The ecumenical debate on the procession of the Holy Spirit involves far more than different pneumatologies: scriptural hermeneutics, ecclesiology, theological method, and liturgical and spiritual implications. Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), an Orthodox opponent of the Filioque, concludes that the doctrine contributes to Trinitarian impersonalism, fails to establish a relationship between the Son and Spirit in eternity, leads to a practical pneumatological subordinationism, and has little to no “life-significance” for the Church universal. A brief history of the controversy will precede Bulgakov's critique. By developing a Thomistic response to each of these false accusations, the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son as from a single principle is reaffirmed as a dogmatically taught, theologically defensible, and spiritually fecund insight into the most holy of Christian mysteries.Footnote 1 Rather than a weakness, the Christological context for reflection on the Spirit's procession (adopted from Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria and ecumenical councils) is one of the strengths of the Thomistic tradition. The Son's mediatorial role in spiration catalyzes contemplation of analogous mysteries, the Church in particular, revealing procession a Filio as life-giving in the Church's doctrine and worship.
Historical Prolegomena
While one could seek to resolve the conflict between Aquinas and Bulgakov without recourse to the long history of the Filioque controvery, this history will make possible the identification of key elements of the controversy as well as potential insights for reconciliation.Footnote 2 The Latin tradition of Trinitarian theology begins with Tertullian. He focused on the order of the communication of the divine substance, affirming the monarchy of the Father and the mediatorial role of the Son in the Spirit's procession.Footnote 3 Hilary of Poitiers, exiled for his opposition to Arians in Gaul, contended that the Spirit's reality and substantiality is due to His having His source in the Father and Son. Ambrose of Milan was the first to explicitly state that “Spiritus procedit a Patre et Filio.” Augustine posits in De Trinitate several “psychological” analogies before resolving that the best revelation we have of the Holy Spirit's hypostasis is the biblical titles, Love and Gift.
Cyril of Alexandria, the hero of Ephesus, is most clear amongst the Greek Fathers in asserting the Son's role in the procession of the Spirit.Footnote 4 The Tractarian, E.B. Pusey, selected Cyril for his series on the Church Fathers because of Cyrils’ support for the Filioque.Footnote 5 Pusey even included an essay on the Filioque in an introduction to the Alexandrian's commentary on John. The Christ-centeredness of Cyril's theological vision contributes to why he describes the Son's mediatorial role.Footnote 6 The Patriarch of Alexandria's indefatigable dedication to the full divinity of the Son led him to adopt as theological loci Johannine verses (John 14:16; 15:26; and, 16:7) that reference the Son sending the Spirit and Pauline pericopes (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:9; and, Phil. 1:19) that identify the Spirit as Christ's own Spirit.Footnote 7
The creedal formula quoted at Ephesus was that of Nicaea—without the interpolations of Constantinople. Only at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), was the formula of First Constantinople recognized as a normative interpretation of Nicaea. The First Council of Constantinople (381), under the leadership of Gregory of Nazianzus, was intentionally agnostic on questions regarding the Spirit's origin and His relationship to the Father and Son: “As a formula of faith,” Brian Daley contends, “the Constantinopolitan Creed is conservative, biblical, and carefully crafted to be open to a variety of possible pneumatologies. It is marked as much by what it does not say as by what it says.”Footnote 8 Daley suggests that First Constantinople may not have been originally intended to be received as ecumenical in the same way that First Nicaea had been.Footnote 9 However, even Nicaea took decades to be received as normative in the Church.Footnote 10 The pneumatological elucidations of the Nicene Creed at Constantinople have to be understood through the Cyrillian and Leonine Christological lens of Ephesus and Chalcedon.Footnote 11 Pneumatology is inseparable from Christology.
Marcus Plested juxtaposes two modern Greek reactions to the early modern and modern history of Eastern Orthodoxy: Christos Yanarras and Stelios Ramphos. For Yanarras and Ramphos alike, Aquinas is the person who represents that which Eastern Orthodoxy most needs to reject or embrace, respectively. Yanarras laments the colonialization of “Hellenism” by a technocratic paradigm which reduces God to an object of dissection.Footnote 12 Ramphos blames the dismissal of linear, rational, and logical Aristotelianism by neo-Platonic Hesychasts for the societal and theological stagnation of the Greek East. Through his paradigm-shifting monograph, Plested is able to uncover the initially positive Byzantine reception of Thomas’ thought and its evolution into post-colonial disdain.
Bulgakov and the Procession of the Holy Spirit
Prior to distilling Bulgakov's critique of Thomas Aquinas’ pneumatology, it is illuminative to examine his own historical overview of the Filioque controversy. Bulgakov notes that the economic Filioque cannot be disputed because it is clearly revealed in Sacred Scripture. Bulgakov's insistence that passages in the Church Fathers that appear to advance the Filioque, do not, is repeated in his exposition of Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nyssa, and Ephiphanius. The Greek Patristic use of “through” language, culminating in John Damascene, is simply asserted as having “no connection with the Catholic Filioque.”Footnote 13 Cyril of Alexandria is particularly vulnerable, Bulgakov cautions, to exploitation by “Filioque partisans.” Cyril “views pneumatology not from within pneumatology itself but from within Christology, and he touches upon the procession of the Holy Spirit only in passing, only with reference to Christology.”Footnote 14 Bulgakov accuses Western Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, of a Christocentrism that stunts their pneumatological speculation. Rather than deny Bulgakov's accusation, this Cyrillian Christocentric tradition as amplified by Thomas and Thomism is one of the strengths of the Filioque doctrine.
Bulgakov rightly understands Augustine's Trinitarian theology as constructed around the Filioque:
The basic idea of Augustine's pneumatology, i.e., the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, is not a random episodic idea for him; rather, it is his central idea, which permeates his entire theology, and one cannot diminish this fact with artificial implications. Historically it is even more important to note that Augustine is not alone here, but is the progenitor of the entire Western theology of the procession of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 15
Connected to his articulation of the Filioque, is Augustine's “true discovery”: the Trinity is Love.Footnote 16 This insight, according to Bulgakov, contributed to Augustine's ability to explore the interrelations of the hypostases more deeply than Eastern theologians who merely juxtapose the hypostases. Augustine's De Trinitate is lauded by Bulgakov as the “most systematic” and “most remarkable” work on the Trinity and the Holy Spirit in the entire Patristic tradition.Footnote 17 Yet, for all his renown, Augustine (and Aquinas for that matter) does not, in Bulgakov's estimation, escape the impersonalism and modalism that plague the West.Footnote 18 Bulgakov is not unique in this accusation. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Rahner, Vladimir Lossky, and Colin Gunton echo the sentiment.Footnote 19
Bulgakov lambasts Photius as 1) the origin of the Scholastic obsession with origin; and, 2) as wrongly equated with Orthodox doctrine.Footnote 20 The Orthodox objections to the Filioque are futile as long as Orthodoxy is “hypnotized’ by causality.Footnote 21 The ek monou of Photius separates the Trinity into two independent dyads: Father-Son and Father-Spirit.Footnote 22 Photius established the East-West binary on the Spirit's procession, sterilizing pneumatology.Footnote 23 The speculative work of the West is considered superior to the reactionary “anti-dogma” of the East because “theology, even if erroneous, defeats no theology.”Footnote 24 When residing in Paris from 1925 until his death in 1944 from cancer, Bulgakov wrote his dogmatic trilogy: The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb. Thomas Aquinas, according to Plested, was the “convenient whipping-boy” for Bulgakov and was a theological force best avoided in the safe-harbor of the Fathers. The Comforter (1936) is Bulgakov's constructive pneumatology and is the subject of the recapitulation and rebuttal below.
Bulgakov, and his theological descendants, are potentially fruitful interlocutors for Catholicism. He argues that the omission of a particular theological concept from the creed does not constitute its refutation.Footnote 25 The creed instead presupposes subsequent investigation. Bulgakov categorizes Photius’ ek monou tou Patros, the West's Filioque, and his preferred pronoun, “dia,” as theological opinions, theological clarifications of the non-exhaustive creed.Footnote 26 Several times, he reiterates that the question of the Holy Spirit's procession is dogmatically open and that there has been no council to definitively settle the question.Footnote 27 Catholics must reject this claim. Nevertheless, Bulgakov's acknowledgment of the Filioque’s validity as at least a theologoumenon gives it a chance to be weighed fairly against alternative theological models of the Spirit's procession (e.g. ek monou tou Patros, dia tou Huiou, and modern Spirit Christologies).Footnote 28 Bulgakov makes a notable admission when he states the question of the Spirit's procession requires not only linguistic precision but dogmatic definition and interpretation.Footnote 29 This openness to dogmatic resolution allows for a future council or dogmatic statement accepted by the universal Church reaffirming the doctrine on the Spirit's procession from Second Lyons and Florence.
While Bulgakov does not condemn the Filioque as heretical, he does dismiss it as theologically problematic and insufficient. Thomas Aquinas in particular comes under fire as the representative Catholic theologian. Equating the Trinitarian hypostases with their relations of opposition is impersonalism, or worse, modalism.Footnote 30 The impersonalism of Latin theology is also evidenced in the priority given to nature over persons, leading to a “hypostatic subordinationism of the ontological type.”Footnote 31 The Son receives the divine nature from the Father without the capacity to generate and the Spirit receives the divine nature without the capacity to generate or spirate. Second Bulgakov is constantly evoking the need for a theological exposition of the eternal relationship of the Son and Holy Spirit. Yet, the Filioque does not meet his standard. The language from the Council of Florence that describes spiration as a single principle is problematic for him:
If the Holy Spirit originates from the Father and the Son, and not in Their hypostatic difference as Two but in Their unity, una spiratione, then the required opposition of origination arises not between the Father and the Holy Spirit, or the between the Son and the Holy Spirit but between the Father Son bi-unit and the Holy Spirit.Footnote 32
The dyadic procession implies the divine nature is possessed commonly by the Father and Son.Footnote 33 To avoid this Father-Son dyad, Bulgakov resolves that the West, if it is to affirm procession from the Father and Son, should teach that it is from two principles rather than one. However, if it was to do so, it would be guilty, he claims, of Photius’ accusation that two sources are introduced into the Godhead. The monarchy of the Father, “the very foundation of trinitarian doctrine,” is also misunderstood because of an over-focus on origin.Footnote 34 The Son and Spirit are united as hypostases revealing the Father but differ as modes of this revelation.
The final feature in Bulgakov's attack on the Filioque is his inconsistent treatment of its “life-significance.” He first denies that “there is any such significance.”Footnote 35 Bulgakov asserts that Christocentrism, and not Christology, is the “religio-psychological” source for Western teaching on spiration.Footnote 36 Moreover, he contends that Protestantism has exasperated this hypostatic imbalance. Despite admitting the interdependence of Catholic Christology, ecclesiology, and the Filioque, the analogy between mysteries is unilateral when applied by Bulgakov to the Filioque. The Filioque is an effect and has no constructive role in illuminating other mysteries as understood by Catholics; it is supposedly outside of Church life and has no effect on veneration of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 37 Yet, Bulgakov insists on the Filioque’s significance in the question of papal primacy. He echoes Bolotov that it is “first and foremost, a dogma about the pope.”Footnote 38 This is a reflection on the method by which the Filioque was added to the Creed (by Benedict VII) and a perceived relationship between Christocentrism and the Papacy's claim to be the Vicar of Christ.Footnote 39 Another renowned Russian émigré theologian, Vladimir Lossky, differs from Bulgakov on the question of “life-significance.” Lossky is certain that the Filioque should be considered heretical and that Photius is normative for Orthodoxy. While Bulgakov wavers, Lossky holds, in Daley's final analysis, that the differences
conceal, instead, a difference in theological mentality and method… which has formed not only the two traditions’ fundamental understanding of God and salvation but even the shape of their Church structures, their spirituality and their pastoral practice.Footnote 40
Far from being inconsequential for Lossky, the difference between the ek monou tou Patros of Photius and Catholicism's Filioque is a difference in the very dogmatic structure of the two traditions. Although Lossky's rejection of the Filioque is ill-informed, his instinct that it is deeply interconnected with other Christian mysteries is correct.
A Thomistic Rebuttal
Temporarily displaced by the exuberance of post-conciliar theology, the study of Thomas has begun anew. Ressourcement Thomism provides the best rebuttal to Bulgakov and offers the greatest hope for theological détente and ecclesial rapprochement. The Thomistic response to Bulgakov is four-fold. Thomas’ reflection on divine persons as subsistent relations will be used as a counter to the accusations of impersonalism. The action of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of adoption and the Spirit of Truth is central to Thomas’ Commentary on the Gospel of John and is fundamental in his exposition of the relation between Son and Spirit. Aquinas also advances a balanced reading of Augustine's statement that there is one spiration by utilizing Augustine's pneumatology of love. This reading preserves the monarchy of the Father and avoids pneumatological subordinationism. Lastly, the biblical theology of Matthias Joseph Scheeben will be presented as an analogy of the Filioque to the mystery of the Church.
The unique character of the Filioque is evidenced by Aquinas’ defense of it in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Rather than begin with objections (as he does on all other doctrines), the Common Doctor begins with biblical, conciliar, and rational arguments.Footnote 41 The character of the doctrine lends itself to an entirely different mode of argumentation. If rationalistic necessity was the strongest argument, Thomas could have begun with objections to be refuted; instead, he begins with the evidence for its veracity prior to defending its credibility. Thomas summons the authority of the Athanasian Creed, Didymus’ De Spiritu Sancto, and Cyril's letter to Nestorius, (known to Thomas as Salvatore Nostro).Footnote 42 Cyril's letter was received as authoritative at Chalcedon, a fact recognized by Thomas, thus justifying the earlier assertion of the Christological interpretation of Constantinople. Thomas, moreover, points out that Augustine was included amongst the list of Fathers and Doctors which Second Constantinople (553 AD) decreed it received “wholly.”Footnote 43 Thus, Augustine's teaching of the Spirit's procession a Filio is compatible with conciliar dogma. Thomas, uniquely among his contemporaries, evokes a text of Chalcedon that interpreted First Constantinople as a corroboration of the Nicene Faith.Footnote 44 Aquinas concludes, as does Bulgakov, the Nicene Creed is open to further biblically-rooted corroboration such as First Constantinople and the Filioque.
a.) A Response to the Charge of Impersonalism: Persons as Subsistent Relations
Bulgakov and many other modern theologians level the weighty charge of impersonalism—or worse, modalism—against Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Rahner accuses Thomas of isolating the treatise on the Trinity and reducing Christianity to a practical monotheism. Giles Emery identifies several thinkers who attempt to rehabilitate Thomas; yet, in the process of rehabilitation, they adopt the dominant preference for “personalism” over against “essentialism.”Footnote 45 Bruce Marshall's addresses question of Thomas’ potential impersonalism without assuming the existence of a dichotomy nor the superiority of “personalism.” Just as Aquinas upholds the veracity and credibility of transubstantiation as taught at Lateran IV in his Eucharistic teaching, he articulates a Trinitarian theology that avoids the condemned errors of Joachim of Fiore who misread Peter Lombard as implying a quaternity.Footnote 46 Augustine was to be interpreted as compatible with Lateran IV, then Aquinas had to explain Augustine's use of essentia de essentia to describe the Son's generation. Thomas turns to another concept in Augustine's De Trinitate to exegete essentia de essentia in an orthodox fashion: relations. Thomas’ teaching on relations is particularly intended for treating the question of the Filioque because “it is in the study of the procession of the Holy Spirit that the commentary on St. John gives the most complete exposition on relative opposition.”Footnote 47
Unlike others in the medieval scholastic tradition, Aquinas identifies relations, rather than modes of origin, as that which constitutes the three Persons.Footnote 48 Emery notes a distinction in Thomas between the esse and the ratio of a relation.Footnote 49 The esse of a relation in creatures is its accidental inherence in the subject. In God who is simple, the esse of the relation subsists as identical with the divine essence. The ratio of a relation in creatures is its reference to another, ad aliquid. In God it consists in the “ecstatic” reference of one person to another. De Potentia q.8 articulates this distinction,
The relations in God, although they constitute the hypostases and thus make them subsist, do it however insofar as they are the divine essence; indeed, the relation insofar as it is relation does not have anything of what subsists or makes subsist: that belongs solely to the substance.Footnote 50
Thomas’ synthesizing of the two aspects of relation prove that he is not guilty of “essentialism” or an “impersonalism.” In the Summa Contra Gentiles IV, Aquinas concludes, “the being of the relations is the being of the essence.”Footnote 51 The ratio distinguishes the persons who are themselves the essence. The divine essence is nothing other than the relations. There is no pre-relational Divine Being.Footnote 52 If Bulgakov better attended to Thomas’ own scholastic distinctions, he would know that Thomas prefers a different definition of divine personhood. Thomas’ solution is to define the divine persons as subsistent relations. The name Father “signifies the relation which is distinctive and constitutive of the hypostasis.”Footnote 53 Relation is preferred to origin because origin does not refer to anything intrinsic. Origin presupposes a subsistent person. The Father begets because He is the Father: “paternity is prior to generation.”Footnote 54 Thus, Bulgakov's reading of Thomas (identifying the persons with their origin) is explicitly ruled out.
b.) The Holy Spirit's “Autonomy” and a Christological Pneumatology
Brian Daley identifies two concerns of contemporary pneumatology: 1) preserving “a certain autonomy for the Spirit of God: an autonomy that is fundamentally implied in our conceiving of the Spirit as a person, and as divine;” and, 2) establishing a relationship between the Son and the Spirit.Footnote 55 Bulgakov, in his own time, professed these same concerns and the inability of the ek monou or the Filioque to mitigate them. One must not undermine the basic Trinitarian teaching of the inseparable action of the persons in creation (opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt).Footnote 56 The “autonomy” problematic may be construed either as a denial of this foundational axiom or as suggesting an erroneous understanding of the action of the Trinitarian persons as in some way competitive or mutually-exclusive.
The Christological interpretation of the Filioque is consonant with the Chalcedonian interpretation of First Constantinople. In S.Th. I q. 36, Aquinas notes, Chalcedon declared the validity of developing statements inferred from earlier conciliar formulae but not explicit in them [“sed id quod implicite continebatur in primo symbol, per aliqua addita explanabatur contra haereses insurgents”].Footnote 57 Chalcedon adopted the Constantinopolitan expansions of the Nicene Creed. Moreover, Thomas elicits Ephesus as evidence of the implicit support of the Filioque.Footnote 58 The arch-heretic Nestorius and his heretical disciple, Theodoret of Cyrus (condemned at Second Constantinople), rejected the procession of the Spirit from the Son. Just as true doctrine is interconnected, Nestorian heresies regarding the person of Christ are of a piece with the denial of the Son's role in spiration. Pneumatological orthodoxy is situated within Christological orthodoxy by Thomas himself.
Bruce Marshall notices two predominate actions of the Spirit in Thomas’ Johannine commentary: filiation and revelation, the “soteriological repercussions of the doctrine of Love and of the Filioque.”Footnote 59 From this consideration of the Spirit's role, Thomas constructs a rule of Trinitarian order (similar to that of Irenaeus and Basil), “Just as the effect of the mission of Son was to lead us to the Father, so the effect of the mission of the Holy Spirit is to lead the faithful to the Son.”Footnote 60 In Thomas's exegesis of John 3:8, he observes that it “is in virtue of his own power of free choice that [the Spirit] blows where he will and when he wills, illuminating hearts.”Footnote 61 The concern for the Spirit's autonomy is here assuaged. He adds that this biblical passage is an explicit refutation of the errors of the Macedonians who reduce the Holy Spirit to a mere minister of the Father and Son. A staunch defender of the Filioque, Thomas resolves that the Spirit's being sent does not restrict his “free choice.” Marshall summarizes “Mission implies origin, but origins preserves spontaneity.”Footnote 62 Thomas unquestionably reaffirms the axiom of the inseparable action of the divine persons ad extra, but he also, because of his Trinitarian commitments, maintains that each person acts in a different way (“alium modum”): “for each kind of action ad extra…the act itself is the same, but the mode or manner of action is not.”Footnote 63
c.) The Monarchy of the Father and the Equality of the Divine Persons
STh. I q. 36 provides the material for a Thomistic defense of the monarchy of the Father. In a. 4, Aquinas reaffirms the monarchy of the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father “immediately,” and from the Son “mediately.”Footnote 64 It is valid to say that the Spirit proceeds “principally or properly from the Father, because the Son has this power from the Father.”Footnote 65 The Son is not the instrument of spiration nor is his begetting prior to spiration.Footnote 66 In a. 4, ad. 1, Thomas says,
If we consider the spirative power, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son as they are one in the spirative power…Nor is there any reason against one property being in two supposita that possess one common nature. But if we consider the supposita of the spiration, then we may say the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as distinct; for He proceeds from them as the unitive love of both.Footnote 67
Thomas’ teaching here is compatible with Second Lyons and Florence and He also displays his indebtedness to Augustine's pneumatology of love. The distinctness of the Spirit's relation to the Father and the Son is the singularity of that divine person's love for the other. Thomas carefully balances the single principle of spiration with the reality of “two spirating [duo spirantes].”Footnote 68 He, however, rules out language of “two spirators [duo spiratores].” Levering expounds upon the importance of this distinction between two spirating and two spirators: “The value…consists in its ability to resist amalgamating the persons while at the same time insisting that the spiration is one act that the Father and Son truly share, due to the Father's communication of spirative power to the Son.”Footnote 69 Bulgakov's accusations of a dyad of Father-Son biunity with the Spirit is thus rebutted. The Father and Son each personally spirate. The success of Aquinas’ reply here depends on a foundational scriptural passage, “all that belongs to the Father belongs to me (Jn. 16:15).Footnote 70
Aquinas cleverly uses the monarchy of the Father and the fullness of his self-communication in a. 2, ad.6, as a response to the assertion that the Filioque is a kind of pneumatological subordinationism. The Son's reception of all that the Father is, except paternity, is the perfection of the Son's generation. To deny this communication of spiration to the Son would undermine the “Father's unique monarchy, his full power to beget his perfect likeness in all but paternity.”Footnote 71 If the East wants to refuse this exchange, they must answer how they are not themselves developing a subordinationism in which the Son and Spirit are diminished relative to the Father.
d.) The Analogy of Christian Mysteries: The “Life-Significance of the Filioque for the Universal Church
The final aspect of this Thomistic defense of the procession of the Spirit a Filio is the exposition of its implications for the contemplation of other Christian mysteries, its “life-significance.” Bulgakov recognizes a complex correspondence between Catholic doctrines in ecclesiology, Christology, and pneumatology. He selects an ecclesiology motivated by the will to power rather than Trinitarian theology as the genesis of the Catholic doctrinal system. There is a real analogy in Catholic dogma between the mystery of the Church and the mystery of the Trinity.Footnote 72 However, for Augustine and Thomas Aquinas the mystery of the Church (and the hierarchical offices she possesses) are to be understood through the primary mystery of God's inner life, not the other way around. It must be asked, if this obtains for the Catholic Church, why is the charge of politically-reduced theology not equally applied to the Orthodox Trinitarian models, especially the Photian ek monou and caesaropapism? The Latin tradition's Christocentrism is implicated as conducive to advancing papal primacy since the Pope is called the Vicar of Christ.Footnote 73 This accusation, however, ignores the fact that the Catholic Church evokes two councils (Second Lyons and Florence), and not simply papal fiat, as the basis for the dogmatic theological note of the Filioque.Footnote 74 Further qualifying Bulgakov's impliction is the long history of associating the papacy with both Peter and Paul, a two-fold inheritance that can be interpreted as parallel to the Christological and pneumatological aspects of the Papal office.Footnote 75
If the Filioque is inseparably bound to papal primacy, as Bulgakov claims, why have many Protestants who have rejected papal primacy so vehemently defended the veracity of the dual procession of the Holy Spirit?Footnote 76 The Protestants may have unknowingly maintained a doctrine that actively undermines their ecclesiology. The more likely solution is that Western Christianity, regardless of its relationship to the Roman Pontiff, shares a common understanding of the relationship between biblical revelation and God's eternal Trinitarian life. Biblical passages, in particular Christ's own words in the Fourth Gospel, reveal His union with His Father in the Love that is the Spirit. The greatest of the Christological councils, Chalcedon, saw fit to adopt both the pneumatological teachings of Constantinople and Cyrillian Christology. The Filioque magnifies the Son. The glory of Christ's divinity is revealed in His sending of His Spirit to the Church to incorporate Her into His Body as His Bride.
While an analogy between the Filioque and papal primacy can be presumed since they are both dogmas taught by the Catholic Church, other more foundational ecclesiological resonances are available. Matthias Joseph Scheeben admits that the Church Fathers often cautioned against any discussion of the difference between the processions of the Son and the Spirit.Footnote 77 Despite these admonitions, Scheeben concludes speculation is permissible if the mystery is approached with faith. Speculation of this kind can bear pastoral fruit, for as Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., laments, “complete ignorance” of the distinction between generation and spiration “does not lead to holy wonder and awe, but to complete intellectual frustration.”Footnote 78
Mysteries of Christianity incorporates two methods of grasping the revealed truths. The first is dogmatic, philosophical, and propositional. The second is scriptural, Romantic, and poetic. Scheeben fluctuates between the two in his helical ascent to understanding spiration. Scheeben does not rely on the argument of logical necessity alone. The expressions used to detail spiration are less exact than those used to describe generation. This “indefiniteness” is replaced with an “elasticity and pregnancy” which, “though less sharply outlined, is all the richer in coloring and vividness.”Footnote 79 Like an Impressionist painter who captures the light, movement, and emotion of her subject, phraseology like “interior sigh of love,” “love-token,” “giving of self,” “flame,” “aspiration,” “self-donation,” and “pledge” work in concert with one another, like the small brushstrokes of the painter, to illustrate the Holy Spirit as the mutual love between the Father and the Son. The ultimate reason why the Holy Spirit proceeds from two persons is not for the purpose of distinguishing His procession from the Son's procession (though it does allow for this); the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son because He is the “outpouring of Love” between the first two persons of the Trinity.Footnote 80
After mustering patristic and medieval sources to defend the Holy Spirit’ s spiration from the Father and the Son, Scheeben reinforces the dogmatic teaching of the Church with a speculative analogy drawn from the scriptures. Scheeben develops an analogy between the creation of Eve, spiration, and the Church. Because the generation of human offspring by sexual reproduction is the analogue of the generation of the Son from the Father, examining alternative ways that human persons are created is profitable for establishing potential analogues for spiration.Footnote 81 Against the Macedonians, Gregory of Nazianzus evoked the production of Eve to suggest alternative origins for human persons.Footnote 82 Scheeben admits that the analogy of Eve's production can only be properly understood “in and from the personal character of the Holy Spirit.”Footnote 83 The measure of the analogy's efficacy is its ability to express the mystery of the Holy Spirit as Love and Gift as revealed in scripture, reflected upon in the Tradition, and experienced in the life of the Church. In light of the nuptial dimension of Christ's relationship to the Church, the “pregnancy” of spiration language is unveiled:
[T]he divine vital principle which constitutes the Church the bride of Christ was drawn from the side of the new Adam, dying and sunk in the sleep of love. This vital principle is none other than the Holy Spirit who, as He receives His own essence from the divinity of God's Son, also enters into the Church through and from the Son's humanity, in order to impregnate it with power of the Son of God.Footnote 84
Because the Spirit animates the Church, He is called the anima of the Church. Through Baptism, the Spirit makes Christians members of the Body of Christ. He is the “spirit of adoption” (Rom. 8:15, cf. Gal. 4:6) which joins the baptized in a one flesh union with Christ, making them sons in the Son.
Scheeben elicits patristic support for this argument from Methodius. Methodius contends that “the septiform Spirit of truth, is quite properly called the rib of the Logos [costa Verbi]…God takes from Him and forms her who is to be Christ's helpmate.”Footnote 85 Eve is built from the side or rib of Adam. Because of the physical proximity of the rib to the human heart and the fact that Eve was given out of and for love, her production is out of Adam's love. Thus, when elevated to describe spiration, the Holy Spirit, because He is a procession of reciprocal love, is said to spirate “from the heart of the Father and the Son.”Footnote 86 The nuptial imagery of Adam and Eve is not normally applied to the Trinity of Persons. The marriage of Christ and the Church is usually the focus of the Fathers’ allegorical readings of Eve's production. Like Eve from Adam, Christ's bride is formed from His pierced side on the Cross. Earlier in this paper, Scheeben was cited as referring to spiration language as pregnant. At first glance, this adjective only seemed to signify a promising openness to expansion. In Methodius’ allegory, the New Eve is the Church, not the Holy Spirit, although the Holy Spirit is the rib of the New Adam. The Church serves the role of helpmate to Christ through evangelization, corporal works of mercy, the Sacraments, and prayer. Methodius’ ecclesial allegory may seem to undermine some of the potential of Scheeben's speculative position on spiration. Yet, all the Body of Christ's actions, liturgical, charitable, or otherwise, are only possible through the action of the Holy Spirit in the baptized. The Holy Spirit is Christ's helpmate working through His Body still on pilgrimage.
The Holy Spirit as the costa Verbi preserves the Father and Son as the principle of the Holy Spirit and respects the revealed language of scripture, patristic exegesis, and the dogmatic definitions of the Church. The rib is given to the New Adam with all but the Father's paternity. The Son is then able to make a reciprocal gift of love from His own Sacred Heart. Prior to creation, this loving gift of the costa Verbi is not to His ecclesial Bride, but to His Father. The Eve-spiration analogy also affords an active role to the Holy Spirit within the immanent Trinity. Critics of the Filioque claim it relegates the Holy Spirit to passivity. Yet, the costa Verbi is the divine love which constitutes the union between the Father and Son. Only the Holy Spirit is understood in His personhood as being an action. Fatherhood and Sonship are states of being. The Spirit is an eternal bond of love. He, more so than either the Father of the Son, reveals that God is pure act, actus purus.
Conclusion
Bulgakov observed that Augustine and Thomas’ theology is permeated by the Spirit's procession a Filio. The mutual dependence of Christology and Pneumatology is inherited from Augustine, Cyril, and the earliest ecumenical councils. Building upon the his historical study of the sure foundation of the Fathers and dogma, Thomas deploys his speculative work on the persons as subsistent relations to articulate a theology preserving the Father's monarchy, the Son's perfect begetting, and the Spirit's relationship to both Father and Son. Far from the impotent fabrication of a papal monarch caricatured by Bulgakov, the procession of the Spirit from Father and Son unveils the Trinitarian communion of love to the believer. It illumines and is illumined by the mystery of the Church.
It remains to be shown the full implications of the Filioque upon Catholic dogmatics and what other mysteries can be illumined in the light of the Spirit proceeding a Filio. Promising areas of further study by analogy to the Filioque are sacraments, Mariology, and the papacy. Augustine's insistence on the necessity of charity for sacramental fruitfulness in contrast to mere validity against the Donatists could provide one entry point. Maximilian Kolbe's meditation that Mary is the Created Immaculate Conception and the Holy Spirit the Uncreated Immaculate Conception could be explored with Christological contextualization with reference to the doctrine of the Filioque. The dual Petrine and Pauline character of the Bishop of Rome can be expanded upon. May the Spirit that is Himself that loving union of Father and Son, the costa Verbi, unify the Church in this life so that its final number may increase in the next.
