The Filioque

Abstract

Among the issues that have divided Eastern and Western Christians throughout the centuries, few have had as long and interesting a history as the question of the filioque—i.e., whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son” as the West came to profess, or from the Father alone, as the East has traditionally maintained. For over a millennium Christendom’s greatest minds have addressed and debated the question (sometimes in rather polemical terms), all in the belief that the theological issues at stake were central to an orthodox understanding of the trinitarian God. The history of the filioque is also one of the most interesting stories in all of Christendom, filled with characters and events that would make even the best dramatists envious, and thus a story worth telling. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy is the first complete English language history of the filioque written in over a century. Beginning with the biblical material and ending with recent agreements on the place and meaning of the filioque, this book traces the history of the doctrine and the controversy that has surrounded it. There are chapters on the Greek and Latin fathers, the ninth century debates, the late medieval era, the Councils of Lyons and Ferrara-Florence, and the post Florentine period, with a separate chapter dedicated to the twentieth and twenty-first century theologians and dialogues that have come closer than ever to solving this thorny, and of yet, unresolved, ecumenical problem.

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