What Was Added and When

The word Filioque — “and the Son” — was inserted into the third article of the Creed of 381 in the Latin West over a period of some four hundred years, against the explicit resistance of Rome for much of that time. This file sets out the documented chronology from Spain to the papal Mass of 1014, through Photius and the councils of union, to the modern dialogues, and separates what is securely attested from what is conventionally repeated.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Creed Says

The third article of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed reads, in the Greek received by the Church: “And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father (τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον), who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets.”

The Latin Filioque inserts two words: qui ex Patre Filioque procedit — “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Nothing else in the article is altered.

Spain

The addition first appears in Spain, in the context of the conversion of the Arian Visigoths to the Nicene faith — a setting in which any formula stressing the Son’s full equality with the Father had obvious polemical appeal.

The Third Council of Toledo (589), at which King Reccared and the Visigothic bishops professed the Catholic faith, is the conventional date, and the transmitted acts of that council contain the clause. But the manuscript evidence is not straightforward. [Disputed: the date of the Spanish insertion. The transmitted acts of Toledo III contain the *Filioque*, and this remains the conventional date (A. Edward Siecienski, *The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy*, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, ch. 4). Against this, the 1992 critical edition of the Spanish conciliar collection excludes *et Filio* from Toledo III, and Shawn S. Smith argues that the insertion occurred between 589 and the Eighth Council of Toledo (653), where it is securely attested ("The Insertion of the Filioque into the Nicene Creed and a Letter of Isidore of Seville," *Journal of Early Christian Studies* 22.2 [2014]: 261–286). This repository's hub article on the Filioque carries the same disposition, and this collection agrees with it.]

What is not disputed is that by the mid-seventh century the interpolated Creed was in liturgical use in Spain, and that the Spanish councils — Toledo VIII (653), Toledo XI (675) and after — profess it as a matter of course.

Behind the Spanish practice stands the Athanasian Creed (Quicunque vult), a Latin symbol of the fifth or sixth century, not by St. Athanasius and unknown in the Greek East until much later, which states that the Spirit is “from the Father and the Son, neither made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding.” Its authority in the West lent the doctrine an antiquity it did not possess.

The Franks

The clause became a European question when the Carolingians took it up.

Charlemagne’s court theologians made the Filioque a mark of Frankish orthodoxy and a weapon against the Greeks. The Libri Carolini (properly the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum, composed c. 791–793, largely by Theodulf of Orléans) attack the acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) on several fronts, one of them being the Greek profession that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son — which the Frankish theologians took to be an inadequate substitute for and the Son. The document is a striking artefact: a Western polemic against an Ecumenical Council of the Church, composed on the basis of a defective Latin translation of its acts.

A dispute at Jerusalem between Frankish monks on the Mount of Olives and Greek monks over the interpolated Creed brought the matter to Rome, and the Council of Aachen (809) under Charlemagne affirmed the doctrine and the addition. Charlemagne then sent legates to Pope Leo III seeking approval for singing the interpolated Creed.

Leo’s answer is the pivot of the whole history, and it must be reported exactly, because it is the strongest single fact in the Orthodox canonical case and it is a fact about a pope. Leo affirmed the doctrine of the double procession and refused the addition to the Creed. According to the record of the conversation, he told the Frankish legates that the Fathers had not put the word in and that it was not lawful to add it. He then had the Creed of 381, without the Filioque, engraved on two silver shields in Greek and in Latin and set up in St. Peter’s, as a permanent record of the text as received (Siecienski, The Filioque, 2010, ch. 5).

Rome held that line for two centuries.

Rome, 1014

The clause was first sung in the Creed at a papal Mass in Rome in 1014, when Pope Benedict VIII acceded to the request of the Emperor Henry II on the occasion of his imperial coronation. From that point the interpolated Creed became standard throughout the Latin Church (Siecienski, The Filioque, 2010, ch. 5).

Photius

The Eastern response had already begun a century and a half earlier, prompted by Frankish missionaries in Bulgaria teaching the interpolated Creed within the jurisdiction of Constantinople.

St. Photius the Great, Patriarch of Constantinople, attacked the addition in his Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs of 867, and later wrote the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (c. 884–886), the fullest dogmatic case any Greek Father had made against it and the work to which all later Eastern theology returns. Its arguments — the monarchy of the Father, the reduction to two causes, the distinction of eternal procession from temporal mission, and the charitable handling of the Western Fathers who had written otherwise — are set out at length elsewhere in this repository and are not duplicated here (see St. Photius: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; The Encyclical of 867).

The standard English translation is that of Joseph P. Farrell, The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987; ISBN 0-916586-88-X), which follows the received division into eighty-nine sections; the Greek is in Patrologia Graeca 102, the treatise proper at columns 279–401.

The Council of Constantinople of 879–880, held under Photius with Roman legates present and its acts subscribed by them, reaffirmed the Creed of 381 without alteration and set an anathema against those who would add to it or subtract from it. Its standing is a matter of Orthodox reflection in its own right and is treated elsewhere (see The Repudiation of the Filioque Addition; The Photian Council 879–880).

The Councils of Union

1054. The mutual excommunications of Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius list the Filioque among the grievances — with the extraordinary feature that Humbert’s bull accuses the Greeks of having removed the clause from the Creed. The events of 1054 are narrower in scope and later in significance than the popular account allows, and are treated in the collection that exists for them (see Humbert and Cerularius).

Lyons II, 1274. Under Pope Gregory X, with a delegation of the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos seeking union and Western military support, the Latin Church defined the doctrine: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son “not as from two principles, but as from one principle” (Lyons II, Constitution On the Supreme Trinity and the Catholic Faith). The union was imposed in Byzantium by imperial force, resisted by clergy and people, and repudiated after Michael’s death at the Council of Blachernae (1285) under Patriarch Gregory II of Cyprus — which also produced the important positive Byzantine formulation of the Spirit’s eternal manifestation (ekphansis) through the Son, as distinct from his procession (Aristeides Papadakis, Crisis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate of Gregory II of Cyprus, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1997; see Lyons 1274).

Ferrara–Florence, 1438–1439. The most serious theological engagement between the two sides, and the one whose decree the Latin Church treats as dogmatic. Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439) defines that “the Holy Spirit is eternally from the Father and the Son, and has his essence and his subsistent being from the Father together with the Son, and proceeds from both eternally as from one principle and a single spiration.” The Greek delegates signed under enormous pressure, with the Ottoman advance on Constantinople the whole background; St. Mark of Ephesus was the only Eastern bishop present at the signing who refused, and he is venerated as a confessor. The union was rejected by the Orthodox faithful on the delegation’s return and is not received by the Orthodox Church (Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959; see Ferrara–Florence 1438–1439).

The formal Greek repudiation followed at Constantinople under Ottoman rule; a synod at Constantinople in 1484, under Patriarch Symeon, with the other Eastern patriarchs represented, annulled the Florentine union and set out the rite for receiving Latin converts (Siecienski, The Filioque, 2010, ch. 6).

The Modern Period

1848 and 1895. The Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848, replying to Pius IX’s appeal to the Easterns, names the Filioque as a heresy and those who obstinately hold it as heretics; the Patriarchal Encyclical of 1895, replying to Leo XIII, repeats the judgment at length. These remain the most authoritative modern Orthodox statements on the question.

1979. The Klingenthal Memorandum, from a Faith and Order consultation of the World Council of Churches meeting at Schloss Klingenthal in 1978 and 1979, recommended that the Filioque not be used in the Creed and that the original text be restored as the shared confession (published in Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, ed. Lukas Vischer, Faith and Order Paper 103, London: SPCK / Geneva: WCC, 1981).

1995. The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, at John Paul II’s request, issued The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit (dated 29 June 1995; published in L’Osservatore Romano, 20 September 1995), which concedes considerably more than any previous Roman document. Its content and its limits are the subject of the companion file (see Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference).

2003. The North American Orthodox–Catholic Theological Consultation issued “The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?” (25 October 2003), which acknowledged that the clause was added without the authority of an Ecumenical Council and recommended that Rome restore the original text. It is the statement of a regional consultation and has no binding force on either communion.

Liturgical practice. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have on occasion recited the Creed in Greek without the Filioque when celebrating with Ecumenical Patriarchs. The Eastern Catholic churches of the Byzantine rite generally do not use the clause. The Latin Creed retains it, and no Roman act has removed it.

What the Chronology Establishes

Three facts, all of them documentary rather than theological, and all of them load-bearing for the argument of the next file.

The clause is an addition. It is not in the Creed of 381, in any Greek text, or in the Latin text as Rome used it for six centuries after Constantinople.

It was added locally and by stages, without a council of the whole Church. Spain, then the Franks, then — under imperial pressure and two hundred years later — Rome. At no point was the addition the act of an Ecumenical Council, and at no point was the East asked.

Rome herself refused it, on the ground that it could not lawfully be added. Leo III accepted the doctrine and rejected the interpolation, and had the unaltered Creed engraved in silver to say so. Whatever else is disputed, the canonical objection is not an Eastern invention: it was Rome’s own position for two centuries.

See Also

References

  • Council of Constantinople I (381). Creed. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 1990.
  • Second Council of Lyons (1274). Constitution On the Supreme Trinity and the Catholic Faith. In Tanner, Decrees, vol. 1.
  • Council of Florence. Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439). In Tanner, Decrees, vol. 1.
  • Photius. The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Joseph P. Farrell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987. ISBN 0-916586-88-X. Greek in Patrologia Graeca 102:279–401.
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Smith, Shawn S. “The Insertion of the Filioque into the Nicene Creed and a Letter of Isidore of Seville.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22, no. 2 (2014): 261–286.
  • Papadakis, Aristeides. Crisis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate of Gregory II of Cyprus (1283–1289). Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1997.
  • Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.
  • Haugh, Richard. Photius and the Carolingians: The Trinitarian Controversy. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975.
  • Vischer, Lukas, ed. Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy. Faith and Order Paper 103. London: SPCK / Geneva: WCC, 1981.
  • Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit. 29 June 1995.
  • North American Orthodox–Catholic Theological Consultation. “The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?” 25 October 2003.