The Third Council of Toledo

For nearly two centuries the Visigoths ruled Spain as Arians over a population that was Nicene. The two groups had separate clergy, separate churches and separate baptisms, and the division ran along the line between rulers and ruled, which made it a political fact as much as a doctrinal one. An Arian king could not be crowned by the church most of his subjects belonged to.

Reccared converted early in his reign and then had to bring his kingdom with him. The council at Toledo in 589 is where that was done in public. The king read a profession of faith to the assembled bishops, his Arian bishops subscribed and were received, and the acts record the nobility with them. The council issued disciplinary canons and directed that the creed be recited at every mass, which is a practical instrument: a doctrine said aloud weekly by everyone is harder to walk back than one filed in an archive.

The conversion held, and it changed what the Visigothic state was. Councils at Toledo became a standing institution, meeting repeatedly over the following century, legislating on church and civil matters together, and functioning as something close to an organ of government. Bishops acquired a formal role in ratifying kings.

It also had a darker consequence that the atlas should not pass over. The same series of Toledan councils produced increasingly severe legislation against the Jewish population of Spain, and a unified Christian kingdom turned out to mean a kingdom with much less room in it.

The creed recited at Toledo says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The creed agreed at Constantinople in 381 says that the Spirit proceeds from the Father. The added phrase is one word in Latin, filioque, and it became the doctrinal marker of the division between eastern and western Christianity.

In Spain it was not a provocation. It was an anti-Arian reflex. Arianism made the Son less than the Father, so a church that had just spent two centuries arguing against Arianism reached for any formula that tied the Son more tightly into the divine life, and saying the Spirit proceeds from him too does exactly that. Whether Toledo is the first conciliar text to carry the addition is argued by specialists. That Spain is where it took hold is not.

From Spain it travelled to the Frankish church, which adopted it enthusiastically and pressed Rome to do the same. Rome resisted for a long time on the ground that nothing may be added to a creed a council has fixed, whatever its merits, and only accepted it into the Latin creed centuries later. By then it was one of the standing eastern grievances against the west, and it was cited as such in 1054 and at every subsequent attempt at reunion.

The eastern churches have never accepted it. A phrase added at a provincial council to close down a local heresy became, four hundred years later, one of the two or three things that separate half of Christendom from the other half.