The Filioque Controversy

The Creed confessed at the Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 381) says of the Holy Spirit that He “proceeds from the Father” — echoing Christ’s own words that the Spirit “proceedeth from the Father” (John 15:26). Nothing was said there about the Son, because the council was defining the Spirit’s eternal origin, not denying the Son any role.

The extra word entered gradually, and in the West. It first appears in the Creed at local councils in Visigothic Spain — the Third Council of Toledo in 589 used it against lingering Arianism, to stress the Son’s full divinity. Carried north into the Frankish realm and promoted under Charlemagne, the addition spread through the Latin world. Rome itself was slow: around 810 Pope Leo III, though he held the teaching to be true, refused to insert the word into the Creed and had the unaltered text engraved on silver tablets set up at St. Peter’s. Only in the eleventh century did Rome finally adopt the interpolated Creed. By then the dispute with Patriarch Photius in the 860s had already made the Filioque a public quarrel between the Churches.

Orthodox Christians object on two levels, and it is important to keep them apart. The first is a question of authority. The Nicene Creed is the common confession of the whole Church, fixed by Ecumenical Councils; the Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus, 431) had even forbidden the composing of a rival creed. For one part of the Church to alter that shared text on its own — however good its intentions — struck the East as a breach of the conciliar order itself. This objection would stand even if the added words were true.

The second objection is to the doctrine. In Orthodox theology the Father alone is the source, the single origin or cause within the Trinity — this is the monarchy of the Father. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father. To say the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” seemed, to Eastern eyes, to give the Godhead two sources and to blur the distinct persons. That the Spirit comes to us in time through the Son (John 16:7) is not in dispute; His eternal origin is.

The Western Church has never taught that the Spirit has two independent origins. Its considered teaching is that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son “as from one principle” — the Father remains the ultimate source, and the Son receives from the Father the very act of breathing forth the Spirit. Rome saw the phrase as safeguarding the full divinity of the Son and the real bond between the Son and the Spirit, and understood itself to be making explicit what was already implied in the faith.

Nor is the East without its own bridge-language. Several Greek Fathers spoke of the Spirit proceeding “through the Son” (per Filium), and St. Maximus the Confessor, writing in the seventh century, defended the Latin usage of his day: the Romans, he explained, did not make the Son a cause of the Spirit, but were confessing that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. Much of the modern Orthodox–Catholic dialogue turns on whether the Filioque, rightly understood, can be reconciled with this older common faith — and, in any case, on whether the added word belongs in the shared Creed.

For the Orthodox the Creed is not merely a checklist of doctrines but the Church’s shared prayer, sung together at every Liturgy; to alter it on one side’s authority is to touch the very bond of unity. That is why the Filioque, small as it looks, remains one of the two chief obstacles — with the papal claims — between Orthodoxy and Rome. The Church prays for the day when East and West again confess the one Spirit in the one Creed.