Augustine and the Filioque

The Filioque — the Latin addition to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” (qui ex Patre Filioque procedit) — is the gravest dogmatic dispute dividing the Orthodox East from the Catholic West, and Augustine stands at its theological headwaters. His teaching that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as their mutual Love became the principal patristic warrant later cited by the Latin tradition for the doctrine and the interpolation. This file presents, without polemic, what Augustine actually taught, how the later West invoked him, the objection of the Orthodox Church (Photios, Palamas) — which confesses the procession from the Father and has never received the Filioque, either as doctrine or as addition to the Creed — and the Western defense, carefully distinguishing Augustine’s own intent from the controversy that followed him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

What Augustine Taught

In On the Trinity Augustine taught plainly that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Having named the Spirit the mutual Love and Gift of the Father and the Son (see De Trinitate), he drew the consequence: “the Holy Spirit… proceeds from the Father and the Son” (de Patre et Filio procedit) (On the Trinity 15.17, 15.26–27; trans. NPNF I/3). He was careful, however, to qualify this in ways that matter for the dispute. He affirmed that the Spirit proceeds principally (principaliter) from the Father, because it is the Father who, in begetting the Son, gave the Son that the Spirit should proceed from Him also — so that the Son’s role in the procession is itself a gift from the Father, and the Father remains the ultimate source (On the Trinity 15.17, 15.26–29; trans. NPNF I/3). He also spoke of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son “as from one principle” (tamquam de uno principio) — a phrase the later Western tradition and the Council of Lyon would make decisive (On the Trinity 5.14; Augustine’s later sermons and tracts; the Tractates on John 99).

Two points must be held in mind. First, Augustine wrote in the early fifth century, before the Filioque was a controversy and before the Creed had been touched; he was expounding the inner life of the Trinity, not amending a conciliar text. Second, he was working in Latin, where procedere renders both the Greek ekporeuesthai (the technical term of the Creed, used of the Spirit’s origination from the Father alone in John 15:26) and the broader notion of “coming forth” — a linguistic difference that lies near the root of the whole dispute (see below). Whether Augustine’s de Patre et Filio procedit means the same thing the East denies when it rejects the Filioque is itself a question on which East and West differ.

How the Latin West Invoked Him

Augustine’s formulations became the backbone of the Western doctrine. His phrase that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son “as from one principle” was taken up verbatim by the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1439) as the dogmatic definition of the Latin Church (Florence, Laetentur Caeli, 1439). The interpolation of Filioque into the Creed itself, which spread in the Latin West from sixth-century Spain (the local Councils of Toledo) and was eventually adopted at Rome in the eleventh century, was defended throughout by appeal to Augustine and the Augustinian tradition (Ambrose, Jerome, Leo, and above all Augustine) as the doctrine of the Latin Fathers (Louth 2007, ch. on the Filioque; Siecienski 2010). Augustine did not insert the Filioque into the Creed — that was the work of later centuries — but his theology furnished the doctrine the interpolation expressed. He is, in this precise sense, the father of the Western teaching, though not of the Western tampering with the Creed.

The Objection of the Orthodox Church

The Church’s objection — not one theological school’s critique but the settled confession of Orthodoxy — has two layers, one canonical, one theological, and Augustine is implicated chiefly in the second.

The canonical objection is to the interpolation of the Creed: the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), confessing the Spirit “who proceeds from the Father” (after John 15:26), is the common faith ratified by the Ecumenical Councils, and no local Church may add to it; the Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus 431) forbade altering the Creed. On this point Augustine is not the target, since the interpolation postdates him.

The theological objection is to the doctrine, and here Augustine’s formulations are squarely in view. The classic Eastern critique was framed by St. Photios the Great (c. 810–893), patriarch of Constantinople, in his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (see St. Photios the Great). Photios argued that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone (ek monou tou Patros), that the monarchia — the sole-source principle — of the Father is the guarantee of the Trinity’s unity, and that to make the Son also a cause of the Spirit’s hypostatic existence either introduces two principles into the Godhead (destroying the Father’s unique monarchy) or confuses the distinct properties of the Persons (Photios, Mystagogy; Siecienski 2010, ch. 4). The Eastern tradition distinguishes the eternal procession of the Spirit’s very hypostasis (which is from the Father alone) from the Spirit’s temporal mission and eternal shining-forth (ekphansis) through the Son in the economy and in the energies — a distinction later deepened by St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) through his theology of the divine energies, which let him affirm that the Spirit is sent and manifested through and from the Son in the energies while proceeding hypostatically from the Father alone (see St. Gregory Palamas; Palamas, Apodictic Treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit). Measured against this, Augustine’s de Patre et Filio procedit appears to the Eastern critique to blur the hypostatic procession with the energetic manifestation and to compromise the Father’s monarchy.

The Western Defense — and the Charitable Eastern Reading

The Western defense holds that Augustine and the Latin tradition never intended two principles or two causes. Augustine’s own qualification — that the Spirit proceeds principally from the Father, the Son receiving from the Father that the Spirit proceeds from Him too, the two being one principle precisely because the Son has all from the Father — was offered (the defense argues) exactly to preserve the Father’s ultimate sourcehood and the unity of the Godhead (On the Trinity 15.17, 15.26–29). On this reading the Latin Filioque, rightly understood, does not deny the monarchy of the Father but expresses the consubstantial communion of the Son in the single principle that the Father is. The medieval and modern rapprochement has often turned on the distinction Maximus the Confessor drew in the seventh century: defending the Romans in his Letter to Marinus, St. Maximus the Confessor explained that the Latins, by their procedere, did not make the Son a cause (aitia) of the Spirit but confessed that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son — a reading that, if applied to Augustine, narrows or dissolves the conflict (Maximus, Letter to Marinus; Siecienski 2010, ch. 3; Louth 2007).

The contemporary Orthodox assessment of Augustine on this point spans a wide range:

[Disputed: Orthodox theologians divide over how gravely Augustine is implicated in the *Filioque*. (1) The *critical* reading — associated with Vladimir Lossky (*The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church*, 1944), John Romanides, and Photios Farantos — holds that Augustine's essence-first Trinitarianism and his doctrine of the Spirit as the mutual love of Father and Son are the very root of the *Filioque* and of a defective Western theology of God, a real departure from the patristic consensus. (2) The *mediating* reading — associated with the 2003 North American Orthodox–Catholic consultation statement *The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?*, and with scholars such as A. Edward Siecienski and the contributors to *Orthodox Readings of Augustine* — holds that Augustine's careful qualifications (the Father as *principaliter* source; "as from one principle") keep him far closer to the Eastern position than the polemical tradition allowed, that the dispute is in significant part terminological (the *procedere*/*ekporeuesthai* equivocation), and that Maximus's *Letter to Marinus* shows the conflict was not always understood as church-dividing. Both readings are held by serious Orthodox theologians; this guide reports the spectrum without adjudicating it.]

The Place of the Question in Augustine’s Reception

The Filioque connection is, with the doctrine of grace, one of the two pillars of the contested Eastern reception of Augustine, and the two are sometimes linked by his sharper critics into a single charge that Augustine introduced a fundamentally flawed theology of God into the West (a charge pressed most forcefully by Romanides; see The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion). But the question must be stated with care and without polemic, as METHODOLOGY §4 requires. Augustine confessed the Nicene faith, defended the full divinity of the Spirit, and named the Father the ultimate source of the Spirit’s procession. He did not alter the Creed. The doctrine the later West built on his words, and the interpolation it made, are the matter of the East–West division — but the man himself, venerated as Blessed Augustine, is read by the Orthodox tradition across a spectrum that runs from seeing him as the fountainhead of error to seeing him as a Father whose words were pressed, after his death, into a controversy he never knew. The fuller Orthodox dogmatic treatment is found in The Filioque; the man’s reception, in the next section.

References

Augustine of Hippo. On the Holy Trinity 5.14, 15.17, 15.26–29. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 3. 1887. (The Spirit’s procession from Father and Son; principaliter from the Father; “as from one principle.”)
Photios of Constantinople. Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1983.
Maximus the Confessor. Letter to Marinus (fragment on the procession of the Spirit).
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
North American Orthodox–Catholic Theological Consultation. The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? 2003.
Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2008.