Filioque (“and the son”)

The dogmatic formula expressing the “double procession of the Holy Spirit,” added by the western church to the NiceneConstantinopolitan Creed by adding the words “and from the Son” (“filioque”) thus changing “the Spirit … proceeding from the Father” to “the Spirit … proceeding from the Father and the Son” in order to emphasize the Son’s full divinity within the Trinity, and so to counter residual Arianism. It was done by a Spanish council, the third council of Toledo, in 589. At the Council Nicaea called by Emperor Constantine in 325 to counter the heresy of Arianism, the consubstantiality of the “Son with the Father” was clarified by the Nicene Creed. This word is not found in Scripture but nevertheless the church came to accept its introduction, thereby recognizing the role of Tradition and the need to use fresh language to express the fullness of revelation in Christ. However, about the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit nothing was said. In fact, the creed ended with the words “And in the Holy Spirit” (meaning “We believe in the Holy Spirit). Half a century after the council of Nicaea, the council of Constantinople I was called in 381 which proclaimed an improved version of the Nicene Creed. It was a development rather than a change from the creed of Nicaea. Accordingly, it is normally called the Nicene Creed rather than given the more precise title of Constantinopolitan, or Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. One important improvement was that it accorded a richer treatment of and full divinity to the Holy Spirit in contrast to the half sentence in the creed of 325. This was also necessitated by the heretical movement of the so-called Pneumatomachi (“Enemies of the Spirit”) who attributed a lesser divinity to the Holy Spirit. Thus the creed said: “And in the Spirit, the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding forth from the Father, co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets.” This was what was changed subsequently and controversially by the council of Toledo, which was not an ecumenical council in any sense but a provincial council of the western church. It received wider acceptance in the West through its adoption in 794 by the council of Frankfurt which was convoked by the emperor Charlemagne. As at Toledo, the addition at Frankfurt was intended only for the West, in order to counter residual Arianism. Nevertheless its introduction offended the East. As well as various theological objections, there was the procedural point that the West was unilaterally tampering with a text approved by an ecumenical council. Pope Leo III was initially reluctant to countenance the Filioque clause, but gradually became an advocate of the change. As a result, the issue of papal authority also entered the debate. Was the Pope superior to an ecumenical council with authority to alter its doctrinal decrees? Papal authority of this kind was quite unacceptable to the church of Constantinople. Here we may also note the recent historical awareness that the earliest known introduction of the Filioque clause may have come at an eastern council, held in Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Persia around 410. In any event, it developed into a major theological controversy between East and West and was one of the causes of the Eastern Schism and remains even today as an obstacle to East-West unity for two distinct reasons: the question of the orthodoxy of the addition, and the question as to the legitimacy of altering the creed of an ecumenical council by a western council. Patriarch Photius of Constantinople in the 9th century wrote to all eastern patriarchs denouncing the filioque on both these counts. He considered it a grave theological error. In his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit he clearly taught that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone; otherwise it undermines the divinity and autonomy of the Spirit. In doing this he was not, as Latin theologians have often assumed, travelling a lonely theological path, alien to the general tradition of Eastern theology. There is an Eastern dogmatic tradition which explicitly opposes the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit. So till today, Roman Catholics use the interpolated creed and the Eastern churches, the original Nicene- Constantinopolitan Creed.