It was decades later that I was told by Colin Davies, a Hong Kong friend, about the ‘filioque’ and the ‘eternal procession’ (St Augustine’s term) which gave rise to the schism between the Eastern and Western churches. This came out of discussions about the Trinity. Though many early Christians shared a belief in One God, they also shared a belief in the paradoxical idea that this one God had three ‘persons’, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, being different ways in which He could act or be apprehended by humans, an idea for which they found a scriptural basis. But what was the relation between these three persons? The Westerners coined as an article of belief that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeded from the Father and the Son (“filioque”)’. This was anathema to the Easterners who perceived it as creating a sort of inequality between these aspects or forms or presences of the Deity. They thought that it downgraded the Holy Spirit.
