At a Glance
- What it isOne Latin word, Filioque (“and the Son”), added to the Creed's confession that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father”.
- Not in the originalThe Greek text of Constantinople (381) says only “who proceeds from the Father” (ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon). The Catechism itself states this plainly (CCC 247).
- First insertionThird Council of Toledo, Spain, AD 589, a regional council receiving Visigothic converts from Arianism.
- Adopted at RomeOnly around AD 1014, under Pope Benedict VIII, roughly four centuries after Spain. Rome had long resisted touching the text.
- Doctrinal statusFor Catholics, true doctrine: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle (Councils of Lyons II, 1274, and Florence, 1439; CCC 246).
- The dispute todayA 1995 Vatican clarification affirms the Father as the sole source of the Trinity and accepts the Eastern formula “from the Father through the Son”. Catholic and Orthodox theologians continue the dialogue.
The Honest History
Nothing in this history needs to be hidden, and this site will not hide any of it. Here is the record, date by date.
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381
Constantinople: the Creed without the Filioque
The Council of Constantinople completes the Creed of Nicaea with its article on the Holy Spirit: “who proceeds from the Father”. The Greek text contains neither “and the Son” nor “only”. It defines where the Spirit is from; it does not settle every question about how.
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589
Toledo: the first insertion
At the Third Council of Toledo, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain formally abandons Arianism, the heresy that denied the Son's full divinity. In that anti-Arian setting the Spanish church professes the Creed with “and the Son”, pressing home that the Son shares everything the Father has. From Spain the practice spreads through Gaul and the Frankish empire.
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c. 810
Pope Leo III: yes to the doctrine, no to the addition
Charlemagne's court presses Rome to adopt the addition. Pope Leo III affirms that the doctrine is true, yet refuses to add the word to the Creed's text, and has the Creed engraved without it on silver shields displayed at St Peter's. A pope defending the received text against an emperor is not the behaviour of a church careless with creeds.
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c. 1014
Rome finally sings it
Under Pope Benedict VIII, the Creed is sung at Rome with the Filioque, apparently in connection with the coronation of the Emperor Henry II. Only now, more than four centuries after Toledo, does the addition enter the Roman liturgy itself.
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1054
The schism context
Legates of Pope Leo IX and the Patriarch Michael Cerularius exchange excommunications at Constantinople. The Filioque is one grievance among several (liturgical customs and questions of authority loom as large), but from this point it becomes the doctrinal emblem of the East-West divide.
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1274 & 1439
The reunion councils define the doctrine
The Second Council of Lyons (1274) and the Council of Florence (1439), both attended by representatives of the East, define that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son as from one principle and by a single spiration. Florence adds that the Fathers' formula “from the Father through the Son” expresses the same truth. Both reunions later collapsed in the East, but the definitions stand as the Catholic Church's formal teaching.
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1995
Rome clarifies
The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity publishes, at the request of Pope John Paul II, the clarification The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit. It affirms that the Father alone is the source without source (arche anarchos) of the Trinity, and accepts the Eastern confession that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father through the Son” as expressing the same faith.
What the Catholic Church Actually Claims
It helps to state precisely what is being defended, because the Catholic claim is narrower and more careful than its critics often assume. The Church claims three things.
First, the doctrine is true. The Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, not as from two sources, but as from one principle (CCC 246; Lyons II; Florence). The Latin tradition confesses this because the Son receives from the Father everything the Father is, except being Father: “all that the Father has is mine” (John 16:15).
Second, the Father remains the sole source. The Father is the origin without origin, the arche anarchos, the “principle without principle” of the whole Trinity. Whatever role the Son has in the Spirit's procession, he has it from the Father. The 1995 clarification states this in so many words, and the Catechism teaches that the two traditions, “from the Father and the Son” and “from the Father through the Son”, are legitimate and complementary ways of confessing the same mystery (CCC 248).
Third, the addition is a clarification within the Latin creed, not a new faith. The Church does not claim the words were in the text of 381; CCC 247 says openly that they were not. It claims that the Latin word procedit, added against a live Arian heresy, unfolds what the Creed already confesses about the Son's equality with the Father. A legitimate development makes explicit what was implicit; a corruption contradicts what came before. The test of this history is which of the two it shows.
The Orthodox Objections, Taken Seriously
The Eastern Orthodox objections deserve their strongest form, not a caricature. Here they are at full strength, with the Catholic answers.
No local church, not even Rome, may alter a creed established by an ecumenical council on its own authority. The Creed of 381 belongs to the whole Church. Even if the doctrine were true, the unilateral insertion of the Filioque into a common conciliar text was an act the West had no right to perform.
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves honest concessions. The insertion did begin regionally, at Toledo in 589, without the East. And Rome itself agreed with the instinct behind the objection for a very long time: Pope Leo III affirmed the doctrine around 810 yet refused to touch the text, displaying the Creed without the addition on silver shields at St Peter's, and Rome did not sing the Filioque until around 1014. That two-century Roman resistance is not an embarrassment to the Catholic case; it is evidence of how seriously the Church takes a conciliar text.
But two questions must be kept distinct: whether the doctrine is true, and whether the manner of insertion was prudent. The first is the question of faith, and on it the Church's answer rests on Scripture and the Fathers of both East and West. The second is a question of discipline and authority, and here the Catholic Church does claim what the objection denies: that the successor of Peter, with the Church's councils, has authority to determine the liturgical confession of the faith. That claim was later exercised conciliarly, at Lyons II (1274) and Florence (1439), councils at which the East was represented and the doctrine was defined in common. One may still judge the earlier centuries untidy. Untidiness in discipline does not make a true confession false.
The Council of Ephesus (431), in its seventh canon, forbade anyone to produce a different faith (heteran pistin) beside the Creed of Nicaea, under penalty of deposition. The Filioque violates a standing canon of an ecumenical council both sides accept.
What Canon 7 forbade was bringing forward a rival faith, a competing creed set against Nicaea's, as the Nestorian formulas then circulating were. It was a defence of the faith's content, not a prohibition of every future word. The proof is the Creed itself: the text of 381 is already an enlargement of Nicaea's text of 325, with a whole new article on the Holy Spirit, and Ephesus in 431 venerated Nicaea's faith without treating 381's fuller wording as a violation. If any addition whatever broke the canon, the Creed the Orthodox themselves recite would break it. The canon binds the Church never to profess a different faith. The Catholic Church professes the same faith, and the burden of this page is to show exactly that.
The Filioque destroys the monarchy of the Father. If the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, there are two sources in the Godhead, and the Father is no longer the single fountainhead of the Trinity that the Greek Fathers confessed.
If the Filioque meant two sources, the objection would be fatal, and the Catholic Church would agree that it was fatal. That is why her definitions exclude it explicitly: Lyons II and Florence define that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son “as from one principle and by a single spiration”, not two. The 1995 clarification goes further in the East's own language: the Father alone is the arche anarchos, the source without source; the Son's part in the Spirit's procession is itself received from the Father. What the Latin word guards is not a second fountainhead but the truth that the Son is not a bystander to the Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Son (Galatians 4:6). Confessed this way, the monarchy of the Father is not denied. It is presupposed.
Scripture and the Fathers
The doctrine did not begin at Toledo. It was drawn from the words of Christ and confessed on both sides of the Mediterranean centuries before the quarrel.
“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me.” John 15:26
“He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” John 16:14
John 15:26 gives the East its formula: the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and it is the Son who sends him. John 16:14 gives the West its question: if the Spirit receives what is the Son's, and all that the Father has belongs to the Son, what the Spirit receives from the Father he receives from the Son also. The two verses are not rivals; each tradition begins from one of them.
Among the Latin Fathers, St Ambrose of Milan wrote in On the Holy Spirit (AD 381) of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. St Augustine gave the teaching its classic form in De Trinitate, Book 15 (early fifth century): the Spirit proceeds from the Father “principally” (principaliter), and from the Son by the Father's own gift, so that the single source is preserved. Pope St Leo the Great taught the same in his letter to Turibius of Astorga (AD 447). None of these men were innovating against the East; Ambrose and Augustine wrote while the Creed of 381 was being received.
The East, for its part, confessed that the Spirit comes forth “from the Father through the Son”. And one Greek saint stands as a bridge across the whole dispute: St Maximus the Confessor, who in his Letter to Marinus of Cyprus (c. 645) defended the Latins on precisely this point. The Romans, he explained, “have not made the Son the cause of the Spirit, for they know that the Father is the sole cause of the Son and of the Spirit”, but they confess that the Spirit comes forth through the Son, to show the unity of the divine essence. Some scholars have questioned the letter's authenticity, so this page will not lean on it more than it can bear; but Rome's own 1995 clarification cites it, and it says in the seventh century exactly what that clarification says in the twentieth.
Why This Honesty Strengthens the Catholic Case
A church with something to hide would tell this story differently. It would claim the words were always there, or bury the dates, or pretend Leo III's silver shields never hung at St Peter's. The Catholic Church does the opposite. Her own Catechism states that the Filioque was not in the Creed of 381 (CCC 247), sets the Latin and Greek traditions side by side as legitimate and complementary (CCC 248), and in 1995 formally embraced the Eastern formula in an official clarification. The facts on this page are not admissions extracted from the Church; most of them are quoted from her.
That is possible because the Church has always distinguished the deposit of faith from the expressions that carry it. The mystery of the Trinity is one; the confessions “from the Father and the Son” and “from the Father through the Son” are two true ways of speaking it, forged by two traditions answering two different errors (CCC 247-248). A body that could not make that distinction would have to choose between denying its history and denying its doctrine. The Catholic Church, because she makes it, can own every date in the timeline above and still say without embarrassment: the doctrine is true, the Father is the sole source, and the faith of Nicaea and Constantinople is confessed whole and entire in every Mass where the Creed is sung.
An institution confident enough to publish its hardest case in its own catechism is not one guarding a corruption. It is one guarding a deposit.
Continue
The Greek Creed of 381
Read the original text at the centre of this dispute: the Creed as Constantinople confessed it, with transliteration and translation.
History of the Creed
From Nicaea 325 to Constantinople 381 and beyond: the Arian crisis, the councils, and how the Creed reached the Mass.
Questions
Is the Nicene Creed Catholic? What does “proceeds” mean? Common questions about the Creed, answered plainly.
Principal sources: the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381); Third Council of Toledo (589); Council of Ephesus (431), Canon 7; Second Council of Lyons (1274); Council of Florence (1439); Catechism of the Catholic Church 246-248; John 15:26, 16:14-15; St Ambrose, On the Holy Spirit; St Augustine, De Trinitate 15; St Leo the Great, Letter to Turibius (447); St Maximus the Confessor, Letter to Marinus (c. 645); Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit (1995).