The One Word That Split the Christian Creed

At the Third Council of Toledo in 589, the Visigothic king Reccared I renounced Arianism and brought his nobles into the Catholic fold. To seal the conversion, the bishops did something small and consequential: they slipped one Latin word into the Nicene Creed. Where the original 381 text said the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father," the Spanish version now read "from the Father and the Son" — filioque. The point was local. Arians taught that the Son was a lesser creature; saying the Spirit came from him too made him sound more equal to the Father.

The addition was illegal on its face. The Council of Ephesus in 431 had explicitly forbidden any change to the Creed. But Spain was far from Constantinople, and the word stuck. From there it traveled north into Frankish liturgy, and by Charlemagne's court it was being sung as if it had always been there.

Rome kept its distance for centuries. In the early ninth century, Pope Leo III personally agreed with the doctrine but refused to add the word to the Creed in the city — he had the unaltered Greek and Latin texts engraved on silver shields and posted at St. Peter's basilica. The compromise held for two hundred years.

It broke in 1014. Henry II of Germany came to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor and was startled to find the Creed sung without filioque. Pope Benedict VIII, who owed his throne to Henry's military backing, accommodated him. Rome started saying the word.

The Greek East had never accepted it. When the legates and the patriarch traded excommunications in 1054, the filioque was front and center: the Latin bull accused the Greeks of having cut the procession from the Son out of the Creed. They hadn't. Spain had added it.