The Filioque Thesis

Lossky’s treatment of the procession of the Holy Spirit — chapter 3 of the Mystical Theology and the 1948 essay reprinted as chapter 4 of In the Image and Likeness of God — is the most influential twentieth-century Orthodox statement on the question. Its governing claim is that this is not a quarrel about words: “We are not dealing with verbal formulas here, but with two established theological doctrines.” The Latin scheme, founding the hypostases on relations of opposition, entails for Lossky “an ontological primacy of the essence over the hypostases”; the Greek scheme, confessing the monarchy of the Father, preserves an antinomy the Latin scheme rationalizes away.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Text

The essay is:

Vladimir Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine.” First published as “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Triadology,” Eastern Churches Quarterly 7 (1948), supplementary issue, pp. 31–53; reprinted as chapter 4 of In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976 [1974]), pp. 71–96.

It is the fullest statement, and this file follows it, with chapter 3 of the Mystical Theology (“God in Trinity”) in the background.

The Opening Claim

Lossky begins by refusing to let the question be marginalized:

“Whether we like it or not, the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit has been the sole dogmatic grounds for the separation of East and West. All the other divergences which, historically, accompanied or followed the first dogmatic controversy about the Filioque, in the measure in which they too had some dogmatic importance, are more or less dependent upon that original issue.”

(Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 71.)

He then rebukes, in unusually sharp terms, those modern Orthodox — “especially… Russians, who are too often ungrateful to Byzantium” — who underestimate or despise the pneumatological debates of the past, and who thereby show that they “lack both dogmatic sense and reverence for the living tradition” (ibid., pp. 71–72). The rebuke is aimed at his own milieu, not at the West.

He also declines to make the question a historian’s question. “It is the duty of the historian to inform us about the circumstances in which a dogma was first required and to state the historical implications of dogma. But it is not his duty, as a historian, to judge dogmatic values as such.” A historical theology that forgets this becomes, he says, “a sort of Caesaropapism of the scholars” (ibid., p. 72). The remark is worth registering, because it is precisely at the level of historical judgment that Lossky’s own thesis has since been challenged (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

Against Bolotov

His first target is not a Latin but a Russian. V. V. Bolotov, on the occasion of the Bonn conversations with the Old Catholics, had argued on the basis of the patristic texts that the Filioque is not an impedimentum dirimens — not a bar to dogmatic reconciliation — since the question concerns two theologoumena, a Filio and dia Huiou, expressing in two formulas one doctrine.

Lossky answers that Bolotov “was too good a historian of theology to conclude that the doctrine on both sides was identical. But he lacked the dogmatic sense to perceive the true place of these two formulas in two different triadologies.” Bolotov’s historical mistake, he argues, was to treat a Filio as the opposite of dia Huiou: the real opposition is between a Patre Filioque and ek monou tou Patros, and by adopting the unionists’ reading of dia Huiou Bolotov “minimized the doctrinal divergence between the two triadologies” (ibid., pp. 72–73).

The move is characteristic. Lossky consistently refuses the irenic middle formula on the ground that it conceals rather than resolves.

Not a Verbal Quarrel

The programmatic sentence follows immediately, and it is the one on which everything else depends:

“We are not dealing with verbal formulas here, but with two established theological doctrines.”

(Ibid., pp. 73–74.)

He is even willing to make a striking concession in passing: “We shall even admit the possibility of an Orthodox interpretation of Filioque, as it first appeared at Toledo for example” (ibid., p. 73). This is not the sentence of a polemicist. Lossky’s case is not that every use of the word is heretical; it is that the developed Latin doctrine — the eternal hypostatic procession of the Spirit from Father and Son as from a single principle — is a different triadology from the Greek, and that the two cannot be harmonized by lexical adjustment.

The Latin Scheme, Stated Fairly

Lossky then sets out the Latin position on its own logic, and does so with a Latinist’s competence.

Because the name “Holy Spirit” does not, taken in itself, mark a personal distinction — God is Spirit, and all three are Holy — Latin theology seeks a positive determination of the Third Person’s mode of origin. It finds it in relation: since “procession” in itself does not distinguish, the Spirit must be related to Father and Son together, in respect of what they have in common; and since a relation of opposition can only be established between two terms, the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son as from one principle of spiration (ibid., pp. 75–76).

He grants the coherence: “One cannot deny the logical clarity of this process of reasoning, which seeks to base hypostatic diversity on the principle of relations of opposition.” He identifies the principle as Thomas Aquinas’s, and states its presuppositions in three propositions: that relations are the basis of the hypostases; that two persons represent a non-personal unity insofar as they give rise to a further relation of opposition; and that “in general the origin of the persons of the Trinity therefore is impersonal, having its real basis in the one essence, which is differentiated by its internal relations” (ibid., pp. 76–77).

And then the conclusion which is the heart of the thesis:

“The general character of this triadology may be described as a pre-eminence of natural unity over personal trinity, as an ontological primacy of the essence over the hypostases.”

(Ibid., p. 77.)

The Orthodox Answer

Against the procession ab utroque the Orthodox confess ek monou tou Patros, from the Father alone — a formula which, Lossky says, “while verbally it may seem novel, represents in its doctrinal tenor nothing more than a plain affirmation of the traditional teaching about the ‘monarchy of the Father,’ unique source of the divine hypostases” (ibid., p. 78).

To the objection that this leaves no relation of opposition between Son and Spirit, he answers that the objection presupposes what Orthodoxy denies: “the very principle of relations of opposition is unacceptable to Orthodox triadology,” and “the expression ‘relations of origin’ has a different sense in Orthodox theology than it has among defenders of the Filioque” (ibid., p. 78).

The positive statement follows:

“The relations only serve to express the hypostatic diversity of the Three; they are not the basis of it. It is the absolute diversity of the three hypostases which determines their differing relations to one another, not vice versa.”

(Ibid., p. 79.)

Here, he says, thought stands still. Personal existence in its absolute difference cannot be defined; one can only say negatively that the Father, who is without beginning (anarchos), is not the Son or the Spirit; that the Son is neither Spirit nor Father; that the Spirit is neither Father nor Son. “Here we cannot speak of relations of opposition but only of relations of diversity” (ibid., p. 79). To pursue the positive approach and treat the relations of origin as something other than signs of the inexpressible diversity of the persons is “to suppress the absolute quality of this personal diversity, i.e. to relativize the Trinity and in some sense to depersonalize it” (ibid., p. 79).

This is the apophatic principle applied to the doctrine of God (see The Divine Darkness), and it is the same claim that grounds his anthropology: person is irreducible, and irreducible things cannot be defined, only indicated (see Person versus Individual).

The Antinomy

The final move is methodological, and it connects the Filioque thesis to everything else in Lossky.

“The positive approach employed by Filioquist triadology brings about a certain rationalization of the dogma of the Trinity, insofar as it suppresses the fundamental antinomy between the essence and the hypostases. One has the impression that the heights of theology have been deserted in order to descend to the level of religious philosophy. On the other hand, the negative approach, which places us face to face with the primordial antinomy of absolute identity and no less absolute diversity in God, does not seek to conceal this antinomy but to express it fittingly.”

(Ibid., p. 80.)

And the conclusion that has echoed through Orthodox theology ever since:

“Since the dogma of the Trinity is the keystone of the arch of all theological thought and belongs to the region which the Greek Fathers called Theologia par excellence, it is understandable that a divergence in this culminating point, insignificant as it may seem at first sight, should have a decisive importance. The difference between the two conceptions of the Trinity determines, on both sides, the whole character of theological thought.”

(Ibid., p. 80.)

That last sentence is the thesis of Section 07 in a single line, and the consequences Lossky drew from it are the subject of the next file.

A Necessary Balance

Lossky himself immediately adds a corrective that his more enthusiastic followers have sometimes dropped: “Orthodox triadology is not a counter-blast to Filioquism; it does not run to the other extreme” (ibid., p. 80). The primordial fact of personal diversity does not make the essential identity of the Three ontologically posterior; the antinomy is to be preserved on both sides, not resolved in the opposite direction. Lossky is arguing for a balance, not for a mirror-image error — a point relevant to the later charge that “the East is person-first” is exactly the schematization he is accused of accepting (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

What the Repository Confesses

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1: the Orthodox Church confesses the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and has never received the addition of Filioque to the Creed. That is the teaching of the Church, presented as such in The Filioque, and this collection confesses it.

What belongs to Lossky, and is reported as his argument, is the further claim that the two formulas encode two triadologies whose difference “determines, on both sides, the whole character of theological thought.” That claim is powerful, influential, and contested — and Section 08 sets out the contest.

See Also

References

  • Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ch. 4, pp. 71–96. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976 [1974]. Originally “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Triadology,” Eastern Churches Quarterly 7 (1948), supplementary issue, pp. 31–53. (All verbatim quotations in this file are from this text at the pages cited.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. Ch. 3, “God in Trinity.”
  • Bolotov, V. V. “Thesen über das Filioque” (the Bonn conversations with the Old Catholics). (Discussed and criticized by Lossky at pp. 72–73.)
  • Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I, qq. 27–43, esp. q. 36, a. 1. (Cited by Lossky at pp. 74–77.)
  • Repository: The Filioque; METHODOLOGY.md, §4.1–4.2.