Drop the Filioque?: Rethinking the Question with the Greek Fathers
In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI visited the United Kingdom. Greg Bruke, then a journalist at Fox News, reported that during the Pope’s visit a young man could be seen protesting by himself in London carrying a sign made from a pizza box that read: “Drop the Filioque.” Photos of the protester can still be found on the internet. It may be surprising that someone would feel the need to call public attention to a theological issue that seems to be of interest only to experts in ecumenical dialogue or historians of the Church. Perhaps this protest is an indication of a depth that cannot be relegated to the past, as if it is no longer relevant to us. There are, in fact, fundamental issues from our history that have a significant influence on our present life.
So, do we really have to drop the Filioque? Would we lose something? Or would we gain something? My book, Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers, was written to answer that question from the standpoint of the Greek fathers of the Church. It stems from the observation that although extraordinary monographs have been written on the historical issue, the theological investigation of such historical data can and should be further developed. In particular, this research has three objectives:
1. To better understand the origins of the tension in the different approaches to the procession of the Holy Spirit and to show how the Filioque does not concern an unnecessary appendix of pneumatology, but instead answers an inescapable question posed by the historical development of the doctrine on the divine Third Person.
2. To add an element to the discussion that is mostly neglected in literature; that is, the doctrine developed by the Greek fathers in response to the Pneumatomachians, who accepted the divinity of the Son while denying that of the Holy Spirit.
3. To try to understand the basis of the misunderstanding between the Byzantine world and Augustine’s tradition, to see if the new information offered by this research can form the basis of a new ecumenical proposal on the second procession.
When at the end of the eighth century two monks from the Frankish monastery on the Mount of Olives returned to Jerusalem after a trip to Aachen and suggested that the Filioque be introduced into the recitation of the Creed in the Mass there, they might not have imagined the scope of the matter, which transcended the question of Charlemagne’s patronage over their monastery. The violent reaction of their Greek confreres, who accused them of heresy, led these monks to write to Pope Leo III asking for a selection of quotations from Greek and Latin authorities to support their position. The Pope passed the letter to the emperor, who summoned a council of Frankish bishops who met in Aachen in 809 and decided in favor of including the Filioque in the Creed recited in the Mass.
But the following year Leo III, after examining the acts of the council and while saying he agreed with the patristic dossier that had been presented to him, strongly defended the exclusion of the formula from the Nicene Creed both to preserve the ancient formula and because the issue was not relevant for the salvation of souls. His approach was apophatic in the sense that the Christian mystery always remains greater than the ability to express it. So the Pope asked that recitation of the Filioque be suspended in the Palatine liturgy, considering that little by little it would fall out of use throughout the empire. Moreover, he had the Creed engraved in Greek and Latin without the Filioque addition on bronze plates placed beside the door of confession in St. Peter’s Basilica and in St. Paul’s Basilica.
The position of Pope Leo III seems very interesting, not only for the fact that it is politically balanced but also from a theological and a pastoral perspective. The key point is his acceptance that the patristic doctrine presents a tradition that is favorable to the Filioque without contradicting the Eastern position, which is focused on the defense of the paternal monarchy. He dropped and kept the expression simultaneously, distinguishing the level of form from that of content.
This observation is fundamental Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers in which the term Filioque, with the theological discussions it inspires, is not understood in the medieval or contemporary sense, but in the patristic sense as:
1. affirmation of an active role of the Son in the immanent procession of the Spirit;
2. without this role being causal, thereby overshadowing the monarchy of the first divine Person.
This double definition marks a clear difference with respect to the medieval proposals, which in a context already distant from apophatic epistemology conceived the relationship between the Father and the Son as closed, so that the Second Person could be indicated as the cause of the Third Person. Anselm’s theology, with its logicalizing defense of the Filioque, goes in this direction, which can be dubbed Filioquism. At the same time, the issue analyzed in the context of Greek patristics relates directly to immanence and not only economy, where the role of the Son in the coming of the Spirit is obvious because the gospel indicates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Spirit is given per Christum, as sent by the Father but also by the incarnate Word. The question examined is whether this per Christum is an expression of a per Filium, which is the immanent root of the economic origin of the Spirit.
For this reason, theological study cannot neglect the question of how the theological reading of God’s immanence reflects on the relationship between creation and salvation history, a question which lies at the heart of the very possibility of expressing dogma in human language and in parallel with how icons can represent the mystery of the triune God without ever fully possessing or grasping it.
So, we will not analyze the literal Filioque (i.e., the history of the insertion of the clause into the Symbol of Faith on the Latin side), a matter already examined in exemplary fashion by Peter Gemeinhardt and Henry Chadwick. Instead, the object of my research is the theological Filioque, that is, this study analyzes the thought of the Greek fathers concerning the role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit or, in other words, the relationship between the first and second processions in the divine immanence. The epoch under consideration essentially ends where Gemeinhardt’s treatment begins. Therefore, no attempt will be made to explain whether or not and why the Pope inserted the Filioque into the Symbol of Faith (that is, the Nicene Creed), nor will any attempt be made to analyze the historical reasons for the ecclesial divisions that originated from it. Instead, we have worked along the lines of a ressourcement in search of dogmatic elements that can explain why the Greek fathers were in communion with the Latin fathers while being aware of the mutual differences in their approach to pneumatology. We are, in fact, convinced that the history of dogma offers valuable insights unfortunately absent in the common narrative. Is Augustine really the father of the Filioque? Does this follow from the psychological analogy? Was all of this caused by the projection of an anthropology in the Trinity, according to the vulgate present in Eastern manuals?
In the light of these questions, the reader is asked to examine this proposal with an attitude of speculative “virginity” to avoid jumping ahead to the polemical perspectives that characterized the post-patristic era and instead stick to the proposed definition and allow the depth of the pneumatological doctrine of the Eastern Fathers to reveal a dogmatic richness that is not reducible to dialectical categories.
This epistemological “virginity” also seems correct from the perspective of history and the critical approach, since the fathers of the Church (despite a certain propensity of early Christian thinkers for confrontation and even conflict, as the history of the councils shows) have left us a testimony of communion, even in the pneumatological field.
Indeed, epistemology plays a key role. The thesis proposed here is that there is an intimate correspondence between apophaticism, the true foundation of the theological method, and the ontological value of the development of dogma. In fact, the comparison with the various objections to the concrete forms that the formulation of the Christian mystery assumed over the centuries forced the Fathers to revise the metaphysical framework inherited from Greek thought in order to reformulate the Aristotelian categories so as to affirm the personal distinction of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit within their perfect substantial identity. This task of reworking and resemantization continued after the fourth century with the deeper examination of Christological doctrine, but the methodological approach had already been settled in the development of Trinitarian thought.
For the philosophical and linguistic background of Christian thought is the graduated metaphysical conception of Greek philosophy, which joined the first principle and the world in a single finite and eternal ontological order, internally organized as a descending scale in terms of perfection. In the first attempts of the second- and third-century thinkers, who were also in the wake of the Philonian inheritance, this construction is polarized into an ever clearer distinction between God and the created world, whose relationship is maintained by the Logos. The Logos is like an intermediary, the thought (and word) of the Father through whom he created the world. Thus, the Son is in an ontologically subordinate position with respect to the Father and has an existence that is at the service of creation. Origen will overcome this Logos-theology and open the way to the elaboration on the difference between the Trinity and the world in terms of physis, which would emerge in the fourth century as a response to the Arian crisis.
From Athanasius onward, only the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are considered eternal because they constitute the one uncreated nature, while every other being is marked by finiteness in time and space. As we shall see, this Physis-theology was the starting point of the Cappadocians, who in their dual response to both the Eunomians and Pneumatomachians transformed it into a Schesis-theology, that is, into an ontological conception in which the identification of the three divine Persons is no longer given by the substance which is unique for them but by the relational distinction within this single substance. This marked the shift from the Logos ut ratio to the Logos ut relatio, that is, from an understanding of the Son as a necessary mediator (who is like an ontological bridge or step between God and the world) to a real relational perspective, where the Second Person is eternally in the divine substance and from there, out of love and in perfect freedom, became flesh, founding the possibility of real relationship between the Trinity and the human being.
But this new metaphysical conception necessarily translated into a new attitude toward knowledge, since the way to approach God could no longer be only the conceptual dimension, climbing the ontological steps going from (necessary) cause to cause, as the nature of the Trinity is totally transcendent with respect to the human being. This means that God radically overcomes the capacities of the latter, but should be known through freedom and the personal relationship. This led to a new understanding of the value of history and the corporeal dimension. And this must be kept in mind as we approach this exciting theological epoch, without anachronistically projecting anterior or successive epistemologies onto it.
From this standpoint, the dogmatic explanation proposed by me cannot be considered a static image, a kind of surpassing synthesis and Aufhebung à la Hegel, which leads to a final solution like an equation or a geometric problem. Instead, one must necessarily resort to a narrative, in which the meaning of each moment is given by their relationships with the other elements of the story, according to a structuring of thought that Gregory of Nyssa indicated with the Greek term akolouthia. Therefore, the proposed path should not be followed as if we were observing snapshots in a photo album, from which we choose the one we like best. Here, the dynamic development and the set of all the moments count, like an arrow that points in a certain direction.
As Sarah Coakley highlights, we cannot just reduce the fierce disputes of past centuries to bad memories and mistakes in the name of a complementarity between East and West, which is stated in an ideological and irenic way. Like this scholar, we should recognize that apophaticism makes it possible to hold together both the spiritual and the metaphysical dimensions among the factors of our analysis, without ever dialectically pitting them against each other: “in and through the Spirit we are drawn to place our binary ‘certainties’ into the melting pot of the crucible of divine—not human—desire.” The dialogue with Sarah Coakley has inspired and encouraged this research, pointing precisely to the Holy Spirit and the related issue of the Filioque as a way to rethink the dialectical binary oppositions, which Coakley rightly describes as idolatrous.
So my argument is conceived as a contribution to the challenge of taking a fresh look at the relationships between East and West in order to overcome the simplistic vision of the opposition between an essentialist approach and a personalist one.
In the end, I aim to show the importance of the specific questions that are answered and the particular problems faced by the Greek Fathers of the Church in order to reach a correct understanding of dogmatic history. The never-ending attempt to formulate the mystery of the triune God in an appropriate way shows how every moment of dogmatic history is an answer to a specific question or a response to a conflict. Thus, in order to reach a full understanding of the theological content of the author’s answer, the modern reader must consider this answer within the context in which it arose, looking not only at the author himself but also at those to whom he was responding. Every word is always addressed to someone, and that is also true for dogma. Thus, we cannot understand the Latin position without considering the contribution of Tertullian, who marked the whole of Western tradition with his a Patre per Filium. Every thought is expressed in a certain language, which conditions the thought itself. Thus, we can say that the very first point of contact of Latin theology with the mystery of the procession of the Holy Spirit was linked to the role of the Son. This element will also be maintained in the fourth century after the distinction between economy and immanence has been clarified, as witnessed in the thought of Ambrose and Hilary of Poitiers.
It is significant that when the latter proposes his thought on the relationship between the Son and the procession of the Spirit he always does so in an apophatic context, both when Hilary takes up the per Filium of Tertullian and when he formulates an explicit Filioque:
But it is neither appropriate to remain silent about the Holy Spirit, nor is it necessary to talk about him. In fact, we cannot remain silent because of those who do not know him, but it is also not necessary to speak of Him who is to be confessed to originate from the Father and the Son.
This Latin Father, who knew Greek theology well from direct experience during his exiles, also witnesses the dogmatic connection of John 15:26 and 16:12–15 with the distinction between the two processions, which we will see as fundamental in the response to Pneumatomachians.
Ambrose (another father who is much appreciated in the Eastern tradition) links Sir 24:5, John 1:1, and 14:10 to show that in the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, which the reference to the last verse clearly places in immanence, the Third Person does not separate from the first two:
Finally, the Wisdom affirms that she proceeds “from the mouth of the Most High,” not because she is external to the Father, but rather with the Father, because “the Word was with God,” and not only with the Father, but also in the Father. She says, indeed: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” But when she proceeds from the Father she does not withdraw from a place, nor does she separate herself from him like a body from a body. Nor when she is in the Father, is she like a body enclosed in another body. And the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, does not separate from them.
But if these are some fundamental stages of the Latin path, what were the stages of the Greek one? What linguistic and theological elements defined it?
What fundamental moments in the elaboration of the relationship between the procession of the Spirit and the Second Person can be found? The narrative to traverse to answer this question starts from the Trinitarian doctrine of Origen which, as in any other theological field, is an essential reference point. This reflection can be traced back to two fundamental schemes, one linear and the other triangular. Each of them responds to a different need, but in the fourth century the tension between the two led to a reconstruction of the ontological framework, the aim of which was first to recognize the full divinity of the Logos by introducing it into divine immanence, then to repeat this for the Holy Spirit, affirming his active role in the creative act. This last clarification is addressed to the Pneumatomachians, that is, those who accepted the divinity of the Second Person while denying that of the Third.
The different responses to their position can be deduced from the analysis of the works of Epiphanius and the Dialogi adversus Macedonianos of Pseudo-Athanasius. This will allow us to appreciate the strength of the Cappadocian response, especially that of Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, who come to determine the Holy Spirit’s own personal proprium and, therefore, the difference between the first and the second procession—a difference that remained in the shadows in Athanasius’s theology. After having revealed the dogmatic heart of the pneumatology of the fourth-century Greek Fathers and having highlighted how they identify an active, but not causal, role of the Second Person in the procession of the Third Person, Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers will try both to respond to possible criticism and to explain why the Filioque has become a painful point of divergence between Eastern and Western traditions.
Three questions will be addressed for the sake of showing how the proposed reading is not simply a Latinizing approach: (1) whether it was only the Latins who felt the need to make explicit the relationship between the first and second procession; (2) whether the Latin Filioque is the “offspring” of Augustine’s psychological analogy; (3) whether the pneumatological reading in the proposed analysis can be considered a projection onto Greek theology of Augustine’s categories of thought. Thus, the geographical and linguistic question can be addressed first by exploring the Syriac tradition so as to show how the need to examine the question about the role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit was not only a Latin requirement. Looking at the dialogue between the Syriac, Greek, and Latin traditions can highlight the theological role of translation as an inescapable element of the process of the handing down of the tradition. Then, one must examine the connection of the Filioque with the psychological analogy, a theological element that is also present in the Greek context. Finally, a comparison between the ontological work of Gregory of Nyssa and that of Augustine can highlight the independence of the results obtained from the theological perspective of the bishop of Hippo so as to also explain the Byzantine difficulty in accepting Western formulations.
This path’s conclusion leads to a paradox and a proposal. When rereading the claim to count Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor in the ranks of the authorities who support the Filioque against the backdrop of the suggested path, one comes to the surprising conclusion that their positions appear very different from one another, since the former is closer to Augustine in a more Nicene pneumatological perspective, while the latter remains in the Constantinopolitan line and is linked to Cappadocian theology and their response to Pneumatomachian criticism, which seems to be absent in the discussions related to the so-called Photian schism. Thus, paradoxically, it is precisely this second line of development that appears to be more coherent with the proposed form of Filioque, where the divine Second Person plays an active, but not causal, role in the procession of the Spirit. Hence, the need to rethink the Filioque itself in order to ecumenically verify whether it is possible today to accept this form of Filioque as a common faith shared by the Greek and Latin fathers before the ninth century.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers (Eerdmans, 2023). All rights reserved.
