This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the very first ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea (325). In response to the Arian heresy, which denied the full divinity of Jesus Christ, the Nicene Fathers produced a creed professing the correct doctrine. But it only mentions the Holy Spirit twice, stating that Christ “was incarnate of the Holy Spirit” and confessing belief “in the Holy Spirit.”
Either at or after the Council of Constantinople (381), a creed based off of the original Nicene Creed was composed.1 It added more details about belief in the Holy Spirit, “the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.” This creed constitutes a common profession of faith for Catholics, Oriental and Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, with one caveat: Latin Rite Catholics and Protestants tend to include a further addition not found in the original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: the Filioque. Filioque is a Latin construct, basically equivalent to et Filio, meaning “and the Son.” This version of the creed says that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”
Orthodox Christians, with varying degrees of opposition, decry this addition. As the Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian Kallistos (formerly Timothy) Ware (d. 2022) wrote in his book The Orthodox Church, “Most Orthodox believe the Filioque to be theologically untrue. They hold that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, and consider it a heresy to say that He proceeds from the Son as well. There are, however, some Orthodox who consider that the Filioque is not in itself heretical, and is indeed admissible as a theological opinion—not a dogma—provided that it is properly explained.”
Kallistos Ware himself softened his stance on the issue. As Catholic Answers quotes him, “The filioque controversy which has separated us for so many centuries is more than a mere technicality, but it is not insoluble. Qualifying the firm position taken when I wrote The Orthodox Church twenty years ago, I now believe, after further study, that the problem is more in the area of semantics and different emphases than in any basic doctrinal differences.”
If the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed separately and independently from the Father from all eternity, then there are—so to speak—two second persons and not a second and a third.
Nevertheless, some Orthodox clergy and theologians still adamantly oppose the Catholic dogma of the Filioque. Many Catholics are not sure how to begin approaching the topic. Given the length and complexity of the controversy as well as the copious theological literature about the Filioque, I have no illusions about resolving the matter in a short article. Nevertheless, I would like to give a basic introduction to the topic for Catholics who would like to understand this issue better.
As already indicated, the Filioque is generally considered a “Western” or “Latin” insertion. However, as Mauro Gagliardi reports, “The first testimony of the Filioque is found in an eastern Synod, held in 410 in Ctesiphon [or Seleucia], in modern-day Iraq. At this Synod, the Symbol of the Nicene faith of 325 was accepted and there was a significant addition to the article dedicated to the Holy Spirit: ‘We profess the living and Holy Spirit, the living Paraclete [who is] of the Father and the Son.’”
The same basic concept is found in other more ancient Eastern sources. As J. N. D. Kelly points out, St. Basil (d. 379) “teaches that the one Spirit ‘is linked with the Father through the one Son’; it is ‘through the Only-begotten’ that the divine qualities reach the Spirit from the Father.”2
Orthodox theologians sometimes protest that when the Fathers speak of “from the Father through the Son,” they are referring to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit and not to a Trinitarian procession within the Godhead. However, St. Basil says that “the natural Goodness and the inherent Holiness and the royal Dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit. Thus there is both acknowledgment of the hypostases and the true dogma of the Monarchy is not lost.” No mention is made of the economy of salvation here; it is quite explicitly referring to the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son with respect to the divine nature.
St. Basil’s younger brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 395) offers a similar account. As Kelly remarks, St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that
the three Persons are to be distinguished by their origin. . . . For one of Them is directly . . . produced by the Father, while the other proceeds from the Father through an intermediary. . . . The Spirit’s relation to the Father is in no way prejudiced by the fact that He derives His being from Him through the Son. Elsewhere Gregory speaks of the Son as related to the Spirit as cause to effect, and uses the analogy of a torch imparting its light first to another torch and then through it to a third in order to illustrate the relation of the three Persons.
Similarly, Joseph Tixeront, in the second volume of his History of Dogmas, reports that St. Epiphanius (d. 403) “teaches unquestionably that the Holy Ghost is produced by the Father and by the Son. . . . The Holy Ghost is affirmed to come from the Father and from the Son. . . . Hence we shall make no mistake, in affirming that, in the last quarter of the 4th century, Greek theology tends unequivocally towards the doctrine of the Filioque, and that some of its representatives explicitly hold this doctrine.”
The Filioque has deep roots in the Alexandrian theological tradition as well. As Johannes Quasten writes, “It was Origen’s [d. c. 253] idea that the Holy Spirit owes His existence to the Son. There is a similar train of thought in the writings of Athanasius [d. 373]. He states e.g.: ‘. . . the Spirit does not unite the Word to the Father, but rather the Spirit receives from the Word. . . . He, as has been said, gives to the Spirit, and whatever the Spirit has, He has from the Word’ (Or. Arian. 3, 24).” Quasten continues, “The procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son or from the Father through the Son is a necessary corollary of [Athanasius’] whole argument. In fact, all that he says about the procession of the Holy Spirit would make no sense if he was not convinced that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son also.”
St. Ambrose (d. 397) and St. Augustine (d. 430) also held the teaching, and Pope St. Leo the Great, a key figure for the Council of Chalcedon, likewise taught the doctrine. In his letter Quam laudabiliter (447), St. Leo wrote, “And so it is pointed out in the first chapter how impiously those persons think about the divine Trinity who assert that there is one and the same Person consisting of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as if the same God were now called Father, now Son, now Holy spirit; and that there is not one who begets, another who is begotten, and another who proceeds from both” (emphasis added).3
Another early creed, often called the Athanasian Creed, similarly affirms the Filioque. Probably written between the late fourth and early sixth centuries, it states, “the Holy Spirit (is) from the Father and the Son, neither made nor created nor generated, but proceeding.”
Gagliardi discusses how the Filioque began to be inserted into Western creeds: “The introduction of the Filioque was the result of the Synods of Toledo, starting from that of 589, after the conversion of the Visigoth Arians to Catholicism. Intuitively, the new clause is due to the firm will to reject Arianism, which preaches the inferiority of the Son with respect to the Father. But if the Spirit also proceeds from the Son, clearly the Son is equal in divinity to the Father. The new formula was reiterated by the following Fourth Synod of Toledo in the year 633, and the Sixth Synod of Toledo in 638. . . . The Eighth Synod of Toledo added the Filioque to the Creed in 653.”
Later on, the Frankish kingdom was embroiled in Trinitarian debates, particularly in opposition to the adoptionist heresy. The Franks were familiar with the Spanish texts and thought recourse to the Filioque could help them combat heresy as it had aided the Spaniards. Pope St. Leo III (d. 816) “pronounced in favor of the doctrine,” but he did not think it prudent to insert it into the creed, at least in the Roman liturgy. Nevertheless, a couple centuries later, Pope Benedict VIII (d. 1024), agreed during a local synod to add the Filioque to the liturgical creed in Rome.
In the medieval period, Scholastic theologians—including St. Thomas Aquinas—sought to elaborate on the doctrine of the Filioque. For one, they wished to maintain order within the Trinity, whom we profess to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in that order. If the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed separately and independently from the Father from all eternity, then there are—so to speak—two second persons and not a second and a third. The reason the third person is third is because the second procession (that of the Holy Spirit) presupposes the first procession (of the Son). Here, there is a direct relation between the two proceeding persons as well as between the two processions. Without this, there would be no direct relation between the Son and the Holy Spirit, only independent relations to the Father. Yet, what distinguishes the persons is precisely their relations of opposition.
Furthermore, as Jean-Hervé Nicolas notes, “Through the first procession, the Father communicates to the Son everything that He has except His paternity. Therefore, He also communicates his ‘spirative power,’ which is not constitutive of His paternity.”
Some have objected that this means there are two principles of the spiration of the Spirit. However, that is not the case in the Thomist view. To use a helpful analogy, God is the single principle of creation: There is one Creator (God) and three creating (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Similarly, as Nicolas explains, “the Father and the Son communicate in the possession of the ‘property’ of active spiration. In other words, together they are one, single principle of the Holy Spirit,” and thus “they are together one unique Spirator. And just as they are Two ‘Being God,’ they are Two ‘Being Spirator,’ which is expressed, ‘duo spirantes’ [two spirating].”
Nicolas also explains a way in which “through the Son” is acceptable to St. Thomas: “The Son possesses with the Father indistinctly the power to spirate, as a property common to both, but He holds it from the Father through the first procession. Thus, He is conceived of as an intermediary between the Father and the Holy Spirit, the second procession presupposing the first.” The Son is, then, not an independent principle of spiration, and the Father retains his position as the first in the Trinitarian order, the primal source of the other two persons.
The Catechism expresses a similar view while encouraging understanding between the Latin and Greek approaches to the issue. It teaches:
At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father’s character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he ‘who proceeds from the Father,’ it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son. The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, ‘legitimately and with good reason,’ for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as ‘the principle without principle,’ is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds. This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed. (CCC 248)
Given the copious sources from Fathers and Doctors of the Church who preceded the schism between East and West and who testify to some concept of the Filioque, and given the concerns about the intra-Trinitarian order, Catholics can be confident that their position is well founded. Hopefully, the softer approach of Eastern Orthodox theologians like Kallistos Ware will continue to be a trend and this issue can be removed as one of the stumbling blocks to Catholic-Orthodox unity.
1 See Joseph Wilhelm, “The Nicene Creed,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (Robert Appleton Company, 1911).
2 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, revised edition (HarperCollins, 1978), 262. Kelly references St. Basil’s work De Spiritu Sancto, §45 and §47.
3 Pope Leo I, Quam laudabiliter, letter to Bishop Turibius of Astorga (July 21, 447), Ch. 1, quoted from Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd ed., ed. Peter Hünermann (Ignatius, 2012), no. 284, p. 102.