Catholic and Enjoying It!
…here is a draft of my stab at explaining the Filioque Controversy to somebody who has never heard of it–from my upcoming book on the Creed.
I post it as a form of almsgiving on the somewhat weak excuse that we are to give of our time, talent, and treasure. Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have I give you.
Be kind. I’m juggling a baby, a bowling ball and a running chainsaw: trying to be respectful to the East, as accurate as I can be, clear to the uninitiated, and faithful to Catholic Magisterial teaching all at once. Morituri te salutant!
The Filioque Controversy
One of the more arcane controversies in the history of the Church has to be touched on here. It is a matter that tends to make the eyes of most ordinary people glaze over, and on those rare occasions it is discussed outside of extremely specialized theological circles, it is perceived by virtually every non-Christian (and by millions of Christians) as the dictionary definition of a theological quibble of no interest or consequence. But it is important for understanding one of the great ongoing tragedies in the history of the Church: the split between the Catholic Church and the various Eastern Orthodox Churches that occurred in 1054.
For many in those Eastern communions, it is still very much a live issue. And no small part of the difficulty of discussing it is that Eastern Christians still keenly feel old historical wounds associated with it while millions of other people not only pay no attention to it but are completely oblivious to any controversy at all. It is a living illustration of another way doctrine develops, as well as showing that such developments are not always received with unanimity by the Body of Christ. It is part of the messiness inherent in the prospect of the Word becoming flesh in a world of fallen human quarrelsomeness, politics, and cultural differences.
“Filioque” refers to the words “and the Son” in this line of the Creed. As we have already seen, the original Nicene Creed of 325 was expanded upon at the subsequent First Council of Constantinople in 381. The occasion of that Council was yet another heresy by a group known as the Pneumatomachi or “Spirit-Fighters”. Just as Arius had denied that the Son is God, so the Pneumatomachi denied that the Holy Spirit is God. They held him to be something like an angel or other created spirit. This necessitated the expansion of the article of the Creed regarding the Holy Spirit in order to underscore the apostolic teaching of his deity, just as Nicaea had underscored the deity of the Son. Accordingly, the Council described the Spirit as “proceeding” from the Father, a reference to the words of Jesus himself (cf. John 15:26).
There is no evidence at all that the Council intended to deny that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well, particularly given the fact that Jesus plainly states in the same verse that he sends the Spirit from the Father. All the Council Fathers were aiming to do was defeat the claim that the Holy Spirit is not God. They were not trying to work out every detail of the complexities of all Trinitarian theology for all time. This is actually typical of the Church. Loving liberty, the Catholic intellectual habit of mind is to not define her Tradition unless it is absolutely necessary. That is why the Church has so little dogma to show for two thousand years’ worth of conciliar and papal teaching. It is also why the Catholic tradition is full of arguments, some of which have gone on for centuries, in which both sides can disagree and still be good Christians.
Unfortunately, however, sometimes Christians have disagreed so sharply that they have broken communion with one another over something that was actually patient of multiple understandings. Often enough, both sides are to blame for the split, as in many family break-ups. This is one of those times, and it led to the Great Schism of 1054, when the Catholic Church in union with the Pope and the Eastern Orthodox Churches broke away from one another–one of the greatest wounds to ever afflict the Church’s unity, and a wound she still suffers today.
The break was a long time coming and had multiple causes far greater than the Filioque itself. The arrogance of the Western Church in general and of the bishop of Rome in particular became a raw sore point for the Eastern Churches. Some of the very worst popes who ever unworthily sat upon the Chair of Peter in Rome filled the seventh to the tenth centuries. Corruption was rampant and the papacy became a political football for various rich and powerful families in Rome. Decisions that had once been taken in union with the other great Churches of antiquity (Jerusalem, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch) were sometimes made by Rome unilaterally. The pope did not define any false teaching as doctrine, but that only shows that you can be theologically correct and still be a hugely corrupt sinner.
The Eastern Churches, for a variety of political, social, cultural, and economic reasons, increasingly felt alienated from the western Churches and vice versa. The West spoke Latin and the East spoke Greek. The Imperial Court (long ago moved to Constantinople from Rome as the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire became known as Byzantium) had its own issues with corruption too. (Not for nothing has the word “byzantine” come to refer to complex and elaborate schemes of intrigue.) Increasingly both sides saw each other, not merely as different, but as foreigners and enemies. Eventually, as happens in divorces, the two spouses started not only to dislike each other, but to exaggerate each other’s worst qualities and to imagine faults where none existed, the better to maintain their hostility.
This is where the Filioque comes into the story. That the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son is perfectly orthodox theology is seen in the fact that not only did Augustine teach it, but lots of great Fathers of the Church and theologians taught it for centuries after First Constantinople without any big objection from anybody.
The great work on the Trinity by Petavius (Lib. VII, cc. iii sqq.) develops the proof of this contention at length. Here we mention only some of the later documents in which the patristic doctrine has been clearly expressed:
- the dogmatic letter of St. Leo I to Turribius, Bishop of Astorga, Epistle 15 (447);
- the so-called Athanasian Creed;
- several councils held at Toledo in the years 447, 589 (III), 675 (XI), 693 (XVI);
- the letter of Pope Hormisdas to the Emperor Justius, Ep. lxxix (521);
- Martin I’s synodal utterance against the Monothelites, 649-655;
- Pope Adrian I’s answer to the Caroline Books, 772-795;
- the Synods of Mérida (666), Braga (675), and Hatfield (680);
- the writing of Pope Leo III (d. 816) to the monks of Jerusalem.[1]
Some will reply that all these sources are from the Western Church. But the reality is that the Filioque was also compatible with the great Fathers of the Eastern Churches too:
- First, the Greek Fathers enumerate the Divine Persons in the same order as the Latin Fathers; they admit that the Son and the Holy Ghost are logically and ontologically connected in the same way as the Son and Father [St. Basil, Epistle 38; Against Eunomius20 and III, sub init.]
- Second, the Greek Fathers establish the same relation between the Son and the Holy Ghost as between the Father and the Son; as the Father is the fountain of the Son, so is the Son the fountain of the Holy Ghost (Athanasius, Ep. ad Serap. I, xix, sqq.; On the Incarnation 9; Orat. iii, adv. Arian., 24; Basil, Against Eunomius V; cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43, no. 9).
- Third, passages are not wanting in the writings of the Greek Fathers in which the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son is clearly maintained: Gregory Thaumaturgus, “Expos. fidei sec.”, vers. saec. IV, in Rufinus, Hist. Eccl., VII, xxv; Epiphanius, Haer., c. lxii, 4; Gregory of Nyssa, Hom. iii in orat. domin.); Cyril of Alexandria, “Thes.”, as. xxxiv; the second canon of synod of forty bishops held in 410 at Seleucia in Mesopotamia; the Arabic versions of the Canons of St. Hippolytus; the Nestorian explanation of the Symbol.[2]
All of these sources from both East and West in the centuries before the Great Schism are basically saying what the Filioque says: that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
But then sometime in the 700s, a local council in Spain did something momentous: they unilaterally inserted “and the Son” into the Creed, apparently in response to a local controversy which denied that the Spirit proceeded from the Son. In 796, we find another western bishop approving of this addition and finally a Council in Aachen approving it in 809. None of these were universally binding decisions representing the whole Church, but the Council in Aachen mattered for two reasons, one political and the other theological.
The political reason was that Aachen was the favorite city of the brand-new king of the brand-new Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, all the power, money, and prestige of the old Roman Empire had become centered far to the East in Constantinople, where the Byzantine Emperor was (now Istanbul in modern-day Turkey). Western Christians were increasingly seen as the poor country cousins to the sophisticated and urban Eastern Church. But the Byzantine Empire had begun to suffer hits from the rise of Islam and various other political powers. So the coronation of Charlemagne as “Holy Roman Emperor” by the Pope himself on Christmas Day, 800 could not but be regarded as a threat. It made Charlemagne the first king of a united Western Empire—and a direct rival to the Emperor in Constantinople. Therefore, a Council held in Aachen could not but be seen as an affront to the Eastern Churches—which leads to the second, theological issue.
The Council of Aachen accepted the Filioque, but they also did what Christians had done since Paul vetted his gospel with Peter (Galatians 2:1-2) and the Council of Jerusalem made certain they were in union with Peter (Acts 15): they consulted the Pope, Leo III. Leo approved of the doctrine expressed by the Filioque, but suggested it nonetheless not be added to the Creed, precisely because he was sensitive to giving offence to the Eastern Churches.
Unfortunately, he was ignored by popular demand and the Filioque become popular and was sung more and more in various Churches in the West. By about 1015 (more than two centuries later), the Pope himself regarded the wide popularity of the Filioque as an expression of the Spirit speaking through the Body of Christ and approved it for the liturgy in the Roman Church.
Notably, this did not, in itself, trigger a schism with the Eastern Churches. It would take a span of time equal to the distance between the first election of Ronald Reagan to the present (2019 as of this writing) for Rome and Constantinople to finally excommunicate each other. But when the split finally came, the Filioque was the theological rationale for it in Constantinople.
Again, it was very much like a divorce where differences that had once been tolerable became life and death quarrels. After centuries of perfectly acceptable teaching about the procession of the Spirit from the Father and Son to which very few had objected, Eastern theologians began to give an extremely stringent reading to Councils that had been held 600 years before at Ephesus and Chalcedon.
These councils had forbidden the introduction of another Creed, and had imposed penalties on any who broke this law. Their point, of course, had been to prevent partisans in the argument of their day from proposing some “counter-creed” to overturn the results of the Council, not to forbid henceforth all theological development forever. So they had not forbidden anybody to explain the same faith or to propose the same Creed in a clearer way. How could they since that is exactly what their own councils had done? So for centuries afterward, in East and West, the Church could (and did) teach explicitly what was only implicit in apostolic teaching or clarify some point of teaching in response to questions that had not arisen earlier in the life the Church. That is exactly why, for seven centuries, people had talked freely about the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son. But, suddenly, in the 11th century, these ancient conciliar prohibitions were given a new meaning under the lash of increasing acrimony and the idea of the procession of the Spirit from the Son was deemed heretical in the East.
Nonetheless, the real issue was not that the Filioque was either new or contrary to Tradition. Rather, the real sticking point for the East was the perceived arrogance of Rome in unilaterally changing the words of the Creed.
As the centuries rolled on, the Western Church essentially took the position that, however the Filioque was arrived at, there was certain nothing false to apostolic teaching in it and that it did indeed express the heart of that teaching: God is love. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Filioque was defined as a dogma of the Church and formally added to the Creed by all the Churches in union with Rome at that time. The Eastern Churches, meanwhile, for a host of reasons pertaining far more to historical wrongs suffered by them (including the sack of Constantinople by Catholic Crusaders, leading to the eventual fall of Constantinople to Islam) continued to see in this development an expression of Roman arrogance. Both were right. As is common in such divorce proceedings, both sides had legitimate points, and both sides were at fault.
All that said, this book is not intended to be a full history of the Church nor to settle a dispute between two great civilizations that has lasted a thousand years. I aim to focus only on the Creed and its implications for us today. As a convert to the Catholic faith, it is obvious which side of the controversy I think has the better theological claim, but I do not think that obliges anybody to condemn the Eastern Churches. Indeed, thanks be to God, the rift between the two great theological traditions of East and West has finally started to heal a bit (though there is a long way to go on both sides). Pope Paul VI and the Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople lifted the millennium-long mutual excommunications of Catholic and Orthodox Christians in 1965.[3] And conversation between the Catholic Church and other theological traditions, including the Orthodox, are ongoing.
In addition to this, Rome has sharply revised its former approach to Eastern Catholics in its own communion. As we shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 13, there are within the Catholic Church different “rites”—that is, ways of celebrating the liturgy and sacraments—which grew up and evolved in various cultures and places. The most common rite is called the “Latin rite” and is what has been celebrated in western Europe for centuries. Meanwhile, in the centuries since the Great Schism, various Christians in the Eastern Orthodox Churches were reunited with the Catholic communion in union with the Pope. These former Orthodox Churches had their own sacramental, liturgical, and cultural traditions and Latin tradition was foreign to them. But, among other things, Rome required them to recite the Filioque, which they had never done before, as a sign of their acceptance of the dogma. Many Eastern Catholics, even though they accepted the dogma, felt this to be overbearing and it was a source of friction within the Catholic Church.
In recent years, however, the pope and bishops of the Western Church have regretted this ham-fistedness and asked the members of those rites to “return to their roots” by observing the custom of the Eastern tradition whence they came by using the wording of the Creed as it stood after the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Relatedly, and especially since the Second Vatican Council, it has been the habit of the Catholic Church to respect Eastern Orthodox sensibilities regarding the Filioque. So, for instance, in a document on the Church’s relationship with other religions called Dominus Iesus, Pope Benedict XVI quoted the Creed without the Filioque, out of respect for Eastern Christians.[4] Similarly, in ecumenical gatherings with representatives of Eastern Churches, the Filioque is omitted when the Creed is recited.
How can the Church do this? Is it not repudiating its own dogmatic teaching from the Fourth Lateran Council? Not at all. Just as you can recite the Apostles’ Creed without rejecting the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, so returning to the language of the Creed as it stood from 381 till 1215 is not a denial of the dogma of the Filioque. It is simply an act of respect for those who honor an earlier form of the Creed.
[1] “Filioque”, Catholic Encyclopedia. Available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06073a.htm as of September 18, 2019.
[2] Ibid.
[3] You can read the document celebrating that at https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651207_common-declaration.html.
[4] Pope Benedict XVI, Dominus Iesus 1 (2000). Available on-line at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html as of September 19, 2019.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In