Dr Peter Gilbert, of De unione ecclesiarum (one of a few blogs by an Orthodox Christian I can bear to read) has just posted the text of a lecture he recently gave to the Youngstown, Ohio chapter of the Society of St John Chrysostom. Please leave any comments you have at Dr Gilbert’s blog.

I will only reproduce here a quote of St Gregory the Theologian, which seems to sum up so well the history of theological wrangling between Greek and Latin Christianity:

Others, mutually divided, drive East and West
into confusion, and God has abandoned them to their flesh,
for which they make war, giving their name and their allegiance to others:
my god’s Paul, yours is Peter, his is Apollos.
But Christ is pierced with nails to no purpose.
For it’s not from Christ that we’re called, but from men,
we who possess his honor by hands and by blood.
So much have our eyes been clouded over by a love
of vain glory, or gain, or by bitter envy,
pining away, rejoicing in evil: these have a well-earned misery.
And the pretext is the Trinity, but the reality is faithless hate.
Each is two-faced, a wolf concealed against the sheep,
and a brass pot hiding a nasty food for the children.

[Poem 2.1.13, To the Bishops, vv. 151-163; PG 37, 1239-1240]

I am proud to feature this interesting article by Catholic friend of the blog and frequent commenter, Michaël de Verteuil –

Of the two Patriarchs of Constantinople most closely associated with the East-West schism, Michael Cerularius (Keroularios) is clearly the lesser figure in Orthodoxy. Unlike Photius, Michael was not a great scholar and was not declared a saint after his death. As the latter schism was to become definitive, Michael correspondingly suffered more at the hands of Catholic historiography. In its more extreme forms, he stands accused of hubris, deceit, mendacity, treachery, and even homicidal intent. The purpose of this brief historical note is to offer a more nuanced picture which may help rehabilitate his reputation in the eyes of Catholic readers.

Michael Cerularius was born in a minor senatorial family probably around the year 1000.  He served initially as a court official under Emperor Michael IV the Paphlagonian (ruled 1034-1041) until implicated in subversive intrigues with Constantine Monomachus circa 1040. Exiled, and pressured to become a monk to preclude him from further political ambitions, he accepted the tonsure following the sudden suicide of his brother.
Michael’s fortunes changed in 1042, when the Emperor died and Michael’s former co-conspirator was recalled to the capital and crowned as Constantine IX (1042-1055). Michael was made principal secretary to Patriarch Alexius I, and succeeded to the patriarchal throne one year later in 1043.  While Catholic historiography tends to portray him as having been from the very first an extremist leader of the “anti-Latin” party then most closely associated with the Studium monastery, this seems unlikely to have been the case. Michael owed his rapid preferment to imperial patronage rather than ecclesiastic politics, and had only been a monk for two years prior to his promotion. In any event, his relations with the Papacy appear to have been largely untroubled and non antagonistic for most of the next decade until 1052.

In that year, Michael ordered the Latin churches serving the important Italian merchant community in Constantinople to conform to established Byzantine practice and cease offering unleavened communion bread. In 1053, at Michael’s apparent invitation, Metropolitan Leo of Ochrid in Bulgaria (modern Macedonia) wrote a letter to Bishop John of Trani in Apulia for circulation to “all the bishops of the Franks and the most venerable Pope.” This letter condemned in harsh terms typical Latin liturgical practices, including the use of Eucharistic “azymes.” Michael then circulated to the other three Eastern Patriarchs a treatise composed by the studite monk Nicetas that further attacked Latin liturgical practices, describing them as “horrible infirmities” and Latins themselves as “dogs, bad workmen, schismatics, hypocrites and liars.” Faced with continuing defiance by the Latin churches nominally under his jurisdiction in Constantinople, he ordered them closed. When these instructions were further ignored, a mob led by studite monks and his chancellor (chartophylax) Nicephorus broke into the Latin tabernacles and reportedly trampled the “invalidly” consecrated Eucharistic bread underfoot.

Given the heated polemic atmosphere that surrounded and followed these events, it is not easy to determine with precision what provoked this series of anti-Latin outbursts. The use of unleavened bread was already long been a point of contention between the Greek and (non Chalcedonian) Armenian Churches.The recruitment in recent years of warlike Armenian officers into the Byzantine army may have helped bring the issue to the fore, but the most likely cause of this new dispute with the West lay in developments in southern Italy.
Between most of the mid 6th to 10th centuries, Sicily and much of southern Italy had been under some form of direct or indirect Byzantine control. Much of the population had been ethnically Greek or hellenized, and the area had been forcibly transferred from Western to Eastern ecclesiastical jurisdiction by the iconoclast Emperor Leo the Isaurian (ruled 718-41). As a result of these factors, by the time of the gradual Muslim conquest of Sicily and southern Italy, most of the local churches were either following or had been deeply influenced by some form of the Byzantine rite.

By 1040, Norman mercenaries formerly in the pay of the Eastern Empire began a campaign of conquest on their own behalf against the various Lombard duchies and the Byzantine catepanate that then dominated the south of the peninsula.  Despite papal opposition to these destabilizing encroachments, the Normans were solidly Latin in their Christianity. They thus understandably proceeded to replace in the areas they controlled Byzantine rite bishops with Latin ones as vacancies opened up. By 1050, a progressively Latinized episcopate had begun to substitute Latin liturgical practices for Eastern ones, and this notably involved the use of unleavened bread.

It may be this perceived Latin “aggression” against the Byzantine rite and Michael’s claimed patriarchal jurisdiction in southern Italy that prompted his restrictions against the Latin rite churches of Constantinople. This would also explain why the relatively pro-Byzantine John of Trani would have been an appropriate recipient for Leo of Ochrid’s letter. Even the invitation to John to share the letter with “the venerable Pope” makes sense in this context, as ironically Pope Leo IX (1048-54, later canonized in the West) was then in loose confinement not far away in Benevento after having been captured by the Normans at the battle of Civitate in June of 1053.

It is probably from this position of weakness in Benevento that Pope Leo sent his three legates to confer with Constantine and Michael with a view both to resolving the outstanding religious issues, and to incidentally secure support for the Pope’s own release and against his Norman enemies. The three legates were Humbert Cardinal bishop of Silva Candida, the Pope’s cousin and chancellor Cardinal Frederick (later elected as Pope Stephen IX, 1057-58), and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi. On their way, the legates were briefed on conditions in Constantinople by Argyrus, a member of the local Lombard aristocracy from Bari then serving as Byzantine catepan (katepano) for southern Italy. Argyrus had argued sharply with Michael during an earlier visit to the capital over the catepan’s inability to receive the Eucharist in its unleavened form, and thus numbered among the Patriarch’s personal enemies.

That the legates’ mission was not fully successful would probably be an understatement. With the Emperor matters went reasonably well. The alliance against the Normans was duly signed and, with Constantine’s stern encouragement, Nicetas was forced to retract his incendiary accusations and publicly burn copies of his letter. With Michael, however, the mission got off to a disastrous start.  The Patriarch found the legates disrespectful and was shocked by the hectoring tone of the papal letter Humbert had drafted. Relations with Leo had always been formally correct and, given the Pope’s plight, Michael might have expected an offer of a return to the status quo ante rather than what amounted to a demand for a humiliating public retraction and submission. While court officials attempted to broken discussions between the Patriarch’s staff and the legates, Michael steadfastly refused to have anything further to do with them, preferring to treat them instead as impostors sent to discredit him by Argyrus.

In the meanwhile, Pope Leo had made his own peace with the Normans and been released.  He died shortly thereafter, leaving the position of the legates in Constantinople untenable. With the negotiated alliance now bereft of much of its point, and the Patriarch still refusing to address any of their demands, the legates drafted a bull excommunicating Michael, Leo of Ochrid and their supporters. This the legates deposited on the altar of Sancta Sophia on 16 July, departing for Rome two days later.  Michael responded by calling a synod of local bishops which exonerated him and in turn excommunicated the legates.

Before turning to the historical reception of these excommunications, it might be worth considering Michael’s actions for what they might imply for ecumenical efforts in our own time between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.  Significantly, at no time did Michael ever deny Leo’s substantive primacy (though he clearly had a less expansive understanding of its scope than Humbert), nor did he presume to excommunicate the Pope. While he clearly opposed the filioque or the liturgical use of unleavened bread as abuses, he never cited these as sufficient grounds for schism. Instead of contesting papal authority head on, he preferred the less confrontational approach of challenging the legates’ credentials. The closure of the Latin churches of Constantinople might have been an extreme gesture, but such action remained well within his canonical discretion as local ordinary. His sponsorship and circulation of the writings of Nicetas and Leo of Ochrid may also have been tactless and provocative, but by failing to pen such missives himself, he left the way open for what he must have considered a reasonable and face-saving compromise for all concerned, i.e. reciprocal guarranties for the Latin churches in Constantinople and the Byzantine rite churches in Italy.  There is also nothing to link the Patriarch directly to sacrilege of Nicephorus (who may have been an imperial appointee) against the Latin Eucharist. In fact, Michael never took any steps explicitly indicating a definitive break with Rome, let alone with the West generally.

The whole episode seems to have been largely ignored by contemporary Byzantine historians until the mid-13th century, at which time Orthodox historiography began to present Michael as a stalwart defender of Orthodoxy against Roman pretensions, and herein lies a tale.
In 1089 Pope Urban II (1088-1099) wrote to Emperor Alexius I Comnenus enquiring as to why the bishop of Rome no longer figured in the diptychs of the Church of Constantinople.  The question was duly passed on to the Patriarchate which, after a search of its archives, purported not to know when or why communion with Rome had ceased. One does not have to ascribe excessive importance to the events of 1054 to see in this exchange a coy exercise in diplomatically convenient institutional amnesia.  After Constantine’s death in 1055, Michael had presided in the space of two years over three successive coronations only to quarrel in 1058 with Isaac I Comnenus (Emperor 1057-1059, died 1061) over some confiscated Church property. Isaac charged the Patriarch with having ordered the making of purple slippers (part of the imperial regalia) either for his own use or that of his nephew, the Emperor’s rival Constantine Ducas (Michael’s nephew by marriage). Michael was then deposed and sent into exile, suffering a shipwreck along the way and dying of his injuries.

The resulting uproar contributed to Isaac’s eventual abdication. The Comneni never forgot, however, and Alexius I and his court had little interest in exalting his uncle’s old nemesis and snubbing the Papacy he hoped would help him recruit military assistance in the West against the Turks. It is not until after the failed reunion council of Lyons in 1274 that Byzantine scholars felt a need to recast Michael as a great champion of Orthodoxy, possibly in order to demonstrate a historically consistent but dubious chain of opposition to Rome stretching from Photius to a much later Patriarch Michael III of Anchialus (1170-1178) who, unlike his 11th century namesake, would famously dismiss the Pope as a “heretical layman.”

From my favorite Orthodox blog, Prof. Peter Gilbert’s De Unione Ecclesiarum –

I finally have some good news to report. Today I received an e-mail from the Managing Editor of the journal Communio, informing me that the Summer 2009 issue is now, at last, in print, and that they have decided to feature my article on “John Bekkos as a Reader of the Fathers” on their website. A link to the website, showing the contents of their current issue, is http://www.communio-icr.com/latest.htm; a permanent link to the article, in PDF format, is http://www.communio-icr.com/articles/PDF/gilbert36-2.pdf

A few choice bits from the article, emphasis mine (but please read the whole thing before commenting) –

John Bekkos, who served as Patriarch of Constantinople during the years of the Union of Lyons (1275–1282) and who not merely accepted that union as a practical political necessity but defended it on the grounds of its theological truth, is not a popular man in much of the Christian East; many people view him as a traitor to Orthodoxy. He earns this reputation by virtue of having defended the view that the Latin doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit, the teaching that the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son as from a single principle, is reconcilable and compatible with Greek patristic tradition.

… How far John Bekkos did or did not convert to Catholicism is a legitimate question; but it is not the question I chiefly wish to ask in this paper. I mention it here merely to give one specimen of new thinking about John Bekkos, thinking that presents some hope that long-entrenched views about him—the automatic assumption of his estrangement from the mind and heart of Orthodoxy—might be due for reassessment. Bekkos is increasingly being recognized as an early practitioner of what is now called “ecumenism.” The word “ecumenism” did not exist in Bekkos’s day, and it may be doubted whether he would have looked favorably on all modern varieties of it—whatever people may say about him, John Bekkos was not a doctrinal relativist—but that Bekkos was, in some sense, a thirteenth-century Orthodox ecumenist can hardly be denied. What is vital to note is that Bekkos consciously modeled his “ecumenism” upon the practice of the fathers of the Church. He saw the effort to move beyond verbal differences to a recognition of fundamental doctrinal agreement, where such agreement in truth existed, as an essential part of the fathers’ theological work. Christian faith is, in the final analysis, a faith not in words, but in things—and intellectual effort is sometimes needed to get beyond mere words to the realities that words signify. The fathers were willing to engage in that intellectual effort in order to preserve the unity of the Church; Bekkos saw himself as following in their footsteps.

… I would contend that his reading of the fathers of the Church provides real insight into what the fathers, or some of them at least, were saying. To dismiss John Bekkos as an “anthologist,” a man who “juggles texts” or collects them mechanically without any genuine insight into their meaning, is to perpetrate a gross misrepresentation. Bekkos was a theologian; and his continuing ecumenical significance has to be based on the very real possibility that some of his readings of the patristic evidence are true.

The central part of the present article attempts to substantiate the claim that Bekkos’s patristic interpretation is an insightful one, that is, that he sees important aspects of the fathers’ teaching that others have missed. In particular, I shall argue (a) that Bekkos rediscovers something that may be called “Old Nicene” theology, (b) that, in line with this theology, Bekkos identifies a certain “logic” to the way the fathers speak about divine substance, (c) that crucial to Bekkos’s understanding of the trinitarian doctrine of the fathers is a recognition of what I would call “referential causality,” and (d) that, contrary to the claims of some, the reliability of most of Bekkos’s patristic citations is not in doubt, and that, for those texts whose genuineness is in doubt, there is reason to think that at least some of them are authentic.

… Whether or not one calls John Bekkos’s change of mind regarding the orthodoxy of the Latin Church a “conversion,” it seems undeniable that John Bekkos did, in fact, change his mind about the orthodoxy of the Latin Church as a result of the things he read while in prison in 1273 and immediately after his release from jail—basically, as a result of an intense study of the Greek Church fathers and of the interpretations of the fathers given by men like Niketas of Maroneia and Nikephoros Blemmydes. After publicly stating that the Latins were heretics, he came to see them as orthodox Christians, differing from Christians of the Greek Church, not in the essentials of their belief, but in the manner in which the one, common faith was expressed.

… John Bekkos was not a juggler of texts or an anthologist, but a man who was concerned to state the logical coherence of traditional Christian belief in the Trinity, and to state it in such a way as to show that the insights of the Latin and Greek Christian traditions are ultimately harmonious. He saw, and I think saw correctly, that the Filioque debate had deep historical roots; this debate arose out of earlier misunderstandings concerning person and substance in God. Bekkos sees Photius and Gregory of Cyprus as teaching, not Cappadocian theology pure and simple, but a kind of neo-Cappadocianism that, by radicalizing the person/substance distinction through logical premises which the Cappadocians themselves do not state, draws from this distinction consequences which the Cappadocians themselves do not draw. They could not have drawn these consequences, because to do so would have disallowed much of their own stated thought; they would not have done so, because they recognized that those who spoke differently than they did nevertheless shared with them one faith.
The Cappadocians practiced a kind of ecumenism; John Bekkos, in his role as bishop and teacher, thinks that he is authorized and obliged to do the same in the circumstances of his own time. The Cappadocians, in their day, articulated the mystery of the Trinity in a way that differed, in some significant respects, from the way St. Athanasius or St. Epiphanius or Pope St. Damasus articulated it; yet the Cappadocians strove to maintain communion with St. Athanasius and St. Epiphanius and Pope St. Damasus. Similarly, St. Maximus, in his day, recognized that the Latin-speaking Church articulated the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s procession in a way that differed from the way most Greek-speaking Christians did; yet he strove to maintain the bonds of communion, and said that he had never known the fathers to disagree with each other in thought, even though, very often, they disagree with one another verbally. John Bekkos thinks that reasons of Christian truth and love oblige him to imitate these holy men.

… Trinitarian language becomes meaningless if it loses its concrete moorings in the revelation of God in Christ. John Bekkos understood that, as there is no approaching the Father except through the Son, so there is no knowing the Holy Spirit’s eternal relation to the Father except, implicitly or explicitly, through the Son. The Spirit does not lead to the Father except through the Son, nor does the Spirit come forth from the Father to us except through the Son. When theologians deny a mediation of divine being, when they confidently assert an ontology that makes the Son’s mediation of the Spirit’s ousia impossible, one must ask how they have acquired this mystical knowledge of the Father that shunts the Son off to the side.

John Bekkos did not shunt off the Son. He worshiped God the Logos, and logic played a role in how he worshiped him. He had no use for a “spirituality” that was not true rationality, just as he had no use for any new Spirit who is not through the Son. He was a diligent, painstaking researcher who cared about fact, because he cared about truth; but he did not worship the status quo. Pachymeres and others testify to Bekkos’s faith that, even if his own generation failed to appreciate what he had tried to do, future generations would understand. Time may yet prove him right.

On the Present Apparent Conflict Between “Orthodoxy” and “Catholicism

From Dissertations on Subjects Relating to the “Orthodox” or “Eastern-Catholic” Communion (1853), by William Palmer, M.A., Fellow of St. Mary Magdalene College, Oxford, and Deacon.

As there is one God and Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, one Holy Ghost, and one Baptism, so also there is One Body of the Church, the essential attributes of which are all inseparably united together. The Church is Holy: the same Church is Catholic, or Universal: the same is Apostolic: the same is Orthodox, or rightly-believing: the same is One. If there can be two Gods, one Almighty and the other all-merciful, then there may be two Churches, one Catholic or Universal, and the other Orthodox.

Yet at a certain point of time, or between two certain points of time, we see that great body of the visible Catholic or Oecumenical Church, which from the division of the Oecumenical Roman Empire (tes oikoumenes) was distinguished superficially into two branches, Eastern and Western, Greek and Latin, without detriment to its essential unity, splitting into two separate and hostile communities, one of which insisting upon “Orthodoxy’” was nevertheless unable to enforce that Orthodoxy upon the consciences of men by the weight of manifest Catholicism, the other insisting at the time on the Roman pre-eminence and the indivisible unity of the Church (and now also upon the note of a greater appearance of Catholicism,) was little careful or able to meet the charge brought against it with regard to Orthodoxy.

The Eastern section of Christendom in condemning the Latins urged openly that they had become heterodox, and assumed or implied tacitly that therefore they could not be Catholic, while their own Eastern Church, in spite of any appearances to her disadvantage, must be also Catholic, because she was unquestionably Orthodox. The Latins retorted that having on their aide the See of Peter (to which was attached the unity and Catholicity of the Church), they must therefore, in spite of any appearances to their disadvantage, be also Orthodox, while the Easterns refusing to follow them, and so breaking off from unity, could not really have any advantage in respect of Orthodoxy, whatever appearances they might think they had in their favour.

Each side had its own strong point, on which it insisted: neither side answered fairly or adequately to the objection of the other. Each alike dissembled the point of its own apparent disadvantage, and trusted to that point on which it felt itself strong to overbalance and hide its weakness.

Under such circumstances if the two contending bodies had been at the first equal in strength the one to the other, and had remained so since, the two forces would have absolutely neutralized one another, and it would have seemed to us now that cither there is no such thing in existence as the Church of the Creed, at once Orthodox and universal, (the two destroying one another,) or else that the two conflicting bodies are both equally the Church, that is parts of the Church, their conflict and external separation being only a superficial accident and disease, and not reaching to the essential orthodoxy and Catholicity inherent in them both.

But whatever may have seemed to be the case at the first separation, when the two sides were in point of extent and in the number of their Bishops nearly equal, (though even then the dignity of the elder Rome and the pre-eminence of the See and Martyrion of Peter turned the balance of mere authority much in favour of the West,) there is certainly no such equality existing now. As time has gone on the evidences of Eastern superiority in respect of Orthodoxy have remained much what they were, while changes have taken place in the world and in Christendom which have greatly increased the advantages of the Westerns in respect of Catholicism.

The so-called “Catholic” or “Roman-Catholic Church appears now plainly to all men to be really Catholic or universally diffused (and this is one part at least of the idea of Catholicism,) in a degree in which the so-called ” Orthodox” Church does not appear to be so. This is a fact, about which there can be no doubt, and no mistake. But on the other side it is only to those who think so that the so-called “Orthodox” Church appears to be really orthodox in a degree in which the so-called ” Catholic” Church does not appear to be so; or that the apparent identity of the spirit of domination in Christian Rome with that of Pagan Rome, and the perpetual self-preaching of the Roman See seem to be strong arguments against the Roman side.

Listen to Pope Benedict XVI and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew recite the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 together in Greek (thanks to Fr Z).

… [T]he reading of history that you have taken on from Joseph Farrell, that I think constitutes an ideology, in fact resembles, theoretically and rhetorically, the ideology of those who gave fuel to the Bosnian war. It presents a discourse wherein the West is conceived to have fallen from divine grace, and the chief villain of the story is St. Augustine. It is to his “dialectic” of divine simplicity, which you see as fundamentally akin to that of Eunomius, that you ascribe the manifold problems of the West. It may well be that you accord Augustine some credit as an honest Christian; but his thinking you consistently represent as heresy, “Sabellianism” or “Semi-Sabellianism.” When I say that this is an ideology, I mean that it is maintained only through a kind of willful disregard of Christian history. It presents a caricature view of both the West and the East, a caricature that arises from an impatience with looking at facts. Neither the East, nor certainly the West, was ever as monolithically Photian in its understanding of the trinitarian mystery as you make it out to be. That is one of the things, in writing this blog, that I have tried to show.

That impatience with looking at facts has serious consequences for Christian relations. The West is asked to renounce its own past, to take on a view of God that never really belonged to it. I do think that this is a kind of destruction of memory, implicitly a kind of violence, and that the West rightly rejects such a demand. And I know that theoretical violence often issues in the physical kind.

This is not to say that the West never perpetrated violence on the East, both theoretical and physical. And it is right that the theoretical and physical causes of violence be acknowledged and renounced on both sides. But my consistent claim throughout this blog has been that people like the Cappadocians, St. Athanasius, St. Maximus, and other fathers of the Church were constantly aware of the dangers of Christian misunderstanding, dangers of violence, and that they sought to obviate those dangers by perceiving, if at all possible, the underlying commonality of doctrine when there was a verbal disagreement. I think that that is what St. Maximus does in his Letter to Marinus. And I am pretty certain that the underlying commonality of doctrine St. Maximus defends in that letter allows for the orthodoxy of St. Augustine’s teaching on the Holy Trinity, in spite of what is said by Anastasius the Librarian.

In short, I think that Bekkos is a better reader of the patristic evidence than Photius is. It may be that you think such an acknowledgment is inconsistent with belonging to the Orthodox Church. Perhaps you are right; God is judge. But I have a great hesitation to leave Orthodox discourse entirely in the hands of those who are impatient with fact, and who thereby disallow the possibility of any Christian reconciliation from the outset …

– Peter Gilbert

Update (6/30/2008) – A new post at De unione ecclesiarum: “On exclusive truth-claims; or, What I Believe”

(Apologies for the cheesy title.)

Recently on some of my favorite blogs, there have been some excellent rebuttals to Orthodox contentions about the Filioque clause and the Procession of the Holy Spirit.

First, Sacramentum Vitae’s Dr Michael Liccione (a veteran of irenic, scholarly, substantive online Catholic-Orthodox debate) has added a new installment to an ever-growing series of posts on the Filioque. As always, the gigantic ensuing combox discussions are well worth following. Also, by popular demand, Dr Liccione has added a separate blog category for discussion of the Filioque, as of today containing 13 posts.

Second, Dr Scott Carson of An Examined Life has posted a lengthy reflection on the Filioque debate currently going on at Sacramentum Vitae. Dr Carson’s past posts dealing with the topic are also well worth studying (see especially here).

Third, Brandon, at the philosophy blog Siris, has another reflection on the ongoing debate at Sacramentum Vitae. Brandon’s previous posts on the topic may be read through here.

Fourth, Jonathan Prejean at Crimson Catholic has posted “A Filioque Footnote” to the Sacramentum Vitae, debate, concerning a Catholic patristic scholar’s take on Gregory of Nyssa’s use of the phrase dia tou yiou (“through the Son”).

Finally (last but not least), Dr Peter Gilbert at De unione ecclesiarum has a very interesting post which is more up my alley, as a very lazy amateur who enjoys studying history more than theology or philosophy. The post concerns Anastasius Bibliothecarius (“the Librarian”) – a very colorful ninth-century member (and perhaps antipope) of the Roman Church – and his apparently Greek-friendly (even Photian) interpretation of Maximus the Confessor’s defense of Latin understandings of the Spirit’s Procession (be sure to read Dr Gilbert’s earlier post on that here).

Update (6/25) – And yet another lengthy post from Dr Liccione, “Creedal Amplification”. Our cup runneth over!

Update (6/28) – Wei-Hsien Wan at Torn Notebook has a great new post on the Filioque debates from the perspective of a “bystander” (which I consider myself to be as well). The post ends with some extremely wise advice from Saint Ephrem Syrus:

Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be reached only by Their names;
do no look further, to Their persons, just meditate on Their names.
If you investigate the person of God, you will perish,
but if you believe in the name, you will live.
Let the name of the Father be a boundary to you,
do not cross it and investigate His nature;
let the name of the Son be a wall to you,
do not cross it and investigate His birth from the Father;
let the name of the Spirit be a fence for you,
do not enter inside for the purpose of prying into Him.
(Memra on Faith 4:129-40)