When Christianity bound itself to the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 c.e., the church and culture were wed together for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, and in sickness as well as in health. And so, when major regime changes happened (such as the collapse of the western part of the empire), the resulting shockwaves were felt throughout the church. Likewise, when schism and heresy upset the natural flow of congregational life, it was felt throughout the political world as well.[1] The same, of course, would go for the converse: when things were well with the state they were well with the church, and vice versa. This attachment to the state, and, furthermore, to distinct, geo-political cultures, has been both the best and worst thing that has ever happened to the church. On the one hand, it has spread the gospel message to many different people in a relatively short amount of time, promoting orthodoxy and attacking unorthodoxy (that is, heresy). On the other hand, however, the different cultural contexts and nuances in language have created confusion and discord in ecumenical dialogue and the formulation of doctrine. The political challenges have only exacerbated these problems. A prime example of both of these trends is the Filioque Controversy (which began in the fifth century). In this present paper, I plan to delineate the geo-political, linguistic, and theological issues at stake in the Filioque Controversy in an attempt to illustrate the love-hate relationship of the church with the culture around her.

So then, the first order of business is to describe what actually happened in the Filioque Controversy. The basic history is as follows: In the wake of the Arian and Semi-Arian Controversies, it had been settled in two ecumenical councils, one at Nicaea and one at Constantinople, that The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all one God, that the Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and that anyone who taught otherwise was undermining the Christian Faith. However, these councils did not settle whether the Cappadocian Trinitarian model or the Augustinian Trinitarian model was to be used in the churches. Nevertheless, the next hundred and forty years after Constantinople were blessed without any major Trinitarian controversies.[2]

This was all to be interrupted in 589, when a church council in Toledo, Spain, interpolated the creed to favor the Augustinian model, which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but “and from the Son.”[3] Then, to make matters worse, three Anathemas were drawn up at the council, the third of which condemned those who disagreed with the procession of the Spirit from both the Father and the Son.[4] This decision was further confirmed by the English in 680 and Germania in 809, where the interpolated creed was made the official creed of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Eastern patriarch refused take this last blow in stride. In 864, Photius, the patriarch of Constantinople and the single most powerful Christian leader in the Eastern Church, leveled the charge of heresy on the entire western church. The west did not respond kindly, and Photius was banished twice from his see, and died in exile in 891 c.e. The controversy slept for another 150 years after his death, and the filioque continued to be engrained deeper and deeper into the Romano-Christian psyche.[5]

In 1043, the Patriarch Michael Cerularius was raised to his see in Constantinople. Desiring to have closer relationship with the west, he wrote and encyclical letter about his desire for unity and the problems preventing that unity, among which was the filioque. Upon receiving this letter, Pope Leo IX responded in vehemence (especially over Cerularius’s criticism of the Western liturgical practices), seeing the letter as a challenge to Roman Authority. He wrote back an angry letter, in which the Patriarch of Constantinople was demanded to submit to him. After Cerularius’s refusal, a formal Sentence of Anathema was placed upon the altar in Constantinople’s church, condemning Cerularius and all who followed him into the Greek errors. A similar anathema followed condemning all who spoke against the Holy See.[6]And this, in effect, ended the Filioque Controversy. The Great Schism had begun.

Now, in order to assess what was at stake in the controversy, we must examine it from a few different angles. The first lens by which we might distill some meaning from the events is the lens of geo-politics. The Eastern Church and the Western Church were both situated in different places, and were, of course, surrounded by different cultures. However, in the beginning, the differences were minimal (though still existent), since the Empire was thoroughly Hellenized throughout. After the fall of Rome in 405 and the subsequent invasion of the vandals, the gap between these two cultures began to widen as a result of the differences in political leadership. The west, on the one hand, began to be more and more Germanic, and the east, on the other hand, retained its Greek identity. All of a sudden, the church was divided by political borders. The Imperial system of governance was replaced in the west by the feudal system of governance. And so, in this respect, then, the stress laid on the filioque controversy can perhaps be understood as a tension arising from the conflict between the Barbarian and Hellenistic cultures.[7]

The second lens by which we might view this controversy is a linguistic lens. The Greek East and Latin West were separated by language- that is, the very philosophy of culture. And this caused westerners, for the most part, to miss the nuances of eastern Trinitarian formulation, especially when considering the differences between persona and hypostasis so central to the Trinitarian debates of the first five centuries.[8] Add to this mix the confusion of the German conquest and the acculturation of non-latins into a Latin culture and system of governments, and it is not surprising that the ensuing controversy only furthered the confusion.

The third lens is perhaps the most important to a theology major, so we will consider it at length: there were many theological motivations for the controversy. The issue at the forefront, of course, is the difference between the Origen-Cappadocian Trinitarian formula and the Tertullian-Augustine Trinitarian formula. The Origen-Cappadocian formula was the older understanding of trinity: God the Father is the source of the other members and creator of the world. The Son is begotten of the Father and is the redeemer of the world. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and is the sanctifier of the world. This tradition stresses the difference between genetos as a characteristic of the Son and exporeuthein as a characteristic of the Holy Spirit, in an attempt to prevent the two from becoming synonymous.

The Terutullian-Augustine model is a bit different. On the one hand, it is in Latin: Tertullian translates ousia as substantia and hypostasis as persona, which, basically, deposed the tradition to focus on God’s unity rather than his plurality. Augustine takes this move to its natural conclusion in his De Trinitas, in which he includes the fact that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son.

This different tradition is the source of the disagreement in the Filioque controversy. The Easterners were trying to safeguard the unique position of the Father, showing how the Son and the Holy Spirit derive from Him.[9] They also were attempting to differentiate between the personhood of the Son and the Spirit by means of the difference between “begotten” and “proceeding.” When they saw that the Westerners were beginning to blur the lines between the Father and Son by making both of them the source of divinity in the trinity, this looked like an attempt to undermine the very personhood of the Father Himself.

The Latins, on the other hand, maintained that the Father was still the source of all divinity, but the Holy Spirit also proceeds from the Son, as a characteristic given to the Son via the Father. The agenda was to safeguard God’s unity and Christ’s full divinity and equality with the Father. The adding of the Filioque was a distinctly Augustinian move, and said something about whose model of Trinitarian theology was more “correct.”

The second theological matter at hand concerns the place of the ecumenical council as an authority for Christian belief. The Eastern Church was unconvinced that a provincial church council could overrule or amend the ruling of an ecumenical council. Rather, any changes should be made before the whole church, not just the eleven bishops that showed up to the third council of Toledo. By changing the ruling, the Western Church was putting into question the very nature and purpose of ecumenical councils and how binding they actually were.

Furthermore, the Western Church was subtly asking a question about the status of ecumenical creeds. Are ecumenical creeds unalterable? Are they the final word on a subject? Or should they be situational, mutable, have the ability to change as new insights become available? The Western Church was, in adding the filioque, basically challenging the universality and binding nature of universal creeds, which furthermore provoked a negative Eastern response.

And so, one can see that there were quite a few factors at stake in the Filioque Controversy. First of all, there were cultural concerns driving much of the hostility and distrust. The difference of languages further muddied the water, making the church ripe with major controversy. However, there were more than just cultural, political, and linguistic concerns in this controversy- rather, these differences began to raise certain questions about the nature of authority in the church and the way the church should conceptualize God. On the one hand, the West was questioning the inalterability of Ecumenical Councils and the creeds which they produced. On the other hand, both Church bodies were trying to decide who would have the final word on God: the Cappadocians or Augustine? And the result? Disagreement. Irreconcilable differences. Anathema. The Filioque Controversy was a controversy over the fundamentals of theology- who God is and who has authority to say so- that was exacerbated by the mess of two diverging cultures. The result was the largest schism the Church has ever witnessed to date.

[1] These categories of “church” and “state” are perhaps a modern, post-enlightenment construct I am forcing on the historical evidence. However, for the sake of brevity and for easy reading, I will maintain the usage of such constructs for a little while longer. Furthermore, it cannot be ignored that whereas the church and state were not “separate” (in the Jeffersonian sense of the term), they were nevertheless distinguishable from one another in post-biblical times.

[2] See George Broadley Howard’s The Schism Between the Oriental and Western Churches (Longmans, Green, and Co.: London, 1892), 18.

[3] Alister McGrath, Christian Theology, ed. 5, (Wiley-Blackwell: London, 2011), 249.

[4] Howard, The Schism, 19. This is effectually a condemnation of the Eastern Trinitarian formulae.

[5] Ibid, 33.

[6] See Ibid, 33-36.

[7] This gap was further exacerbated by the different political threats of which each cultures were dealing with. The East, on the one hand, was being troubled by the militant expansion of Islam. The West, though it sent crusades, was rather in an age of expansion and domination.

[8] Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology, (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2004), p. 8.

[9] McGrath, Christian, 250.