Meg said in the first thread
Quote from the above Orthodox article:
"The filoque's distortion of the doctrine of the Trinity also led directly oftlamented "neglect" of the Holy Spirit in the Western Church, which same neglect the Charismatic movement in this century set out to heal."
I've read that there are many Charismatics who feel the same - that the Holy Ghost had been neglected, and Charismatic Renewal changed that. I don't believe it.
It is quite peculiar that on the Catholic side the refusal of the filioque on the part of the Orthodox seems like bare stubbornness, so that the Catholic Encyclopedia ascribes it to national feeling; whereas the Orthodox consider it to be a profound split with great ramifications.
Given the previous objection, the repercussions to the acceptance of the filioque into church life are potentially massive. Because how we relate to God is significantly affected by what we believe about him, false beliefs lead to damaging spirituality. One objection often raised about Filioquist theology is that it undermines the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Thus, with his role being denigrated, his traditional ministries are effaced or replaced. The Church's unity becomes dependent on an office, spirituality becomes adherence to the letter of the law rather than its spirit, sacraments come to be understood in terms of validity, and a spirit of legalism prevails.
I've read also from the Orthodox that they feel that the filioque ties down the Holy Spirit so that the Pope becomes the distributor of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments (which is partially true seeing as the Pope is the vicar of Christ and the Holy Spirit does proceed from Christ).
In the quote from Meg above the Orthodox attitude to the Holy Spirit is compared to the Charimsatics'. I think that this is an apt analogy. I think in wanting to separate the Holy Spirit from the Son they are both trying to obtain a false and forbidden spirituality. With the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Son it becomes clear just how much Christ's life of sacrifice and his ultimate sacrifice on the cross is the normal and proper way of obtaining the Holy Spirit in this life. By denying this procession the Holy Spirit is "freed" from this sacrifice. Perhaps one of the greatest polemicists against the Church in recent times was the Orthodox priest Romanides, who was something like one of the New Theologians that infected our Church in the 20th century. He repeatedly said that we, the Catholics, had a too juridical and penetential account of salvation with too great a focus on sin when we see Christ as putting on the sins of all mankind to appease God. According to him salvation is not primarily against sin, but against death, and the Church is primarily a therapeutic hospital where we come to be cured of death (our Church does not deny this) and not primarily a place of penance where men go to make satisfaction for their sins (our Church denies this). The ultimatum being that by "freeing" the Holy Spirit from Christ they "free" Him from the cross and the humanity of Christ, which opens the doorway to a kind of Pantheistic spirituality which focuses much on communing with the Holy Spirit and little on penance. In the Charismatic movement we see a gross disregard of lawfulness and penance in favour of an extreme spiritual gluttony for "charismatic gifts" (the Church's interpretation is that God gives extraordinary gifts only when they are needed, and the reason that speaking in tongues was prevalent in the Church early on was that it was needed to spread the Gospel. Certain saints in later centuries, like St. Vincent of Ferrer, were given the gift precisely for this purpose. The Charismatics on the other hand, see it as a NORMAL sign of sanctity, which is apt to deceive them and cause them to give up basic spiritual practices like humility in chasing after these extraordinary gifts).
This is a lengthy passage from an article by James Larson:
To Dissolve Christ:
The Real Effect of the Denial of the Filioque:
Denying a knowable Essence in God, it seems inevitable that Eastern Orthodox theology and philosophy would be corrosive to human nature. If such concepts as truth, love, goodness are not applicable to God's Essence, then it only makes sense that their eternal verity and applicability to the human condition should also be eroded. As the Essence of God must disappear behind an apophatic (negative) theology, so the being of man becomes engulfed in an eschatological anthropology which is the negation of all that we associate with being human. Vladimir Losskey writes:
"This is the perfecting of prayer, and is called spiritual prayer or contemplation….It is the 'spiritual silence' which is above prayer. It is that state which belongs to the kingdom of Heaven. 'As the saints in the world to come no longer pray, their minds having been engulfed in the Divine Spirit, but dwell in ecstasy in that excellent glory; so the mind, when it has been made worthy of perceiving the blessedness of the age to come, will forget itself and all that is here, and will no longer be moved by the thought of anything." (Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 208)
Such a description of human fulfillment sounds more like the state of Nirvana, or the Vedantic state of self-realization, than it does union with a Personal God. Even more explicitly "Eastern" is the description of beatitude offered us by Dionysisus the Pseudo-Areopagite who, next to Gregory Palamas, is the most important writer in this Eastern Tradition:
“But these things are not to be disclosed to the uninitiated, by whom I mean those attached to the objects of human thought, and who believe there is no superessential Reality beyond, and who imagine that by their own understanding they know Him who has made Darkness His secret place. And if the principles of the divine Mysteries are beyond the understanding of these, what is to be said of others still more incapable thereof, who describe the transcendental First Cause of all by characteristics drawn from the lowest order of beings, while they deny that He is any way above the images which they fashion after various designs; whereas they should affirm that, while He possesses all the positive attributes of the universe (being the Universal Cause) yet, in a more strict sense, he does not possess them, since He transcends them all; wherefore there is no contradiction between the affirmations and the negations, inasmuch as He infinitely precedes all conceptions of deprivation, being beyond all positive and negative distinctions….He is super-essentially exalted above created things, and reveals Himself in His naked Truth to those alone who pass beyond all that is pure or impure, and ascend above the topmost altitudes of holy things, and who, leaving behind them all divine light and sound and heavenly utterances, plunge into the Darkness where truly dwells, as the Oracles declare, that ONE who is beyond all.” (Dionysisus the Areopagite, Mystical Theology).
Such a view of God and the ultimate destiny of man destroys the foundations of all that we consider solid and of absolute value in this life. It undermines the very basis of all human thought. If God is beyond the law of contradiction, beyond all positive and negative distinctions, beyond purity , and if He dwells in a Darkness beyond all, then all of our beliefs and efforts on the way to this Divine Nihilism are deprived of ultimate legitimacy and meaning.
Considering this devaluation of all that is human which is integral to Eastern Orthodox spirituality, it is not at all surprising that Christ's humanity is also devalued. Vladimir Losskey writes:
"The cult of the humanity of Christ is foreign to Eastern tradition….The way of the imitation of Christ is never practiced in the spiritual life of the Eastern Church." (Ibid, p. 243).
Eastern Orthodoxy does not deny the importance of the humanity of Christ in the salvific sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. In other words, Christ's Humanity is integral to their view of the act of Redemption. It does, on the other hand, profoundly devalue the centrality of Christ's Sacred Humanity in the process of our sanctification and deification. This "bypassing" of Christ's Humanity is intimately related to the denial of the Filioque – the Catholic doctrine that the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son (Latin: Filioque).
In the Catholic view the Holy Spirit is sent by both Father and Son in order to enable us to imitate Christ in His birth, life, passion, death, and resurrection. The Way of our humanity is the Way of Christ's Humanity, working out our salvation in imitation of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is thus in a spiritual sense truly "incarnate": sent by the God-Man Jesus Christ in order to form us into the likeness of the Man-God Jesus Christ. The Filioque is therefore absolutely integral to this incarnational work of the Holy Spirit.
It is otherwise with the Eastern Orthodox. Their denial of the Filioque enables the Holy Spirit to be "liberated" from this connection to the Sacred Humanity of Christ in order to that He might become what some Orthodox writers have been so bold as to call the "Soul of the World." The Holy Spirit, having been liberated from the necessity of working through the Humanity of Christ, thus becomes the source of those Divine Energies which are in creation from the beginning, and are the object and source of our Divine communication, sanctification, and deification.
Eastern Orthodox writers are therefore right in claiming that the rejection of the Filioque is the axis around which revolve all the significant differences between Eastern and Latin Rite theology and spirituality. Ultimately, while accepting the salvific fact of the Incarnation, it rejects or bypasses its meaning in regard to our salvation and deification. The Holy Spirit, sent by Christ in order to form us into His likeness, is deflected by Dionysian-Palamite theology into a type of Gnostic-Pantheistic Esotericism. And at the end of this road of ascending gnosis, we also find that our own humanity has also been bypassed. There, in this Heaven of Orthodoxy, we find no personhood as we know it, no love, no thought, no truth, no purity, and no prayer, but only a Divine Darkness beyond all being, essence, and naming. In other words: the negation of all that we now consider human.
With a Heaven like this, Who needs a Hell?
We need also mention that this liberation of the Holy Spirit from the Incarnation also has immense effects upon Eastern Orthodox positions in reference to all sorts of other Catholic doctrines: rejection of purgatory; rejection of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption; rejection of Transubstantiation; rejection of the Catholic doctrine on Original Sin; rejection of the Papacy, rejection of the Church’s teaching on contraception and divorce. If the ultimate road to union with the Divine is rooted in negation of everything that we can possibly affirm, then ultimately truth itself becomes a victim, and all doctrine and dogma are swallowed up in that darkness which is the apophatic God of Eastern Orthodox theology.
Finally, we need also mention that there has always existed in Eastern Orthodoxy, as a sort of minority, a "counter-Palamite" theology which to various degrees distances itself from Palamism, and is much closer to Catholic theology. We can do no greater service to such persons than to simply invite them home.
Authored by: James Larson - © 2008
http://www.waragainstbeing.com/partiii