On the Procession of the Holy Spirit

One word in the creed divided the Latin and Greek churches; Anselm argues the Latin side from premises the Greeks themselves accepted.

by Anselm of Canterbury88 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: De processione Spiritus Sancti
First published: 1102(aged 69)
Original language: Latin

Report a rights issue

Overview

In October 1098 Pope Urban II held a council at Bari, on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, before 185 bishops, and called on Anselm, then an exile from his see of Canterbury, to answer the Greeks. The question was a single word. The Latin churches said in the creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son, the Filioque; the Greek churches said from the Father, and rejected the Latin teachers who said otherwise. The council's own records are lost, and Eadmer, the monk who wrote Anselm's life, spent most of his account describing the bishops' vestments. The council ended by condemning those who rejected Anselm's position, and did nothing to reunite the churches. The Greeks present were probably bishops of southern Italy, some of whose sees had been under Constantinople as recently as 1071; for the Norman lands of the south the council served chiefly to bring church practice into line with Rome. Four years later, back in England, Anselm wrote the argument out. His preface says he wrote because many asked him to, and in the hope that the Greeks, if they cared more for truth than for an empty victory, could be led by reason from what they confessed to what they denied. The method is the one he had always used: take only premises both sides accept, and see what follows. Both churches confessed one God in three persons, and that the Son is from the Father; from those shared beliefs Anselm argues that either the Son is from the Spirit or the Spirit is from the Son, and since no one held the first, the second must be true.

Key concepts

What does “procession” of the Holy Spirit mean?

Procession is the way the Holy Spirit comes from God, as distinct from the way the Son comes from the Father, which is called being born. Both are eternal and neither makes the one who comes forth less than the source. The whole dispute is about a single word: whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, as the Greek churches said, or from the Father and the Son, as the Latin churches said.

What is the Filioque?

The Filioque is the Latin phrase “and from the Son”, which the Latin churches said in the creed after “proceeds from the Father”. The Greek churches did not say it and objected that it had been added. Anselm defends it, but not by appeal to the authority of the Latin church. He argues that it follows from beliefs the Greeks already held.

What is the “opposition of relations”?

It is Anselm’s rule for speaking of God: unity holds everywhere, except where an opposition of relations prevents it. Father and Son are opposed as giver and receiver of being, so one cannot be the other; but in everything else, being God, eternal, wise, they are one. The rule means that persons in God can differ only by where they come from, and that is what lets Anselm argue from the persons’ distinctness to the Filioque.

If the Spirit comes from Father and Son, are there two sources?

Anselm argues that Father and Son are one source of the Spirit, not two. The Spirit proceeds from the one deity that Father and Son share, not from two things side by side. In the same way there are not two gods from whom Son and Spirit come, but one God. That is why he rejects the Greek formula “from the Father through the Son” as a description of where the Spirit comes from.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

From What Both Sides Confess

Can a quarrel between two churches be settled by reasoning from what both already believe? The treatise tries, on a single word of the creed: whether the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father.

Anselm takes only what both churches confess: one God, three persons, the Son from the Father. Then he lays down a rule. In God everything is one, except where an opposition of relations stands in the way, as being Father stands against being Son. Unless something set Son and Spirit in such a relation, they could not be told apart, so either the Son is from the Spirit or the Spirit from the Son. To the charge that the Latins added to the creed he replies that the creed also never says the Spirit is God from God, and nobody denies that.

divine procession
holy spirit
trinity
divine unity
divine relations
relations
divine essence
scriptural interpretation
creed
theological argument
reason and faith
divine mission
divine origin
objection

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 88
distinct concepts: 56
by passages held, corpus-wide: #534

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine procession” and “trinity”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
divine procession	trinity	20
divine relations	trinity	18
divine unity	trinity	18
holy spirit	trinity	16
divine procession	holy spirit	14
divine essence	holy spirit	11
divine procession	scriptural interpretation	11
procession	trinity	11
holy spirit	scriptural interpretation	10
divine essence	divine procession	9
scriptural interpretation	trinity	9
divine procession	divine unity	8
divine essence	trinity	7
divine procession	divine relations	5
divine relations	divine unity	5
divine unity	scriptural interpretation	5
holy spirit	procession	5
divine relations	procession	4
divine unity	holy spirit	4
divine essence	procession	3
divine unity	procession	3
divine essence	scriptural interpretation	2
divine essence	divine relations	1
divine relations	holy spirit	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1076 Monologion
The earliest of Anselm's books about God and the longest he wrote at Bec, composed in the mid-1070s while he was still prior there.
LA
1078 Proslogion
The book by which Anselm is known: twenty-six short chapters composed at Bec in 1077 and 1078, a year or two after the Monologion.
LA
1078 Reply to Gaunilo (Liber apologeticus contra Gaunilonem)
A treatise Anselm did not choose to write: his answer to a critic of the Proslogion, in which he restates its argument point by point.
LA
1080 De Grammatico (De grammatico)
The odd one out on Anselm's shelf: a short exercise in logic for beginners, of disputed date, which he refused to count among his dialogues on Scripture.
LA
1080 On Truth (De veritate)
The first of three dialogues Anselm wrote at Bec in the 1080s and later arranged as a set, with On Freedom of Choice and On the Fall of the Devil.
LA
1085 On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)
Builds on the definition of justice reached in On Truth, and supplies the account of the will that On the Fall of the Devil then tests on the first sin of all.
LA
1085 On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)
The longest of the three dialogues from Bec and Anselm's fullest account of evil, worked out on the case of the angels who fell.
LA
1094 On the Incarnation of the Word (Epistola de incarnatione Verbi)
A letter turned treatise, begun by the abbot of Bec around 1092 and finished by the Archbishop of Canterbury two years later, addressed to the pope.
LA
1098 Why God Became Man (Cur Deus homo)
The founding text of the satisfaction theory of the atonement, in two books, completed during Anselm's first exile from England.
LA
1099 On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato)
A sequel to Why God Became Man, written a year later for Boso, the questioner of that dialogue, to give a second answer to a question it had raised.
LA
1102 On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (De processione Spiritus Sancti) you are here LA
1107 De Concordia (The Compatibility of God's Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Human Freedom) (De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio)
Anselm's last completed treatise, written in 1107 and 1108 after his second exile, and his answer to a question the student had raised in On Freedom of Choice more than twenty years before.
LA

— or open another of their works