The Spirit of Christ, and What the Filioque Costs

Not a rerun of the Filioque controversy, which is settled elsewhere in this repository, but the narrower and more interesting question underneath it: what happens to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit if he is defined as the bond of love between Father and Son. This file reports St. Augustine’s account from De Trinitate VI–XV accurately and at its strongest, states the pneumatological cost as a claim about a doctrine’s structure rather than about anyone’s intent, and refuses the historiographical shortcut that would make the argument easy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What This File Is Not

The Filioque — its documented chronology from Spain and Aachen through the papal Mass of 1014 to Lyons and Florence, the Latin case in its own words including the 1995 Roman concessions, the canonical objection from Ephesus and 879–880, and the theological objection that the doctrine relocates the ground of divine unity from the person of the Father to the shared essence — is set out in full in the Trinity collection, and this collection agrees with it and does not repeat it (see What Was Added and When; Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference).

The question here is different and belongs to a collection about the Spirit’s work. Grant, for the sake of the argument, everything the Latin tradition says in its own defence. There remains a question about the Holy Spirit himself: does he retain a hypostatic identity with an economy of his own, or does he become the name for a relation between the other two? That question is pneumatological, not triadological, and the answer to it determines whether the rest of this collection has a subject.

Augustine, at His Strongest

The account must be Augustine’s own, in his own terms, and it is a great deal better than the summaries usually allow.

The image of love. In Book VIII, having exhausted the attempt to speak of God directly, Augustine turns inward and finds a trace of the Trinity in love itself: “But love is of some one that loves, and with love something is loved. Behold, then, there are three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and love” (De Trinitate VIII.10.14; trans. NPNF I/3). He offers it as a trace — vestigium — and he immediately says that the mind must “ascend also from hence,” refusing to rest in it (VIII.10.14). The tentativeness is part of the argument and is routinely dropped by both his admirers and his critics.

The mental triads. Books IX–X develop the analogy into the mind’s knowledge and love of itself (mens, notitia, amor) and then into memory, understanding, and will (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas). These are analogies of the image of God in man, offered as aids to a mind that cannot look at the light directly, and Augustine dismantles each in turn as inadequate.

The Spirit as communion. In Book VI he states the doctrine that matters here: “Wherefore also the Holy Spirit consists in the same unity of substance, and in the same equality. For whether he is the unity of both, or the holiness, or the love, or therefore the unity because the love, and therefore the love because the holiness, it is manifest that he is not one of the two, through whom the two are joined” (De Trinitate VI.5.7). And: whatever the Holy Spirit is, he “is something common both to the Father and Son. But that communion itself is consubstantial and co-eternal; and if it may fitly be called friendship, let it be so called; but it is more aptly called love. And this is also a substance, since God is a substance, and God is love” (VI.5.7). He adds the phrase that gives the doctrine its warmth: the Spirit is “the sweetness of the begetter and of the begotten, filling all creatures according to their capacity” (VI.10.11).

The Spirit as Gift, and the humility about naming. In Book XV Augustine is careful in a way the summaries never register. “The Scriptures, accordingly, have not said, The Holy Spirit is Love. If they had said so, they would have done away with no small part of this inquiry. But they have said, God is love” (XV.17.27). He then argues that if one of the three is to be specially called Love, the Spirit is the fitting one, “namely, that in that simple and highest nature, substance should not be one thing and love another” (XV.17.29). And he is emphatic that the Spirit is not less for being given: “he is given as a gift of God in such way that he himself also gives himself as being God. For he cannot be said not to be in his own power, of whom it is said, The Spirit blows where it lists… We have not here the creating of him that is given, and the rule of them that give, but the concord of the given and the givers” (XV.19.36).

And the qualification of the procession. “God the Father alone is he from whom the Word is born, and from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds (principaliter procedit). And therefore I have added the word principally, because we find that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son also. But the Father gave him this too, not as to one already existing, and not yet having it; but whatever he gave to the only-begotten Word, he gave by begetting him” (XV.17.29; cf. XV.26.47).

And the confession of failure. Book XV ends with Augustine saying that he does not “dare to profess myself to have said” anything worthy of the Trinity, “but rather to confess that the wonderful knowledge of him is too great for me, and that I cannot attain to it” (XV.27.50), and with a prayer. A reader who takes De Trinitate to be a confident system has not read its last chapter.

That is Augustine. He is not a rationalist, he does not mean two causes, he explicitly subordinates his analogies to the mystery, and his Spirit is a person who gives himself. Any Orthodox argument that needs him to be otherwise is not worth making.

The Pneumatological Cost

The claim of this file is not about Augustine’s intent. It is about what happens to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit when the nexus amoris is not one image among several but the definition of the Spirit’s hypostatic identity — which is what the later Latin tradition made of it when Lyons and Florence defined the Spirit’s subsistent being as proceeding from Father and Son as from one principle.

First, the Spirit acquires no relation of origin proper to himself. The Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit, on this account, is the relation between them, hypostatized. His identity is constituted by what the other two do together. He is the how of the Father–Son relation rather than a who standing in his own relation to the Father.

Second, the relation is asymmetric without warrant. There is no Spirituque: the Spirit contributes nothing to the Son’s generation and is nowhere said to. The Latin structure makes the Spirit the terminus of a relation in which he alone is passive — a point the Trinity collection makes as part of the triadological argument, and which has a pneumatological consequence here (see Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference).

Third, and this is the point of the file: a person defined as a bond has no economy of his own. If the Spirit is the love of Father and Son, then his mission in the world is to communicate that love — which is true, and insufficient. It leaves nothing for the Spirit to do that is not the completion of the Son’s work. Pentecost becomes the application of Calvary rather than a second and irreducible sending; the Church becomes an institution founded by Christ into which the Spirit is subsequently poured; the charisms become the distribution of Christ’s benefits; and the epiclesis becomes the ratification of the words of institution. In each case the Spirit remains, but as adverb rather than agent.

Against this the Orthodox account holds that the Spirit is sent by the Father, at the Son’s asking (John 14:16, 26), proceeding from the Father (John 15:26), and that his coming is a new divine mission and not the execution of a previous one. The two hands are two hands (see The Two Hands and the Order of the Economy). Everything sections 04 through 06 of this collection describe — the Church constituted at Pentecost, the gifts distributed as the Spirit wills, the epiclesis as the anaphora’s consummation, the Christian life as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit — presupposes that there is something the Spirit does that is his own.

What Is Not Claimed

Four disclaimers, each of which the honest form of this argument requires.

This is not the claim that Latin theology has no pneumatology. It has a great deal, and the claim that the West “forgot the Spirit” is contested — including by Latin theologians who have documented the opposite at length. Yves Congar’s three volumes, Je crois en l’Esprit Saint (Paris: Cerf, 1979–1980; ET I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, New York: Seabury, 1983), are the standing counter-example, and Congar simultaneously conceded that Latin theology had been too Christocentric and demonstrated how much Latin pneumatology there is to be recovered. That dispute is the subject of this collection’s one §4.2 file and is not adjudicated here (see The Modern Questions).

This is not an argument from the de Régnon paradigm. The nineteenth-century schema on which “the Greeks begin from the three persons and the Latins from the one essence” is a historiographical construct of Théodore de Régnon, not a description of what the Fathers do; it has been dismantled in the modern scholarship, and this repository has already taken that position and does not revive the paradigm here or anywhere (see The De Régnon Paradigm Critique; Ousia and Hypostasis). The argument above rests on the texts of Lyons and Florence and on what a definition of the Spirit as bond entails, and would stand if de Régnon had never written.

This is not the claim that the Filioque caused Western ecclesiology, scholasticism, or the modern condition. Vladimir Lossky and the tradition after him made claims of that order; those claims are contested among Orthodox scholars and are reported without adjudication elsewhere (see The Filioque Thesis; The Modern Personalist Reading). The “Christomonism” charge in particular was pressed by Lossky and, in the ecumenical debates of the 1960s, by Nikos Nissiotis — not by Georges Florovsky, who was reserved about deriving Western divergences from the clause.

And the Orthodox side must concede its own risk. The mirror-image error is a pneumatology detached from Christ: a Spirit who acts freely of the incarnate Word, authenticated by experience rather than by confession. Scripture forecloses it — “he shall not speak of himself; … he shall glorify me” (John 16:13–14), and “every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 4:3) — and the Church has had to say so more than once (see The Criteria and the Counterfeits). The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9; Galatians 4:6; 1 Peter 1:11), rests on the Son and is his own, and any Orthodox account that loosens that bond in order to secure the Spirit’s independence has made the opposite mistake and a worse one.

[Disputed: whether the *nexus amoris* doctrine in fact reduces the Spirit to a function. (a) The Orthodox critique, classically in Photius and in modern form in Lossky, holds that a person defined by the relation of two others has no hypostatic property of his own and therefore no proper economy (Photius, *Mystagogy* §§14, 36; Lossky, *Mystical Theology*, ch. 8). (b) Latin theologians reply that *amor* and *donum* are appropriated names, not definitions of the hypostasis, that Augustine expressly denies Scripture identifies the Spirit as Love (*De Trinitate* XV.17.27), and that the Spirit's missions in Aquinas are as proper and irreducible as the Son's (*Summa Theologiae* I, q. 43); Congar makes the case at length (*I Believe in the Holy Spirit*, vol. 3). This collection holds (a) as a claim about what the conciliar definitions entail, and reports (b) as the serious answer it is.]

The Position, Stated

The Orthodox Church confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, rests in the Son, is manifested and given through the Son, and is not from the Son. That confession is stated and defended in the Trinity collection. What this collection adds is the reason the confession matters for everything that follows: because a Spirit who is the bond between two others is a Spirit with nothing of his own to do, and the Church’s whole life — her constitution at Pentecost, her mysteries, her saints — is the record of what the Holy Spirit does.

References

Augustine of Hippo. On the Trinity (De Trinitate) VI.5.7; VI.10.11; VIII.10.14; IX–X; XV.17.27–29; XV.19.36–37; XV.26.47; XV.27.50. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 3.
Council of Florence. Laetentur Caeli (1439). In Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
Second Council of Lyons (1274). Constitution On the Supreme Trinity and the Catholic Faith. In Tanner, Decrees, vol. 1.
Photius the Great. The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit §§14, 36. Trans. Joseph P. Farrell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I, qq. 36–38, 43.
Congar, Yves. I Believe in the Holy Spirit. 3 vols. Trans. David Smith. New York: Seabury, 1983. (French original Je crois en l’Esprit Saint, Paris: Cerf, 1979–1980.)
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Scripture: John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:13–14; Romans 8:9; Galatians 4:6; 1 Peter 1:11; 1 John 4:3.