Giulio Maspero’s book Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers addresses the seemingly perennial theological debate that has divided Christendom for a thousand years through a close reading of the development of trinitarian doctrine in the early Church. For those unfamiliar with the filioque controversy, a brief overview will help set the stage for Maspero’s book. “Filioque” is a Latin phrase that means “and the Son.” It was first added to the third heading of the Niceno-Constantinoplitan Creed (“I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and the Son”) at the regional Council of Toledo held in 589 and later adopted by the Western Latin-speaking Church under the jurisdiction of the Roman pontiff. Greek-speaking Christians saw this as problematic both ecclesiastically and theologically. Ecclesiastically, they saw it as an illegitimate addition to the Creed without ecumenical consent. It would be like a single state in the US making a change to the US Constitution and declaring that all the other states had to accept the change whether they liked it or not. Theologically, Greek-speaking authors thought that the addition of the filioque compromised the unity of God, which was seen to be found in the Father as the sole cause of the Trinity, by adding a second cause within the Godhead. Two causes meant there were two Gods. Ultimately, this became one of the issues that led to the schism between East and West Christendom in 1054 that has never been healed.

Maspero’s book is not an attempt to address all the issues of the Filioque. The history is long and this ground has been covered by others, such as A. Edward Siecienski’s excellent historical survey The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford University Press, 2010). Any reader interested in Maspero’s book should read Siecienski’s book first to familiarize themselves with the history. Instead, Maspero focuses on giving a nuanced historical reading of the development of filioque within the development of trinitarian doctrine in the early church from Origen (c 185-254) to Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395). At each stage, Maspero is careful to explain how these authors were addressing specific issues in their own time and how that affected their articulation of Trinitarian doctrine.

For example, Origen (the subject of chapter 1) was addressing both Stoic materialism and Gnostic cosmology when he made a sharp distinction between God and creation but kept an ordered hierarchy within the Trinity such that the Father was more truly God than the Son, and the Son more God than the Holy Spirit. This Logos-theology (as he calls it) resulted in two models of the Trinity: the linear model (Father → Logos → Pneuma) and the triangular model ( Logos ← Father → Pneuma). These were never resolved in Origen and led to the Arian controversy at the beginning of the fourth century. Maspero then traces (chapters 2 and 3) how these two models worked themselves out in the fourth century in authors like Epiphanius, Pseudo-Athanasius, Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea and Marcellus of Ancyra. While Athanasius’s nature (physis)-theology approach might have helped address the Arian debates over the status of the Son, it was insufficient to answer the so-called Pneumatomachians (=Spirit Fighters) who affirmed the divinity of the Son but denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. It is this debate seen in authors like Gregory of Nazianzus and especially Gregory of Nyssa (chapters 4 and 5) that Maspero focuses on as the immediate context for the development of the Greek filioque.

I think this is a particularly important contribution not only to debates about the filioque but also to general discussions about the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century. Too often the Pneumatomachian controversy is an appendix to the Arian controversy. “Once the Arian controversy was solved,” so the story typically goes, “there were some weird people who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit but that was an anomaly and everybody just moved on until the Christological controversies of the fifth century.” Instead, Maspero argues that the Pneumatomachian controversy highlighted a gap in the nature (physis) model that made the Pneumatomachian position a comprehensible position to hold. It is in their response to the Pneumatomachians that Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa shifted from the question of nature to the question of relation that allowed them to sufficiently answer the Pneumatomachian objections: the identity of the Son and Spirit is distinguished by a difference in the way they relate to the Father (Son is begotten; Spirit proceeds). More so, the Spirit, argued the two Gregories, is metaphysically placed in between the Father and the Son such that the Father can remain cause while admitting an active role of the Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Maspero then tests his hypothesis by comparing these Greek developments with the Syrian theological tradition (chapter 6). Here Maspero once again demonstrates historical nuance in attending to the linguistic difficulties in translating concepts developed in a Greek-speaking context into a Syrian one. Namely, Gregory of Nazianzus was able to distinguish procession as a general category (proion) from the specific relation of the Spirit to the Father (ekporeutōs). Not only does the Syrian Church’s adaptation of the Creed in 410 explicitly say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son—as well as being present in their own nascent theologians such as Ephrem the Syrian—but Syriac translations of the Cappadocians use filioque-type language to express Gregory’s terminological distinction that was unavailable to them in Syriac. When placed in the highly technical Trinitarian debates of the fourth century, it becomes clear that this evidence isn’t merely the result of translation, but of conceptual pressure arising from the Pneumatomachian debates at the end of the fourth century.

The rest of the book is a comparison between what Maspero has discovered in the Greek (and Syrian) Fathers, with the theological developments in the West, specifically Augustine. Augustine, as the most important Latin-speaking theologian, is usually charged with being the source of the filioque. In chapter 7, Maspero addresses the issue of the so-called “psychological analogy” of the Trinity which plays an important part in Augustine’s De Trinitate. Was this a cause of the filioque? Maspero argues that it was not because he also has discovered a similar, though not identical, psychological analogy at work in Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and the seventh-century theologian Anastasius of Sinai (which he argues is independent of Augustine’s influence). Secondly, in chapter 8, Maspero takes a close look at the metaphysical differences between Augustine and the Cappadocians. While he thinks that Augustine is at a conceptual disadvantage compared to the Greek-speaking East—specifically on the ontological status of relation—Maspero shows how Augustine is driven by similar conceptual pressures (a shared theological grammar) as Gregory of Nyssa to affirm a role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit.

Maspero finally concludes with a summary of his argument and an ecumenical proposal: affirm a Greek understanding of the active (but not causal) role of the Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Maspero has written a nuanced and highly technical, historical, and theological investigation of the “Greek Filioque”. While he gives helpful summaries of his argument along the way to mark the trail he is blazing, this is still an admittedly difficult book and requires a slow and careful reading. Those unfamiliar with scholarship on the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century would do well to read Lewis Ayres’s Nicaea and Its Legacy or Mark DelCogliano’s introduction and translation of Basil of Caesarea’s Against Eunomius. Nevertheless, this is an important and necessary book for three reasons. First, Maspero demonstrates how to do historical theology well. Historical theology isn’t just appealing to what theologians of the past have said, but why they said it. Second, I think Maspero does an excellent job of showing how biblical exegesis was an integral part of these debates. These early Christians weren’t just philosophizing or engaging in abstract conceptual arguments for their own sake. Their reflections arise out of their close reading of the Bible to address the needs of their time. While we might not always understand the nuances of their exegesis, we should walk away from Maspero’s book appreciating just how important the Bible was for them in these debates. Third, remembering the role the filioque played in the division of 1054, Maspero’s work is an important contribution to healing those rifts so that we, as Jesus prayed, might be one.

Reviewed by Ryan Clevenger

Publisher’s page: https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467466417/rethinking-the-filioque-with-the-greek-fathers/

The Resurgence of the Gospel and the Flowering of the Global Christian Message

Part One: The Medieval Prologue & the Remapping of the World  

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

In Retrospect

By looking backwards to the beginning of the spread of the Gospel that Jesus is both Lord and Christ and considering the results of both the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the message that Peter spoke at the Feast of the Pentecost, we are struck by the Power of the Holy Spirit to change lives and change the course of history and why, no matter the opposition and oppression, that gospel continued to spread. Other things factor in. The first factor is that of those who heard.

Those who heard Jesus were the Jews of the circle of the Gentiles (Galilee), the Jews of Judaea, and a mixture of peoples, Jew, Greek, Syro-Phoenician, and Samaritans to begin with, and a centurion or two within the Roman military system and stationed within Galilee and Judaea. There was a mixture of peoples and a mixture of social classes ranging from shepherds, to high status people, including a rich young ruler. The Gospel reached from those at the bottom to those at the top and officials as tax-gatherers. The news spread horizontally and vertically from among those who heard.

The visitors who were present when the Church began returned home and told of what they heard. When Peter, John, Philip the Deacon, and later Paul, started their missionary journeys, they were simply following up where these visitors came from: The Mediterranean world and its northern, southern, southeastern shorelines, up the Nile and the Gulf of Suez as well as northeast to the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and following their courses toward the Arabian Sea. The significance of this spread west and east is in the mode of travel. The early Christians traveled the waterways more so than by way of roads which were few and dangerous to travel. Even the Roman-built roads were not all that good across Anatolia [Asia Minor/modern Turkey], going from Antioch to Ephesus facing the Aegean Sea.

Rodney Stark, Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome.

Most travelers went by ship, boat, or along the shores of rivers. As a result, most Christian communities were found in port cities such as Antioch, Caesarea, Troas, Ephesus, Corinth, Alexandria going west in the Mediterranean. The Roman military road from Capernaum and the upper shore line of the Sea of Galilee took one up to Damascus, Dura-Europos, and the towns along the Euphrates-Tigris waterways. Seldom were Christian churches found in the hinterlands. Most were found in shoreline cities. It was Wayne Meeks who first noticed that the earliest Christian churches were in urban areas; then it was Rodney Stark who wrote of how Christianity became an urban movement in his Cities of God (Harper San Francisco, 2006).

This was the situation of the resurgence of the gospel throughout the following centuries when persecution or invasions occurred. The Christians took to the sea or the waterways to spread the gospel to more distant lands. When persecution broke out in Jerusalem, Acts 8: 25-49 tells of Philip the Deacon’s ministry with a Treasurer of the Candace of Ethiopia (Roman name for modern Sudan). The roadway he traveled goes along the southeastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile river and then up the Nile to the city of Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia. The Angel of the Lord then turned Philip around and had him introduce the gospel along the Eastern Coast of the Mediterranean from Azotus to Caesarea, a major port for ships from Rome and the Aegean Sea. Acts 11:19 to 30 informs the reader that Christians from the Island of Cyprus and from Cyrene, the main port city of what is now Modern Libya in Northern Africa, were among the forerunners of the church in Antioch (modern Antakya), another major port city. This is but the start of the story.

Robert L. Calhoun, Scripture, Creed, Theology: Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in the First Centuries (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 508 pages, ISBN 9781556354946.

Robert Calhoun was a well beloved lecturer at Yale Divinity School until his retirement in 1965. Before he retired, he planned to have his lectures in the area of historical theology prepared for publication, but those plans fell through until more recently, decades after his death. This book represents the completion of those plans, carried through by George Lindbeck. Lindbeck also contributed an informative 62-page introduction.

These lectures cover a span from Jesus to Gregory the Great. After an initial methodological clearing, Calhoun covers the New Testament in two chapters, one dealing with Jesus and the “Primitive Church”, and another dealing with Johannine theology. After that, the chapters proceed apace, for more than 400 pages total, covering most of the major developments. Some historical figures are given chapters of their own (Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Augustine)—Clement of Alexandria and Origen share a chapter. Both “orthodox” and heretical figures are covered.

There is, of course, an obvious drawback to publishing lectures from so long ago: they will inevitably be dated. When Calhoun lectured, we had a lot fewer noncanonical gospels, and those that we did have had not yet made much of an impact on our understanding of the early church. Walter Bauer’s ideas about the lateness of “orthodoxy” had not yet made an impact in the English-speaking world. The introduction owns up to the dated aspect of Calhoun’s work, and assures us (rightly) that the lectures stand the test of time much better than we might have expected. Although the reader will want to supplement these lectures with something more recent, they are thoroughly solid in what they do discuss.

Calhoun’s writing is clear, and his judgments are measured. Future studies will undoubtedly quote a great deal from this book. We owe a debt to Lindbeck for seeing Calhoun’s promise through.

Reviewed by John C. Poirier