The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas - El Camino ...

270 Procession of the Holy Spirit
doctrine and the explanation of the procession a Filio. Arianism was the initial
issue: in professing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from
the Son, we recognize that the Son is of the same substance as the Father; this
shows that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not creatures.2 The idea that
the Holy Spirit proceeds a Patre and a Filio is intimately bound in with the
recognition of the unity in being of Father and Son.3 The accent placed on the
divinity of Christ seems to be closely connected with the history of the Latin
doctrine, in which the resurgence of various kinds of adoptionism, particularly
in Spain, played an important part.4 Thomas notes that the confession of
the Holy Spirit’s procession a Filio was also tied in with the Christological
question of the unity of the person of Christ, in response to Nestorianism.5
His theoretical assessment is, ultimately, that the aYrmation of the Spirit’s
procession a Filio seems necessary to avoid Sabellianism, because within the
structure of Latin Trinitarian doctrine, to reject the Filioque is to take away the
diVerentiation of the persons of Son and Holy Spirit. If one cannot accept that
the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, one will not be able to conceive their
personal distinctness, and ‘this undermines faith in the Trinity’.6 The concern
to preserve the faith from the errors which rejecting this article creates is
constantly present.
(2) Christ’s dignity and prerogatives. Highlighting the fact that everything
we say when we profess our faith has Christological repercussions, this second
theme is an extension of the former. The prerogatives of Christ’s person are at
the heart of this question, to the extent that the rejection of the Spirit’s
procession a Filio seems to diminish Christ’s dignity.7 The reasoning behind
this is the unity of the Father and the Son as principle-spirator of the Holy
Spirit, a unity in virtue of which that which belongs to the Father is also
attributed to the Son, except for the Wrst person’s constitutive property of
paternity. The theme of the dignity of Christ implies a determined hold on the
Nicene homoousion. Thomas’ aYrmation of the dignity of Christ is an
outstanding positive feature of his attachment to the Nicene doctrine.
(3) The concrete Son-shapedness of salvation. The Spirit’s procession a Filio
does not only engage us in theoretical reXection on the oppositional relations
within the Trinity, but also seems to be a prerequisite for explaining the
2 Homilies on the Creed, a. 8 (no. 962).
3 See for instance In Ioan. 16.15 (nos. 2114–2115).
4 See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine,
vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700), Chicago, 1977, pp. 185–186. It seems to
have been the need to respond to Arianism that created a favourable bias or orientation to the
Filioque amongst Western theologians.
5 ST I, q. 36, a. 2, ad 3; see also De potentia, q. 10, a. 4, ad 24.
6 ST I, q. 36, a. 2; SCG IV, ch. 24 (no. 3616).
7 CEG II, prol.