… Who Proceeds from the Father …

The Nicene Creed is, at least theoretically, one of the major forces that unifies Christians. But, as we will see today, its text has created as much division as it has resolved. Today I’m going to try, as best as I can, to summarize the controversy, which is about the relationships among the Trinity, its motivations and possible implications for the different positions for the life of faith, but also to use it as a case study for how easy it is for us as Christians to stop understanding one another, and the importance of looking past words to intention in assessing someone else’s theology.

On the surface, the text in question looks pretty unassuming. After asserting faith in the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life,” the text (as amended according to the Second Ecumenical Council of 381) says: “Who proceeds from the Father; who, with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.” Now, if you are Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Rite Catholic, or were raised in an Anglican environment since the 1980s, this text will be exactly as expected. But, if you’re Roman Catholic, Reformed, or raised Anglican before the 1980s, you’ll think I skipped over a few words. And you’d be right for your context: Those traditions have instead, “Who proceeds from the Father and the Son…” These three words, which translate the single Latin word filioque which gives the controversy its name, have been one of the biggest barriers to Christian unity for the past 1400 years, and were one of the primary causes of the schism between East and West of the past thousand years. So, what does the text mean? What was it trying to do? Where the did the alternative reading come from? What was it trying to do? And, why should we care (if indeed we should)?

This will be a long and pretty technical post, but I think it’s an interesting case study and it’s impossible to talk about the Creed without addressing it. If you’d just like the main takeaways, feel free to jump to the last section.

The Procession of the Spirit

First, let’s define what it is we’re talking about. So far, the Creed has talked about God the Father, the source of all divine life, and God the Son, who is eternally begotten of the Father. Now it’s talking about God the Holy Spirit, who is neither source nor ‘begotten’, but is rather said to ‘proceed’. So in this context, ‘procession’ is a technical term referring to the relationship between the Spirit and divinity within God. This language comes from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says: “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will testify on my behalf” (John 15.26). And this is exactly, word for word, the language used in the 381 Creed. But, note that even here, the language is a bit confusing. The Son sends the Spirit from the Father, so there’s a sense in which the Spirit comes from the Father, but also a sense in which the Spirit comes from both. Moreover, the New Testament elsewhere talks about how the Son becomes incarnate by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1.20) and that no one can know the Son without the Spirit (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12.3) — so as much as the Son may ‘send’ the Spirit, the Spirit also in some sense ‘sends’ the Son. There is a reciprocity inherent in activity of the Trinity that is almost impossible to describe in language. Probably the best image has been the idea of the divine ‘perichoresis,’ which imagines the Persons of the Trinity like dancers in chorus lines, seamlessly weaving in and out of each other, not being identical with one another, but each working in support of the same goal, functioning as a single unit.

Looking at all this, it should not be surprising that the Church Fathers talked about the relationship between the Spirit and the Father and the Son in different ways, depending on what they were focusing on:

• If we look at John 15.26, in terms of ultimate source, the Spirit ‘comes from’ the Father. This is the language of the Creed, but is also what St. Irenaeus (mid-to-late 2nd C) had in mind with his famous image of the Son and Spirit being the Father’s two hands. In the 5th C, Theodoret of Cyrus took it as a given that “the Holy Spirit does not receive existence from or through the Son, but proceeds from the Father.” And, in the 9th C, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople (clearly in reaction against the filioque) used the formula, “proceeds from the Father alone” in his writings.
• But looked at it from another way, we could easily say that the Spirit comes from the Father through the Son. This was a formula used by St. Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century, as well as some Western Fathers such as St. Jerome and St. Ambrose (late 4th C). This formula expresses the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, but rests in the Son, before being sent out into the world (a way of of speaking that even Photius used). It captures the truth the Spirit can never be thought of as working apart from the Son and that the Spirit is “the Spirit of Christ” as much as “the Spirit of God” (Romans 8.9, which uses both expressions apparently synonymously).
• But, looked at from our perspective as recipients of the Spirit, we could just as easily say the Spirit comes from both the Father and the Son, which was a formula used as early as Tertullian in the 2nd C, in those same 4th C Western Fathers mentioned above, and most importantly, St. Augustine in the 5th C, who was unarguably the most important and influential Western theologian until Thomas Aquinas eight hundred years later. This formula argues that, since we receive the Spirit through faith in the Son, and since God cannot be or act in any way contrary to God’s nature, then this must mean that the Spirit proceeds from the Son within the Trinity as well.

Again, all of these formulas are reasonable descriptions of the inter-Trinitarian relationship, depending on what exactly you’re asking. And, because some Fathers before the Filioque Controversy used more than one of these expressions, it’s clear that they weren’t thinking about it with the theological specificity the Controversy would later demand. (Famously, when Theodoret pressed Cyril of Alexandria about his use of the “through the Son” formula, Cyril affirmed that he rejected any sense that the Spirit had its ultimate source in the Son.)

So after this lengthy introduction, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of the Controversy itself.

The Filioque Controversy in Historical Context

The Second Ecumenical Council (or, the First Council of Constantinople) of 381 was prompted by the emergence of a group called the Pneumatomachoi, literally the ‘Spirit Fighters’, who rejected the divinity and personhood of the Holy Spirit. Instead, they held that the Spirit was a creation of the Son (who was himself, as per the Arian belief defeated at the 325 Council, of a different sort of divinity from the Father). In response to this controversy, the Fathers of the 381 Council refuted the Pneumatomachian claims simply by quoting the Gospel of John, that the Spirit comes from the Father and is therefore not a creation of the Son. They then added language insisting that the Holy Spirit is due the same worship and glory as both the Father and the Son. This largely put the theological controversy to bed — or at least would have, had not history intervened.

Within twenty years of the Council, the Empire was losing its grip on much of Western Europe, and within a century, it had been replaced by its Germanic-led successor kingdoms. This had two consequences that are relevant to the Filioque Controversy. First, most of the Germanic tribes that set up shop in formerly Roman territory were officially Christian, but were Christians of an Arian stripe. So, suddenly the Arian Controversy was alive and well once again in Western Europe. And second, this meant that Western Christians were now turned towards the North and West culturally, away from the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world to the East and South. And so, East and West started having different conversations, and Greek and Latin bilingualism became less and less common.

Both of these had a tremendous impact on that would happen next, and its repercussions over the next few hundred years. Faced with these renewed pressures from Arian authorities, a council of the Western Church met in Toledo in 589. They decided that the language of double-procession of the Spirit (i.e., the filioque) was correct and needed so as not to undermine the Son’s divinity. The logic was this: The Nicene doctrine creates a divine dyad of Father-Son, from which the Spirit must flow in order to fully participate in their full, common, divinity. They were very clear not to change the reading of the Creed at this time, but rather held that the filioque was a helpful explanatory gloss of the Creed. Because Western Fathers had long considered the language of the ‘double procession’ of the Spirit to be acceptable, and held one of its major proponents, Augustine, to be a stalwart of orthodoxy, they probably didn’t think much of this development, or that the rest of the Church would find this problematic. But, this whole debate was only happening because of the Arianism of the new Germanic leadership in the West; as far as the East was concerned, Arianism was a dead issue, and the acts of the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople more than enough already to combat it. And the rest of the Church did notice what the Fathers of Toledo said and did find it to be problematic. It was a source of tension and threats on both sides for several hundred years that eventually came to a head when the word filioque was formally added to the text of the Creed at mass in Rome in the eleventh century, less than a generation before the schism between East and West became official.

We might ask how East and West came to such different conclusions. And this is where, I think, the linguistic issue might have come into play. Previously, the Church had shown an ability to accept difference in formulas between different languages. For example, in the orthodox formula for the Trinity in Greek, the word used to describe the oneness of God (ousia) had no parallel in Latin, and the only word Latin had at hand for this concept (substantia) was the direct translation of the word the Greeks used to describe the threeness of God (hypostasis); and the Greeks rejected the word the Latins used for God’s threeness (persona) because to them it suggested that there was one God playing different roles, a heresy called modalism. And yet, both formulas were accepted as orthodox, recognizing the linguistic differences at play. Unfortunately, it would seem that this flexibility was lost after the fall of the Western Empire, and fewer people understood both languages well. This is not just a speculative hypothesis. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Council of Toledo, St. Maximus the Confessor noted that the Latin and Greek words used to describe the procession of the Spirit were not exact synonyms and so the two weren’t comparing apples to apples: The Latin procedere means ‘to move forward’ or ‘to come forth towards’, which was normally translated in Greek by proienai. But, when talking about the procession of the Spirit in the Creed, the Greek Fathers (following John), used ekporeuesthai, ‘to issue forth from’, ‘to come out of.’ The difference is right there in the prefixes: pro– focuses attention on movement toward; ek- focuses on movement away from. Note that this is exactly the difference in perspective I mentioned above as a cause of the diversity in formulas used among the earlier Church Fathers. So it could very well be that when accepting the double procession of the Spirit, the Western Fathers weren’t saying what the Eastern Fathers thought they were. I’m not trying to say the entire controversy was a giant misunderstanding. There surely was a different theology underpinning the different formulas. But what I am saying is that the theological differences were almost certainly exacerbated by linguistic differences that the Church was no longer able or interested in bridging in the new, early Medieval, political situation.

What – if anything – Does this Mean, for Us?

Reading all of this leaves most of us today wondering ‘Who could possibly think this is important?” And I’m not unsympathetic to this question at all. When it comes to the inner workings of the Trinity, to think we can possibly say anything seems to me to be the utmost arrogance. This is why I’m happiest with the original 381 wording of the Creed, which simply quotes the Gospel of John and calls it a day. But at the same time, the filioque didn’t come out of nowhere, and it seems to me that the East certainly overreacted to the theological difference without expressing any curiosity for what the West was actually trying to say. There were likely theological differences that, even in an ideal world, would still need to be resolved, but the next few hundred years after Toledo saw both sides simply ratchet up the rhetoric against one another. To this day, a surprising amount of the literature on this topic is highly polemic in nature. So, I would argue that one major takeaways for us today about this, in a ‘meta’ sort of way, is to treat the Filioque Controversy as a lesson in how not to do Church. (Or politics for that matter.) I am a big believer in the need to be able to express the opinions of those with whom we disagree in a way they recognize as their own. So much right now in our world involves turning one’s opponents into caricatures and therefore, easily into enemies. We need to push back against this tendency as much as possible and make sure we can understand what everyone, especially those with whom we disagree, is saying.

And on that note, I think the theological concerns that both sides raise in support of their positions are helpful for us to consider and bring into our own theologies — and spirituality.

Those who have advocated for the filioque are concerned about two major things: First, that God cannot contradict Godself, that any action of God must express who, what, and how God is. And I think this is something we would all do well to take to heart. God may work in mysterious ways, but at the heart of those ways must be one and the same God whose greatest act of self-revelation was the man, Jesus of Nazareth. And second, proponents of the double-procession rightly insist that the Spirit’s work can never be separated from the work of the Son. The Holy Spirit will never contradict Christ or lead us away from Christ. Now, I don’t think the original language of the Creed in any way suggests otherwise, but it’s important to remember this. This is why I’m still partial to Irenaeus’ image of the Word and Spirit being the Father’s two hands: the left hand will always know what the right hand is doing, and they work together for the same purpose. If we take this analogy further, it’s like how our words are always more spirited when we are most deeply connected to our values and deepest beliefs; and how we are more likely to speak out when our spirit is most profoundly moved. So too are the Spirit and Word of God inextricably connected and inseparable even as they are not the same thing.

Meanwhile, those who have rejected the filioque have always been concerned with the reciprocity within the Trinity that is a mirror of our own ideal relationships: Again, the Son sends the Spirit, but the Spirit also sends the Son; the Father gives the Son, but the Son reveals the Father, and so on. Where one Person acts, the whole Trinity acts, to the glory of God, and “for us and for our salvation.” They have also been concerned about giving the Spirit its full due, refusing to subordinate the Spirit to Christ, and far less to the Church, which is Christ’s Body on Earth. If we think of the Spirit as the diversifying principle and the Word as the unifying principle, those who have affirmed the single procession of the Spirit, have always correctly insisted that they be in balance, equal in power, equal in authority, equal in glory and worship.

And, to me most important of all, those who have rejected the filioque have obeyed the principle that, when it comes to the inner workings of God, we know nothing of which we speak, and therefore we do best to say as little as possible. This is why I am as uncomfortable with Photius’s explanatory gloss of “….from the Father alone” as I am with the filioque. When it’s not something we can ever know, it seems best practice simply to accept what Jesus said and leave it at that.

All in all, the can of worms unleashed by the inclusion of language about procession of the Spirit is one of the least flattering events in Church history. And, it had nothing to do with what the Creed did when it was responding to the Pneumatomachian Controversy. The important thing for us is to remember and trust that the Holy Spirit given to us is fully God, sent by the Son from the Father for us and for our salvation, empowering us to grow up into the full stature of Christ and into everything God created us to be, both as humans and as persons.

 

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-Begotten, Who was begotten of the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, Begotten not made, Who is of the same essence as the Father, Through whom all things exist. Who, for us humans and for our salvation, came down from heaven, And was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became human. Who was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose gain on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Who is coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom will have no end. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified…