Between East and West.

The christological controversies of the fifth century, as we have seen, provoked a final break between Byzantine Christendom and the other ancient spiritual families of the East: Syrian, Egyptian, and Armenian. The Greeks and the Latins remained alone in their common faithfulness to Chalcedon as the two main cultural expressions of Christianity inside the Roman world. The schism, which finally separated them, could not be identified with any particular event or even be dated precisely. Political opposition between Byzantium and the Prankish Empire, a gradual estrangement in thought and practice, divergent developments in both theology and ecclesiology, played their respective parts in this process. But in spite of the historical factors, which pushed the two halves of Christendom further and further apart, there were political forces working in favour of union: the Byzantine emperors, for example, systematically tried from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries to re-establish ecclesiastical communion with Rome and thus gain Western support against the Turks.

In fact, neither the schism nor the failure of the attempts at reunion can be explained exclusively by socio-political or cultural factors. The difficulties created by history could be resolved if there had been a common ecclesiological criterion to settle the theological, canonical, or liturgical issues keeping the East and the West apart. But the Medieval development of the Roman primacy as the ultimate reference in doctrinal matters stood in obvious contrast with the concept of the Church prevailing in the East. Thus, there could not be agreement on the issues themselves or on the manner of solving them as long as there was divergence on the notion of authority in the Church.

The Filioque.

The Byzantines considered the Filioque issue as the central point of disagreement. In their eyes, the Latin Church by accepting an interpolated creed was both opposing a text adopted by the ecumenical councils as the expression of the universal Christian faith and giving dogmatic authority to an incorrect concept of the Trinity. Among the Byzantines, even the moderates like Peter, Patriarch of Antioch, who objected to the systematic anti-Latinism of his colleague in Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, considered the interpolation as an “evil and even the worst of evils.”¹

Generally, the Byzantines lacked a full knowledge of the complicated historical circumstances, which led to the acceptance of the Filioque in the West: the interpolation of the creed in Spain in the sixth century as a means of strengthening the anti-Arian position of the Spanish Church; the spreading of the interpolated creed in the Prankish Empire; Charlemagne’s use of it in his anti-Greek polemic; the post factum reference by Prankish theologians to Augustine’s De Trinitate to justify the interpolation (which Augustine never envisaged), and, finally, the acceptance of the Filioque in Rome probably in 1014. Photius offered the first open Greek refutation in 866 when he saw in the interpolated creed not only an alteration by some Prankish “barbarians” in the distant West, but also a weapon of anti-Byzantine propaganda among the nearby Bulgarians, who had recently been converted to Christianity by the Greeks and for whom the Byzantine patriarch considered himself directly responsible.

In his encyclical to the Eastern patriarchs (866), Photius considers the Filioque as the “crown of evils” introduced by the Prankish missionaries in Bulgaria.² We have already seen that his major theological objection to the interpolation is presupposed a confusion of the hypostatic characters of the Persons of the Trinity and therefore a new form of modalism, or “semi-Sabellianism.” After the Council of 879-880, which solemnly confirmed the original text of the creed and formally anathematized anyone who would either “compose another confession of faith” or corrupt the creed with “illegitimate words, or additions, or subtractions,”³ Photius considered himself fully satisfied. To celebrate what he considered a final victory of Orthodoxy, he composed a detailed refutation of the doctrine of the “double procession” — his famous Mystagogy — in which he also praised Pope John VIII for having made the triumph possible.⁴

After the final adoption of the Filioque in Rome and throughout the West, the issue was bound to be raised at every encounter, polemical or friendly, between Greeks and Latins. Byzantine literature on the subject is extremely voluminous and has been reviewed in reference works by Martin Jugie, Hans-Georg Beck, and others. The arguments raised by Photius — “the Filioque is an illegitimate interpolation,” “it destroys the monarchy of the Father,” and “relativizes the reality of personal, or hypostatic existence, in the Trinity” — remained at the centre of the discussion. But often, the controversy was reduced to an interminable enumeration by both sides of patristic texts collected in favour of the respective positions of the Greeks and of the Latins.

The battles around ancient authorities often concentrated on texts by those Fathers — especially Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Epiphanius of Cyprus — whose main concern was anti-Arian or anti-Nestorian polemics, i.e., the establishment of Christ’s identity as the eternal and pre-existing divine Logos. In reference to the Holy Spirit, they unavoidably used expressions similar to those also adopted in sixth-century Spain where the interpolation first appeared. Biblical texts, such as John 20:22 (“He breathed on them and said: Receive the Holy Spirit”), were seen as proofs of the divinity of Christ: if the “Spirit of God” is also the “Spirit of Christ” (cf. Rm 8:9), Christ is certainly “consubstantial” with God. Thus, it is also possible to say that the Spirit is the “proper” Spirit of the Son,⁵ and even that the Spirit “proceeds substantially from both” the Father and the Son.⁶ Commenting upon these texts and acknowledging their correspondence with Latin patristic thought, Maximus the Confessor rightly interprets them as meaning not that “the Son is the origin of the Spirit” because “the Father alone is the origin of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” but that “the Spirit proceeds through the Son, expressing thus the unity of nature.”⁷ In other words, from the activity of the Spirit in the world after the Incarnation, one can infer the consubstantiality of the three Persons of the Trinity, but one cannot infer any causality in the eternal personal relationships of the Spirit with the Son.

However, those whom the Byzantines called Latinophrones, the “Latin-minded”, and especially John Beccos (1275-1282), enthroned as patriarch by Emperor Michael VIII Paleologus with the explicit task of promoting in Byzantium the Union of Lyons (1274), made a significant effort to use Greek patristic texts on the Spirit’s procession “through the Son” in favour of the Latin Filioque. According to the Latinophrones, both “through the Son” and “from the Son” were legitimate expressions of the same Trinitarian faith.

The usual counter-argument of the Orthodox side was that in Biblical or patristic theology procession “from” or “through” the Son designates the charismata of the Spirit and not His hypostatic existence.⁸ For indeed pneuma can designate the giver and the gift; and in the latter case, a procession of the “Spirit” from or through the Son — i.e., through the Incarnate, historical Christ — happens in time and thus does not coincide with the eternal procession of the Spirit from the hypostasis of the Father, the only “source of divinity.”

This counter-argument was recognized as insufficient however by the major Orthodox Byzantine theologians of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Gregory of Cyprus, a successor of Beccos’ on the patriarchal throne (1283-1289) and chairman of the council (1285), which officially rejected the Union of Lyons, had this assembly approve a text, which, while condemning the Filioque, recognized an “eternal manifestation” of the Spirit through the Son.⁹ What served as a background to the council’s position is the notion that the charismata of the Spirit are not temporal, created realities but the eternal, uncreated grace or “energy” of God. To this uncreated divine life, man has access in the body of the Incarnate Logos. Therefore, the grace of the Spirit does indeed come to us “through” or “from” the Son; but what is being given to us is neither the very hypostasis of the Spirit nor a created, temporal grace but the external “manifestation” of God, distinct from both His persons and His essence. The argument was also taken over and developed by Gregory Palamas, the great Byzantine theologian of the fourteenth century, who like Gregory of Cyprus formally recognizes that as energy: “the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and comes from Him, being breathed and sent and manifested by Him, but in His very being and His existence, He is the Spirit of Christ, but is not from Christ, but from the Father.”¹⁰

As time went on, it became increasingly clear that the Filioque dispute was not a discussion on words — for there was a sense in which both sides would agree to say that the Spirit proceeds “from the Son” — but on the issue of whether the hypostatic existence of the Persons of the Trinity could be reduced to their internal relations, as the post-Augustinian West would admit, or whether the primary Christian experience was that of a Trinity of Persons whose personal existence was irreducible to their common essence. The question was whether tri-personality or consubstantiality was the first and basic content of Christian religious experience. But to place the debate on that level and to enter into a true dialogue on the very substance of the matter, each side needed to understand the other’s position. This unfortunately never occurred. Even at the Council of Florence, where interminable confrontations on the Filioque issue took place, the discussion still dealt mainly with attempts at accommodating Greek and Latin formulations. The council finally adopted a basically Augustinian definition of the Trinity, while affirming that the Greek formulations were not in contradiction with it. This however was not a solution of the fundamental issue.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 560