Filioque - Summary

Summary

The Filioque was originally proposed to stress more clearly the connection between the Son and the Spirit, amid a heresy in which the Son was taken as less than the Father because he does not serve as a source of the Holy Spirit. When the Filioque came into use in Spain and Gaul in the West, the local churches were not aware that their language of procession would not translate well back into the Greek. Conversely, from Photius to the Council of Florence, the Greek Fathers were also not acquainted with the linguistic issues.

While the Filioque doctrine was traditional in the West, being declared dogmatically in 447 by Pope Leo I, the Pope whose Tome was approved at the Council of Chalcedon, its inclusion in the Creed appeared in the anti-Arian situation of seventh-century Spain. However, this dogma was never accepted in the East. The Filioque, included in the Creed by certain anti-Arian councils in Spain, was a means to affirm the full divinity of the Son in relation to both the Father and the Spirit.

Ironically, a similar anti-Arian emphasis also strongly influenced the development of the liturgy in the East, for example, in promoting prayer to "Christ Our God", an expression which also came to find a place in the West, where, largely as a result of "the Church's reaction to Teutonic Arianism", "'Christ our God' ... gradually assumes precedence over 'Christ our brother'". In this case, a common adversary, namely, Arianism, had profound, far-reaching effects, in the orthodox reaction in both East and West.

Church politics, authority conflicts, ethnic hostility, linguistic misunderstanding, personal rivalry, forced conversions, large scale wars, political intrigue, unfilled promises and secular motives all combined in various ways to divide East and West.

As regards the doctrine expressed by the phrase in Latin (in which the word "procedit" that is linked with "Filioque" does not have exactly the same meaning and overtones as the word used in Greek), any declaration by the West that it is heretical (something that not all Orthodox now insist on) would conflict with the Western doctrine of the infallibility of the Church, since it has been upheld by Councils recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as ecumenical and even by those Popes who, like Leo III, opposed insertion of the word into the Creed.