East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy

Our meeting with the affable and stimulating  Dale Tuggy on June 20th at St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery a little south of Florence, Arizona, got me thinking about the Trinity again.  So I pulled Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church off the shelf wherein I found a discussion of the differences between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman approaches to the doctrine.  Let's take a look.  Earlier this year, in January and February, we had a stimulating and deep-going discussion of Trinitarian topics which the interested reader can find here.  But there was no discussion of the Orthodox line.  It is high time to fill that lacuna.  (Image credit.)

East and West agree that there is exactly one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  They also agree that the Father is neither born of anything nor proceeds from anything, that the Son is born of the Father but does not proceed from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not born.  Bear in mind that 'born' and 'proceeds' in this context refer to relations that are internal to the triune Godhead, and are therefore eternal relations.  I hope it is also clear that neither of these relations is one of creation.  Each of the persons is eternal and uncreated.

The main difference between East and West concerns that from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.  The West says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), whereas the East says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.  One can of course question whether this dispute has any clear sense, but let's assume that it does for the space of this post.  I don't reckon there are any Stovian or other positivists hanging around this site.  (If there are, I pronounce my anathema upon them.)

The question is whether there is any reason to prefer the one view over the other.  Ware naturally thinks the Orthodox view superior (pp. 219-222).  He thinks it is superior because it is able to account for the unity of the three persons without making of this unity something impersonal.  His reasoning is as follows.  The tripersonal God is one God, not three Gods.  So the question arises as to the unity of the Godhead.  What is the ground of God's unity?  There is one God because there is one Father, the Father being the 'cause' or 'source' of Godhead, the principle (arche) of unity among the three.  The Orthodox speak of the "monarchy of the Father."  The other two persons originate from the Father.  Because the principle of unity is the Father, and the Father is one of the divine persons, the principle of unity is personal in nature.  So although there are three persons in one God, the unity of these three persons is itself a person, namely, the Father.

The Western view, however, issues in the result that the principle of unity is impersonal.  The reasoning is along the following lines.  If the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, then "the Father ceases to be the unique source of Godhead, since the Son is also a source." (219)  Consequently, "...Rome finds its principle of unity in the substance or essence which all three persons share." (219)  This implies that, on the Roman Catholic view, the principle of unity is impersonal.  (I am merely reporting Ware's reasoning here, not endorsing it.)

And that, Ware maintains, is not good.  "Late Scholastic theology, emphasizing as it does the essence at the expense of the persons, comes near to turning God into an abstract idea."  (222)  The concrete and personal God with whom one can have a direct and living encounter gets transmogrified into a God of the philosophers (as opposed to the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), an impersonal being whose existence needs to be proved by metaphysical arguments.

And so the Orthodox "regard the filioque as dangerous and heretical. Filioquism confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead." (222) God is stripped of concrete personality and made into an abstract essence.  And that's not all. The Roman view gives the Holy Spirit short shrift with the result that his role in the church and in the lives of believers is downplayed.  What's more, this subordination of the Holy Spirit, together with an overemphasis on the divine unity, has deleterious consequences for ecclesiology.  As a result of filioquism, the church in the West has become too worldly an institution, and the excessive emphasis on divine unity has led to too much centralization and too great an emphasis on papal authority.  It is worth noting in this connection that the Orthodox reject papal infallibility while accepting the infallibility of the church.

You can see, then, that for the Orthodox  the filioque is quite a big deal: it is not a mere theological Spitzfindigkeit.

Ware's exposition -- which I assume is a faithful representation of the Orthodox position -- saddles filioquism with a nasty dilemma: either ditheism or semi-Sabellianism.  For if the Son as well as the Father is an arche, a principle of unity in the Godhead, then the upshot is ditheism, two-God-ism.  But if it is said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son tamquam ex/ab uno principio, 'as from one principle,' then, as the Orthodox see it, the Father and the Son are confused and semi-Sabellianism is the upshot.  (221)

Sabellianism or modalism is the view that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are modes or aspects of the deity.  The East sees semi-Sabellianism in the West insofar as the Western view, in avoiding ditheism, merges Father and Son into one principle so that they become mere modes or aspect of that one principle.

That's the lay of the land as seen from the East.  I have been concerned in this post with exposition only.  Adjudication can wait for later. (He said magisterially.)

 

Comments

[Bill an Anxious Anglican]

Thanks for this exposition - the diagram (borrowed though it might be) is great, too. I will be very interested to read your "adjudication," as I believe that Ware and other eastern exponents assert rather than establish the dilemma that you posit. The western riposte, i.e., that the east is guilty of monarchianism," is more persuasive to me, but ultimately unpersuasive in an absolute sense, so I just stop talking at that point in the creed.

[Drew]

The problem with Ware's argument is that it's merely ad hoc. What does he mean when he uses the word "personal", what is a "principle of unity", and why should it be personal? There is no clear answer to any of these three questions in Ware's writings, and one finds similar problems in John Ziziouslas.

[Holopupenko]

May I suggest the following three chapters from Frank Sheed's Theology and Sanity may prove helpful: (6) Three Persons in One Nature, (7) Father, Son, and Holy spirit, (8) Some Further Precisions.

[Joe]

Met. Kallistos has since modified his position.

"Today many Eastern Orthodox bishops are putting aside old prejudices and again acknowledging that there need be no separation between the two communions on this issue. Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware (formerly Timothy Ware), who once adamantly opposed the filioque doctrine, states: "The filioque controversy which has separated us for so many centuries is more than a mere technicality, but it is not insoluble. Qualifying the firm position taken when I wrote [my book] The Orthodox Church twenty years ago, I now believe, after further study, that the problem is more in the area of semantics and different emphases than in any basic doctrinal differences" (Diakonia, quoted from Elias Zoghby’s A Voice from the Byzantine East, 43)." http://www.catholic.com/library/Filioque.asp

[Bill Vallicella]

That's a helpful comment, Joe.

[Lukas Novak]

Just a small remark regarding the Orthodox theory: They do not just say that the HG proceeds from the Father, but from the Father THROUGH the Son. Thus, rather than a triangle, the more apt representation of the Trinity in the Orthodox way is a line.

Note also that the formula "From the Father through the Son" is not regarded as heretical from the Catholic point of view but as correct in its way and complementary to the "Filioque". The Catholics say that the HG proceeds both from the Father and from the Son, however, the ability to spirate the HG is originaly in the Father, whereas the Son receives it from the Father (this is the main "systematic" Catholic argument for Filioque: since Father gives the Son everything except his paternity, the Son must be in all things like Father, except his paternity, including spiration of the HG). Thus even in the Catholic view there is only one ultimate "unoriginated origin" of the HG - the Father; and here also lies the possibility to reconcile the two doctrines.

The Catholics see the "Filioque" as a remedy against the Eastern tendency to subordinationism, rooted in the neo-Platonic interpretation of the Trinity, where the 2nd and 3rd persons are often explained in terms similar to neo-Platonic hypostases, so that the equality of the persons is compromised.

I would also like point out the "as from one principle" phrase in the western formulation of the dogma: it is a very important implication of the "perfect identity wherever the opposition of relation does not intrude" principle for God. Just like the Father and the Son are only relatively opposed and are only distinct in relation to each other, they are, in relation to the Holy Ghost, perfectly identical. The Son's spiration is not another one than the Father's, it is the very Father's one that the Son has received from the Father, since it is not something that gets affected by the relative opposition between Son and Father.

[Scott]

@Lukas: What do you make of Aquinas's argument for the filioque. The Son is distinct from the Father b/c he is generated by the Father. But if the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, then the Holy Spirit would not be distinct from the Son--for on this view the Son and the Holy Spirit would originate from one agent (the Father). So, Aquinas argues that the Son and Holy Spirit are distinct b/c the Son originates from one agent (the Father), and the Holy Spirit originates from two agents (the Father & Son). On this argument, we can't say that the Father and Son are identical to each other in regard to originating the Holy Spirit--b/c then the Holy Spirit would originate from one person and not two persons. But this argument depends on there being two persons that originate the Holy Spirit. It's another question to ask what the power is which is that by which the Father and Son originate the Holy Spirit--for Aquinas this power is the divine essence. As someone mentioned above, the Father shares the numerically one divine essence with the Son such that there is one principle by which the two agents (Father and Son) originate the Holy Spirit.

But a western Christian need not appeal to an argument like Aquinas's to argue for the filioque. Other scholastics (e.g., Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus) developed other arguments for it.

[weus]

Church unity and world peace will come when we UNIFY THE DATES OF EASTER. Jesus has been asking the Church for more than 2 decades to have ONE EASTER DATE.

“I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.” (1 Cor 1:10 RSV)

“Every Easter season I must drink of the cup of your division since this cup is forced on Me... the more time passes for them to unite the dates of Easter, the more severe their sentence this generation will receive.” (May 31, 1994 TLIG)

LOVE AND HUMILITY IS MISSING.

Dialogues, rationalism and intellectualism will not bring about unity. Unity begins not with a signed treaty, but in the heart. All is possible with God and prayer is our contact with Him. Let us ask the Holy Spirit for the grace to truly repent, for the fruit of repentance is humility and love. "It is not just through words that unity among brothers will come, but through the action of the Holy Spirit" (Sep 30, 1993 TLIG).

We need to and must allow the Holy Spirit to invade our minds and hearts so that He is able to direct us towards complete unity and peace. Until we UNIFY THE DATES OF EASTER, we hinder the Holy Spirit's action to come upon us in full force to give us the next step to take. We must UNIFY THE DATES OF EASTER first.

Let us bend our knees in prayer for the grace of the Holy Spirit to inflame our hearts with obedience and love to UNIFY THE DATES OF EASTER.

Lord, have mercy on us. God bless us.