**The dispute here is not that the Holy Spirit was SENT in the temporal sense by both Father & Son - at a point in time - to man.
Nor is the dispute that the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father THROUGH the Son temporally.
The dispute is based upon the ETERNAL PROCESSION of the Holy Spirit from the Father - defining the very nature of GOD as revealed to us in the three Persons of the Trinity.
The early Church (and EOC today) taught & teaches 3 unique (unshared) characteristics of the personae of the Trinity - based on the revelations to man by GOD about the
Hypostasis** of the Father:
**1. The Father was “unbegotten”
- The Son was “begotten - of the Father”
- The Holy Spirit “proceeds/ spirates - from the Father”
**
**Roman innovation of this understanding based upon the Filioque altered the consensus teaching of the pre-schism Church on the very nature of the Trinity - subordinating the Holy Spirit within the Trinity- and was outside of the accepted lawful consensus of the unified Ecumenical Church.
This extract deals with both matters - and has something to say about the “Pride” of Rome:**
The Filioque distorts the meaning of personhood within the Holy Trinity
**Pagan Greek ontology taught that God is first and foremost, His substance or nature. Heretics such as the Arians and Nestorians, working from this pagan Greek thought, taught that the substance or nature preceded God’s existence as Trinity, i.e. as Three Persons. This is the same interpretation that has come to prevail in Western Christian thought as can be seen by the typical arrangement of books on dogmatic and systematic theologies. (First is the existence of God, then the nature of God, then the attributes or qualities of God; all before the existence of the Trinity is broached.)
This interpretation is important inasmuch as it assumes a priori that the ontological “principle” of God lies not in a Person, but in the substance, the “being” of God. In the West, this has led to the belief that the unity of God consists of the one divine substance.
This is a distortion of Patristic theology. Among the Fathers the unity of God, the “cause” of the being and life of God consists not in the one substance of God, but in the Person of the Father (His hypostasis). The one God is not the one substance, but the Father who begets the Son and “spirates” the Holy Spirit. Thus, God is not bound by some ontological “necessity” to exist. God exists because the Father exists, He who out of love freely and eternally begets the Son and freely and eternally “spirates” the Holy Spirit.
Substance or nature does not exist in a vacuum, without a mode of existence (i.e. a hypostasis or person, an individuation). The one divine substance/nature is the being of God only because it has three modes of existence — Three Persons — which it owes not to the substance, but to the source (αρχή) of the Three: the Father. Apart from the Holy Trinity there is no God, no divine substance because the ontological “principle” of God is the Father. By regarding some Divine substance as the source of the Holy Trinity, the existence of the Three Divine Persons is made a kind of logical necessity, thus undermining the autonomy of the Holy Trinity. In the Filioque, this emphasis on likeness of Divine substance between the Father and the Son results in the subordination of the Holy Spirit.
**
The addition of the Filioque was arbitrary
Even Roman Catholic historians and theologians now admit that the addition of the Filioque was done arbitrarily, without consulting the East. The Filioque expressed a novel belief which was not a part of that which had been believed “everywhere, always, and by all”. As Alexei Khomiakov wrote in “The Church Is One”:
Code:
***Therefore the pride of reason and of illegal domination, which appropriated to itself, in opposition to the decree of the whole Church (pronounced at the Council of Ephesus), the right to add its private explanations and human hypotheses to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol is in itself an infraction of the sanctity and inviolability of the Church. Just as the very pride of the separate Churches, which dared to change the Symbol of the whole Church without the consent of their brethren, was inspired by a spirit not of love, and was a crime against God and the Church, so also their blind wisdom, which did not comprehend the mysteries of God, was a distortion of the faith; for faith is not preserved where love has grown weak.***
If the True Faith were not preserved in the West where love had grown weak (as evidenced by the arrogance of Rome in arrogating to itself all authority within the Church) then one should expect that innovations that developed in this realm where the True Faith were no longer preserved will be inconsistent with the truth. Sadly, this is the case with the Filioque.
Source: OODE - full article linked in previous post page 3 of thread.