Nicene and the Filioque

This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which first promulgated the creed that goes by its name. As the recent Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo, In Unitate Fidei, the council was called to respond to the heresy of Arius, who denied the full divinity of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh. In the creed, the term homo-ousios was adopted to signify the relation between the Father and the Son: They are of the same nature, essence or substance, and the Son, ‘true God, from true God’, and ‘begotten, not made’. As Saint Irenaeus put it, God became Man, so that Man might become God.

Nothing’s been the same ever since.

Yet the Creed is not just that of Nicaea, as Pope Leo’s letter goes on to make clear, but also of the subsequent council of Constantinople in 381, when some in turn denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The creed was then expanded, to clarify that He too is the ‘Lord, the giver of life’ and Who is ‘worshiped and glorified’.

So far, so good. The Incarnation changed all of history, and to every person the path to heaven is now open, if they but avail themselves of God’s salvific grace and truth offered through Jesus Christ and His one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

The controversy – besides the odd insertion into a letter on the Creed to care for creation – is the glossing over the filioque clause. This was added after Constantinople and the following council of Chalcedon (451), that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Pope quotes the original version of the creed, stating simply that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father:

And in the footnote (#10), the following clarification is made:

First Council of Constantinople, Expositio fidei: CC, Conc. Oec. Gen. Decr. 1, 57 ^20-24. The statement “and proceeds from the Father and the Son ( Filioque)” is not found in the text of Constantinople; it was inserted into the Latin Creed by Pope Benedict VIII in 1014 and is a subject of Orthodox-Catholic dialogue.

The Catechism goes further and is somewhat more dramatic, making clear that the filioque had been confessed much earlier, by the first Leo, the Great, around the time of the Council of Chalcedon:

The affirmation of the filioque does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople. But Pope St. Leo I, following an ancient Latin and Alexandrian tradition, had already confessed it dogmatically in 447,⁷⁶ even before Rome, in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, came to recognize and receive the Symbol of 381. the use of this formula in the Creed was gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries). the introduction of the filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Latin liturgy constitutes moreover, even today, a point of disagreement with the Orthodox Churches. (#247)

‘Disagreement’, since the filioque is necessary to properly understand the nature of the Trinity. The divine Persons are distinguished by their ‘relations of origin or opposition’. The Father is identified by His relation to the Son, and the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. To paraphrase Saint Thomas, it’s not as though the Persons are related to one another – rather, they are the relations of one to the other. The Father is subsistent paternity, the Son filiation, and the Holy Spirit is the procession from the Father and the Son.

If the Son and the Holy Spirit both simply proceed from the Father, then they would be the same relation and, hence, the same Person. We need the filioque, or something like it. The Catechism goes on to make this clear:

At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father’s character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he “who proceeds from the Father”, it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son.⁷⁷ The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, “legitimately and with good reason”,⁷⁸ for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as “the principle without principle”,⁷⁹ is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.⁸⁰ This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed. (#248)

The East rejects the filioque for complex historical and theological reasons. That it was added under a ‘barbarian’ emperor (Charlemagne). As well, they wanted to emphasize the ‘monarchy’ of the Father, as the source without source, or, as stated, the principle without principle. This is still held in the Latin formulation with the filioque. The phrase ‘through the Son’ – per Filium – has its own metaphysical issues, not least subordinating the Son and the Holy Spirit, but is a compromise, and one that the East does not put into their own version of the creed.

Pope Leo has his ecumenical reasons for doing what he does, in the midst of which we may be confident he will leave the Creed as it is, which we may recite with gusto and with fullness of Faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three Person, one God, with whom we hope to live in eternal beatitude, in saecula saecolrum. Amen.

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