The Filioque
The theology behind
the filioque was aptly elucidated by Adrian Fortescue in his book, "The
Orthodox Eastern Church". He says,
“It will be as well
to begin by explaining what the "procession of the Holy Ghost" means.
God the Father is the sources of the Divine nature. The other Divine Persons
receive this same nature from Him. God the Son receives it by generation: He is
born of the Father before all ages. Therefore he is always called the Son and
he is distinguished from God the Father by this relationship of birth or
generation, Filiatio. The Holy Ghost receives the same Divine nature from the
Father (and also from the Son) but not by generation: otherwise he, too, would
be a Son of God. The Divine nature is communicated to Him by another relation,
to which we know nothing analogous, and for which we therefore have no proper
name. For this reason the words Spiratio or Procession are used; and we say
that whereas the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is born, the Third Person
proceeds from the Father. God the Son proceeds from the Father too, but for His
procession we have and use the special name generation. The theological
difference then is whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son,
or from the Father alone. But the issue is not quite so simple as that.
Catholics say that he proceeds from both Persons as from one principle.
The Orthodox in the
first place admit that the temporal mission of the Holy Ghost (His office as
source of grace among men and angels) comes from both Father and Son. On this
point our Lord's words are to clear: "But when the Paraclete cometh, whom
I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceedeth from the
Father, he shall give testimony of me." (John 15:26). Some of them at any
rate are disposed to admit that the Holy Ghost receives the Divine essence from
(or, as they prefer to say, through) God the Son. The Latin Church through her
schoolmen, as far as it concerns this point it is this: All creatures are made
up of two principles called actus and potentia. The actus is the principle of
perfection, the potentia receives and by receiving limits that perfection.
Throughout nature these two principles are seen, always in couples. Potentia
alone would have no perfection, could not be. Actus alone would be unlimited
perfection. So all creatures that have a limited nature and limited perfection
are made up of double principles. All creatures are composite. God alone has no
potentia, He is pure actus, unlimited, infinite perfection. God alone is
simple. Therefore in God all things are really the same, they are all
identified with His one simple, infinite essence. Goodness, might, wisdom,
love, all perfection in us are received into a potentia and are really distinct
from our essence which limits them, in God are not received into anything; they
are His essence.
We have love,
power, wisdom. God is love, power, wisdom. So we come to the first great axiom
about God: In God all things are the same; an infinite being is necessarily a
simple one. In Deo omnia suni unum. Revelation tells us that there are,
however, real distinction in God and three really distinct Persons. The
schoolmen now consider the difference between two categories of things --
absolute things and relation. Absolute things are perfection; they concern the
being in whom they are. Goodness makes a being good, and so on. Relation are
not perfection; they concern, not the being in whom they inhere, but something
else. Their whole nature is not to add anything in themselves, but only to
connote the state of their subject with regard to something else.
If I say, for
instance, "This man is white," I say something about his own quality.
If I say: "This man is equal to that one," I say nothing positive or
absolute about him. I only establish how he stands with regard to the other
one. I have stated no entity in him, but only his relation to another. Now in
God all absolute and positive things are identified with the Divine nature. But
the opposite extremes of a relation cannot metaphysically be identified with
each other, or there would be not relation. If, then, there are relations in
God, these mutual relations must establish real distinction. We should never
have thought such relations possible, but Revelation has taught us that they
exist. There is the relation of Paternity and "Filiatio," and the
relation of active and passive "Spiratio."
These relations are
also identified with the Divine essence, but they necessarily involve real
distinction between themselves. If there is real Paternity and
"Filiatio," there must be a really distinct Father and Son. The
distinction between God the Father and God the Son is constituted solely and
entirely by this relation. In all absolute things they are identified. Their
wisdom, power, goodness, are the same thing; these qualities are simply the one
Divine essence. (Essence, nature, and substance in scholastic language mean the
same thing.)
Therefore the
Father would be the same Person as the Son, but for the relation between them.
The Persons are constituted by the relations. Were there no relation, God would
be one Person; the three relations constitutes three Persons. (The right way to
say this is that the Persons are subsistent relations.)
So we come to the great
axiom about the Blessed Trinity: "In God all things are one, except where
there intercedes the opposition of a relation"---Omnia sunt unum, ubi non
obviat relationis oppositio. Now exactly the same principle applies also to the
Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is God, is identified with every perfection of the
simple essence of God. He cannot be distinguished from the other Persons by
anything absolute or positive (otherwise He would either have something they
have not, or lack something they have, and there would be a limitation in God).
He is distinguished from God the Father only by the mutual relation of
"Spiratio," or Procession. He proceeds from the Father, and so is
distinguished from Him. If He did not, he would be the same Person as the Father.
And He proceeds also from the Son. If He did not, there would be no relation
between them, and so, again, he would be identified with God the Son. The only
way in which there can be three really distinct Persons in the Blessed Trinity
is that there is a real relation between each of them --- Paternity between the
first and second, Procession between first and third, and Procession also
between second and third. So, from the point of view of scholastic theology,
the thesis of Latin schoolmen is unanswerable: "The Holy Ghost proceeds
from the Father and the Son; indeed, if He did no proceed from the Son, he
would not be distinct from Him. Wherefore the error of the Greeks in this
matter fundamentally overturns the truth of the Trinity."
The decree of
Florence which for us defines the Catholic faith and which the Easterns then
also signed, but afterwards repudiated, it: "The Holy Ghost is eternally
from the Father and the Son, and He has His essences and His subsistent being
both from the Father and the Son, and He proceeds from both eternally as from
one principle and by one spiration. And we declare that what the holy doctors
and Fathers say, namely, that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father through
the Son, comes to mean the same thing, that the Son also is the cause,
according to the Greeks, or the principle, according to the Latins, of the
subsistence of the Holy Ghost."
It will be seen how
the council, while inevitably maintaining the essential Catholic faith, was
scrupulously conciliatory and tolerant towards the Easterners in every point
that possibly could be conceded. And this faith of Florence is established, not
only by such passages of Scriptures as declare that the Holy Ghost is the
"Spirit of the Son (Galatians 4:6; Romans 8:9) just as He is the
"Spirit of the Father" (Matthew 10:20), that He "receives from
our Lord" (John 16:13-15), that He is "sent by Christ" (John
15:26; 16:7), but also by a long chain of Fathers both Latin and Greek. As an
example for the Latin Fathers St. Augustine may stand: "Why then should we
not believe that the Holy Ghost proceeds also from the Son, since He is the
Spirit of the Son? If He did not proceed from Him, (Christ) after His
resurrection would not have breathed on His apostles saying: Receive the Holy
Ghost. What then did that breathing mean but that the Holy Ghost proceeds from
Him too?" And for the Greeks St. Athanasius says: "We are taught by
Holy Scripture that He (the Holy Ghost) is the Spiration of the Son of God, and
we call the Son of God the source of the Holy Ghost."
In an agreed
statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, it
stated:
"The Filioque
controversy is first of all a controversy over words. As a number of recent
authors have pointed out, part of the theological disagreement between our
communions seems to be rooted in subtle but significant differences in the way
key terms have been used to refer to the Spirit’s divine origin. The original
text of the Creed of 381, in speaking of the Holy Spirit, characterizes him in
terms of John 15.26, as the one “who proceeds (ekporeuetai) from the Father”:
probably influenced by the usage of Gregory the Theologian (Or. 31.8), the
Council chose to restrict itself to the Johannine language, slightly altering
the Gospel text (changing to pneuma…ho para tou Patros ekporeuetai to: to
pneuma to hagion… to ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon) in order to emphasize that
the “coming forth” of the Spirit begins “within” the Father’s own eternal
hypostatic role as source of the divine Being, and so is best spoken of as a
kind of “movement out of (ek)” him. The underlying connotation of ekporeuesthai
(“proceed,” “issue forth”) and its related noun, ekporeusis (“procession”),
seems to have been that of a “passage outwards” from within some point of
origin. Since the time of the Cappadocian Fathers, at least, Greek theology
almost always restricts the theological use of this term to the coming-forth of
the Spirit from the Father, giving it the status of a technical term for the
relationship of those two divine persons. In contrast, other Greek words, such
as proienai, “go forward,” are frequently used by the Eastern Fathers to refer
to the Spirit’s saving “mission” in history from the Father and the risen
Lord."
The Latin word
procedere, on the other hand, with its related noun processio, suggests simply
“movement forwards,” without the added implication of the starting-point of
that movement; thus it is used to translate a number of other Greek theological
terms, including proienai, and is explicitly taken by Thomas Aquinas to be a
general term denoting “origin of any kind” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 36, a.2),
including – in a Trinitarian context - the Son’s generation as well as the
breathing-forth of the Spirit and his mission in time. As a result, both the
primordial origin of the Spirit in the eternal Father and his “coming forth”
from the risen Lord tend to be designated, in Latin, by the same word,
procedere, while Greek theology normally uses two different terms. Although the
difference between the Greek and the Latin traditions of understanding the
eternal origin of the Spirit is more than simply a verbal one, much of the
original concern in the Greek Church over the insertion of the word Filioque
into the Latin translation of the Creed of 381 may well have been due – as
Maximus the Confessor explained (Letter to Marinus: PG 91.133-136) - to a
misunderstanding on both sides of the different ranges of meaning implied in
the Greek and Latin terms for “procession”.”
Although the
Orthodox object to the word "proceeds", they don’t do so in its
substance, since they admit that the Father sends the Holy Spirit through the
Son, and "ekporeuomai" in its ordinary sense means to "journey
forth," which is the inverse of "sending", in Greek no less than
Latin. However, the problem is that the Greek verb has the preposition
"ek" built in, so if you predicated it of the Son, it would imply
that the Holy Spirit proceeds "out of" the Son, which He does, but
only by virtue of proceeding out of the Father, not in the sense of the Son
being a second unoriginated origin.
Their doctrine is
distinguished from ours only by introducing subtle distinctions such as
"eternal manifestation" (an improvement over Photius' claim that the
"sending" of the Spirit was confined to the temporal order). Gregory
Palamas explained Gregory II's teaching in terms of his essence/energies
distinction, saying that the Spirit is manifested/revealed to the saints in
divine energeia, but not as the Essence (God-in-Himself, which cannot be
revealed). Yet what the Orthodox attribute to the energies falls under what
Catholics attribute to the Divine Essence (since we do not regard God's
operations as really distinct from Himself), so again there is no
incompatibility, especially if, as some scholars have come to understand - and
I tend to agree from my reading - Palamas considered the essence/energy
distinction to be more of a formal distinction than a real one. Modern
Orthodox, however, tend to treat the distinction as real, which creates a
contradiction with the Council of Florence's definition that the Holy Spirit
has His essence from the Father and the Son. Yet this conflict is now a
consequence of the hesychast essence/energies theology, which is the more
substantive difference.
My impression is
that the filioque is a problem only for those who want it to be. Where there's
an earnest desire for reunion, there should be no problem for theologians of
East and West to close the small gap on this issue (as they actually did at
Lyons and Florence, and with the various Uniate churches) without compromise of
conscience.
Overall, I believe
that this issue is something of a pretext or excuse for refusing obedience to
the Holy See, which is the real Church-dividing issue. If we could come to an
agreement on papal primacy, no one would stumble over the filioque, as the
linguistic differences are minor and it's well known that the Latins intend
only what Christ Himself said in John 15:26.
For more
information on the Filioque, read:
https://bekkos.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/st-maximus-on-the-filioque/
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