Filioque
To the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the Roman Catholic Church added the phrase "and the Son" -- in Latin, filioque -- to the description of the Holy Spirit's procession, in violation of the canons of the Third Ecumenical Council. This word was not included by the Council of Nicea nor of Constantinople, and the Orthodox Church considers this inclusion to be a heresy. The Church of England is generally sympathetic to the Orthodox position, and both versions are authorized, but inertia leads most churches to continue to include the Filioque except during ecumenical services.
Use of the Filioque in the West
The phrase "and the son" (filioque in Latin) was first used in Toledo, Spain in 587 without the consultation or agreement of the five patriarchs of the Church at that time and in direct violation of canons of the Third Ecumenical Council that prohibited unilateral alteration of the Creed by anything short of another Ecumenical Council. The purpose of its addition in Spain was to counter a heresy that was local to that region, probably some form of Arianism. The practice spread then to France where it was repudiated at the Gentilly Council in 767. Emperor Charlemagne called for a council at Aix-la-Chapelle in 809 at which Pope Leo III forbade the use of the filioque clause and ordered that the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed be engraved on silver tablets displayed at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome so that his conclusion would not be overturned in the future. The dispute over the filioque clause and the manner of its adoption was one of the reasons for the Great Schism. The filioque clause was officially added to the Roman Catholic version of the creed by the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 although it was first used in liturgy during the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Henry II by Pope Benedict VIII of Rome in 1014.
Historical Background
It is useful to note that a regional council in Persia in 410 introduced one of the earliest forms of thefilioque in the Creed; the council specified that the Spirit proceeds from the Father "and from the Son." Coming from the rich theology of early East Syrian Christianity, this expression in this context is authentically Eastern. Therefore, the filioque cannot be attacked as a solely Western innovation, nor as something created by the Pope.
In the West, St. Augustine of Hippo taught that the Spirit came from the Father and the Son, though subordinate to neither. His theology was dominant in the West until the Middle Ages, including his theology of the Trinity. Other Latin fathers also spoke of the Spirit proceeding from both the Father and the Son. While familiar in the West, this way of speaking was virtually unknown in the Greek-speaking, Eastern Roman Empire.
Although the Second Ecumenical Council in 381 had expanded and completed the Nicene Creed begun at the First Ecumenical Council , the Third Ecumenical Council, (at Ephesus in 431) had forbidden any further changes to it, except for by another Ecumenical Council. By this time, then, the text of the Nicene Creed had acquired a certain definitive authority, of ecumenical value and importance.
Rome received the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which referred to preceding councils, citing the authority of the text of the Creed. However, at this time, central Italy was in a state of collapse. In 410 and 455, Rome was vandalized. In 476, the Western Roman Empire fell, with the exile of Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor. In the West, chaos followed.
After generations of social upheaval, strong leadership appeared in the person of Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, and his son, Charlemagne, crowned as emperor in 800. Charlemagne intended to restore the Roman Empire in the West, with himself in charge, to the chagrin of the leaders of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Some historians have suggested that the Franks in the Ninth century pressured the Pope to adopt the filioque in order to drive a wedge between the Roman Church and the other patriarchates. It is true that the filioque had come into wide use in the West and was widely thought to be an integral part of the Creed. Similarly, unleavened bread had come to be thought of as normative for the Eucharist; diocesan priests were expected to be unmarried. In such cases, in the West, ancient tradition was forgotten. Contemporary usage was thought to be normative and authentic. In these matters of discipline, the influence of the Franks is certain. They intended to exalt Charlemagne, as the new Roman Emperor. The Catholic religion, as they knew it, was to be part of the package. Meanwhile, from c. 726 to 843, the Eastern Roman Empire, under the thumb of successive emperors, was dominated by the heresy of iconoclasm. Both Franks and Greeks, in their own way, departed from ancient tradition. Unlike the East, however, where iconoclasm was repudiated at the Seventh Ecumenical Council and the use of icons later confirmed by the Empress Theodora, the West to date never recovered from its departure.
Within a couple of generations, in 858, a new situation came to pass. The Eastern Emperor Michael III removed Ignatius I as Patriarch of Constantinople. The emperor replaced him with a layman, St. Photius the Great, who was the first Imperial Secretary and Imperial Ambassador to Baghdad. However, Ignatius refused to abdicate. Michael and Photius asked Pope Nicholas I of Rome to settle the matter. His legates, exceeding their authority, probably under pressure from Byzantine leadership, took part in a synod in 861 that deposed Ignatius.
In opposition to this removal of Ignatius, the Bishop of Rome supported Ignatius as legitimate Patriarch. Moreover, contrary to existing canons, Photius had been ordained to the office of bishop very quickly. (Some scholarship suggests that violation of these church laws was the main reason the Bishop of Rome rejected the appointment of Photius.)
Therefore, after the arrival of an embassy from Ignatius, in 862, Nicholas said that Photius was deposed, as well as the bishop who ordained him and all the clergy Photius had appointed. As would be expected, this did not go over well in Constantinople. In 867, Photius rejected the Pope's assertion and objected to Latin missionaries in Bulgaria. Photius' response cited the filioque as proof that Rome had a habit of overstepping its proper limits.
In 867 and 869-70, synods in Rome and Constantinople (the Robber Council of 869-870) restored Ignatius to his position as Patriarch and deposed Photius. In 877, after the death of Ignatius, Photius again resumed office, by order of the emperor. In 879]-880, he was officially restored to his see and the filioque effectively condemned by the Eighth Ecumenical Council. He resigned in 886 when Leo VI took over as emperor. Photius spent the rest of his life as a monk in exile in Armenia; he is revered by the Orthodox today as a saint. He was the first important theologian to accuse Rome of innovation in the matter of the filioque.
In the ninth century, Pope Leo III of Rome agreed with the filioque phrase theologically but was opposed to adopting it in Rome, in part because of his loyalty to the received tradition. (He also knew that the Greeks resented the new Roman Empire in the West and Charlemagne in particular; the Pope wanted to preserve Church unity.) In fact, Leo had the traditional text of the Creed, without the filioque, displayed publicly, having the original text engraved on two silver tablets, at the tomb of St. Peter. In any case, during the time of Pope Leo's leadership, 795-816, there was no Creed at all in the Roman Mass.
Later, in 1014, the German Emperor Henry II, of the Holy Roman Empire visited Rome for his coronation and found that the Creed was not used during the Mass. At his request, the Bishop of Rome added the Creed, as it was known in the West with the filioque, after the Gospel. At this time, the papacy was very weak and very much under the influence of the Germans. For the sake of survival, the Pope needed the military support of the Emperor. This was the first time the phrase was used in the Mass at Rome.
Thus, over a 600 year period, dispute over the filioque had not divided the Church definitively; for the most part, in spite of cultural and linguistic conflicts, the Eastern and Western Churches remained in full communion.
In 1054, however, the argument contributed to the Great Schism of the East and West. There were many issues involved, in large part based on misunderstandings between Greek and Latin traditions, as well as the irascible temperament of the antagonists. These were Cardinal Humbert from Rome and Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople. In addition to the actual difference in wording and doctrine in the filioque, a related issue was the right of the Pope to make a change in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, on his own, apart from an Ecumenical Council.
One must acknowlege, however, that the filioque was introduced in the West first of all in Spain, then in Gaul, not in Rome, and not by the Pope's initiative. Centuries later, the phrase became something to argue about; for a long time, as mentioned, it was in no way justification for breaking communion.
By the same token, it is not accurate to say, as some historians do, that the "Catholic Church" introduced the filioque into the Mass. Eastern Churches, for example, the Maronites, fully part of the Roman Catholic Church, never used the filioque. Moreover, the phrase was in wide use in the West, following the language of many Latin fathers, outside the Mass, especially in Spain and Gaul. Instead, it is more accurate to speak of the filioque as a Latin expression or as an expression found in the Latin Church. In the first millennium, as John S. Romanides points out, the "Catholic Church" is the "Roman Church" of both East and West.
For many years after the condemnations of 1054, many Orthodox and Catholics did not think of themselves as being in schism; neither Church, in fact, had excommunicated the other. Many Slavic Christians saw the whole episode as a dispute among individuals.
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was one of the dominant Scholastic theologians. He dealt explicitly with the processions of the divine Persons in his Summa Theologica. While the theology of Aquinas and other Scholastics was dominant in the Western Middle Ages, for all its apparent clarity and brilliance, it remains theology, not Roman Catholic Church teaching.
In 1274, the Second Council of Lyons said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, in accord with the filioque in the contemporary Latin version of the Nicene Creed. Reconciliation with the East, through this council, did not last. Remembering the Crusaders' sack of Constantinople in 1204, Byzantine Christians did not want to be reconciled with the West. In 1283, Patriarch John Beccus, who supported reconciliation with the Latin Church, was forced to abdicate; reunion failed.
These Crusaders were the Venetians of the Fourth Crusade, who had earlier been excommunicated for attacking other Christians. In 1204, they were getting even for a slaughter of Venetian merchants, in rioting, that took place in 1182. Pope Innocent III had sent them a letter, asking them not to attack Constantinople; after hearing of the sack of the city, he lamented their action and disowned them. Nevertheless, the people of Constantinople had a deep hatred for the people they called the "Latins" or the "Franks."
For much of the 14th century, there were two bishops, each claiming to be Pope, each excommunicating the followers of the other. The Great Western Schism concluded with yet a third individual claiming to be Pope and the Council of Constance. The East could hardly seek reconciliation with a Western Church divided among itself. (In the middle of the century, about a third of Western Europe died of the Black Death. People were more concerned about the plague than about Church unity.)
At the Council of Florence, in the 15th century, Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, and other bishops from the East travelled to northern Italy, in hope of reconciliation with the West, mainly in order to solicit military assistance to fend off the encroaching Turkish invaders. After extensive discussion, in Ferrara, then in Florence, they acknowledged that some Latin Fathers spoke of the procession of the Spirit differently from the Greek Fathers. Since the general consensus of the Fathers was held to be reliable, as a witness to common faith, the Western usage was held not to be a heresy and not a barrier to restoration of full communion. All but one of the Orthodox bishops present agreed and signed a decree of union between East and West, Laetentur Coeli in 1439. The one bishop who refused to sign and was later heralded as a Pillar of Orthodoxy by the Church was St. Mark of Ephesus.
Officially and publicly, Rome and the Orthodox Church were back in communion. However, the reconciliation achieved at Florence was soon destroyed, founded as it was on a compromise of faith. Numerous Orthodox faithful and bishops rejected the union. Moreover, after the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, they fostered separation from the West, which remained an adversary to Islamic political and military dominance. Furthermore, the patriarch, Gennadius, was also one of the bishops who had repudiated the reunion of Florence on his own initiative.
Finally, the theology of rationalistic Western Scholasticism predominated among the Latin theologians and bishops and so obscured the biblical, patristic perspective long advocated by the East, in which the Spirit is said to proceed "from the Father" (as in the Gospel of John) or, more often, "from the Father through the Son" (as in some of the Fathers). Many of the Eastern bishops had not imbibed the rationalist intellectualism of the West, and so were unconvinced by the highly abstract and convoluted arguments of the Scholastics. Hence, the agreement of Florence, intellectually, represented in many respects an imposition of Scholastic theology.
Undeniably, the filioque controversy was officially resolved, for both Orthodox and Catholic. However, because of the historical situation and because of the different ecclesiologies of the East and West (i.e., in the East, the whole Church is seen as the guardian of faith, while for the West, the Magisterium maintains the faith), this resolution was neither fully received nor permanently sustained.
Recent discussions and statements
Dialogue on this and other subjects is continuing. The filioque clause was the main subject discussed at the 62nd meeting of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, which met at the Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Boston from June 3 through June 5, 2002, for their spring session. As a result of these modern discussions, it has been suggested that the Orthodox could accept an "economic" filioque that states that the Holy Spirit, who originates in the Father alone, was sent to the Church "through the Son" (as the Paraclete), but this is not official Orthodox doctrine. It is what the Greeks call a theologoumenon, a theological opinion. (Similarly, the late Edward Kilmartin, S.J., proposed as a theologoumenon, a "mission" of the Holy Spirit to the Church.)
Recently, an important, agreed statement has been made by the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, on October 25, 2003. This document The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?, provides an extensive review of Scripture, history, and theology. Especially critical are the recommendations of this consultation, for example:
- That all involved in such dialogue expressly recognize the limitations of our ability to make definitive assertions about the inner life of God.
- That, in the future, because of the progress in mutual understanding that has come about in recent decades, Orthodox and Catholics refrain from labeling as heretical the traditions of the other side on the subject of the procession of the Holy Spirit.
- That Orthodox and Catholic theologians distinguish more clearly between the divinity and hypostatic identity of the Holy Spirit (which is a received dogma of our Churches) and the manner of the Spirit's origin, which still awaits full and final ecumenical resolution.
- That those engaged in dialogue on this issue distinguish, as far as possible, the theological issues of the origin of the Holy Spirit from the ecclesiological issues of primacy and doctrinal authority in the Church, even as we pursue both questions seriously, together.
- That the theological dialogue between our Churches also give careful consideration to the status of later councils held in both our Churches after those seven generally received as ecumenical.
- That the Catholic Church, as a consequence of the normative and irrevocable dogmatic value of the Creed of 381, use the original Greek text alone in making translations of that Creed for catechetical and liturgical use.
- That the Catholic Church, following a growing theological consensus, and in particular the statements made by Pope Paul VI, declare that the condemnation made at the Second Council of Lyons (1274) of those "who presume to deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son" is no longer applicable.
In the judgment of the consultation, the question of the filioque is no longer a "Church-dividing" issue, one which would impede full reconciliation and full communion, once again. It still stands for the bishops and faithful of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches to review this work and to make whatever decisions would be appropriate.
