The Father as Sole Cause

The Father is the sole cause, source, and principle of the Son and the Holy Spirit — and this causality is personal, not natural, so that it establishes no superiority of nature and no subordination. This file sets out the doctrine as the Church confesses it: what aitia means and what it excludes, the argument against Eunomius that made it possible, the difference between order and rank, and why the unity of God is grounded in a Person and not in a shared essence. It is the spine of the collection and the presupposition of everything in Section 08.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Confession

The Father is unbegotten and has his being from no one. The Son is begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Father is therefore the one cause (αἰτία), source (πηγή), and principle (ἀρχή) within the Godhead, and there is no other. This is what the Greek Fathers call the monarchy of the Father — μοναρχία, the sole principle — and it is the Orthodox answer to the question of how God is one.

The word cause is being used strictly and must not be softened. The Son and the Spirit are not effects in any sense that would make them creatures: the causing is eternal, necessary to God’s being what he is, and without any interval, change, or diminution. But it is real, and it is asymmetric. The Father is not caused by anyone; the Son and the Spirit are from him.

The Two Things It Is Not

Because the doctrine sounds, to an unaccustomed ear, like a hierarchy, two exclusions must be stated at once — and they were stated by the Fathers themselves, at the time, against precisely this objection.

It is not superiority of nature. St. Gregory the Theologian addresses head-on the text “my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). His answer is that “greater” refers to cause and not to nature: the Father is greater as the one from whom, and equal as God, “for the nature is the same” — indeed Gregory presses that the very word “greater” implies sameness of kind, since only comparables are compared (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 29.15; Oration 30.7; trans. NPNF II/7). To be caused is not to be lesser. The Son is not less God than the Father; there are no degrees of divinity, and the Godhead is possessed wholly and identically by each of the three.

It is not temporal or successive. There is no “before” in which the Father was and the Son was not; that is exactly what Nicaea anathematized. Causality in God is a relation, not a process.

Gregory’s fullest statement of the positive doctrine is worth quoting because it defines the term:

“The three most ancient opinions concerning God are anarchia, polyarchia, and monarchia… But monarchy is that which we hold in honour — not a monarchy limited to one person, for it is possible for one to be at variance with himself and so become many; but one which is made of an equality of nature and a union of mind, and an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity — a thing which is impossible to the created nature.”
(Gregory the Theologian, Oration 29.2; trans. NPNF II/7.)

Note what is refused in the first clause. The monarchy the Church honours is not the rule of a single person in the unitarian sense. It is the sole principle of a Godhead that is three.

And in his farewell address at Constantinople, Gregory states the ground of unity in a single sentence that is as close to a definition as the tradition possesses:

“The three have one nature — God. And the union is the Father, from whom and to whom the order of Persons runs its course, not so as to be confounded, but so as to be possessed [by each], without distinction of time, of will, or of power.”
(Gregory the Theologian, Oration 42.15; trans. NPNF II/7.)

The union is the Father. Not the essence, not the community of the three, not a fourth thing behind them: the Father, a Person.

Why It Must Be Personal Causality

The decisive technical point was settled in the 360s, against Eunomius, and it is what makes everything else in this file coherent.

Eunomius held that agennēsia — unbegottenness — is the divine essence itself, so that the Father’s being unoriginate is what divinity is; from which it follows that the Son, being begotten, is of a different essence. St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nyssa answered that unbegottenness is not the essence but a mode of existence (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) — a statement of how the Father is, not what he is — and that in general the divine names are drawn from operations and relations and never reach the essence (Basil, Against Eunomius I.5–15; Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius II; trans. NPNF II/5, II/8; see Ousia and Hypostasis).

Apply this to causality and the whole structure follows.

Being the cause is a hypostatic property, not a natural one. The Father causes as Father, that is, as a particular hypostasis characterized by that relation — not as God, that is, not in virtue of the essence he shares.

Therefore the causality is not communicated with the essence. If the Father caused in virtue of the divine nature, then everything possessing that nature would cause; the Son would cause, and the Spirit would cause, and the doctrine would collapse into absurdity. Since the Father causes as hypostasis, the Son and the Spirit — who possess the same nature entirely — do not thereby cause anything, because causing is not a property of the nature.

And therefore the causality does not affect the equality of nature. Cause and caused differ hypostatically and are identical in essence. That is not a paradox; it is what it means to say the distinctions are relations of origin and nothing else.

This is the argument St. Photius would later turn against the Filioque, and it was fully in place five hundred years before he needed it (see St. Photius: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit).

Order Is Not Rank

The Fathers preserve a fixed order (τάξις) — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — in the baptismal formula, the doxology, and the Creed. Opponents inferred a ranking from it, and St. Basil devotes several chapters to refuting them.

The refutation turns on the distinction between numbering (ἀρίθμησις) and sub-numbering (ὑπαρίθμησις). To count things is not to grade them; sub-numeration, the technical device his opponents were using, would place the second and third in a descending series of dignity, and Basil denies that the Church’s enumeration does any such thing. The order in the formula follows the order of the relations of origin — the Son is from the Father, the Spirit from the Father — and it tells us that the three are really distinct, not that they are unequal (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 17.41–18.45; trans. NPNF II/8).

The same point can be made from the Church’s practice. She does not baptize “in the name of the Father, and under him the Son”; she baptizes into one name borne equally by three.

What Grounds the Unity of God

Here is the substantive claim, and it is the reason this section exists.

There are two available answers to the question why the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God and not three. One grounds the unity in the essence: the three are one because they share one divine nature. The other grounds it in the Father: the three are one because the Son and the Spirit have their being from one source, who is the Father, and the divine nature is one because it is the Father’s own nature communicated wholly to them.

The Orthodox Church confesses the second. The essence is not denied to be one — it is one, and confessing that is what homoousios does — but the ground of the oneness is a Person. God is one because the Father is one. This is what Gregory means by “the union is the Father, from whom and to whom the order of Persons runs its course,” and it is why the Greek Fathers can say without embarrassment that the Father is “the God” in a way that does not diminish the Son.

The consequence is that in Orthodox theology there is no divine essence standing behind or above the three, no impersonal Godhead in which the three participate. The Father is not an instance of divinity; he is God, and the Son and the Spirit are God because they are wholly from him. The New Testament’s own habit of using “God” for the Father while calling the Son “Lord” is the apostolic form of this (see The New Testament and the Baptismal Faith).

The Later Codification

St. John of Damascus states the doctrine in the form the tradition afterward received. The Father is “the fountain and cause of the Son and the Holy Spirit”; the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds, both from the Father, “and we do not say that the Son is a cause”; the Spirit is “the Spirit of the Son, not as from him, but as proceeding from the Father through the Son”; and the Damascene is careful that “through the Son” is not “from the Son” (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.8, 12; trans. NPNF II/9; see The Exposition).

St. Maximus the Confessor, writing to Marinus about Latin usage, defends Western writers on the ground that they “showed the Father to be the one cause of the Son and the Spirit” — that is, he defends them by showing that they did not deny the monarchy (Maximus, Opusculum 10, Letter to Marinus [PG 91:136]; and see the discussion at Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference). That this is the criterion Maximus applies is itself evidence of how central the doctrine was by the seventh century.

What Is Not Claimed Here

Three limits, stated so that the doctrine is not asked to carry more than it will bear.

It does not explain the Trinity. Why there are three and not two or four, what generation is, what procession is, how they differ — none of this is answered, and St. Gregory the Theologian expressly refuses to answer it (Oration 31.8).

It is not a general metaphysics of personhood. The monarchy of the Father is a statement about God. A twentieth-century school of Orthodox theology has built from it an ontology in which personhood is prior to nature and freedom is the ground of being; that construction is contested among Orthodox theologians and is reported, unadjudicated, in Section 09 (see The Modern Personalist Reading). Nothing in this file depends on it, and the doctrine as stated here is the Fathers’ and not that school’s.

It does not make the Father greater. This bears repeating because it is the objection that never goes away, and because it is the objection the Fathers most consistently anticipated. The Father is cause; the Son and the Spirit are caused; all three are God, wholly, equally, and identically. Anyone who deduces a greater and a lesser from the monarchy has misunderstood it in precisely the way Eunomius did, and the Church has already condemned that.

Why It Matters

If the unity of God rests in the person of the Father, then the Father’s being the sole cause is not an ornament of the doctrine but its structural member, and anything that assigns causality elsewhere pulls the structure down. That is the whole of the Orthodox case in the matter of the Filioque, and it is the reason that case is not a quarrel about a word. Section 08 makes the argument; this section is what the argument is made from.

See Also

References

  • Gregory the Theologian. Orations 29.2, 29.15, 30.7, 31.8, 31.14, 42.15. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; Five Theological Orations also trans. Williams and Wickham, Popular Patristics 23. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2002.
  • Basil the Great. Against Eunomius I; On the Holy Spirit 17–18. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8; Against Eunomius trans. DelCogliano and Radde-Gallwitz, Fathers of the Church 122, 2011.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Against Eunomius II; Ad Ablabium. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5.
  • John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.8, 12. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 9.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Opusculum 10 (Letter to Marinus) [PG 91:136].
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.