Book Review: Myk Habets, ed., Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque
Myk Habets, ed., Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for
the 21st Century (New York: T&T Clark, 2014), 272pp. $39.95.
Review forthcoming in the Participatio: Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Fellowship journal
“Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain
shall meet, ” or so goes the first line to Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem. Some
of the most fruitful moments in recent Trinitarian theology have been attempts
to ensure that the poem not turn to prophecy.
About three decades ago the strategy for the meeting of the ways
generally amounted to the academic version of a spiritual travelogue, with
theologians exhorting the West to “go East.”
More recently, the meeting of East and West has occurred in projects
like those of Lewis Ayres, Marcus Plested, or Anna Williams, unearthing common
modes and manners of theologizing that are inevitably obscured when well-worn
historical tropes of standard East-West differences are invoked too readily. While nuanced dissent to some of these
projects has come (for example in David Bradshaw’s excellent Aristotle East and West), they have by
most estimates been successful at building new bridges over old divides.
The troll under the ecumenical bridge has remained the filioque, nonetheless (or as Edward
Siecienski writes in his essay in the present volume, it is “a landmine on the
road to unity” (19)). The second line of
Kipling’s poem laments that the divide of East and West will remain “’Till
earth and sky stand presently at God’s judgment seat.” With a wry sense of
humor, Jaroslav Pelikan has a similarly eschatological pessimism for the filioque:
If there is a special circle of the
inferno described by Dante reserved for historians of theology, the principle
homework assigned to that subdivision of hell or at least the first several
eons of eternity may well be the thorough study of all the treatises—in Latin,
Greek, Church Slavonic, and various modern languages—devoted to the inquiry:
Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the
Father only, as Eastern Christendom contends, or from both the Father and the
Son (ex Patre Filioque), as the Latin
church teaches?[1]
It is thus not a trivial first moment of praise for Myk
Habet’s excellent edited volume, Ecumenical
Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21st Century that its array
of thinkers and essays make the filioque controversy
quite readable and even interesting.
Perhaps even more stunning is the fact that, despite the variety of
perspectives and traditions on offer here—ranging from Reformed, to Catholic,
Orthodox, Free Church, Pentecostal, and others—there is a sort of unity and
even clarity among its many parts. Few
topics are quite so eager and ready to stumble over themselves and their own
technicality and tradition as the filioque,
but each author has taken pains to be as clear as possible what the terms and
differences are, and what is at stake.
Moreover, and unexpectedly, the filioque here provides readers an opportunity to see something like
real progress in a theological controversy.
Noting its own precedents, this volume opens by recounting what Myk
Habets calls “small but significant” steps toward the removal of the filioque as an obstacle (xiv). This is hesitant language, of course, as
“removal of obstacles” is not the same as unity of thought and practice. Nonetheless, these steps include the World
Council of Churches’ study, Spirit of
God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy
published in 1981, and many other documents such as, “The Greek and Latin
Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Spirit” in 1995, and another
statement issued in 2003 by the North American Orthodox-Catholic
Consultation.
There are also several items of what appear to be material
and thematic agreement amongst the many esteemed authors contributing to this
volume. For example, while Augustine and
the Third Council of Toledo are typically cited as instigating the filioque, recent research has shown that
the filioque was not a systematic
point of emphasis in the West until the Carolingian Renaissance (indeed the
phrase a Patre filioque procedit does
not even appear in Augustine’s corpus), where the Carolingians “made the filioque a cornerstone of their
anti-Arian rhetoric” (11). Pope Leo III
even commanded the Franks to remove the filioque,
as he “could not prefer himself to the fathers and alter the ancient
creed.” Only with the growing power of
the Ottonian dynasty was the filioque forced
upon the Pope, “forever joining the legitimacy of the addition to the pope’s
right to decide the faith of the universal church” (12). On the other hand, it certainly does appear
that Eastern animosity to the filioque—legitimate
theological points aside—was born as much from lack of easy access to the
Patristic witness on the matter, as it was from its partisan insertion into the
creed (16 n.46).
Other broader points of agreement (helpfully summarized by David
Guretzki’s chapter) include: a growing irenicism on all sides, a growing
awareness of the need for scholarly investigation, and a movement from seeing
this as a piece of irrevocable and fundamental dogma to one of differing
interpretations (for more, cf. 40-61).
Materially, the latter (from dogma to interpretation) is justified by
increasing clarity on just what is at stake in the formulations of East and
West. It is now broadly agreed on all
sides, for example, that the West did not intend to include two archai in the Godhead by saying the
Spirit also proceeds from the son (46, 93), and indeed that Augustine and
Aquinas (for example) did not break with the East in considering the Father as arche.
There is also clarity in the discussion throughout this
volume regarding the fact that the Latin procedit
is an incredibly misleading translation of the Greek ekporeusis. Just as the
language barrier created confusion in shifting from hypostasis to the Latin substantia,
so too does the highly specified meaning of ekporeusis
get lost in the broader Latin of procedit,
creating inordinate puzzlement and raising the polemical stakes (and poor
theology student’s blood pressures) uneccessarily. This is not just a recent discovery. Many of the Fathers like Maximus the
Confessor were quite aware of this linguistic distinction, and as such would not refute the filioque, understanding the Latins did not imply more than one
principle of origin (21, 51, 86). As Robert Jenson thus concludes, without
wanting to gloss the real and actually abiding differences, there is a sense in
which “East and West have worked within very different conceptual frameworks
and that when this is reckoned with, neither side needs to deny what the other
affirms, or affirm what the other denies” (160; cf. 20; 48; 91-92).
That said, however, there is also what appears to be an
emerging agreement (though, not consensus) amongst many authors in this volume
regarding some of the theological complaints of the East against the filioque. As one example, several of the authors
(Westerners, no less), take Photius’ theological criticism of the filioque seriously, and deal with it
accordingly. If we are to stick with
talking about relations of origin as the sole ground for distinction in the
Trinity (and, as we will turn to in a moment, this is a big if for several of
the contributors), taking Brannon Ellis’ opinion as representative: “when the
power of breathing the Spirit in God is what the Son receives as God from the Father as God, then advocates of the filioque are still speaking of the
Spirit’s origination, but no longer on the level of personal predication” (94;
cf. Jenson on 163; and McDowell on 171).
And what of the constructive proposals on offer here? These are as various as the number of essays
submitted, nonetheless a few patterns do emerge. For example, though many of the authors take
Photius’ criticism seriously, as Kathryn Tanner notes Photius is certainly not
the final word, for with his solution that the spirit only proceeds from the
Son in the economy of salvation, “it is … not clear from the Eastern
(Photinian) view what the [immanent Trinitarian] relations, if any, are between
Son and Spirit” (207).
As such, in his fascinating historical essay, Theodoros
Alexopolous examines the Eastern conceptual history of the eternal manifestation or shining forth (eklampei) of
the Spirit through the Son (65-87). He
traces this concept from Athanasius, the Cappadocians, through Maximus Confessor
and John Damascene, ultimately to two lesser known theologians: Nikephoros
Blemmydes and Gregory of Cyprus. What we
have here is an acceptance of the Photian criticism of the filioque, and so an attempt to avoid the idea that the Holy Spirit
is somehow constituted hypostatically by the Son as well as the Father. And yet, going beyond Photius, both Blemmydes
and Gregory of Cyprus want to affirm that the sending of the Spirit by the Son
in the economy has some foothold in the eternal divine life itself. Thus in the eternal life of the Trinity the
Holy Spirit is not hypostatically constituted by the Son, proceeding (ekporeusis)
from the Father alone; yet He eternally shines forth God’s glory through the Son (eklampei) (e.g. 78).
Others through the volume do not follow this specific path,
but rather invoke a more generous application of perichoresis to the eternal taxis
or order of the Trinitarian relations, in order to account for
sensibilities from both cardinal directions.
At this point, eye-rolling might be expected. Perichoresis has of late reached near-infomercial levels of
optimism as a catch-all spackle for Trinitarian home-improvement. But here such skepticism would be
unjustified, as it is used with interesting variety and nuance. Thomas Weinandy critiques in its entirety what
he terms “Trinitarian sequentialism” (189), and puts forward a concise version
of the thesis he previously argued in his book The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: “The Spirit (of love) proceeds from
the father simultaneously to his begetting of the Son. The Spirit does so as the one in whom the
Father loving begets his Son, and in so doing the Spirit conforms (persons) the
Father to be the loving Father of and
for the Son he is begetting. Moreover,
the Holy Spirit proceeds simultaneously from the Son, and in so doing conforms
(persons) the Son to be the loving Son
of and for the Father who begets Him” (193).
This is, as a formulation, cumbersome and brain twisting
(and unlikely to invade the hymnals any time soon). But it does try to account for the Eastern
critique while simultaneously keeping the instincts of the West’s tradition of
the Holy Spirit as the vinculum caritatis,
binding Father and Son. Kathryn Tanner and Myk Habets likewise invoke perichoresis, with Tanner arguing “in
sum, Son and Spirit come forth together from the father and return together in
mutually involving ways that bind one to the other” (203), while Habets wishes
to emphasize that he is attempting to combine the best insights of the Western
“subsistent relation” tradition with the Eastern focus on “perichoresis” (218).
In a similar vein, Brannon Ellis invokes John Calvin to ask
“what if the age-old divergence between Eastern and Western formulations of the
spiration of the Spirit, is due to a significant extent to teasing out variant
implications of a shared commitment to a particular explanatory strategy for
speaking of the manner of divine procession?”
He in turn offers theologians the provocation: “this explanation of the
ineffable relation between personal taxis
and essential unity is precisely what a Calvinian perspective does not
grant – and ostensibly on the tradition’s own terms” because, according to
Ellis, the essence is not communicated but equally possessed by the three:
“simply put, to speak of the divine essence itself
in a relative or comparative sense (as given or received among the persons)
is just as inappropriate as making no personal distinctions between Father, Son
and Spirit …” (90). As such Ellis wants
to use Calvin as an inspiration to call both East and West “to deeper self-consistency in challenging modes of
thought and speech that are in tension” with pro-Nicene Trinitarian grammar
(99).
Robert Jenson in turn uses similar logic to critique the
traditional limitation of distinction in the Trinity to one of origins (164):
“a diagram of the Trinity’s constituting relations would then show both active
relations of the Triune origin … and active
relations of the Triune goal” (165), while Paul Molnar highlights
T.F.Torrance’s insistence that the monarchia
refers to the entire consubstantial Trinity and not just the Father,
thereby circumventing the entire logic that created the opportunity for the
problem of the filioque in the first
place. Habets emphasizes this as well,
closing the volume with such a Torrance-inspired suggestion (230).
Certainly the millennia-old question is not resolved here,
but we have been given some fascinating food for thought. It is perhaps too trivial to mention what one
wishes would have been added to such a rich volume, yet it was curious that
without fail Maximus the Confessor was mentioned as a pivotal resource for
future dialogue, and yet there was no specific chapter on Maximus, who receives
heaps of praise but hardly any sustained analysis. In addition, Yves Congar’s bold suggestion
that the filioque be suppressed in
the Western church is also mentioned several times but the broader issue—just
what is one to do with the respective
liturgies that have encoded the controversy and cemented themselves into the
living memory of various ecclesia?—is likewise not given any attention.
These nitpicks aside, this is a remarkable volume not only
in its clarity and readability, but by also demonstrating how the filioque is related to the entire array
of beliefs involved in what it is to be a Christian. Angels and pinheads have no place here—what
each contributor has done, and done remarkably well, is to display that the
controversies surrounding the filioque circulate
around how the whole of the scriptural narrative itself is read, how we
interpret its agents, and ultimately, how we are drawn into God’s very life. This will no doubt remain a pivotal guidebook
on the topic for years to come.
[1]
Jaroslav Pelian, The Melody of Theology:
A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambrdige: Harvard University Press, 1988), 90.
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