Position · 589

Filioque

The teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, expressed by adding filioque (“and the Son”) to the Nicene Creed.

History

Roots

The creed finished at the Council of Constantinople (381) says only that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father.” It echoes John 15:26, where Jesus speaks of “the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father.” The council was answering people who denied the Spirit’s divinity. It was not asking how the Spirit relates to the Son, and Greek theologians after it kept the Father as the single source of both Son and Spirit.

Latin theology took a different path. Augustine, in On the Trinity (c. 400–420), described the Spirit as the shared love and gift of Father and Son. He concluded that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father principally,” and also from the Son, because the Father gave the Son, in begetting him, the power to be a source of the Spirit too (book 15, ch. 17 and 26). The word “principally” mattered to Augustine: he kept the Father as the ultimate source, even while speaking of procession “from both.” Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose had used similar language before him, and Latin writers after him took it as settled.

A second fact set up the later fight. The Council of Ephesus (431) decreed “that it is unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different Faith as a rival to that established by the holy Fathers assembled with the Holy Ghost in Nicæa” (canon 7). Eastern critics would later read that as a ban on changing the creed’s wording at all.

Causes

The phrase entered the creed in Visigothic Spain. At the Third Council of Toledo (589), King Reccared renounced Arianism for the Catholic faith, and the version of the creed recorded there includes filioque. Some scholars think the word was added to the acts later, so its exact date is uncertain (see Siecienski, secondary). Either way, the purpose in Spain was anti-Arian: saying the Spirit comes from the Son as well as the Father stressed that the Son is fully equal to the Father.

From Spain the wording spread to the Frankish church, where Charlemagne’s court theologians championed it and turned it into a mark of Western orthodoxy against the Greeks. Around 807 Frankish monks on the Mount of Olives were accused of heresy by Greek monks for singing the creed with the addition, and they appealed to Rome. A Frankish council at Aachen (809) defended the phrase. Pope Leo III agreed with the doctrine but refused to change the creed. He reportedly had the original creed engraved, without filioque, in Greek and Latin on silver shields in St Peter’s (the shields are reported in the Liber Pontificalis life of Leo III; see Gibbon’s note, secondary).

The East took the matter up in the 860s, when Frankish and Byzantine missionaries were competing in Bulgaria. Patriarch Photius of Constantinople condemned the addition in an encyclical letter of 867. In his later Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (c. 886) he argued that if the Spirit came from both Father and Son, the Trinity would have two sources, and the Father’s personal property of being the sole cause would be shared with the Son. Photius’s arguments became the core of the Orthodox case, set out in the note on Procession from the Father Alone.

Rome itself held out until 1014, when Pope Benedict VIII added the phrase to the creed sung at Mass for the coronation of the German emperor Henry II. Pope Leo XIV’s 2025 letter on Nicaea states this history plainly: the phrase “is not found in the text of Constantinople; it was inserted into the Latin Creed by Pope Benedict VIII in 1014” (In Unitate Fidei, n. 10).

Influence

The filioque became one of the formal grounds of the Great Schism. In 1054 Cardinal Humbert’s bull against Patriarch Michael Cerularius even accused the Greeks of having deleted the word from the creed. After that, each attempt at reunion had to deal with it. Anselm of Canterbury defended the Latin view against Greek bishops at the Council of Bari (1098) and wrote it up as On the Procession of the Holy Spirit. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) confessed it (decrees).

The Second Council of Lyons (1274) gave the Latin teaching its sharpest dogmatic form: the Spirit “proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, not as from two principles, but as from one principle; not by two spirations, but by one single spiration,” and it condemned anyone who denied this (constitution 1). The union agreed at Lyons collapsed in Constantinople within a few years. The Council of Florence (1439) tried again. Its decree of union with the Greeks accepted that the Greek formula “through the Son” could mean the same as “and the Son,” and declared that the words “were licitly and reasonably added to the creed for the sake of declaring the truth and from imminent need” (decree Laetentur caeli). Mark of Ephesus refused to sign, and the union was rejected in the East after the delegates returned.

The Reformers kept the Western creed without debate. The Augsburg Confession and the Thirty-Nine Articles (Article V says the Spirit is “proceeding from the Father and the Son”) carried the doctrine into Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican confessions. When Lutheran theologians from Tübingen wrote to Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople (1573–1581), the filioque was one of the points on which the correspondence stalled. Today the phrase is used in the creed by Roman Catholics of the Latin rite and most Protestant churches. The Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox do not use it, and Old Catholics dropped it after the Bonn reunion conferences of 1874–1875.

Key ideas and contributors

The Spirit as the bond of love. Augustine’s main argument was theological rather than textual. If the Father is the lover and the Son the beloved, the Spirit is the love between them, the gift that belongs to both. A gift given by both must in some sense come from both. Augustine was careful to add that the Son’s share in sending forth the Spirit is itself something the Father gave him, “a property derived by the Son from the Father” (On the Trinity 15.26). Western defenders of the filioque have always pointed back to this qualification when accused of giving the Trinity two sources.

Biblical evidence. The New Testament calls the Spirit “the Spirit of his Son” (Galatians 4:6) and “the Spirit of Christ” (Romans 8:9). The Son sends the Spirit (John 16:7) and breathes him on the disciples (John 20:22). Latin theologians read these temporal missions as reflecting the eternal relations: the Son sends the Spirit in time because the Spirit comes from him in eternity. The East answers that these texts describe the Spirit’s mission in the world, not his eternal origin.

Distinction by relation. Thomas Aquinas gave the doctrine its most rigorous form in the Summa Theologiae. He argued that the divine persons are distinct only by relations of origin that stand opposite one another. If the Spirit did not proceed from the Son, nothing would distinguish Son from Spirit, since both would simply come from the Father (I, q. 36, a. 2). In the same question he noted that the Greeks themselves grant that the Spirit is “from the Father through the Son,” and held that Father and Son are one principle of the Spirit, which is the language Lyons adopted a few months after his death.

Through the Son. Several Greek Fathers spoke of the Spirit coming from the Father “through the Son,” and Cyril of Alexandria called the Spirit proper to the Son. Maximus the Confessor, in his Letter to Marinus (c. 655), defended Roman usage by saying the Latins did not make the Son a cause of the Spirit, only showed that the Spirit comes forth through him. That letter has been the main patristic bridge in every modern dialogue, and Florence relied on the same idea.

The ecumenical clarification. In 1995 the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity issued The Greek and Latin Traditions regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit (text at EWTN). It distinguished the Greek verb used in the creed (ekporeuesthai, coming forth from an ultimate source), which belongs to the Father alone, from the broader Latin procedere, which can describe the Spirit’s coming from the Son. On that reading the two creeds say different, compatible things. It also recognized the Greek text of 381 as normative and stated that Eastern Catholic churches need not use the addition.

Key controversies

Changing a common creed. The oldest and least technical objection is about authority. The creed belonged to an ecumenical council, and Ephesus forbade any rival formula. For the East, a Western church altering it alone, and then a pope endorsing that alteration, was an act of Papal Primacy that broke Conciliarity. Western defenders replied that Ephesus banned a different faith, not an explanatory phrase, and Florence claimed the addition was justified by “imminent need.” Even many Catholic theologians now concede the procedural point: the 2003 North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation recommended that the Catholic Church use the original text of the creed in catechesis and liturgy (The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?).

The monarchy of the Father. Photius’s doctrinal objection is that the Father alone is the cause within the Trinity. To make the Son a co-cause of the Spirit either creates two principles or merges Father and Son into one impersonal source. Lyons answered with “one principle,” but Orthodox critics argued that this made the Father-and-Son unit a kind of shared divine essence that produces the Spirit, which they took as a confusion of person and nature. The 1995 clarification’s insistence on the Father as the sole source of ekporeusis was largely an attempt to meet this objection.

Palamas and the energies. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Orthodox theologians worked out a middle answer. Gregory of Cyprus, at the Council of Blachernae (1285), taught that the Spirit eternally shines forth through the Son while taking his existence from the Father alone. Gregory Palamas distinguished the Spirit’s hypostatic origin, which is from the Father only, from the eternal flowing-forth of the divine energies, which does come through the Son. Orthodox writers still use this distinction to say what is true in the Latin position.

Is it heresy or a theological opinion? Orthodox judgement is divided. Vladimir Lossky, in “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine” (collected in In the Image and Likeness of God, 1974), treated the filioque as the root of the Western drift toward abstract essence over persons, and toward a church where the Spirit is subordinated to Christ and the hierarchy. Vasily Bolotov’s “theses on the filioque” (c. 1898) and Sergei Bulgakov took a milder view: the doctrine is a permissible private theological opinion, though the insertion into the creed is not. On the Western side, Karl Barth defended the filioque in the Church Dogmatics (I/1, 1932), arguing that it protects the link between the Spirit and the revelation in Christ. Jürgen Moltmann, from the same tradition, proposed that the West drop it from the creed. The World Council of Churches’ Klingenthal Memorandum (1979) gave similar advice.

Practical concessions. Several churches have acted without settling the theology. The Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1978 (Resolution 35) asked member churches to consider omitting the phrase, and the 1988 conference repeated the advice; provinces have followed unevenly (ACNS report, 2015, secondary). Popes since John Paul II have recited the creed without it at ecumenical services. On 28 November 2025, Pope Leo XIV and Patriarch Bartholomew recited the original creed together at Iznik, the site of Nicaea, for the council’s 1700th anniversary (Catholic News Service report, secondary). Leo’s letter for the anniversary called on Christians to “leave behind theological controversies that have lost their raison d’être” (In Unitate Fidei).

What remains unresolved

The Catholic Church has not withdrawn the teaching of Lyons and Florence, and the Latin liturgy still uses the addition. Orthodox churches have not declared the doctrine acceptable. What has changed is the frame. Many on both sides now treat the procedural question (the unilateral insertion) as more serious than the doctrinal one, and accept “from the Father through the Son” as common ground. What is still open is whether the Latin “and the Son,” read through Augustine’s “principally,” says the same thing as that formula or something more. Behind that sits the larger question the filioque has always carried: who has the authority to settle a dispute like this for the whole church.