the Filioque and Charlemagne..?

[MoNiCa4316]

sometimes I hang around at TAW and see comments like this:

The Filioque was not accepted by the Papacy until about 800 AD when forced to do so by threat of force by Charlemagne

what's the Catholic view of this?

I'm not very good at history lol.
I know that the Schism is very complex though.. and the history of the filioque is difficult to understand too. And I've come across some pretty good arguments for Catholicism and some historical events that are rarely ever talked about, it seems..

but all this stuff about Charlemagne.. I know very little about.

thanks

 

[SolomonVII]

The way I remember the story, the pope's response to Charlemagne's charge against the East that the original Creed was without filioque was to engrave the Creed without filioque in both Greek and Latin onto silver plates and hang them on the wall of his cathedral.
This would be the exact opposite to what is being contended that he gave into political pressure from the Emperoror.

The point is that the pope would not give into the political, nationalistic ambitions of the emperors of the Latin Church, nor did the papacy ever give into the equally chauvinistic and nationalistic ambitions of the Greek Church in their attempts to break away from the authority of Rome through their claims that the Latin filioque was a a heresy.

The proper understanding of the filoque is that there is no heresy in the Creed with, or without it. Even as it has sucked many ardent believers into the controversy from both sides, at the bottom it is not even pertinent to theological debate, but is and always has been at bottom a political issue.

 

[MoNiCa4316]

thanks for your reply..

why are the EO saying that Charlemagne pressured the Pope into accepting the filioque? is there a document or historical document/event that suggests this?

I agree with you that this is mostly political. It's not so much changing the creed as a clarification, which was necessary for the Western church to fight the heresy. I read some things about the filioque that I found interesting..that support the Catholic side of the argument.. but I can't remember all the information now.. there's lots of names and dates lol.

 

[WarriorAngel]

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Filioque

The first undoubted denial of the double Procession of the Holy Ghost we find in the seventh century among the heretics of Constantinople when St. Martin I (649-655), in his synodal writing against the Monothelites, employed the expression "Filioque". Nothing is known about the further development of this controversy; it does not seem to have assumed any serious proportions, as the question was not connected with the characteristic teaching of the Monothelites.

~~~~


Some of the foregoing conciliar documents may be seen in Hefele, "Conciliengeschichte" (2d ed.), III, nn. 109, 117, 252, 411; cf. P.G. XXVIII, 1557 sqq. Bessarion, speaking in the Council of Florence, inferred the tradition of the Greek Church from the teaching of the Latin; since the Greek and Latin Fathers before the ninth century were the members of the same Church, it is antecedently improbable that the Eastern Fathers should have denied a dogma firmly maintained by the Western. Moreover, there are certain considerations which form a direct proof for the belief of the Greek Fathers in the double Procession of the Holy Ghost.

• First, the Greek Fathers enumerate the Divine Persons in the same order as the Latin Fathers; they admit that the Son and the Holy Ghost are logically and ontologically connected in the same way as the Son and Father [St. Basil, Ep. cxxv; Ep. xxxviii (alias xliii) ad Gregor. fratrem; "Adv.Eunom.", I, xx, III, sub init.]
• Second, the Greek Fathers establish the same relation between the Son and the Holy Ghost as between the Father and the Son; as the Father is the fountain of the Son, so is the Son the fountain of the Holy Ghost (Athanasius, Ep. ad Serap. I, xix, sqq.; "De Incarn.", ix; Orat. iii, adv. Arian., 24; Basil, "Adv. Eunom.", v, in P.G.., XXIX, 731; cf. Greg. Naz., Orat. xliii, 9).
• Third, passages are not wanting in the writings of the Greek Fathers in which the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son is clearly maintained: Greg. Thaumat., "Expos. fidei sec.", vers. saec. IV, in Rufius, Hist. Eccl., VII, xxv; Epiphanius, Haer., c. lxii, 4; Greg. Nyss. Hom. iii in orat. domin.); Cyril of Alexandria, "Thes.", ass. xxxiv; the second canon of synod of forty bishops held in 410 at Seleucia in Mesopotamia; the Arabic versions of the Canons of St. Hippolytus; the Nestorian explanation of the Symbol.

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Filioque

The dogma of the double Procession of the Holy Ghost from Father and Son as one Principle is directly opposed to the error that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father, not from the Son. Neither dogma nor error created much difficulty during the course of the first four centuries. Macedonius and his followers, the so-called Pneumatomachi, were condemned by the local Council of Alexandria (362) and by Pope St. Damasus (378) for teaching that the Holy Ghost derives His origin from the Son alone, by creation. If the creed used by the Nestorians, which was composed probably by Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the expressions of Theodoret directed against the ninth anathema by Cyril of Alexandria, deny that the Holy Ghost derives His existence from or through the Son, they probably intend to deny only the creation of the Holy Ghost by or through the Son, inculcating at the same time His Procession from both Father and Son. At any rate, if the double Procession of the Holy Ghost was discussed at all in those earlier times, the controversy was restricted to the East and was of short duration.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04301a.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14169b.htm

 

[Gwendolyn]

There was heresy in Spain gaining ground, and the popular teaching was that Christ was not divine, but merely the most perfect creature ever created (Arianism). One of the false "supports" that the heretics had for this belief was that the Creed said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father. They said, "See! Only from the Father, because the Son cannot send it since He is not divine!" People in the area started using the filioque to make a point, and initially Rome refused to accept it and use it in every profession... but eventually Rome caved to the political pressure, too.

I'd rather say the Creed without it, since we all know that Christ is divine now, and it's not a necessary addendum.

 

[WarriorAngel]

Maximus's response:

"Those of the Queen of cities (Constantinople) have attacked the synodic letter of the present very holy Pope, not in the case of all the chapters that he has written in it, but only in the case of two of them. One relates to the theology (of the Trinity) and, according to them, says: 'The Holy Spirit also has his ekporeusis (ekporeuesthai) from the Son'. The other deals with the divine incarnation. "With regard to the first matter, they (the Romans) have produced unanimous evidence of the Latin Fathers, and also of Cyril of Alexandria, from the study he made of the gospel of St. John. On the basis of these texts, they have shown that they have not made the Son the cause (aitian) of the Spirit - they know in fact that the Father is the only cause of the Son and the Spirit, the one by begetting and the other by ekporeusis (procession) - but that they have manifested the procession through him (to dia autou proienai) and have thus shown the unity and identity of the essence... "They (the Romans) have therefore been accused of precisely those things which it would be wrong to accuse them, whereas the former (the Byzantines) have been accused of those things of which it has been quite correct to accuse them (Monothelitism). They have up till now produced no defence, although they have not yet rejected the things that they have themselves so wrongly introduced. "In accordance with your request, I have asked the Romans to translate what is peculiar to them [the 'also from the son'] in such a way that any obscurities that may result from it will be avoided. But since the practice of writing and sending [the synodic letter] has been observed, I wonder whether they will possibly agree to do this. It is true, of course, that they cannot reproduce their idea in a language and in words that are foreign to them as they can in their mother-tongue, just as we too cannot. In any case, having been accused, they will certainly take some care about this."




​

 

[SolomonVII]

thanks for your reply..

why are the EO saying that Charlemagne pressured the Pope into accepting the filioque? is there a document or historical document/event that suggests this?

I agree with you that this is mostly political. It's not so much changing the creed as a clarification, which was necessary for the Western church to fight the heresy. I read some things about the filioque that I found interesting..that support the Catholic side of the argument.. but I can't remember all the information now.. there's lots of names and dates lol.

http://www.usccb.org/seia/filioque.shtml

....The different liturgical traditions with regard to the Creed came into contact with each other in early-ninth-century Jerusalem. Western monks, using the Latin Creed with the added Filioque, were denounced by their Eastern brethren. Writing to Pope Leo III for guidance, in 808, the Western monks referred to the practice in Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen as their model. Pope Leo responded with a letter to “all the churches of the East” in which he declared his personal belief that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son. In that response, the Pope did not distinguish between his personal understanding and the issue of the legitimacy of the addition to the Creed, although he would later resist the addition in liturgies celebrated at Rome.
Taking up the issue of the Jerusalem controversy, Charlemagne asked Theodulf of Orleans, the principal author of the Libri Carolini, to write a defense of the use of the word Filioque. Appearing in 809, De Spiritu Sancto of Theodulf was essentially a compilation of patristic citations supporting the theology of the Filioque. With this text in hand, Charlemagne convened a council in Aachen in 809-810 to affirm the doctrine of the Spirit’s proceeding from the Father and the Son, which had been questioned by Greek theologians. Following this council, Charlemagne sought Pope Leo’s approval of the use of the creed with the Filioque (Mansi 14.23-76). A meeting between the Pope and a delegation from Charlemagne’s council took place in Rome in 810. While Leo III affirmed the orthodoxy of the term Filioque, and approved its use in catechesis and personal professions of faith, he explicitly disapproved its inclusion in the text of the Creed of 381, since the Fathers of that Council - who were, he observes, no less inspired by the Holy Spirit than the bishops who had gathered at Aachen - had chosen not to include it. Pope Leo stipulated that the use of the Creed in the celebration of the Eucharist was permissible, but not required, and urged that in the interest of preventing scandal it would be better if the Carolingian court refrained from including it in the liturgy. Around this time, according to the Liber Pontificalis, the Pope had two heavy silver shields made and displayed in St. Peter’s, containing the original text of the Creed of 381 in both Greek and Latin. Despite his directives and this symbolic action, however, the Carolingians continued to use the Creed with the Filioque during the Eucharist in their own dioceses.

As near as I can gather, this would be their (mistaken) basis for this statement. The filioque was very much a part of Augustine's theology centuries before Charlemagne, and became popularly used in the West as a result of this, and other things peculiar to the Western experience of evangelizing against Arianism. Pope Leo was a part of this tradition, as was Charlemagne who was vying at the time to be Roman emperor, in spite of Byzanitine's long-established claim to the same title. Charlemagne believed that the filioque was the authentic version of the Creed and wanted the pope's agreement.
But then , as always, the Pope could not pronounce against the Holy Spirit. Even as he understands that the Creed with the filioque is not heresy, he refuses to say that the Creed without filoque is not the authentic one, approved in 381 through the commision of the Holy Spirit.

 

[QuantaCura]

In both attempted reunion Councils, it was agreed that both sides meant the same thing--the West did not intend to imply two principles or two spirations and the East did not intend to imply that the Son and Holy Spirit had the same relationship to the Father and each other (thus making their persons indistinguishable--the persons of the Trinity being distinguishable by their relationship to the other persons).

Here is a very in depth explanation of this:

http://rtforum.org/lt/lt66.pdf

 

[SolomonVII]

I think it is a question of "by their fruits you shall know them" QC.
1200 years later, in spite of all the linguistic and cultural differences there right from the beginning, in spite of Muslim domination of the East for 600 years, in spite of the Reformation, and secularism, and materialism, and the dual scourges of athiesm and communism;
when we in the Catholic church talk about Jesus, and when the people in the Eastern Orthodox Church talk about Jesus, we are saying exactly the same things about Him!


In spite of everything, of all the differences and corruptions and political intrigues and slandering of the message that have been constantly disrupting us and keeping us apart, our message about Jesus, His nature, both human and Divine, is the same one as the Eastern Orthodox is still evangelizing.

And that my friend is no small potatoes!