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Introduction
A frequent talking point among Eastern Orthodox apologists concerns a short work that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in 1263 or early 1264, known as the Contra errores Graecorum. The claim is that St. Thomas bases his entire refutation of Eastern Orthodoxy on a mass of forgeries. The conclusion drawn from this (supposed) fact is that the medieval Latin synthesis on the papacy, the Filioque, and the other points disputed with the Greeks was founded on forgeries rather than on a genuine study of the Fathers. The same claim then becomes the explanatory framework for the unions of Lyons II and Florence, which remain an embarrassment for the Orthodox.
In this article I want to focus especially on the Filioque, since it is a particular interest of mine and, in my opinion, was regarded as the more important dogmatic question at both Lyons II and Florence.
In reality, this narrative is a fabrication on several different levels, and nowhere more so than on the composition of the Contra errores Graecorum itself. As the scholarship of the last century has decisively shown, the Contra errores Graecorum is nothing like a florilegium (i.e., an ancient “quote mine”) against Orthodoxy, and to call many of its quotations “forgeries” does no justice to their origins, least of all in the case of the Trinitarian texts.
Further, as a supposed disproof of Catholicism the objection is self-defeating. These apologists betray their ignorance of how inauthentic texts were used in the patristic era and in the Byzantine East, and the same standard would just as easily refute the Church of the first millennium and the Byzantines of the second.
Finally, the idea that the Eastern Orthodox at Florence were chiefly convinced by forgeries is a fairy tale. Both sides at Florence did put forward some inauthentic texts in the debate on the Filioque, but the great majority of the texts cited were authentic. In fact, when explicitly commenting on what convinced them, the Greek bishops pointed to the lengthy excerpts from authentic texts, against the claims of Mark of Ephesus (which could hardly be verified). To explain the defection of the Eastern bishops and the ensuing union by the small number of forgeries is delusional.
I. Spurious texts in the councils and in Byzantine controversy
NOTE. The examples that follow are given ad hominem in the classical sense: they show the disastrous conclusions that follow from discrediting doctrines, councils, and the like on the basis of the inference the apologists draw. None of them is meant to discredit the doctrine in whose service the text was cited. They are meant to show that the inference from “spurious texts were used” to “the doctrine is false” cannot be drawn by anyone who accepts the first seven councils and the later Byzantine tradition.
1. The Apollinarian forgeries
The first example of dubious texts entering a theological dispute comes from the Council of Ephesus (431). At its first session a florilegium of sixteen patristic extracts was read. Two of them were Apollinarian writings under orthodox names: one read as Pope Julius comes from a letter of Timothy the Apollinarian, and one read as Pope Felix is an Apollinarian fragment. Another famous example from the same dispute concerns the origin of St. Cyril’s celebrated formula, “one incarnate nature of God the Word,” which came from a tract of Apollinarius lying in the Alexandrian archive under the name of St. Athanasius. These forgeries were not exposed by modern scholarship but a century after the dispute by Leontius. [1]
2. The Dionysian corpus
The corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite first appears in controversy at the Collatio of 532, where it was cited by the Severians. Some contemporary Orthodox pretend that concern over the origin of the Dionysian corpus is a modern invention; in fact there were doubts about its authorship at the very moment it first appeared. Hypatius of Ephesus objected to the quotations as soon as the Severians produced them, arguing that they could not be genuine, since St. Cyril never cites them. [2] The corpus was nevertheless received by both East and West, and quoted by the Lateran Synod of 649, by the Sixth and Seventh Councils, by St. Maximus, by St. John Damascene, and by many others. How, then, are we to receive a corpus whose authorship is, at the very least, dubious on both intrinsic and extrinsic grounds? The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in its article on Pseudo-Dionysius, states the following: the Dionysian writings “lose none of their credibility owing to the ‘problem’ of authorship; they rise or fall in Orthodox esteem on the basis of their content alone.” [3] This is a good principle, and it should apply equally to texts of dubious origin used in the East and in the West.
3. Constantinople III
The history of Constantinople III (680–681) is a complete mess. The council was almost entirely taken up with questions about the authenticity of texts. The trouble began when the official acts of the Fifth Council, held in the same city roughly a century earlier, were suspected of having been falsified in a Monothelete sense. After a great deal of investigation, a monk named George confessed that, at the instigation of Macarius of Antioch, he had falsified every copy of the Fifth Council that came into the patriarch’s hands. Macarius’s own patristic florilegium was then found to consist of mutilated extracts, and he was condemned. What makes the affair stranger still is that recent scholarship has argued that the documents the council denounced as forgeries were in fact authentic, so that the council’s own proof of forgery was unsound to some degree. [4]
4. The Quinisext Council and the “Apostolic” Canons
One of the most egregious examples of the use of forgeries comes from the Council in Trullo (691–692), also known as the Quinisext Council. Ironically, the council accepted the eighty-five canons “handed down to us in the name of the holy and glorious Apostles” (can. 2) while accusing the Apostolic Constitutions of having been corrupted by heretics. In reality, the Apostolic Constitutions is a compilation of fourth-century Syrian liturgical and canonical material from a variety of sources, and the same is true of the Apostolic Canons, which is exactly why the Canons were attached to the Constitutions: they came out of the same ecclesiastical community and were gathered for the same purpose. Some may accuse me of relying on “modern scholarship,” but here, as with the Cyrillian texts and the Dionysian corpus, the objection is ancient. That is why the Gelasian decree lists the Apostolic Canons among the apocrypha. The example may look minor, but these canons are the foundation of the Byzantine canonical tradition. If we are to throw out everything built on texts of dubious authorship, the whole Byzantine canonical tradition goes out with it.
Another ironic instance concerns the canons on clerical continence. To support their practice of not binding priests to perpetual continence, the fathers of Trullo appealed to a canon of the Council of Carthage, claiming to stand in line with the North African discipline. Yet when we look at the sources, the African canons say the opposite. The Council of Carthage of 390, received into the African Code of 419, decreed that bishops, priests, and deacons be “continent in all things,” and called this “what the Apostles taught and antiquity itself observed.” [5] Some chalk this up to an atrocious misreading of the canons, but it is far more likely that the text was mangled in translation, whether by accident or on purpose. This dubious text became the foundation (together with other spurious material) of a distinctive Greek practice that has lasted more than thirteen hundred years.
And this is not even the best part. Why did I call this “ironic”? If you are paying attention, you may have noticed that the mangled version of the Carthaginian canon, as the Greeks read it, said that bishops as well as priests and deacons needed to remain continent only at certain times. Their own source, in other words, supported the continued use of marriage by bishops too. Yet their legislation refused to go that far and denied the concession to bishops, as remains the practice to this day. The fathers of Trullo did not even follow their own dubious texts when they legislated. [6]
5. Nicaea II
An oft mentioned example occurred at the Second Council of Nicaea. The pseudo-council of Hiereia had cited a litany of dubious texts, and its florilegia were “riddled with fragments of dubious attribution and genuineness,” [7] something the contemporary enemies of iconodulia rarely mention. Nicaea II, with this in mind, made a genuine attempt to avoid the same risk in its own citations. The Seventh Council insisted that whole books, and not loose extracts, be produced in session, precisely because Hiereia had worked from sheets of doubtful texts. Yet the precaution was not completely successful, and a number of dubious texts slipped through, among them the pseudo-Basilian letter to Julian the Apostate, read as Basil’s. (As I said above, it would be far too rash to proclaim all such texts “forgeries” with absolute certainty.)
6. Photius, St. Andrew, and Constantine
While many Byzantines are quick to point out the use of forgeries in support of the papal dogma, there are plenty of examples of Byzantines doing the same thing in order to oppose the authority of the Bishop of Rome.
First, at the Photian council of 879–880, letters of Pope John VIII were read in a Greek version heavily redacted to remove the passages unfavorable to Photius and the council. Francis Dvornik, who is more than fair to Photius, says that the letters “were changed, with the consent of the legates,” and that “John VIII protested against the changes made in his letters by the Greeks.” [8]
Second, one of the chief difficulties for Constantinople was that the see of Byzantium was not an apostolic see but a later foundation. A legend was therefore produced in which the Apostle Andrew founds the see and ordains Stachys its first bishop, circulating under the name of Dorotheus of Tyre. Dvornik showed that these episcopal lists were compiled around the turn of the ninth century, which is probably not a coincidence. The legend became a standard tool in the hands of Byzantine polemicists and went a long way toward shaping their ecclesiology of the see of Constantinople and its relation to Rome. [9]
Third, one of the most ironic examples is the use of the Donation of Constantine in the East. Orthodox polemicists often cite the Donation as one of the forgeries on which the papal dogma was supposedly built. Yet in the East the Donation of Constantine was received into the Byzantine canonical tradition in the twelfth century and used to argue for the claims of Constantinople as the New Rome. [10]
7. The azymes
The controversy over the azymes (the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist) does not get much attention today, but it was a major point of dispute in earlier eras. A tract under the name of St. Athanasius and fragments attributed to St. John Damascene, both titled On the Azymes (De azymis), circulated in the centuries after 1054 to supply some sort of patristic support for the Eastern position against the West.
8. Lyons and Florence
There were plenty of shenanigans surrounding Lyons II and Florence on both sides, extending in some cases to the mutilation of manuscripts in order to destroy the other side’s evidence (although, to my knowledge, the only well-documented instances are Greek). After Lyons II, Patriarch John Bekkos had to defend his unionism against the great majority of Greeks who opposed him. He focused above all on the Filioque and produced many texts from the Fathers. In one case an “old codex” (old from the perspective of 1280!) of St. Gregory of Nyssa was found to have had the word ἐκ scraped off with a knife, at the very place where Gregory speaks of the Spirit as from the Son. When the matter was brought before Bekkos’s synod, it ordered that the gap be left empty and the facts recorded, since it would not be safe to write the word back in. [11]
Something similar came to light after the Council of Florence. In the middle of a textual dispute, Mark of Ephesus claimed that the Latin codices of St. Basil had been falsified, while admitting that four or five manuscripts in Constantinople itself carried the same reading. The Latins, for their part, knew their manuscript’s history well enough: it had been brought from Constantinople the year before by Nicholas of Cusa, it was a parchment book far older than the schism, and it bore no mark of alteration. To test the claim, Bessarion (a Greek, and later a cardinal) examined the manuscripts present at the council. Of the six copies there, five had the Latin reading, among them the ninth-century Marcianus gr. 58. [12] Then, upon returning to Constantinople, he searched the libraries of the monasteries and found that the copies written after the controversy began lacked the Latin reading, while the older ones had it. Beyond this, in the monastery of Christ Pantepoptes he found two old codices from which the words had been removed, one by a blade and the other by ink. [13]
9. Gregory Palamas
In the Palamite controversy one of the texts most often cited by Gregory Palamas and his party was a homily on the Annunciation ascribed to St. Athanasius. It supplied the language about the realities “around God” that served the distinction of essence and energies. Palamas cites it in his letters, in the Hundred and Fifty Chapters, in the Antirrhetics, and in the treatises on the procession, and it is quoted twice in the synodal Tome of 1351. The homily is a seventh-century pseudepigraphon, “now almost unanimously recognized as spurious.” [14] Here we have one of the key articulations of the doctrine resting on a “forged” text.
Conclusion
The point of this section is not to disparage or disprove any of the doctrines mentioned, which should be obvious enough from the fact that I hold many of them. What the examples show is that the unqualified assertion “if doctrine x is supported by forgeries, then it is false” is simplistic and self-defeating. Many of the qualified versions of the assertion fail as well. In several of these cases the forgeries were not merely incidental but quite fundamental to the formulation and defense of the doctrine (St. Cyril, Palamas, the azymes, the laws on priestly continence, the role of Constantinople, etc.).
II. Were the Greeks deceived by forgeries?
At Florence the texts of the Fathers were debated at length in the sessions of March 1439, with John of Montenero speaking for the Latins and Mark of Ephesus for the Greeks. The Orthodox apologists argue that the Greeks were won over by a great number of Latin forgeries. If that were really the case, we would expect at least a majority of the texts Montenero cited to be of dubious origin.
Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P., has done exactly this work, tallying the authorities Montenero read in the March sessions, sixty-one testimonies in all, and checking them against the authenticity judgments of the Clavis Patrum. Of the twenty-nine Latin authorities, twenty-two are indisputably authentic, three inauthentic, two disputed, and two unidentified. Of the thirty-two Greek authorities, twenty-nine are authentic (counting the fifth book Against Eunomius as the ancient witness it is, and taking St. Jerome’s version of Didymus at face value), two inauthentic, and one unidentified. That is fifty-one authentic testimonies against five inauthentic and five disputed. [15] By modern standards such a rate of inauthentic texts would be troubling; by medieval standards it was a remarkable feat, and very few florilegia could boast such accuracy. What is also notable is the accuracy with which it cited texts from original manuscripts, rather than from other florilegia wich often included interpolations, glosses, and bad translations (as we shall see later in the case of Nicholas of Crotone).
On the Orthodox account we would expect a high rate of inauthentic texts, wildly out of proportion to the authentic ones. Yet, we see the opposite. Not only is there a mere handful of inauthentic texts, but, relative to the era, there are far fewer than one would expect, with the remaining texts quoted with precision often from the most ancient condices they could find with a clear chain of custody. Consider the total number of inauthentic texts presented: are we really to believe that the Greek bishops would have capitulated at sixty-one texts but not at fifty-six? From this consideration alone it is incredible to me that anyone would dream of making the claim.
Among the disputed points the most attention has gone to the aforementioned Against Eunomius III, 1, which makes an interesting case study. The variant used by the Latins is attested in manuscripts well before the schism, some of them from regions outside any Latin influence. The exact origin of the variant is still debated, and most scholars hold that it is not from St. Basil himself. But, as I said before, it is an early interpolation in a text that was read, studied, and taught in the East for centuries before the schism. Quite a few of the “forgeries” are cases exactly like this, minor manuscript variants present long before the schism, which hardly support the grandiose claims of the Orthodox apologists.
When we look at the testimonies of the unionist Greeks, the reason they joined the Latins was not isolated discrepancies among manuscripts but the fact that so many of the testimonies simply could not have been forged: to forge them one would have had to create whole homilies, commentaries, and chapters. These men, many of them humanists with experience of manuscript variation, understood perfectly well that small corruptions and insertions happen. But when they studied these texts they saw that the arguments for the Filioque drawn from the Fathers went far beyond anything such variants could account for. Bessarion famously said that if all such passages were removed from the books of the Latin Fathers there would be “nothing left but blank pages.” [16] To claim that these men were convinced by isolated insertions or corruptions is absurd, since they deliberately sought out the long passages that could not have been corrupted.
III. St. Thomas and the Contra errores Graecorum
The popular picture of the Contra errores Graecorum is that St. Thomas sat down one day to write a book refuting the Greeks and filled it with whatever texts came to hand. This is far from the truth. The work was written at the request of Urban IV, who sent St. Thomas a libellus (a florilegium) compiled by Nicholas of Durazzo, a Greek by birth, and asked for his assessment of it. The libellus was troubling because many of its quotations contained language offensive to Latin ears, especially in the way they spoke of the Trinity. St. Thomas accordingly sets himself two tasks in his prologue: first, to explain how these seemingly erroneous statements can be understood in an orthodox sense; second, to show how the same authorities can be used to teach and defend the Catholic faith.
It would be a complete distortion to imagine that St. Thomas collected these quotations himself in order to deploy them against the Greeks, or that he authenticated them on his own authority. The work is a commentary on a florilegium, nothing out of the ordinary before the modern era, and in works of this kind the fault obviously lies not with the commentator but with whoever compiled the quotations in the first place.
This is universally recognized by the scholars who have studied the Contra errores Graecorum. The title itself, which St. Thomas did not give the work and which was attached to it decades after his death, is something of a misnomer. As Hyacinthe-François Dondaine, who edited the text for the Leonine edition, puts it, the title “purely and simply misreads the intention of the author.” Antoine Dondaine called the work “less a treatise against the Greeks than an inquiry into the Libellus.” Mark Jordan describes it as “an occasional commentary upon a missionary polemic. It is not itself a polemic.” Martin Hubert writes that “this piece of writing, poorly named Contra errores Graecorum, is the benevolent examination of a libellus.” [17]
This is obvious from even a cursory look at the work’s content and context. Lost for centuries, the original libellus of Nicholas of Durazzo was brought to light by Pietro Antonio Uccelli in 1869, and Dondaine, comparing the two texts, found that of St. Thomas’s 205 citations of the Greek Fathers, 200 come from the libellus. [18] If this were a polemical work of St. Thomas’s own (rather than a commentary on a florilegium), it would be incredible that he did not bring forward the many citations of the Fathers that he regularly employs on these topics, as he does in every one of his polemical works. Funnily enough, of the five authorities he did supply from his own stock, none is a forgery. [19]
This is confirmed by a quick reading of the text itself (which, to my astonishment, none of these people seem actually to have done). In the epilogue St. Thomas sets out a series of criticisms of the very work the Pope had asked him to comment on; he faults, for instance, the translation of many passages in the Libellus. His distrust is confirmed by a simple historical observation. As students of St. Thomas know, he is one of the most consistent authors in the history of the world. You can read texts on the same topic written decades apart and he will give the very same patristic quotations. From this simple fact we should be able to gather whether St. Thomas trusted this work or not. We would expect him to pick up a few quotations from the libellus and begin using them in his other works, as we see so many times when St. Thomas gets hold of a new source (after his Roman period, for example, when he gained access to many new texts, or in the compiling of the Catena). If St. Thomas trusted the genuineness of the 200 quotations he reproduced from the libellus, we would expect to see at least some of them turn up in his later works on the same topics, right? Yet we see almost nothing of the sort.
In fact, we have one instance that should put every other interpretation to rest. In Summa contra Gentiles IV, 24, written at the very time he was writing the Contra errores, St. Thomas has an excursus in which he demonstrates the doctrine of the Filioque from the Greek Fathers. If St. Thomas were really composing a polemical tract in the Contra errores, rather than a simple commentary, it would have been nearly impossible for him to avoid the dozens of quotations in the Contra errores attributed to the Greek Fathers. Yet not a single citation from the Libellus appears in that passage.How much clearer could it be?
I can go even further. In De potentia q. 10, a. 4, St. Thomas quotes St. Cyril’s synodical letter to Nestorius from the acts of the councils, together with the declaration of the Fifth Council on the authority of the Fathers. The sentence of Cyril also stands in the libellus. Yet St. Thomas quotes it in a completely different translation, that of the Collectio Casinensis, rather than in the version of the libellus he had used shortly before. [20]
All of this could be gathered even without a detailed textual study of the libellus. The Dominicans Échard and De Rubeis had already answered, in the eighteenth century, that these texts were collected by someone else and handed to St. Thomas for his commentary, [21] and the collection itself would not be rediscovered for more than a century.
St. Thomas understood quite well that texts can carry critical errors, and he did the best he could with the tools he had to root them out and avoid misattributions. Besides the remarkable work done in Rome gaining access to conciliar collections and works of the Fathers that were not commonly read, St. Thomas showed flashes of critical genius in his judgment of particular works: his rejection of the Augustinian authorship of the De spiritu et anima and of the De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus, his being the first to identify the origin of the Liber de causis in Proclus, and his correctly naming Theophylact rather than St. John Chrysostom as the author of certain texts on which the libellus erred. [22] In the Catena the same critical sense is on display, carefully and methodically distinguishing the Fathers’ own words from glosses. Elsewhere he recognizes faulty translations from the Greek (especially in the works of St. John Chrysostom) and remedies them, and in order to study the Fathers he had a number of Greek commentaries translated into Latin. [23]
Here, too, we can praise the genius of St. Thomas on another point that few have given him credit for. The first part of the Contra errores is almost entirely taken up with critical explanations of the texts of the libellus. Dondaine notes that the passages St. Thomas singled out in this section as doubtful in their phrasing turn out almost all to be corrupted in some way (by translation, by gloss, etc.). Without knowing it, his theological judgment had picked out what was spurious. [24] Far from being ashamed of this work, Catholics should be glad of the genius of the Common Doctor in pulling off this superhuman feat.
As noted above, Nicholas of Durazzo was a Greek by birth. His libellus was prepared for the Byzantine emperor and written in Greek. The irony should not be lost on any reader that the supposed “Latin forgeries of St. Thomas” were written by a Greek, for Greeks. When the work came to Pope Urban IV he evidently had his suspicions about it (interestingly, there is no record of the Greeks suspecting the work, only the Latins), and he sent it to St. Thomas for review, as both Dondaines and Plested note. [25]
IV. Forgery, pseudepigraphy, and scholarship before criticism
In the remainder of this article I go into more detail about the strange origins of the libellus. We will see that modern scholarship has argued, convincingly in my view, that the core of the libellus comes from a late eighth-century Roman collection, and that its Filioque section goes back to a mid-seventh-century collection gathered in the time of St. Maximus the Confessor by the Greek and Palestinian monks around him which had been translated from Greek into Latin, then back into Greek, before being translated back into Latin by a translator with very little skill, and even less skill at sourcing, distinguishing glosses, etc.. I also explain in some detail why the charge of “forgery” is not so simple after all.