Filioque

One word added to the creed

The Nicene Creed as confessed at Constantinople in 381 said that the Holy Spirit proceeds ‘from the Father’, following Jesus' own words:

When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father — the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father — He will testify about Me.

John 15:26

The verb, ekporeuō (ἐκπορεύω), was used by the creed to name the Spirit's eternal origin, distinct from the Son's being begotten. The West added to it the Latin word filioque, ‘and the Son’. The teaching that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well was present early in the West, but the word's entry into the creed is usually traced to the Council of Toledo in Spain in 589. The phrase spread through the Frankish kingdom, and Rome adopted it when the creed was introduced into the Mass in 1014. The text of the Nicene Creed in this app follows the Western form, confessing the Spirit "who proceeds from the Father and the Son" The Nicene Creed.

The reasons on each side

The Western church holds that the confession is rooted in Scripture. The Spirit is "the Spirit of His Son" (Galatians 4:6); the Son sends the Spirit (John 16:7); and the risen Lord "breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'" (John 20:22). Augustine wrote that "the Holy Spirit is not the Spirit of one, but of both" Augustine, while still teaching that the Spirit proceeds ‘principally’ from the Father, so guarding the Father as source Augustine, On the Trinity. Many scholars think the phrase was meant in the West to stress, against Arianism, that the Son is fully equal with the Father. The Protestant churches of the West inherited the confession:

The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.

The Athanasian Creed

The Orthodox churches object on two grounds. First, the West changed on its own, without a council, a creed that the whole church had confessed together in council. Second, a matter of theology: the Father is the one source of the Son and the Spirit, and the Spirit's eternal procession from the Father must be distinguished from the Son's sending of the Spirit into the world. Theophylact, commenting on John 15:26, wrote: "To proceed is not the same as being sent" Theophylact. In the ninth century Patriarch Photius of Constantinople pressed this objection sharply, and the question, together with the authority of the pope, was among the issues in the break between East and West in 1054.

Conversation today

Some Eastern Fathers said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father ‘through the Son’, and John of Damascus taught the same John of Damascus, Exact Exposition. Churches today use such expressions as a way into dialogue rather than mutual condemnation, and within the West there have been proposals to confess the creed in its original form of 381. East and West are of one mind that the Spirit is true God, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. The commentary on the Nicene Creed and the lesson The Trinity take this further.