It occurred to me in a recent dialogue that I had not put my theory on how the Council of Blachernae fits into my theory that the East and the West actually agree on the filioque on paper anywhere. Obviously, that seems to be a pretty clear case of dogmatic conflict, but even so, I am not so sure. Here were my thoughts on how I would fit Blachernae into the discussion:
Blachernae is the hard part, and this is (weirdly) the time at which the East might have gotten closer to the West, but the polemical context against Florence obscured the fact.
I think there is a merely verbal distinction about the same conceptual understanding. That conceptual understanding is that the begetting of the Son is logically prior to the procession of the Spirit. But there was a period in Palamas where he went really far to the other side in trying to answer the Latin use of Cyril; this is documented by Mikonja Knežević. During that time, Palamas argued that the priority between the Son and the Spirit was *merely* verbal; that is, he argued that it was literally because the word “Father” caused us to immediately think of “Son” first that there was any order among the Trinitarian persons. But I think even he realized later that this position was too extreme, because Gregory of Cyprus doesn’t seem to take that position by Blachernae, and Palamas wasn’t objecting to that. So I think that we’ve at least agreed that the procession of the Spirit logically presumes the existence of the Son. The question then really becomes how that logical priority is articulated; the assumption on the Eastern side is that the West must be saying that the logical priority of the Son to the Spirit is the *same as* the logical priority of the Father’s priority to the Son. That is where I think the mistake was made. The West had made that distinction all the way back to Augustine in his notion of principium, and it was essentially just followed for centuries. I believe that Cyril makes the same conceptual distinction in different words when he says that the Spirit proceeds from the Son according to essence.
If we accept that there is a common conceptual distinction here, then we can look at how it is articulated differently in Latin and Greek, how we say the same thing in different words. So let’s talk about what the West means by the “single spiration” “as from one principle.”
The fact that this is from Augustine (and Leo the Great) and not Aquinas is demonstrated by the fact that it was stated in the Fourth Lateran Council when it condemned the doctrine of Joachim of Fiore and said the true doctrine was found in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. In recounting the confession of faith, the council fathers repeat a very old formula in Latin theology: “The Father is from none, the Son from the Father alone, and the holy Spirit from both equally, eternally without beginning or end; the Father generating, the Son being born, and the holy Spirit proceeding; consubstantial and coequal, co-omnipotent and coeternal; one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal.”
That relation to the Trinity as the principle of creation is important, because it connects being “principle” to inseparable operations. If the Father and the Son are both principle of the Spirit (as per Augustine, the Father being principle-without-principle and the Son being principle-from-principle), then just as the Trinity is one principle to creation, so the Father and the Son must be one principle to the Spirit. There could no more be multiple spirations than there could be multiple acts of creation.
So nothing in Lyons or Florence was new. The actual difference between Latin and Greek is not this; the difference is that the Latins *explicitly* appeal to the prior existence of the Son, while the Greeks only *implicitly* affirm the prior existence of the Son. From my perspective, this is primarily out of two concerns: (1) because a lot of heresy came out of Neoplatonism, they do not want to say anything that even *sounds* like the Intelligible Triad, and (2) there is no *explicit* statement that the Spirit proceeds from the Son (although Irenaeus interpreted Rev. 22:1 that way, so there was precedent). For that reason, theologians like Theodoret maintained that we couldn’t affirm it, even if it should have been implicit in a way that Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Cyril had no problem affirming.
Blachernae is, it seems to me, an attempt to have it both ways: to affirm some kind of logical relationship presuming the Son’s existence without actually making any positive affirmation that the Spirit proceeds from the Son. I am persuaded by Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan that what Palamas and Gregory of Cyprus had in mind was NOT eternal energetic procession and so was NOT linking the essence-energies distinction to the inner life of the Trinity. What I think that they were trying to do was to affirm a logical relationship that would not require them to affirm the filioque, and what I think they had in mind was something like the difference between an originating cause and a sustaining cause.
Note that this does NOT work from the Western perspective. It would break the causality into two principles, and there is no way for the Father to be the sole principle as originator but one principle with the Son as sustainer. So I’m not saying that we can just adopt one explanation and say that we’re done. What I am saying is that we can at least bracket the question of metaphysical explanation and say that what both sides are trying to explain is the same thing: a conceptual framework that explains the logical existence of the Son in the procession of the Spirit. Being a less-than-perfect philosopher is not an impediment to holiness; St. Basil implicitly denied inseparable operations when he thought that the Holy Spirit could only act spiritually and not materially, but he is nonetheless revered as the Doctor of the Holy Spirit for the dogma that he affirmed. In my opinion, Blachernae was not successful as a metaphysical explanation, but I can see what they were trying to affirm with the explanation, and what they were trying to affirm seems to be the very same thing that is affirmed in Latin theology.
