The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten; the Son is of the Father alone, not made nor created, but begotten; the Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, not made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding.

highly contested

What it says

“The Father is from no one, the Son begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son — the only things that tell the persons apart.”

The stake: The filioque — 'and the Son' — the clause that, with the warning clauses, divides East and West. Here it is native to the creed, not a later edit.
Why it matters: At the heart of reality is relation, not a solitary self; and the Spirit you receive is the Spirit of the Son, so he will never lead you away from Jesus — the church's test of the spirits.
The Wesleyan take: Wesley deleted the creed but kept the filioque (Article IV); his interest is the Spirit's Christ-shaped work — the Spirit of adoption who cries 'Abba.'

Latin: Pater a nullo est factus, nec creatus, nec genitus. Filius a Patre solo est, non factus, nec creatus, sed genitus. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio, non factus, nec creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens. The verse states the personal properties — the relations of origin — the only things that distinguish the persons (everything in verses 7–20 was what they share). Pater a nullo … nec genitus: the Father is from no one; his property is innascibilitas, being the source from no source. Filius a Patre solo … genitus: the Son is from the Father alone, by generation (filiation). a Patre solo — 'from the Father alone' — note the creed does use 'alone' of the Son's origin. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio … procedens: the Spirit is from the Father AND the Son, by procession. The clause a Patre et Filio is the filioque in the creed's own words. Unlike the Nicene Creed — where 'and the Son' is a later Western interpolation into a conciliar text (see [[nicene-creed/proceeds-from-the-father]]) — the Athanasian Creed was composed in Latin in the Augustinian West and carried a Patre et Filio natively. The fourfold grid (factus / creatus / genitus / procedens) strips every creaturely category away: 'begotten' and 'proceeding' are sui generis relations, not species of making. The creed names the relations and, in the restraint of verses 19–20, declines to say what they are.

Version	Rendering
Book of Common Prayer (1662)	The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
Book of Common Prayer (1979), Historical Documents	The Father was neither made, nor created, nor begotten of anyone. The Son was neither made nor created, but was begotten of the Father alone. The Holy Spirit was neither made nor created nor begotten, but proceeds from the Father and the Son.
United Methodist use	— (not received), yet the doctrine is retained Wesley deleted the Athanasian Creed but kept the filioque: Methodist Articles of Religion, Article IV, confesses the Holy Spirit 'proceeding from the Father and the Son.'

Traditions cited patristic ·scholastic ·reformed ·eastern orthodox ·wesleyan ·modern ecumenical

The Father of none, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding

The Text

The litany is over. From verse 7 to verse 20 the creed said, eleven times and then in summary, what the three persons share — one nature, one glory, one Godhead, one Lord. Now, in three balanced lines, it says the one thing they do not share, and it turns out to be the only thing that distinguishes them at all: their relations of origin. The Father is from no one. The Son is from the Father, by being begotten. The Spirit is from the Father and the Son, by proceeding. Strip these away and there is nothing left to tell the persons apart, because everything else about them is identical. The persons are not distinguished by attributes, roles, or degrees; they are distinguished only by where they are from.

And the third line contains the most divisive sentence in Western Christendom. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio — the Holy Spirit, from the Father and the Son. This is the filioque. It is, with the warning clauses, the chief reason the Eastern church has never received this creed. One must say at the outset what is true: the dogmatic substance of the filioque, and its long history, is treated at length in the annotation on the Nicene Creed’s [[nicene-creed/proceeds-from-the-father]]. What is proper to this verse is something the Nicene case does not raise — that here the clause is not an interpolation. The Nicene Creed acquired “and the Son” by a contested Western edit of a conciliar text. The Athanasian Creed was Latin and Augustinian from birth and said a Patre et Filio from the beginning. There is no original form of this creed without the filioque. Which means the East’s refusal of the Quicumque is not a refusal of an edit; it is a refusal of the document as it always was.

Translation Notes

Pater a nullo est factus, nec creatus, nec genitus — “the Father is from no one: not made, not created, not begotten.” The Father’s personal property is innascibility (Latin innascibilitas) — being unoriginate, the fons et principium, the source that is from no source. The triple negation (factus / creatus / genitus) is not redundancy; it walks down every category of derivation and denies each of the Father.

Filius a Patre solo est … sed genitus — “the Son is from the Father alone … but begotten.” The Son’s property is generation (filiation). Note the word solo: the Son is from the Father alone. The creed is willing to use “alone” of an origin — a fact the Eastern argument will press, since the creed does not say the Spirit is from the Father alone.

Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio … sed procedens — “the Holy Spirit, from the Father and the Son … but proceeding.” The Spirit’s property is procession. The contested two words are et Filio. The creed gives no theory of how procession differs from generation — both are denied to be “making” or “creating,” and beyond that the creed is silent. This is the restraint of verses 19–20 in action: it names the relations as real and distinguishing; it refuses to say what they are.

the fourfold grid. Factus, creatus, genitus, procedens. The first two (made, created) are denied of all three persons — none is a creature. The last two (begotten, proceeding) are the bare, undefined relational terms by which the Son and the Spirit are distinguished from the Father and from each other. The persons differ by relation alone; the relations differ by origin alone; and the creed will not be drawn one inch past that.

Historical Context

The relations of origin. The grammar is patristic. Nicaea’s “begotten, not made” began it; the Cappadocians named the distinguishing properties (idiōmata): the Father’s agennēsia (unbegottenness), the Son’s gennēsis (begottenness), the Spirit’s ekporeusis (procession). Augustine’s On the Trinity gave the West its decisive form: the persons are distinguished by relation and by nothing else, and the Spirit is the mutual love, the vinculum, of Father and Son — the seed from which the Western filioque grew.

The filioque, in brief. The original Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) said the Spirit proceeds “from the Father.” The West added “and the Son”: in the anti-Arian creeds of the Councils of Toledo (notably III, 589), then under Charlemagne (the Synod of Aachen, 809, and the Libri Carolini), and finally at Rome itself, where the Creed was sung with the filioque by about 1014. The Photian controversy (867; 879–880), the mutual excommunications of 1054, and the failed reunions of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1439, “from the Father and the Son as from one principle”) are the milestones of the division. The standard modern history is A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque (Oxford, 2010); the dogmatic substance and the contemporary ecumenical convergence are set out under [[nicene-creed/proceeds-from-the-father]] and are not repeated here.

Why this creed is different. The point peculiar to the Athanasian Creed is the one the Nicene case cannot make. The Eastern objection to the Nicene filioque has always had two prongs: the doctrine, and the canonical irregularity of altering a conciliar creed. The second prong does not exist here. The Quicumque is not an ecumenical-council creed and was never edited; it is a Latin Western catechetical document that confessed a Patre et Filio from its origin around 500. So the East’s non-reception of this creed is doctrinally cleaner and, in a sense, more total: there is no “earlier, shared form” of the Athanasian Creed to return to. With its warning clauses, this verse is the reason the Quicumque remained, and remains, a creed of the West alone.

Lines of Interpretation

The relations of origin are common ground. The church-dividing question is the filioque: does “and the Son” safeguard the doctrine or corrupt it? (The full dossier is at [[nicene-creed/proceeds-from-the-father]]; what follows is how the dispute bears on this verse.)

Patristic

Tradition: the Cappadocian idiōmata; Augustine, On the Trinity XV; Maximus the Confessor, Letter to Marinus

The Greek Fathers fixed the distinguishing properties; Augustine fixed the Western reading (the Spirit from the Father and the Son as from one principle, the Father principaliter). Maximus the Confessor’s Letter to Marinus is the great irenic text: the Latins, he reported, do not make the Son a second cause; they confess the Father as sole cause and mean by a Filio the Son’s mediating role — so the Latin usage, rightly construed, does not contradict the Greek.

Strengths

Roots both the Eastern and Western instincts in the patristic settlement rather than in the later polemic
Maximus shows the formulas were once heard as compatible — the division is not metaphysically inevitable

Weaknesses

Augustine’s vinculum model and the Cappadocian monarchia genuinely pull in different directions; Maximus harmonizes them but does not erase the tension
“Begotten” and “proceeding” remain undefined; the whole dispute rides on terms no Father fully unpacked

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I qq. 27–36; the Council of Florence (1439), Laetentur caeli

Aquinas gives the Western filioque its most rigorous defense: the persons are distinguished only by relations of opposition; the Son and the Spirit must be distinguished from each other by some relation; the only available one is that the Spirit proceeds from the Son. On this argument the filioque is not an option but a necessity — without it, Son and Spirit cannot be told apart. Florence dogmatized the Western position (“as from one principle, by one spiration”).

Strengths

The single most powerful argument that the filioque is required, not merely permitted — it does real work distinguishing the persons
Florence’s “one principle” formula explicitly guards the Father’s monarchy against the “two causes” charge

Weaknesses

By making a contested point a logical necessity, the scholastic argument hardened the schism rather than easing it
“Distinguish by relations of opposition” is a Western axiom the East does not grant; the necessity is necessity only within the Latin system

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Photius, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; Gregory Palamas; Mark of Ephesus at Florence

The East confesses the Spirit ek monou tou Patros — from the Father alone — as ultimate source (ekporeusis). The objections: the filioque either posits two causes in the Godhead (destroying the Father’s monarchia) or collapses the Son and Spirit’s distinction; and a Western creed has no authority to define the inner divine life against the Greek Fathers. Mark of Ephesus’s lone refusal to sign at Florence is the tradition’s emblem. The East presses, against this creed, a sharp point: it says the Son is from the Father solo — it knows the word “alone” — yet withholds solo from the Spirit’s relation to the Father.

Strengths

Guards the Father’s monarchia and the Spirit against any whiff of subordination — the Spirit is not a junior product of the first two
The internal argument from the creed’s own a Patre solo (of the Son) is genuinely incisive: the creed had the word and did not use it of the Spirit’s origin

Weaknesses

A hard ek monou can underplay the Son’s evident role in the Spirit’s mission and the patristic per Filium that even Greek Fathers used
The objection partly conflates eternal ekporeusis with the Son’s economic sending; the modern clarifications (below) turn on keeping them distinct

Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican (the Western inheritors)

Tradition: the Reformation confessions’ retention of the filioque; modern Western ecumenical reconsideration

The Reformation churches inherited and kept the filioque without controversy; it is simply the Western faith. In the modern ecumenical era many Anglican, Reformed, and Lutheran bodies have conceded that inserting “and the Son” into the Nicene Creed was canonically irregular, and some now recite the Nicene without it while continuing to affirm the doctrine. (That concession concerns the Nicene interpolation; it does not touch the Athanasian Creed, which never lacked the clause.)

Strengths

Distinguishes cleanly between the doctrine (widely retained) and the canonical impropriety of editing a conciliar creed (widely conceded) — a real ecumenical advance
Models a tradition holding its inheritance while repenting of the manner of its imposition

Weaknesses

The distinction rescues the Nicene situation but leaves the Quicumque untouched and still unreceived in the East
Practice varies confession to confession, so “the Western position” is less monolithic than it sounds

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: the Maximian retrieval; the 1995 PCPCU clarification (The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit); the 2003 North American Orthodox–Catholic statement (The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?)

The contemporary convergence builds on Maximus: distinguish the eternal ekporeusis (the Spirit’s origin from the Father as ultimate source — where the Greek is right that it is “from the Father”) from the processio / per Filium (the Son’s real mediating role in the eternal taxis and the temporal mission — where the Latin instinct is not wrong). On this reading the two traditions are confessing complementary truths in non-equivalent vocabularies.

Strengths

Recovers a path the Fathers themselves walked (Maximus) and has produced genuine, signed ecumenical progress
Reframes the quarrel as largely terminological without pretending the difference is nothing

Weaknesses

Not all Orthodox accept that the difference is only terminological; for some the monarchia is substantively at stake
The convergence addresses the doctrine; the Athanasian Creed’s liturgical and comminatory form (a Western creed that damns those who do not hold its Western faith) remains an additional, unresolved wound

Wesleyan Voice

The precise Wesleyan datum on this verse is exact and easily overlooked: Wesley deleted the Athanasian Creed but kept the filioque. The Methodist Articles of Religion, Article IV, confesses “the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.” Whatever Wesley refused in the Quicumque — the warning clauses, the binding of the manner — it was never the doctrine of double procession. American Methodism has, for two hundred and forty years, confessed a Patre et Filio in its constitutional standards while never once reciting the creed in which it here appears.

Wesley was not polemically anti-Eastern; he simply received the filioque as the settled Western faith and transmitted it without quarrel. His own attention, true to Sermon 55, was not on the manner of the eternal procession but on the work of the proceeding Spirit — and here the doctrine earns its Wesleyan keep. Because the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, the Spirit’s work in the believer always bears the character of Christ: the Spirit of adoption who cries “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6 — “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts”) is the very ground of the Wesleyan doctrine of assurance. The witness of the Spirit is trustworthy precisely because the Spirit who witnesses is not a free-floating numen but the Spirit of Jesus, who will never testify to anything other than the gospel of the Son. The filioque, for Wesley’s heirs, is not chiefly a metaphysical thesis about the immanent Trinity; it is the guarantee that the Spirit one experiences is recognizably the Spirit of Christ.

Charles Wesley’s pneumatological hymns breathe exactly this: “Spirit of faith, come down,” “Come, Holy Ghost, our hearts inspire,” “Spirit of grace, and health, and power” — the Spirit always addressed as the Spirit who reveals and applies Christ. The Wesleyan tradition rarely sings the eternal procession as such; it sings the Spirit of the Son, poured into the heart — which is the filioque met not as doctrine but as experience.

Hymnody

The eternal procession is almost never the explicit subject of a hymn — it is among the most apophatic clauses in the creed, and the hymnody honors that by not pretending to depict it. What the church sings instead is the Spirit who comes, and the filioque surfaces in the way she addresses him: as the Spirit of Christ.

The Veni Creator Spiritus — “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire” — names the Spirit “the anointing Spirit,” the Spirit of the Anointed One; sung at every ordination, it is the proceeding Spirit invoked as the Spirit of the Son’s own mission. Charles Wesley’s “Spirit of faith, come down, / reveal the things of God” makes the filioque’s pastoral point a prayer: the Spirit’s office is to reveal Christ. “Come down, O Love divine,” “Breathe on me, Breath of God,” “Holy Spirit, Truth divine” — all invoke the Spirit to do what only the Spirit of the Son would do: conform the believer to Jesus.

There is, fittingly, no great hymn that explains a Patre et Filio. The clause is the creed at its most reticent, and the hymnody keeps the reticence — singing the Spirit’s coming and his Christ-shaped work, and leaving the eternal relation, as the creed does, named but unexplained.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

This verse gives a pastor two gifts that look unrelated and are not: a doctrine of personhood, and a test of the spirits.

Preach the relations of origin as the end of the sovereign self. The verse says something about God that, made explicit, overturns the reigning modern picture of what it is to be a person. The persons of the Trinity are distinguished only by relation: the Father is Father only in relation to the Son; the Son is Son only as begotten of the Father; the Spirit is Spirit only as proceeding. There is no Father behind being-Father, no divine self that is first itself and then enters relation. At the source of all reality there is not a solitary monad who subsequently decides to relate; there is relation, all the way down. The modern self is built on the opposite axiom — that I am most fully myself when most independent, self-defining, self-possessed, owing nothing and derived from no one. The Trinity, in this verse, says the reverse is true of the deepest reality there is: to be a person is to be from another and for another. For a congregation catechized by autonomy, this is not abstract; it reframes marriage, family, church membership, and the whole suspicion that dependence is diminishment. We are made in the image of a God whose very persons are constituted by being from-one-another. The creature who insists on being from no one is not imitating the Father’s innascibility; he is refusing the image he was made in.

Use the filioque as the church’s test of the spirits. Here the divisive clause becomes pastorally indispensable. Because the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus — and that gives the church a working criterion for every claim to the Spirit’s leading. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits” (1 John 4:1–2): the test is christological. A “spirit” that leads away from the character, the cross, the commands, and the lordship of Jesus is, by the filioque’s own logic, not the Holy Spirit, whatever its intensity. In an age of unmoored “spirituality” — the Spirit invoked to bless whatever the self already wanted — this verse is the antidote a pastor most needs. The Spirit is not a wild card or a warrant for the self’s projects; he is the Spirit of the Son, and he can be recognized by whether he makes people look like Jesus. The clause that divided the church turns out to be the clause that keeps the church’s pneumatology from floating away.

Keep the reticence the creed keeps. On what generation and procession actually are, the creed names and refuses to explain — and the East’s long objection should make a Western pastor humble, not triumphant, about a sentence that helped break the church. The pastoral model is the creed’s own discipline (verses 19–20): say exactly what is given — the Father from none, the Son begotten, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, each fully God — and then stop, and let the Gloria, which simply names the Three in their order, do what explanation cannot. The congregation does not need the eternal procession diagrammed. It needs to know that the Spirit it prays for in every epiclesis — send your Holy Spirit — comes as the Spirit of the Son, and will always lead it home to him.

The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten; the Son is of the Father alone, not made nor created, but begotten; the Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, not made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding.

The Father of none, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding

The Text

Translation Notes

Historical Context

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Scholastic

Eastern Orthodox

Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican (the Western inheritors)

Modern / Ecumenical

Wesleyan Voice

Hymnody

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Further Reading

Related