The Modern Questions

The collection’s one §4.2 file. Three modern disputes about pneumatology are reported here with their proponents named and no verdict rendered: whether Western theology “forgot the Spirit”; whether Orthodox pneumatology is itself thin outside the Filioque polemic; and how charism and institution are to be related. None of the three is a dispute about dogma, and the file is written so that a reader can see who says what and why.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Scope of This File

METHODOLOGY §4.2 governs disputes the Church herself has not settled and questions of fact where evidence rather than confession decides. This is the only file in the collection written under it. Everything else here — that the Spirit is the Lord and Giver of Life, that he proceeds from the Father, that he is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son, that the Filioque is a doctrine the Church has examined and not received — is the Church’s confession and is stated as such (§4.1).

What is at issue below is not dogma but the assessment of theological traditions and the direction of modern theology. The questions are live, the disputants are serious, and this file names the positions and stops.

As of August 2026, none of the three questions has been the subject of a conciliar act by any Orthodox church, and there is no sign that any will be.

(a) Did the West Forget the Spirit?

The thesis. A prominent line of twentieth-century Orthodox writing holds that Western theology suffers from a structural pneumatological deficiency, traceable to the Filioque: if the Spirit proceeds from the Son, he becomes the Son’s gift rather than a distinct sending, and the resulting theology is “Christomonist” — centred on Christ to the exclusion of the Spirit — with consequences in ecclesiology (a Church constituted juridically by Christ’s institution and then animated), in sacramental theology (consecration by a Christological formula), and in the doctrine of grace (created grace rather than the uncreated energies).

Who said it. Vladimir Lossky made the Filioque the hinge of a comprehensive contrast between the two traditions (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, ch. 3; “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God). The term Christomonism was pressed in the ecumenical debates of the 1960s especially by the Greek theologian Nikos Nissiotis, and taken up widely. Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) made a related but narrower argument: that pneumatology must be constitutive of ecclesiology rather than added to it (Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985, ch. 3).

Who did not. Georges Florovsky was reserved about deriving Western divergences from the clause, and this repository’s hub article records that reserve (see Pneumatology).

The counter-evidence. The most substantial reply is a Roman Catholic one, and it is not a rebuttal so much as a demonstration. Yves Congar‘s Je crois en l’Esprit Saint (3 vols., Paris: Cerf, 1979–1980; ET I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, New York: Seabury, 1983) documents a continuous Latin pneumatology — Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, the Victorines, Bonaventure, Aquinas on the divine missions, the Pentecost sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus, the Rhineland mystics, and the modern recovery — while simultaneously conceding that Latin theology had been too Christocentric and needed a pneumatological correction. That a Latin theologian both makes the concession and supplies the counter-evidence is the reason this dispute cannot be settled by assertion on either side.

Further complications for the thesis: the specific charge that the Filioque causes the alleged deficiency requires a causal claim that is very hard to establish and that the Trinity collection’s dogmatic argument deliberately does not need (see Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference). And the historiographical framework in which the contrast is usually stated — the de Régnon paradigm — has been dismantled in modern scholarship, and this repository has already taken that position (see The De Régnon Paradigm Critique; The De Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

[Disputed: whether Western theology exhibits a structural pneumatological deficiency. (a) Lossky, Nissiotis, and a wide body of twentieth-century Orthodox writing affirm it and attribute it to the *Filioque* (Lossky, *Mystical Theology*, ch. 3). (b) Congar documents a substantial and continuous Latin pneumatology while conceding a Christocentric imbalance (*I Believe in the Holy Spirit*, vols. 1–3); critics of the thesis further hold that its historiographical frame (de Régnon) is a nineteenth-century construct and that the causal claim is unproven. This file reports both and adjudicates neither. The dogmatic question about the *Filioque* itself is settled in this repository at §4.1 and is not what is disputed here.]

(b) Is Orthodox Pneumatology Itself Thin?

The self-critical counter-claim is made by Orthodox writers and deserves to be reported as carefully as the first.

The claim. That Orthodox pneumatology has been developed chiefly as a polemical instrument against the Filioque, and that outside the controversy over the Spirit’s eternal procession the Orthodox literature on what the Spirit does is comparatively slight; that Orthodox theology has been more energetic in defending the doctrine of the Spirit than in expounding it; and that the confidence with which Orthodox writers diagnose a Western deficiency sits oddly with the state of their own bibliography.

The evidence usually offered. That there is no major Orthodox dogmatic treatise devoted to the Holy Spirit between St. John of Damascus in the eighth century and Sergius Bulgakov’s The Comforter in 1936 — and that Bulgakov’s is embedded in a sophiological framework whose reception in the Orthodox world was contested and which was formally condemned by two Russian jurisdictions in 1935 (see The Moscow Ukazy of 1935; The Critics: Lossky, Florovsky and After). That the standard Orthodox dogmatic manuals of the modern period treat the Spirit largely under the heading of the procession. And that when Orthodox parishes in North America met the charismatic movement in the 1970s, the pastoral resources available were markedly thinner than the polemical ones (see The Charismatic Question).

The reply. That the criterion is wrong. Orthodox pneumatology is not primarily written in dogmatic treatises but carried in the liturgical texts, in the ascetic literature, and in the lives and teaching of the saints — the Macarian corpus, Diadochos, Symeon the New Theologian, the Philokalia, Palamas and the councils that received him, Seraphim of Sarov, Silouan. On this reading the apparent thinness is an artefact of looking for the doctrine in the genre where the West happens to put it (see The Liturgical Witness). Whether that reply is sufficient, or is a way of declining the question, is exactly what is in dispute.

[Disputed: the adequacy of Orthodox pneumatology outside the *Filioque* controversy. (a) A self-critical current among Orthodox theologians holds that the Orthodox literature on the Spirit's work is comparatively undeveloped and that its energy has gone into the procession controversy. (b) Others hold that the doctrine is carried in the liturgical, hagiographic, and ascetic tradition rather than in systematic treatises, and that the objection mistakes a difference of genre for a deficiency. Both positions are held by serious Orthodox writers, and the question is one of assessment rather than of fact; this file names it and does not resolve it.]

(c) Charism and Institution

The third question is the relation between the Spirit’s free gifts and the Church’s ordered ministry — whether the eucharistic ecclesiologies of Afanasiev and Zizioulas correctly recover the Church’s pneumatological constitution, and how far their historical reconstructions hold.

This collection has set out the material and named the disputes (see Charism and Institution), and the substantive ecclesiological adjudication belongs to the treatment of the Church rather than to a collection about the Spirit (see Ecclesiology). It is listed here so that the reader knows it is the third live question and knows where it is handled, not so that it can be settled at the end of a pneumatology.

What Is Not in Dispute

It is worth ending by stating what none of this touches.

That the Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of Life, proceeding from the Father, worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son, who spoke through the prophets — the confession of the Second Ecumenical Council, held by the whole Church.

That the Filioque is a doctrine the Orthodox Church has examined and not received, and that the interpolation into the Creed was made without the authority of the whole Church — the position stated and argued in the Trinity collection, and confessed here.

That the Spirit is given in the mysteries, that his gifts are distributed as he wills, that his fruits are the measure of a Christian life, and that the aim of that life is his acquisition.

The disputes reported above are about how well various traditions have expounded these things and about what follows from them for theology and Church order. They are not about whether they are true.

References

Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957; In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Nissiotis, Nikos A. Contributions to the Faith and Order discussions of the 1960s on pneumatology and “Christomonism”; see the survey in Lukas Vischer, ed., Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, Faith and Order Paper 103. London: SPCK, 1981.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985.
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.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Comforter. Paris: YMCA Press, 1936; trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Collected Works, vol. 1). Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine–Human Communion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
North American Orthodox–Catholic Theological Consultation. “The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?” 2003.