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The Procession of the Holy Spirit   

Mr. Peter Finney III 

   Theology is the reasoned articulation of faith. From the early days of the Church, therefore, there has been a progressive refinement of theology, of the expressions of the articles of faith. Difficulties and disagreements have arisen in the process of understanding more completely the fullness of Revelation the Church possesses in Christ. Within the Immanent Trinity, the procession of the Holy Spirit has been, through the ages, a point of theological formulation, but also of controversy and debate, often conveniently used as the reason for the split of the Orthodox Church, an argument that is generally rendered mute when an accurate understanding of the differing explanations is known.

            With the zeal to take on the most arduous of tasks, St. Augustine of Hippo in his work On the Trinity attempts to accurately state the truth of the Trinity, including the issue of the Holy Spirit’s procession. Dealing with the Immanent Trinity, the procession of the Holy Spirit is ultimately a point of difficulty because finite man knows first and more easily the Economic Trinity, or the Trinity with regards to its actions in creation, not the Trinity in itself or as the persons relate with each other. As St. Augustine notes in his title heading, a complete understanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit can “only be understood when we are in bliss.”[i] Yet some understanding must be sought.

            For St. Augustine, any understanding of the Holy Spirit must be grounded in the nature of the Son and in time. The Son is consubstantial with the Father, containing the same divine nature, the same being[ii]; the Son contains all that the Father has. St. Augustine, therefore, reasons with regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit that “if the Son has of the Father whatever He has, then certainly He has of the Father, that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from Him.”[iii] Also important is the nature of time and its nonexistence outside of the temporal world. St. Augustine makes such a position evident, stating, “In that Highest Trinity…there are no intervals of time.”[iv] Therefore, such a procession from both the Father and the Son would not occur in stages or steps, with a gap between the procession of the Holy Spirit form one compared to the other.

The Father, being the begetter of the Son, does have a certain initiating in the procession of the Holy Spirit, without minimizing or eliminating the role of the Son. As St. Augustine notes, “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father principally, the Father giving the procession without any interval of time, yet in common from both.”[v] There is, though, one act, one spiration. As the Council of Florence succinctly yet thoroughly noted of the Holy Spirit, “The holy Spirit is eternally from the Father and the Son, and has his essence and his subsistent being from the Father together with the Son, and proceeds from both eternally as from one principle and a single spiration.”[vi] Moreover, as the Synodl of Toledo notes almost six hundred years earlier, the Holy Spirit “is shown to have proceeded from both at once, because He is known as the love or the sanctity of both.”[vii] Clearly, there is consistent patristic and councilliar examples of the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son.

St. Augustine also stresses the importance of the concept of “procession,” as opposed to a begetting or birth, a point that seems tedious but is necessary. When dealing with the Holy Spirit immanently, a fine line must be balanced between “unbegotten” and “begotten.” That He cannot be unbegotten seems evident enough: if He were, there would be two Fathers. Such a statement is untenable and contains no support from Scripture or Tradition. The title of “begotten,” though, presents more subtle problems. Applied to the Holy Spirit, “begotten” of the Father would maintain the uniquely “unbegotten” Father, while still maintaining the eternal nature of the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine, however, is not quickly convinced. The Son is consubstantial and, therefore, equal with the Father, with the Holy Spirit proceeding from both persons. If the Holy Spirit is deemed to be “begotten,” though, there are problems based upon that which has been previously established. As St. Augustine argues in simple fashion, “If He, too, was called a Son, He would certainly be called the Son of both, which is most absurd, since no one is son of two, save of father and mother.”[viii] To hold that the Holy Spirit is “begotten” would be to make a divine family out of the Trinity, something impossible given the Economic nature of God. Such a view is countered in the Nicene Creed’s assertion that Jesus Christ is “the only Son of God.”[ix]

The Holy Spirit, therefore, proceeds from the Father and the Son, having the same divine nature, eternally, outside of time. The Father’s begetting of the Son and the Holy Spirit’s proceeding from the Father and the Son can be attributed as the overflowing love that is the nature of God. Such a love begets the Son, and the equally abundant love each possesses for the other overflows with the procession of the Holy Spirit from a “single spiration.”[x] The Holy Spirit, therefore, is rightly the “unity of both, or the holiness, or the love.”[xi] Yet this bond is clouded in the immanent mystery of the Trinity. As St. Augustine profoundly states, “The Holy Spirit, whatever it is, is something common both to the Father and Son. But that communion itself is consubstantial and co-eternal; and if it may fitly be called friendship, let it be so called; but it is more aptly called love.”[xii] Hence, though each member of the Holy Trinity possesses the same divine nature and perfections, the Holy Spirit is often attributed with the quality of love. Furthermore, this bond of love that is the Holy Spirit emboldens St. Augustine to believe that “the Trinity can be called the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit is a certain unutterable communion of the Father and the Son.”[xiii] No other person of the Godhead can be spoken of as such; no other person connects the other two as such.

The immanent nature of the Holy Spirit and His processions has not been without conflicts. The most noted controversy is over the Latin word filioque and its insertion in the Nicene Creed. The Latin word “filio” is the ablative form—indicating means—of filius meaning son, and the enclitic que is attached to the end of filio, serving to bind a preceding word with son through the word “and.” Filioque, therefore, means “and by means of the son.” The controversy inauspiciously begins at the Council of Nicea in 325 which produced a creed that is still its namesake. As Charles Price notes, that creed, though, “ended abruptly with the phrase ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit.’”[xiv] The Council of Constantinople, which followed sixty years later, added to the creed of Nicea but without asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father[xv]; rather the Holy Spirit proceeds from only the Father. There was no mention of the filioque.

In 431, the final groundwork is laid at the Council of Ephesus for the later conflict. The Council fathers stated that “it is not permitted to produce or write or compose any other creed except the one which was defined by the holy fathers who were gathered together in the holy Spirit at Nicaea.”[xvi] Though changes had been made at the previous council, further alterations would not be acceptable, a position dictated by the threat of heterodox creeping into the beliefs of the faithful.

The procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, however, was already a position embraced by many, as seen with St. Augustine. In fact in a letter written by Pope St. Leo the Great only fourteen years after the calling of the Council of Ephesus, the pontiff indicated such a belief, referring to the Holy Spirit as the divine person “who proceeds from the two.”[xvii] The belief, therefore, already has the strength of Tradition. In 675, the Synod of Toledo became the first official body of bishops to explicitly hold the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son as the correct theological position, stating, “[The Holy Spirit] is called the Spirit not of the Father alone, nor of the Son alone, but of both Father and Son. For He does not proceed from the Father to the Son, nor from the Son to sanctify creatures, but He is shown to have proceeded from both at once.”[xviii] The insertion of filioque to the Creed “was gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy,”[xix] culminating with Pope Benedict VIII’s  introduction of it in Rome in 1014.[xx]

The perceived liberty the Roman Church was taking, with the seeming neglect for the Council of Ephesus’s statements, caused some unrest in the East but was a minor factor in the Great Schism of 1054.[xxi] The official position of the Eastern Church was that the procession occurred from the Father and through the Son, a difference in explanation but ultimately not a substantial theological barrier. In fact, the position itself was not the cause for conflict, but its insertion into the creed. Moreover, at both the Councils of Lyon and Florence groups of Greek bishops approved the belief of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son.[xxii] The fathers at the Council of Florence even affirmed the insertion of the filioque, stating, “We define also that the explanation of those words ‘and from the Son’ was licitly and reasonably added to the creed for the sake of declaring the truth and from imminent need.”[xxiii] The Council of Florence was also conciliatory to the Greeks, indicating the filioque disagreement was one of semantics and legalistic issues rather than theological ones, stating, “Texts were produced from divine scriptures and many authorities of eastern and western holy doctors, some saying the holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, others saying the procession is from the Father through the Son. All were aiming at the same meaning in different words.”[xxiv]

The agreements, though, did not last a generation either time and were somewhat tied to military help from the Roman Church.[xxv] Yet, there did develop a certain theological understanding that the two positions were not that apart. The Eastern Church’s belief that the procession occurs through the Son is not irreconcilable. The Son is, after all, one in being with the Father and, therefore, possesses nothing that the Father does not have.

The Immanent Trinity ultimately is a mystery, one that requires a further deepening of the spiritual life to obtain any understanding. Without such a lex orandi lex credendi, a blindness will occur, one that fails to grasp the most important things, one that fails to grasp the communion of love proceeding form the Father and the Son that is the Holy Spirit. For those people, as St. Augustine notes, “If they think they ought to deny that these things are, because they, with their blind minds, cannot discern them, they, too, who are blind from their birth, ought to deny that there is a sun.”[xxvi]

Endnotes