From the early days of the Church to our own, it is the Trinity that consistently has been examined and then re-examined by the Church, defined and codified, only to later be undefined and re-codified all over again. It is, and for centuries has been, the Trinity and the nature, function, action, and definition of It that have been ripped apart, argued over, fought over, even killed over; for when all is said and done, it is Trinity that is the core of Christianity and upon which all authority must therefore be established and in which all understanding must be rooted. And the problem with all of this is that the Church really never has known what the Trinity is.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Britain’s great travel writer of the last century, known for his lengthy asides on Byzantine art and Orthodoxy’s lost theological treasures, once called the filioque the “tintack which split Christendom.”1 So it was and, like it or not, so it continues to be even now fifty some years since Fermor made his caustic observation.
The problem with all of this is that while most of us know what a tintack is, we, up until quite recently, have managed to be happily unconcerned with what the filioque is. Truth told, in fact, most of us in Western or latinized Christianity didn’t know, also until quite recently, that there was such a thing even to be ignorant of.
A tintack is that humblest of all nails, and perhaps one of the oldest of them as well, not to mention its having been the forebear of our own rather plebian thumbtack. It is a lightweight fastener beaten or shaped out of lightweight metal and destined to be lightweight in the burden it tacks together. It should, in other words, be of no consequence unless, perchance, it should fall out of its place and directly into the working gears of a mighty machine, which, as Fermor observed, is exactly what this one did.
The mighty machine was, is, and for two millennia has been, the Church. As for the filioque, it is just a simple Latin word—or, to be a bit more accurate, when translated into English, it is just a simple phrase. In either case, it means “and from the Son.”2 It dropped into the mighty machine in the year of our Lord 689 when it fell—ah, most would now say was intentionally, if furtively, dropped—into the working gears of the machine. That is, 689 CE was the year when filioque was inserted by the churchmen and power brokers of the Latin-speaking Church into the Church Universal’s greatest statement of faith, the Nicene Creed, thereby making either two creeds or two variants of one creed, depending on one’s point of view.
Either way, within the Latin-speaking half of the Church, what, before 689 CE, had read as:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem. . . . Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum, et vivicantem; qui ex Patre procedit
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty. . . . And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father
after 689 CE became:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem. . . . Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum, et vivicantem; qui ex Patre Filioque procedit
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty. . . . And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
A tintack had just changed the very definition of the Trinity, and by extension, of God.
A simple word, even one that admittedly had been slipped into things under the cover of night so to speak, should not, logically speaking, have created much more than a creedal hiccup of sorts. Or it would not have done much more than that in our time. But the seventh century was not our time, nor was the world of its citizens like ours.
In that distant era, the words of Scripture were heard but hardly ever seen. The typical Christian never, in his or her whole lifetime, glimpsed the pages of a Bible with his or her own eyes. Not in church, not at home, never. Scriptures were mentioned in sermons and read from lecterns, usually in languages unfamiliar to many of those gathered there to listen. Phrases from Scripture were embedded in liturgies that were spoken by the faithful or chanted by a distant choir, but there was no understanding of the Bible as a book that was accessible or even as something to be read for oneself. Liturgy was everything. The words and phrases of liturgy—such as those said aloud by the faithful in the Creed—were the full meaning of faith and the transport of heaven to earth. It was those words—those words of the people’s faith—that had been inexplicably changed.
What happened when the Spiritum Sanctum ceased to proceed just ex Patre and abruptly (or so it must have seemed to Latin-speaking laity) was said to proceed both ex Patre and ex Filio (i.e., filioque) was a diminishment of the Holy Ghost. It was a clear signal that the Spirit was somehow “less” than the Son, since the greater cannot proceed from the lesser. Rather, the greater gives rise to the lesser.
It was a subtle but telling change. It was also a power play on the part of the political and ecclesial leaders of the West who first suggested and then enforced it. And in a way, settling on an understanding of the Spirit as a quasi-weapon or serious token in a political and cultural tussle had its own kind of logic. The Spirit cannot be controlled, neither there and then nor here and now. Likewise, the Spirit does not have any trail or history or definition that can be manipulated by human interpretation, much less stabilized by clerical rhetoric. The Son was a different matter. The Son was present in physical history and had been defined to some greater or lesser degree in physical documents that require the skills of informed and powerful men if they are to be correctly read and interpreted, of course, but still legitimate and tangible artifacts.
Yes, the Spirit was an outlier and not a team player in the game of building institutions, and by 689 CE there was quite definitely a whole organization of coaches and managers in the western half of the old Roman Empire who were seriously into the business of building institutions and who therefore needed team players and only team players. Free thinkers and loose agents were dangerous to the stability of both the Church and the State in those perilous times. The filioque was to be a further enforcement and guarantee of that stability. Thus it is that to this very day, we still refer to our tintack by its dogmatic name of “the double procession of the Holy Ghost.” What an ominous-sounding thing that is.
Any thinking person, especially any thinking Christian, would, and should, be tempted to say right about now that perhaps we would be better off if we just chose to walk away from that disingenuous moment in our history, as well as from its precursors and its sequelae. Perhaps we would be better off, after all, just to let it be. Certainly that great historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan thought so. He famously once observed that:
If there is a special circle of the inferno described by Dante reserved for historians of theology, the principal homework assigned to that subdivision of Hell for at least the first several eons of eternity may well be a thorough study of all the treatises . . . devoted to the inquiry: Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father only, as Eastern Christendom contends, or from both the Father and the Son as the Latin Church teaches?3
What, indeed, could possibly be the purpose of investigating today matters that seem to have been both a bit unsettling for centuries and yet of little consequence now? What could be the point of such, other than as an intellectual exercise? What is to be gained by the expenditure of so much energy in investigating an old and odd collection of ecclesial and doctrinal shenanigans? Unfortunately, the answer is: Quite a bit, especially if one reads either the tea leaves or the daily news.
The truth of the thing, in other words, is that we can’t walk away from the filioque story, and not just because there is a good, if sometimes scurrilous, set of tales to be told here. Rather, we can no longer walk away from the filioque because those interweaving and sometimes disturbing stories that are its history are also suddenly, wrenchingly pertinent to the present and future of this thing we call Church. In sum, we are stuck with it, like it or not.
How that tintack change in the Church’s earlier days unravels and is unraveled in our time concerns every person on the planet who today adopts the name of Christ. It especially concerns those of us who are latinized or Northern Hemisphere, Western Christians for several subtle and two fairly obvious reasons.
Ours is a shrinking world, literally. Barriers and inconveniences and delays in communications that once seemed an incontestable and natural part of how the world worked no longer apply. Ugly as the word may sound to the ear, “glocalization” is our reality now. The nation, the continent, the indigenous culture, the hemisphere are all reduced to a kind of antique or quaint status of remembrance. And Christendom has glocalized along with the rest of the world.
The balance of influence in Christendom no longer rests in the so-called First World, nor in Euro-Caucasian demographics. The bulk of Christians live elsewhere now and, even if that were not true, they now have ready access to and empowered influence in the world’s theological debates and ecclesial discussions. The descendants of the Western churchmen who needed and then asserted the filioque no longer command the influence their forebears did. More to the point, the Spirit, whose mysterious lack of definition was treasured and worshipped by Eastern and Orthodox Christians, now moves across the waters and blows within the currents of the wind. We can call that shift by names like Pentecostalism or the Charismatic movement, or we can recognize it as a major characteristic of Emergence Christianity, or we can use it to explain the phenomenon of the “spiritual but not religious.” But none of those things changes the fact that, ready or not, we have come into the Age of the Spirit.
1. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople—The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 197.
2. -que is actually a construct attached to the end of a Latin word to indicate what English indicates by the word and. Filio- is a prepositional form of filius, the Latin word for son. All of which is how, in translation, filioque becomes and from the Son.
3. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Melody of Theology: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 90.