Rejection of the filioque

The creed agreed at Constantinople in 381 says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. Latin-speaking churches came to recite it with two words added, filioque, and the Son.

The phrase appears first in Spain, at a council of Toledo in 589 held to receive the Visigothic kings out of Arianism, where affirming that the Spirit proceeds from the Son too helped assert the Son's full divinity. It spread through the Frankish church and was promoted by Charlemagne's court, which used it polemically against Byzantium. Rome resisted for two centuries: Pope Leo III accepted the theology while refusing to alter the creed, and reportedly had the original text engraved on silver shields at St Peter's. The addition was received at Rome only in the eleventh century, at which point it became the Western norm.

The Eastern objection has two distinct components, and conflating them obscures the dispute.

The procedural objection is that a creed promulgated by an ecumenical council can be changed only by another ecumenical council, and that a portion of the church acting alone has no such competence. On this reading the offence is not the word but the unilateralism, and it is the sharper of the two objections because it concerns who holds authority in the church.

The theological objection is that within the Trinity the Father alone is the source, the sole principle from which the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds. Photius, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, argued that a double procession either introduces two first principles or collapses the distinction between Father and Son. Western theology answers with Augustine's account of the Spirit as the mutual love of Father and Son, and with the formula that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, which the East has historically found acceptable.

The filioque was one of the charges laid in the mutual excommunications of 1054 and it remained on the agenda at every attempted reunion afterwards. The councils of Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439 both produced formulas of union that the Greek delegations signed and that the Eastern churches at home refused to receive, which tells its own story about where authority in Orthodoxy actually lies.

Modern dialogue has narrowed the theological question considerably by distinguishing two things the word procession can mean. The eternal origin of the Spirit within the divine life is one question; the temporal mission, the sending of the Spirit into the world, is another, and the New Testament plainly describes the Son as sending the Spirit. Much of the Western argument turned out to concern the second. A 1995 clarification issued by the Vatican acknowledged that the Greek term for procession carries a stronger sense of ultimate origination than the Latin equivalent, so that the Latin phrase was never intended to assert what the Greek phrase would have asserted.

Practice has shifted accordingly. Popes have recited the creed in Greek without the addition on ecumenical occasions, and Eastern Catholic churches in communion with Rome generally do not use it. Anglican and some Protestant bodies have recommended dropping it. It remains, however, in the ordinary Latin liturgy, and the procedural objection has not been resolved by any of this: the question of whether a part of the church may amend a common creed is exactly the question of papal authority in another form.

The dispute is a useful case for a comparative reader because it shows how a doctrinal difference that both sides now describe as largely verbal could nonetheless mark a real division, since what was actually at stake was jurisdiction and the two churches' divergent accounts of how the church decides anything.