Does the Holy Spirit proceed only from the Father—or also from the Son?
Protestants and Roman Catholics might immediately answer the latter and wonder why their Orthodox friends protest. Historically one of the major obstacles to Christian unity across the East-West divide, the Filioque —the part of the Latin translation of the Nicene Creed claiming the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son —still bedevils Trinitarian theologians today.
How can the church possibly achieve unity in the face of this dogmatic difference, implacable for over a millennium? Giulio Maspero shows us how the answer can be found in history.
Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers is availble on Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Bookshop , Christianbook , and more.
What People Are Saying
“With objectivity, clarity, and great skill, the author guides the reader through the patristic corpus, East and West, demonstrating that there is something akin to a consensus partum on the active but not causal role played by the Son in the Spirit’s procession. In this way, Father Maspero shows a way out of the stale dialectic between procession ‘from the Father alone’ and procession ‘from the Son,’ between essentialism and personalism, and offers real hope that in looking back a new way forward may be found.”
—A. Edward Siecienski, author of The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy
“In Rethinking the Filioque with the Church Fathers , Giulio Maspero makes the compelling argument that the Filioque need not be viewed as the source of hopeless theological division… Maspero challenges theologians to consider the possibility that East and West might come together affirming the Western Filioque grounded on classical Eastern pneumatology.”
—J. Warren Smith, Duke Divinity School
“Maspero…is always attentive to modern debates, but ever drawing us back to the best of starting points. This text is a very welcome addition to the literature on this complex topic and can only serve to aid the dialogue between East and West.”
—Lewis Ayres, Durham University
Read the Foreword
by Sarah Coakley
I am delighted and honored to provide this short introduction to Giulio Maspero’s new book, Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers , and to commend it with warmth and admiration to all those interested in new developments in patristic theology and in contemporary ecumenical relations—
whether they be teachers, students, clergy, or general readers. This book makes several important and original interventions into a new story about “Eastern” and “Western” Christendom in the patristic period up to the fifth century, which has already been developing importantly in recent decades and which this volume further refines and complexifies.
Fr. Maspero, who is a professor at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce in Rome, was originally trained as a physicist, and perhaps something of his sharp analytic mind and pedagogical ambition to probe to the fundamental presumptions of the patristic authors he studies may be attributed to this original formation. For over twenty years he has been well known in the international patristics guild as an astute, original, and probing interpreter of the fourth-century Cappadocian father Gregory of Nyssa, on whom he wrote his dissertation under the late Professor Lucas F. Mateo Secco at the University of Navarre. (Indeed, it was at this period of his theological career that he and I first became fast friends.) Particularly important in Fr. Maspero’s reading of Nyssen has been his nuanced account of how “apophaticism” actually works in Gregory’s doctrinal thinking, and especially in his Trinitarianism (a matter that also features in the core argument of this current book), and his concomitant challenging of the so-called social Trinitarian rendition of Nyssen’s thought, which had dominated an earlier generation of scholarship and had led to a misleading thesis about a supposed East-West disjunction in patristic Trinitarianism. Fr. Maspero’s more recent work, however, has branched out much more ambitiously into wider themes in contemporary systematic or “dogmatic” theology, while not abandoning his characteristic interest as a patristic scholar in the underlying stories that theologians are inclined to tell about doctrinal development in the history of the church. Indeed, while other theologians in the period of postmodernity have tended to recoil, in line with current fashion, from what they see as the modernistic pretensions of any Dogmengeschichte of an earlier generation, Fr. Maspero has remained refreshingly impenitent about seeking some such metanarrative of doctrinal development, albeit one suitably chastened by the complexity and breadth of the texts he surveys. For this, and other reasons now to be outlined, however, Maspero’s new book is bound to be controversial. That is why it merits your close attention.
We find in this current volume, then, a challenging and original account of the origins of Christian Trinitarian thinking, which—when read with due care and attention to the specific texts which Fr. Maspero covers—contains the following novel contributions that should be underscored.
First, the very title of the book should be heeded, but also not misunderstood, since in a sense it is itself deliberately and provocatively anachronistic. The so-called Filioque problem (occasioned by the addition in the West of the phrase “and from the Son” to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to the clause about the procession of the Holy Spirit “from the Father”) did not arise until after the patristic period covered in this book; and the impropriety of its being added to the creed without the agreement of an ecumenical council
must be regarded as a problem distinct from the relevant theological issue of
early metaphysical speculation about the immanent “procession” of the Holy
Spirit. Well before that fatal credal addition, however—as this book demonstrates with new insight and textual discoveries (but in the wake of many other scholars’ previous work in the area)—the idea of a “double procession” of the Spirit, or something like it, was by no means confined to the West; nor should
we constrain our investigation of it to the work of Augustine, as older textbooks
have often implied. Indeed, the particular contribution of this volume
as to the genesis of the “double procession” is Fr. Maspero’s argument that we
need to focus especially on the late-fourth-century Greek debates with the
“Spirit-fighters” (who denied the full divinity of the Spirit) to account for its
vindication in quest of a fully-coherent Trinitarian ontology. The vital Cappadocian contribution to this rebuttal of pneumatological late Arianism, then, was—according to Fr. Maspero—the originally Eastern locus of the proposal of a view of “relationality” in the Trinity that actually necessitated something akin to what later came to be called the Filioque ; indeed, for those reared on older textbooks, it may still be a surprise to learn that Nyssen himself explicitly described the Spirit as the relational “bond” between Father and Son. But this was a view that subtly, but crucially, distinguished the primal notion of “cause” (a term still reserved for the Father alone) from this new idea of inner-personal relationships of equality in the immanent life of the Trinity, which now logically required an active role for the Son also in the procession of the Spirit. Ultimately, it is this patristic “Greek” solution to the (later) “problem of the Filioque ” that Fr. Maspero wants to commend to the churches for reconsideration, one that need not require the Filioque to be excised once more from the Western version of the creed, but rather to be glossed irenically and ecumenically through the lens of Cappadocian thought.
It is most important to stress here, then, that Maspero’s is not an anachronistic reading of the Cappadocian contribution that forces an Augustinian rendition upon it for reasons of Western Tendenz : to presume that would be to continue to kow-tow to the outworn thesis about an East-West disjunction in fourth-fifth Trinitarian thinking, which even now dies hard in some ecumenical circles. Rather, Maspero’s painstaking investigation of the Cappadocian Trinitarian heritage, alongside—and in comparison with—the slightly later contribution of Augustine, stresses both their shared theological instincts and their philosophical differences on how to construe the notion of divine “substance.” What is not necessary, however, is to create any wedge between them on the grounds of their supposedly dichotomous understanding of the Spirit’s “procession.”
Perhaps even more fascinating still in this book, however (alongside this new proposed entente between Greek and Latin patristic views about the Spirit), is the wonderful chapter Fr. Maspero contributes on the Syriac theology of the same period (chapter 6), in which—partly because of the semantic distinctions in Greek on the matter of “procession” that Syriac did not replicate—we again find a remarkable set of witnesses to the idea of “double procession,” right from the time of Ephrem, but arising from a richly distinct cultural and theological source.
Because this book contributes to a rising tide in scholarship that already notes the congruence of “pro-Nicene” patristic Trinitarianism, both East and West, it might therefore be easy to miss the very distinctive contributions that Fr. Maspero makes to this ongoing debate, here outlined. That is why I have chosen to underscore these points in this foreword. But Fr. Maspero’s own solution to the contemporary question of the “ Filioque problem” is just as bold, and will of course generate further debate: we are bound to ask whether it can really forestall the objection to the underlying canonical inappropriateness of the West’s alteration of the creed, and—more importantly—whether the distinction between primal “cause” (the Father) and merely “active” role (the Son) in the procession of the Spirit can finally be maintained philosophically as an ecumenical solution without either collapsing the distinction or else leaving a remaining trace of the ontological subordination of the Spirit, which the Cappadocian solution had so urgently sought to erase. Such matters constitute the ongoing discussions that Fr. Maspero and I continue to enjoy, as—I do not doubt—will many others.
What is certain, however, is that no careful reader of this enticingly ambitious book will emerge without gaining vividly new perspectives on an age-old theological problem. It deserves to be read in all basic courses on the patristic development of Trinitarian ontology, and, more particularly, in service of the continuing discussions of the future of ecumenical relations between “Western” and “Eastern” denominations on the “ Filioque problem,” as a most creative exercise in ressourcement that rightfully returns this matter to its patristic roots.
Sarah Coakley
Oxford, Feast of the Assumption/Dormition,
August 15, 2022
Essential reading for the ecumenically minded theologian, Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers takes a crucial step toward Christian unity.
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