What is the Filioque?

Icon of the Emperor Constantine

with the bishops after the Council of Nicea

The Nicene Creed, as it is commonly called today, was finalized over several church councils, beginning in Nicea in 325 and concluding in Constantinople in 381. The creed affirms that God is revealed in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the section about the Spirit, the original creed (translated from Greek), reads something like this:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.

Over the course of a few hundred years, some churches in Latin-speaking western Europe added this one little phrase:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.

If your church uses this creed during its worship services, there is a good chance that it includes this "and the Son" clause, which is known by his Latin rendering: filioque. It is impossible to prove exactly how or why that phrase first got added, but it more or less became the standard practice in the West by the year 1014, which is when the influential church in Rome added it to the liturgy.

This tiny addition eventually led to the biggest split that the Christian church has ever experienced. The Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic churches had been growing apart for centuries due to cultural and linguistic differences, and they had not been treating each other very well, with the Crusades in particular creating a considerable amount of friction. But in 1054, when things finally reached a boiling point, the filioque clause was named as one of the major reasons for the so-called Great Schism. This separation still exists today, and the filioque will have to be revised before the two sides will ever consider reconciling.

The Orthodox church has good reasons for protesting the filioque. Perhaps the core issue is that no one asked them before it was added. The Creed was worked out over several decades in the fourth century, with painstaking care over specific words and phrases. As far as the East is concerned, this is an unauthorized change to one of the church's fundamental documents. Tied to this is the ongoing dispute about what a pope is authorized to do -- Orthodox churches do not have popes, and their highest leaders do not have the authority to act unilaterally (by adding phrases to the creeds).

Also, there is a fundamental theological issue at stake about how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute the Holy Trinity. If the Spirit comes (proceeds) from the Father and the Son, then that seems to create a pecking order within the Godhead, with the Holy Spirit coming in last. This is a heresy, and not even Catholic or Protestant churches believe that the Holy Spirit is somehow less than the Father or the Son. Indeed, basic Christian doctrine maintains that none of the persons of the Trinity is subordinate to any of the others. The Catholic Church today claims that the filioque was never meant to say that the Holy Spirit is less than the Father or Son -- it was supposed to clarify that the Spirit is a different person than the Son, and the relationships between the three persons of the Trinity are full of mutual sharing and love. Sadly, the damage has been done, and the current Western wording of the Nicene Creed is one of the most significant issues that separate the two main branches of Christianity to this day.