Two Triadologies and Their Consequences

Lossky did not stop at the Trinity. If the difference between the two triadologies “determines, on both sides, the whole character of theological thought,” then it should be visible downstream — in ecclesiology, in the theology of grace, in the spiritual life. He argued that it is: that a Trinity in which the Spirit is subordinated to the Son yields a Church in which the charismatic is subordinated to the institutional, and finally papal centralism. This file sets out that derivation, the doctrine of the two economies on which it rests, and the substantial counter-positions — including the 2003 North American Orthodox–Catholic agreed statement.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Move Downstream

The Filioque essay ends at the Trinity. The Mystical Theology does not: having set out the two triadologies in chapter 3, it proceeds through creation, anthropology, and the two economies to an ecclesiology in chapter 9 that is explicitly built on the Trinitarian result.

The argument, in Lossky’s form, has three steps.

Step one: two irreducible economies. Chapters 7 and 8 of the Mystical Theology treat the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit in deliberately parallel and separate chapters, and the parallelism is the point. The Son assumes and heals the human nature; the Spirit deifies human persons, one by one. The two works are inseparable but not reducible: Christ becomes what we are, that we may become what he is, and the Spirit is what makes the “we” a communion of irreducible persons rather than an undifferentiated mass. Neither economy is a function of the other (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, chs. 7–8; see The Image and the Likeness).

Step two: two aspects of the Church. Chapter 9, “Two Aspects of the Church,” draws the ecclesiological consequence. The Church is at once the body of Christ — one nature, one organism, the objective and institutional reality with its hierarchy, sacraments and continuity — and the fullness of the Spirit — the communion of persons, each receiving grace personally, each irreducible. Catholicity, on this account, is not uniformity: it is precisely the coincidence of the one nature and the many persons, which is the Trinitarian pattern realized in the Church (Lossky, Mystical Theology, ch. 9; “Catholic Consciousness: Anthropological Implications of the Dogma of the Church,” in In the Image and Likeness of God; cf. Ecclesiology).

Step three: the diagnosis. Where the Spirit’s procession is made dependent on the Son, Lossky argues, the Spirit’s economy tends in practice to be read as a function of Christ’s — the Spirit as the animator of an institution rather than as a distinct personal principle. The result is a “Christomonist” ecclesiology in which the institutional, hierarchical, juridical aspect of the Church absorbs the charismatic and personal aspect; and the terminus of that development is a Church organized around a single visible head — papal centralism. Conversely, in Lossky’s judgment, an East that keeps the two economies distinct keeps the personal and charismatic dimension irreducible to the institutional one (Lossky, Mystical Theology, chs. 3 and 9; the derivation is summarized in the repository’s hub essay: Vladimir Lossky, “The Filioque”).

He drew a corresponding conclusion for the spiritual life: that Western piety tends to mediate the soul’s relation to God primarily through Christ and thus through the institutional Church, while Eastern spirituality more fully affirms the direct operation of the Holy Spirit in the believer (ibid.).

Where This Sits in the Repository

Two clarifications, per METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2.

The dogmatic core is confessed. The Orthodox Church confesses the procession of the Spirit from the Father, has not received the addition to the Creed, and does not accept the doctrines of papal supremacy and infallibility (see The Filioque; Orthodox vs. Catholic). That is the teaching of the Church and this collection confesses it.

The derivation is Lossky’s. The claim that papal centralism follows from the Filioque — that a Trinitarian premise generates an ecclesiological conclusion — is a theological argument advanced by a private theologian. No council has taught it. It is influential, it is powerful, and it is contested. It belongs in the §4.2 register.

The Counter-Positions

1. That the derivation does not hold

The most obvious objection is that the inference from triadology to ecclesiology is loose. Latin theology held the Filioque for centuries during which Western ecclesiology took many forms; conciliarism, the medieval theology of the local church, and the whole Augustinian tradition of the Church as communio sit inside a Filioquist triadology. Correspondingly, the East has produced its own varieties of institutional centralism without any help from the Filioque. Post hoc sequence is not derivation, and the critics ask what exactly the entailment is supposed to be.

2. The 2003 agreed statement

The most significant institutional counter-position is the North American Orthodox–Catholic Theological Consultation’s agreed statement, The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?, adopted 25 October 2003 — a document produced jointly by Orthodox and Catholic theologians which takes a markedly more conciliatory approach than Lossky’s, recommending among other things that the Catholic Church use the Creed without the addition in Greek and that the historical and linguistic dimensions of the dispute be given full weight. The repository’s hub essay on Lossky already records this as the counterweight to his position (see Vladimir Lossky; The Filioque).

Two elements of the conciliatory case bear directly on Lossky. The first is the linguistic argument: the Greek ekporeuesthai denotes specifically origination from an ultimate source, while the Latin procedere is a broader term covering any coming-forth, so that the Latin formula need not assert what the Greek formula denies. The second is the appeal to St. Maximus the Confessor’s Letter to Marinus, in which Maximus defends the Latin usage as compatible with the monarchy of the Father — evidence that the conflict was not always understood as church-dividing (see Augustine and the Filioque, where the repository sets out this mediating reading alongside the critical one).

Lossky had anticipated the linguistic move and rejected it in advance — that is exactly what “we are not dealing with verbal formulas here” means — and he had anticipated the dia Huiou move in his critique of Bolotov (see The Filioque Thesis). The disagreement is therefore genuine and not the product of misunderstanding on either side.

3. De Halleux: a bad controversy

The most direct scholarly rebuttal of Lossky’s frame came from the Belgian patrologist André de Halleux, who argued that contemporary Orthodox theology had broadened the polemic against the Filioque into a confrontation between Greek Trinitarian personalism and Latin essentialism; that Lossky, “the principal new anti-Filioquist,” was himself inspired in this by Slavophile thought and above all by Théodore de Régnon; and that the Cappadocian Fathers cannot be enlisted for the contrast, since they were “at the same time and equally totally both personalists and essentialists” (de Halleux, “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse,” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 [1986], in two parts). The title’s judgment — une mauvaise controverse, a bad controversy — is the thesis.

This is the hinge between Section 07 and Section 08, because de Halleux names de Régnon, and it is the de Régnon paradigm that the wider critique targets (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

4. The Orthodox re-readers of Augustine

A further line runs through the Orthodox scholars gathered in Orthodox Readings of Augustine (ed. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, SVS Press, 2008), who argue that the polemical Orthodox picture of Augustine rests substantially on caricature and that Augustine’s own qualifications — the Father as principaliter source, the Spirit proceeding from Father and Son “as from one principle” — keep him far closer to the Eastern position than the critical tradition allowed. The repository maps the resulting spectrum of Orthodox opinion, placing Lossky as a “measured” critical voice — more restrained than Fr. John Romanides, and not making Augustine the villain of a historical drama, but reinforcing the sense of Augustine as standing at the headwaters of a problematic Western trajectory (see The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion).

5. And the measured defence

Fairness requires the other side of the ledger. David Bradshaw, in Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge, 2004), argues that there is a real and consequential divergence between Eastern and Western metaphysics of God, located carefully in the differing receptions of the Aristotelian notion of energeia — a disciplined defence of a genuine East–West difference that does not depend on the de Régnon schema (see The de Régnon Paradigm Critique, which places Bradshaw as the sober middle position in this field).

More broadly, Lossky’s defenders point out that the critique of the paradigm shows the East–West contrast to be less clean than the twentieth century made it, not that there is no difference; that the Filioque remains an unreceived addition whatever one concludes about Augustine; and that Lossky’s own text is more careful than the tradition that followed him — he concedes a possible Orthodox reading of the Toledan formula and insists that Orthodox triadology is “not a counter-blast to Filioquism” (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, pp. 73, 80).

The Honest Statement

What the reader may hold with the Church is firm: the Spirit proceeds from the Father; the addition to the Creed has not been received; the monarchy of the Father is Orthodox doctrine.

What Lossky built on that foundation — the systematic derivation of two theological civilizations, and of Western ecclesiology from Western triadology — is one contested position in a live scholarly field, held by serious people and opposed by serious people. The repository’s practice, here as in the collection that stages this debate most fully, is to name the positions and adjudicate none of them (cf. The de Régnon Paradigm Critique).

See Also

References

  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. Chs. 3, 7, 8, 9.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine” and “Catholic Consciousness: Anthropological Implications of the Dogma of the Church.” In In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974/1976. (The Toledo concession, p. 73; “not a counter-blast to Filioquism,” p. 80.)
  • de Halleux, André. “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986), parts 1 and 2. (Lossky as the principal new anti-Filioquist; the inspiration of de Régnon; the Cappadocians as “at the same time and equally totally both personalists and essentialists.”)
  • North American Orthodox–Catholic Theological Consultation. The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue? An Agreed Statement. Adopted 25 October 2003.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Letter to Marinus (Opusculum 10). 7th century.
  • Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
  • Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Repository: The Filioque; Vladimir Lossky; Augustine and the Filioque; The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion; The De Régnon Paradigm Critique.