Dr. Farrell is the author of The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, an annotated translation of St. Photios' famous treatise, sponsored by the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies and published by the Holy Cross Orthodox Press. He received his doctorate in theology at Oxford University.
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There is another consequence of subsuming the category of persons under that of attributes, as if the three Divine Hypostases were a special category of attributes; that is, this subsumption makes the preeminent Name of God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit subject to the same nominalizing process already evident in the attributes. If the attributes function simply as alternative definitions of the same divine "Something," then nothing is logically to prevent one from saying the same of the Name "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." It becomes possible to talk of "desexing" God, of changing the Name "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" to "Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer," as some in the United Methodist Church have recently advocated. This nominalizes God for another reason, for it defines Him exclusively in terms of His relationship to the world, and to a bygone world of "patriarchy" at that. But in fact, modern "feminist" calls for a genderless language of God are just another result of the inherent heresies of the filioque which only history can play out. By the dogma of the filioque, to amend the words of Vladimir Lossky, we do indeed end up with a "God in general, who could be the God of Descartes, or the God of Leibnitz" or the "God" of twentieth century feminists [Vladimir Lossky, 'The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine; in Image and Ukeness of God, p. 88). This program of sanitizing and degendering the "God-language" of the West is itself, perhaps, the most egregious example of the divorce of theology from liturgy, of the theologies and "renewals" legislated in the seminaries from the theology prayed by believing men in the various confessions.
Sacramental Nestorianism. It was the late Father Georges Florovsky who once observed that the precise problem with the West is Nestorianism. This trenchant remark is perhaps nowhere better attested than in St. Augustine's approach to sacramental theology. During his episcopate, he waged a relentless polemic against the Donatist heresy, the essence of which is a belief that the worthiness of a priest is the determining criterion for the efficacy of any given sacrament celebrated by him. Baptism by an unworthy priest is, therefore, not truly regenerative. Attempting to mitigate this position, St. Augustine noted that the true minister of any sacrament is the Word of God, i.e., Jesus Christ. Baptism, when performed according to his Word, is consequently true, or "valid" baptism.
However, since one who is baptized by a schismatic or heretic immediately finds himself in schism from the Church, according to St. Augustine, he lacks the grace of the Spirit. A Donatist baptism, in this view, can be seen as a "valid" baptism into Christ, but not a "valid" baptism into the Spirit, leaving the Word of regeneration and the Spirit of Life separated. The "validity' of a sacrament thus has no necessary connection to the grace which it confers, as there cannot be grace in schism.
This view leads ultimately to a kind of sacramenlal Nestorianism: the decoupling of the Water of baptism (from) the Spirit of baptism. This in itself highlights an interesting aspect of Western Church history. According to the ancient liturgy of baptism in the West, the Spirit hovers over the face of the waters of the font, making it the virginal womb of the Church. But with regard to validity, this may no longer be the case. For once "validity" and "grace" were separated, it was only a short and logical step through a necessarily long historical process to the discovery of "two baptisms" by the more radical wing of Protestantism. "Water baptism" came to be separated from "Spirit baptism," the latter being diversly interpreted as the equivalent of "getting saved," "being born again," or even "speaking in tongues. There is thus an unbridgeable gap of sacramental Nestorianism between the element (water) and the grace (the Spirit). It goes without saying that the Scholastic theology of the Mass is also a reflection of this sacramental Nestorianism. In the Mass, the "Words of Institution" were singled out to constitute the solely necessary element in the celebration of a valid sacrament; they alone are understood to effect the conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of our Lord. Strictly speaking, the surrounding liturgical rite does not itself constitute the sacrament This surrounding context is therefore capable of "revision;" it may be given new trappings with impunity, without compromising the "validity" of the rite. One feels sympathy for those traditionalist Roman Catholics forced to acquiesce to an ugly and, from their standpoint, heretical liturgy, while nonetheless acklowledging its validity.
The De-Christianization and poliliclzation of the Filioquist Trinity. Throughout the foregoing discussion, one motif has been stressed again and again. We have called this "Nominalism" or "nominallzation." It might also have been called by its more popular, though less accurate, name, "secularization" and "secularism." Some have also called this process "demythologization," in what surely must be a misnomer. Here I choose to call the process by a name which, I believe, more accurately describes its historical course: "deChristianization." There are two significant paths from the transformation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as a doctrine of God in His eternal transcendence to a wholly malleable secular process. It begins with Joachim of Fiore in the Middle Ages, for whom the Trinity had largely an historical significance. For him, history was divided into three Ages, each of which corresponded to one Person in the Trinity:
1) the Age of the Father, comprising the period of the Old Testament and primarily an age of the law;
2) the Age of the Son, the current New Testament and Church age, in which the elements of righteousness and unrighteousness coexist;
3) and the Age of the Spirit, still in the future, when there will be naught but grace and righteousness.
This teaching had no small influence upon the Franciscans and, from them, on the Lutheran Pietists. It was in this climate of Pietism that the German philosopher Georg Friedrich WilheIm Hegel was nurtured. Hegel wed this vision of the doctrine of the Trinity as an historical process which he took from Joachim, to the dialectical vision of the Trinity which he inherited from Scholasticism and St. Augustine. For Hegel, historical proccesses were inherently trinitarian, that is, dialectical. Every event, nation, or circumstance in history was, for Hegel, a proposition, a "thesis. " As every "thesis" entailed its opposite, an "antithesis: so in history. But Hegel went farther. From both opposites, partaking of those elements common to both the "thesis" and the "antithesis", there arises a "synthesis." History is a constant unfolding of this dialectic, for every synthesis arrived at by the dialectic becomes in its turn a new thesis, with its own antithesis, from which another synthesis comes forth, and so on ad infinitim. It is precisely this historico-dialectical process which Hegel, in his Philosophy of History, identifies with the World Spirit, which he in turn identifies with the Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity, a Trinity which, for Hegel, was filioquist.
One may thus analyze the filioque doctrine according to the terms of the Hegelian dialectic, which, in fact, Hegel himself did. Simply put, the Father is the thesis, the Son the antithesis, and the Holy Spirit, proceeding from both, is their synthesis, the "substantial and consubstantial love of both" the Father and the Son, to cite St. Augnstine himself [St Augnstine, 0n the Trinity, 15:27:50]. And as Hegel's attempt to reduce this structure to an ongoing historical process meant an infinite succession of syntheses, one can also observe, as did St Photios, that if the filioque is true, then "...another person should proceed from the Spirit, and so we should have not three but four persons... and so on to an infinite number of processions and Persons..." [The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, op. cit., pp. 43, 73].
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Hegel's dialectical trinity of history is but St Augnstine's filioque. Only the names have been changed, to suit the perceived philosophical needs of modern man; for Augustine, the goal was to combat Arianism; for Hegel, to integrate history and philosophy.
Karl Marx read Hegel religiously. But with Marx, the ties to the Christian doctrine are finally and irrevocably severed; all that remains is the bare, material historical process of the dialectic. Thus, if there is any truth to the adage that "Marxism is a Christian heresy," then this is becacause it is a trinitarian heresy and not merely an error in anthropology, as some have superficially suggested. The October Russian Revolution, to the extent that our analysis is true, appears in this light as the violent overthrow of a civilization based on the correct doctrine of the Holy Trinity by a civilization based upon an heretical one.
The route followed by the filioque in its influence on culture and society in the West took a very different turn than that which it followed in Germany and Russia. This may best be called the "politicization" of the doctrine into structures of organized constitutions which elaborate the doctrine of the separation of powers: legislative, judicial, and executive. But the manner of this distinction is interesting: checks and balances; in other words, opposition. One wonders. Had the American Founding Fathers held a different doctrine of the Trinity, what might they have devised? But the fact remains quite evident that the American constitutional system has no political equivalent of the doctrine of the relation of origin between the three separated powers, a situation that increasingly leads to political, as well as theological, chaos. My purpose in showing this relationship between the filioque and the American Constitution must not be misunderstood, however. It is not to suggest a systematic program of "Orthodox political theory" corresponding to Western "social gospels," or anything remotely similar. It is not for the Church to undertake such ventures. It is rather to suggest that Orthodox theology does have a deep and abiding significance for the American witness in the world, for it, and it alone, can provide an alternative and truly penetrating critique of our metaphysical and moral collapse, precisely because it comes from within a shared Christian experience. At the same time it comes from outside, as it has a completely different fundamental doctrine and metaphysic of that experience. Holy Orthodoxy alone is in the position of providing an analysis of the sensation, sO often lamented, that America is adrift from her religious, philosophical, and moral foundations. The fact is, as we have indicated in this essay, that those foundations were set adrift long before this nation came into existence.
For the two paths of de-Christianization and politicization, in fact, merge here in America. In such disparate authors as Francis Schaeffer and Allan Bloom, one encounters the thesis that it is the Hegelian dialectic which is the root cause of much of the moral relativism and political chaos in Arnerica today. Dr. Schaeffer called his thesis "the Line of Despair," which he traced to Aquinas' attempted synthesis of theology and philosophy. For Professor Bloom, the cause can be traced to the German emigres of the 'thirties and 'forties and to their disciples, who took control of the academies. Both analyses are correct as far as they go. But they both miss, as the Western churches miss, the significant fact that the Hegelian dialectical fruit, the sacramentally Nestorian view of creation, and the nominalistic view of God already had a rich constitutional soil well sown with filioquisms of its own on which to grow. Both authors do, however, imply that the problem is metaphysical.
It is. And in saying that, one says that the problem, for the West and for America, is also trinitarian, lending new importance to the words of 5t. John of Damascus: "The error of all the heretics is the same, for they say that nature and person are identical." We must help the Christian West rediscover the full roots of their trinitarian faith and, in that process, help them to rid themselves of a doctrine that has done and continues to do so much to compromise that faith.
An Editorial Comment.The foregoing essay by Joseph Farrell was given to me by Bishop Chrysostomos, who, while he was a visiting scholar at Oxford, met the author, then a doctoral student at Pembroke College. His Grace read and edited the essay with care, suggesting with enthusiasm that I publish it. My first concern at seeing the piece was, frankly, that it was too technial for a general audience. On reading if more carefully, however, I understood Bishop Chrysostomos' enthusiasm with the essay. In the context of a theological argument of some precision, it addresses issues which demand the critical attention of every Orthodox Christian. Dr. Farrell draws our attention to the fact that the Orthodox Christian world separated from the Christian West, not over incidental matters of language, but over issues that reach into the very core of our Faith and which touch on every aspect of the human condition. To those who talk of superficial unions which set aside "mere words," this essay has much to say.
Archimandrite Auxentios
