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So is the Holy Spirit. Does the Holy Spirit proceed from itself?
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Filioque
- Thread starter humble theologian
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Indeed, this is precisely the kind of accidental crypto-pneumatomacchianism I am concerned about. I don’t believe there is a vast group of Western Christians that intends to deprecate the Trinity or the Deity of the Holy Spirit, but rather, the filioque has the effect of prompting Pneumatological statements which are inadvertently de-personalizing in nature.
Whether the member you replied to intended it or not, and I believe they did not intend it, the effect of their reply read literally is to elevate the person of Jesus Christ above the person of the holy Spirit on an existential level, which violates the personal identity of the Holy Spirit and violates the triadological (Trinitarian theological) principle of the co-equality of persons.
I assume the individual you replied to has a fully acceptable view of the Trinity, that they would agree with the classical diagrams of who the Trinity is. The problem is that the next person who reads their post might, on the basis of it, and on the basis of attempting allegiance to some church that embraces the Filioque dogmatically, interpret it in such a way as to mean that the Holy Spirit is not really a person of the Trinity in the same sense as the Father or the Son, since the post declares Jesus Christ to be God without also declaring the Holy Spirit to be God or explaining precisely that the Holy Spirit is a person, and the personal relationships between the two, which I would note would be unreasonable, but the problem with the Filioque is that it creates a situation where the only way to preclude a misunderstanding that leads to Pneumatomachian beliefs is to expressly declare all of the above in practically any writing or discussion of it and also within the context of its use.*
Throughout my entire career, even before I converted to Orthodoxy, I was opposed to the Filioque because of its potential to cause this kind of confusion, and its been something I’ve been fairly stalwart in regards to.
* In this respect, it has become a bit reminiscent of the another all-too frequently encountered problem in Western Christianity, that being of reading the Psalter in a literal-historical manner rather than as Christological prophecy, because when people do that, and many Anglicans have apparently made this mistake, including even John Wesley, the result is that they react in horror to the concluding verse of Super Flumina Babylonis (136 in our LXX Psalter, Psalms 137 in an MT-based Psalms) and thus tend to delete it and other “imprecatory verses” from their Psalters without realizing the important messages these verses actually contain, for example, Psalm 136 v. 9 LXX is not a benediction upon those who would dare to murder the youths of Mesopotamia but rather, if read typologically and prophetically, is a benediction upon those who overcome sin, temptation and the sinful passions, which are the offspring of Babylon, which in Scripture is used as an icon to represent the corruption and sinfulness of this world, which will perish, while Jerusalem is used as an icon to represent holiness, purity and all of the virtues that follow from the correct worship of God and which exist in the Church and in the life of the World to Come.
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Xeno.of.athens
I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven.
Referring to the Holy Spirit as "it" may not be intended to depersonalize, but it can do so because, in English, "it" often allows for, and to some extent implies, non-personhood.
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This is also true, which is why I try to refer to the Holy Spirit using masculine terminology, even though it is referred to in a neutral gender in the Greek of the Nicene Creed and in feminine in the Syriac and other Aramaic languages.
Your concern is similar to my concern about the effect of the Filioque.
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Xeno.of.athens
I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven.
Agreed, and that is why I brought it up. The filioque as it is expressed in English ("Who proceeds from the Father and the Son") serves to mitigate against subordinationism. One is in a constant struggle to keep the balance between fidelity to conciliar intent and the language in which it is expressed.
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The problem is that the filioque is not required to mitigate against subordinationism, and insofar as it leads to Pneumatomachian and even Nestorian tendencies, and interferes with ecumenical relations with the Orthodox, and additionally is a direct and material violation of Canon VII of the Council of Ephesus, which is something of a big deal since the Council of Ephesus is the third ecumenical synod, and the second council convened ecumenically that received an ecumenical reception, and also, insofar as being the synod which officially rejected Nestorianism and Pelagianism, its canonical legislation really matters greatly)* the cure is worse than the disease.
The real problem in terms of subordination in Western Christianity is the very entrenched practice in most Western liturgies of addressing most prayers to the Father alone, and referring to Jesus Christ almost exclusively as “the Son of God.”
The Orthodox avoid this by addressing prayers in the Divine Office and the Eucharistic liturgy to all three Persons of the Trinity, and by addressing and referring to all three persons of the Trinity as God.
*I would also note that the Council of Ephesus is the last ecumenical synod that was accepted as ecumenical by the Oriental Orthodox, who had legitimate grievances that were not addressed at Chalcedon, and I will say that on a personal note I am extremely sympathetic to the Oriental Orthodox position, and I would note the Oriental Orthodox have endured being falsely accused of Monophysitism for over 1500 years, as well as being brutally persecuted not only by the Muslims and Communists but also by Chalcedonian Christians starting with Justinian, and during that time, they managed to avoid all of the issues that plagued the Chalcedonian church such as Monothelitism, Iconoclasm, and anything remotely resembling the Protestant Reformation. They also managed to convert to Orthodoxy two large and entrenched heretical groups in Ethiopia, as well as the last group of ancient paleo-Gnostic Christians to survive, the Paulicians in Armenia - thanks to the Oriental Orthodox, no Gnostic cults from antiquity or the middle ages survived into the 20th century, as missionary efforts in Armenia converted the last of the Paulicians in the 19th century, so any modern day groups that call themselves Gnostics are really neo-Gnostics who are trying to recreate the ancient heresy from fragments, but happily the original heresy has been obliterated, with the final blow being dealt by Armenian missionaries, without violence or coercion.
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Well we could assert the same thing about Aramaic for forcing the Holy Spirit into a feminine grammatical gender. I am disinclined to make either assertion. Given the current problem in the English speaking world with gender roles, I think the use of male pronouns exclusively concerning God is of some benefit, to emphasize that, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware stressed, Christianity is not a mother goddess religion.
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Xeno.of.athens
I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven.
from Copilot:
Interesting.
The Western Church, influenced by theologians like Augustine of Hippo, argued that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. This was seen as a way to emphasize the unity and equality of the Trinity, and to counter the Arian heresy, which denied the full divinity of the Son [Defending the Filioque]. The addition of the Filioque was formalized in the liturgy of the Western Church in 1014 AD.
Interesting.
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- Aug 3, 2007
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I mentioned in post #54 that St. Augustine expressed a filioque theology in his work: On the Trinity ( around 412 AD) but in his Enchiridion ( around 420 AD) he twice affirms that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father exclusively.
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Indeed, St. Augustine of Hippo, to his great credit (and I do mean great - that he did this attests to his considerable humility and saintliness) made a point of retracting several positions and statements he made in his earlier writings that he later realized were erroneous. I myself have wished that based on this, someone would edit his works to produce a compilation edited to reflect his later corrections and emendations, with the original text moved to footnotes that would also reference the later works that contradicted it.
A work similar to the Philocalia, the collection by the Cappadocian Fathers (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Gregory of Nyssa) of Orthodox writings of Origen, albeit in this case rather than having to sift through the mixed bag that was Origen’s work as a whole, in the case of St. Augustine of Hippo, he corrected his own works wherever he realized they were in error. I
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Which is unfortunate - would that we could converse in Koine Greek or Syriac or Bohairic Coptic or Classical Armenian or Ge’ez - there is so much good material in those languages yet to be translated into Englsih. Alas my Greek is rusty, my Latin is rusty to the point of being like a shipwreck at the bottom of an ocean for decades, and my Syriac pronunciation is notoriously bad, since some of the vowell sounds, like with German or Dutch, cause me to get a sore throat as for some reason my throat is often dry and sounds requiring plegm or a suction like ich or a glottal stop (as is common in vernacular English accents, where words like butter become bu’h’h’er) are painful for me to produce. Indeed the only such sounds I’m good at are the vowels in words such as doogh or tadiq (staples of Persian food) although on one occasion in my youth I nearly soaked a Persian restauranteur when I rather over-pronounced them.
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This of course is true. It is however a mistake to assume that a theology of double procession can only be expressed by adopting the filioque clause. As I mentioned earlier there are three passage in John to consider.
John 14:16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.
John 15:26 When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.
John 20:22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.
In the absolute context, the Holy Spirit always proceeds from the Father, and in many cases through the Son, but always from the Father. The Holy Spirit is uncreated, which is to say eternal, from before the beginning. The Nicene Symbol, before the Roman Insertion, laid this very clearly. The Filioque is inelegant, clumsy, and open to a wide degree of misunderstanding, not to mention divisive.
I say Restore the Nicene Symbol as it was in the Councils from 381 AD and following.
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Also, it may interest you to know there is an original version of what some people call the “Athanasian Creed” (which was compiled psuedepigraphically from some writings of St. Athanasius), which I think is better referred to as Quincunque Vult) which lacks the filioque. One can find it in Church Slavonic, Russian and Ukrainian Psalters, some Greek editions of the Horologion (which contains the invariant parts of the Divine Office, much like what you would find in the Book of Common Prayer, but without the full set of propers), and the English language A Psalter For Prayer, which is one of two really good Orthodox Psalters arranged for use as prayerbooks (it uses the Jordanville Psalter, and is published by the same monks, of the Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary of ROCOR in Jordanville, New York, which is my favorite publisher of Orthodox liturgical material - their recent edition of the Divine Liturgy of St. James is the best and most definitive translation I’ve seen. The Jordanville Psalter is the Coverdale Psalter adapted for Orthodox use (since like the traditional Latin rite, we use the Septuagint version of the Psalter, and our service books refer to Psalms based on Septuagint versification, which is frequently offset by one psalm from the versification in the Masoretic text).
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I believe St. Thalassios, the Lybian ( & friend of St. Maximos the Confessor) has some of the best summations of the Trinity like from the 4th set of his “century” ( sets of sayings grouped into sets of 100) writings in vol 2 of the Philokalia:
- Just as the single essence of the Godhead is said to exist in three Persons, so the Holy Trinity is confessed to have one essence.
- We regard the Father as unoriginate and as the source: as unoriginate because He is unbegotten, and as the source because He is the begetter of the Son and the sender forth of the Holy Spirit, both of whom are by essence from Him and in Him from all eternity.
- Paradoxically, the One moves from itself into the Three and yet remains One, while the Three return to the One and yet remain Three.
- Again, the Son and the Spirit are regarded as not unoriginate, and yet as from all eternity. They are not unoriginate because the Father is their origin and source, but They are eternal in that They coexist with the Father, the one begotten by Him and the other proceeding from Him from all eternity.
- The single divinity of the Trinity is undivided and the three Persons of the one divinity are unconfused.
The above are actually sayings 91-5 but I couldn’t paste the numbers & the software (or AI) grouped them 1-5. St. Thalassios is a saint in the Catholic Church also. His existing writings are only about 25 pages in the Philokalia but are rich. His writings were primarily for monastics and a layperson should take note of the few times he mentions like mortification of passions with serious fasting are not meant for the average person.
Fourth Century
Just as the senses and sensible objects pertain to the flesh, so the intellect and intelligible realities pertain to the soul.
www.orthodoxriver.org
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Indeed, I love his writings, as well as those of St. Nikitas Stithatos and St. Peter of Damascus, many of the jewels in the Philokalia.
Note that the Philocalia with a C, as you are probably aware, but for the benefit of other readers, is a collection of the Orthodox writings of Origen by the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century, whereas the Philokalia with a K is an anthology of theological writings from the fifth century until at least the sixteenth century*, which largely, but not exclusively, deal with prayer, mystical theology, hesychasm, asceticism and monasticism, compiled in the 18th century by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and St. Macarius of Corinth.
* Metropolitan Kallistos Ware as far as I am aware never finished the translation of Volume V of the Philokalia with Mother Mary, so I have not read the entirety of the later material, and what I have read has come from an abridged version of the Romanian edition of the Philokalia, which is partially a translation from Greek into the Romanian language, but also somewhat different in its contents.
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Xeno.of.athens
I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven.
It is interesting that the Son breathed the Spirit of God onto the apostles, and that Spirit means breath, and that it was the Spirit (breath) of God who acted in creation. My breath proceeds from me every time I breathe it. But I am no theologian.
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Or Latin
I thought I mentioned Latin… but if not, a slip… As you know I prefer strongly the traditional Latin mass, or, failing that, the Novus Ordo in Latin.
The thing about Latin is that most everything in it has either been translated or can readily be translated, but I thought I had mentioned it as well.
The only headache with Latin really is just finding the texts. For example, I can’t find online the complete Mozarabic Rite liturgical books currently in use in Toledo in Latin, even though I know they exist, and likewise I can’t find either the old Ambrosian breviary or the new one.
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