The
significance of the Filioque question

by fr. John S. Romanides (†)

John
Savvas Romanides (1928–2001) was a Greek Orthodox priest, author and
professor who, for a long time, represented the Greek Church to the
World Council of Churches. He was born in Piraeus, Greece, on 2
March 1928 but his parents emigrated to the United States when he
was only two months old. He grew up in Manhattan. A graduate of the
Hellenic College, Brookline, Massachusetts, and of the Yale Divinity
School, he received his Ph. D. from the University of Athens. From
1956 to 1965 he was Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Holy Cross
Theological School in Brookline, Massachusetts. In 1968 he was
appointed as tenured Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the
University of Thessaloniki, Greece, a position he held until his
retirement in 1982. His latest position was Professor of Theology at
Balamand Theological School, in Lebanon. Romanides died in Athens,
Greece in 2001.

Because the question of
the Filioque played such an important role in
the centuries long conflict between the Frankish and
Roman worlds, the author's study originally prepared as
the Orthodox position paper for the discussions on the
Filioque between Orthodox and Anglicans at the
sub-commission meeting in St. Albans, England in 1975
and at the plenary commission meeting in Moscow in 1976,
is presented here in a revised form. It was first
published in Kleronomia, 7 (1975), 285-34 and
reprinted in Athens in 1978.

Historical Background

One must take note from
the very beginning that there never was a Filioque
controversy between the West and East Romans. There were
domestic quarrels over details concerning the
Christological doctrine and the Ecumenical Synods
dealing with the person of Christ. The West Romans
championed the cause of Icons defined by the Seventh
Ecumenical Synod, but they never supported the Frankish
Filioque, either as doctrine or as an addition
to the Creed. The Filioque controversy was not a
conflict between the Patriarchates of Old Rome and New
Rome, but between the Franks and all Romans in the East
and in the West.

As we saw in Part 1,
there is strong evidence that the cause of the
Filioque controversy is to be found in the Frankish
decision to provoke the condemnation of the East Romans
as heretics so that the latter might become exclusively
Greeks and, therefore, a different nation from
the West Romans under Frankish rule. The pretext of the
Filioque controversy was the Frankish
acceptance of Augustine as the key to understanding the
theology of the First and Second Ecumenical Synods. That
this distinction between cause and pretext is correct
seems adequately clear in the policy manifested at the
Synod of Frankfurt in 794 which condemned both sides of
the iconoclastic controversy so that the East Romans
would end up as heretics no matter who prevailed.

The Franks deliberately
provoked doctrinal differences in order to break the
national and ecclesiastical unity of the Roman nation,
and thus separate, once and for all, the revolutionary
West Romans under their rule from the East Romans. The
free Romans supposedly have changed their
nationality by becoming heretics, by moving their
capital from Old Rome to New Rome, and preferring Greek
over Latin. So goes the argument of Emperor Louis II in
his letter to Emperor Basil I in 871, as we saw.

Because of this
deliberate policy, the Filioque question was
about to take on irreparable dimensions. Up to this
time, the Filioque was a Frankish political
weapon which had not yet become a theological
controversy because the Romans hopefully believed that
the Papacy could dissuade the Franks from their
doctrinal dead-end approach. When it became clear that
the Franks were not going to retreat from these
politico-doctrinal policies, the Romans accepted the
challenge and condemned both the Filioque and
the Frankish double position on icons at the Eighth
Ecumenical Synod of 879 in Constantinople-New Rome.

During the ensuing
centuries long course of the controversy, the Franks not
only forced the Patristic tradition into an Augustinian
mold, but they confused Augustine's Trinitarian
terminology with that of the Father's of the First and
Second Ecumenical Synods. This is nowhere so evident as
in the Latin handling of Maximos the Confessor's
description, composed in 650, of the West Roman Orthodox
Filioque at the Council of Florence (1438-42).
The East Romans hesitated to present Maximos' letter to
Marinos about this West Roman Orthodox Filioque
because the letter did not survive in its complete form.
They were pleasantly surprised, however, when Andrew,
the Latin bishop of Rhodes, quoted the letter in Greek
in order to prove that in the time of Maximos there was
no objection to the Filioque being in the
Creed. Of course, the Filioque was not yet in
the Creed. Then Andrew proceeded to translate Maximos
into Latin for the benefit of the pope. However, the
official translator intervened and challenged the
rendition. Once the correct translation was established,
the Franks then questioned the authenticity of the text.
They assumed that their own Filioque was the
only one in the West, and so they rejected on this
ground Maximos' text as a basis of union.

When Maximos spoke about
the Orthodox Filioque, as supported with
passages from Roman Fathers, he did not mean those who
came to be known as Latin Fathers, and so included among
them Saint Cyril of Alexandria.

The fanaticism with which
the Romans clung to the Papacy, the struggle of the
Romans to preserved this institution, and the hierarchy
within the confines of the Roman nation are very
well-known historical facts described in great detail in
Medieval histories.

However, the identity of
the West Romans and of the East Romans as one
indivisible nation, faithful to the Roman faith
promulgated at the Roman Ecumenical Synods held in the
Eastern part of the Empire, is completely lost to the
historians of Germanic background, since the East Romans
are consistently called Greeks and Byzantines.

Thus, instead of dealing
with church history in terms of a united and indivisible
Roman nation, and presenting the Church a being carved
up in the West by Germanic conquerors, European
historians have been sucked into the Frankish
perspective, and thereby deal with church history as
though there were a Greek Christendom as distinguished
from a Latin Christendom. Greek Christendom consists of
supposedly, the East Romans, and Latin Christendom, of
the Franks and other Germanic peoples using Latin plus,
supposedly, the West Romans, especially Papal Romania,
i.e. the Papal States.

Thus, the historical myth
has been created that the West Roman Fathers of the
Church, the Franks, Lombards, Burgundians, Normans,
etc., are one continuous and historically unbroken Latin
Christendom, clearly distinguished and different from a
mythical Greek Christendom. The frame of reference
accepted without reservation by Western historians for
so many centuries has been the Greek East and the
Latin West.

A much more accurate
understanding of history presenting the Filioque
controversy in its true historical perspective is based
on the Roman viewpoint of church history, to be found in
(both Latin and Greek) Roman sources, as well as in
Syriac, Ethiopian, Arabic, and Turkish sources. All
these point to a distinction between Frankish and Roman
Christendom, and not between a mythical Latin and Greek
Christendom. Among the Romans, Latin and Greek are
national languages, not nations. The Fathers are neither
Latins nor Greeks but Romans.

Having this historical
background in mind, one can then appreciate the
significance of certain historical and theological
factors underlying the so-called Filioque
controversy. This controversy was essentially a
continuation of the Germanic or Frankish effort to
control not only the Roman nation, but also the rest of
the Roman nation and Empire.

In order to expand on
this historical approach, we would point out the
following:

The doctrinal differences which exist between Saint
Ambrose and Saint Augustine are a summary of the
differences between Frankish and Roman theological
method and doctrine. This is indeed a strange
discovery, since one is given the impression that
Augustine was a student and friend of Ambrose, and
that the latter instructed and baptized the former.
After comparing the two, I have come to the
conclusion that Augustine did not pay much attention
to the sermons of Ambrose and evidently read little
of Ambrose's works.

The two differ radically over the questions of the
Old Testament appearances of the Logos, the
existence of the universals, the general framework
of the doctrine of the Trinity, the nature of
communion between God and man, the manner in which
Christ reveals His divinity to the apostles, and in
general, over the relation between doctrine and
speculation, or revelation and reason. Ambrose
clearly follows the East Roman Fathers, and
Augustine follows the Bible interpreted within the
framework of Plotinus, and under the pressure of his
Manichaean past.

The province of Gaul was the battleground between
the followers of Augustine and of Saint John Cassian,
when the Franks were taking over the province and
transforming it into their Francia. Through his
monastic movement and his writings in this field and
on Christology, Saint John Cassian had a strong
influence on the Church in Old Rome also. In his
person, as in other persons such as Ambrose, Jerome,
Rufinus, Leo the Great, and Gregory the Great, we
have an identity in doctrine, theology, and
spirituality between the East and West Roman
Christians. Within this framework, Augustine in the
West Roman area was subjected to general Roman
theology. In the East Roman area, Augustine was
simply ignored.

In
contrast to East and West Roman theology, the
Frankish theological tradition makes its appearance
in history reading and knowing in full only
Augustine. As the Franks became acquainted with
other Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking Roman
Fathers, they subordinated them all to the authority
of Augustinian categories. Even the dogmas
promulgated at Ecumenical Synods were replaced by
Augustine's understanding of these dogmas.

This theological frame of reference within the
framework of feudalism gives the Franks confidence
that they have the best theology, not only because
they have what Latin (i.e. Frankish) Christendom
ever since has considered the greatest Father of the
Patristic period, but also because the Franks and
the other Germanic peoples are, by the very nature
of their birth, a noble race superior to the Romans,
Greeks (East Romans), and Slavs. The natural
result of this superiority is that the Germanic
races, especially the Fanks, Normans, Lombards, and,
finally, the Germans, should produce a theology
better than that of the Romans. Thus, the scholastic
tradition of the Germanic Europe surpasses the
Patristic period of the Romans. I personally can
find no other justification of the claim, so popular
until a few years ago in the West, that scholastic
theology succeeded and surpassed patristic theology.

This distinction has its derivation in a second
factor which has gone unnoticed in European,
Russian, and modern Greek manuals because of
the identification of Germanic or Frankish theology
with Latin-language Roman theology under the heading
Latin Christendom.

The historical appearance of Frankish theology
coincides with the beginnings of the Filioque
controversy. Since the Roman Fathers of the Church
took a strong position on this issue, as they did on
the question of Icons (also condemned initially by
the Franks), the Franks automatically terminated the
patristic period of theology with Saint John of
Damascus in the East (after they accepted the
Seventh Ecumenical Synod) and Isidore of Seville in
the West. After this, the Roman Empire no longer can
produce Fathers of the Church because the Romans
rejected the Frankish Filioque. In doing
so, the Romans withdrew themselves from the central
trunk of Christianity (as the Franks understood
things) which now becomes identical with Frankish
Christianity, especially after the East Franks
expelled the Romans from the Papacy and took it over
themselves.

From the Roman viewpoint, however, the Roman
tradition of the Fathers was not only not terminated
in the eighth century, but continued a vigorous
existence in free Romania in the East, as well as
within Arab-occupied areas. Present research is now
leading to the conclusion that the Roman Patristic
period extended right in tot he period of Ottoman
rule, after the fall of Constantinople New Rome.
This means that the Eighth Ecumenical Synod (879),
under Photios, the so-called Palamite Synods of the
fourteenth century, and the Synods of the Roman
Patriarchate during the Ottoman period, are all a
continuation and an integral part of the history of
Patristic theology. It is also a continuation of the
Roman Christian tradition, minus the Patriarchate of
Old Rome, which, since 1009 after having been
captured, ceased to be Roman and became a Frankish
institution.

Without ever mentioning the Franks, the Eighth
Ecumenical Synod of 879 condemned those who either
added or subtracted from the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and also those who
had not yet accepted the Seventh Ecumenical Synod.

It must first be emphasized that this is the first
instance in history wherein and Ecumenical Synod
condemned heretics without naming them. In this
case, the heretics are clearly the Franks.

It is also significant that Pope John VIII's
Commonitorium to the Synod does not mention the
need to condemn those who either add or subtract
from the Creed.

There is, however, a letter of John to Photios,
which is usually published at the end of the acts of
the Synod, in which the Filioque is
vigorously condemned, and is described as something
added not long ago, but never in the Church of Rome.
The letter also requested that admonition from the
pope be used for its removal, since a harsher
approach may lead to its addition by force.

It has been argued that the surviving version for
the letter is a product of the fourteenth century.
However, the existing version fits in perfectly with
the conditions of Papal Romania under Frankish
domination at the time of John VIII, which could not
have been known by either a Frank or an East Roman
in the fourteenth century.

The power of the Franks over the Papacy, although
not completely broken after the death of Charlemagne
in 814, was in any case weakened with the
dissolution of his Empire, and, in turn, neutralized
by the reconquest of South Italian Romania from the
Saracens by the Roman army beginning in 876.
However, Roman power had not been so strongly
established that the Papacy in 879 could afford an
open doctrinal war with the Franks. Such an open
conflict would have led to the transformation of
papal Romania into a Frankish duchy, and of the
Roman population into the condition of the Romans
conquered in other parts of Western Romania by the
Franks and other Germanic nations and, of course,
also would have meant the addition of the
Filioque to the Creed by force, as pointed out
by John.

At the same time, the Roman popes, after the death
of Charlemagne, seem to have gained a real influence
over the Frankish kingdoms which recognized the
magical powers of the popes to anoint an emperor in
the West, thus making him equal to the emperor in
the East. John VIII seems to have been
extraordinarily successful in this regard, and there
is not doubt that his request to Photios to be
allowed to use persuasion for the removal of the
Filioque was based on a real possibility of
success.

It
is always claimed by Protestant, Anglican, and Latin
scholars that since the time of Hadrian I or Leo
III, through the period of John VIII, the Papacy
opposed the Filioque only as an addition to
the Creed, but never as doctrine or theological
opinion. Thus, it is claimed that John VIII accepted
the Eight Ecumenical Synod's condemnation of the
addition to the Creed and not of the Filioque
as a teaching.

However, both Photios and John VIII's letter to
Photios mentioned above testify to this pope's
condemnation of the Filioque as doctrine
also. Yet the Filioque could not be
publicly condemned as heresy by the Church of Old
Rome. Why? Simply because the Franks were militarily
in control of papal Romania, and as illiterate
barbarians were capable of any kind of criminal act
against Roman clergy and populace. The Franks were a
dangerous presence in papal Romania and had to be
handled with great care and tact.

Gallic Romania and Italic Romania (including papal
Romania) are for the Romans one continuous country,
identical with East Romania. The conquering
movements of the Franks, Lombards, and Normans into
the free sections of Romania are seen from the Roman
viewpoint as a united whole, and not from the
viewpoint of the Germanic European conquerors, who
see the Romans as happy to be conquered and
liberated from the so-called Greeks, or now,
Byzantines, so that once conquered, they are
of no concern to the Romans of free Romania.

That the above is the correct framework for
understanding the historical context of the
Filioque controversy and the place of the roman
popes with this conflict, from the time of Pepin
till the descent of the descent of the Teutonic or
East Franks into the papal scene in 962-963, and
their removal of the Romans from their papal
ethnarchy finalized in 1009, can be seen in a) the
doctrinal positions of Anastasios the Librarian, the
chief advisor of the pro-Frank Nicholas I and also
of John VIII, in preparation for the Eighth
Ecumenical Synod of 879, representing the newly
restored Roman power over the Papacy, and b) in the
attitudes toward the Filioque of anti-Pope
Anastasios the Librarian (855-858) and Pope Leo III.

It is obvious that
Anastasios the Librarian did not at first understand the
Frankish Filioque, since on this question he
reprimands the Greeks for their objections and
accuses them of not accepting Maximos the Confessor's
explanation that there are two usages of the term; the
one whereby procession means essential mission, wherein
the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son (in
which case the Holy Spirit participated in the act of
sending, so that this is a common act of the whole
Trinity), and the second, whereby precession means
casual relation wherein the existence of the Holy Spirit
is derived. In this last sense, Maximos assures Marinos
(to whom he is writing), that the West Romans accept
that the Holy Spirit proceeds casually only from the
Father and that the Son is not cause.

There is every reason to
believe that this reflects the position of Nicholas I on
the question.

However, this was not the
position of the Franks who followed, not the West Romans
on the question, but Augustine, who can easily be
interpreted as teaching that the Holy Spirit receives
not only His essence, but His existence from the Father
and the Son.

But this also means that
the Romans in the West could never support the
introduction of the Filioque into the Creed,
not because they did not want to displease the Greeks,
but because this would be heresy. The West Romans knew
very well that the term procession in the Creed was
introduced as a parallel to generation, and that both
meant causal relation to the Father, and not energy or
mission.

It was perhaps as a
result of the realization that the Franks were confused
on the issue and were saying dangerous things that led
Anastasios to a serious reappraisal of the Frankish
threat, and to the support of the East Roman position,
as clearly represented by Photios the Great and John
VIII at the Eighth Ecumenical Synod of 879.

This interpretation of
the Filioque, given by Maximos the Confessor
and Anastasios the Librarian is the consistent position
of the Roman popes, and clearly so in the case of Leo
III. The minutes of the conversation held in 810 between
the three apocrisari of Charlemagne and Pope
Leo III, kept by the Frankish monk Smaragdus, bear out
this consistency in papal policy. Leo accepts the
teaching of the Fathers, quoted by the Franks, that the
Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as
taught by Augustine and Ambrose. However, the
Filioque must not be added to the Creed as was done
by the Franks, who got permission to sing the Creed from
Leo but not to add to the Creed.

When one reads these
minutes, remembering the Franks were a dangerous
presence in Papal Romania capable of acting in a most
cruel and barbarous manner if provoked, then one comes
to the clear realization that Pope Leo III is actually
telling the Franks in clear and diplomatic terms that
the Filioque in the Creed is a heresy.

What else can Leo's claim
mean but that the Second Ecumenical Synod, and the other
synods, left the Filioque out of the Creed
neither by oversight nor out of ignorance, but on
purpose by divine inspiration?

This theological position
is that of Pope Hadrian I (772-795) also and of the
Toledo Synods where the Filioque is not in the
Creed but is in another context.

Once the Franks secured
their hold on Papal Romania, the Papacy became like a
mouse caught in the paws of its traditional enemy
the cat. The Franks knew very well what they had
captured. They began developing theories and church
policy which would put this Roman institution to good
use for the fostering of Frankish control over
territories formerly under the control of the Romans,
and of aiding in new conquests. The West Franks
continued in the steps of Charlemagne, but in a weak
manner. The Romans regained full control of the papacy
after 867, but then the East Franks entered the papal
scene beginning in 962, with the known results.

The attitudes of the West
and East Franks toward the Papacy and the Filioque
were different, the first being mild, and the second
fanatically hard. One of the important reasons for this
is that, after 920, the new reform movements gained
enough momentum to shape the policies of the East German
Franks who took over the Papacy. When the Romans lost
the Papacy, the Filioque was introduced into
Rome for the first time in either 1009, or at latest by
1014.

In the light of the
above, we do not have the situation usually presented by
European, American, and Russian historians in which the
Filioque is an integral part of so-called
Latin Christendom with a Greek Christendom in
opposition on the pretext of its introduction into the
Creed. (The addition to the Creed was supposedly opposed
by the popes not doctrinally, but only as addition in
order not to offend the Greeks.) What we do have
is a united West and East Roman nation in opposition to
an upstart group of Germanic races who began teaching
the Romans before they really learned anything
themselves. Of course, German teachers could be very
convincing on question of dogma, only by holding a knife
to the throat. Otherwise, especially in the time of
imposing the Filioque, the theologians of the
new Germanic theology were better than their noble
peers, only because they could read and write and had,
perhaps, memorized Augustine.

The cleavage between the
Roman and Frankish Papacy is nowhere so clearly apparent
as in the fact that, when at the Pseudo-Union Council of
Florence (1439), the Romans presented to the Franks
Saint Maximos the Confessor's interpretation of the
Filioque as a basis of union. The Franks not only
rejected this interpretation as false and not in keeping
with Franco-Latin doctrine, but also they were not aware
of its correct reading.

The Theological Background

At the foundation of the
Filioque controversy between Franks and Romans
lie essential differences in theological method,
theological subject matter, spirituality, and therefore,
also in the understanding of the very nature of doctrine
and of the development of the language or of terms in
which doctrine is expressed. Of all the aspects dealt
with in my published works, I will single out the
following as necessary to an elemental understanding of
the Roman attitudes to Frankish pretensions on the
Filioque. Although we have named the second part of
this paper The Theological Background, we are
still speaking about theology within historical
perspective, and not abstractly with extra contextual
references to the Bible.

When reading through
Smaragdus' minutes of the meeting between Charlemagne's
emissaries and Pope Leo III, one is struck not only by
the fact that the Franks had so audaciously added the
Filioque to the Creed and made it into a dogma,
but also by the haughty manner in which they so
authoritatively announced that the Filioque was
necessary for salvation, and that it was an improvement
of an already good, but not complete, doctrine
concerning the Holy Spirit. This was in answer to Leo's
strong hint at Frankish audacity. Leo, in turn, warned
that when one attempts to improve what is good he should
first be sure that in trying to improve he is not
corrupting. He emphasizes that he cannot put himself in
a position higher than the Fathers of the Synods, who
did not omit the Filioque out of oversight or
ignorance, but by divine inspiration.

The question arises,
Where in the world did the newly born Frankish
theological tradition get the idea that the Filioque
is an improvement of the Creed, and that it was omitted
from creedal expression because of oversight or
ignorance on the part of the Fathers of the Synod?
Since Augustine is the only representative of Roman
theology that the Franks were more or less fully
acquainted with, one must turn to the Bishop of Hippo
for a possible answer.

I think I have found the
answer in Saint Augustine's lecture delivered to the
assembly of African bishops in 393. Augustine had been
asked to deliver a lecture on the Creed, which he did.
Later he reworked the lecture and published it. I do not
see why the Creed expounded is not that of Nicaea-Constantinople,
since the outline of Augustine's discourse, and the
Creed are the same. Twelve years had passed since its
acceptance by the Second Ecumenical Synod and, if ever,
this was the opportune time for assembled bishops to
learn of the new, official, imperially approved creed.
The bishops certainly knew their own local Creed and did
not require lessons on that.

In any case, Augustine
makes three basic blunders in this discourse and died
many years later without ever realizing his mistakes,
which were to lead the Franks and the whole of their
Germanic Latin Christendom into a repetition of those
same mistakes.

In his De Fide et
Symbolo, Augustine makes an unbelievable naive and
inaccurate statement: With respect to the Holy
Spirit, however, there has not been, on the part or
learned and distinguished investigators of the
Scriptures, a fuller careful enough discussion of the
subject to make it possible for us to obtain an
intelligent conception of what also constitutes His
special individuality (proprium).

Everyone at the Second
Ecumenical Synod knew well that this question was
settled once and for all by the use in the Creed of the
word procession as meaning the manner of
existence of the Holy Spirit from the Father which
constitutes His special individuality. Thus, the Father
is unbegotten, i.e. derives His existence from
no one. The Son is from the Father by generation. The
Holy Spirit is from the Father, not by generation, but
by procession. The Father is cause, the son and the
Spirit are caused. The difference between the ones
caused is the one is caused by generation, and the other
by procession, and not by generation.

In any case, Augustine
spent many years trying to solve this non-existent
problem concerning the individuality of the Holy Spirit
and, because of another set of mistakes in his
understanding of revelation and theological method, came
up with the Filioque.

It is no wonder that the
Franks, believing that Augustine had solved a
theological problem which the other Roman Fathers had
supposedly failed to grapple with and solve came to the
conclusion that they uncovered a theologian far superior
to all other Fathers. In him the Franks had a theologian
far superior to all other Fathers. In him the Franks had
a theologian who improved upon the teaching of the
Second Ecumenical Synod.

A second set of blunders
made by Augustine in this same discourse is that he
identified the Holy Spirit with the divinity which
the Greeks designate Θεοτης and explained that this
is the love between the Father and the Son.

Augustine is aware of the
fact that those parties oppose this opinion who think
that the said communion, which we call either Godhead,
or Love, or Charity, is not a substance. Moreover, they
require the Holy Spirit to be set forth to them
according to substance; neither do they take forth to
them according to substance; neither do they take it to
have been otherwise impossible for the expression God is
Love to have been used, unless love were a substance.

It is obvious that
Augustine did not at all understand what the East Roman
Fathers, such as Saint Gregory Nyssa, Saint Gregory the
Theologian, and Saint Basil the Great, were talking
about. On the one hand, they reject the idea that the
Holy Spirit can be the common energies of the Father and
Son known as Θεοτης and love since these are not an
essence or an hypostasis, whereas the Holy Spirit is an
hypostasis. Indeed, the Fathers of the Second Ecumenical
Synod required that the Holy Spirit not be identified
with any common energy of the Father and Son, but they
did not identify the Holy Spirit with the common essence
of the Father and Son either.

The Holy Spirit is an
individual hypostasis with individual characteristics or
properties not shared by other hypostases, but He does
share fully everything the Father and Son have in
common, to wit, the divine essence and all uncreated
energies and powers. The Holy Spirit is an individuality
who is not what is common between the Father and Son,
but has in common everything the Father and Son have in
common.

All his life, Augustine
rejected the distinction between what the persons are
and what they have (even though this is a Biblical
distinction) and identified what God is with what He
has. He not only never understood the distinction
between 1) the common essence and energies of the Holy
Trinity and 2) the incommunicable individualities of the
diving hypostases; but completely failed to grasp the
very existence of the difference between a) the common
divine essence and b) the common divine love and
divinity. He himself admits that he does not understand
why a distinction is made in the Greek language between
οὐσία and ὑπόστασις in God. Nevertheless, he insisted
that his distinctions must be accepted as a matter of
faith and rendered in Latin as una essentia and
tes substantiae. (De Trinitate,
5.8.10; 7.4-6)

It is clear that St.
Augustine accepted the most important aspect of the
Trinitarian terminology of the Cappadocian Fathers and
the Second Ecumenical Synod.

However, not aware of the
teaching of such Fathers, like Basil and the two
Gregories mentioned, who do not identify the common
Θεοτης and the αγαπη of the Trinity with the common
divine essence of the Trinity, Augustine has the
following peculiar remarks:

But men like these should
make their heart pure, so far as they can, in order that
they may have power to see that in the substance of God
there is not anything of such a nature as would imply
that therein substance is one thing, and that which is
accident to substance (aliud quod accidat substantia)
another thing, and not substance; whereas whatsoever
can be taken to be taken therein is substance.

Once these foundations
are laid, then the Holy Spirit as that which is common
to the Father and Son exists by reason of the Father and
Son. Thus, there can be no distinction between the
Father and Son sending the Holy Spirit, and the Father
causing the existence of the Holy Spirit. What God is by
nature, how the three hypostases exist by nature, and
what God does by will, become confused. Thus, it is a
fact that for Augustine both generation and procession
end up being confused with the divine powers and
energies and, thereby, also end up meaning the same
thing. The Filioque thus is an absolute
necessity in order to salvage something of the
individuality of the Holy Spirit. God, then, is from no
one. The Son is from one. The Holy Spirit must be from
two. Otherwise, since generation and procession are the
same, there would be no difference between the Spirit
and the Son since they would both be from one.

The third and most
disturbing blunder in Augustine's approach to the
question before us is that his theological method is not
only pure speculation on what one accepts by faith (for
the purpose of intellectually understanding as much as
one's reason allows by either illumination or ecstatic
intuition), but it is a speculation which is transferred
from the individual speculating believer to a
speculating church, which, like an individual,
understands the dogmas better with the passage of time.

Thus, the Church awaits a
discussion about the Holy Spirit "Full enough or
careful enough to make it possible for us to obtain an
intelligent conception of what also constitutes His
special individuality (proprium)...

The most amazing thing is
the fact that Augustine begins with seeking out the
individual properties of the Holy Spirit and immediately
reduces Him to what is common to the Father and Son.
However, in his later additions to his De Trinitate,
he insists that the Holy Spirit is an individual
substance of the Holy Trinity completely equal to the
other two substances and possessing the same essence as
we saw.

In any case, the
Augustinian idea that the Church herself goes through a
process of attaining a deeper and better understanding
of her dogmas or teachings was made the very basis of
the Frankish propaganda that the Filioque is a
deeper and better understanding of the doctrine of the
Trinity. Therefore, adding it to the Creed is an
improvement upon the faith of the Romans who had allowed
themselves to become lazy and slothful on such an
important matter. This, of course, raises the whole
question concerning the relationship between revelation
and verbal and iconic or symbolic expressions of
revelation.

For Augustine, there is
no distinction between revelation and conceptual
intuition of revelation. Whether revelation is given
directly to human reason, or to human reason by means of
creatures, or created symbols, it is always the human
intellect itself which is being illumined or given
vision to. the vision of god itself is an intellectual
experience, even though above the powers of reason
without appropriate grace.

Within such a context,
every revelation is a revelation of concepts which can
be searched out by reason for a fuller and better
understanding. Suffice it that faith and the acceptance
of dogmas by virtue of the authority of the Church
always forms the starting point. What cannot now be
fully understood by reason based on faith will be fully
understood in the next life. And inasmuch as, being
reconciled and called back into friendship through love,
we shall be able to become acquainted with all
the secret things of God, for this reason it is said of
the Holy Spirit that He shall lead you into all truth.
What Augustine means by such language is made very clear
by what he says elsewhere, I will not be slow to
search out the substance of God, whether through His
scripture or through the creature.

Such material in the
hands of the Franks transformed the purpose of theology
into a study or searching out of the divine substance
and, in this respect, the scholastic tradition far
surpassed the tradition of the Roman Fathers who
consistently taught that not only man, but even the
angels, neither know, nor will ever know, the divine
essence which is known only to the Holy Trinity.

Both Orthodox and Arians
fully agreed with the inherited tradition that only God
knows His own essence. This means that He who knows the
divine nature is himself God by nature, Thus, in order
to prove that the Logos is a creature, the Arians argued
that the Logos does not know the essence of the Father.
The Orthodox argued that the Logos does know the essence
of the Father and, therefore, is uncreated. The
Eunomians threw a monkey wrench into the agreed rules
for proving points with their shocking claim that, not
only does the Logos know the essence of God, but man
also can know this essence. Therefore, the Logos does
not have to be uncreated because He knows this essence.

Against the Arian and
Orthodox position that creatures cannot know the divine
uncreated essence, but may know the uncreated energy of
God in its multiple manifestations, the Eunomians argued
that the diving essence and uncreated energy are
identical, so that to know the one is to know the other.

Strangely, Augustine
adopted the Eunomian positions on these questions.
Therefore, when the Franks appeared in the East with
these positions they were accused of being Eunomians.

In contrast to this
Augustinian approach to language and concepts concerning
God, we have the Patristic position expressed by Saint
Gregory the Theologian against the Eunomians. Plato had
claimed that it is difficult to conceive of God but, to
define Him in words is an impossibility. Saint Gregory
disagrees with this and emphasizes that it is
impossible to express Him, and yet, more impossible to
conceive Him. For that which may be conceived may
perhaps be made clear by language, if not fairly well,
at any rate imperfectly...

The most important
element in Patristic epistemology is that the partial
knowability of the divine actions or energies, and the
absolute and radical unknowability and incommunicability
of the divine essence is not a result of the
philosophical or theological speculation, as it is in
Paul of Samosata, Arianism, and Nestorianism, but of the
personal experience of revelation or participation in
the uncreated glory of God by means of vision or
theoria. Saint Gregory defines a theologian as one who
has reached this theoria by means of purification and
illumination, and not by means of dialectical
speculation. Thus, the authority for Christian truth is
not the written words of the Bible, which cannot in
themselves either express God, but rather the individual
apostle, prophet, or saint who is glorified in God.

Thus, the Bible, the
writings of the Fathers, and the decisions of Synods are
not revelation, but about revelation. Revelation itself
transcends words and concepts, although it inspires
those participating in divine glory to accurately
express what is inexpressible in words and concepts.
Suffice it that under the guidance of the saints, who
know by experience, the faithful should know that God is
not to be identified with Biblical words and concepts
which point to Him, albeit infallibly.

Thus, we find that Saint
Gregory the Theologian does not only point to the
revelatory experience of the prophets, apostles, and
saints in order to set out the theological foundations
for confuting the Arians, Eunomians, and Macedonians,
but also to his own experience of this same revelation
of divine glory.

What is this that has
happened to me, O friends, and initiates, and fellow
lovers of the truth? I was running to lay hold of God,
and thus I went up into the Mount, drew aside the
curtain of the Cloud, and entered away from matter and
material things, and as far as I could I withdrew within
myself. And then when I looked up, I scarcely saw the
back parts of God; although I was sheltered by the Rock,
the Word that was made flesh for us. And when I looked a
little closer, I saw, not the first and unmingled Nature
known to itself, to the Trinity I mean; not that which
abideth within the first veil, and is hidden by the
Cherubim; but only that (Nature), which at last even
reaches to us. And that is, as far as I can learn, the
Majesty, or as holy David calls it, the Glory which is
manifested among the creatures, which It has produced
and governs. For these are the Back Parts of God, which
are after Him, as tokens of Himself...

This distinction between
the first Nature and the uncreated glory of God, the
first known only to God and the other to those to whom
God reveals himself is to be found not only in the
Orthodox Fathers but also in Paul of Samosata, the
Arians, and the Nestorians all of whom claimed that God
is related to creatures only by will, and not by nature,
since natural relations mean necessary relations which
would reduce God to a system of emanations like that of
Valentinus. Paul of Samosata and the Nestorians argued
that in Christ, God is united to humanity not by nature,
but by will, and the Arians argued that God is related
to the hypostatic Logos not by nature, but by will.

Against these positions,
the Orthodox Fathers argues that in Christ, the Logos is
united to His humanity by nature or hypostatically, and
the Father generates His Son not by will only, but by
nature primarily, the will not being in contradiction to
what belongs to God by nature. Thus, God generates the
Logos by nature and by will. The Holy Trinity creates
and is related to creatures with the exception of the
Logos who by nature unites himself His own humanity.

In any case, the
Eunomians and Augustine obliterated this distinction
between what God is by nature and what God does by will.
In Augustine this led to a failure to distinguish
between generation and procession (which are not
energies of the Father) and such acts as knowing
sending, loving, and giving, which are common energies
of the father, Son and Holy Spirit, but not he radically
incommunicable manners of existence and hypostatic
properties of generation and procession.

Because the Franks,
following Augustine, neither understood the Patristic
position on this subject, nor were they willing from the
heights of their majestic feudal nobility to listen to
Greek explain these distinctions, they went about
raiding the Patristic texts. They took passages out of
context in order to prove that for all the Fathers, as
supposedly in the case of Augustine, the fact that the
Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit means that the
Holy Spirit derives His existence from the Father and
Son.

In concluding this
section, we note that the Fathers always claimed that
generation and procession are what distinguish the Son
from the Holy Spirit. Since the Son is the only
generation begotten Son of God, procession is different
from generation. Otherwise, we would have two Son, in
which case there is no only begotten Son. For the
Fathers this was both a biblical fact and a mystery to
be treated with due respect. To ask what generation and
procession are is as ridiculous as asking what the
divine essence is. Only energies of God may be know, and
then only in so far as the creature can receive.

In contrast to this,
Augustine set out to explain what generation is. He
identified generation with what the other Roman Fathers
called actions or energies of God which are common to
the Holy Trinity. Thus, procession ended up being these
same energies. The difference between the Son and the
Spirit was that the Son is from one and he Holy Spirit
from two.

When he began his De
Trinitate, Augustine promised that he would explain
why the Son and the Holy Spirit are not brothers. After
completing his twelfth book, his friends stole and
published this work in an unfinished and uncorrected
form. In Book 15, 45, Augustine admits that he cannot
explain why the Holy Spirit is not a son of the Father
and brother of the Logos, and proposes that we will
learn this in the next life.

In his
Rectractationun, Augustine explains how he intended
to explain what had happened in another writing and not
publish his De Trinitate himself. However, his
friends prevailed upon him, and he simply corrected the
books as much as he could and finished the work with
which he was not really satisfied.

What is most remarkable
is that the spiritual and cultural descendants of the
Franks, who pricked and swelled Roman livers for so many
centuries, are still claiming that Augustine is the
authority par excellence on the Patristic
doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Whereas no Greek-speaking
Roman Father ever used the expression that the Holy
Spirit proceeds (ἐκπορεύσθαι) from the Father and Son,
both Ambrose and Augustine use this expression. Since
Ambrose was so dependent on such Greek-speaking experts
as Basil the Great and Didymos the Blind, particularly
his work on the Holy Spirit, one would expect that he
would follow Eastern usage.

It seems, however, that
at the time of the death of Ambrose, before the Second
Ecumenical Synod, the term procession had been adopted
by Didymos as the hypostatic individuality of the Holy
Spirit. It had not been used by Saint Basil (only in his
letter 38 he seems to be using procession as Gregory the
Theologian) or by Saint Gregory of Nyssa before the
Second Ecumenical Synod. Of the Cappadocian Fathers,
only Saint Gregory the Theologian uses very clearly in
his Theological Orations what became the final
formulation of the Church on the matter at the Second
Ecumenical Synod.

The first fully developed
use of procession as the manner of existence and the
hypostatic property of the Holy Spirit is to be found in
the Pseudo-Justin collection of works, which probably
came out of the Antiochene tradition. It reached
Cappadocia via Saint Gregory the Theologian and
Alexandria via Didymos the Blind. Saint Ambrose however,
did not pick up this tradition. Augustine picked it up
in a confused manner.

It is clear that, in the
third or fourth century, the term generation, used with
regard to the Logos and God, changed from signifying the
Holy Trinity's relation to creation and the incarnation
whereby the already existing God became Father, having
generated the already existing Logos, who thus became
the Son, so that He may be seen and heard by the
prophets and become man) to signifying the manner of
existence of the Logos from the Father. The question of
the Holy Spirit's manner of existence and hypostatic
attribute arose as a result of this change.

With the exception of
Antioch, the prevailing tradition and, perhaps, the only
tradition, was that the Father is from no other being,
that the Logos is from the Father my means of
generation, and the Holy Spirit is from the Father also,
but not by generation. Saint Gregory of Nyssa initially
seems to have put forth the idea that the Holy Spirit
differs from the Son in so far as the Son receives
existence from the Father, and the Spirit received
existence from the Father also, but through the Son. The
Father is His only principle and cause of existence,
since these pertain to what is common, belonging to all
three persons. Saint Gregory's usual usage is the not
by generation. To this not by generation was
added by procession in Antioch. This gained
enough support to be put into the Creed of the Second
Ecumenical Synod. However, this term procession
neither adds nor subtracts anything from the patristic
understanding of the Holy Trinity, since the Fathers
always insisted that we don not know what generation and
procession mean. The Fathers evidently accepted the term
in the Creed because it was better than inserting such
cumbersome and negative expressions as from the
Father not by generation. In combining Saint Gregory
Nyssa's through the Son with the final settlement, we
get Saint Maximos the Confessor's and Saint John of
Damascus' procession of the Holy Spirit from the
Father through the Son.

It is obvious that the
Greek-speaking Fathers before this development used
procession as the Bible does, and so spoke of the Holy
Spirit as proceeding from the Father, and never from the
Father and the Son. It seems, however, that in the
Latin-speaking tradition procedure is used for
ἐκπορεύομαι, but sometimes also for εξερχομαι, and even
for πεμψις. In any case, when Saint Ambrose used
procedure, he does not mean either manner of
existence or hypostatic property. This is clear from his
insistence that whatsoever the Father and the Son have
in common, the Holy Spirit also has. When the Father and
the Son send the Spirit, the Spirit sends himself. What
is individual belongs to only one person. What is common
is common to all three persons.

Evidently, because
Augustine transformed the doctrine of the Holy Trinity
into a speculative exercise of philosophical acumen, the
simple, schematic and biblical nature of the doctrine in
the Roman tradition had been lost sight of by those
stemming from the scholastic tradition.

Thus, the history of the
doctrine of the Trinity has been reduced to searching
out the development of such concepts and terminology as
three persons or hypostases, one essence, homoousios,
personal or hypostatic properties, one divinity, etc.

For the Fathers, the
Arians and the Eunomians, however, the doctrine of the
Trinity was identical to the appearances of the Logos in
His Glory to the prophets, apostles, and saints. The
Logos was always identified with the Angel of God, the
Lord of Glory, the Angel of Great Council, the Lord
Sabbaoth and the Wisdom of God who appeared to the
prophets of the Old Testament and became Christ by His
birth as man from the Virgin Theotokos. No one ever
doubted this identification of the Logos with this very
concrete individual, who revealed in himself the
invisible God of the Old Testament to the prophets, with
the peculiar exception of Augustine, who in this regard
follows the Gnostic and Manichaean traditions.

The controversy between
the Orthodox and Arians was not about who the Logos is
in the Old and New Testament, but about what the Logos
is and what His relationship is so the Father. The
Orthodox insisted that the Logos is uncreated and
unchangeable, having always existed from the Father, who
by nature generates the Logos before the ages. The
Arians insisted that this same Logos is a changeable
creature, deriving His existence from non-being before
the ages by the will of the will of the Father.

Thus the basic question
was, did the prophets see in God's uncreated glory a
created Logos, or an uncreated Logos, a Logos who is God
by nature and, therefore, has all the energies and
powers of God by nature, or a God by grace who has some,
but not all, the energies of the Father and then only by
grace and not by nature.

Both Orthodox and Arians
agreed in principle that, if the Logos has every power
and energy of the Father by nature, then He is
uncreated. If not, He is a creature.

Since the Bible is a
witness of whom and what the prophets and apostles saw
in the glory of the Father, the Bible itself will reveal
whether or not the Logos has all the energies and powers
of the Father by nature. Thus, we will know whether the
prophets and apostles saw a created or an uncreated
Logos ὁμοούσιος with the Father.

Once can see clearly how,
for the Fathers, the con-substantiality of the Logos
with the Father is not only the experience of the
apostles and saints, but also of the prophets.

One of the most amazing
things in doctrinal history is the fact that both Arians
and Orthodox use both the Old and New Testaments
indiscriminately. The argument is very simple. They make
a list of all the powers and energies of the Father.
They do the same for the Son. Then they compare them to
see if they are identical or not. The important thing is
for them to be not similar, but identical.

Parallel to this, both
Arians and Orthodox agree against the Sabellians and
Samosatenes that the Father and Son have individual
hypostatic properties which are not common, although
they do not completely agree on what these are. When the
controversy is extended into the question of the Holy
Spirit, the exact same method of theologizing is used.
Whatever powers and energies the Father and Son have in
common, the Holy Spirit must also have both in common
and by nature, in order to be God by nature.

However, parallel to this
argumentative process is the personal experience of
those living spiritual masters who themselves reach
theoria, as we saw expounded by Saint Gregory above.
This experience verifies or certifies the patristic
interpretation of the Bible, which witnesses to the
uncreatedness of the Logos and the Holy Spirit and their
oneness nature with the Father and the identity of their
uncreated glory, rule, grace, will, etc. This personal
experience of the glory of God also certifies the
biblical teaching that there is absolutely no similarity
between the created and the uncreated. This means also
that there can be no uncreated universals of which
creatures are supposedly copies. Each individual
creature is dependent upon the uncreated glory of God,
which is, one the one hand, absolutely simple, yet
indivisibly divided among individual creatures. All of
God is present in each and every energy simultaneously.
This the Fathers know by experience, not by speculation.

This summary of the
Patristic theological method is perhaps sufficient to
indicate the nonspeculative method by which the Father
theologize and interpret the Bible. The method is simple
and the result is schematic. Stated simply and
arithmetically, the whole doctrine of the Trinity may be
broken down into two simple statements as far as the
Filioque is concerned. 1) What is common in the Holy
Trinity is common to and identical in all three persons
or hypostases. 2) What is hypostatic, or hypostatic
property, or manner of existence is individual, and
belongs only to one person or hypostasis of he Holy
Trinity.

Thus, we have τα κοινα
and τα ακοινωνητα, what is common and what is
incommunicably individual.

Having this in mind, one
realizes why the Romans did not take the Frankish
Filioque very seriously as a theological position,
especially as one which was supposed to improve upon the
Creed of the Second Ecumenical Synod.

However, the Romans had
to take the Franks themselves seriously, because they
backed up their fantastic theological claims with an
unbelievable self-confidence and with a sharp sword,
What they lacked in historical insight, they made up
with nobility of descent, and a strong will to
back up their arguments with muscle and steel.

In any case, it may be
useful in terminating this section to emphasize the
simplicity of the Roman position and the humor with
which the Filioque was confronted. We may
recapture this Roman humor about the Latin Filioque
with two syllogistic jokes from the Great Photios which
may explain some of the fury of Frankish reaction
against him.

Everything, therefore,
which is seen and spoken of in the all-holy and
consubstantial and coessential Trinity, is either common
to all, or belongs to one only of the three: but the
projection προβολη of the Spirit, is neither common, but
nor, as they say, does it belong to anyone of them alone
(may propitiation be upon us, and the blasphemy turned
upon their heads). Therefore, the projection of the
Spirit is not at all in the life-giving and all-perfect
Trinity.

In other words, the Holy
Spirit must then derive His existence outside of the
Holy Trinity since everything in the Trinity is common
to all or belongs to one only.

For otherwise, if all
things common to the Father and the Son, are in any case
common to the Spirit,...and the procession from them is
common to the Father and the Son, the Spirit therefore
will then proceed from himself: and He will be principle
(αρχή) of himself, and both cause and caused: a thing
which even the myths of the Greeks never fabricated.

Keeping in mind the fact
that the Fathers always began their thoughts about the
Holy Trinity from their personal experience of the Angel
of the lord and Great Counselor made man and Christ, one
only then understands the problematic underlying the
Arian/Eunomian crisis, i.e. whether this
concrete person derives His existence from the essence
of hypostasis of the Father or from non-being by the
will of the Father. Had the tradition understood the
method of theologizing about God as Augustine did, there
would never have been and Arian or Eunomian heresy.
Those who reach glorification (theosis) know by this
experience that whatever has its existence from
non-being by the will of God is a creature, and whoever
and whatever is not from non-being, but from the Father
is uncreated. Between the created and the uncreated,
there is no similarity whatsoever.

Before the Cappadocian
Fathers gave their weight to the distinction between the
three divine hypostases (υποστασεις) and the one divine
essence, many Orthodox Church leaders avoided speaking
either about one essence or one hypostasis since this
smacked of Sabellian and Samosatene Monarchianism. Many
preferred to speak about the Son as deriving His
existence from the Father's essence and as being like
the Father in essence (ὁμοούσιος) . Saint Athanasios
explains that this is exactly what is meant by ὁμοούσιος
— coessential. It is clear that the Orthodox were not
searching for a common faith but rather for common
terminology and common concepts to express their common
experience in the Body of Christ.

Equally important is the
fact that the Cappadocians lent their weight to the
distinction between the Father as cause (αιτιος) and the
Son and the Holy Spirit as caused (αιτιατα). Coupled
with the manners of existence (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) of
generation and procession, these terms mean that the
Father causes the existence of the Son by generation and
of the Holy Spirit by procession or not by generation.
Of course, the Father being from no one (εξ ουδενος)
derives His existence neither from himself nor from
another. Actually, Saint Basil pokes fun at Eunomios for
being the first to say such an obvious thing and thereby
manifest his frivolousness and wordiness. Furthermore,
neither the essence nor the natural energy of the Father
have a cause of manner of existence. The Father
possesses them by His very nature and communicates them
to the Son in order that they possess them by nature
likewise. Thus, the manner by which the uncaused Father
exists, and by which the Son and the Holy Spirit receive
their existence from the Father, are not be confused
with the Father's communicating His essence and energy
to the Son and the Holy Spirit. It would, indeed, be
strange to speak about the Father as causing the
existence of His own essence and energy along with the
hypostases of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

It also must be
emphasized that for the Fathers who composed the creeds
of Nicaea and Constantinople neither generation nor
procession mean energy or action. This was the position
of the heretics condemned. The Arians claimed that the
Son is the product of the will of God. The Eunomians
supported a more original but bizarre position that the
uncreated energy of the Father is identical with His
essence, that the Son is the product of a single energy
of the Son, and that each created species is the product
of a special energy of the Holy Spirit, there being as
many crated energies as there are species. Otherwise, if
the Holy Spirit has only one created energy, then there
would be only one species of things in creation. It is
in the light of these heresies also that one must
appreciate that generation and procession in the Creed
in no way mean energy or action.

Augustine did not
understand generation and procession in this manner
since he clearly identifies them with energies. It is
this which allowed him to speculate psychologically
about the Holy Trinity, a luxury which was
methodologically impossible for the Fathers. Thus,
Augustine did not use and neither was he aware of the
conciliar and especially East Roman understanding of
generation and procession. He identified these terms
with the Father's communication of being, i.e.
essence and action to the Son and the Holy Spirit, an
aspect which exists in all the Fathers, but not to be
identified with generation and procession, at least
after the First and Second Ecumenical Synod. It is
within such a context that Augustine should be
understood when he speaks about the Holy Spirit as
receiving His being (essence) and as proceeding
principally from the Father, but also from the Son. This
is exactly what the East Roman Fathers mean by the Holy
Spirit receiving His essence and energy from the Father
through or even and (St. Gregory Palamas) the Son
simultaneously with His procession or reception of His
proper or individual existence of hypostasis from the
Father. Neither the essence nor the essential energy of
the Father are caused, nor are they the cause of the
existence of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father's
essence and energy are communicated and common (κοινα)
to the Holy Trinity which is thus one cause of creation.
However, neither the Father's nor the Son's, nor the
Holy Spirit's hypostasis is communicated. The hypostases
are incommunicable (ακοινωνητα). Thus, the persons of
the Holy Trinity are one, not by union or identity of
persons, but by the unity and identity of essence and
energy, and by the Father being the sole cause of the
existence of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In the experience of
illumination and glorification in Christ, one is aware
that God is three absolutely similar realities, two
derived from one and co-inhering in each other, and at
the same time one identical reality of uncreated
communicated glory, rule (βασιλεια) and grace in which
God indivisibly divides himself in divisible things, His
one mansion (μονη) thus becoming many while remaining
one. The divine essence, however, is not communicated to
creatures and, therefore, can never be known.

Augustine did not
approach the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the manner
of the other Fathers. However, the other West Roman
Fathers each have their parallels in the developing East
Roman tradition. Augustine also accepted the settlement
of the Second Ecumenical Synod and the Fathers who
forged it as we saw. Thus, the East Roman Fathers became
West Roman Fathers. To speak about a Western doctrine of
the Holy Trinity is, therefore, a falsification of how
the West Romans themselves understood things. It is
within such a context that procession in the West came
to have the two meanings as explained by Maximos the
Confessor and Anastasios the Librarian.

However, when the Franks
began raiding the Fathers for arguments to support their
addition to the Creed, they picked up the categories of
manner of existence, cause and cause, and identified
these with Augustine's generation and procession, thus
transforming the old Western Orthodox Filioque
into their heretical one. This confusion is nowhere so
clear than during the debates at the Council of Florence
where the Franks used the terms cause and
caused as identical with their generation and
procession, and supported their claim that the Father
and the Son are one cause of the procession of the Holy
Spirit. Thus, they became completely confused over
Maximos who explains that for the West of his time, the
Son is not the cause of the existence of the Holy
Spirit, so that in this sense the Holy Spirit does
not proceed from the Father. That Anastasios the
Librarian repeats this is ample evidence of the
confusion of both the Franks and their spiritual and
theological descendants.

We end this section with
the reminder that for the Fathers, no name or concept
gives any understanding of the mystery of the Holy
Trinity. Saint Gregory the Theologian, e.g. is
clear on this as we saw. He ridicules his opponents with
a characteristic taunt: Do tell me what is the
unbegotteness of the Father, and I will explain to you
the physiology of the generation of the Son and the
procession of the Spirit, and we shall both of us be
frenzy-stricken for prying into the mystery of God.
Names and concepts about God give to those who reach
theoria understanding not of the mystery, but of
the dogma and its purpose. In the experience of
glorification, knowledge about God, along with prayer,
prophecy and faith are abolished. Only love remains (1
Cor. 13, 8-13; 14,1). The mystery remains, and will
always remain, even when one sees God in Christ face to
face and is known by God as Paul was (1 Cor. 13.12).

The Significance of the Filioque Question

Smaragdus records how the
emissaries of Charlemagne complained the Pope Leo III
was making an issue of only four syllables. Of course,
four syllables are not many. Nevertheless, their
implications are such that Latin of Frankish Christendom
embarked on a history of theology and ecclesiastical
practice which may have been quite different had the
Franks paid attention to the Greek.

I will indicate some of
the implication of the presuppositions of the Filioque
issue which present problems today.

Even a superficial study of today's histories of
dogma and biblical scholarship reveals the peculiar
fact that Protestant, Anglican, Papal, and some
Orthodox theologians accept the First and Second
Ecumenical Synods only formally. This is so because
there is at least an identity of teaching between
Orthodox and Arians, which does not exist between
Orthodox and Latins, about the real appearances of
the Logos to the Old Testament prophets and the
identity of this Logos made flesh in the New
Testament. This, as we saw, was the agreed
foundation of debate for the determination of
whether the Logos seen by the prophets is created or
uncreated. This identification of the Logos in the
Old Testament is the very basis of the teachings of
all the Roman Ecumenical Synods.

We emphasize that the East Roman Fathers never
abandoned this reading of the Old Testament
theophanies. This is the teaching of all the West
Roman Fathers, with the single exception of
Augustine, who, confused as usual over what the
Fathers teach, rejects as blasphemous the idea what
the prophets could have seen the Logos with their
bodily eyes and, indeed, in fire, darkness, cloud,
etc.

The Arians and Eunomians had used, as the Gnostics
before them, the visibility of the Logos to the
prophets to prove that He was a lower being than God
and a creature. Augustine agrees with the Arians and
Eunomians that the prophets saw a created Angel,
created fire, cloud, light, darkness, etc., but he
argues against them that none of these was the Logos
himself, but symbols by means of which God or the
whole Trinity is seen and heard.

Augustine did not have patience with the teaching
that the Angel of the Lord, the fire, the glory, the
cloud, and the Pentecostal tongues of fire, were
verbal symbols of the uncreated realities
immediately communicated with by the prophets and
apostles, since for him this would mean that all
this language pointed to a vision of the divine
substance. For the bishop of Hippo this vision is
identical to the whole of what is uncreated, and
could be seen only by a Neoplatonic type ecstasy of
the soul, out of the body, within the sphere of
timeless and motionless eternity, transcending all
discursive reasoning. Since this is not what he
found in the Bible, the visions therein described
are not verbal symbols of real visions of God, but
of creatures symbolizing eternal realities. The
created verbal symbols of the Bible became created
objective symbols. In other words, words which
symbolized uncreated energies like fire, etc,.
became objectively real created fires, clouds,
tongues, etc.

This failure of Augustine to distinguish between the
divine essence and its natural energies (of which
some are communicated to the friends of God). led to
a very peculiar reading of the Bible, wherein
creatures or symbols come into existence in order to
convey a divine message, and them pass out of
existence. Thus, the Bible becomes full of
unbelievable miracles and a text dictated by God.

Besides this, the biblical concept of heaven and
hell also becomes distorted, since the eternal fires
of hell and the outer darkness become creatures also
whereas, they are the uncreated glory of God as seen
by those who refuse to love. thus, one ends up with
the three-story universe problem, with God in a
place, etc., necessitating a demythologizing of the
Bible in order to salvage whatever one can of a
quaint Christian tradition for modern man. However,
it is not the Bible itself which need
demythologizing, but the Augustinian Franco-Latin
tradition and the caricature which it passed off in
the West as Greek Patristic theology.

By
not taking the above-mentioned foundations of Roman
Patristic theology of the Ecumenical Synods
seriously as the key to interpreting the Bible,
modern biblical scholars have applied
presuppositions latent in Augustine with such
methodical consistency that they have destroyed the
unity and identity of the Old and New Testaments,
and have allowed themselves to be swayed by Judaic
interpretations of the Old Testament rejected by
Christ himself.
Thus, instead of dealing with the concrete person of
the Angel of God, Lord of Glory, Angel of Great
Council, Wisdom of God and identifying Him with the
logos made flesh and Christ, and accepting this as
the doctrine of the Trinity, most, if not all,
Western scholars have ended up identifying Christ
only with Old Testament Messiahship, and equating
the doctrine of the Trinity with the development of
extra Biblical Trinitarian terminology within what
is really not a Patristic framework, but an
Augustinian one. Thus, the so-called Greek
Fathers are still read in the light of Augustine,
with the Russians after Peter Mogila joining in.

Another most devastating result of the Augustinian
presuppositions of the Filioque is the
destruction of the prophetic and apostolic
understanding of grace and its replacement with the
whole system of created graces distributed in Latin
Christendom by the hocus pocus of the clergy.
For the Bible and the Father, grace is the uncreated
glory and rule (βασιλεια) of God seen by the
prophets, apostles, and saints and participated in
by the faithful followers of the prophets and the
apostles. The source of this glory and rule is the
Father who, in begetting the Logos, and projecting
the Spirit, communicates this glory and rule so that
he Son and the Spirit are also by nature one source
of grace with the Father. This uncreated grace and
rule (βασιλεια) is participated in by the faithful
according to their preparedness for reception, and
is seen by the friends of God who have become gods
by grace.
Because the Frankish Filioque presupposes
the identity of uncreated divine essence and energy,
and because participation in the divine essence is
impossible, the Latin tradition was led
automatically into accepting communicated grace as
created, leading to its objectification and magical
priestly manipulation.
On the other hand, the reduction by Augustine of
this revealed glory and rule (βασιλεια) to the
status of a creature has misled modern biblical
scholars into the endless discussion concerning the
coming of the Kingdom (βασιλεια should rather
be rule) without realizing its identity with the
uncreated glory and grace of God.

In
order not to extend ourselves into more detail, we
end this section and this paper by pointing out what
the presupposition of the Filioque have
done to the matter of authority on questions of
biblical interpretation and dogma.

In this patristic tradition, all dogma or truth is
experienced in glorification. The final form of
glorification is that of Pentecost, in which the
apostles were led by the Spirit into all the truth,
as promised by Christ at the Last Supper. Since
Pentecost, every incident of the glorification of a
saint, (in other words, of a saint having a vision
of God's uncreated glory in Christ as its source),
is an extension of Pentecost at various levels of
intensity.

This experience includes all of man, but at the same
time transcend all of man, including man's
intellect. Thus, the experience remains a mystery to
the intellect. Thus, the experience remains a
mystery to the intellect, and cannot be conveyed
intellectually to another. Thus, language can point
to, but cannot convey, this experience. The
spiritual father can guide a person to, but cannot
produce, the experience which is a gift of the Holy
Spirit.

When, therefore, the Fathers add terms to the
biblical language concerning God and His relations
to the world, like hypostasis, ousia, physis,
homoousios, etc., they are not doing this because
they are improving current understanding as over
against a former age. Pentecost cannot be improved
upon. All they are doing is defending the
Pentecostal experience which transcends words, in
the language of their time, because a particular
heresy leads away from, and not to, this experience,
which means spiritual death to those led astray.

For the Fathers, authority is not only the Bible,
but the Bible plus those glorified or divinized as
the prophets and apostles. The Bible is not in
itself either inspired or infallible. It becomes
inspired and infallible within the communion of
saints because they have the experience of divine
glory described in the Bible.

The presuppositions of the Frankish Filioque
are not founded on this experience of glory. Anyone
can claim to speak with authority and understanding.
However, we follow the Fathers and accept only those
as authority who, like the apostles, have reached a
degree of Pentecostal glorification.

Within this frame of reference, there can be no
institutionalized or guaranteed form of
infallibility, outside of the tradition of
spirituality which leads to theoria, mentioned
above, by St. Gregory the Theologian.

As a heresy, the
Filioque is as bad as Arianism, and this is borne
out by the fact that the holders of this heresy reduce
the Pentecostal tongues of fire to the status of
creature as Arius had done with the Angel of Glory. Had
Arius and the Scholastics been gifted with the
Pentecostal glorification of the Fathers, they would
have known by their experience that the Logos who
appeared to the prophets and the apostles in glory, and
the tongues of fire are uncreated; the one an uncreated
hypostasis, and the other the common and identical
energies of the Holy Trinity emanating from the new
presence of the humanity of Christ by the Holy Spirit.

What is true of the Bible
is true of the Synods, which, like the Bible, express in
symbols that which transcends symbols and is known by
means of those who have reached theoria. It is for this
reason that the Synods appeal to the authority, not only
of the Fathers in the Bible, but also to the Fathers of
all ages, since the Fathers of all ages participate in
the same truth which is God's glory in Christ.

For this reason, Pope Leo
III told the Franks in no uncertain terms that the
Fathers left the Filioque out of the Creed
neither because of ignorance nor by omission, but by
divine inspiration. However, the implications of the
Frankish Filioque were not accepted by all
Roman Christians in the Western Roman provinces
conquered by Franco-Latin Christendom and its scholastic
theology. Remnants of Roman biblical orthodoxy and piety
have survived all parts may one day be reassembled, as
the full implications of the Patristic tradition make
themselves known, and spirituality, as the basis of
doctrine, becomes the center of our studies.