05 — Augustine and the Filioque Thesis

Farrell’s reading of Augustine as the fountainhead of the Second Europe, and the Filioque as the watershed at which the Augustinian dialectic first becomes public dogma. This section expounds both and locates Farrell precisely on the spectrum of Orthodox opinion the repository has already mapped — the maximalist-critique pole, alongside Romanides — while keeping firm the Church’s actual confession that the Filioque is an error.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”; the Filioque is a confessed error)

Overview

This is the section where the collection’s confessional discipline is most exercised. On the one hand, the Church confesses that the Filioque is an error and that Augustine, though a saint, contributed to it — this is firm ground, not a both-sides question. On the other hand, Farrell’s reading of Augustine as a coherent generative “system,” and his claim that the Filioque is the necessary output of absolute divine simplicity and the master-watershed of two civilizations, is one strongly contested position within a live Orthodox debate — the maximalist end of the critical pole (Romanides), answered from within Orthodoxy by Seraphim Rose and the Orthodox Readings of Augustine scholars. The section slots Farrell into that existing staging without contradicting it, and keeps the confessed core distinct from the disputed thesis.

Files in This Section

  • Farrell’s Reading of Augustine — Augustine as the systematic root of the dialectic; the precise placement of Farrell at the maximalist-critique pole; and the answer from the appreciative pole (Rose, Demacopoulos & Papanikolaou, Ayres, Barnes) that GHD does not engage.
  • The Filioque as First-vs-Second-Europe Watershed — the Filioque as the first symptom and boundary of the Two Europes; what rests on the Church’s confession (the Filioque is an error) and what outruns it (the necessity-from-simplicity and the civilizational-watershed claims).

See Also