Above: Icon of the Fathers of the Eighth Ecumenical Council.

In accounts of the development of the Christian Church as understood in the global West, a key Ecumenical Council has been virtually erased and replaced, in what in modern times has become an Orwellian style re-write of the historical and spiritual record of Christianity.

The “lost” Eighth Ecumenical Council holds a key not only to true Christian union today, but to the true theology and soteriology of the Apostolic Tradition. Powerful interests across the centuries and especially today have sought to obscure it.

This is no delusional “Da Vinci” code conspiracy theory, but a sober and spiritually enlightening aspect of Orthodox Christian Tradition in the one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.

All this was highlighted last week in an historic Orthodox Christian conference in North America, organized by Orthodox Ethos and co-hosted by the Serbian Orthodox Christian Mission Church of St. Michael the Archangel in northern Alabama. The conference was a powerful rejection of those who would corrupt Orthodoxy, especially in the Anglo-Eurocentric cultural sphere of the Global West. Prominent hierarchs and scholars speaking at the conference from Europe and America represented a coming together of upholders of Orthodox Christian Tradition with those in the grassroots energetic American Orthodox mission field, together offering discernment and warnings about the “signs of the times” of these latter days.

The Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 879-80, the so-called Photian Council (after St. Photius the Great, one of the “Three Pillars’ of Orthodoxy), upheld the integrity of the Most Holy Trinity and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, while rebuking pretensions of those in the West who would pervert the conciliar ecclesiology of the Church by unjustly advancing the Roman Papacy’s control. (The earlier false Eighth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church 869-70, claimed to replace the Photian Council, was rightly declared illegitimate for poor attendance and heretical views and politics by the subsequent truly ecumenical council; however its influence again lingers in the common Western mis-labeling of the whole controversy as the “Photian Schism.”)

The Orthodox Eighth Council of 879-80 was accepted by all the patriarchates of the day, including Rome. It remains a powerful antidote to the schism and heresy of Roman Catholicism as well as to the modern heresy of false ecumenism. Recognition of the Eighth Council as such, as was made by past Church Fathers and Councils, today will stand as a spiritually powerful bulwark against false union and heresy.

The filioque was an addition to the Creed that emerged from a local council in the West to become upheld as official Roman Catholic doctrine. It added erroneously that the Holy Spirit proceeded from “the Father and the Son,” instead of only from the Father as in the original Creed. It reflected a growing heretical culture in the Latin world of regarding the Holy Spirit as in effect subservient to a melding of the Father-Son, shaping an impossible binary view of the Trinity as the deluded basis for the ecclesiology of the Roman Pope. In that view, the papacy was exalted over the true governance of the Church by Councils inspired by the Holy Spirit.

The Eighth Council’s resounding rejection of the filioque and Rome’s false claims to non-canonical self-assertion relate also to what others also term an additional “lost council,” what some call the Ninth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople 1341, 1347, 1351), supporting the theology of another “pillar of Orthodoxy” St. Gregory Palamas against the rationalistic heterodox philosophy of Roman Catholicism. By defending the distinction between essence and energies in Orthodox theology and its hesychastic practice, and the uncreated nature of the divine energies, the Ninth Council further buttressed the critique of the heresy of the filioque and Roman Catholic tendencies. For the false binarized theological culture of the filioque in the West encouraged an instrumentalized view of the Holy Spirit and ultimately of divine energies or grace, leading from Thomas Aquinas’ Scholasticism to a de facto false sense of grace or energies of God as created. Thus the Most Holy Spirit and the grace of God were objectified and made subject in effect to the will to power and individualism that increasingly took over Western culture, as evident in the development of the post-Schism papacy.

One additional aspect of the “lost councils” is their relation to Western psychology. The Bulgarian psychoanalytic writer Julia Kristeva wrote of this in an essay on Dostoevsky. While Dr. Kristeva was a feminist and postmodernist, her adaptation of neo-Freudian or Lacanian psychology to issues of cultural symbolism here is instructive. Kristeva argued that in effect the filioque equated Father and Son and thus contributed to a hyper-individualistic Western psychology evident both in the emergence of the modern Roman papacy and in an exaltation of individual will (now evident in current global Western “identity politics” and identitarian ideologies, both racial and sexual).

Kristeva’s analysis drew on the neo-Freudian Lacanian model of realms of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic as shaping human selfhood culturally. In her view, the filioque reflected a new Western model in which the Real and the Imaginary were melded, creating a kind of virtual reality of individual selfhood. In turn, the Symbolic realm was subjected to that meld of individualism, meaning that the world as symbolism came to be seen culturally in the global West as an object to be manipulated, as in technocracy. In effect, Creation became falsely identified with technology, and all apart from God. (In biblical terms in Orthodoxy, this could be considered akin to the emergence of arts and technology in cities under the exiled descendants of Cain in Genesis.)

Kristeva then contrasted this model to what she termed the more mystical and fluid model of the Christian East (the Orthodoxy of her youth) following the original Creed without the filioque. While Kristeva’s technique of mixing the psychological and theological is typical of the West, in which she has spent her adult career as a secular academic, nonetheless it offers insights into that very mixing of the psychological and theological that became part of Western heresy historically, both Catholic and Protestant. Her original critique of the filioque in relation to Western individualistic psychology is in line with modern Russian Orthodox philosophical critiques of modern colonialist “Western civilization” from the time of Dostoevsky. It is also in line with similar secular critiques of modern Western ontology related to individualism by Martin Heidegger among others.

Kristeva’s work as a feminist postmodernist needs of course to be distinguished from Orthodoxy, which in later writing she also criticicized as too traditional, and given her later revealed status as a former agent of the Bulgarian Communist government while a student in France.

But it is undeniable that the filioque as grave theological error both reflects and expresses Western corruption, which in modern globalization afflects the entire world, and of which Orthodox Christians need to be alert and to denounce. Some Westernized Orthodox academics today discount the importance of the filioque to their own peril, by way of promoting false unity with Catholicism, following the lead of liberal and aggrandizing Roman Catholic academics. But the recent Orthodox conference highlighted how essential it is for faithful Orthodox Christians to uphold the Eighth Council and the work of the pillar of Orthodoxy St. Photios the Great.

Although I was not able to attend the conference in person as planned, due to work and family commitments, I was grateful that a member of our mission was able to attend in person to report back to us. while I was edified and blessed by listening to talks live-streamed. Thanks to Father Peter Heers for organizing and his family, with Archangel Michael Parish, and to my friends Fr. Hans Jacobse and Prof. David Ford among other speakers for participating.

(Unworthily the above reflection on the cultural-psychological aspects of the filioque draws on my own academic work as an Orthodox Christian academic in the field of ecosemiotics, including in my books Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape, Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics, my essays in collections I co-edited Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage  and Healing Humanity: Confronting our Moral Crisis, and my manuscript in progress, The Hidden God of Nature: Christian Ecopoetics and the Novel from Chaucer to Dostoevsky.)

Glory to God!