Ian Sivo

Mr. Mook

Development of Christian Thought

Final Paper: The Theological Reasons for the Great Schism

The story of the split between the Orthodox East and Roman Catholic West frequently

focuses on the political rivalry between the Papacy and the Patriarch of Constantinople. While

this aspect of the schism is important, an oft-overlooked aspect is the theological controversies

which made institutional separation unavoidable. The divergences that developed over the

centuries began as a result of linguistic differences between Latin and Greek, but came to

embody completely opposing approaches to theology that would color every debate. The issue at

the center is the filioque, the doctrine of the dual procession of the Holy Spirit.

The first thing to establish is what the common teaching of the ancient church was before

any controversy developed. The difficulty is that the earliest writers were not concerned with the

nature of the procession, as they had more pressing issues to deal with, but it is clear from what

many Fathers wrote that the Father was the sole cause of the Godhead. This is known as the

monarchy of the Father. They often spoke of the Spirit “flowing” through the Son from the

Father. The Greek Fathers, particularly St Gregory of Nyssa in Against Eunomius, stressed the

distinction between the economia, or the actions of the persons of the Trinity in time and space,

and the theologia, their eternal relations in the Godhead. They used two different words to talk

about the eternal spiration of the Spirit - ekporeusis- and a generic sending of the Spirit -

proienai, although this wasn’t a strict rule, more of a general practice. Meanwhile, these two

different senses of the word “procession” are meant by the single word procedere in the Latin

West, seen in Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate. This led to much confusion between the two
sides in later years. In those first few centuries, it was the Greek East which led the way on

theological formulations, but later as the West caught up, it overtook the East in regards to the

procession question and led the debate over its orthodoxy.

The divergence truly begins with St Augustine in his work De Trinitate. Siecienski notes,

“Although Augustine of Hippo would eventually become the most quoted Latin father

supporting the filioque, it should be noted that his earliest writings on the creed make no mention

of the doctrine. In his work De Fide et Symbolo, composed in 393, Augustine claimed that ‘the

learned and eminent exponents of sacred scripture...have not yet applied themselves to the

subject of the Holy Spirit.’ Yet it had been established that ‘the Holy Spirit is not begotten, as

they assert of the Son, from the Father, for Christ is the only-begotten Son, nor is he begotten of

the Son, the grandson, as it were of the almighty Father…[T]he Holy Spirit owes his existence to

the Father, from whom everything comes, lest we should find ourselves postulating two

principles of origin without an origin, an assertion that would be totally false, utterly absurd, and

contrary to the Catholic Faith.’”(P. 60). So we can see that in the 390s, the consensus patrum

from Augustine’s perspective was that the Father was the sole cause, and to suggest that the Son

could be co-cause would be absurd. However, a shift occurs later in Augustine’s intellectual

career. “This move was in large part made possible by Augustine’s trinitarian model, which (like

that of Victorinus) spoke of the Trinity’s likeness to the human mind, where the triad of

“memory”, “understanding”, and “will” coexisted just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in the

one substantia of God. He wrote ‘The three then, memory, understanding, and will, are not three

lives but one life, not three minds but one mind. So it follows, of course that they are not three

substances but one substance.”(p.60). Note the essentialism, or the starting of the theology with

the substance or essence of God. Siecienski continues “Augustine employed other models
throughout the work, but perhaps the most influential was the triad of “lover”, “beloved”, and

“love”. In this model the Spirit becomes, as it was for Victorinus, the bond of love joining lover

(Father) and beloved (Son)...Since ‘the Holy Spirit is something common to Father and Son’ and

thus ‘the gift of both’, Augustine can affirm that, ‘according to the Holy Scriptures this Holy

Spirit is not just the Father’s alone, nor the Son’s alone, but the Spirit of them both.’ Since he is

the Spirit of both, it logically followed for Augustine that the Holy Spirit must proceed from

both.” (P. 60). Augustine added that the Spirit proceeded principally from the Father, but that he

was the Spirit of both the Father and the Son and so proceeded from them both. Siecienski

continues on page 62, “The one aspect of Augustine’s trinitarian thought that later Latin

theologians (especially Anselm and Aquinas) adopted and adapted was the teaching the “Father”,

“Son”, and “Spirit” were not absolute, but rather relative terms denoting relationships within the

Trinity...According to Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Here the decisive point comes beautifully to light.

“Father” is purely a concept of relationship. Only in being- for the other is the Father, in his own

being-in-himself he is simply God. Person is the pure relation of being related, nothing else.

Relationship is not something extra added to the person as it is with us; it only exists at all as

relatedness.’ While this schema works well in describing the Father-Son dyad, it has long been

recognized (especially among Augustine’s critics) that the Holy Spirit does not fit neatly into the

system. As Congar described it; ‘This theory of the relationships which make the Persons

different within the substance or essence without dividing the latter is simple, grand, and

satisfactory. Nonetheless it does involve a difficulty in characterizing the Holy Spirit. “Father”

and “Son” are correlative, terms which comprise an opposition in a reciprocal relationship...What

correlative term has the Spirit from which he proceeds and which points to a hypostasis?’ For

Augustine the answer was simple- the Son is the Son because he comes from the Father; the
Spirit, who is the mutual love of Father and Son, has his origin, that is, he proceeds from both

and is the gift of both. In this way is the person of the Spirit defined and differentiated in terms

of his relational opposition to both Father and Son.” However, this position is problematic

because it affirms first the substance or the essence of God, which must be absolutely simple,

and makes the distinctions within the Trinity merely relative. This gets further developed by

Aquinas, who wrote that the distinctions within the Godhead are merely conceptual and not real.

If the different persons of the Trinity are simply mentally, conceptually different, then how could

one argue that the Father was not also incarnate with the Son? Of course, this is impossible, the

infinite God, the uncaused cause, did not take on flesh- this is a unique action of Christ the

Eternal Logos. The presupposition behind this idea is that distinction entails composition, which

is lifted straight out of Hellenistic philosophy.. To introduce a Hellenistic conceptual scheme into

the Latin understanding of the Trinity would have serious consequences. By affirming absolute

divine simplicity, all of God’s attributes get smashed into the essence, without distinction,

making it impossible to make any sense of his actions eternally - such as begetting- or

temporally- creating the world. In Augustine’s defense, he admitted that he could be mistaken,

and invited his readers to correct him. It is unfortunate that his brilliant writings would

inadvertently lead to a rupture in the Catholic Church.

Although the East learned about the filioque in the 6th century, the Letter to Marinus by

St Maximus reassured the Eastern fathers that the doctrine was orthodox, and in his

understanding, the Latins affirmed that the Father was the sole cause of the Godhead. It took

until the 13th century at the Council of Lyons for the two positions to be fully understood, and

for the two sides to fully recognize that their positions constituted two different faiths. The true

departure occurred with the interpolation of the Creed by the Carolingian reformers in the 9th
century, and their rejection of the 7th Ecumenical Council. At this point, the West parted ways

with the East and began to develop its theology independently of Constantinople and the Greek

fathers. Over the next two centuries, via the political pressure of the Franks and the Germans, the

Papacy would cease to uphold the traditional Orthodox position on these questions, and in 1014

interpolated the Creed in Rome. After the Great Schism in 1054, enmity between the two sides

grew until it exploded in the 4th Crusade, with Latin knights looting, raping, and desecrating the

City of the World’s Desire, stripping her of her precious relics, and replacing the Eastern Roman

Empire with a Latin Empire. When reunion talks began in 1272, there was no debate between the

two sides. The Latins took the position of superiority, and simply gave to the Greeks a confession

to sign, which conceded everything to the Latins. Pressured by the Emperor, the Greek bishops

assented to the reunion, but it was widely repudiated in the East, and as soon the Emperor

Michael died, his son Andronicus ended the union. More fruitful talks came out of the Council of

Ferrara-Florence in 1438-39, but one of the angles that might have enabled compromise to be

reached, the essence/energies distinction formulated by Gregory Palamas, was forbidden from

being debated by the Byzantine emperor. Robert Haddad wrote, “Palamas’s teaching at least held

out hope of resolving the question that had bedeviled relations between the two Churches since

the beginning of the 9th century…[and yet it was] intentionally avoided at the council of

Ferrara-Florence. Theologically, this deliberate evasion of Palamite teaching may have

represented the point of no return.”(P.158). The Latins also refused to use St Maximus’ Letter to

Marinus as a reunion formula, because his formula cut both ways- he wrote that the filioque was

Orthodox, but the way he had understood it then was very different from the way the Latins

understood it at the Council of Florence. So the council ended very much the same as the

previous one- the Greeks capitulated under political pressure (including irregular payments from
the Pope, which frequently caused the visiting Greek bishops to go hungry), except for Mark of

Ephesus, who remained staunchly opposed to the union. They then returned home, and refused to

recite the filioque in their creed. Thus we can see how a seemingly minor difference in

theological approach can lead to centuries of animosity and division.

Works Cited: The Filioque. A. Edward Siecienski.