Clichés are like old garden shoes: seriously worn, almost always covered in muddy experience, yet enormously appropriate and economical when one is working a piece of ground. And, at the moment, there could be no more appropriate way for us to proceed than to use the weary old saw that holds that “whatever goes around comes around.” As clichés go, that one is almost always unfailingly accurate, and Lord knows, it certainly is in this case.
While our generalized fascination with human subjectivity, psychological phenomena, and interior experience may be a relatively new trend or focus in Western culture and popular conversation, concern about the Spirit per se certainly is not. The Spirit out there somewhere, the Spirit as entity within a Godhead that is both with and without entities, that objectified Spirit—that Spirit—has indeed been a source of varying levels of concern, especially among theologians, fathers and mothers of the Church, and secular and ecclesial authorities from the very beginning of Christianity.
What had seemed at first to be little more than a cache of mixed Scriptural signals had grown, by the time of Montanus and his ghostly heresies of the mid-second century CE, into heated discussions—or were all of those conversations about the imperative that good Christian folk should attend constantly to the Holy Spirit as ranging and directive in present time really heretical? Some were, and some weren’t, of course, and the trick for many centuries to come was going to be the prayerful winnowing out of the wheat from the chaff.
By the early fourth century and the convoking of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, some of those earliest heated discussions had matured into the perceived need, as we have seen, for creedal clarity about the Trinity, about Jesus as Son, and about the Holy Spirit as who knew what. Blessedly, God the Father seemed, at that point in time anyway, to be fairly securely fixed in a position or role that needed no further defining.
But few religious creeds or declarations of orthodoxy, be they Christian or otherwise, are ever free from debate for very long—earnest, and often contentious, debate. That certainly, as we know, was the case with Nicaea, and it eventuated in 381 CE in the convening of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Church in Constantinople where the original Nicene Creed of 325 CE was modified and expanded to clarify, among other things, what exactly was to be understood by faithful believers about the nature and function of the Holy Spirit. But the subterranean rumblings continued and grew in magnitude for another half century when, in 431 CE, the Third Ecumenical Council was convened in Ephesus. And it was Canon 7 of the Council of Ephesus that made it an “unfaithful, unkind, and spiritually treasonous act” for anyone to bring forward or write or compose any other creed as a rival to the one that was defined by the holy fathers who were gathered together in the Holy Spirit at Nicaea. By which those gathered actually meant the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, but no matter. The point had been made and was very clear.
All that “unfaithful, unkind, and spiritually treasonous” wording was still not formidable enough, however, to restrain godly men and women from continuing to mull upon some foundational concerns. A kind of nescient but growing awareness of filioque—of double procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son—as a correct, defensible, and/or perhaps even requisite doctrine or understanding was, if not roiling, then at least simmering in Latin conversation. It was, in point of fact, being debated in theological circles, even as Ephesus met. Admittedly, much of the conversation was a bit sotto voce, but that did not make it any less sincere and portentous.
Three verses from the New Testament, in particular, were most often used in those early debates as support for the idea of “double procession.”
In his Letter to the Philippians, Paul writes, “for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance” (Phil. 1:19). In writing to his friend Titus, Paul says, “This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:6). And whoever the man or woman who wrote Luke-Acts may have been, he or she had this to say about Christ: “Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear” (Acts 2:33).
Of course, despite the fact that each of these passages seemed to argue for the addition of filioque and the hierarchal arrangement of double procession within the Trinity, there were—and almost always are—contrary proof texts. In the case of the filioque, Eastern or Greek-speaking Christians tended then—and have continued since—to be exquisitely attuned to those contrary texts for some reason. Consider, for example, these words of Jesus taken from John’s Gospel:
When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. (15:26)
Even the Lord himself seems to say here that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. Or, barring that, the most one can surmise from his words is the possible option of the Spirit’s coming from the Father through the Son (certainly not and from the Son!). In any event, one or the other of those two options was to inform for centuries the position of theologians in the East who deeply opposed the West’s increasing insistence upon filioque, with its apparent diminishment of the Holy Spirit as an essential adjustment to the creed.
And so it was that, by the late seventh century CE, Nicaea, Ephesus, and all the heated discussions associated with them had devolved into outright ecclesial warfare, and the filioque was quietly maneuvered into place as part of the Western Church’s recitation of the Nicene Creed. The tintack had been dropped into the mighty machine.
It had all been done so cleverly, so very, very cleverly. In one stroke of the pen, Western or Latin Christianity managed to change the definition of the Spirit simply by changing the nature of relationships within the Trinity. The oldest and noblest of the Church’s creeds, the Nicene, had been modified subtly but profoundly by half the body of Christ on earth. Where once all Christians—both Eastern and Western—murmured, “I believe in . . . the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father,” now half of them, both clergy and laity, were permitted and even encouraged by Mother Church upon occasion to murmur, “I believe in . . . the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Filioque.
It first happened in a most ordinary sort of way in one of the medieval world’s more out-of-the-way places. It first happened at Toledo in Spain in 589 CE. At that time and in that part of the old empire, Latin Christianity was deeply embroiled in the clarifying business of converting some recalcitrant followers of Arius to more acceptable, more Athanasian ways of believing. In their struggle to stamp out Arianism completely and finally in Spain, the bishops in Toledo inserted the filioque into the Creed. What the bishops gained by making that insertion was, of course, creedal proof that the Son was indeed God and had been from the beginning and, from that position of co-being, had been that from which the Spirit had proceeded. It followed logically that, in order to establish the absolute immutability of their change, the bishops had to make their insertion of the filioque into the law of the land as well as of the Sabbath mass.
Anathemas against Arius and his doctrines and his miscreant adherents would henceforth march in lockstep with that one, single, danger-fraught word that had been so shrewdly—and so very, very arbitrarily—added to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by bishops acting on their own regional authority. Perhaps, though, and to give them their due, we should admit the possibility that the bishops and churchmen present at Toledo in 589 CE never actually intended to create a discontinuity with the past.1 But whether intended or not, that disconnect happened among them and by their hand. More than that, from Toledo onward, every time Arian Christians were identified and confronted throughout the centuries of medieval Europe, they were forced to acknowledge and then speak the filioque. It had become, for much of Europe, the litmus test of choice.
Despite the intrusion of the filioque into European affairs after 589 CE and despite its repeated use in letters from Latin popes to Orthodox patriarchs and back again, and despite the theological ping-pong that took place among monks and academics for the next four-hundred-plus years—despite all those things—leaders of the two branches of the church, East and West, popes in Rome and patriarchs in Constantinople, largely avoided the major landmines buried just below the surface of their differences. In fact, they stepped lightly around and over them for a while, because the use and practice of the filioque did not immediately go into uniform practice everywhere or consistently.
But if the filioque as official doctrine did not enjoy a highly visible inception or a particularly appealing initial raison d’être, it most surely has not enjoyed an innocuous or very quiet existence since. From the first, it seemed destined, like everything that goes around, to indeed come around again, and again, and again.2 Prior to our own time in history, it was to make its most dramatic appearance in 1054 CE when, among other things, it would cause a world war, or at the very least, when it would become the ordained excuse for one, as well as the ultimate symbol of the differences being settled by one. Both the Church and formal history would call that deadly engagement the Great Schism. It would become the third of the seismic, semi-millennial shifts Christianized culture has gone through since we changed our dating of eras from BCE to CE.3
The Great Schism is traditionally and continually memorialized in seminary courses as having taken place in the year 1054, but as every historian worth his or her salt will tell you, it was actually sealed as inevitable for all practical purposes forty years earlier, in 1014. February 14, 1014, to be specific, was the month, day, and year when the new Holy Roman Emperor, a Bavarian who took the title Henry II, decreed that Benedict VIII, the bishop of Rome who had just crowned him, must begin reciting the Nicene Creed with the filioque on certain occasions and for special events. It was so simple, so innocuous, so subtle-as-a-snake easy.
The truth of the thing is that, despite the Eastern Church’s plainly and frequently stated opposition to double procession—or perhaps because of it, some would say—a goodly number of Western emperors had already pressured Rome over the preceding years since Toledo to command the insertion of filioque into the Latin mass. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the emperors’ desires had very little to do with theology but instead had a great deal to do with power plays and demarcating the areas and reach of their own governance. It took Pope Benedict VIII, however, to finally do what was asked of him by imperial power.
Benedict VIII and Henry II of Bavaria were made for each other. In an era when it was rare for a pope and an emperor to share much affection for one another, these two were inextricably bound by circumstance and, quite possibly, by a certain large dedication to expediency in both their personalities. However, all of that may have been, it is absolutely true that Benedict owed his very life to Henry.
In 1012, Benedict VIII, at that point only recently crowned as pope, had been forced to flee from Rome rather hastily. The supporters of Gregory VI, an antipope and false pretender to the chair of St. Peter, were threatening his very life. But Henry II, who at the time was only king of Bavaria and not yet Holy Roman Emperor, used his sword and his considerable military force to slash the way open for Benedict’s return. He did so with the understanding, of course, that Benedict would one day return the favor.4 And so it was that two years later, on St. Valentine’s Day, 1014 CE, Benedict VIII placed the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor upon Henry II’s head at St. Peter’s Basilica and, in compliance with Henry’s express wishes, had the filioque included in the coronation masses.
In the naves of churches on that February morning, and assuming they were paying attention, Christians throughout the Eternal City heard filioque intoned for the first time, but the soft sounds of its chanting were hardly whispered before they were heard as a roar around all of the Christian world. East and West had entered into the final stages of coming undone one from another. They had fallen asunder. After that, the Great Schism itself came rather quickly.
Only forty years later, the unspeakable, the irreparable, and the unthinkable happened. Pope Leo IX, through his emissaries, excommunicated the Eastern patriarch, Michael Cerularius of Constantinople. In response, the patriarch immediately anathematized the pope. It was over.
We have come a thousand years since then and, indeed, stand now within the time of the Great Schism’s millennial anniversary.5 We have come as well to a time in the world’s history that is characterized, among other things, by a process of rapid internationalization. Schisms, whether ecclesial or geo-political—assuming there is a distinction to be made between those two—cannot be allowed to go unattended and unameliorated. Accordingly, in the face of different circumstances and vastly different priorities, both the Church and the State have expended considerable effort over the last half century or so in trying to undo what had been done centuries ago. The Eastern and Western Churches, both caught in a shrinking world, must discover a basis for, at the very least, the public appearance of common cause in an increasingly non-Christian milieu. It has not been easy. Nor has it been entirely successful, at least not at the foundational or creedal level.
In 1965, as the Second Vatican Council was winding to its conclusion, Patriarch Athenagoras I of the Eastern or Greek Church and Pope Paul VI of the Western or Latin Church met together in a gesture of goodwill and absolute intention. Each of them brought to that meeting a thousand years of history in which the various predecessors of each had formally and several times over excommunicated from the Body of Christ on earth and/or anathematized the predecessors of the other. In the course of their meeting, the patriarch and the pope formally lifted those millennium-old anathemas and excommunications. It was a monumental step that would have been inconceivable only a half century or so before.
In that same year of 1965, the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation was founded. As its name would indicate, the Consultation was, like the meeting of the primates, a deliberated and official attempt to arrive at a rapprochement of sorts between the Eastern and the Western Churches. That effort has borne, if not a bumper crop, then at least a modicum of fruit. In 1989, in an event that sent shockwaves through the media, if not through the Church per se, Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Demetrius knelt together in Rome and recited the Nicene Creed without the filioque. There have now been a total of three subsequent occasions when the leaders of East and West have done likewise. Additionally, several ecumenical commissions of Orthodox and Catholic theologians have agreed since then that in their work together, they will step back from even engaging this old dividing point.
Despite the fact that popes and patriarchs have jointly knelt to pray the creed without the filioque, however, the deeply religious of the East and West still remain profoundly divided and suspicious of each other. Indeed, one would have a very difficult time finding an Eastern bishop today who is not very conscious of the fact that the recent Roman pope was, before gaining his tiara, Cardinal Ratzinger and that it was Cardinal Ratzinger who is on record as having referred to all Eastern churches as “static” and “petrified as it were.”6
Perhaps less inflammatory and more studied, not to mention more useful, are the opening paragraphs of The Filioque: A Church Dividing Issue? An Agreed Statement, issued in October 2003 by the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation. Those opening sentences read in part:
From 1999 until 2003, the North American Orthodox-Catholic Consultation has focused its discussions on an issue that has been identified, for more than twelve centuries, as one of the root causes of division between our Churches: our divergent ways of conceiving and speaking about the origin of the Holy Spirit within the inner life of the triune God. . . . [T]he presence of this term (filioque) in the Western version of the Creed has been a source of scandal for Eastern Christians, both because of the Trinitarian theology it expresses, and because it had been adopted by a growing number of Churches in the West into the canonical formulation of a received ecumenical council without corresponding ecumenical agreement.7
In other words, schisms matter. They also heal only imperfectly, as a rule.
Notes
1. To more fully appreciate the actual naivete of the bishops’ position, one should consult A. Edward Siecienski’s The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, in which he argues authoritatively that the bishops in Toledo had “no consciousness that they were introducing something novel” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 69.
2. More than we could ever manage to comprehend today, liturgical practice was everything a thousand years ago. Spoken words had power, and that power led all too often, as in this case, to unbelievably bloody conflict.
3. Lest we be accused of a certain cynicism in our treatment of Henry, we must add here that he became one of the most effective emperors in Western history. His defeat of Gregory’s attempt to seize the papacy and his restoration of Benedict to it were interpreted in his own lifetime as having saved the Church. A century later, he was canonized in recognition of that fact, as was his wife, Cunigunde, shortly thereafter.
4. A little more than a century ago, sociologist Max Weber called this sort of confluence of disintegration “the disenchantment of the world.” There probably never has been, and never shall be, a more poignant or more accurate naming than that.
5. There could probably not be a better or more auspicious time than ours, in fact, for us to reflect on what happened then and what it means for us now. In doing so, we would do well to consider the words of one of the twentieth century’s great Orthodox theologians on the impact of the filioque, purely as a theological idea:
In Latin theology, the divine Persons were considered as the simple inner relations of the unique essence of the Godhead: hence, if the very existence of the Spirit is determined by its relations to the Father and the Son, the doctrine of the Filioque—or procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son—becomes a logical, dogmatic necessity, for the Spirit cannot be said to be distinct from the Son if he does not proceed from him. Eastern theologians, on the other hand, remained faithful to the old “personalism” of the Greek Fathers. The doctrine of the Filioque appeared to them, consequently, as Semi-Sabellianism (to use the expression of Photius). . . . Consubstantial with the Father and the Son, because proceeding from the Father, the unique source of the Deity, the Spirit has his own existence and personal function in the inner life of God and the economy of salvation: his task is to bring about the unity of the human race in the Body of Christ, but he also imparts to this unity a personal, and hence diversified, character. It is with a prayer to the Holy Spirit that all the liturgical services of the Orthodox Church begin, and with an invocation of his name that the eucharistic mystery is effected. (John Meyendorff, The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981], 196–97)
6. Cardinal Ratzinger made his caustic remarks in 1985 in The Ratzinger Report, a series of interviews the cardinal gave to an Italian reporter but that nevertheless read today like a Catholic Wikileaks.
7. The reader who wishes may see more of this seminal document which was, last we checked, at http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/ecumenical/orthodox/filioque-church-dividing-issue-english.cfm.