How One Word Contributed to the Great Schism

We now move on toward a consideration of what we might call the Third Article of the Creed. While this may and, indeed, has been claimed to be a “Trinitarian Faith”, such a claim can easily be understood in mistaken and misleading ways. The Creed does not at all call us to exercise trust in three gods or even in three separate persons identified as one God. Though all words may fall short of trying to clearly identify the all-too mysterious being of God, we might better serve our efforts in this if we hold ourselves to grounding our attempts at understanding to what we might claim is a “Triune” God. Triune, as in Three-in-One, may seem merely pedantic, but it will hold us to the essential Oneness of God which the Creed strives to claim holds true whether we are speaking of the Creator, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. If we lose a sense of that essential unity, we quickly lose touch of the mystery which we will never get the hands of our minds around. (There are many cheap and extremely limited ways in which even the greatest of theologians have attempted to clarify our understanding of the Trinity: Things which are, in addition to being in and of themselves one thing, like fire, are not really separate from, in fire’s case, the light and the warmth associated with it; or people who are in and of themselves who they are still holds true if they are - or are not for that matter - a child to somebody, a spouse to somebody else, and a parent to somebody else…) Though we may make claims that a conceptual Trinitarian foundation is implied throughout the Creed (or, for that matter, scripture), there is a reason why the composers of the Creed did not, when they could have, utilize the word “three”. It’s absence implies a greater insistence upon the prevalence of their choice of the word “One”. That being said, on to the Third Article in reference to the Holy Spirit of God.

The “And…”, which leads off the Third Article, ties what follows to the Father/Creator of the First Article and Jesus the Christ in the Second Article.
Here the Spirit is just another way of speaking of the One God in whom we put our trust. With the exception of one word, all the immediate descriptive words used in reference to the Spirit all reflect and echo words previously used in the two previous Articles. The Spirit, like Christ, is the Lord. Like the Creator being the maker of all that is and Christ as the One through whom all things were made, the Spirit is identified as the giver of life. Christ is eternally begotten and the Spirit likewise proceeds from the Father. The only word identifying the Spirit which is not found in the previous articles - no matter how much we might claim that it is implied, is in calling the Spirit “Holy”. Now holiness may popularly be associated with a spirit of piousness but its Hebraic - and thus Christian - origins more accurately associate it with a spirit of “otherness”. Keeping ourselves honest with the otherness of God is an essential element in the exercise of our trust in this God. The Spirit drives us into the wilderness of otherness where we are confronted with God in people other than us, in opinions other than our own, in the ways we might otherwise choose to go. All of this requires the exercise of a deep and abiding trust in the otherness of God. However, before we more fully contemplate the presence and activity of this Spirit as contemplated in the Creed of Nicaea, let us engage in an aside wherein the addition of one word to the Creed in the Western Latin-speaking churches contributed to something the Creed was originally intended to safeguard against and which history now calls The Great Schism.

The original words in the Creed read: “…the Spirit…out of the Father out-proceeds…” However, we in Western churches, are accustomed to adding an additional clause so that it reads that: “…the Spirits…proceeds from the Father AND THE SON…” The addition of these words is called “the Filoque clause” as “filoque”, the Latin word added to reference the inclusion of the son in this procession of the Spirit, was the only additional word added to the existing (though translated into Latin) Creed. The inclusion of such a phrase was never in nor even considered for inclusion in the councils which established the Creed. While there is some evidence to suggest this word began to appear as early as the 6th century in some Latin-speaking churches, the word was not officially added to the Creed by Rome until 1014 - more than 550 years after the original establishment of the Creed. The Eastern churches rejected the change. While the reason for rejecting it may simply be understood as a way to assure that the Spirit not be relegated to a subordinate role in the mystery of God, it is the subsequent consequences of such an understanding which were seen as potentially divisive to both our understanding of God and, thus, one another. Risking yet again the perception of pedantic distinctions, let’s consider the concern.

First, a Triune understanding of God can not be sustained if we suggestively imply that two can be pitted against one. This would be a “separate-but-equal” policy which clearly calls into question unity and can hardly be seen to support true equality. Secondly, biblically speaking and echoed by the words of Jesus, the activity and presence of the Spirit of God is mysteriously elusive, it can’t be nailed down. Equating it with the wind (a word which both in Hebrew (nephesh) and Greek (pneuma) can refer to either spirit, wind or breath), it blows where it will with nobody knowing from whence it comes or whither it goes. However, lacking the capacity to contain it does not lessen our ability to experience its presence and impact. In some sense, upholding the absolute unified equality of the Spirit in the One Triune God served as a check, not on God’s inner being - as if we could fathom whatever goes on there, but on the churches which, again and again, had a rather indiscriminate habit - as we still do - of making authoritative claims with justifications that: “Jesus says it so that settles it!”; or, “The Father says it in the Bible so that settles it!” To preserve an understanding of the absolute unified equality of the Spirit in One God was to claim that nothing is ever immune from the mysterious power of God’s Spirit to change us, to bring us to new revelations and understandings, to foster a new creation out of the chaos of those opinions we once idolized, those prejudices the Spirit of God was actively driving from our hearts.

The inclusion of the filoque clause (just one word in the Latin) predictably contributed to what, within fifty years, led to what has ever-since been called “The Great Schism.” In 1051, what had been One Church became divided. The Eastern and the Western churches broke apart. The very unity the Creed was meant to establish and sustain was incalculably helped along by the adoption of a single word they had lived without the need of for more than 500 years. One last aside to this matter: The Episcopal Church in America are in the midst of taking substantial steps toward eradicating the filoque clause from our use of the Nicene Creed.

The words which follow in regards to the Spirit in the Creed provide perhaps the greatest argument against the inclusion of the filoque clause. “The Spirit, together with the Father and the Son is simultaneously worshipped and simultaneously glorified”. The worship and/or glorification of each is the worship and/or glorification of the One God without distinction. There were those who made claims that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be best understood if we saw them as somehow processing from one another sequentially, almost chronologically in and through time depending upon the circumstance of the time. They might cite such concepts as the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Spirit. The composers of the Creed held to a conviction that any understanding of a temporal, sequential, or functional procession of God from God was both misleading and potentially dangerous to not only our understanding of the unity of God but also our understanding of the unity of the Church. Experience continually informed them that those who insisted upon an insistence of knowing exactly who God is and exactly how God acts betrayed our ability to trust that which we can only claim to be a great mystery; and, soon, all too soon, that insistence on certitude served only to divide the churches into those who agreed with them and those who disagreed - the very thing the Creed set out to prevent. Thus the Spirit, like the Son, is understood to mysteriously and eternally processing out of the One God without distinction from the essence of who God is.