” Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine (Taylor & Francis, 2023), 164–66. Although some modern sources have credited Arateus with identifying gluten sensitivity, Alessio Fasano, Riccardo Troncone, and D. Branski, eds., Frontiers in Celiac Disease (Basel: Karger, 2008), 4. he makes no mention of wheat and seems instead to have described something like ancient irritable bowel syndrome. It is physician Samuel Gee (1839-1911) who is properly credited with first describing celiac disease in 1888, Samuel Gee, “On the Coeliac Affection,” St Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports 24 (1888): 17–20. although he, something of a classicist, borrowed Aretaeus’ terminology in naming his own discovery the “coeliac affection.” Gee however still had little to say about the causes of the disease. The missing piece we owe to Dutch pediatrician Willem Dicke (1905-1962), who during the Second World War had his suspicions about the role of wheat in his celiac patients ‘ conditions strengthened when bread become hard to obtain in the occupied Netherlands. Tom Vorstenbosch et al., “Famine Food of Vegetal Origin Consumed in the Netherlands during World War II,” J Ethnobiol Ethnomed 13 (2017): 63. Children fed hardship substitutes such as tulip bulbs thrived, but later regressed after the occupation and its exigencies came to an end. Stefano Guandalini, “Historical Perspective of Celiac Disease,” in Frontiers in Celiac Disease, ed. Alessio Fasano, Riccardo Troncone, and D. Branski (Basel: Karger, 2008), 1–11. Work by Dicke and collaborators later refined the cause of celiac disease to gluten, the protein complex in wheat flour, and then further again to gliadin, one of the two constituents of wheat gluten (the other being glutenin). Proceedings VIth Meeting of the “Association Des Sociétés Nationales Européenes et Méditerranéennes de Gastro-Entérologie” (A. S. N. E. M. G. E.) (Excerpta Medica Foundation, 1961), 637. Although wheat gluten was an ancient part of Chinese cuisine, Chinese culinary use of gluten goes back to the 6th century CE; see H.T. Huang, “Production and Usage of Gluten,” in Science and Civilisation in China: Biology and Biological Technology; Fermentations and Food Science, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 497–502. and presumably created in the West as a by-product in the extraction of starch, which is attested by Pliny the Elder even before Aretaeus’ time (Nat. Hist. 18.76), gluten was either unknown or ignored in Europe until the eighteenth century. Its discovery or at least description there is attributed to Italian chemist Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari (1682-1766), who in 1728 washed wheat flour to separate and dissolve the water-soluble starch, and thus isolated an insoluble component. Describing the two substances produced he said: …one was quite similar to all the things which are usually extracted from vegetable bodies...the other was such that it seemed that they could only have been extracted from the bodies of animals. “altera erat allarum rerum plane similis, quae a corporibus vegetabilibus solent extrahi...altera sic erat ut non nisi ab animantium corporibus trahi potuisse videretur”; Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari, “De Frumento,” in De Bononiensi Scientiarum et Artium Instituto Atque Academia Commentarii. (Bononiae: Ex typographia Laelii a Vulpe, 1745), 122. Beccari thus correctly noted the affinity between gluten and at least some aspect of meat—protein, we would now say—and this led him to call gluten the “animal substance” of wheat, while naming it “gluten,” from a Latin word for glue. Beccari, “De Frumento”; Eliot F. Beach, “Beccari of Bologna: The Discoverer of Vegetable Protein,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 16.4 (1961): 354–73. Beach suggests that the third-person narrative of these proceedings reflects Beccari’s own words fairly directly. Beccari’s theoretical framework—in particular the notion that “animal” and “vegetable” were different principles or essences found within both animals and plants, rather than descriptive categories for whole living things or species—bore the marks of earlier natural philosophy, despite his own commitment to empiricism and stated disdain for the ancient tradition of Galen. His closeness to the Church implied sympathy for principles found in scholastic philosophy and theology that still gave particular emphasis to essences or substances, although he sought to integrate the results of experimental science with them. Beccari thus drew at least implicit conclusions, not just about the fact of this distinction between gluten and starch, but about the value of each relative to each other and to the essence of wheat itself. Beccari offered in this discussion a version of the familiar observation that we are—at least materially—what we eat: for [he said] if we look only at the body, and leave out the immortal and divine soul (animus), what else are we, but that very thing from which we are nourished? “...nam si corpus tantum spectemus, immortalemque ac divinum animum excipiamus, quid aliud sumus, sed id ipsum unde alimur?” Beccari, “De Frumento,” 122. By implication, humans are nourished as humans not by wheat itself, but by gluten. Beccari’s work thus allowed gluten a prominence in subsequent discourses about diet, both contributing to an emergent understanding about the significance of protein, but also giving new energy to ancient ideas that nutrition was a matter of essential principles within living beings, of which the “animal”— gluten, here—must be more relevant to humans. The burgeoning industry of dietary and culinary science in the 19th and early 20th centuries waxed eloquent about human affinity with the glutinous character of wheat and bread, using the ideas of “animal” and “vegetable,” not only as ways of dealing with particular foodstuffs collectively and descriptively, but for analyzing and valorizing their substance. These terms evolved, but the core idea of gluten as the valuable aspect of wheat, and its affinity with human bodily substance, remained. The phrase “flesh-forming” could be equivalent, nodding to the growing scientific understanding of the role of protein in diet. Augustus Voelcker, Agricultural Chemistry, Four Lectures (London: Ridgway, 1857), 63. Later, the positive nutritional value of gluten and other proteins could be termed “nitrogenous,” and contrasted with “carbonaceous,” the latter standing for what to Beccari had been the essentially vegetable aspect. John Harvey Kellogg, The Natural Diet of Man (Coastalfields Press, 2006), 313. John Harvey Kellogg was among the advocates of such “nitrogenous” diets, even and especially derived from cereals, not only in the familiar breakfast foods but in meat substitutes based on gluten. John Harvey Kellogg, The Stomach (Modern Medicine Publishing Company, 1896). While this language emphasizing elements rather than essences appears less beholden to classical natural philosophy, the emphasis on gluten continued to dominate understandings of the nutritional value of grains as a whole, and to overshadow how (e.g.) fiber, fat, and carbohydrate contribute to their dietary value. Gluten thus appeared in the western public consciousness first not as threat but as promise, and as something like the true and desirable essence of wheat. The Bread of Coimbatore Concern about celiac disease and the Eucharist could not emerge before the 1950s and Willem Dicke’s work, but the question of gluten and eucharistic bread had arisen much earlier. In 1852— a full century before the link between gluten and celiac disease was identified, but well after Beccari’s discoveries had begun to influence thinking about gluten, wheat, and diet—the Apostolic Vicar of Coimbatore, in what is now the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, sought advice from the Holy Office about eucharistic bread. This dignitary was Melchior-Marie-Joseph de Marion-Brésillac, today on his way to sainthood because of his later missionary work in Africa. A Frenchman, doubtless with some expectations for the quality and forms of bread, he found the local methods of producing the eucharistic host vexing: In this region it is extremely difficult to make eucharistic breads from flour properly speaking; hence the custom has arisen…of making breads from grains cracked and soaked in water for some hours, not however to the point of fermentation. These grains are crushed by hand and from the white substance produced they make the breads on a hot iron, in the way usual in Europe. Felix Maria Cappello, Tractatus canonico-moralis de sacramentis (Turin: Marietti, 1921), 192 my translation. Mgr de Marion-Brésillac’s concern arose because “the whole substance of wheat does not seem to me to be contained in such bread” and that “this material appears to me to approach starch…” Cappello, Tractatus canonico-moralis de sacramentis, 192. Nothing in his description suggests that the process of soaking and grinding involved any separating of the resultant batter; however the slurry produced by soaking grains rather than grinding them was clearly unfamiliar. The immediate source of this concern, the method of soaking and then grinding grain rather than milling flour, is far from incidental to the place it had arisen. In Tamil cuisine it is traditional to soak grains and pulses, and to grind the wet mixture to create batters, which are then cooked on griddles to create breads or cakes. Some of these are now reasonably well-known in the West: dosa especially perhaps, as well as idly and appam. These batter breads are made usually from soaked rice or lentils; wheat-based versions of appam and dosa are known but uncommon, since wheat is historically much less significant in the South than in northern India. S. Meenaksi Ammal, Cook and See, 11th ed. (Chennai: S. Meenakshi Ammal Publications, 2008), 2:51–52. The method of producing these breads is so widespread in Tamil Nadu that an electrical appliance was developed in the 1950s to lessen the labor of producing batters from soaked grain, at least for better-resourced households. In 2005, given that 75% of these electric wet grinders produced in India were made in Coimbatore itself, the appliance was awarded a “Geographic Indication” status—for Mgr de Marion-Bressilac’s sake we might say an appellation contrôlée designation—as the “Coimbatore Wet Grinder”. Anu Kapur, Made Only in India: Goods with Geographical Indications (New York: Routledge, 2016), 53. Tamils—Tamil women, presumably—charged with producing eucharistic bread had apparently turned to the time-honored methods of their own foodways, wet-grinding soaked wheat manually, with the result so perplexing to Fr de Marion-Brésillac. As we have noted, there is no indication in his description that gluten or anything else was removed from the resulting slurry or batter, only that it was a wet mixture from the outset, rather than made from flour. If we consider products of this wet-grinding process, it seems likely that the Coimbatore hosts would have been more hydrated than European ones and hence softer, even when baked, which may have led to a product that was disconcerting to the French missionary, and hence also to a misconstrual of the cause. The Holy Office at least partially confirmed the Apostolic Vicar’s concern, and in response declared that such material was “valid but not licit”; grain, they said, should be first be turned into flour and bread then made from that, modo in Europa usitato—in the European way. Cited in “Consultazioni VI: Si sia valida e lecita la consecrazione delle ostie, fatte con farina vendereccia,” Il Monitore Ecclesiastico, Second Series 1 (1899): 166. This would allow for the flour “to be sifted in a reliable manner,” this scruple confirming that the substance of the flour was at issue, and that gluten as well as starch be present. So while the anxiety Mgr de Marion-Brésillac expressed was actually driven by observation—can this material made from a slurry formed directly from soaked whole grain really be bread?—both he and his curial interlocutors seem to have turned this into a question of essences, asking whether the “whole substance” and not just the non-glutinous starch was present. This may imply concern for the validity of the further and metaphysical transformation in which that substance, now apparently identified with the “animal,” flesh-forming gluten of wheat, would cease to exist in favor of the substance of the body of Christ. The controversy certainly places an emphasis on the presence of gluten impossible before the discoveries of Beccari, and implies acceptance of the view that gluten, because of its “animal” quality, was the real essence of wheat. Canon Law and Fr Cappello The case of the bread of Coimbatore was kept under the eye of specialists in canon law through the following decades, long before the identification of celiac disease, and for reasons quite unrelated to Indian foodways. It was published or discussed in the annotated Acta Sanctae Sedis, precursor to the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, in Gasparri’s Codicis Iuris Canonici Fontes, and in 1900 in a standard compendium of decrees on moral theology, the Enchiridion Morale of the Jesuit Bucceroni, among others. Januarius Bucceroni, Enchiridion Morale Complectens: Selectas Decisiones Sanctae Sedis et Sacrarum Romanarum Congregationum, 3rd ed. (Rome: Della Pace, 1900), 260. It was also featured in a 1900 Italian case study on the surprisingly vexed question of whether eucharistic hosts could be made from store-bought flour, a dilemma which seems to reflect lack of trust in commercial flours because of adulteration—on which more below. “Si sia valida e lecita.” These issues may also have been fueled by the encouragement given by Pope Pius X to more frequent lay communion. Antonio Alonso, “On The Host in the Modern World,” Religion and American Culture 33.1 (2023): 117–19. The case also featured in perhaps the most influential manual of Canon Law of the earlier twentieth century, by Felix Cappello SJ—himself also now subject of a cause for sainthood. In his Tractatus canonico-moralis de sacramentis published in 1921, Cappello pondered the question of valid matter for the Eucharist, Cappello, Tractatus canonico-moralis de sacramentis, 187–95. commenting on the recent Code of Canon Law of 1917 which had stated merely that bread be “pure wheat and recently made so that there is no danger of corruption” (can. 815). Cappello invoked the traditional scholastic idea of communis hominum aestimatio –general human opinion—as basic to determining whether bread is indeed bread. Related to or often rendered as communis opinio; communis aestimatio is used in Aristotelian and scholastic discourse more narrowly to refer to ideas about price or value. However his detailed discussion relies on much more essentialist logic. Cappello considered the varieties of materials that might be used, and treated two categories separately. The first are frumenta: apart from wheat, these include spelt, far (other hulled wheats, such as emmer), rye, and durum wheat. The second set, of definitively excluded materials, consists of barley, oats, chestnuts, rice, potatoes, maize, beans, peas, millet, almonds, all of which are listed only to be dismissed summarily. The curious inclusion of rye in the frumenta, but of barley and oats in the other list, is a clue that this is more than an academic or lexicographical exercise but reflects known bread-making in that time and place. The B-list also includes hardship foods that poorer Italians of the 1920s were treating as substitutes for wheat under trying circumstances, and which may thus have been appearing in manufacture of the host. The Church was not alone in having a concern that real wheat be in better supply and central to proper eating; just three years after Cappello published his manual, Mussolini would launch his Battaglia del grano, a battle for wheat, seeking to drive production up and lessen dependence on expensive imports. See H. van der Wee, The Great Depression Revisited: Essays on the Economics of the Thirties (Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 94–95; Karima Moyer-Nocchi, Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita (Perrysburg, OH: Medea, 2015). Cappello also considered whether bread could properly be made from wheat starch alone. There is no sign this particular risk had arisen recently, but the correspondence between Mgr de Marion-Brésillac and the Holy office is cited here, apparently because the Indian case had become a commonplace for thinking about such issues. Cappello’s interpretation of the Coimbatore correspondence with the Holy Office suggests the continuing influence of nutritional theory that went back to Beccari. Cappello echoes nutritionists like his older contemporary Kellogg, to the effect that gluten is the “materia azotata ideoque nutritiva,” the “nitrogenous and hence nutritious matter.” And he adds, returning to the more descriptive method, that bread made without gluten “is not bread in common opinion.” "non est ille, qui in communi aestimatione censetur panis”; Cappello, Tractatus canonico-moralis de sacramentis. The real issue in Cappello’s mind was unlikely to have been attempts to make bread just from starch, but instances of adulterating flour with cheaper materials altogether different from wheat. In 1929, as the Great Depression loomed and food scarcity was already or again widespread in Italy, the Sacred Congregation on the Discipline of the Sacraments issued an Instruction addressing a number of eucharistic abuses or dangers, including admixture of other flours or materials in the production of hosts: …it follows that bread made from another substance, or to which a quantity [of material] different from wheat has been added, so that according to the communis aestimatio cannot be called wheat bread, by no means constitutes valid matter for confection of the Eucharistic sacrifice and sacrament (632). “Instructio ad Revmos Ordinarios de quibusdam vitandis atque observandis in conficiendo Sacrificio Missae et in Eucharistiae Sacramento distribuendo et asservando,” AAS XXI (1929), pp. 631 ff. Despite or even because of the notional victory of Mussolini’s “Battle for Grain,” wheat in Italy was expensive, and poverty remained widespread. This curial intervention suggests locally produced altar breads may sometimes have involved such substitution. The invocation of the bread of Coimbatore was merely the use of what had now become the standard canonical exhibit in such cases, despite its oblique connection to the real matters at hand. Gluten in any case was given a continued prominence via that recitation, and its effect was not so much to clarify how wheat flour could be adulterated, but to ensure the curious prominence of gluten as a supposed essence of wheat. Gluten and the Host These documents of the early twentieth century have a very different social and pastoral setting from the 1995 intervention of the Curia regarding gluten-free hosts, but we can nevertheless suggest a trajectory leading from their concerns to how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, successor to the Holy Office, formed an opinion concerning the use of gluten-free bread signed by its then-head Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. The connection lies less in the issues at hand, which were quite different, than in the common quest for what constituted bread itself and the assurance that the answer was gluten. The 1995 letter no longer focusses on nutritive or other essentials as characterizing true bread, but nevertheless singles out gluten as essential. Now however the issue was identified, at least in theory, with the role of gluten in the actual bread-making process. Panificazione, the term used in the Italian version, makes more sense than the “confection” of bread used in the English translation, but in any case these terms seem to be the contemporary version of the earlier interest in a communis aestimatio. People know what bread is, and that seems to matter. The letter however seems to mix essentialist with descriptive criteria when it specifies both that gluten-free hosts were excluded, and also that hosts in which only a residual amount of gluten remained could be allowed, but with this condition: provided that they contain the amount of gluten sufficient to obtain the confection of bread, that there is no addition of foreign materials, and that the procedure for making such hosts is not such as to alter the nature of the substance of the bread (non sia tale da snaturare la sostanza del pane). Here cited as translated in McGrath, “Coeliacs, Alcoholics, the Eucharist and the Priesthood,” 126–28. Here gluten is not “animal” nutrition, but by implication the elastic network that helps form a bread dough, and which thus connects fermentation to rising, trapping the gases from yeast or bacteria to inflate a leavened loaf. In the accompanying commentary to the letter from the Congregation of Divine Worship, Mgr Antonio Miralles states “In the end what is determinant is that one can in fact make bread, and not just in any sort of way, but the procedure used in making hosts should not run contrary to the nature of bread.” Antonio Miralles, “Il pane e il vino per l’eucaristia: sulla recente lettera della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede,” Notitiae 31.352 (1995): 622. This seems further to shift the focus from gluten as a quintessential guarantor of what makes wheat itself via nutrition, to a pragmatic and descriptive criterion related to how bread is made. Yet since hosts are neither leavened nor much like what usually counts as bread, this begs questions about the relationship between the manufacture of the host and of bread in the communis opinio, to which we will return. The allusions in the letter and the commentary to some unnamed “sort of way” in which preparation might change the nature of bread are not explained. No specific reference is made to any particular “way” that might have arisen in the course of considering gluten-free hosts. It is tempting however to see here an allusion to the old Coimbatore controversy, in which the modus of manufacture had indeed been at issue. If so, the presence of gluten is also being treated here as a sort of essence to guarantee the reality of bread, panificazione notwithstanding. Further documents in 2003, See https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20030724_pane-senza-glutine_en.html 2004, The 2004 instruction from the Congregation on Divine Worship Redemptionis Sacramentum does not address gluten, but expresses concern about adulteration in terms that suggest not hardship, but modern western sumptuary cuisine: “bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament. It is a grave abuse to introduce other substances, such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist.” https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20040423_redemptionis-sacramentum_en.html and 2017 Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, “Circular letter to Bishops on the bread and wine for the Eucharist,” https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20170615_lettera-su-pane-vino-eucaristia_en.html repeated but did not add substantially to this curial position, other than in 2003 emphasizing “encouragement given to the production of hosts with a minimal amount of gluten” (my emphasis), even while repeating also the 1995 requirement that the amount of gluten present be sufficient for the physical purpose of preparation of bread. These prescriptions have been taken to allow hosts made by the traditional methods—and often by the traditional nuns—from what is effectively wheat starch in which there persists an amount of gluten chemically detectable yet insufficient to cause reactions in some celiacs at least. See Antonio E. Alonso, Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 112–13. Yet here the primacy of an essentialist understanding of the presence of gluten shows through. Hosts made with less gluten than otherwise, but enough to “confect” bread in the typical sense—to form a dough with sufficient elasticity to retain the carbon dioxide produced during fermentation, and cause bread to rise—would not in fact be safe for celiacs. Bread flours typically contain 11% or more protein; flours with 8% or less would be used only for pastry, and for fodder. Low-gluten hosts are made so as to have the lowest amount of gluten detectable, perhaps 0.01%. Nancy Patin Falini, “Celiac Disease and Religious Practices,” in M. Dennis and D. A. Leffler (eds), Real Life with Celiac Disease (Bethesda, MD: AGA Press, 2010), pp. 190-191. Such minimal amounts of gluten are quite irrelevant to panificazione. These rulings and practices have therefore stayed closer to the concerns of Cappello and the science of Beccari, all beholden to the idea of gluten as the true essence of wheat, and have no real connection with any descriptive principle of “confection” or panificazione. As far as the communis aestimatio is concerned, observers are likely to find the low-gluten version as convincing or unconvincing as any other traditional host as a form of bread. The eucharistic bread in which many of us have usually communed, the ubiquitous wafer of western tradition (which has even morphed into the plastic single-serve disposable fellowship cups of the megachurches), fails to meet any historic or contemporary communis aestimatio about the nature of bread as otherwise understood. These wafers, made not from dough from batters (but starting from flour, not soaked grain as in Coimbatore), and cooked not in ovens but on irons, evoke that liturgist’s bon mot attributed to the late Aidan Kavanaugh OSB, to the effect that the problem with eucharistic transformation isn’t believing that the consecrated wafer is the body of Christ, it’s believing that it’s bread. Gluten thus functions here not as the basis of bread-making normally understood, but as a trace element that somehow guarantees the essence of wheat. Both before and after the pastoral problem of celiac disease arose, it is held that gluten is what is essential to wheat. Why other components of the grain, such as husk or germ, which are inherent but routinely removed from white flour, and which contain nutritionally valuable fiber and oils, are not considered necessary to wheat or bread is never considered or explained. The character of wheat in these cases is still beholden to the logic of Beccari, the “animal” protein of gluten taken to be the essence of wheat. Wheat and Jesus The common element in the two controversies discussed above is wheat. While in the Azymes controversy leaven was held by the Greeks to guarantee the reality of bread, the use of wheat itself had the more foundational, if implicit, place in western thought; the leavenable character of wheat bread was in any case a shared assumption between the two sides. Modern curial gluten anxiety uses the wheat protein complex as a sort of litmus test for this same affirmation, that wheat must be the source of eucharistic bread. Both these cases, and other controversies such as those over Communion bread in the Reformation, reflect a common tradition concerning the use of wheat, itself assumed in the Roman Catholic Church to be a form of obedience to the practice of Jesus at the Last Supper, and hence also to Passover. See Can. 899 §3 of the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law. Yet a tradition is as old as our evidence for it. Nothing is said in New Testament texts about the material of the bread used at the Last Supper, or in other early eucharistic meals—or at Passover. From no earlier than the fourth century, there is clear evidence that wheat was preferred in eucharistic breads, especially relative to the also-popular-but-cheaper barley. This however mirrors the status and cost of the two grains in general, rather than fidelity to a tradition from Jesus. Barley was typically half the price of wheat in Palestine, easier to grow and nutritious, yet mostly less preferred, sometimes functioning as a marker of ethnic preferences, but more often simply as a marker of (lesser) economic power. Nathan MacDonald, Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60–61; Magen Broshi, “The Diet of Roman Palestine in the Roman Period: Introductory Notes,” Israel Museum Journal 5 (1986): 123. The notion that wheat would always have been used in early eucharistic celebration, rather being a more desirable option, is in particular quite implausible. The prominence of bread made from barley in the Johannine story of the Sign of the Loaves (see John 6:9) is noteworthy; this is the only reference to the material of any bread in the New Testament. John McHugh, “Num Solus Panis Triticeus Sit Materia Valida SS. Eucharistae?,” Verbum Domini 39 (1961): 229–39. We cannot exclude use of barley in the last or penultimate suppers of Jesus. While eucharistic origins are much more than the imitation of the Last Supper, the likely practice of Jesus and his Passover does offer a specific complication to the supposed universal tradition of eucharistic wheat. In rabbinic literature—which for these purposes can be used as a reasonably reliable guide to first century practice—matzah can be made not only from wheat, but from any of five grains thought to have been grown in the historic land of Israel (m.Pes. 2.5). These are also regarded as capable of producing hametz, or leaven, and hence must be excluded at Passover, except as matzah. Wheat of course is one such grain, and is usually privileged in rabbinic sources, for the economic and esthetic reasons already noted. There is some doubt about the real identity of others named in the Mishnah. For later European Jewry, the five were understood to be wheat, spelt, oats, rye, and barley, but some of the terms must have changed meanings, since oats and rye were largely unknown in the ancient Levant. It is more plausible that the five may have been multiple forms of hulled wheat (such as emmer and spelt) and free-threshing wheat, and/or of barley, anciently identified by those Hebrew names in terms no longer recoverable. Gil Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 101–2. In its received Ashkenazic form however, the list of five includes not only grains other than wheat, but at least one typically regarded as gluten-free, namely oats. All of barley, rye, and oats—as well as spelt which is merely a wheat varietal—contain protein complexes, sometimes generically referred to as “gluten” even though more strictly that term can be limited to wheat. Barley and rye however are usually indicated as unsuitable for celiacs while oats are typically termed “gluten-free” because their protein complex is less commonly problematic. “Leaven” is of course not yeast, which in the modern sense is not known in the ancient Mediterranean world; rather leaven is fermented material produced from grains, stored and refreshed for baking. Hence matzah is not just unleavened bread, but a sort of anti-leaven; it is leavenable material, transformed into a substance incapable of fulfilling that potential. What can become matzah is exactly what can become hametz, and so this set of grains are prescribed and proscribed simultaneously for Passover consumption. Rabbinic authorities also debated more broadly what could produce hametz and/or was fit for matzah. The Mishnah itself (b.Ber. 36b-37a) records some robust disagreement about how to treat rice and millet, from which some forms of bread could be made (see m. Pes. 35a). Defining these (gluten-free) grains also as hametz was presumably based on how they behaved when fermenting, i.e., that their doughs or batters swelled markedly, just as glutinous grains do. The inclusion of oats in the later Ashkenazic interpretation of the ambiguous grains, along with these debates over rice and millet, suggests that the behavior both celebrated and avoided in bread for Passover by ancient Jews might not have been the capacity for panificazione in the modern sense, as in light, expansive doughs (few ancient breads were light), but visible fermentation. To eat matzah was therefore not to eat wheat as such, let alone gluten, but to eat bread of any fermentable grain, distinguished for Passover by its strictly unleavened preparation. For Passover then, wheat bread would have been sought and preferred as matzah, but other grains that behaved like wheat were certainly accepted, and likely still others we would call gluten-free were probably allowed—and excluded too, of course—because fermentable. Modern Jewish thought reflects a similar rationale and resulting flexibility: a recent Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics deals with the question of the requirement for celiacs to eat matzah at Passover by directing them simply to eat matzah made from a gluten-free grain. Fred Rosner, Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics: A Compilation of Jewish Medical Law on All Topics of Medical Interest ... (Feldheim Publishers, 2003), 476. An interim conclusion about the bread of Jesus, or at least the bread of Palestinian Judaism shortly after his Last Supper, then seems possible: first-century matzah was not necessarily made from wheat, and in some instances may have been made from gluten-free materials such as rice or millet. The example of Jesus then, if deemed the center of authentic eucharistic practice, would give us different food for thought than the later tradition that allows only for wheat. True Bread If the bread of the eucharist does matter, these cases are worth taking seriously, as well as considering critically. Some of the assumptions or concerns that have led to scrutiny of eucharistic breads may seem odd or misconceived, but we would wrong to think that beginning with the indifference of the western bourgeoisie to the history or present reality of foods amounts to a firm point on which to stand and judge ancient, medieval, or modern arguments about bread. The question posed by modern Roman Catholic thinkers, “Does this seem to be bread,” is important. Despite its uneven application, the principle that bread be recognizable as such is may well be a necessary but not sufficient criterion for eucharistic celebration. Its potential insufficiency is manifest in how recent curial documents use it via a measure of cultural chauvinism; the historic and present diversity of Christianity is ill-suited to boundary policing that leaves Tamils, celiacs, those eating hardship foods during war, and the other side of the East-West schism (whichever that may be), excluded from the fundamental sign of communion by precisely those things that constitute their own communis aestimatio of what is bread, even when wheat is generally held to be an essential element of bread. While in some of the cases noted, the “common” idea of bread has been wielded to normalize a Eurocentric and elite perspective, this need not be so. Like the notion of “family resemblances,” commonality does not require uniformity but connection, resonance, or similarity. If catalyzed with a certain cultural awareness, the idea of a generally-recognized form allows for generosity in defining bread, for both diversity and experimentation, yet perhaps also leaving room to contest the weight or force of particular answers. There is good reason to tread carefully, for instance, when concerns for local enculturation are assumed to overwhelm all other considerations and hence to dismiss the historic tradition that centers wheat and grapes. The principle of a connection with the meals of Jesus may not require all that has been assumed in the past, but this does not make it unimportant. This point was made in another session at the ISM conference by Nougoutna Norbert Litoing SJ on “The Cost of Celebrating Authentically: Revisiting the debate on the Inculturation of the Eucharist in Africa and Its Economic Import,” who commented critically on the work of René Jaouen, L’Eucharistie du mil : langages d’un peuple, expressions de la foi (Paris: Karthala, 1995). The resolution of such debates is not possible here, with greater generosity and circumspection, it is still possible and necessary to consider critical questions that invite all those who break bread in memory of Jesus to ask what their particular version of a sacred meal connotes, not only in word and ceremony but via the bread chosen, bought, or baked. Each answer is likely to reveal other unexamined assumptions. We should not shirk such questions, even where they probe the boundaries of adequacy, at least if we are more generous about legitimacy. There is no immaculate or perfect bread, since bread is always a sign both of creation still struggling for birth, and of labor always bound up in the realities of human social relations, including oppression and exploitation, as well as of the varying conditions and abilities of human bodies to be sustained by what they can obtain. Grains themselves, as well as what is produced from them, are the stuff of history as well as of nature. Each eucharistic tradition and choice will reveal what is yet to be redeemed, as well as allowing that redemption to be glimpsed in consecration and communion. 1