THE FILIOQUE IN QUOTATIONS

A look at the filioque via some quotations from Dr. Joseph P. Farrell's landmark translation: Saint Photios: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987. 
 

THE HELLENISTIC BACKGROUND

"seeking as he [St. Augustine] did . . . the common ground between the two doctrines (Christianity and Neoplatonism) . . could come to believe, without basis for it, that he found Christianity in Plato or Plato in the Gospels." - Portalie

"Even Plato had not gone beyond a plurality of finite universals to posit one, all-encompassing universal, a "Universal" universal. Nor had Aristotle posited an absolute genus in which all particulars could be comprehended. Plotinos does both. He posits the infinite One and defines this infinite One as "simplicity." Thus with Plotinos and the advent of Neoplatonism, a monumental change in philosophy took place. In his thought, philosophy had its first real impetus to explore the infinite in the context of a rational philosophical system." - Farrell

THE AUGUSTINIAN INNOVATION

"since the three are together one God, why not also one person . . . "  - St. Augustine

"The Godhead is absolutely simple essence, and therefore to be is then the same as to be wise." - St. Augustine

"to God it is not one thing to be, another to be a person, but it is absolutely the same thing . . . It is the same thing to Him to be as to be a person." - St. Augustine

"He is called in respect to Himself both God, and great, and good, and just, and anything else of the kind; and just as to Him to be is the same as to be God, or as to be great, or as to be good, so it is the same thing to Him to be as to be a person." - St. Augustine

"In regard to the essence of truth, to be true is the same as to be and to be is the same as to be great . . . therefore, to be great is the same as to be true." - St. Augustine

"the person of the Trinity" - St. Augustine

"The terms (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) are used reciprocally and in relation to each other."  - St. Augustine

"understand that as the Father has in Himself that the Holy Spirit should proceed from Him so He has given to the Son that the same Spirit should proceed from Him (the Son), and both apart from time. For if the Son has of the Father whatever He (the Father) has, then certainly He has of the Father that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from Him." - St. Augustine

"Because both the Father is a spirit and the Son is a spirit, and because the Father is Holy and the Son is Holy, therefore . . . since, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one God, and certainly God is Holy, and God is a spirit, the Trinity can be called also the Holy Spirit." - St. Augustine

"God" for Saint Augustine, thus "did not mean directly" the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but the "more general notion of the godhead, conceived concretely and personally no doubt, not as any one person in particular." - Dr. Farrell/Portalie

"For Augustine, existence itself is not personal, for whatever is personal in the divinity is not absolute but relative. Person is ad se identical to the essence. Person becomes merely another aspect of existence; for God to exist is the same as to be a person, just as it is the same to be good, just, wise." - Haugh

HERETICAL PARALLELS

"As one cannot be a father apart from a son, nor a lord apart from holding possession of a a slave, so we cannot even call God Almighty if there are none over whom He can exercise his power." - Origen, the Heretic

"Do you not see the manifold flexibility of this ungodly thing?" - St. Photios

THE DEVELOPING FILIOQUE-ISM OF THE LATINS

(St. Augustine is) "the foundation of everything the West has to say" - Paul Tillich

"each new crisis and each orientation of thought in the West can be traced back (to Augustine)" - Portalie

". . . by the dogma of the filioque . . . the unknowable essence of God receives positive qualifications. It becomes the object of natural theology. We get a God in general, who could be the God of Descartes, or the God of Leibnitz, or to some extent the God of
Voltaire and the de-Christianized Deists of the eighteenth century." - Lossky

"Anselm made it possible to discuss the incarnation without Christ."- Farrell

"In fine, leaving Christ out of view (as if nothing had ever been known of him), it proves, by absolute reasons, the impossibility that any man should be saved without him." - Anselm

(of later scholastic theologians) "our ideas of the divine attributes are not formally distinct but mutually compenetrate each other." - Portalie

"God's will is not other than His essence" - Thomas Aquinas

"simplicity is the abyss of everything specific" - Paul Tillich

Thesis. Synthesis. Antithesis. - Hegel

(Though) "this bold ambition to procure necessary reasons for revealed dogmas had never entered the mind of Augustine . . . , it was bound to follow from a merely dialectical treatment of the Christian faith." - Gilson

THE GRAVITY OF THE INNOVATION

"Nothing could prevent [one] from applying the same method to each of the Christian dogmas." - Gilson

"The doctrine of the double procession was for Saint Photios a sort of summation of all theological error; it said "all the rash impudence that there is to say"." - Farrell

"These men have said all the rash impudence that there is to say" - St. Photios

"If Cyril means that the Holy Spirit has his existence from or through the Son, we repudiate this as irreligious blasphemy. We believe that, in the Lord's own words, the Spirit proceeds from the Father." Farrell

"The Photian case is not merely a matter of Byzantine interest. It concerns the history of Christianity and the world, as the appraisement of Photios and his work lies at the core of the controversies that separate Eastern and Western churches." Farrell

"to predestine is the same as to foreknow" - St. Augustine

SOME PHOTIAN CHALLENGES, ARGUMENTS AD REDUCTIO ABSURDUM

"if something is said of one thing in the Godhead, and if this cannot be observed to be a property of the nature of the Almighty Trinity, then it is said of only one of the three Persons." - St Photios

"Is it possible to avoid the conclusion that the Spirit has been divided into two? On the one hand, He proceeds from the Father, Who is the First cause and also unoriginate. On the other hand, however, He proceeds from a second cause, and this cause is not underived." St Photios

"Spirit, Who is of equal honor and dignity is deprived of the equal perogative of an essential procession from Himself." St Photios

"another person should proceed from the Spirit, and so we should have not three but four persons. And if the fourth person is possible, then another procession is possible from that, and so on to an infinite number of processions and persons, until the doctrine is transformed into Greek polytheism." St Photios

"Is He not also the Spirit of fulness . . . Why do you frown at this? At the gifts, the very things that He supplies and bestows? Is it because you fight against the procession of the all-holy Spirit from each of these gifts as well?" St Photios

"But since it is claimed that He proceeds from two persons, the Spirit is brought to a double cause . . . Does it not follow as an implications of this that the Spirit is therefore composite? How then is the Trinity simple? But on the other hand, how shall the Spirit not be blasphemed if, proceeding from the Son, He in turn has no equality by causing the Son?" St Photios

"For if the Son and the Spirit came forth from the same cause, that is to say, the Father, and if -- as this blasphemy cries out -- the Spirit also proceeds from the Son, then why not simply tear up the Word ad propagate the fable that the Spirit also produces the Son, thereby according the same dignity to each person by allowing each person to produce the other person? And not according to any different manner -- by no means! --, even if you say that the Spirit proceeds and the Son is begotten! For reason demands equality for each person so that each person exchanges the grace of causality indistinguishably." St Photios

" For if, according to the reasonings of the ungodly, the specific properties of the persons are opposed and transferred to one another, then the Father -- O depth of impiety! -- comes under the property of being begotten and the Son will beget the Father." St Photios

RECENT COMMENTARY

"If the filioque can now only be viewed as a dispute about words, this can only indicate the absence of historical perception, or a modalist theology, or both.This means that it is not necessary merely to insist that the filioque must be dropped from Western creeds and confessions for unity to come about, but that, as Karl Rahner has so pertinently observed, there is need for the West to return to a non-Augustinian theology. Indeed, this means that the Augustinian ordo theologiae itself must be shunned as being ultimately contradictory to the Christian experience of God as primarily personal and concrete and not impersonal, abstract, and philosophical." - Farrell

("procession" did not signify merely) "a simple going forth of someone from another, as for example in the case of being born; it means rather a setting forth from somewhere towards a definite goal; a departure from one person in order to reach another. When the Spirit proceeds from the Father he sets out towards the Son; the Son is the goal at which He will stop." - Gregory of Cyprus, Patriarch of Constantinople (1283-1289)

Gregory's formula exposed another danger latent not only in the filioque but to some extent also in the response of Saint Photios to it. In Gregory's theology, it was impossible to separate the Son and the Spirit, for there was an eternal, personal relation between them. If this were not so, and the Holy Spirit proceeded beyond the Son as from a point of origin, then important ecclesiological ramifications would result: "in that case the faithful might possess the Spirit without being in Christ, or they might possess Christ without being in the Spirit." It is precisely this "abiding of the Spirit upon the Son" which affords the theological basis in the very life of the Trinity for the fact that Orthodoxy does not separate Scripture and Tradition as two, isolated, independent and opposed sources of authority. Rather, it sees them as implying and complementing each other, both having equal weight because they are related." - Farrell

"The twentieth century Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae has found in the filioque, in addition to certain ecclesiological implications, other ramifications for the pattern and structure of authority in the contemporary West. He sees in it the theological basis for confusing Spirit with human subjectivity: without that which constitutes the distinguishing mark of divinity in this system, causality, it becomes all to easy to equate the movements of the Spirit with the movements of the human spirit." - Farrell

NOTES:

Eugene Portalie, A Guide to the Thought of St. Augustine (Norwood, 1975), p. 97.
Farrell, p. 20.
St. Augustine, Trinity, 7.1.2
St. Augustine, Trinity, 7.6.11
St. Augustine, Trinity, 7.6.11
St. Augustine, Trinity, 8.1.2
St. Augustine, Trinity, 7.4.8
St. Augustine, Trinity, 2.10.18
St. Augustine, Trinity, 6.5.6
St. Augustine, Trinity, 15.27.45
St. Augustine, Trinity, 15.27.48.
Dr. Joseph Farrell, St. Photios: Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, pp. 27-28: quoting Portalie, p 130-131.
Richard Haugh, Photios and the Carolingians: The Trinitarian Controversy (Belmont, 1975), p. 204.
Photios, Mystagogy, 62.
Origen: Cited in Florovsky, "St Athanasios' Concept of Creation," Volume 4 of The Collective Works of Georges Florovsky: Aspects of Church History (Belmont, 1975), 45.
Portalie, p. 83.
Vladimir Lossky, "The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine," in The Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood, 1974), p. 88.
Farrell, 46.
Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (St. Anselm: Basic Writings), trans. S. N. Deane (Chicago, 1981), p. 177.
Portalie, p. 128.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book One, God (Notre Dame, 1975), p. 242.
Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York, 1968), p. 51.
Gilson, 27.
Tillich, p. 103.
Farrell, 17-18.
St. Photios, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, 16.
Theodoretos, "Reprehensio (12 Captium seu) anathematismorum Cyrilli," in Bettenson, p. 275.
Francis Dvornik, The Photian Schism (Cambridge, 1970), p.15.
Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York, 1966), p. 26.
St. Augustine, Ad Romanum Expositio, 8.29, cited in Gonzales, p. 31.
Photios, 63.
Photios, 43.
Photios, 38.
Photios, 37.
Photios, 56.
Photios, 4.
Photios, 3.
Photios, 17.
Staniloae, Theology and the Church, p. 15.
Farrell, p. 49.
Farrell, p. 49.
Farrell, 49-50.

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Dr. Farrell's TRANSLATION OF ST. PHOTIUS

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From amazon.com - Dr. Farrell's translation of Saint Photios' Mystagogy is eloquent and, in this time of renewed interest in the ancient Church, altogether timely. His lengthy introduction, drawing on references as diverse as Plotinus and Paul Tillich, provides the historical, cultural, and theological setting of Saint Photios' controversial treatise. The introductory essay is itself a classic of modern Patristics - the study of the Church Fathers. Dr. Farrell argues that Photios is attacking a fundamental theological trend in Western Christendom which has implications for its entire polity. In this sense he offers the Mystagogy as a prophetic work rather than simply a theoretical one. The Mystagogy is a comprehensive assault on the new culture being created in the West by the addition of the "filioque" clause to the Western Creed. For Saint Photios, this clause represents "all the rash impudence" that the new Europe has to say. Dr. Farrell in his analysis uses the phrase "summation of all theological error". This is not a wishy-washy work of scholarship for the faint-hearted. It packs a punch both in stye and in depth. Still, the brevity of the book makes it accessible for a general audience and rightly so if, as Dr. Farrell argues, Saint Photios' work is of universal import. Hearty reading!
From: Archmandrite Chrysostomos:

"Mr. Farrell... has given us a text which is faithful to Saint Photios' original Greek text; a theological overview of the filioque controversy - an essential controversy in the history of the whole Church - that is not too technical to be understood by an untrained theologian; and an historical view of this subject and Saint Photios that presents no problem to the reader untrained in historical investigation. His is not the only translation to be had in a modern language, but it certainly is the only translation which consciously attempts to reach the average Orthodox reader... introducing the faithful to the inner spirit of the Patristic witness."

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