St Maximos Confessor to Marinus on the Filioque
St Maximos Confessor to Marinus on the Filioque
Those of the Queen of cities (Constantinople) have attacked the synodal letter of the present very holy Pope, not in the case of all the chapters that he has written in it, but only in the case of two of them. One relates to the theology (of the Trinity) and according to this, says 'the Holy Spirit also has his ekporeusis from the Son.'
The other deals with the divine incarnation. With regard to the first matter, they (the Romans) have produced the unanimous evidence of the Latin Fathers, and also of Cyril of Alexandria, from the study he made of the gospel of St. John. On the basis of these texts, they have shown that they have not made the Son the cause of the Spirit--they know in fact that the Father is the only cause of the Son and the Spirit, the one by begetting and the other by procession--but that they have manifested the procession through him and have thus shown the unity and identity of the essence.
They (the Romans) have therefore been accused of precisely those things of which it would be wrong the accuse them, whereas the former (the Byzantines) have been accused of those things it has been quite correct to accuse them (Monothelitism).
In accordance with your request I have asked the Romans to translate what is peculiar to them (the 'also from the Son') in such a way that any obscurities that may result from it will be avoided. But since the practice of writing and sending (the synodal letters) has been observed, I wonder whether they will possibly agree to doing this. It is true, of course, that they cannot reproduce their idea in a language and in words that are foreign to them as they can in their mother-tongue, just as we too cannot do.
Saint Maximos' Letter to Marinus, PG 91, 136.
The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity document, The Father as the Source of the Whole Trinity, clearly explains why the Latin-Greek communication was not working. Processio and ekporeusis did not mean the same thing. Processio is a general term in Latin theology, whereas ekporeusis refers to a specific kind of relationship in Greek theology. To people natively fluent in one language but not the other, this would not be readily apparent. St. Maximos understood that problem.