St Vladimirs Theological Quarterly 46 2 (2002) 209-68

THE STATIONS OF THE FILIOQUE

Robert M. Haddad

Whether we like it or not, the question of the procession of

the Holy Spirit has been the sole dogmatic grounds for the
separation of East and West.
—Vladimir Lossky1
I would modify Lossky s dictum by insisting that the long and bit-
ter dispute over the filioque, although fundamentally a doctrinal
controversy, was born amidst secular political turmoil and thereaf-
ter could rarely free itself of mundane entanglement. Nor would it
be long before the filioque ramified into the ecclesiological realm
and became inextricably bound to the question of papal primacy.
And while most of the secular political turmoil relevant to the
filioque has receded in our own day, the doctrinal and ecclesiological
issues remain unresolved. What follows is an attempt to survey the
evolution of the filioque controversy in its political and ecclesio-
logical context.

Background
In the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, there emerged in East
and West two distinct and not easily reconcilable ecclesiologies.
The reasons for this are not difficult to fathom: the defacto division
of the Roman Empire, since the end of the third century, into East-
ern and Western segments, each under its own emperor; the con-
struction of a second imperial capital by Constantine in the early
fourth century; renewal of the Germanic assaults at the start of the
1 Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, eds. John H. Erickson and
Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974), 71.
2 An earlier version of this article was presented at The Sixtieth Meeting of the North
American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, Saint Vladimir's Orthodox
Theological Seminary, Crestwood, NY; May 30, 2001.

209
210 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

fifth century and the consequent end of the Western imperial line
in 476. Although the Eastern Empire survived and, under Justin-
ian (527-65), even sought to reunite Latin West and Greek East,
the political unity of the empire had been irretrievably lost. The
loss of political unity led inevitably to a disintegration of cultural
and linguistic affinities, a development manifest in the erosion of
the classical tradition in the much-beleaguered West.
Although political separation nurtured ecclesial division, the
roots of discord had been apparent virtually from the beginning of
Church history. The many churches of apostolic foundation in the
East encouraged a sense of the essential equality of all bishops. In
the West, on the other hand, the uniqueness of Rome as an apos-
tolic see, with its jurisdiction over vast territories, inclined the bish-
ops of Rome to interpret their primacy among equals, conceded to
them by the East, in more exclusivist and universal terms. This ten-
dency grew stronger as the German onslaught brought the West
the dubious advantage of political plurality, in fact a plurality of
warring Germanic chiefs. Under circumstances often approaching
political anarchy, the see of Rome represented the only institution
commanding universal subscription in the West, the sole surviving
principle of authority and stability in the spiritual, intellectual and
political life of Europe. The popes' exercise of power could not
have been confined to the spiritual realm even if they had so willed
it. That God had granted the bishop of Rome special authority
over the whole Church was early and clearly expressed by Pope Leo
the Great (440-61) and Pope Gelasius I (492-96) in the fifth cen-
tury.3 Political fortunes had cast the bishop of Rome into a role that
the eastern bishops, the patriarch of Constantinople not excluded,
3 A sermon delivered by Leo around 450 leaves little doubt about his exalted sense of
the prerogatives of the Petrine office^A translation may be found in Charles T.
Davis, ed., The Eagle, the Crescent and the Cross, vol. 1 o{ Sources of Medieval History
C.250-C.1000, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), 50-52. The
letter of Gelasius to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasios I in 494, berating him for
supporting Monophysitism, portrays the pope as possessing ultimate authority over
Church and state. A translation may be found in Sidney Z. Ehler and John Morrall,
eds. Church and State through the Centuries (Westminster, MD: Newman Press,
1959), 10-11.
The Stations of the Filioque 211

had never been called upon to play. Because in the East there
existed an emperor to exercise the broad political authority so con-
spicuously absent in the West, the Eastern Church continued more
or less confined to the spiritual realm, continued to assume as the
natural order of things a spiritual authority comprising a collégial-
ity of bishops, and a more or less distinct political authority.
Rome, it must be said, enjoyed the virtue of consistency in
asserting its claim to universal jurisdiction, whereas the East, while
never accepting Romes presumption, failed to reject it formally
and unequivocally until the ninth century. Before that time, the
East viewed Rome as a distant reality whose claims were unenforce-
able in the East and, in the interests of peace and convenience,
could be ignored. The East failed to see that, for Rome, the right
of jurisdiction and the right to define doctrine were becoming
inseparable.

The Council of Toledo

The third Council of Toledo (598) marks the introduction of the
Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (henceforth referred to simply
as the "Creed") into the Latin Eucharistie liturgy, as well as the first
intrusion, albeit informal, of the filioque into that Creed. It was at
Toledo that King Reccared of the Visigoths ordered "that in all the
churches of Spain and Gaul the symbol of the council of Constan-
tinople ... shall be recited according to the use of the Eastern
churches ..." He added, however, that "we must preach that [the
Holy Spirit] proceeds from the Father and the Son {filioque) and is
of one substance with the Father and the Son..." The aim of these
affirmations, Reccared explained, was "to confirm the recent con-
version of our people." The council echoed Reccared in phrasing
its third anathema: "Whoever does not believe in the Holy Spirit,
4 Quoted in J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (New York: D. McKay Co.,
1972), 351.
5 Italics are mine.
6 Quoted in Kelly, 361.
7 Quoted in ibid., 351-52.
212 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

or does not believe that He proceeds from the Father and the Son,
and denies that He is coeternal and coequal with the Father and the
Son, let him be anathema."8
Several points bear emphasis. First, the conversion noted by
Reccared refers, of course, to the Visigoths' abandonment of
Arianism in favor of the Orthodox-Catholic faith. Second, it was
believed that rejection ofthat potent heresy would be highlighted
by adoption and recitation of the Creed which, after all, owed its
origins to the same ecumenical council that had condemned
Arianism. In addition, the stress on the filioque (although its
formal interpolation into the Creed came long after the Council of
Toledo9) made clear the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from
the Son as well as the Father, and served as vibrant antithesis to the
Arian claim that the Son was inferior to the Father. The Visigoth
rejection of Arianism, however, represented a political as well as a
religious exercise. For the Visigoths' reconciliation to the Church
also implied political reconciliation to Latin Christendom or, in
any case, the support or neutrality of the Church in any confronta-
tion between the Visigoths and other Latin political powers. Nei-
ther Latin Church nor states were unaware of this.
Reccared s words also make it clear that the Latins viewed the
introduction of the Creed, even with the filioque^ as emulation
rather than provocation of the East. It is at least conceivable that
had not the West eventually made the filioque omnipresent by
mandating use of the interpolated Creed in the Eucharistie liturgy,
the issue of the Spirit's procession from the Son would have been
confined to the realm of legitimate if, from the East's point of view,
irregular theologizing. Finally, the Latins came by the Creed and
the filioque honestly—by the Creed because this unimpeachable
product of two ecumenical councils had been confirmed by subse-
quent ecumenical councils, by the filioque because of its earlier
endorsement by major Latin theologians. In fact, "the weight of ...
Western theology as a whole was on the side of the filioque "l0

8 Quoted in ibid., 362.

9 Below, 223; see also Kelly, 362.
The Stations of the Filioque 213

Tertullian (d. 230?) had spoken of "the Spirit from God and the
Son." Hilary of Poitiers (d. 367) had indicated the Holy Spirit as
"proceeding from Father and Son."11
For Augustine (d. 430), Scripture itself teaches thefilioquewhen
it refers to the Spirit as both the Spirit of the Son and the Spirit of
the Father. That being the case, the Spirit must proceed from Son
as well as Father.12 The Bishop of Hippo's teaching on the Trinity,
in contrast to that of the Cappadocian Fathers in the East, had as its
starting point not the idea of the Father as the source of the other
two Persons but, rather, the notion of one Godhead which in its
essence is Trinity. In some primordial sense, Augustine conceded, it
may be said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, since it was the
Father who endowed the Son with the capacity to produce the
Spirit. But it was a cardinal Augustinian premise that whatever can
be predicated of one of the Persons must also be predicated of
the other two.13 Photios (820-891) would later protest that "a
common procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son," in
the context of such a premise, would have the Spirit "share in his
own procession."14 A churlish historian might suggest further that
the Augustinian teaching would make it possible for the Father to
proceed from the Son and Spirit, or the Son from the Father and
Spirit.
While "Augustine seems to try to explain the Trinity as a meta-
physical problem,"15 the Cappadocians were compelled to write of
10 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), vol. 2 of The Chris-
tian Tradition: A History ofthe Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1974), 188.
11 Quoted in ibid. It is to be noted, however, that Ritschl considers Tertullian "not re-
ally a witness for laterfilioquism"(Dietrich Ritschl, "Historical development and
implications of thefilioquecontroversy,n in Spirit ofGod, Spirit ofChrist: Ecumeni-
cal Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, ed. Lukos Vischer [London: SPCK,
1981], 59.)
12 See Pelikan's discussion (Pelikan, 2, 188-90).
13 Kelly, 359.
14 Photius, On the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery
(Studion Publishers, 1983), 72; also see below, 232.
15 Theodore Stylianopoulos, "The Filioque: Dogma, Theologoumenon or Error," in
214 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

the Trinity while confronting the challenge of Arianism, and so

argued for "the unity and distinctiveness of the persons of the
triune God."16 In contrast to Augustines quest for unity in the
Trinity's essence, the Cappadocians sought to ensure unity by iden-
tifying the Father as the sole cause within the Trinity—hence, the
monarchy of the Father. Much later, Photios would argue that "if
one admits of two causes in the ... Trinity, where then is the much
hymned and God-befitting majesty of the monarchy?" But for
Photios and the East, the Father is cause not according to his nature
or essence, which is common to all three persons (hypostases) of
the Trinity, but according to his hypostasis as Father.17 While it is
perhaps admissible to speak of the Spirit proceeding from the
Father through the Son (the Son seen not as cause but as agent of the
Father), the Father alone is the source of the Spirits procession.18
As for those Eastern Fathers who spoke of the double procession,
notably in dealing with the biblical allusion to the Spirit as the
"Spirit of the Son," the East, as we shall note, generally interpreted
this to refer to the temporal mission of the Spirit and not to the
Spirits eternal procession.19 Such a distinction was usually absent
in the Augustinian West. The same aforecited historian might here
suggest that the monarchy of the Father, within a Godhead that is
one in essence, introduces a certain inequality among the three per-
sons. The East s position, like that of the West, was not without its
problematic.
For Photios and the East, then, the double procession violates
the Trinity's unity under the monarchy of the Father and flouts the
rational doctrine that there can be only one principle in the God-
head. For Augustine, the unity of the Trinity lies in its essence,
wherein the Holy Spirit serves as communion between the Father
and the Son. He is the "Spirit of the Father" but also the "Spirit of

Spirit of Truth: Ecumenical Perspectives on the Holy Spirit, eds. Theodore Styliano-
poulos and S. Mark Heim (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, MA, 1986), 29.
16 Ibid., 30.
17 Photius, Mystagogy, 75.
18 Kelly, 359-60.
19 Below, 239-40, 248-49, 252-54.
The Stations of the Filioque 215

the Son."20 From the Augustinian perspective, then, it is denial of

the double procession that violates the unity of the Trinity. Unfor-
tunately for relations between East and West, Augustine's teaching
became universally accepted in Latin Christendom in the fifth and
sixth centuries and has never been abandoned.21
Augustine probably never intended to advance the double pro-
cession as dogma, much less add it to the Creed, but by the time of
the Council of Toledo the filioque had become so firmly rooted in
the Latin West that its authority and authenticity there went virtu-
ally unquestioned. The West had come to view the filioque as the
patrimony of the Church universal. The entrenchment of the
filioque also owed much to its appearance in the widely dissemi-
nated creed erroneously attributed to Athanasios and bearing his
name.22 Before and after the Council of Toledo, mutual incompre-
hension between East and West deepened as, in general, the Latins
lost their knowledge of Greek, and the Greeks abandoned Latin.
Because so few translations existed, Latins and Greeks tended to
read and to cite only the Fathers of their own tradition. An East
unable to approach Augustine, and a West ill equipped to probe
the Cappadocians, made truly informed dialogue almost impossi-
ble.23

From Toledo to the Iconoclastìe Controversy

The practice of reciting the Creed in the Eucharistie liturgy crossed
from Spain over the Pyrenees as far as the Rhone, which is to say
into those territories held by the Visigoths at the time of the Coun-
cil of Toledo, but for 200 years thereafter seems to have penetrated
no further into continental Europe. It would appear, however, that
singing the Creed at mass became well established in Ireland by
the eighth century, and had passed from there to England; the
20 Pelikan, 2, 196.
21 Kelly, 359.
22 Richard Haugh, Photiusandthe Carolinians: the Trinitarian Controversy (Belmont,
MA: Nordland Publishing Co., 1975), 26-27, 160 et passim.
23 Pelikan, 2, 180.
216 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

profession of faith published by the Synod of Hatfield in 680, for

example, explicitly affirms the double procession. Yet in the
same year, a synod convoked in Rome by Pope Agatho (678-81)
produced a letter, subsequently sent in the popes name to the
Byzantine Emperor Constantine IV (668-85), which studiously
omitted any reference to the filioque. Agatho probably sought
thereby to escape the fate of Pope Martin I (649-55) whose
Lateran Council in 649 had solemnly condemned the Mono-
thelitism then championed by the Emperor Constans II (641-68).
In response to Martin s courageous defense of orthodoxy, Byzan-
tium accused the pope of teaching the filioque. For this, but much
the more for his Lateran Council, Martin was arrested at the
instance of the emperor in 649, carted off to Constantinople, tried
before the senate on charges of high treason and exiled to the Cri-
mea where the unhappy pontiff died soon after. The conciliatory
note sounded by the Greek theologian, Máximos the Confessor (d.
662), who, despite his anxiety that the filioque compromised the
monarchy of the Father, sought to interpret the filioque as an
attempt "to express the Spirit s going forth through the Son" went
unheard. His words in staunch opposition to Monothelite chris-
tology, on the other hand, were heard so clearly that they earned the
Confessor martyrdom at the hands of Constans II. Mono-
thelitism, that unfortunate compromise between Chalcedonian
and Monophysite christology, which had pitted the sporadically
Monothelite see of Constantinople against the almost consistently

24 It is noteworthy that Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek from Asia Minor, presided over
the Council of Hatfield. While in Rome, he had been asked by Pope Vitalian (657-
72) to go to England as Archbishop of Canterbury to organize the Anglo- Saxon
church. The pope took the precaution of dispatching with Theodore an African
theologian named Hadrian "to watch that he did not introduce ... any Greek cus-
toms" (this quotation from Bede is cited in Haugh, 31, n. 25). That Theodore at
least tacitly sanctioned thefilioque testifies not only to Hadrian's policing but also to
the deep roots the interpolation had already struck in England (ibid., 30-31).
25 Kelly, 360.
26 Stylianopoulos, "The Filioque," Spirit of Truth, 40; Haugh, 32-33.
27 David Knowles with Dimitri Obolensky, The Middle Ages, vol. 2 of The Christian
Centuries, 5 vols, in Fr. original (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 83.
The Stations of the Filioque 217

Chalcedonian see of Rome, was finally laid to rest by the sixth ecu-
menical council in 681—a triumph for Rome and orthodoxy.
The rift between East and West widened in the seventh century,
not merely as a consequence of the Monothelite controversy, but
also as a result of the Islamic conquests and the movement of Avars
and Slavs. The Islamic conquests, by submerging the patriarchates
ofAntioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, and initiating the process by
which the vast majority of their faithful would rally to the faith of
the Arabian Prophet, enhanced the already formidable de facto
power of the see of Constantinople. Styling himself, from the late
sixth century onward, the ecumenical patriarch, the bishop of Con-
stantinople emerged, in wake of the Muslim advance, uncontested
leader of Greek Christendom, wielding in ecclesiastical gover-
nance, though hardly in the realm of doctrinal definition, an
authority comparable to that exercised by Rome. Although there
persisted in the East a sense of the conciliar nature of the Church,
there is no denying that the imperial patriarch became rather more
than equal to his brother bishops. Little ambiguity, however,
hedged the question of authority in the West where there existed
only one apostolic see, with authority over a huge area. In the
minds of the pontiffs and their flock, Rome came to be regarded as
the apostolic see, and the Church less a conciliar entity than a mon-
archy—a papal monarchy.

The Islamic conquests of the southern, and parts of the eastern

and western, shores of the Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth
centuries led inevitably to the expansion of Muslim naval power
into the Mediterranean. The erstwhile Roman maritime highway
may not have been quite transformed into Henri Pirenne s "Mus-
lim lake,"28 but maritime contact between Christian East and West
became difficult and often dangerous. The seventh century also
witnessed the movements of the Avars and Slavs into the Balkan
Peninsula, resulting in the eclipse of Christianity there and the
28 Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York: Meridian Books, 1957),
147-85.
218 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

creation of a pagan wall severely inhibiting land communication

between Greek East and Latin West.
Let us now pause to consider how thoroughly the seventh and
eighth centuries had transformed the old Roman Empire. Gone
was the Christian, albeit largely Nestorian and Monophysite,
Fertile Crescent, gone too all of mainly Monophysite Egypt and
much of largely Monophysite Armenia, as well as Donatist-ridden
North Africa. Most of the Balkan Peninsula lay outside effective
Byzantine control, and so would remain throughout much of the
seventh and eighth centuries, its Christian communities adrift in
the pagan tide. As the Mediterranean base of Latin Christendom
disintegrated in face of Muslim dominance in mare nostrum, the
Latins were to begin the long and arduous task of reconstruction
on the only territory left to them—the continental European land
mass. In the process, the Germanic Franks would emerge as chief
actors, and this with enormous implications for the question of the
filioque. For its part, the Byzantine Empire, sandwiched between
Muslims in the Middle East and pagans in the Balkans and enjoy-
ing but limited contact with the Latin West, would constitute
Christendoms shield against further Muslim penetration, while
simultaneously laboring to bring the pagan Slavs into the Byz-
antine orbit. The Eastern Empire would evolve the while into a
Greek empire, claiming the political universality of the old Roman
Imperium but, as time passed, less and less able to make good that
claim in the Latin West and not at all in those lands seized and, in
greater part to this day, retained by Islam.

The Iconoclastic Controversy

In light of their different historical evolutions, their growing physi-
cal and cultural estrangement, and their conflicting claims in the
realm of doctrine and ecclesiology, open confrontation between
the First and Second Rome was scarcely to be avoided. It came as
the turmoil of the seventh century yielded to that of the eighth and
ninth, now in the form of the Iconoclastic Controversy. The pre-
emptive attitude of the iconoclast emperors resembled that which
The Stations of the Filioque 219

had governed their Monothelite predecessors in the seventh cen-

tury with such dangerous repercussions on relations between the
East and West. "I am emperor and priest," wrote the iconoclast
Emperor Leo III (717-741) to Pope Gregory II (715-731). "I too
am a son of the Church," declared Leo V (813-20), another impe-
rial iconoclast, to bishops of the ecumenical see in 814, "and as
mediator I shall listen to both parties and after a comparison of the
two I shall determine the truth." During the more than one hun-
dred years of the Iconoclastic Controversy (726-843), as during
the Monothelite dispute, Rome held fast to orthodoxy while firmly
denouncing the views of the iconoclast emperors who were still, at
least nominally, the temporal sovereigns of the popes. When Pope
Gregory II (715-31) received from Leo III, the imperial instigator
of iconoclastic policy, the emperor s edict condemning the images,
the pope convoked a council in Rome, which denounced Leo s dik-
tat. Despite imperial warnings, Gregory urged all Christians to
resist the emperor s heretical pronouncement, thereby precipitat-
ing a schism between Rome and Constantinople that lasted from
726 to 787. The iconoclast emperors moved with heavy hand.
Around 732, Leo III confiscated the papal estates in Calabria and
Sicily and removed the two provinces from Romes jurisdiction.
The emperor also detached from Rome and placed under Constan-
tinople the whole of Greece and most of the Balkan Peninsula.
Not surprisingly, the era of the Photian Schism would feature a
determined effort on the part of Rome to recover its lost posses-
sions. Indeed, the Photian Schism, which prefigured the Schism of
1054 and, indeed, the Great Schism itself, is traceable to the Icono-
clastic Controversy.
Amid the growing alienation between iconodule Rome and
iconoclast Byzantium came the conquest of Byzantine Ravenna by
the Lombards in 751. This demonstration of Byzantium s incapac-
ity to defend its Italian enclaves also revealed Rome's increased vul-
nerability and turned Pope Stephan II (752-57) to alliance with
29 Quoted in Knowles and Obolensky, 87.
30 Ibid., 97, 108-109.
220 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

the Frankish King Pippin (751-68), a precursor to the historically

decisive papal alliance with Charlemagne. Pippins defeat of the
Lombards and his alliance with the papacy represented a seismic
shift in political relations.31 Early indication of the impending
struggle between Greek East and Latin West came at the Council of
Gentilly in 767, convened and attended by Pippin to discuss icon-
oclasm and the return of Ravenna to Byzantium. After Latin dele-
gates took their Greek colleagues to task for the iconoclastic poli-
cies being pursued by Emperor Constantine V (741-75), the
Easterners reproached the Latins for their interpolation of the
filioque.32 Following the conclusion of the Franko-papal alliance,
Rome would never succeed in extricating itself from the question
of the filioque.

The Carolingians
Upon Pippins death in 768, his son and successor, Charlemagne
(768-814), missed no opportunity to flaunt the filioque before the
scandalized East, while doing his utmost to persuade Rome to pro-
vide him support. Pope Hadrian I (772-95) had sent to Charle-
magne the acts of the seventh ecumenical council, held in Nicaea in
787. Choosing to ignore the fact that the main work of the council
had been to uphold the iconodule position he himself had long and
loudly espoused, Charlemagne reacted by ordering his theologians
to prepare a list of objections to the acts of the council. Heading the
list was the assertion "That Tarasius33 is not correct in professing
that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father and the Son,
according to thefaith oftheNicene Creed, but that he proceeds from
the Father through the Son." This elicited from Pope Hadrian
the rebuke that "Tarasius has not pronounced this dogma by him-
self but he has confessed it by the doctrine of the Holy Fathers,"
which accords perfectly with the teaching of Rome. Hadrian
31 Ibid., 61.
32 Kelly, 363.
33 Patriarch of Constantinople (784-806).
34 Quoted in Haugh, 46. Italics are mine.
35 Quoted in ibid., 47.
 The Stations of the Filioque 221

warned that "should anyone say he differs from the Creed of the
[seventh] Council, he risks differing with the Creed of the [first]
Six Holy Councils, since these Fathers [at the seventh Council]
spoke not according to their own opinions but according to the holy
definitions previously laid down." Charlemagne once more turned
to his theologians, this time commissioning them to provide a full
reply to the acts of the seventh council and to Hadrians defense of
them. So was spawned the monumental Libri Carolini, probably
composed between 791 and 794, in the main by Theodolphus of
Orleans. Theodolphus, not incidentally, had come to Charlemagne's
court from Spain, girded by the interpolated Creed.
The Libri Carolini show that, thefilioqueapart, Western theolo-
gians shared the antipathy towards doctrinal innovation so charac-
teristic of Eastern theology particularly during and after the Icono-
clastic Controversy. Departing from a strict iconodule position,
the Libri Carolini based their opposition to what they imagined to
be Eastern teaching about the "adoration" of icons on their rejec-
tion of "all novelties of phraseology and all foolish inventions of
new ways of speaking."37 "We do not smash [images] with the
[iconoclasts], nor adore them with the [iconodules]."38 Even the
filioque had to be defended as a teaching that had been "most
diligently ventilated by the holy fathers," but had been "lying
neglected for a long time," so that it appeared to be new.39 It was
not the Western, but the Eastern, Church which, by separating
itself from Rome, was "attempting something novel and singu-
lar."40 The authors of the Libri Carolini simply assume that "it is
rightly and customarily believed that the Holy Spirit proceeds
from the Father and the Son"41 and go on to assert that procession
a
through the Son" is not only imprecise but reduces the Spirit to a
creature.42 The Libri Carolini also have resort to the Augustinian
36 Quoted in ibid., 47-48.
37 Quoted in Pelikan, 2, 173.
38 Quoted in ibid., 176.
39 Quoted in ibid., 173.
40 Quoted in ibid., 173.
41 Quoted in Haugh, 49.
222 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

argument that since the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, he must
proceed from the Son.43 The Latins also level against the Greeks a
charge analogous to one which the Greeks will come to use against
the Latins: "through the Son," the Latins claimed, was absent
from the Creed because the expression was not authorized.44 The
Carolingian theologians seem oblivious of the fact that neither was
uvefilioqueauthorized. Indeed, their insistence that "all verbal novel-
ties be avoided [in] ... matters which the Holy and Ecumenical
Synods have treated in the Creed"45 strongly suggests that the
authors of the Libri Carolini believed that the original Creed con-
tained nie filioque.
Armed with the Libri Carolini, the quite unlettered Charle-
magne protested to Pope Hadrian in 794 the pontiff s subscription
to the Creed professed by the Council of Nicaea in 787. Charle-
magne openly rebuked Hadrian for endorsing the doctrine "that
the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father and the Son, accord-
ing to the faith of the Nicene symbol, but from the Father through
the Son."46 Hadrian replied in the same year that the Creed con-
firmed by second Nicaea was consistent with the teaching of many
ancient fathers and with the practice of the Church of Rome
itself.47 Hadrians protestations notwithstanding, Charlemagne
strenuously pursued his advocacy of the filioque.
If at Toledo the Creed, embellished by the filioque, had been
regarded as the answer to Arianism, the same embellished Creed
now emerged as the Frankish rebuttal to the Adoptionism that
seems to have gripped much of Spain in the late eighth century.48
Employment of the filioque as a weapon against both Arianism and
Adoptionism bespeaks a purity of purpose on the part of the Cath-
olic parties involved, particularly because in the West, outside

42 Ibid., 50.
43 Ibid., 51.
44 Ibid., 50.
45 Quoted in ibid., 52
46 Quoted in Kelly, 364.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 354-57; Pelikan, 2, 185-86.
The Stations of the Filioque 223

Rome, the unilateral amendment of the Creed was hardly recog-

nized as amendment. The danger posed by Adoptionism may
indeed have spurred Charlemagne into interjecting the altered
Creed into his mass, but he, like Pippin before him, was also moved
by the need to reduce the chaotic liturgical diversity prevailing in
the Frankish realm. Given the lamentable state of education, more-
over, memorization of the Lord s Prayer and the Creed imparted to
the faithful some modicum of knowledge, albeit highly special-
ized.49 Charlemagne, however, did not lack a political rationale for
his theological and liturgical reforms.

The year 794 witnessed the anti-Adoptionist Synod of Frankfurt-

on-Main, which, in the presence of Charlemagne, vigorously affirmed
niefilioqueand approved the Libri Carolini. There followed, in 796 or
797, the Synod of Fréjus, at which Paulinus of Aquileia insisted that
interpolation of thefilioquewas needed "on account of those heretics
who whisper that the Holy Spirit is of the Father alone."50 Those who
had introduced nie filioque were not to be blamed "as if they had
added or subtracted something from the faith of the 318 [Nicene]
Fathers. They did not think contrary to the intentions of the Fathers,
but rather strove to supplement their pure understanding with a
sound usage."51 At Fréjus, two centuries after Toledo, Paulinus "set
down what appears to be the earliest documentation for the Western
recension of the Nicene Creed."52 We are also indebted to Paulinus for
developing a theology of interpolation, according to which something
that contradicts neither the meaning of the Creed nor the intentions
of the Fathers may be legitimately added to the Creed. Interpolation of
niefilioquewas thus no less justified than were the alterations to the
Creed of Nicaea made by the Council of Constantinople in 381. 53
The authority carried by the Councils of Frankfurt and Fréjus ensured
that, thenceforward, tkefilioquewould not be omitted from the Creed
49 Ibid.; Kelly, 422-23.
50 Ibid., 364.
51 Quoted in Haugh, 57.
52 Pelikan, 2, 184.
53 Haugh, 56.
224 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

in the liturgy celebrated in the royal chapel at Aachen and throughout

the Frankish domain.
Charlemagne s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope
Leo III (795-816), "a mediocrity of equivocal repute,"54 in Rome
on Christmas day in the year 800—this while an emperor with
a more antique claim to the title dwelled still in Constantinople—
could only aggravate the political rivalry between West and East
and exacerbate relations between Rome and Constantinople. By
championing the filioque and condemning the iconoclasm that
periodically tainted the Byzantine imperium and Church, Charle-
magne could reinforce his imperial pretensions by reference to his
own impeccable orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Charlemagne remained
bent upon foisting the interpolation on a reluctant papacy.
When, in 808, Latin monks on the Mount of Olives chanted the
filioque, they heard themselves denounced as heretics by their
Greek brethren. The monks straightway addressed a letter to Leo
III, asking guidance and pointing out that it was in Charlemagne's
chapel that they hadfirstheard thefilioquesung.55 The pope s reply
to the monks is to be found in his letter to "all the Churches of the
East," an epistle calculated to soothe Charlemagne and give offense
to Constantinople. It begins with the words "we are sending you
this Creed of the Orthodox Faith so that you and everyone may
hold the correct and inviolate faith according to the Holy Roman
Catholic and Apostolic Church."56 A salient feature of this "correct
and inviolate faith," was the filioque. Unlike earlier and many later
popes, Leo failed to distinguish between the "truth" oï the filioque
and the legitimacy of adding it to the Creed, and this could only
have emboldened the filioque 's Carolingian sponsors. The pope
forwarded the documents relevant to the Jerusalem controversy to
the Frankish emperor who, by this time, had arrogated unto him-
self the role of protector of Christians in the Holy Land.57
It was in response to the events in Jerusalem, and to Leo's reac-
54 Knowles and Obolensky, 62.
55 A translation of the monks' letter is found in Haugh, 64-67.
56 Ibid., 68
57 Ibid., 63.
The Stations of the Filioque 225

tion to them, that Charlemagne commissioned Theodolphus of

Orleans to produce a defense of"the filioque. His treatise, DeSpiritu
sancto, a compilation of patristic quotations apparently supporting
the filioque, made its appearance in 809. In 809-810, Charlemagne
convoked the Council of Aachen to affirm the filioque, specifically
against the East. The treatise by Theodolphus, with its thoroughly
Augustinian trinitarianism, was apparently read and accepted at
the council and sanctioned by Charlemagne.58 After Aachen, the
Carolingians entertained no doubt of either the theological accu-
racy of the filioque or the legitimacy of its interpolation into the
Creed.
Some mention should be made here of Libellus de Processione
Spiritus Sancii, a work of uncertain authorship, which appeared
sometime between 800 and 809, because the treatise seems to have
introduced the novel notion that the Council of Constantinople
(553) actually professed the filioque. At the first session ofthat
council, after all, the Fathers had declared their acceptance of the
four preceding ecumenical councils. Since the third of them, the
Council of Ephesos (431), had approved the letter of Cyril of Alex-
andria (d. 444), which stated that the Spirit is poured forth from
the Son, it follows that the Council of Constantinople had sanc-
tioned the filioque.^
After the Council of Aachen, Charlemagne sought the pope's
blessing upon the councils unqualified endorsement of the filioque
and its interpolation into the Creed. The emperor designated the
abbot Smaragdus (d. 840) to write a letter to Pope Leo III, intro-
ducing the subject. Citing the usual biblical and patristic argu-
ments, the abbot offered a defense of the double procession.60 A
meeting in 810 between Pope Leo III and three representatives of
Charlemagne, led by Smaragdus, was devoted mainly to discussion
of the legitimacy of including the filioque in the Creed. In what
amounted to a debate, Leo, pressed by the Carolingian delegation,
58 On Theodolphus' treatise, see ibid., 48, 69-71; Pelikan, 2, 187.
59 On the Libellus, see Haugh, 72-77.
60 Haugh (80) offers a translation of excerpts of the letter.
226 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

went so far as to concede that anyone who understands the filioque,

and understanding it rejects it, cannot be saved.61 Winning Leos
endorsement of the theology of the double procession was not dif-
ficult, for since Toledo the papacy had generally confessed the
filioque. But over the same period the papacy had resolutely refused
to parade it as dogma before the face of the East, or to agree to its
formal addition to the Creed. Leo, then, not only rejected interpo-
lation of the filioque but left the three emissaries with the clear
impression that he did not even favor recitation of the Creed at
mass, with or without the filioque. "Did you not give permission
for singing this Creed in the Church?" asked the delegation. "I gave
permission for the singing of the Creed but not for the adding, sub-
tracting or altering of the Creed while it is s u n g . . . For we do not
sing it [in Rome] but read the Creed and in reading it we teach [it].
Nor do we presume in our reading or teaching to add anything to the
Creed by insertion . . . "62
Leo clearly upheld the orthodoxy of the filioque but had no
intention of sanctioning its formal inclusion in the Creed. Indeed,
he sought to dispel controversy by entirely eliminating the interpo-
lated Creed from the Carolingian mass. He recommended, "that
gradually in the Palace [at Aachen] the custom of singing the Creed
can be dispensed with because it is not sung in our Holy Church...
If you will dispense with it, all will dispense with it. And so, per-
haps, . . . both things [the Creed and the filioque] could be dis-
pensed with."63 There can be no doubt, however, that both Leo
and the Carolingian delegation believed that the bishop of Rome
possessed the ultimate authority to declare the filioque, as well as
its interpolation into the Creed, valid or invalid for the whole
Church.64 Charlemagne, of course, ignored Leo s recommenda-
tions; by the dawn of the ninth century, after all, the filioque had
won virtually all of Western Christendom, including France,
Spain, Germany and northern Italy.
61 Ibid., 82. A translation of Smaragdus* notes on the meeting is found in ibid., 81-88.
62 Quoted in ibid., 87; the italics are Haugh's.
63 Quoted in ibid., 88; see also Kelly, 356-57, 365-66.
64 Pelikan, 2, 187.
The Stations of the Filioque 227

Rome, probably in deference to Eastern sensibilities, continued

to decline tampering with the Creed. Indeed, more than two hun-
dred years would pass before a Western emperor found a pope
more pliant than Leo III had proved to be. It would be use of the
filioque in Bulgaria by Frankish missionaries in the second half of
the ninth century that bound fast the filioque to Romes peculiar
definition of papal primacy and precipitated the Photian Schism.
Yet even during that schism, and despite the ensuing acrimony
between Constantinople and Rome, the papacy resisted formal
alteration of the Creed.

The Photian Schism

The dispute over the images, despite the settlement of 843 in favor
of the iconodules, had left the Byzantine Church divided into two
parties on the basis of the policy to be adopted towards the
erstwhile iconoclast clergy now seeking reconciliation with the
Church. The "intransigents" urged that they be treated harshly
while the "moderates" argued that charity and common sense
should prevail. Patriarch Ignatios (847-56, 867-78) sympathized
with the "intransigents" but was forced to resign in 856 after an
imperial coup d'état, and was succeeded by Photios (858-867,
878-886), a convinced "moderate." Pope Nicholas I (858-867),
apparently influenced by "tendentious reports" delivered to the
pontiff by supporters of Ignatios, declared Photios' election un-
canonical and in 863 presumed to reinstate Ignatios. Church and
state in Constantinople of course ignored the papal initiative but
nevertheless harbored considerable resentment towards the pope
for what they deemed his jurisdictional trespass against the see of
Constantinople. As long as the papacy's claims universally to gov-
ern and to define obtained, defacto, only within territory admitted
by the four Eastern patriarchs to fall under the jurisdiction of
Rome, the East had kept silent. In so doing, however, the East
65 My use of "Photian Schism," a familiar Western designation, in no way implies that
Photios was solely or even mainly responsible for the schism.
66 Knowles and Obolensky, 98-99.
228 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

tended to compromise its objections to later overt papal assertions

of supremacy over the Eastern patriarchates. At all events, the duel
between Ignatios and Photios erupted into open schism between
Rome and Constantinople, merely a hint of things to come.
Events in the Balkans further complicated the scene, as the
reopening of the peninsula to Christianity inspired a jurisdictional
struggle between the First and Second Rome. The decision of the
Bulgarian ruler, Boris, to undergo baptism at the hands of Byzan-
tine missionaries did not keep him, about a year later, from appeal-
ing to Rome and to Louis the German (855-875) to provision him
with an ecclesiastical hierarchy—this in the idle hope that Rome
might afford the emergent Bulgarian church greater autonomy
than Constantinople appeared prepared to grant. We saw that
most of Bulgaria had been under Rome s jurisdiction until severed
from it by the iconoclast Emperor Leo III in 732 in pique over the
papacy's iconodule persuasion. The papacy had never reconciled
itself to that loss and, seeing Boris's request as an invitation to reas-
sertion of Roman jurisdiction, promptly dispatched missionaries
to southern Bulgaria. Three considerations governed Constanti-
nople's response. In the first place, southern Bulgaria had never
been under Rome's jurisdiction. The Byzantine emperor, more-
over, feared that, in the wake of the Latin missionaries, the political
influence of the German emperors might soon penetrate to the
gates of Constantinople itself. Concurrently, the Byzantine clergy
learned to their horror that the papal minions in Bulgaria were
using the interpolated Creed.67 The Greeks shrank before the
filioque not because they were encountering the expression for the
first time but because its defilement had never before spread so
close to home. Characteristically, Constantinople, imperial and
patriarchal, had chosen largely to ignore the filioque as long as it
was confined to the Latin West and there existed no compelling
political reason for strenuous opposition to it. The perceived Latin
threat in Bulgaria ensured that nie filioque would never again be
ignored.
67 Ibid., 99.
 The Stations of the Filioque 229

Events now moved quickly. In 867, Photios addressed an encyc-

lical to the Eastern patriarchs, condemning thefilioqueas heretical
and refuting it on doctrinal grounds.68 Photios may have been
attempting a modification of Augustinian teaching in stating that
the very essence of the Trinity is that either something is common
to all Three Persons (Augustinian) or else is the property of one of
the Persons. If the procession of the Spirit is common, then it is not
the procession of a Person. The encyclical ends with an immediate
call for an ecumenical council to resolve the issue.69
Meanwhile, a council in Constantinople, presided over by
Emperor Michael III (842-67) in 867, excommunicated and
deposed Pope Nicholas I. While yet unaware of his sentence (as
unenforceable as the pope's deposition of Photios in 863 had
been), Nicholas responded to the emperor's letter by marshaling
his Carolingian theologians, "For it is ridiculous and an utterly
abominable disgrace for us in our times to permit the Holy Church
of God to be falsely accused."70 One of the pope's designated theo-
logians, Aeneas of Paris, provided no new argument in defense of
thefilioquebut is noteworthy for the characteristically Carolingian
contempt he expressed for Byzantium and the ecumenical see, a
contempt analogous to that directed by the East towards the
Carolingians and Rome. Not even the tongue of Byzantium
escaped the Parisian's wrath: "The Greek language," he wrote,
"should agree with the truth by which Latin indissolubly holds the
norm of Catholic faith." The pope, of course, is touted as "Father
of the entire Church."71
The treatise of Ratramnus of Corbie, which may have reached
Photios, resembled the work of Aeneas of Paris in focusing on the
filioque but also directed fire against the Byzantine Emperors,
Michael III and Basil I (867-86), whose "charges [against] the
Church of Rome are known to be false, heretical, superstitious and
68 The encyclical is excerpted and discussed by Haugh, 94-98.
69 Ibid., 98-99.
70 Quoted in ibid., 102.
71 Ibid., 104-5.
230 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

irreligious" and who "strive to find fault not only with the Roman
Church but with the entire Latin Church/'72 Without even both-
ering to cite specifically the dismal imperial record during the Icon-
oclastic Controversy, Ratramnus accuses the Byzantine emperors
of usurping the authority that properly belongs to the Church
("Was it to the Greek emperors that the Savior gave the power of
binding and loosing?").73 The chief contribution of Ratramnus to
the doctrinal debate on the filioque lies in repeating the Augustin-
ian argument that since the Spirit is of the substance of the Father
and the Son, he must proceed from both.74 Ratramnus also echoes
Aeneas in asserting that to be in the Church implies communion
with the see of Rome.75 Because Christ awarded primacy to the
bishop of Rome, it follows that if thefirstCouncil of Constantino-
ple had the right to add to the Nicene Creed, "this same right was
given to the Romans [sic] through the authority of Holy Scrip-
ture."76 Like Paulinus of Aquileia, Ratramnus justifies interpola-
tion of the filioque on the basis of papal primacy, although he
appears unaware that the papacy had yet to sanction it.
The political situation in Byzantium changed radically as
Michael III was assassinated and his successor and regicide, Basil I
(867-86), forced Photios to resign and reinstated Ignatios (867-
78), the "intransigent." Emperor and patriarch promptly sought
restoration of communion with Rome, perhaps, as Dvornik sug-
gests, "to screen [Michaels] murder behind the authority" of the
Roman see.77 A council, convoked in Constantinople in 869, saw
those papal legates in attendance excommunicate Photios. Con-
currently, the situation in Bulgaria was decisively altered when an
embassy dispatched by Boris appeared in Constantinople even as
the council met. Boris had obviously concluded that his flirtation

72 Ibid., 107-8.
73 Quoted in ibid., 110.
74 Ibid., 114.
75 Ibid., 110.
76 Ibid., 115-16.
77 Francis Dvornik, The Photian Schism: History and Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1948), 143.
The Stations of the Filioque 231

with Rome was impractical. Basil at once arranged a conference

made up of the Bulgarian envoys and representatives of the Eastern
patriarchs, but pointedly excluding the papal legates. Not surpris-
ingly, the men of the East awarded jurisdiction over Bulgaria to Con-
stantinople. In vain did the papal legates produce a letter from Pope
Hadrian II (867-72) forbidding Ignatios to interfere in Bulgaria.78
By 878, when Ignatios died and Photios recovered the patriar-
chal throne, moderation had returned both to Constantinople and
to Rome, neither side wishing to press its claims too vigorously.
Photios, nonetheless, seems to have had the last word on interpola-
tion of the filioque. Yet another council, convened in Constantino-
ple in 879-80 and attended by papal legates, recognized Photios as
legitimate patriarch, annulled Rome's former condemnations of
him, abrogated the decisions of the council of 869-70, and
accepted the patriarchs carefully phrased statement condemning
any tampering with the Creed—"we all proclaim with a loud voice
that this Creed cannot be subtracted from, added to, altered or dis-
torted in anyway."79 Pope John VIII (872-82) accepted these deci-
sions although he made Photios' reinstatement conditional upon
receiving from the patriarch an apology as well as his promise to
refrain from interfering with Roman missionaries in Bulgaria.80
Any hope, however, that this would lead to deletion of the filioque
from the Creed now used virtually throughout Latin Christen-
dom, except in Rome, came to nothing. Pope John, in his letter to
Photios, sought to persuade the patriarch of
. . . how difficult it is to change immediately a custom which
has been entrenched for so many years. Therefore we believe
the best policy is not to force anyone to abandon that addi-
tion to the Creed. But rather we must act with wisdom and
moderation, urging them little by little to give up that blas-
phemy.81
78 Haugh, 124.
79 Quoted in ibid., 127.
80 Ibid. On die council of 879-80, see also Knowles and Obolensky, 100.
81 Quoted in Haugh, 129-30.
232 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

The true winners would prove to be the Carolingians and their

theologians, in the words of Photios, the "imitators of Ham."
In 883 or 884, Photios wrote to "the Patriarch of Aquileia" very
much in the irenic spirit of Pope Johns letter to Photios. Appealing
to the authority of Scripture, of popes such as Leo III and Hadrian
I, and of the council of 879-80, Photios called upon the Latin prel-
ate to lead his flock "away from error."83 Photios not only advanced
the familiar thesis that the filioque "introduces two causes and ori-
gins and utterly destroys the monarchy in the Holy Trinity,"84 but
put forth, too, the novel argument that, while the Bible does refer
to "the Spirit of the Son," Scripture also alludes to the Spirit as the
Spirit of "wisdom, knowledge, understanding and fortitude" and
yet the Spirit does not proceed from them. 85 As for those Fathers,
including Augustine, who speak of the double procession, "If ten
or twenty Fathers said this, many innumerable hundreds did not."
Venerable Fathers like Augustine, he concluded, are damaged
when their errors are cited in opposition to the teaching of ecu-
menical councils.86
In his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, written after his deposition in
886 by his erstwhile student, now Emperor Leo VI (886-912),
Photios provided a fuller theological critique of the filioque, which
has yet to lose its relevance to the Orthodox apologetic. We pause
to cite but one of his oft-repeated arguments.
For if both the Son and the Holy Spirit are produced from
one and the same cause, namely, the Father (even though the
Spirit is by Procession while the Son is by begetting); and if, as
that blasphemy proclaims, the Son in turn produces the
Spirit, then why not assert the cognate myth, for reasons of
consistency, that the Spirit produces the Son? For both come
forth with equal rank from that cause; so if the Son supple-
mented the function of cause for the Spirit, but not the Spirit

82 Quoted in ibid., 139.

83 Quoted in ibid., 133.
84 Quoted in ibid., 134.
85 Quoted in ibid., 135.
86 Quoted in ibid., 136. Photios develops this argument in his Mystagogy, 97-100.
The Stations of the Filioque 233

for the Son, would not the preservation of the identity of rank
require that each serve as cause for the other?87
In short, if the Son is a cause of the Spirit, why is the Spirit not also a
cause of the Son? Again, to admit two causes in the Trinity is to
destroy the divine monarchy of the Father. Moreover, "If, at the
same instant that the Son comes forth by begetting, the Son also
issues the Holy Spirit by procession, then the originator comes into
existence simultaneously with that which is originated." If the
Son is a cause of the Spirit, the Spirit is no longer of equal rank with
the Son.
Photios' Mystagogy may be taken as a representative Eastern
statement that the consistent confession of the Church does not
support the filioque. Such, Photios maintained, is the faith of most
of the Fathers, but above even the Fathers rank the ecumenical
councils. It was therefore an act of "extreme effrontery" for the
West to take it upon itself "to adulterate the holy and sacred
symbol" which had been affirmed by so many ecumenical councils.
The advocates of the filioque, by deliberately going beyond the
received text of the Creed, were guilty of innovation.89 To the Latin
contention that the Fathers at Nicaea had not included the filioque
because they thought it manifest to all the faithful and, hence, need
not be mentioned explicitly, the Greeks replied that even if the
filioque were theologically correct—and it manifestly is not—only
an ecumenical council is empowered to alter a Creed promulgated
by an ecumenical council.90
The Photian Schism, inspired as it was by political rivalries, and
the mutual ignorance and suspicion born of several centuries of rel-
ative isolation of West from East, ended with little beyond restora-
tion of the status quo ante. But the schism had brought to the fore
the two related issues of the filioque and Romes peculiar claims to
primacy. The East could never again dismiss them as aberrations
87 Photius, 70.
88 Ibid., 97.
89 See Pelikan, 2, 191.
90 Ibid., 192.
234 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

confined to the nether-nether region of Latin Christendom. The

Eastern Church may earlier have eschewed confrontation because
the primacy and the filioque had little practical effect on the East,
and the venom thatfirmand explicit opposition would have engen-
dered were best avoided for the peace of the Church, but such an
attitude became wholly anachronistic with the Photian Schism.

The Schism of 1054

The issues of the filioque and papal primacy, then, had been tabled
rather than resolved and could be expected to erupt at the first sign
of pronounced strain between East and West, whatever its non-
doctrinal basis. It may, indeed, be conjectured that peace prevailed
from 879 to 1054 largely because relations between Rome and
Constantinople were limited by the subjugation of the papacy by
the German emperors. At all events, information about the period
is scanty.
The decline of the Carolingians in the late ninth century had led
to the advance of the Saxon kings, the most notable ofwhom, Otto
I (936-73), as if in emulation of Charlemagne, convinced Pope
John XII (955-63) in February 962 to crown him Holy Roman
Emperor.91 Clearly, the Latin West was not to do without its own
emperor; nor were the popes ever again to look toward Constanti-
nople for political leadership or protection, commodities which
the Eastern Empire, ever preoccupied with the Islamic threat, was,
in any event, quite ill equipped to provide. The virtual seizure of
the papacy by the Saxons (eighteen months after his coronation,
Otto saw to the deposition of the "able but worldly and immoral"
John XII and appointed his successor) revived German theological
influence at the papal court. After 962, Rome began to waver and
Pope Benedict VIII (1012-24), beholden to King Henry II (1002-
24) for his assistance against the anti-pope Gregory in 1012, finally
succumbed. During the coronation- of Henry II as emperor in
1014, Benedict included the filioque in the Creed.92 As a conse-

91 Knowles and Obolensky, 66.

92 Kelly, 357.
The Stations of the Filioque 235

quence, the interpolated Creed became standard throughout the

West and, before long, Rome was justifying its new Creed on the
basis of papal primacy. That the Roman pontiff had declared the
filioque dogma placed it beyond question or reproach. The pope,
by dint of his Petrine power, was not subject to conciliar judgment
for he alone had the right not only to convoke general councils but
also to amplify and even to revise their decisions. Rome's earlier
refusal to adopt the filioque was not seen as a contradiction.
Pelikans statement that "to the East the pope was chief bishop
because he was orthodox, while to the West he was and always
would be orthodox because he was chief bishop"93 requires some
amendment. While Pelikan s description of the East s position is
accurate enough, it should be remarked that the Latin West yielded
but slowly to the claim that orthodoxy inhered in the papal office.
Charlemagne's exercise in caesaropapism has already been dis-
cussed. And although undoubtedly written at the command of
Emperor Henry IV ( 1056-1106), the letter of the German bishops
to Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) is not to be discounted as simply a
brief in favor of lay investiture, for its authors clearly imply a
conciliar basis of Church authority.
For you have taken from the bishops, so far as you could, all
that power which is known to have been divinely conferred
upon them through the grace of the Holy Spirit... you have
shaken into pitiable disorder the whole strength of the apos-
tolic institution and that most comely distribution of the
limbs of Christ... Who, however, is not struck dumb by the
baseness of your arrogant usurpation of new power, power
not due to you, to the end that you may destroy the rights due
the whole brotherhood?94

With Pope Benedict's embrace of the filioque in 1014, the inter-

polation emerged as a doctrinal issue between Constantinople and
Rome specifically and, when joined to the papacy's more and more
93 Pelikan, 2, 161.
94 Quoted in Bennett J. Hill, ed. Church and State in the Middle Ages (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1970), 76.
236 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

insistent claims to primacy, narrowed the room for compromise.

Rome's demand for submission would henceforth characterize her
relations with the East, while virtually every subsequent papal con-
tact with Constantinople became an occasion for raising the issue
of nie filioque. These penchants become especially pronounced, of
course, during and after the reform of the Latin Church carried out
by Pope Gregory VII. Although it must be conceded that Gregorys
drive toward centralization was initially aimed not at the East but
at state encroachments in the West, no Easterner could have read
Gregorys Dictatus Papar*5 without a shudder.
That the papacy's turnabout of 1014 did not immediately
muddle the peace that had generally prevailed between Old and
New Rome since the end of the Photian Schism may be attributed
not only to the reduction of the papacy by the German emperors
but also to the relative absence of political provocation by either
East or West. In the past, as in the future, only political rivalry
transformed thefilioqueinto a burning issue. One incident did dis-
turb the surface calm: the appeal of the Byzantine Emperor, Leo VI
(886-912) to Pope Sergius III (904-911) to sanction his fourth
marriage, this one to the woman who had already borne him a son.
The pope, undeterred by Byzantine canon law which forbade a
fourth marriage, cited the Latin canons that set no limit on the
number of valid successive marriages, and granted the emperor a
dispensation. Although accused of jurisdictional trespass by the
Patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas Mysticos (901-7), the pope
could not resist the temptation to succor an emperor who, by
appealing to Rome over the head of Constantinople, appeared
to be acknowledging papal primacy. Leo VI, thus "vindicated,"
deposed his uncooperative patriarch. Nicholas, however, regained
the patriarchal throne under Leo's successor, Alexander (912-13),
and Constantinople broke briefly with Rome. Although soon
mended, the fracture engendered by Leo's marital meandering
testifies to the persistence of Rome's view of its own authority,
despite the ostensible resolution of the Photian Schism.96
95 Quoted in ibid., 66-67.
The Stations of the Filioque 237

As one enters the last quarter of the tenth century, important

changes take place in the Byzantine Empire, and, during the elev-
enth century, in the papacy as well. In the East a series of able mili-
tary emperors managed to reassert imperial control over much of
Asia Minor, northern Syria and a portion of southern Italy. The
ecumenical patriarch now had little trouble seeing himself as leader
of a revived Church in a revived empire, a Church which had also
brought Bulgaria and Russia under its jurisdiction. For its part, the
papacy, after a century of debasement, was regaining power and, in
anticipation of Gregory VII, was proclaiming ever more categori-
cally its claims to primacy. The East, secure in its regained power,
lost none of its contempt for the West as heretical and rude. The
papacy, in its new-won confidence, viewed the East as heretical and
decadent. Chrétien de Troyes (1140? -before 1200?), the foremost
poet of twelfth-century France, gave voice to Latin Christendom's
mounting self-esteem vis-à-vis the East.
From the books in our possession we know of the deeds of the
ancients and of the world as it was in olden days. These books
of ours have taught us that Greece once stood preeminent in
both chivalry and learning. Then chivalry proceeded to
Rome in company with the highest learning. Now they have
come into France. God grant that they be sustained here and
their stay be so pleasing that the honor that has stopped here
in France never depart. God had lent them to the others, for
no one ever speaks now of the Greeks and the Romans. Talk
of them is over; their burning coals are spent.97

Having thus dismissed classical Greece and Rome, Chrétien

passes to Byzantium and tells the tall but instructive tale of Alexan-
der, son of a Greek Christian emperor, who "was so proud and cou-
rageous that he did not care to become a knight in his own coun-
try" but wished rather to seek chivalry and learning in the West,
specifically in the court of King Arthur.98 Chretien's anecdote
% Knowles and Obolensky, 111.
97 Chrétien de Troyes, "Cliges," in The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans.
David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 87-88.
238 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

crisply reveals Latin Christendom's disinclination to pattern itself

according to Eastern models. The eleventh century, which began
with an imperial revival in the East and an ineffectual papacy in the
West, ended with a supremely powerful papacy in the West and a
Byzantine Empire hard pressed by the westward pressures of the
Muslim Turks. It is not fortuitous that the Schism of 1054
occurred in the middle ofthat century.
The two personalities most directly involved in forging the
schism reflected perfectly the attitudes prevailing in Constantino­
ple and Rome. Patriarch Michael Cerularios (1043-58), intent
upon asserting both the independence of his see and Latin inferior­
ity (he had authored a tract denouncing Latin liturgical practice),
blamed the differences separating East and West on "the innova­
tion of the Italians."99 On the subject of the filioque, Cerularios
would admonish: Ό Latin, cease and desist from saying that there
are many principles and many causes, and acknowledge that the
Father is the one cause."100 If a turning away from truth were the
cause of separation, it is not to be found in the East, where
"the apostolic and patristic forms of orthodox doctrine are pre­
101
served." Unfortunately for the Church universal, Cerularios
confronted Cardinal Humbert Moyenmoutier (fl061), the papal
envoy to Constantinople, who proceeded to rehearse the maxim­
alist papal claims, and whose "histrionic postures, abusive language
and truculent behaviour were almost matched by the intransigence
and arrogance of the patriarch of Byzantium."102
The rest of the sorry story is well known: Humbert's bull excom­
municating Michael, deposited on the altar of Hagia Sophia; the
bull burned at the instance of Emperor Constantine IX (1042-55);
and the excommunication of Humbert by a synod convoked by
103
Michael. Michael followed this with a long manifesto summa-

98 Ibid., 88.
99 Quoted in Pelikan, 2, 173.
100 Quoted in ibid., 197.
101 Quoted in ibid., 173.
102 Knowles and Obolensky, 104,112.
103 Ibid.
The Stations of the Filioque 239

rizing the history of the rift between Rome and Constantinople,

and presenting himself as head of the entire Orthodox Church,104
and this in language which the naïve or cynical might almost have
mistaken for Humbert holding forth on Rome's claims to primacy.
Such was the Schism of 1054—not in any sense final, for
the excommunications involved only a few individuals, and nei-
ther side considered them warrant to sever ecclesiastical or diplo-
matic relations or to pronounce the other heretical. Churchmen
such as Patriarch Peter III of Antioch displayed considerably more
restraint than had Peter's friend, Michael Cerularios, in dealing
with the Latins. The filioque was, of course, incorrect, Peter
opined, but we cannot expect from our Latin brothers, in their
ignorance, the exactitude that we demand from ourselves.105
When the Synod of 1089 convened under the aegis of the
Ecumenical Patriarch Nicholas III (1084-1111), Pope Gregory
VII had departed the mortal scene and his successor, Urban II
(1088-99), his eyes already on the Holy Land, had no wish to
deepen the quarrel with Constantinople. The Synod of 1089
certainly offers no evidence of a formal break in relations between
the two Churches.106 In the last years of the eleventh century,
moreover, we see the scholarly Theophylact, a Greek archbishop
reduced to Bulgaria, berate his Orthodox brethren for their criti-
cism of the Latins and then declare: "I do not think that the [ir]
errors are numerous, or that any of them can cause a schism." Even
the filioque, he ventured, was due "less to wickedness than to
ignorance," the result of the inability of Latin to convey the requi-
site subtleties.107 (That such a low estimate of Latin could be
advanced at this time says much about Greek ignorance of the
steadily expanding corpus of medieval Latin theology. The lag
in sophisticated theological development, which theretofore had
104 Ibid., 112-13.
105 Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern
Churches during the Xlth andXllth Centuries (Oxford, 1955), 65.
106 Aristeides Papadakis, in collaboration with John Meyendorff, The Christian East
and the Rise ofthe Papacy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1994), 76-77.
107 Knowles and Obolensky, 323.
240 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

favored the East, was ending even as Theophylact wrote.) Theo-

phylact does add one argument that goes beyond Photios' critique
of the filioque: the Latins, in citing John 20:22 108 in support of the
filioque, mistake the temporal for the eternal procession. The Spirit
does indeed proceed eternally from the Father alone, but in the
temporal sphere "procession" denotes the outpouring of the Spirit
by the Son.109 This embryonic doctrine would undergo further
development in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.110 On
the question of papal primacy, Theophylact adamantly rejected
the Roman version of it. No doctrine is correct just because it had
been declared true by the pope, not even if the Latins "shake the
keys of the kingdom in our faces."111 Archbishop Nicetas of
Nicomedia, in his eloquent letter to a Latin bishop in 1136, echoed
Theophylact.
My dearest brother, ... we do not deny to the Roman church
the primacy amongst the sister [patriarchates] ... But she has
separated herself from us through her pride when she
usurped a monarchy which does not belong to her office ... If
the Roman pontiff... wishes to thunder at us, and... hurl his
mandates at us from on high, and if he wishes to judge us and
even to rule us and our churches, not by taking counsel with
us but at his own arbitrary pleasure, what kind of brother-
hood, or even what kind of parenthood can this be? ... we
should be the slaves, not the sons, of such a church, and the
Roman see would be not the pious mother of sons but a hard
and imperious mistress of slaves ... 112
Around the same time, Anselm of Canterbury, writing to a fellow
Latin bishop concerning the "errors" of the Greeks, shared Theo-
phylact s opinion that disagreement over the filioque should not
lead to schism. The filioque, while implicit in the Creed, need not
be added by the Greeks, provided they refrain from criticizing the

108 "... he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit."
109 Dimitri Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 42-43.
110 Below, 248-49, 252-54.
111 Quoted in Obolensky, Portraits, 44.
112 Quoted in Knowles and Obolensky, 101.
The Stations of the Filioque 241

Latins for having done so. Of the issue of papal primacy, which had
so perturbed Theophylact and Nicetas, Anselm, typically, made no
mention.

The Road to Lyons

The rancor generated by the Schism of 1054 never had time to dis-
sipate. For it took place on the eve of the Crusades, that movement
outward by Latin Christians which signaled the effective end of the
insularity foisted upon them by the loss of Iberia and most of the
Mediterranean to Islam, and the long exercise in self-defense dic-
tated by the assaults of Germans, Slavs, Norsemen and Magyars.
By the year 1000, the worst was over; and Latin Christendom
could once more look beyond its borders and begin its march
towards world hegemony. And while Latin Christendom bur-
geoned, Greek Christendom continued to contract before the
onslaught of Turkish Islam. The Byzantine defeat by the Turks in
the Armenian highlands at Manzikert in 1071 had opened all of
Asia Minor to the invaders.
So came the Crusades, in modest proportions anxiously solic-
ited by Emperor Alexios I Comnenos (1081-1118), and on a far
grander scale avidly pursued by Pope Urban II. The general tenor
of the Crusades may be captured in a letter from certain crusaders
to Pope Urban in 1098 after their capture of Antioch, detailing
their plans for the Latinization of northern Syria: "For we have
beaten the Turks and the heathen, but we do not know how to
defeat the heretics, the Greeks and the Armenians and Syrian
Jacobites." The authors appeal to Urban to come to Antioch "to
root out and destroy all heresies, of whatever kind they are, by your
authority and our strength."114 Similar sentiments are voiced in the
mid-twelfth century account of the Second Crusade, written by
Odo of Deuil, chaplain of Louis VII and, later, abbot of St Denis.
In large measure because of their rejection of the filioque, Greek
Christians are condemned as heretics by Odo.
113 Obolensky, Portraits, AA-A5; Runciman, Schism, 77.
114 Quoted in Papadakis, Christian East, 92-93.
242 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

We know of other heresies of theirs, both concerning their

treatment of the Eucharist and concerning the procession of
the Holy Ghost... Actually, it was for these reasons that the
Greeks had incurred the hatred of our men, for their error had
become known even among the lay people. Because of this they
were judged not to be Christians, and the Franks considered kill-
ing them a matter of no importance and hence could with the
more difficulty be restrained from pillage and plunder.115
The twelfth-century Latin heresiologist, Hugh of Amiens,
wrote that the filioque had to be asserted "against the heretics," by
whom he evidently meant Eastern Christians. Such was "the lively
curiosity about Eastern Christianity" inspired by the Crusades.116
By the end of the twelfth century, these attitudes had become so
widespread among the crusaders that the sack of Constantinople in
1204 by the forces of the Fourth Crusade would be accepted with
few demurrals. It must be admitted, however, that until that inaus-
picious day the Byzantines had suffered less at the hands of the
Latin soldiers of Christ than the Christian, let alone the non-Chris-
tian, populations of Syria and the Holy Land. Who can forget the
exaltation of Raymond of Agiles, chaplain to Count Raymond of
Toulouse, on the occasion of the crusader sack of Jerusalem in
1099?
So let it suffice to say... that in the Temple and porch of Solo-
mon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.
Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this
place should befilledwith the blood of the unbelievers, since
it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.117
The Christians of the Holy City could not have been entirely
spared the carnage visited upon Muslims and Jews, for they looked
too much like Muslims to be conveniently distinguished from
them in the pitch of battle and pillage. The slaughter done,

115 Odo of Deuil (ed. & tr. by Virginia Gingerick Berry), Deprofectione Ludovici VII in
orientem: TheJourney of Louis VII to the East (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948), 57.
116 Pelikan, 3, 229-30.
117 Quoted in August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts ofEye-Witnesses and Par-
ticipants (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921), 261.
The Stations of the Filioque 243

however, many Christians appear to have preferred Latin to Mus-

lim rule. To this generalization the largely Arab Orthodox Chris-
tians of the patriarchate of Jerusalem proved the exception. Given
their pro-Byzantine sentiments and their patriarchs refusal to
accept subordination to his Latin counterpart, they found crusader
rule onerous. Just how onerous may be measured by the prayers
they offered for the victory of Salâh al-Dîn (Saladin) as he fought to
restore Jerusalem to Islam in 1187.

The first three Crusades notwithstanding, Constantinople before

1204 remained open to Latin visitors and civility usually prevailed—
witness, for example, the public debate of 1136 between Bishop Anselm
of Havelberg120 and Nicetas of Nicomedia. Thefirstsession dealt with
niefilioque,the second with the primacy, and despite the fact that the
ecclesiological dichotomy between Rome and Constantinople was
publicly debated, perhaps for thefirsttime, courtesy enveloped the two
bishops. Anselm denied that the filioque introduced more than one
principle within the Godhead. The Holy Spirit proceedsfromthe Son
as well as from the Father, "not according to his essence, which is
common [to all three persons], not according to his person, which is
unto itself, but according to his relation" to both Father and Son.121
Both men agreed that, ultimately, the problem of the filioque came
down to the question of authority. When Nicetas indicated an ecumen-
ical council as the proper forum for adjudicating this and any other doc-
trinal difference, Anselm agreed, but with the proviso that the pope
must validate such an assembly for it to carry universal authority.
Anselm added, politely, that the Eastern Church had separated itself
"from obedience to the most holy Roman Church" which alone had
118 Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church
(London: Variorum, 1980), 181.
119 Robert B. Betts, Christians in the Arab East: A Political Study (London: SPCK,
1979), 13.
120 Ambassador of the Saxon Emperor Lothar III (1125-37) to Constantinople. The
proceedings of the debate survive in Anselm's account, written shortly after 1149 at
the request of Pope Eugenius III (1145-53) [Papadakis, Christian East, 156].
121 Quoted in Pelikan, 3, 230. Anselm's "relation" seems to be synonymous with Au-
gustine's "communion" (above, 213).
244 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

"always remained unshaken" by heresies, while Constantinople had

"always been fermenting with innumerable heresies."122 Anselm's
indictment of the imperial see was not inaccurate.
After their ill-advised intervention in Byzantine dynastic poli-
tics had gone terribly wrong, the forces of the Fourth Crusade in
1204 turned the city of Constan tine over to three days of pillage.
The events memorialized by Nicholas Choniates would ever remain
etched in the Greek consciousness.
... the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden
underfoot... the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into
unclean places ... the divine body and blood of Christ [were]
spilled upon the ground ... They snatched the precious reli-
quaries, thrust into their bosoms the ornaments which these
contained, and used the broken remnants for pans and drink-
ing cups ... the sacred altar [in Hagia Sophia], formed of all
kinds of precious materials ..., was broken into bits and dis-
tributed among the soldiers, as was all the other sacred wealth
... [A] certain harlot,... a servant of the demons,... insulting
Christ, sat in the patriarchs seat, singing an obscene song ...
Could those, who showed so great a madness against God
Himself, have spared the honorable matrons and maidens or
the virgins consecrated to God?... No one was without a share
in the grief. In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, com-
plaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the
shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of
those most closely united... Oh, immortal God, how great the
afflictions ..., how great the distress!123
Choniates added that the crusaders, in their search for gold and
precious stones, plundered the graves of emperors. The Greeks
suffered the mutilation of their capital with all the desperate fury of

122 Quoted in ibid., 231. The summary of the debate provided by Papadakis, Christian
East, 156-63, is devoted almost exclusively to the issue of the primacy.
123 Quoted in "The Fourth Crusade," ed. Dana C. Munro, in Translations and Reprints
from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Department
of History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1896.), 15-16.
124 Quoted in Deno J. Geanakoplos, Byzantium: Church, Society, and Civilization Seen
through Contemporary Eyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 371.
The Stations of the Filioque 245

the helpless and have never forgotten. If there is a date for the Great
Schism, it is 1204 rather than 1054 or 1453. Since then, Greek
East and Latin West have been effectively torn in two.
Following the sack of Constantinople, that noblest Greek of all,
Baldwin of Flanders (1204-05), seized the imperial throne and
inaugurated the Latin Empire at Constantinople. Actually, most
Byzantine possessions in Asia Minor remained under Greek con-
trol, as a new Byzantine emperor, Theodore Lascaris (1204-22)
established himself at Nicaea and, together with the Greek enclave
at Trebizond, staved off further Latin encroachment. Largely
blocked in Asia Minor, where they would have encountered not
only the Greeks but also the far more formidable Muslim Turks (to
whom Asia Minor had been falling piecemeal since the mid-elev-
enth century), the Latins fanned out towards the European posses-
sions of the Byzantine Empire. Baldwin was of course quick to
express his loyalty to the pope. Although the men of the Fourth
Crusade had made their way to Constantinople against the express
instructions of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), and there is no evi-
dence that the pope was anything but horrified by their actions,
Innocent accepted the situation. Cast in the mold of Pope Gregory
VII, Innocent probably considered the Latin Empire at Constanti-
nople, its dubious beginnings notwithstanding, a prelude to the
"return" of the Orthodox Church to obedience. And although the
Greek patriarch and emperor at Nicaea still enjoyed more real
power than their Latin counterparts in Constantinople, Innocent
never sought a genuine understanding with the real Church of the
East. In this era, however, only a most unusual pope would have
accepted from the Greeks anything short of unconditional surren-
der on the disputed points of doctrine and ecclesiology.125 Hence-
forth, Latin and Muslim pressures upon Byzantium made certain
that the Greeks could negotiate only from the posture of the pow-
erless and humiliated.
True it was that Pope Innocent IV (1243-54), convinced that
125 On Baldwin I and Innocent III, see Knowles and Obolensky, 319-20.
246 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

the Latin Empire had little future in the sea of hostility surround-
ing it, used a more conciliatory approach which included the
promise of holding an ecumenical council in the East. His death
aborted that effort and, five years later, in 1259, the founder of a
new Byzantine dynasty, Michael Palaeologos (1259-82), seized
power in Nicaea and, in 1261, recaptured Constantinople.126 But
as the Muslim Turkish advance echoed nearer and the Byzantine
emperors saw, however unrealistically, aid from the West as their
only hope, their bargaining position deteriorated while that of
Rome waxed proportionately stronger. Both sides stirred largely
out of political rather than purely religious motives, the Byzantines
in the hope of saving their empire, the papacy to further its theocra-
tic ambitions, in which process reunion simply implied submission
to Rome. From the accession of Innocent III in 1189 through the
reign of Innocent IV in 1254, much of the energies of the papacy
had been expended in trying to establish Rome as the chief actor in
Western European politics. Rome could hardly have been expected
to extend to Constantinople other than the same logic.
But neither the establishment of the Latin Empire at Constanti-
nople nor the harshness of papal policy silenced debate. The very
terms of debate, however, were changing. As John Meyendorff has
perceptively pointed out:
Seen in historical perspective, [the] formal renunciation in the
eleventh century of the Greek philosophical inheritance in
Greek-speaking Byzantium offers a remarkable contrast with
the almost simultaneous "discovery" of Aristotle in the Latin
West on the eve of the great synthesis between philosophy and
theology known as scholasticism. Paradoxically, in the Middle
Ages the East was becoming less "Greek" than the West.127
With the firm establishment of scholasticism by the thirteenth
century, the abstract systematic theology of the Latins tended
to relativize the patristic legacy or, in any case, to assign less
126 Ibid., 320.
127 John Meyendorff, "Byzantium as a Center of Theological Thought in the Christian
East," in SchooL· of Thought in the Christian Tradition, ed. P. Henry (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1984), 70.
The Stations of the Filioque 247

significance to the Greek and rather more to the Latin Fathers.

Greekpatristic arguments against thefilioquebecame less compel-
ling. The greatest of the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, faithfully
echoed Augustine in rebutting the Greek charge that the filioque,
in making the Son a second "source" or "principle" or "cause"
within the Trinity, jeopardized the unity of the Godhead. While
conceding, with Augustine, that there is a sense in which the Father
is the principle of both the Son and of the Holy Spirit, by begetting
the former and spirating the latter, Aquinas drew upon Augustine s
assertion that the Father and the Son comprise one principle with
the Holy Spirit. But Thomas also argued that the Greeks, in
using the nouns "cause" and "principle" indiscriminately in speak-
ing of the relationship of Father to Son, teach Subordinationism,
an abomination the Latins avoid by shunning "cause" in favor of
"principle." In any case, as the Latins spun their abstract system-
atic theology, most Byzantine theologians, as faithful disciples of
Photios, remained rooted in their traditional patristic arguments
and continued to object not only to the arbitrary interpolation of
thefilioquebut to its most serious doctrinalflaw:the impairment
of the monarchy of the Father in the personal {hypostatic) reality of
the Trinity.131
The thirteenth century did feature two noteworthy attempts to
bridge the doctrinal divide. By the 1230s the Byzantine state at
Nicaea, now somewhat strengthened vis-à-vis the Latin Empire at
Constantinople, was confident enough to raise the possibility of
reconciliation—this in a letter from Patriarch Germanos II (1222-
40) to Pope Gregory IX (1227-41) in 1232. A pope who stood
squarely in the maximalist tradition of Innocent III, Gregory
responded by dispatching four friars to Nicaea in 1234. The popes
men were to joust against Germanos and the lay theologian
Nicephoros Blemmydes.132 The debates enjoyed the full support
128 Papadakis, Christian East, 181-82.
129 Above, 213.
130 Pelikan, 3, 279-80.
131 Papadakis, Christian East, 229-30.
248 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

of Emperor John III Vatatzes (1222-54) who could hear the grind
of Turkish arms draw closer and, like all of his successors, franti-
cally sought accommodation with Rome. Discussion of the filioque
focused on writings from the Fathers, particularly on those quota-
tions which described the Holy Spirit as acting "through the Son."
The phrase, the friars maintained, had substantially the same
meaning as "and [from] the Son." They went on to argue, of
course, that such biblical expressions as "Spirit of God," "Spirit of
Truth," and "Spirit of Christ" also convey "procession." To the
contrary, Blemmydes replied, these patristic and biblical expres-
sions simply denote the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit,
and the temporal sending of the Spirit by Christ. They do not con-
note the double procession.133 (As Stylianopoulos has observed:
"Had Augustine converged upon the preposition 'through.'
instead of the conjunction 'and,' to describe the Spirits relation to
the Son, he would have saved Christendom a lot of headaches."134)
In contrast to the irenic debate in 1137 between Anselm of
Havelberg and Nicetas of Nicomedia, the debates of 1234 ended in
mutual recrimination, each side accusing the other of heresy.
Negotiations between East and West, nevertheless, continued
intermittently to the end of the Latin Empire at Constantinople in
1261. A debate in Nicaea in 1249, pitting Blemmydes against the
Franciscan, John of Parma, ended inconclusively.135 Not only was
it too soon after the Fourth Crusade for dispassionate debate but
the mounting Turkish danger compounded the weakness of Byz-
antium in facing a papacy whose exclusivist claims to primacy
showed no sign of abating.
In two letters or treatises, written after 1253, Blemmydes did
seem to provide an opening to renewal of dialogue. Conceivably,
he wrote, the patristic and biblical expressions employed by the
four friars in 1234 may indeed refer to the eternal life of the Trinity,
as the Latins had argued, and not simply to consubstantiality and
132 Ibid., 230.
133 Ibid., 231.
134 Stylianopoulos, "The Filioque," Spirit of Truth, 47.
135 Papadakis, Christian East, 218.
The Stations of the Filioque 249

the temporal sending of the Spirit by Christ, as the Greeks had

argued. Although Blemmydes left his new ideas undeveloped,
some twenty years later his tentative musings would be expanded
upon and distorted by John Bekkos. Bekkos' exercise would lead to
his conversion to unionism and to his elevation to patriarch by
Michael VIII Palaeologos (1259-82). A concerted effort was then
launched to demonstrate that Latin trinitarian theology was in
substantial agreement with that of the Greek fathers. Bekkos fas-
tened upon the phrase "through the Son" and sought to make it
equivalent to "from the Son." PerFilium and a Filio were synonyms
used to express the same dogmatic truth: that the Spirit has his exis-
tence from the essence of the Father and the Son. Although given
his opening by Blemmydes, Bekkos had obviously gone well
beyond him and had effectively denied the centerpiece of the
Orthodox polemic since Photios—that the eternal procession of
the Spirit is the exclusive prerogative of the Father.136

The Council ofLyons

Michael seized upon the thesis of Bekkos and took the initiatives
that eventuated in the Council of Lyons in 1274. The emperor
acted as he did not solely because of the Islamic threat but, more
immediately, because he wished to have Pope Clement IV (1264-
68) and, after him, Pope Gregory X (1271-76) prevail upon
Charles of Anjou (1266-85), King of Sicily and Naples, to aban-
don his plans to restore the Latin Empire at Constantinople.
Charles regularly used Constantinople's resistance to Rome to jus-
tify equating his campaign to a crusade. In a letter, dated 4 March
1267, Clement had already apprised the emperor that the terms of
unity would be exclusively papal. Although the agreed statement
would be submitted to an "ecumenical" council, traditional con-
ciliar procedure would not be followed, for it was neither fitting
nor desirable to submit the truths of the faith to "discussion or defi-
nition." The veracity of Roman doctrine and the papacy's ultimate
136 Ibid., 230-32; Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium: Its ecclesiastical history and relations
with the western world (London: Variorum, 1972), V, 471.
250 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

authority were not open to question. Charles of Anjou would

be restrained only through Michael's submission, sealed by the
emperor affixing his signature to a detailed profession of faith
which Clement thoughtfully embedded in his letter. In effect,
Clement offered Michael military conquest by Charles of Anjou as
his alternative to submission to Rome. The profession of faith
crafted for Michael by Clement would, in the event, form the basis
of union at the Council of Lyons. Pope Gregory X, like his pre-
decessor, held Charles at bay, the pontiff moved by religious
motives (he has been called "the most spiritually-minded pope of
the thirteenth century") but also by his ambition to restore Chris-
tian control over Palestine, and this unlikely prospect would be
rendered the more unlikely without union with the Greek Church.
Before and during the Council of Lyons, Charles of Anjou labored
assiduously to thwart agreement between Rome and Constantino-
ple, while Michael had resort to force to silence his anti-unionist
clergy.
The Council of Lyons (regarded by Rome as "ecumenical") met
in 1274. Three men represented Michael Palaeologos: his personal
envoy, an ex-patriarch of Constantinople and another prelate.
They duly promised obedience to the pope in their own and in the
emperor's name and joined in chanting the interpolated Creed.
What crossed their minds and hearts in that hour we can only
guess. In agreeing to union on papal terms, Michael may have been
spared Charles ofAnjou but the union, wholly dictated by political
expediency, proved empty of substance. The emperor's apparent
diplomatic triumph quickly dissipated as his Church, amid violent
social unrest, rejected subscription to the papal version of papal
primacy as well as to thefilioque. Attempts at theological persua-
sion by Bekkos, now Patriarch John XI (1275-82), and his pro-
Latin collaborators only compounded the emperor's problems. So
much for the theory of eastern caesaropapism!139

137 Papadakis, Christian East, 220-21.

138 Knowles and Obolensky, 321
139 Papadakis, Christian East, 225.
The Stations of the Filioque 251

When Martin IV was elected pope in 1281, Charles of Anjou

successfully obtained his fellow Frenchman's sanction for his scheme
to restore the Latin Empire at Constantinople. The union pro-
claimed at Lyons was dissolved, the Byzantine emperor denounced
by the pope as a heretic, and the papacy returned to its policy of
achieving union through military means. Only the Sicilian Ves-
pers, the bloody revolt against the French that broke out in Sicily
on 31 March 1282—a revolt arranged by Michael's agents—
finally interred Charles' ambitions towards Constantinople. As for
the luckless Michael Palaeologos, he died excommunicated by
Constantinople and Rome and was denied church burial in his
own empire. Michael's son and heir, Andronicos II (1282-1332),
moved quickly to restore Orthodoxy and saw to the election of
Gregory II of Cyprus (1282-89) in place of the deposed and dis-
graced Bekkos.140

The Tomus of Gregory of Cyprus

Although disavowed by the East, the Council of Lyons continued
to haunt Byzantium, for the council had declared the filioque
dogma and anathematized any who would deny it.
We profess faithfully ... that the holy Spirit proceeds eter-
nally from the Father and the Son, not as from two principles,
but as from one principle ... we ... condemn and reprove all
who presume to deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally
from the Father and the Son, or rashly to assert that the Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from two prin-
ciples and not as from one.
For the Latin Church, the filioque had become non-negotiable.
Still, the Greek Church could not ignore it, not only because hope
for the empire's survival still seemed to depend on military aid from
the West, but also because the pro-Latin faction in Constantino-
ple, led by the deposed John Bekkos, had by no means disappeared.
140 Ibid., 226-27.
141 Norman P. Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical CounciL·, vol. 1: Nicaea I to
Lateran F (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 314.
252 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

Bekkos' insistent demand for an official hearing, and Patriarch

Gregory H's realization that a fresh theological evaluation of the
filioque was needed, brought about the Council of Blachernae in
1285. The councils Tomus, authored by Gregory II, has been
called "the key [Greek] doctrinal document of the century." A
detailed conciliar examination of the double procession, and the
only one endorsed by the Greek Church since the time of Photios,
Gregory's Tomus represented his Church's response to the pro-
Latin arguments of John Bekkos. Although the Tomus would
encounter opposition from strict Photians, the Greek Church has
never rescinded its approval of the Tomus or modified its text.
The Tomus denounces the union of Lyons, which "divided and
ravaged the Church," and its principal Byzantine clerical advocate,
John Bekkos, who "is going to be justly punished for his endless
chatter."144 Gregory cleaves, of course, to the notion of the monar-
chy of the Father who imparts to the Son and to the Holy Spirit
the totality of his essence but not his personal or hypostatic pro-
perties.145 The Cypriot patriarch rejects Bekkos' argument that
"through the Son" and "from the Son" are equivalents.146 The prin-
ciple of unity and divinity among the three consubstantial divine
persons is always the Father. Gregory rejects the Latin hypothesis,
also embraced by Bekkos, that the Father and the Son together
bring forth the Spirit as from one principle, for that violates the
axiom that the hypostatic attributes are absolutely unchange-
able.147
But Gregory's vaulting contribution to the filioque controversy
consists in his novel interpretation of the allusion of certain Fathers
to the procession of the Spirit through the Son. Before Gregory,

142 Papadakis, Christian East, 227.

143 Ibid., 228. A translation of the Tomus may be found in Aristeides Papadakis, Cri-
sis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate ofGregory II ofCypru
(1283-1289), revised ed. (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1996), 212-26.
144 Ibid., 215.
145 Ibid., 215, 222.
146 Ibid., 220.
147 Ibid., 219, 221.
The Stations of the Filioque 253

Greek theology had tended to interpret the expression not as a ref-

erence to the eternal procession of the Spirit but to the sending of
the Spirit into the world within time, to the spiritual gifts given
man by the Holy Spirit through the incarnate Christ. Gregory,
however, was not content with restriction of the expression to
the Spirit's temporal mission, to his activity in time. Following
Blemmydes, who had avoided the opposition between eternity and
time in his own post-1253 exegesis, Gregory accepted "through the
Son" as a reflection of eternal divine life.
Indeed, the very Paraclete [the Consoler, the Holy Spirit]
shines forth and is manifest eternally through the Son. It does
not, however, mean that it subsists through the Son and from
the Son, and that it receives its being through Him and from
Him. For this would mean that the Spirit has the Son as cause
and source ... 148
Gregory's interpretation of the patristic usage, "through the Son,"
prefigured Palamite teaching.
In his Apologia, Gregory would distinguish between God's inac-
cessible nature, and his "eternal manifestation," in which he exists
and reigns. Within the inner life of the Trinity, there exist the mode
of subsistence (wherein the Spirit derives his personal existence
from the Father alone) and the mode of manifestation (wherein the
Spirit exists through the Son). The Spirit is caused by the Father,
but also has his resting-place in the Son, "through" whom and
"from" whom he is manifested. It is this permanent eternal rela-
tionship between the Son and the Spirit as divine hypostases, to
which the Fathers allude in their formula, "through the Son." To
argue, as did the conservative Photians, that the patristic phrase
signified solely the Spirit's temporal sending was insufficient. If the
Son "manifests" the Spirit temporally as a result of the incarnation,
he also does so eternally. The divine gifts of the Spirit, bestowed
through or from the Son, are eternal ana not solely temporal; they
are at once inseparable and distinct from both the essence and the
148 Ibid., 219.
254 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

persons. The formula "through the Son" neither designates, as

Bekkos affirmed, the procession of the Spirit through the Son, nor
solely the sending of the Spirit in time, but rather the Spirit's eter-
nal manifestation through the Son himself, which concurs with his
procession from the Father.149 Gregory's exegesis, approved by the
Church in 1285, scarcely differs from the doctrine defined by the
Palamite councils of the fourteenth century. His assertions about
the inaccessible nature and the eternal manifestation are analogous
to Palamas' distinctions between the unknowable divine essence
and the temporally manifest divine energies. God's manifestations
are an "energetic" procession, a mode of divine life distinct from
both the essence and persons.150 Gregory's achievement "was to
show that Latin trinitarianism could be interpreted in terms
acceptable to Orthodox patristic tradition ... [that] there was a
sense in which East and West could agree to say that the Spirit pro-
ceeds exfiliol"151 In contrast to Bekkos' Latinizing distortion of the
Greek Fathers, Gregory offered a genuine effort at dogmatic recon-
ciliation. Unfortunately, it was Bekkos, rather than Gregory of
Cyprus or Gregory Palamas, who would carry the day at the Coun-
cil of Ferrara-Florence.

Prelude to Ferrara-Florence
The civil war that tore Byzantium between 1341 and 1347 did
nothing to stay the Ottoman Turkish advance, and reemphasized
in the minds of many Greeks their need for accommodation with
the Latins. John VI Cantacuzenos (1347-54) sought negotiations
with Rome almost from the instant he emerged victorious in the
civil war. But union between the two Churches, the emperor
insisted, could issue only from an ecumenical council. In his letter
of 1350 to Pope Clement VI (1342-52), John suggested that such
a council meet somewhere halfway between Rome and Constanti-
nople. But this was the era of the "Babylonian Captivity" (1305-

149 Papadakis, Christian East, 236-37.

150 Ibid., 237.
151 Ibid., 238.
The Stations of the Filioque 255

78), and the papacy at Avignon delayed action on the emperor's

suggestion. Not until 1376, twelve years after his abdication, was
John afforded the opportunity to present his views before a papal
envoy. The former emperor stressed to Paul, titular Latin Patriarch
of Constantinople, that Rome had to abandon its hope of union by
papal decree.
... what prevents ... union from being accomplished is the
fact that never since the schism have you [Latins] sought its
accomplishment in a friendly and fraternal matter. Always
you have adopted a magisterial, authoritarian attitude, never
allowing that we or anyone else can contradict what the pope
has said or may say in the future, since he is the successor of
Peter and therefore speaks with the voice of Christ.152
During the last two centuries of the Byzantine Empire, there
emerged in the East four groups with more or less distinct positions
concerning reunion with Rome. At one extreme stood those with
little taste for doctrine, the "doctrinal relativists," who considered
the problem of reunion an essentially political one, and who
deemed the survival of the empire worth the concessions demanded
by Rome. At the other extreme stood the archconservatives, the
"unenlightened traditionalists," for whom the slightest concession
to Rome was unthinkable. Between the extremes stood those called,
with some hostility and contempt, Latinizers or unionists, and
others who might be labeled "creative traditionalists," men steeped
in the patristic tradition but seeking to turn it to fresh uses.153
The Latinizers comprised a small group of thinkers intellectu-
ally attracted by the idea of union with Rome. In the fourteenth
century, Demetrios Kydones (c.l324-c.l397), theologian and
translator into Greek of the Summa of Aquinas emerged as their
chief representative; in the fifteenth century they were led by Met-
ropolitan Bessarion (d. 1472?) of Nicaea. Reacting against the
ultra-conservative tradition which had characterized Byzantine
152 Quoted in ibid., 384; see also 382-83.
153 On the four groups, see the summary provided by Knowles and Obolensky, 326-
28.
256 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

theology since the defeat of iconoclasm, they sought liberation in

Latin scholasticism. For one like Kydones, Thomism, with its met-
aphorical canonization of Aristotle, seemed the perfect amalgam-
ation of patristic theology and Greek philosophy. The affinity of
the Latinizers for Latin scholastic theology enabled them to con-
template submission to Rome with perfect equanimity. The Latin-
izers were also convinced that only reunion with Rome could save
the empire. It is perhaps no mistake that Kydones openly con-
verted to Roman Catholicism, despite his reservations about the
filioque and the lack of conciliar arbitration on that and other dis-
puted points. For better or worse, the Latinizers' exerted but
modest influence within the Greek Church.154
The "creative traditionalists,,, the second group betweeh the two
extremes, comprised a broad section of theologians, churchmen,
and men of a mystical bent who, building on the foundation
bequeathed by Gregory of Cyprus, sought to reinterpret the patris-
tic texts. In his distinction between the inaccessible nature of God
and his eternal manifestations, in his willingness to speak of an eter-
nal illumination of the Spirit from the Son, Gregory, as we have
seen, had gone well beyond Photios. The Cypriot s thesis would
come to be adopted by Gregory Palamas (1296-1359). Although
the question of reunion with Rome was not Palamas' central con-
cern, his and the other Gregorys teaching might have opened the
way to resolution of the filioque controversy. While they opposed
union on the basis of the doctrinal relativism and political expedi-
ency advocated by many (including most Byzantine sovereigns), or
outright adoption of Latin doctrine, as urged by the Latinizers, the
Palamites, who shared Cantacuzenos' belief in a genuine ecumeni-
cal council as the way to reunion, might well have contributed sig-
nificantly to a true doctrinal debate on the filioque at such a
council.
Palamas elaborated Gregory of Cyprus' distinction between the
essence and energies of God, postulating that, although the essence
of God is unknowable and inaccessible, God reveals and commu-
154 On Kydones, see Nicol, I, 335-37; VII, 69, 81-82, 95; XII, 54-55.
 The Stations of the Filioque 257

nicates himself through his energies or operations in the world He

created. God s essence is to his energies as the sun is to the sun's rays.
While the essence of the Trinity features the procession of the Spirit
from the Father alone, thus protecting the monarchy of the Father,
the energies of the Trinity, which are manifest in the temporal
realm, feature a Spirit that may be said to proceed from Father and
from Son. "When you understand," wrote Palamas, "that the Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Two, because it comes essentially from the
Father through the Son, you should understand this teaching in
this sense: it is the powers and essential energies of God which pour
out, not the divine hypostasis of the Spirit." The passages in which
the Fathers appear to favor the Latin doctrine of the double
procession,
... do not say that the Spirit proceeds from the hypostasis of
the Son, but "from the nature of the Son," that "it comes nat-
urally ... from him." Now, that which comes by nature is the
energy, not the hypostasis ... The Holy Spirit belongs to
Christ by essence and energy, because Christ is God; never-
theless, according to essence and hypostasis it belongs but
does not proceed, whereas, according to energy, it belongs
and proceeds.155

As energy, "the Spirit pours itself out from the Father through the
Son and, if you like, from the Son over all those worthy thereof";
this "pouring out" may also be called "procession."

We must, of course, remind ourselves that Palamas admits the

filioque only in the realm of God's energies while the Latins hold
that the filioque obtains in the realm of God's essence. But Palamas'
teaching at least held out hope of resolving the question that had
bedeviled relations between the two Churches since the ninth cen-
tury. Perhaps tragically, the teaching of Palamas, although con-
firmed by local councils convened in Constantinople in 1341 and
155 Quoted in John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 2nd. ed., trans. George
Lawrence (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974), 230-31.
156 Quoted in ibid., 231-32.
258 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

1351, was, as we shall see, intentionally avoided at the Council of

Ferrara-Florence.
Theologically, this deliberate evasion of Palamite teaching may
have represented the point of no return. While Greek theology
continued to use patristic language and ideas, and developed a
sophisticated mystical theology, in the West the patristic tradition
became overshadowed by the great synthesis of patristic theology
and Aristotelianism indelibly associated with the name of the
Angelic Doctor. This is not at all to assert that the Latins lacked a
profound mystical theology. It is a matter of emphasis, but it seems
fair to say that while scholasticism captured the official theology of
the West, Palamite mystical theology came to occupy center stage
in the East. And Palamite theology remained as unassimilated by
the West as Thomistic theology by the East. The two Churches
would lose much common ground for theological discourse.

The Council ofFerrara-Florence

The Greeks, however, were losing more than ground for theologi-
cal discourse. Before 1400, most of Asia Minor and the Balkans
had fallen to the Ottoman armies of Islam, and the once mighty
Eastern Roman Empire had been reduced virtually to the city of
Constantine and its environs. It was against this backdrop that the
Council of Ferrara-Florence was convened in Ferrara on 9 April
1438. In attendance was a large Eastern delegation headed by
Emperor John VIII Palaeologos (1425-48) and the patriarch of
Constantinople. Thirteen sessions between 8 October and 13
December were devoted to the filioque, with Mark Eugenicos
(Mark of Ephesos, d. 1444) the principal Byzantine spokesman.
Mark was not solely the naysayer ensconced in Latin tradition. He
came to Italy as a Palamite genuinely desiring union but also con-
vinced that Rome had to make concessions on the filioque and the
primacy.
On 10 January 1439, the council was moved to Florence where
the first eight sessions (2—24 March) also focused on the filioque.
157 Papadakis, Christian East, 394.
The Stations of the Filioque 259

Debate was often heated but the syllogistic methodology favored

by the Latins inhibited progress, for few of the Greeks present were
well briefed in the theological approach of the schoolmen.158
His devotion to the apophatic tradition rendered even Mark of
Ephesos ineffective in the distinctly cataphatic environment estab-
lished by the Latin delegation.159 The end result came as no
surprise.
... we define, with the approval of this holy universal council
of Florence, that... the holy Spirit is eternally from the Father
and the Son ... and proceeds from both as from one principle
and a single spiration ... We define also that... "and from the
Son" was licitly and reasonably added to the creed ... 160
The delegates from Constantinople were hardly blameless, for
they purposefully avoided any serious dialogue between the Palam-
ites among them and the Thomists. Evidence suggests that the
emperor and even Mark of Ephesos declined to introduce into
debate the distinction drawn by the two Gregorys between the
unknowable divine essence and the divine operations or energies,
lest it broaden the range of theological disagreement and further
complicate the agenda.161 The emperor evinced little tolerance for
anything that might delay union. Meyendorff speculates, too, that
formal debate between Thomists and Palamites was avoided
because neither side felt prepared for such a dialogue.162 Certainly,
as George Scholarios admitted, the members of his delegation were
no match for the Latins in erudition and dialectic skill.163 Nor did
they exhibit unanimity concerning Palamite teaching.164 In any
158 Ibid., 396, 398.
159 Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1968), 125.
160 Tanner, 527.
161 Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1959), 205-206.
162 J. Meyendorff, "Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence,?" in
Christian Unity: the Council of Ferrara-Florence, 1438/39-1989, ed. Giuseppe
Alberigo (Leuven: University Press, 1991), 165.
163 Steven Runciman, Great Church, 105.
164 Ibid. See also John Erickson, "Filioque and the Fathers at the Council of Flor-
260 ST VLADIMIRE THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

case, "no authentic encounter of the two traditions took place."165

Yet we must be allowed to wonder, with Runciman, "how a council
which shirked the main matters of discord could hope to achieve
concord."166 In the absence of genuine debate between Thomists
and Palamites, the theological question of the filioque remained
unresolved, while unadorned Latin assertion carried the day. In
John Ericksons felicitous phrase, Florence was "less a success that
failed than a failure that almost succeeded."167
The councils maximalist declaration concerning papal primacy
was aimed not only at the Greeks but also targeted the Latin
conciliarists still gathered at the Council of Basel. The primacy, as
annunciated at Ferrara-Florence, was a weapon against the Latin
conciliarists as well as the Greeks. As the councils formula put it: the
bishop of Rome "holds the primacy in the entire world" and is ...
"the head of the whole Church."168 Although the Greeks were aware
of Basel, and Basel of the Greeks, both parties appeared oblivious of
their common interests. The Latin conciliarists no doubt shared the
papacy's view of the filioque and the subsidiary issues dividing East
and West,169 but neither they nor the Greeks ever sought to join
forces on the vital issue of the primacy, not even to the extent of
exploiting one another's polemic. But, then, the men at Basel may
have been ignored because they were in no position even to promise,
much less deliver, the military aid sorely desired by Byzantium. The
historic accomplishment of the Council of Ferrara-Florence con-
sisted not in achieving union with the East but, rather, in undermin-
ing the Latin conciliar movement. "By its very existence [Ferrara-
Florence] counterbalanced and finally outweighed the council of
Basel, and in so doing checked the development of the Conciliar

enee," The Challenge of our Past (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991), 166.
165 Ibid., 175.
166 Steven Runciman, Great Church, 105.
167 Erickson, 166.
168 Tanner, 528.
169 These would include: liturgical usage; rules for fasting; the Eastern use of leavened,
and the Western use of unleavened, bread in the Eucharist; the West's doctrine of
purgatory and its practice of priestly celibacy.
The Stations of the Filioque 261

Movement.. ."170 The defeat of the Latin conciliarists must also be

counted a defeat for the Greek conciliarists.
The council ended with a proclamation of union on 6 July
1439. Although only Mark of Ephesos and Metropolitan Isaias of
Stavropolis declined to sign the document of union, it soon
became evident that they spoke for the entire Orthodox Church.
Pope Eugenius IV (1431-47) quickly and correctly divined that
Marks rebuke would doom the union.171 The patriarchates of
Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, the churches of Russia, Roma-
nia and Serbia, almost immediately joined Mark and Isaias in
rejecting the accord of Florence. In Byzantium, where the irratio-
nal hope of effective military aid against the Turks was slow to
die—although it is inconceivable that Latin Christendom could
have deployed a military force capable of containing the Ottoman
Turks—the last two emperors as well as a minority of the clergy and
intellectuals, notably the Latinizers and those heedless of doctrine,
clung to the union. Not for thefirsttime, however, did the imperial
authority fail to force its will upon the Church. Several prelates
who had signed at Florence repudiated their signatures on return-
ing home, and the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras, allegedly echoing
the words of the emperors sister after the Council of Lyons, spoke
the sentiments of the great majority of faithful in declaring: "Better
the Sultans turban than the Popes mitre."172 As 800 years earlier,
the Monophysites of Egypt and Syria and the Nestorians of Meso-
potamia had seen the Muslim conquest as an acceptable alternative
to Byzantine control, the Byzantines now saw in Muslim conquest
an alternative preferable to submission to Rome.
Actually, it was not until 12 December 1452 that union was for-
mally proclaimed in the Church of the Holy Wisdom. On 7 April
1453, the Turks began to attack Constantinople by land and sea,
170 Gill, 411.
171 Deno J. Geanakoplos, Byantine East and Latin West: Two Worlds ofChristendom in
Middle Ages and Renaissance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 107.
172 Quoted in Gill, 375. Gill rightly points out, however, that Notaras, as a supporter of
imperial policy to the bitter end, behaved in a manner "hardly consonant with so
forthright an expression of principle" (ibid.).
262 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

and on 29 May the city finally fell to them. On the same day, the
Ottoman sultan transformed the most splendid church in Chris-
tendom into a mosque, and the obligatory three days of pillage
commenced. During those days of grace, the Ottomans showed
themselves no improvement over the crusaders in 1204, except in
leaving the Orthodox faith inviolate. And, for over 200 years after
the Ottoman conquest, the East would also be spared the incessant
drumbeat of the filioque and the primacy. So died the Byzantine
Empire and, with it, the lingering hope of reunion between East
and West. The essentially political motives which, since the mid-
thirteenth century, had turned the emperors toward Rome no
longer existed, for the empire no longer existed. The long struggle
waged by the Byzantine Church against a Byzantine state variously
compromised by Arianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Icon-
oclasm and,finally,surrender to Rome had ended in the victory of
the Church.

Epilogue
Latin inactivity in the East subsequent to the fall of Constantinople
was not entirely due to the pax Ottomanica which blanketed the
Balkans, Asia Minor, the Middle East and parts of North Africa.
Rome faced its own egregious internal problems. The first half of
the sixteenth century ushered in the Protestant Reformation, and
the Council of Trent (1545-63) soon instituted the Catholic- or
Counter-Reformation, a phase of Latin Church history which may
be said to have persisted until Vatican II (1963-65). The forces
unleashed by Trent began to buffet the East early in the seven-
teenth century. Not only was European Protestantism to be
stamped out, but the Orthodox and non-Chalcedonian commu-
nions of the East were to be "restored" to the bosom of Rome. The
once proud Churches of the Greek and Semitic East were no longer
ecclesial entities with which to negotiate but merely objects for
Latin proselytizing.
The filioque, however, was not to be forgotten. In the seven-
teenth century, discussion oî the filioque comprised the first, and
The Stations of the Filioque 263

by far the lengthiest, article in the confessional summary of Patri-

arch Metrophanes Critopoulos of Alexandria (1633-39). Metro-
politan Peter Mogila of Kiev (1633-46), at some length; and
Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem (1669-1707), more briefly, also
rehearsed the Eastern rejection of thefilioque.The three prelates
did so partly in reaction against "The Protestant Patriarch," of
Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris (1620—38), who had compromised
the Eastern position in his unvarnished acceptance of the formula
"from the Father through the Son." The traditional arguments
against thefilioquewere also advanced by the Ecumenical Patriarch
Anthimos VII (1895-96) in his reply to the encyclical of Pope Leo
XIII (1878-1903), dated 20 June 1894.173 Nor since the Council
of Ferrara-Florence has Eastern opposition to papal primacy slack-
ened; the Orthodox remain persuaded that no particular church
has legitimate claim to universal sway.
With virtually all the secular political issues which had exacer-
bated the problem of thefilioquebehind them, Roman Catholics
and Eastern Orthodox would now seem to enjoy the luxury of con-
sidering thefilioquein more or less unadulterated doctrinal terms.
But although the empires are gone, the scars inflicted by them on
the Churches they represented endure; as evidence one need only
cite the reception accorded Pope John Paul II during his visit to
Greece on 4-5 May 2001. A cursory glance at modern treatments
of the issue of the filioque reveals, moreover, that—explicitly for
most Orthodox, implicitly for most Catholics—the bond between
the filioque and papal primacy remains prominent. And while
modern approaches to thefilioquecontinue to exhibit scant agree-
ment between the two Churches, they display as well a lack of una-
nimity within each communion. Both Churches now contain a
negligible number of doctrinal relativists, a full complement of
ultra-conservatives, and a healthy minority of creative traditional-
ists. Missing from the Orthodox camp are the Latinizers.
Boris Bobrinskoy s "Thefilioqueyesterday and today" provides
173 Ritschl, "Historical Development," Spirit of God, 47.
264 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

an excellent summary of modern Orthodox opinion on the filio-

que. The slavophile theologian, Alexis Khomiakov (1804-60), was
perhaps most extreme: "The pride of the separated Churches, who
have had the effrontery to alter the Creed of the whole Church
without the consent of their brethren ... was a crime before God
and before Holy Church."174 At the opposite pole stood Fr Sergi us
Bulgakov (1871-1944) who wondered whether the controversy
over the filioque is "not simply a false problem which leads inevita-
bly to a sterile war of words?" and who concluded that it is just that.
If, on one level, Bulgakov dismissed the ancient controversy as a
matter of indifference, he is hardly to be counted a latter-day doc-
trinal relativist. For he goes on to link the filioque to the Latin
Christocentrism that culminated in the dogma of the pope as Vicar
of Christ. Thefilioque,for Bulgakov, is above all a dogma about the
pope, important less for its pneumatological substance than as a
symbol of papal absolutism.175 His idea seems to be that the
filioque, in subordinating the Spirit to the Son, led to the subordi-
nation of the Spirit to the Vicar of the Son and, hence, to the cre-
ation of the papal monarchy and a Latin Church bent on earthly
power and universal jurisdiction. It is the subordination of the
Spirit, implied by the filioque, that distorted the true role of the
Spirit within the Church, producing the excessive centralization of
the papacy and its attempts to eliminate legitimate and salutary
diversity within the Church. If these arguments seem tortured,
they nonetheless highlight the Orthodox view of the intimate con-
nection between the filioque and papal primacy.
Less extreme than Khomiakov and Bulgakov, the Russian church
historian, Vasilii Bolotov (1854-1900), distinguished among: dog-
mas which require obligatory adhesion from all believers; theolo-
goumena which concern what is probable but which nevertheless
possess a high degree of authority; and theological opinions which
carry no authority. Bolotov considered the procession of the Spirit
from the Father as dogma; the Photian addition, "from the Father

174 Boris Bobrinskoy, "The filioque yesterday and today," Spirit of God, 139.
175 Ibid., 136, 140.
The Stations of the Filioque 265

alone," a theologoumenon; and Augustine sfilioquea private theo-

logical opinion. Bolotov, accordingly, did not consider the filioque
an impediment to re-establishment of communion between the
Orthodox Church and the Old Catholic Church,176 the latter
unencumbered by the dogma of papal primacy.
Vladimir Lossky (1903-58) and his followers, among whom
are arrayed John Meyendorff, Paul Evdokimov, Nikos Nissiotis,
Olivier Clément and Dumitru Staniloae,177 view the filioque as the
one dogmatic reason for the separation between East and West but,
nonetheless, look favorably upon the efforts of Gregory of Cyprus
and Gregory Palamas to integrate the filioque into Orthodox trini-
tarian theology.178
Bobrinskoy himself urges the Latins to remove the filioque from
the Creed but without this suppression signifying ipso facto their
denial of the doctrinal content of the expression. The next step
would be "the opening of a genuine theological dialogue." This
stage would be followed eventually by a reformulation of the rele-
vant article of the Creed on the basis of the dogmatic agreement
reached between the Churches.179 As if providing a preview of the
dialogue he envisages, Bobrinskoy goes on to discuss what he terms
"The positive theological content of the filioque," which includes
the early Latin and Alexandrian notion that "the Spirit, as the reve-
lation of the mutual love of the Father and the Son, is communi-
cated to men jointly by the Father and the Son." This concept
preceded, but is consistent with, elaboration of the distinction
between the eternal procession and the temporal mission of the
Spirit and, so, should be acceptable to the Orthodox.180 On the
other hand, the notion of a procession of the Holy Spirit from the
Father and the Son as from one principle remains radically unac-
176 Ibid., 135.
177 See, for example, Dumitru Staniloe, "The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the
Father and His Relation to the Son, as the Basis of Our Deification and Adoption,"
Spirit of God, 174-86.
178 Bobrinskoy, "Thefilioque" Spirit of God, 137-38.
179 Ibid., 140-41.
180 Ibid., 141.
266 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

ceptable to Orthodox theology. "For the Father does not transmit

his hypostatic properties, even to his Son. What is common to two
hypostases (their attributes-energies, their life, the divine nature
itself) is common to all three." Nor is the compromise formula
"through the Son" a solution "on account of the ambiguities it con-
tains." Finally, Bobrinskoy aligns himself with Lossky and others
who look to the Palamite synthesis as key to the solution.181
Bobrinskoy urges the Latins to lift the anathemas hurled by the
Council of Lyons against those who reject the filioque as an article
of faith. This action, and the deletion of the filioque from the
Creed, would free the expression from its dogmatic character and
cease to be seen by the Orthodox "as a sin against unity and love."
Only then will it be possible to view the filioque "as a particular
theological investigation belonging to a certain region, to a certain
period of Christianity, seeking to express a particular aspect of the
Catholic faith."182
Despite its importance, the now quite famous "Klingenthai
Memorandum"183 receives little attention here because the ecu-
menical cast of its framers precludes considering it a strictly Ortho-
dox or Catholic document. Still, it is significant that the suggested
reformulations of the filioque contained in the Memorandum have
received the approbation of Orthodox theologians such as Fr The-
odore Stylianopoulos184 and Catholic theologians such as Fr Brian
Daley.185 The Memorandum should surely be the stuff of future
discussion between Catholics and Orthodox.
Fr Jean-Miguel Garrigues detains us briefly, not because he sum-
marizes modern Catholic thinking on the filioque, which in its
range is probably comparable to that of the Orthodox, but because

181 Ibid., 145-46.

182 Ibid., 147-48.
183 "Memorandum, the Filioque Clause in Ecumenical Perspective," Spirit ofGod, 6-
16 (particularly 15-16).
184 Stylianpoulos, "The Filioque," Spirit of Truth, 37-39.
185 Brian Daley, "Revisiting the 'Filioque,' Part Two: Contemporary Catholic Ap-
proaches," Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 10 (2001
31-62; especially 196-97.
The Stations of the Filioque 267

of his own suggestions for breaking the impasse. Garrigues' salient

argument seems to me captured in his statement that
... the only strictly dogmatic content of thefilioquewhich
can claim any rightful place in the Church's confession of
faith, is that the Holy Spirit goes forth ... from the Father as
Father, i.e. as begetter of the unique Son. Understood in this
way, thefilioquesimply spells out the dogma of the Third Per-
son, whom the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed presents
to us as proceeding from the Father who begets the unique
Son.186
In confessing uvefilioque,therefore, the Catholic Church is merely
affirming the fact, "universally recognized by the Fathers, that the
procession of the Spirit depends on the generation of the Word in
the bosom of the Father." The filioque should be considered as "no
more than a Latin explanation which does not claim to add anything
to the conciliar dogma." Garrigues draws back from recommending
deletion of thefilioquefrom the Creed, and expects the Orthodox to
respond to Rome s adoption of Garrigues' "clarification" by aban-
doning "the view that there is more in thefilioquethan the Catholic
Church sees in it and accepting] the liturgical development of the
Latin Church without branding it as heretical."
Garrigues maintains that "Ecumenical agreement can be estab-
lished between East and West only if each of the churches acknowl-
edges that the trinitarian formula [Latin-Alexandrian in the West
and Cappadocian-Byzantine in the East] to which it clings is only
a theologoumenon." The two theologoumena are intended to
express the same reality.188 Garrigues sees little future in a dialectic
between the Latin scholastic and the Greek Palamite systems, both
having developed in a climate of hostility between West and East
that made them increasingly resistant to one another. Garrigues
believes that once ecumenical agreement is established, a new ecu-
186 Jean-Miguel Garrigues, "A Roman Catholic view of the position now reached in the
question of ûiefilioque,"Spirit ofGod, 152.
187 Ibid.
188 Ibid., 157-58.
268 ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

menical consensus will emerge to express the dogmatic truth which

the Councils of Lyons and Ferrara-Florence, and the Palamite
Councils of Constantinople, attempted to formulate unilater-
ally.189 In contrast to our contemporary Orthodox commentators,
Garrigues leaves unmentioned, although he probably assumes,
papal primacy. Orthodox would, I think, wonder how "ecumenical
agreement" and "ecumenical consensus" on the filioque are to
materialize while the issue of papal primacy remains unaddressed
and unresolved.
Finally, let all those who travel the stations oí nie filioque seek
comfort in Gregory Nazianzus (d. 389).
What, then, is "procession'? Do you tell me what is the
Unbegottenness of the Father, and I will explain to you the
physiology of the Generation of the Son and the Procession
of the Spirit, and we shall both of us be frenzy-stricken for
prying into the mystery of God. And who are we to do these
things, we who cannot even see what lies at our own feet, or
number the sand of the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of
Eternity, much less enter into the depths of God, and supply
an account ofthat Nature which is so unspeakable and tran-
scending all words?190

189 Ibid., 161.

190 Gregory Nazianzen [sic], "The Fifth Theological Oration. On the Holy Spirit,"
VIII, tr. Charles G. Browne and James E. Swallow, A Select Library ofNicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series (New York, 1894), 320.
 ^ s
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