Creedal amplification

In the combox to my post The Filioque VIII, Photios Jones addressed me as follows:

If some Hierarch in the Orthodox Church were to use a formula of Gregory of Cyprus II that the "Holy Spirit the Lord the Giver of Life Who procheisthai (flows forth) from the Father and the Son" as an interpolation in the Creed it would be "another" Creed because it goes against the intentions of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed even though an Orthodox expression. It would be reflecting something else than what the original text established and breaking the bond of love in the Church as she professes Her faith. Of course, I think you already know this, but it is on that basis that the "filioque" should be dropped so we can profess the original intention of our Fathers as Pope Leo III engraved on those two silver shields. I know you don't have any control of such things, but one can only hope.

This is where the difference between the usual Catholic and Orthodox perspectives on development of doctrine makes itself so keenly felt. Photios and I agree that Gregory of Cyprus’s phrase is, in its context, a good bit of triadology, in the sense that it accurately expresses an aspect of the faith-once-delivered. But I simply cannot agree with Photios that interpolating said phrase into the Creed of 381 would run counter to “the intentions” of that Symbol. If that Symbol can be said to have an intention, the intention was to express the faith-once-delivered for the universal Church, in response to some heresies of the fourth century. Now for all I know, Gregory’s expression might run counter to the pneumatology of some of the bishops active at Constantinople I; that is an intensely academic matter of opinion; but since Photios concedes that the expression is Orthodox, he is logically committed to holding that the interpolation would not go against the Faith expressed by the Creed of 381. Therefore, on my account, it cannot go against the intention of that Symbol.

Of course Photios might be urging something more specific: that “the intention” of the Fathers of Constantinople was to rule out any formal amplification of their Symbol in future, even if such an amplification would accurately express the faith of the Church. If that is so, then any formal amplification would be “reflecting something else than what the original text established”; for the text only “established” what it actually and formally says; and hence adding any truth, even by way of explication and amplification, would be adding “something else” just in virtue of the formal difference. But why would interpolating an agreed-upon truth, by going beyond what the text formally says, thereby constitute “breaking the bond of love in the Church as she professes Her faith”? Ex hypothesi, Gregory of Cyprus’ expression is a truth, and is therefore at least compatible with the truths expressed by the Symbol of 381. Interpolating such a phrase would “break the bond of love in the Church” only if, unrecognized by many as expressing a truth belonging to the deposit of faith, the phrase were nonetheless imposed on the Church as a whole, without general agreement, by formal addition to the Creed. But if the phrase were to be recognized by the Church as a whole as expressing a truth, what would be the problem?

Even if the Fathers of Constantinople I did intend to rule out any formal amplification of their Symbol via interpolation of some phrase expressing an agreed-upon truth of the Faith, I do not believe that such a stricture binds all subsequent ecumenical councils (and, as a Catholic, I would also deny that it binds the papacy). That is because the question whether a given creed should be formally amplified by a truth expressing an aspect of the Faith is not, itself, a doctrinal question but a disciplinary one. That a particular creed should or should not be formally amplified by a truth is not a matter belonging to the deposit of faith. It is a matter of deciding which is best for the unity of the Church in a particular set of historical circumstances. That is why, as I’ve said many times, my objection to the papacy’s 11th-century interpolation of the filioque into the Creed of 381 is pastoral rather than doctrinal. The interpolation did not introduce a falsehood; rather, it broke the bonds of love in the Church as a whole by professing, as the faith of the Church as a whole, a truth that was not carefully enough formulated to be recognized by the Church as a whole as a truth in the sense intended.

But it is also for pastoral reasons that I reject the proposal simply to delete the filioque from the Latin Church’s creed. Of course I would not object to such a deletion in principle as an ecumenical gesture meant to reverse the Roman error of 1014. If Rome made such a move tomorrow, my faith would not be affected in the slightest, nor would the Catholic faith be compromised in principle. The filioque has, after all, been formally defined as a dogma by more than one council whose decrees were ratified by Rome as binding on the Church as a whole; and in the course of discussing that dogma in several of my previous posts, I have taken it for granted as an article of the divine and Catholic Faith. Logically, none of that would be affected by the ecumenical gesture of deleting the mere phrase from the Creed. But I say that only as a theology geek. I am also a lifelong, practicing Catholic who came of age in the decade following Vatican II. I know the mentality of Catholics, especially American Catholics, very well. Given as much, I would strongly advise against Rome's making such a move as a pastoral matter. I do not suspect, I know, what would happen in the Catholic Church if such a move were made.

A millennium has now passed in which Catholics have simply taken the filioque for granted as a truth of the Faith. They recite it every Sunday at Mass without a second thought. But only forty-odd years have passed since the close of Vatican II. During that time, many Catholics of my and the previous generation got the idea that everything is basically up for grabs in the Church, that even dogma is a kind of extended policy paper which the next administration in Rome might rewrite if and when it suits them. That idea is false, and deeply so; but I'm afraid that the average Catholic, who is not a theology geek, can be forgiven for holding it. For in the 25 years or so after Vatican II, many priests and theologians held it too, and taught accordingly. Some still do hold it. Of course, after 26 years of John Paul II and three of Benedict XVI, they are now a defensive minority. But if the filioque were dropped from the Latin-Church creed, at least within my lifetime, those guys would be right back in business. They would succeed in reinforcing, in the mind of the average non-geek, the idea that everything is up for grabs. After all, the thought would go, if even the Creed can be changed by subtraction, then what couldn't be? The resulting confessional chaos would make the fights over birth control and women's ordination look like garden-party repartee.

Let me hasten to add that there would be nothing logical about such a development. I've already explained why, logically speaking, nothing substantive about the Catholic faith would thereby be changed. But right now I'm not talking about the logic a theologian can savor in his study; I'm talking about the mass psychology of average believers. I shudder even at the thought of confronting that if the filioque were dropped from the Creed.

What I'd like to see instead is unlikely to happen for a long time, but could happen in principle: an ecumenical council of East and West in which the Symbol of 381 is amplified in such a way as to exhibit the harmony between the filioque, properly understood, and the original Symbol. To get to that point, of course, much will have to change by way of ethos. Any such changes will be glacial. But when it comes to issues of dogma, glacial change is almost always preferable.

The filioque VIII

In the "insanely long" combox to my post of June 9 "A rad-trad converts," I finally broke down and summed up for my long-time Orthodox interlocutor Photios Jones the current state of my thinking about the filioque issue. Naturally Photios had a good deal to say in reply, even though I had indicated that I felt the combox was not the place to continue the discussion and left open the possibility of continuing elsewhere. Well, now that I see fellow philosopher Brandon at Siris weighing in on the issue, I see the occasion to continue.

Before I get to the substance of the matter, two observations are in order. One is that, in my view, the sole good purpose to be served by discussing the filioque at this stage of history is to exhibit how the Catholic dogma thereof is compatible with what Orthodoxy is concerned above all to uphold: the doctrine of the "monarchy of the Father" (MF), meaning that the Father is the sole fons et origo of the Godhead. That is the necessary point of departure for any effort to move the issue off the polemical dime it has occupied for so many centuries. My other preliminary observation is that most of my critics, whether Orthodox or Catholic, tend to see my efforts on the filioque as discontinuous, if not downright incompatible, with what the Catholic Church has dogmatically defined on the subject: to wit, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son "as from one principle" (quasi ab uno principio). Of course the Orthodox tend to see that as, ceteris paribus, a plus, and the Catholics as a minus. But that is usually how theologizing that tries to move the state of a given question forward is greeted—whether or not the theologizing in question turns out to be sound. If and where somebody can demonstrate that I am in error, I will happily concede the point; and of course I submit my efforts to the judgment of the Magisterium, supposing that I will ever be fortunate enough to see them actually noticed at that level.

With that said, I issue a final caveat: if you have to ask what any of Greek or Latin terms in what follows mean, read no further than that term. This one is for the true nerds.

Here's what I substantively wrote in the aforementioned combox:

First, my position takes for granted three things: the truth of the definitions of Lyons and Florence on the filioque; the truth of the main assertions of the Vatican's 1995 white paper on the filioque (a document you know well); and the logical compatibility of the Lyons-Florence definitions with the "monarchy of the Father." As the historical record of discussion shows, the bishops who signed on to the Florentine definition of the filioque accepted that compatibility, else they could not have signed on in good conscience. Said compatibility is also implied by CCC 248. Second and accordingly, the sole question that concerns me is how the two doctrines are compatible....

The key step is to recognize the polyvalence of the Latin word causa. If the two doctrines are compatible, then the Son cannot be understood to be a "cause" of the Spirit in the sense of ekpoureusis—a kind of causation which, ad intra, belongs solely to the Father. So, assuming that the Son is, with the Father, a "cause" of the Spirit, that must be in at least one sense of causa other than that of ekpoureusis. The Latin theological tradition recognizes many senses of the term causa, e.g. the "four causes" postulated by Aristotle. The main conclusion I've reached is that, in order to get at the relevant sense of causa, it must be recognized that the two Trinitarian processions are somehow mutually interdependent. Conceptually speaking, if two activities A and B depend on each other, then there's a sense of 'cause' in which the products of A and B respectively are causes of each other. In the present case, it follows that there's a sense in which spirituque is as true as filioque, and it's that consequence which irritates my Latin brethren. So, given the traditional taxis of Father, Son, and Spirit, what I need to work out is the sense in which filiation has a certain priority over spiration. From that standpoint, even though both spirituque and filioque are true, the mutual interdependence of filation and spiration is asymmetrical, with the former having priority over the latter. My work is far from complete even in conception because I haven't been able to give much thought to the asymmetricality I feel obliged to acknowledge.

I'm not working in the dark; I've read a number of Fathers and Doctors of the Church, both East and West, on the subject. I pray about this. But I'm not sure that the effort involved in going further would be worthwhile. It seems to me that the effort would be worthwhile only given insight into the inner life of the Trinity that I'm not sure anybody can reasonably claim to have. So, all I've tried to do is sketch out a logical space where the dogmatic affirmations of East and West can be understood as mutually compatible. I think I've made some modest progress on that.

Those who are interested in seeing just what progress, if any, I've made can do a search on the term filioque within this blog. But my hunch is that anybody who's read this post this far has already read that earlier stuff.

As I've said, Photios had a good deal to say in response to that comment of mine. Much of it was praise not criticism. But one point he made included both:

...I think you still need to work out how the Father and Son are "one principle," and the Spirit not also be "one principle." Causa is not really the term that the Latins use to describe the relation, but rather principle. Causa is used more of how God relates to creation if I'm not mistaken. So when we say "cause" we mean ekpoureusis. Proienai is a type of cause, but not a relation of origin, or express the uniqueness of hypostatic origination. It is within THIS CONTEXT I see your interpretation being the greatest benefit.

Before I get to those comments of Photios' that caught Brandon's eye, I want to respond to that passage.

From both the record of discussion and the relevant decree at the Council of Florence, it is evident that most of the Latins were disposed to use the terms causa and principium as synonyms in this context. What led them to use the latter rather than the former in the final dogmatic definition is that the Greeks, for old and understandable reasons, were wont to treat the Latin causa as a cognate for the Greek ekporeusis, meaning 'origination', so that only the Father is to be seen as the originating "cause" of both the Son and the Spirit. That is nothing other than a formulation of MF. Now as I interpret both Florence and earlier Western conciliar statements on the filioque, the Latins were willing to concede this point. They did not believe that the filioque was to be interpreted as being incompatible with MF. Nor, I would add, should they have believed that; that much is also implied by the Vatican's 1995 white paper on the filioque.

As for the Spirit's not also being "one principle" (with the Father?), I'm not sure what Photios is talking about. From the claim, which I make, that the Son's coming forth from the Father is in some way dependent on the Spirit's coming forth from the Father, it does not follow that the Son comes forth from the Father and the Spirit in the same way in which the Spirit comes forth from the Father and the Son. Hence, on the (disputed) hypothesis that there is a sense in which it can be said that the Son comes forth from the Father and the Spirit "as from one principle," that would not be the sense in which Lyons II and Florence defined the Spirit's procession from the Father and the Son "as from one principle." If the Son can be said to come forth from the Father and the Spirit as from one principle, that would be more like what's suggested in Photios' point (3) below, to which I do not object. So I don't think I've got a problem just yet. One problem at a time, please.

What caught Brandon's eye in Photios' comments also caught mine:

One must be able to fit together these unique things from the Fathers:
(1) The Father as sole cause and originator of Son and Spirit *as* relation of origin (one by genesis, the other by ekpoureusis). - St. Photios
(2) The taxical order of the Persons coming forth: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, expressing their consubstantiality - Sts. Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor
(3) The Spirit rests in the Son as his object, the Son's existence from the Father is the Sprits aim for Spiration. - St. Gregory of Cyprus II
(4) The Spirit as bond of love between Father and Son, because it is this bond of love as the energy of the Spirit that is common to all. - St. Gregory Palamas, St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Cyprus II. This is how the Gregory's interpret Augustine anyway.

What doesn't fit well here is the Carolingian and Scholastic view of 'relations of opposition' since there is no step of two-ness in the Trinity, and dialectic can only consider two and not three.

Like Brandon, I basically disagree with the last sentence. Since Brandon's exposition of what's wrong here seems correct to me, I shall not pursue the matter further in the body of this post.

Nonetheless Photios' (1)-(4) are all true, and I am familiar with them from my patristic reading. I also agree that any adequate account of the filioque must take account of them. So, how would I take account of them on my current theory?

Well, for one thing, the Augustinian idea that the Spirit is the "bond of love" between the Father and the Son, which is what Photios' point (4) alludes to, can be interpreted in a weaker or a stronger sense. In the weaker sense, it means only what St. Gregory Palamas says: that the loving activity (energeia) of the Spirit within the Godhead is the love uniting the Father and the Son. That much can be and has been called the "energetic procession" of the Spirit ex Patri filioque and is not, I believe, in dispute. What is in dispute is the Augustinian idea taken in the stronger sense, viz., that it is also the Spirit as hypostasis (or: prosopon, "person") who is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. In this stronger sense, the Holy Spirit-qua-hypostasis must be thought to proceed ex Patri filioque because, as the Spirit of both uniting them both, his existence is logically posterior to and dependent on that of the Father and the Son. As I understand the matter, it is to that idea among others that the 9th-century bishop Photios the Great so strongly objected, in his Mystagogia, as incompatible with MF.

I doubt that the dogma of the filioque, as defined by Lyons II and Florence, needs to be interpreted in terms of the stronger nexus amoris idea. The Orthodox present at those councils certainly did not do so. But given Photios Jones' point (3), there might be a way to salvage the stronger interpretation.

Thus we could say that the Father, as sole producing cause of the Spirit, produces the Spirit precisely for the sake of the Son. From this standpoint, the Father is like the efficient cause of the Spirit, and the Son like the final cause of the Spirit. Thus the Spirit can be said to "proceed" or come forth from the Father and the Son "as from one principle" because the one principle is the Father not only as Father of the Son, but as the one who eternally and perfectly loves the Son in generating him. Photios Jones cites Gregory of Cyprus on the general point, but I think we could also cite Gregory of Nyssa for greater specificity of the kind I'm striving for. For an extended presentation of what that might yield, go here.

Let me stress that I am offering only sketches of a theory that I look to refine in light of criticisms and further suggestions. The purpose of such a theory is not to strive for greater knowledge of the Trinity's inner life than the Fathers and Doctors of the Church attained. Any such purpose would be laughable hubris on my part. My sole purpose is to logically reconcile those ways of speaking about the Trinitarian processions to which both sides are dogmatically committed.

Spirituque: development as recovery

In the my ongoing researches into Trinitarian theology, I've come across a very interesting article by Orthodox theologian Alexander Golitzin, published in 2001, entitled "Adam, Eve, and Seth: Pneumatological reflections on an unusual image in Gregory of Nazianzus's Fifth Theological Oration. Toward the end of that article, he writes (emphasis added):

The fact, however, that Western Christians have taken the matter further, beginning chiefly (though not exclusively) with Augustine, and have raised—legitimately, I think—the question of the Second Person's part in the Spirit's origin, brings us to what I, and several other Orthodox theologians before me, feel that the ancient Semitic-Christian tradition sketched above and presupposed by Gregory can contribute to the discussion.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the so-far-unaddressed question of the Spirit's role in the generation of the Son. What the old image of the Trinity as "family" reveals, together with the Synoptic baptismal narratives and Luke's account of the Incarnation, is a different Trinitarian taxis or model than the one we are all used to: not Father-Son-Spirit, but Father-Spirit-Son—or, and to borrow a phrase from Leonardo Boff, precisely an implied spirituque. 14 It is this other taxis which I take to be effectively presupposed both by the Eastern epicleseis over the baptismal font and the eucharistic elements, and by the witness of the Eastern ascetico-mystical tradition, which is to say, that it has its roots in the very deepest and, I would argue, most primordial levels of Christian faith and practice as the latter have been known in the East since—well, since the beginnings of Christianity itself.

Here, I think, we arrive at the real reasons—beneath and aside from the abstractions of divine narchia, relations of origin, and of the properties of ousia and hypostasis, or of the purely canonical question of proper or improper additions to the ecumenical creed—for that visceral, almost instinctively negative Eastern reaction to the filioque which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In a nutshell, the filioque as it stands, tout court, offends as it were the "inner ear" of Eastern Christian faith and practice, almost exactly in the way in which we would speak of the vertigo and nausea resulting from an injury to the fluids of the body's inner ear. Put more briefly still, the filioque strikes us Easterns as unacceptably lopsided. If it answers to a real need to explain in intra-Trinitarian terms the Son's sending of the Spirit, it does so at the expense of the Spirit's own active role and Person. The Latter becomes entirely passive and, in our eyes, this does not in consequence account adequately for the scriptural, liturgical, and (yes) mystical data of the Tradition which witness to His (or, if the reader prefers my ancient Syrians, Her) creative and generative power.

Fr. Boris Bobrinskoy has written very recently, and Fr. Dumitru Staniloae some time ago, of the need to restore a sense of the reciprocity in the relations between the Son and Holy Spirit.15 I would like to second that motion. As to the precise theological shape that reciprocity might take, or what formula might be found to express it adequately, I will not venture either to propose or to guess. Allow me instead to close not with my own words, but with those of a great Byzantine saint and mystic who wrote on the very eve of our millennial schism.

St. Symeon the New Theologian (+ 1022) testifies here, as so often in his works, to personal transfiguration in the visio dei. It seems to me that his words might be taken as summing up and encapsulating the legitimate insights of both halves of the now sundered Christian ecumene:

What is the "image of the heavenly man" (1 Cor. 15:49)? Listen to the divine Paul: "He is the reflection of the Glory and very stamp of the nature" and the "exact image" of God the Father (Heb. 1:3). The Son is then the icon of the Father, and the Holy Spirit the icon of the Son. Whoever, then, has seen the Son, has seen the Father, and whoever has seen the Holy Spirit, has seen the Son. As the Apostle says, "The Lord is the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:7); and again: "The Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words ... crying `Abba, Father!' (Rom. 8:26 and 15). He says rightly that the Lord is the Spirit when He cries "Abba, Father!", not that the Son is the Spirit—away with the thought!—but that the Son is seen and beheld in the Holy Spirit, and that never is the Son revealed without the Spirit, nor the Spirit without the Son. Instead, it is in and through the Spirit that the Son Himself cries "Abba, Father!"16

I could not agree more with both Golitzin and St. Simeon. See my earlier post on the spirituque-filioque theme.

That spirituque show

A subset of my vast readership follows my posts on Trinitarian theology with considerable interest. My main effort has been to construe the Catholic dogma of the filioque in such a way that its compatibility with the monarchy of the Father is made clear, so that the chief Orthodox objection to the filioque is thereby obviated, and the compatibility of the Eastern and Western traditions is thereby clarified. Yet the most interest seems to have been drawn by a logical corollary of that effort: what I called the spirituque. On my account, just as there is a certain real sense in which the Holy Spirit can be said to come forth from the Father and the Son, there is another sense in which the Son can be said to come forth from the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Most of the attention to that corollary has been from Catholics, and most of that attention has been negative. I find that ironic in a way. The purpose of my effort has been to show that the filioque, as a doctrinal development, is compatible with what has always been affirmed in common by East and West; yet the main objection to my effort seems to be that the spirituque corollary, as a candidate for doctrinal development, is incompatible with what the West in particular has affirmed. Obviously I don't agree; it seems to me that the spirituque, which is not the main focus of my proposal anyhow, is being misunderstood to say more than it really says.

That's why it comes as a relief to me that Jonathan Prejean has now "got it." The amateur triadologists among my readers out there would do well to read his post. If you want to resume the discussion, we can all do it here, where its background is more easily accessible.

The filioque VII continued

Designed as a reply to Catholic objections, my previous filioque post did not satisfy the objectors, as is quite evident in the combox. I hereby make another attempt to answer them. Clarifying my position further may also be of interest to others, even though I do not for a moment imagine that it will quell all doubts.

I believe Robert Kovacs is representative in attributing to me the thesis of "symmetric interdependence" (SI) between the origination of the Son and that of the Holy Spirit. I take it that, by SI, Robert means the thesis that the origination of the Son by the Father depends on that of the Holy Spirit in the same way that the origination of the Spirit by the Father depends on the Son. I admit that my use of the term spirituque for the former would naturally cause people to attribute SI to me, and indeed the arguments against my position depend on that attribution. But I do not hold SI, and I need to make clear why not.

I do claim that the origination of the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively are "mutually interdependent." But from that claim, it does not follow that the interdependence relation is "symmetric," as though each depends on the other in exactly the same way, such that there is no order of precedence between them. All that follows is that it's impossible to have one without the other, not merely because both obtain co-eternally and necessarily, but also because they do so from the same source with whom they together constitute one substance, the divine substance. I see no need to argue on behalf of that claim for the benefit of Catholics. I call it the thesis of mutual interdependence (MI), which is a weaker claim than SI would be, for it does not rule out some-or-other order of precedence between the Son and the Holy Spirit even as it does not, by itself, specify any such order. Assuming there is some such order, the reason must lie in some further truth not specified by MI.

Robert's position is that the order of precedence ad intra must be specified as follows: the Son is a principle of the Spirit but the Spirit is not a principle of the Son. (That, I take it, is the position of Jonathan Prejean and Brandon Watson as well.) But it is not at all clear to me that said position is compatible with the monarchy of the Father. (I speak of "said position" because I want to avoid an exegetical debate about Aquinas' position, which Robert cites as an authority but whose unique aspects are not dogmatically binding.) Robert interprets the Lyons-Florence definition, i.e., that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son "as from one principle," to mean that there is one common action, spiration, in which the Father participates as principle without principle and the Son participates as principle with a principle, i.e. the Father, from whom the Son has his being principle. But as it stands, that interpretation does not rule out double procession, an idea to which the Orthodox rightly object. Two hypostases, one of which is primary and the other derivative from the primary, are still two principles of the third, even if the action in which the first two participate is one common action, and even if the hypostasis that is the secondary principle derives its being principle from the hypostasis that is the primary principle. And two principles of procession constitute dual procession. Yet since the Lyons-Florence definition was deliberately adduced to rule out dual procession, and thus to address that very Orthodox objection, I firmly believe that we need to interpret "as from one principle" differently.

I interpret it thus: to say that the Spirit proceeds hypostatically from the Father and the Son "as from one principle" means that the Father originates the Spirit in virtue of being Father of the Son. That is the clearly orthodox sense of the filioque; it is entailed by, but does not itself entail, the objectionable sense. The former is thus weaker than the latter; but it is not just to say that the Father breathes forth the Spirit alongside begetting the Son, as if the former had nothing otherwise to with the latter. Rather, the Spirit is breathed forth by the Father only as the Spirit of the Father and the Son and is thus, as Paul VI confessed in his Credo of the People of God, as the bond or nexus of love between the Father and the Son. But the Son must not be said to contribute something to the act of spiration distinct from the Father's contribution; otherwise we would have dual hypostatic procession, which is ruled out ex hypothesi. Accordingly, while the Holy Spirit is consecutive to the Son inasmuch as the Son is, on my account, what I call an "explanatory factor" in there being a Holy Spirit, the Son is not said to be a cause of the Holy Spirit, even by derivation, in the way the Father is. That is also how I understand the traditional taxis by which the Son as hypostasis precedes the Holy Spirit as hypostasis, or the Holy Spirit is "consecutive" on the Son. I believe my interpretation to be clearly compatible with the monarchy of the Father, and thus acceptable to the Orthodox.

Now given such an interpretation, we may ask something similar about the begetting of the Son: can it reasonably be said that the Father begets the Son without the Holy Spirit's being in any way an explanatory factor in that act? Well, traditionally, Western theologians have argued that we must characterize the difference between the act constituting the origination of the Son, i.e., "generation" or begetting, and the act constituting the origination of the Holy Spirit, i.e. "spiration" or breathing forth, thus: the Son is involved in spiration but the Spirit is not involved in generation; generation is direct from the Father, having nothing to do with the Spirit; whereas spiration is with or through the Son. From that, it follows that the Spirit is not an explanatory factor in generation even though the Son is such a factor in spiration. But I don't think that will do. For if MI, then it is unreasonable to claim that generation takes place without being in any way dependent on spiration. Rather, I suggest, it is in virtue of breathing forth the Holy Spirit that the Father begets the Son, because it is impossible that there be a Son who is not related to the Father by a co-eternal and co-necessary Third, the Spirit, who is the bond of love between them. That, I take it, is what the PCPCU statement referred to in my previous post, which comes pretty much straight out of Gregory of Nazianzus, means. It must not be said, however, that the Holy Spirit contributes something to the act of begetting distinct from the Father's contribution. That would be dual generation, which is even more clearly unacceptable than dual procession. Rather, I claim, the Father and the Holy Spirit beget the Son "as from one principle," which means nothing other than that the Father begets the Son in virtue of his breathing forth the Spirit. That is also, I take it, what Weinandy means by saying that the Father begets the Son "in" the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is thus an explanatory factor in generation, even as the Son is an explanatory factor in spiration.

But the symmetry between generation and spiration is not precise. We may infer that the Father and the Holy Spirit beget the Son "as from one principle" only because, and as defined at II Lyons and Florence, it is revealed and professed that the Father and the Son breath forth the Holy Spirit "as from one principle." That epistemic asymmetry, I believe, reflects an ontic asymmetry by which a certain order of precedence must be said to obtain in reality, not just in thought. Thus the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, is said to be the "Word" and hence the perfect self-expression of the Father, which is never said of the Third Person, the Holy Spirit, even though it must nonetheless be said that the Holy Spirit is co-equal in divinity to the other two persons. I suggest, perhaps unoriginally, that the Son "images" the Father immediately, whereas the Spirit only does so mediately, through the Son. By way of explaining the order of precedence, as weakly and inadequately as the subject matter makes inevitable, I invoke St. Maximus' analogy, whereby the Father is the "thought," the Son is the "word" embodying the thought, and the Spirit is the "breath" transmitting the word and thus the thought.

In human life, the kind of thought we're capable of is embodied in language, i.e. words expressing the thought, which in turn would not exist without physical tokens, i.e., speech and, later on in human development, markings. Hence the thought gives rise to the words and the tokens insofar as the latter two are mutually interdependent; but it is the words that more directly express the thought, giving meaning to the tokens. Hence the Son more directly expresses the Father than the Spirit, who can only be understood as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. But there would be no Son without the Spirit, just as there would be no words without speech.

The filioque VII: replies to the Catholic objections

Several of my weightier Catholic commenters have strongly objected to a key claim I've made in the course of my effort to get beyond the filioque impasse between Orthodoxy and Catholicism: i.e., that there's a sense in which it can be said that the Son is begotten ex Patri spirituque, inasmuch as the Father originates the Son and the Holy Spirit "only in relation to each other." I confess to a bit of dismay about that; I expected most of the objections to come from the Orthodox, not the Catholics. If my ecumenical project is to gain any traction, it is obvious that I need to reassure my Catholic brothers on this score. Hence this post.

As I've said before, it is not my purpose to offer greater insight into the inner life of God than the Church has enjoyed before. Such an ambition would be absurdly hubristic. My aim is only to reconcile the ways of speaking that are normative in West and East respectively. But that cannot be done just by repeating old affirmations and seeking to draw out their deductive implications: that method has been tried many times before, even at general councils, to no lasting effect. The real challenge is to construe certain premises that both sides either already accept or can accept as legitimate theological proposals, so as to get a helpful result both sides can live with. In my view and that of some theologians from both sides, that requires a new affirmation which, without adding anything to the deposit of faith, would constitute an authentic instance of doctrinal development. Such an affirmation is actually on offer; but I shall save its specific form for the end.

Since most of the objections seem to me to be missing the point, I shall only address what seem to me to be the two most important. To that end, I point out that the Vatican itself is on record as proposing an idea logically equivalent to mine.

In a much-discussed 1995 white paper from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, we read (emphasis added):

If it is correctly situated, the Filioque of the Latin tradition must not lead to a subordination of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Even if the Catholic doctrine affirms that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son in the communication of their consubstantial communion, it nonetheless recognizes the reality of the original relationship of the Holy Spirit as person with the Father, a relationship that the Greek Fathers express by the term ekporeusis.⁵

In the same way, if in the Trinitarian order the Holy Spirit is consecutive to the relation between the Father and the Son, since he takes his origin from the Father as Father of the only Son,⁶ it is in the Spirit that this relationship between the Father and the Son itself attains its Trinitarian perfection. Just as the Father is characterized as Father by the Son he generates, so does the Spirit, by taking his origin from the Father, characterize the Father in the manner of the Trinity in relation to the Son and characterizes the Son in the manner of the Trinity in his relation to the Father: in the fullness of the Trinitarian mystery they are Father and Son in the Holy Spirit.⁷

The Father only generates the Son by breathing (proballein in Greek) through him the Holy Spirit and the Son is only begotten by the Father insofar as the spiration (probolle in Greek) passes through him. The Father is Father of the One Son only by being for him and through him the origin of the Holy Spirit.⁸

The Spirit does not precede the Son, since the Son characterizes as Father the Father from whom the Spirit takes his origin, according to the Trinitarian order.⁹ But the spiration of the Spirit from the Father takes place by and through (the two senses of dia in Greek) the generation of the Son, to which it gives its Trinitarian character. It is in this sense that St John Damascene says: "The Holy Spirit is a substantial power contemplated in his own distinct hypostasis, who proceeds from the Father and reposes in the Word" (De Fide orthodoxa I, 7, PG 94, 805 B, ed. B. Kotter, Berlin 1973, p. 16; Dialogus contra Manichaeos 5, PG 94, 1512 B, ed. B. Kotter, Berlin 1981, p. 354).¹⁰

Though inspired by St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the highlighted statement does not have magisterial force, for it was not made by an organ of the magisterium. Neither has it been the explicit and ordinary teaching of the Church in the past; rather, I take its appearance in the document as a proposal for authentic doctrinal development. From that standpoint, the mere fact that a Vatican commission has attempted to advance discussion by such means, and has not in any way been reigned in for it, shows that Rome sees the proposal as within the ambit of Trinitarian orthodoxy.

Assuming it is orthodox to say that the Father begets the Son only "by" breathing forth the Holy Spirit "through" the Son (whatever 'through' may mean here, which is a distinct question), then there is a sense in which we may say that the Son "comes forth" or "proceeds" ex Patri spirituque, i.e. from the Father and the Holy Spirit. That does not mean, nor should it mean, that the Holy Spirit originates the Son in the same way as the Father, as if the two could be said to act in exactly the same way in producing the Holy Spirit—any more than the Holy Spirit's coming forth or proceeding from the Father and the Son does or should mean that the Son originates the Holy Spirit in the same sort of way as the Father, in the sense of dual procession. It means that the Father and the Holy Spirit beget the Son "as from one principle," that principle being the Father as spirator, just as the Father and the Son breathe forth the Holy Spirit "as from one principle", that principle being the Father as Father of the Son. Besides reaffirming the monarchy of the Father, that sense of "as from one principle" permits and calls for saying that the Father originates the Son and the Holy Spirit only in some sort of relation to each other.

Getting clear about that is essential for my purpose, since the most serious criticism of my proposal was that it is incompatible with certain conciliar affirmations. Thus, Robert Kovacs pointed out that, in the bull of union with the Copts (1442) promulgated by Pope Eugene IV, it is professed as the faith of "the holy Roman church" that "the Father alone from his substance begot the Son; the Son alone is begotten of the Father alone; the Holy Spirit alone proceeds at once from the Father and the Son" (emphasis added). But that is only to say that "begetting" is what the Father does to originate the Son as distinct from what he does to originate the Holy Spirit. It is not to say, nor does it entail, that the Father's origination of the Son by "begetting" has nothing to do with the Father's origination of the Spirit by "breathing forth." And the same considerations apply to other conciliar statements Robert quotes; otherwise, the statement I've highlighted from the Vatican white paper would be heretical, which cannot reasonably said.

The other major objection to spirituque that I need to consider was registered by Brandon Watson:

I can understand saying that the Son is related to the Father and the Spirit, so if that's all you mean, I agree; but this is not the same as saying that the Son is begotten from the Father and the Spirit, which is what seems implied by the word itself. Everyone must admit the former; the latter seems dubious, particularly if we affirm the Filioque, because the Filioque restricts what can be said about the Son's generation by identifying a distinctive characteristic of the Spirit that must be preserved in distinguishing the other Two. The Son's relationship to the Spirit must reciprocate the Spirit's relationship to the Son, not run parallel to it. Otherwise we seem not to have done anything to distinguish the Spirit's procession from the Son's begetting.

The force of that objection is clear: to affirm spirituque is obliterate the distinction between how the Son is originated and how the Spirit is originated. But as Brandon suspects, I think that is "sticking at words." Construed as I've been explaining, spirituque is an indirect logical consequence of what the Vatican statement affirms, i.e., that the Father begets the Son "by" breathing forth the Holy Spirit "through" him. Given that statement, it can also be said that the Father begets the Son "in" the Holy Spirit; from that, it follows that the Son is begotten by the Father "and" the Spirit as from one principle. It must not of course be said that the Spirit begets the Son by the same activity as the Father, any more than it may be said that the Son breathes forth the Spirit by the same activity as the Father; saying either would be incompatible with the monarchy of the Father. What can and, I believe, should be said is that the Father's origination of the Son only takes place in virtue of the Spirit's, just as the Father's origination of the Spirit only takes place in virtue of the Son's. The latter gives us an orthodox sense of filioque; the former gives us an orthodox sense of spirituque. That kind of parallelism does not preclude the kind of reciprocal relation that Brandon rightly notes, for what is denoted by 'in virtue of' differs in the two cases, and differs in a way that preserves whatever other relation obtains between the Son and the Spirit specifically . So it does not run afoul of his objection.

For the position I'm defending, I am much indebted to a paper I'm fond of recommending: Fr. Thomas Weinandy, OFM Cap., “Clarifying the Filioque: The Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue,” Communio 23, no. 2 (1996): 354-367 K. Then lecturing at Oxford, Weinandy wrote that paper in reaction to the Vatican document and as a followup to his book The Father's Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity; currently he heads the USCCB's Committee on Doctrine. As an ecumenical proposal, Weinandy concludes his paper with the following suggested reformulation of the Creed:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the Giver of Life, who comes forth (ejkporeuvetai) from the Father as the one in whom the Son is begotten and who proceeds (proei'si) from and through the Son in communion with the Father, and together with the Father and the Son is worship and glorified.

That's the "new affirmation" I believe would signify having got beyond the filioque impasse. Perhaps that's what we should be discussing at this point.

The filioque V: replies to objections

Unsurprisingly, my account of the filioque has come in for a certain amount of criticism. Yet I am gratified that the criticism has been less hostile than it often can be in this area. It merits response.

Here I shall consider three criticisms. The first and most important concerns my actual argument; it comes from a Christian philosopher and fellow "filioquist" who has not stated his ecclesial affiliation. The latter two concern the filioque's dogmatic authority, and come from Orthodox believers.

I. In a post entitled "Interposition," philosopher Brandon Watson of Siris actually registers two objections to my account as outlined in "The filioque IV: the issue narrowed further." The first is that my claim that it can also be said that the Son is begotten ex Patri spirituque, "if true (I'm actually not convinced it is), would be a reductio ad absurdum of the account." The second is that, contrary to what I hold, filioquists need not reject the Cappadocian principle ('CP' for short) that every divine property must be either individual, and thus unique to a particular hypostasis, or common to all three and thus "of the nature."

On reflection, I think the second objection is right. I had taken CP to entail, in conjunction with the doctrine of the monarchy of the Father (DMF), that there is no sense in which it could be said that either the Son and the Spirit have anything to do with each other's origination from the Father as hypostases. And I had adopted that construal because the Eastern Christians with whom I have most often discussed the filioque issue do so, or at least seem to do so. But Brandon has shown why, logically speaking, one needn't construe CP as I and they have.

The upshot is this. All sides agree that the Son and the Spirit are each "God from God" (cf. St. Anselm), and thus each can be said to have the property of being God by derivation. But that is not a violation of CP; for it is equally generally agreed, as a requirement of orthodoxy, that the modes of origination of the Son and the Spirit respectively are not precisely identical. Although both "come from" the Father, who is their sole fons et origo, the Son is "begotten" and the Spirit is "spirated"; so, aside from what, exactly, that difference consists in, we must say that there is a difference. Accordingly, the fact that the Son and the Spirit each have the property of "being God from God" is only what Brandon terms a "notional" identity; in reality, the respective modes of derivation are different, and thus the modes of origination by the Father are different. So if the Son does have something to do with the Spirit's origination from the Father, the uniqueness of personal properties ad intra is preserved for the Son and the Spirit—provided that the something in question is not ekporeusis, which has already been conceded to be the unique, personal property of the Father. Following St. Gregory of Nyssa's account, Brandon labels that something as "interposition" and fleshes out a bit about what that meant for Gregory. The details of Gregory's account are interesting, but I shall not review them here. It seems to me that several possible "filioquist" accounts could observe the same stricture that Gregory's does and be at least as illuminating.

The advantage of such a result, besides its truth, is ecumenical: it does not require Eastern Christians to give up CP. I confess to feeling a bit sheepish for missing that. For the reasons Brandon gives, all the present result requires is rejecting the criticism offered by St. Photios in the Mystagogia that the filioque violates CP. And the reason why it doesn't violate CP is also a reason why it doesn't violate DMF.

By the same token, however, I can't make much sense of Brandon's other criticism of my account. My main claim has been that the Father originates the Son and the Spirit "only in relation to each other." From that, I concluded, there is a sense in which the Son is begotten ex Patri spirituque. But that is only to say that the Spirit has something to do with the Father's origination of the Son, even as the Son has something to do with the Father's origination of the Spirit; it is not to say that the sense in which the Spirit has to do with the Son's origination is the same as the sense in which the Son has to do with the Spirit's origination. Indeed, Brandon himself hints at the relevant sense of spirituque (emphasis added):

To say that the Spirit is from the Father and the Son is as much to say that the Father is together-with-the-Son in the procession of the Spirit, just as to say "Paul and Silvanus" is as much to say "Paul-with-Silvanus". This is why there is only one spiration; the spiration is always from the Father; but the Son is with the Father in the Spirit's being breathed forth by the Father, and thus distinctively interposes without detriment to the Spirit's full Godhead. The Son, on the other hand, is in being begotten together-with-the-Spirit from the Father (begotten from the Father and the Spirit), and together-with-the-Father in the Spirit's proceeding, as the only-begotten who has the same Spirit as His Father.

I don't think the boldfaced text is saying anything different from, still less incompatible with, what I've been saying. In fact, I agree with everything Brandon says. Once my mistake about CP is corrected, we're saying pretty much the same thing.

II. Now for the simpler of the two objections from the Orthodox.

In a long thread at Energetic Procession, I had written: "In fact, I do think there are problems with the filioque. E.g., I have said many times that I believe Rome needlessly wounded Church unity by inserting the phrase into the Ecumenical Creed" in AD 1014 under pressure from the "Holy Roman" Emperor. That's something I've said, in substance, many times both online and off. But a man who names himself "David" and identifies himself as a Catholic philosopher "on the verge of becoming Orthodox" objects to that as follows:

Strictly speaking, this is not a position open to a Roman Catholic, for the council of Florence declares (session 8): “In the first place, then, we give them the holy creed issued by the hundred and fifty bishops in the ecumenical council of Constantinople, with the added phrase and the Son, which for the sake of declaring the truth and from urgent necessity was licitly and reasonably added to that creed”Strictly speaking, this is not a position open to a Roman Catholic, for the council of Florence declares (session 8): “In the first place, then, we give them the holy creed issued by the hundred and fifty bishops in the ecumenical council of Constantinople, with the added phrase and the Son, which for the sake of declaring the truth and from urgent necessity was licitly and reasonably added to that creed.”

I treat that objection as "Orthodox" because it comes from somebody leaning to Orthodoxy and entails a conclusion I've heard before from some Orthodox: that Catholics cannot self-consistently affirm the truth of the filioque and the unwisdom of its addition to the Creed.

The argument itself, however, is a non-sequitur. In no sense are Catholics bound to accept the judgment that the filioque had been added to the Creed "from urgent necessity" and "reasonably." For one thing, the decree being cited had only juridical not dogmatic force. It was meant to establish only that the Council of Basel be "one" council, which indeed it became even as it was eventually moved to Florence and Ferrara. What Catholics are bound to accept, by giving the assent of faith to, is the proposition that the dogma of the filioque defined by the Council of Lyons (1274) and in due course by Florence (1442) is true. Of course I render such assent precisely as a Catholic. But that is altogether different from saying that Rome's original insertion of the phrase in 1014 was a sound move in some practical sense. Logically, one who accepts the dogmatic infallibility of general councils, and hence the truth of the filioque in particular, can affirm the former while denying the latter. That's just what I do.

III. The final objection I shall consider comes from—who else?—Perry Robinson, and is that, by Roman standards themselves, the council held at Constantinople in 879-80 binds Rome. Among other things, that council forbade any attempt to "add" to the ecumenical creed of 381; and historically, the the filioque is the only candidate for such addition. This issue has come up before between Perry and me; here, I link to the latest iteration of it.

There are two difficulties with his objection: one historical, one logical. The historical has been cited deftly by Greg DeLassus (emphasis added):

In his work The Photian Schism, Francis Dvornik [a Jesuit—ML] quotes the letter which Pope John VIII sent to Patriarch Photios wherein he recognizes Photios as Patriarch and the Constantinopolitan synod of 879-80 as a legitimate ecumenical council rescinding the synod of 869-70.

Basically, in his letter, John accepts Photios and his council conditionally. John intructed that his legates should insist on certain assurances from Photios. If his conditions (including that Photios acknowledge Roman supremacy) are met, then the council is accepted. If his conditions are not met, then the council is rejected. So, were John’s conditions accepted by Photios and the Constantinopolitan church? We have no letter in reply from Photios to John which would make his acceptance explicit. As such, given that John’s reception of the 879 synod is conditional on such acceptance, we cannot say with any precision that Rome did or did not receive the 879 synod as authoritative.

The relevant text of the letter reads: Nam et ea, quae pro causa tuae restitutionis synodali decreto Constantinopoli misericorditer acta sunt, recipimus. Si forasse nostri legati in eadem sinodo contra apostolicam preceptionem egerint, nos nec recipimus nec iudicamus alicuius existere firmitatis.

Now given that Rome eventually repudiated said council, we may conclude that in due course she judged the conditions not to have been met. Hence, the council can be said to have bound Rome only if one asumes that its authority obtained with or without Rome's consent. Catholics as such cannot accept that assumption. And given the broader issues between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, such an assumption would only beg the question against the former.

But even supposing, for argument's sake, that Rome really had accepted the council of 879-880, there remains the logical question whether the condemnation of adding anything to the confession embodied in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 ('NCC' for short) is dogmatically binding by Rome's own standards. That would indeed be the case if the condemnation entails that the filioque is, in fact, false, or otherwise adds anything of substance. But the pertinent conciliar text entails no such result. In the translation and with the emphasis Perry uses, here's the most pertinent passage:

If one dares to rewrite another Symbol besides this one, or add to it, or subtract from it, or to remove anything from it, and to display the audacity to call it a Rule, he will be condemned and thrown out of the Christian Confession. For to subtract from, or to add to, the holy and consubstantial and undivided Trinity shows that the confession we have always had to this day is imperfect. It condemns the Apostolic Tradition and the doctrine of the Fathers. If one, then having come to such a point of mindlessness as to dare do what we have said above, and set forth another Symbol and call it a Rule, or to add to or subtract from the one which has been handed down to us by the first great, holy and Ecumenical Synod of Nicaea, let him be Anathema.

The key thing to note about that is its conditionality. Its condemnation extends to the filioque only if it be granted that the doctrine of the filioque "adds to the holy and consubstantial and undivided Trinity" and thus shows that the earlier confession is "imperfect." But that is precisely what Rome does not grant.

The position of the Catholic Church is that the filioque does not "add" to the doctrine of the Trinity as developed by councils acknowledged as ecumenical by East and West. The Roman claim is that the phrase filioque merely helps to make explicit what was implicit in NCC, the "symbol" being referred to by the above condemnation. But it follows that the "confession" embodied in NCC is "imperfect" only if Rome's later adding the filioque to NCC implies that she holds there is something wrong with the confession NCC embodied when it was issued in 381. No such implication holds, nor does Rome think it does. NCC was a perfectly adequate and orthodox response to the issues of its time, and its original text remains perfectly true. It just doesn't say everything true that later contingencies might call for saying. Now as I've said before, I believe that Rome's later judgment that the filioque was worth adding to NCC was pastorally unsound. But that doesn't affect the question of the truth of the doctrine expressed by that phrase.

As always, the key issue lurking in the background here is that of "development of doctrine." In a spirit quite similar to that of certain Catholic traditionalists and Protestant fundamentalists, Perry and some other Orthodox deny that there is any legitimate DD. I shall shortly resume addressing that issue in its own right.

The filioque IV: the issue narrowed further

The main conclusion of my two previous filioque articles, "Triadological diagram, anyone?" and "The filioque issue narrowed," is that the Father originates the Son and the Holy Spirit only in relation to each other. That does not undermine the doctrine of the monarchy of the Father ('DMF' for short) because the posited senses in which the Son and the Holy Spirit have to do with each others' origination is not that of ekporeusis, which belongs exclusively to the Father as the only unoriginated person. Yet it is uncontroversial that the Holy Spirit is originated by the Father only as Father of the Son; moreover, the perichoretic relationship of love between Father and Son is not accidental; the Father doesn't just happen to love the Son, but the two necessarily love each other. And the Spirit is traditionally said to be the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Given those three premises, it is reasonable to conclude that the Holy Spirit is originated by the Father only as the Spirit in whom the Father begets and loves the Son. That, I submit, is the sense in which it can be said, without undermining DMF, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. That is why it can also be said that the Son is begotten ex Patri spirituque. In both cases, the origination is "as from one principle" (cf Lyons 1274; Florence 1441). And that is what preserves DMF.

On such an account, there can be no spiration without generation and no generation without spiration. One can deny that necessary connection only if one argues that the Father just happened to originate two other persons, when he might as well have originated more, less, or none. I don't believe anybody is prepared to make such an argument. Yet there remains a sense in which the Spirit is "of" the Father and Son which is not the same as that in which the Son is "of" the Father and the Spirit: the Son is the perfect self-expression of the Father, which is not said of the Spirit too. Thus the Son is logically but not ontically prior to the Spirit. That accounts for the traditional taxis of the divine persons; but on my account, it does so without subordinating the Holy Spirit.

The chief objection to such an account, as far as I can tell, is to cite the Cappadocian principle ('CP' for short) that every divine property must be either individual, and thus unique to a particular hypostasis, or common to all three and thus "of the nature." If CP, then origination ad intra, in any sense of 'origination', must belong to the Father alone. And I have observed CP repeatedly invoked by Orthodox commenters against the filioque on any construal of that doctrine. Hence there is no originating within the Trinity that is not ekporeusis, and the filioque is incompatible with DMF. From that, it follows further that the Son and the Spirit each have no role in each other's origination as persons; their interrelation is thus purely "energetic," having nothing at all to do with their "hypostatic" origination from the Father; hence the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son only energetically not hypostatically. Now as I've said before, I've never found that result plausible. We do not say merely "God is loving" but also, with the Apostle John, "God is love." So, granted that the divine persons are necessarily as well as mutually perichoretic, it hardly seems plausible that the hypostatic origination of each originated person has nothing to do with that of the other. But that's what follows if CP is true. So then the question becomes: why believe CP?

The most common argument for CP I've seen is the sort of reductio deployed by Patriarch Photius in the Mystagogia: on the supposition that CP is false, there could be infinitely many divine hypostases, which is absurd as well as heterodox. But that argument is entirely question-begging. As Jonathan Prejean points out, St. Anselm's argument in the De Processione Spiritus Sancti "can quickly be used to demonstrate that, if there is more than one Person, there can be exactly and only three based on the bipolarity of the relations, and Photius's reductio doesn't work on it." It is highly unlikely that Anselm knew of the Mystagogia, but the point stands anyhow: the only way to block Anselm's argument is to premise that the only sort of origination within the Godhead is ekporeusis, which by common agreement belongs only to the Father. But that kind of monopatrism, of course, is precisely what is at issue. To be sure, the assertion that the Holy Spirit comes forth "from the Father" was made by Christ himself as quoted in the Gospel of John and repeated verbatim in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, accepted decades later by Rome as ecumenical. But the assertion that the Holy Spirit's origination from the Father in no way depends on that of the Son is a feature of one theological grid, the Cappadocian, among others. It is not itself dogma.

The issue, at bottom, is whether DMF logically depends on CP. I agree that Anselm's argument shows it does not. For a fuller exposition, see Prof. Scott Carson's paper "And the Son" given at an ACPA meeting last fall.

Triadological diagram, anyone?

One reader of this blog has proposed, by e-mail, the above diagram for the "hypostatic" as distinct from "energetic" side of the triadology I've been trying to develop in aid of harmonizing Western dogma with the faith held in common during the first millennium. (The sketcher remains unnamed unless and until he seeks otherwise.) I have read in a few places—though how true it is I do not know—that back in the ninth century the great opponent of the filioque, Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, produced his own diagram, which consists of simply the top two lines above without the bottom two.

Even before I knew the history of the filioque issue or even what was meant by the phrase, I had always assumed that, within God, generation and spiration must have something to do with each other. It just couldn't be that the breathing forth of the Spirit had nothing to do with the generation of the Son. God is not compartmental like that. And indeed, I learned in college that such has been the Latin belief since the issue came up. But I've also and always assumed the converse: the generation of the Son must also have something to do with the breathing forth of the Spirit. Only a few years ago did I start coming upon theologians, Catholic of course, who had the same idea. Amazingly, none of the writings in question seem to predate the mid-20th century. Such is development of doctrine, I suppose.

Development of diagrams, at least for blackboard purposes, sometimes goes with development of doctrine. The above diagram one will do, even though adding the perichoresis would require color-coding and 3D. Thanks, dear reader.

The filioque issue narrowed

Often our vocations are not what we would have thought they were. On this blog, the posts which get by far the most attention are those addressing issues between Catholicism and Orthodoxy; thus I find myself having to accept dialogue on them as my ecclesial vocation—or at least avocation—for the time being. And the most discussed among them seems to be dat ol' bone of contention, the filioque.

Most of my vast readership knows that I've written fairly substantially about that issue before. (To find my articles thereon, just do an internal blog search on the phrase.) While I believe the doctrine is true as formally defined by the Catholic Church, I have at the same time made clear my belief that Rome's insertion of the phrase, a millennium ago, into the creed recited in the Latin Church was a needless blow to church unity. I have also made clear what ought to be uncontroversial: that rehashing old debates, whether about the phrase's insertion or the substance of the doctrine itself, is worse than useless. My interest in the topic is mostly to come up with a construal of it that is compatible with what both sides are dogmatically committed to affirming. And I am more convinced than ever that such is quite possible.

The longest thread ever seen on this blog was a combox on the latest article I've done on the issues dividing the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Unsurprisingly, over 50 of the comments were about the filioque. In his last comment therein, directed to me, the Orthodox theologian-in-training "Photios" Jones wrote (words between quotation marks are mine):

Mike,

"As my earlier filioque article implied, to say that the Father breathes forth the Spirit "as" Father of the Son entails that the Spirit is caused by the Father..."

Okay. I think we've agreed here before. The Father causes the Spirit as Father of a Son.

"...Father of the Son entails that the Spirit is caused by the Father just in case the Father both generates..."

Let me ask a few question here: Are you implying that generation is a necessary condition for Spiration? I would also like to know if the reverse is true: is spiration a necessary condition of generation given that the Spirit is also "Spirit of the Father?" Or perhaps, you are only wishing to state the "condition" simply as the taxis (trinitarian order) relationship of the Persons?

"and has a perichoretic relationship with the Son.."

Same thing: Is perichoresis (of Father and Son) a necessary condition for Spiration? This is where I have the biggest problem because the perichoresis is absolutely in common between Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It would seem that for Them to have the same perichoretic nature, that perichoresis is dependent on spiration instead. Are you placing a middle [natural] attribute between Father-Son and Spirit as follows:Father - Son ---perichoresis--- Holy Spirit?

Given what I take to be the only legitimate purpose in discussing the filioque ecumenically, Photios' questions are fair. Herein I shall do my best to answer them.

The generation of the Son and the spiration of the Holy Spirit by the Father, which are the primordial instances of ekporeusis, are necessary conditions of each other. The Father not only breathes forth the Spirit as Father of the Son; he begets the Son as the one who breathes forth the Spirit. But even though we may thus say that the Holy Spirit "proceeds" (procedit) from the Father and the Son "as from one principle" (Lyons 1274: tamquam ex uno principio), we may not say that the Son is begotten by the Father and the Holy Spirit, as if it could be said that the Son is the Son of the Holy Spirit as well as the Father. We may and should say, however, that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. This implies something about the order (taxis) of the Persons: the existence of the Spirit depends on that of the Son in a way in which the existence of the Son is not dependent on the Spirit. Although the existence of each is a necessary condition of that of the other, there's something more involved which would explain why the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son but the Son is not the Son of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

That something, I submit, is the perichoresis of the Persons: their mutual indwelling in love. That the Spirit is Spirit of the Father and the Son does not mean merely that it is only as Father of the Son that the Father breathes forth the Spirit; it also means that a necessary condition of the breathing forth of the Spirit is that there be a perichoretic, and thus "energetic," relationship between the Father and the Son. Some Latin theologians have suggested that the Spirit just is that energetic relationship between Father and Son; that, at any rate, is what some have meant by following Augustine's dictum that the Spirit is the "bond of love" between the Father and the Son. The difficulty with that is not so much with what it says as with what it doesn't say: it does not afford clear grounds for presenting the Spirit as hypostasis, not merely energeia. Of course we can and must say that the perichoresis of all the Persons, like their existence, is eternal and thus unalterable, so that the perichoresis of all the Persons is logically equivalent to the existence of all the Persons. But that, in turn, doesn't capture the difference between the ekporeusis of the Spirit and the begetting of the Son. The Cappodocian Fathers were indeed most reluctant even to allow speculation about the difference. So, Houston, we still have a problem.

What I offer as a tentative pointer to a solution is this: the difference in taxis I've described is accounted for by whatever-it-is that accounts for why the Spirit is Spirit of the Father and the Son but the Son is not the Son of the Father and the Holy Spirit. I do not profess to know the difference; and I suspect that, even if somebody knew it mystically or by some special revelation, they would not know how to state it and would find it almost blasphemous to try. Perhaps a metaphor of St. Maximus' would help: the Father speaks his thought by begetting the Word and breathing forth the Holy Spirit. The "breath" of God's self-expression thus has a certain order in which the Son comes before the Spirit, even though the former does not and cannot exist without the latter.

The filioque II: continued

I opened discussion of the filioque last Saturday with a rough proposal for harmonizing Eastern and Western approaches. Prof. Scott Carson was thereby moved to dedicate to me his own discussion of the issue, which is essentially an explication and defense of St. Anselm. Both essays are essential background for this post. So, let the unmotivated beware.

That said, I was intrigued Jonathan Prejean's comments on Scott's post. To avoid taxing my vast readership further, I sum up his point as follows.

The East's main objection to Anselm's approach is that it applies a notion of dialectical opposition to the sphere of "theology"—i.e., talk of God in himself—that is appropriate only when discussing the realm of "being", i.e., the created world of limited beings. Hence the traditional Byzantine insistence, evident especially in the influential sixth-century writer Pseudo-Dionysius, that God is "beyond being." But in the Western tradition, God is beyond being only in the sense that he is not one being among others, as if he fell under the ordinary categories of being. Being in that latter sense is what the scholastics called ens commune. God clearly is not "a" being like that. But God is not beyond being because God is Being Itself, ipsum esse subsistens, from whom all beings are derived. Ens commune is being by participation; Being Itself is not. So the question is whether that fact permits an Anselm to reason as he does.

Obviously I believe the answer is yes, and in fact I accept Anselm's argument. But I truly wonder whether arguments of that kind are helpful ecumenically. It's a "deucedly clever argument" indeed, but it raises broader issues that cannot be usefully discussed in the context of a particular doctrinal issue such as the filioque. So, I suggest that work continue along the lines I suggested in my first filioque post, which Photios Jones has been kind enough to do in the combox and at his own blog.

Beating the filioque horse II: a dedication

Dr. Scott Carson has dedicated to me an article on the filioque that centers on St. Anselm's De Processione Spiritu, written for the Greeks at the Council of Bari (1089), and on the modern logical notion of relative identity, shown to be wanting by comparison. I am stimulated as well as honored. Thank you, Scott.

Alas, since I've just put in a 14-hour day at work, I can't formulate my reply very well right now. More tomorrow.

Beating the filioque horse

I dedicate this essay to Fr. Alvin Kimel on the occasion of his ordination to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday, December 3, 2006. When he has time, he might even help correct it!

If you follow this blog at all, you're probably the sort of person who knows what the "filioque problem" is. If you're not, go here.
My interest in the topic is great for two reasons: getting it right would both contribute to our knowledge of God and aid the cause of Orthodox-Catholic unity.

If you know anything about horsemanship, you know that the cliché 'beating a dead horse' does not refer to a paroxysm of futile rage but rather to an attempt to get somewhere with a vehicle unsuited to the purpose. To get a horse to gallop, one sometimes must give its flanks a whack or two; if the horse is dead, that method won't work. But this horse is not dead: theologians continue to whack its flanks intermittently. Given how old the battle lines are, however, success would not mean a gallop; a leisurely walk would do nicely, perhaps even better.

Our approach must be accordingly modest, avoiding all polemics; for as the late, great scholar of Christian doctrine Jaroslav Pelikan said: "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 the thorough study of all the treatises--in Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, and various modern languages--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 (ex Patre Filioque),as the Latin Church teaches?" Save only, perhaps, for the topic of justification—a staple of Protestant-Catholic polemics—one is hard-pressed to find a theological topic on which more ink has been spilled to less constructive effect than the filioque. Beyond warning the unwary, the only justification for addressing it is to try to find a way to accommodate what each sides is, respectively, dogmatically committed to.

To that end, the first rule of discussion should be that any truth we can come up with on this topic will not add to our knowledge of God's inner life. There are far better means than academic theology for doing that—to the quite limited and indirect extent it can be done at all—and they are about living the Christian life to the full rather than disputation. What we can do by reasoning is to make more explicit and consistent what is already implicit in our dogmatic formulations of the deposit of faith. It's a matter of harmonizing our ways of talking, not of presuming, blasphemously, to do what is undoable. But even that modest goal would increase our knowledge of God by breaking down polemical battle lines and coming up with something that does justice to both sides' formulations. I've already set forth a bit about how; here I want to continue along that line.

In my brief earlier treatment, I argued that the filioque as defined by the Council of Lyons (1274), whereby the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son "as from one principle" (quasi uno principio) can be logically derived from (a) what both sides profess in common and (b) two additional premises I take to be unexceptionable: God is essentially hypostatic, and the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Such a result is opposed by many Orthodox on the ground that it confuses "economy" with "theology" in such a way as to violate the mutually-agreed doctrine of the "monarchy of the Father," i.e. that the Father is the "sole cause" (monos aitia) of the existence of the other two divine Persons. Thus, while the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son in terms of the "economy," i.e. what God does for us, that does not and indeed could not follow in terms of "theology," i.e., what God is in himself. The way round that objection is to make some distinctions both sides could accept consistently with their dogmas.

If one takes the doctrine of the monarchy of the Father in a modest sense, to mean that the existence of the Father alone is underived, and that of the other two persons is derived from the Father's, there is no dispute. The dispute arises over the question whether the Son has something to do with the eternal "coming forth" (ekporeusis) of the Spirit's existence, a mode of derivation that is ineffably distinct from the Son's "generation" by the Father. The West has tended to take as axiomatic that economy reveals theology, so that the Spirit's "sending" of the Son in the "economy" reveals by analogy something about the Son's role in the Spirit's eternal procession in "theology," which is inchoately expressed by Lyons' definition of the filioque. So the question then becomes whether the result the West is thus committed to—i.e. the "theological" filioque—is compatible with the monarchy of the Father taken in a stronger sense, to mean that the Father alone is the cause of the being of the other two persons. People who take the monarchy in that sense are what Cardinal Dulles terms "strict monopatrists."

If strict monopatrism is true, then the theological filioque is false; for the former entails that the Son has nothing whatsoever to do with the Spirit's coming forth from the Father. But most Orthodox theologians seem, at the least, reluctant to say that. Thus a good many grant an "eternal manifestation" of the Spirit from both Father and Son, such that in that sense the Holy Spirit can be said to proceed from the Father "through" the Son. On that point too, there is no dispute; and if both sides had been suitably modest, the filioque problem could have been solved right there. For if the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, then there is a sense, perfectly compatible with Lyons as well as with the monarchy, in which the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But the latter expression is vague, lending itself to other, arguably heterodox interpretations, such as the doctrine of the "dual procession" that seems to have been adopted by the Carolingians through their reading of Augustine. It has been agreed at least since Lyons that dual procession is out of bounds. So, in the final analysis, the dispute is really over whether the Spirit's eternal manifestation is somehow equivalent to his existence. If it is, then the theological filioque follows; if not, not.

The issue so framed hinges on the distinction between the divine "essence" and the divine "energies" from the Orthodox side ('DEE' for short) and the doctrine of divine simplicity on the Western side ('DDS' for short). Following the Palamite councils of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, most Orthodox insist that there is a "real" distinction between the essence and the energies, such that the Spirit's energetic manifestation through the Son does not logically entail the eternal procession of his being from the Son as well as the Father. Now if, by positing DEE that way, one urges that what-God-is does not necessitate what he does, there is a sense in which that is true and undisputed. What God has eternally decreed to do ad extra is in no way necessitated by what he is. On that the West should and does agree. But does it follow that what God eternally does ad intra is distinct in the same way from what he necessarily is? If so, then the theological filioque is false; if not, the question remains logically open.

Recall my earlier claim that God is "essentially hypostatic." That means that the Father's causing of the Son and the Spirit is necessary, not contingent: it's not as though the Father might have chosen not to generate the Son and breathe forth the Spirit; it is of the divine essence that he do so. On that, I take it, the Orthodox agree. The existence of the Son and the Spirit is accordingly logically equivalent to that of the Father: just as the Son and the Spirit exist only if the Father exists, so too does the Father exist only if the Son and the Spirit do. You get one of them if and only if you get all three. The question facing us at this stage of inquiry is similar: is the eternal but energetic manifestation of the Spirit ad intra logically equivalent to his existence? If DDS, the answer is yes and the theological filioque follows; if DEE, the answer would seem to be no, and the theological filioque consequently false.

I said the answer "would seem" to be no. Strict monopatrists have long taken that ball and run with it, which is why, e.g., Mark of Ephesus repudiated the reunion formula of Florence, a council where he was the chief Orthodox champion, and eventually induced the Orthodox world as a whole to do so. But things are not what they seem. As is so often the case, all depends on how terms are used.

If one takes the term 'divine essence' in DEE to mean what-God-is apart from what he does, then Mark's position follows almost trivially. What God does is, in certain respects, free, so that what he does is not necessitated by what he is; by the same token, what he is is not even communicated by what he does. That is why, in this kind of thinking, "theology" cannot be inferred from "economy." In that way, the essence of A is "really" distinct from A's manifestations and thus not logically equivalent to any of them. But DEE doesn't do the work that strict monopatrists require of it here.

For God is not just essentially hypostatic; God is essentially perichoretic too. The term perichoresis means 'mutually inhering' or 'mutually indwelling'; and as the Apostle John wrote, God is love. The love that is God ad intra consists precisely in how the Persons mutually inhere or indwell, which is something our minds can perceive only dimly and indirectly, by analogy, even as we are called to participate in it as children of God. That the Persons mutually indwell in love is, accordingly, not free: it is of the essence of God that they do so. What is free is only how they do so, since God is love and love, as distinct from desire or affection, is free. But if God is necessarily and thus essentially perichoretic in the way indicated, then we get the Spirit's eternal manifestation ad intra from the Father through the Son just in case we get the Spirit's existence, and vice-versa. The two are logically equivalent. From that, it follows that whatever holds necessarily of the Spirit's eternal manifestation ad intra holds of his eternal procession. It follows in turn that there is a theological filioque in a certain sense: it is the Spirit's eternal existence, not just his eternal manfestation, that proceeds from the Father through the Son, and therefore from the Father and the Son.

The filioque in that sense is not compatible with strict monopatrism, and thus is unacceptable to some Orthodox. Yet it's also a weaker filioque than the majority of Western theologians want and take for granted. But as far as I can tell, it's perfectly compatible with what each side is committed to dogmatically. Even if my way of framing it is not the best we can hope for, that sort of result is the best we can hope for. And I believe getting agreement on it is attainable.