Matthias Joseph Scheeben was a theological writer of acknowledged merit, born at Meckenheim near Bonn on 1 March, 1835, and died at Cologne on 21 July, 1888. He studied at the Gregorian University at Rome under Passaglia and Perrone, was ordained on 18 December, 1858, and taught dogmatic theology at the episcopal seminary of Cologne. Notable in his own time, Scheeben later received praise from Pope Pius XI, who in 1935 encouraged study of the late theologian’s works. Hans Urs von Balthasar credited Scheeben as “the greatest German theologian to date.”
Scheeben was a mystic. His mind revelled in speculating on Divine grace, the hypostatic union, the beatific vision, and the all-pervading presence of God. In Scheeben, one sees a grand synthesis of the Church Fathers and the Scholastics, especially St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Heart of the Matter: The Trinity and the Filioque
“God as a Trinity of Persons is the source and summit of all the Christian mysteries. From this mystery flows the Incarnation, Redemption, the Church and Sacraments, and Eschatology.” This is the animating conviction of Scheeben’s entire theological project. And this is precisely why the Filioque — the Catholic dogma that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son — is not, for Scheeben, a peripheral creedal footnote. It is the very hinge on which the doctrine of the Trinity turns.
The Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, Volume 2, treats perennially important topics such as the natural knowledge of God, analogical discourse about God, the divine perfections, and the Trinitarian nature of God. His treatment of the divine life — intellect and will — serves as the transition point to the Trinity of persons, and his treatise on the Trinity begins with an overview of Magisterial definitions as well as a survey of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Ante-Nicene Patristic tradition.
Reconciling East and West
Here is where Scheeben’s genius shines most brightly. He does not simply assert the Latin position against the Eastern Orthodox. He rolls up his sleeves and does the hard patristic work.
His careful treatment of the Spirit’s procession enables a fruitful attempt at reconciling the divergent Western and Eastern Patristic conceptions thereof that underlie later disputes about the Filioque. When Eastern theologians say the Spirit proceeds “from the Father through the Son,” and Western theologians say “from the Father and the Son,” Scheeben sees not irreconcilable contradiction but complementary expressions of a single, inexhaustible mystery. Scheeben’s immersion in the Greek Fathers and their notion of salvation as divinization gives his Trinitarian theology a genuinely ecumenical depth.
The Nuptial Analogy: Eve, the Spirit, and the Bride
This is Scheeben at his most breathtaking and most original. By examining Scheeben’s speculative reflections on the procession of the Spirit as analogous to the creation of Eve and illuminative of the Church as Bride of Christ, Bulgakov’s most damning criticism — that the Filioque is a theologoumenon lacking in “life-significance” — is rebutted, and additional avenues of elaborating upon the Spirit’s procession as indivisibly connected to other mysteries of the faith are advanced.
Think carefully about what this means. Just as Eve proceeds from Adam and becomes his Bride, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the mutual love of Father and Son and becomes the animating Spirit of the Bride of Christ, which is the Church. The Filioque is not a dry philosophical proposition — it is the eternal ground of the nuptial mystery at the heart of all creation and redemption.
The Nexus Mysteriorum: Everything Hangs Together
Scheeben is famous for the nexus mysteriorum — the principle that all the mysteries of faith are internally connected, each illuminating the others. The Filioque is the clearest example of this principle in action.
Scheeben addresses with clarity and depth the fundamental mysteries of divine revelation, the Triune God, creation, grace, sin, and salvation, deftly interweaving biblical, historical, and speculative concerns. Remove the Filioque, and the whole architecture begins to collapse. If the Spirit does not proceed from the Son, then the Spirit He sends upon the Church is severed from His own divine identity. Grace becomes unintelligible. Deification becomes unmoored. The Bride of Christ loses her animating principle. The economy of salvation, for Scheeben, is the created image of the inner-Trinitarian mystery.
Grace, Deification, and the Indwelling Spirit
Grace, as Scheeben describes it, “ultimately leads to our intimate union with God Himself” — a union Scheeben so wonderfully describes as “drawing down the entire Holy Trinity from Heaven into our soul.” This is only intelligible if the Spirit who indwells the soul is the same Spirit who proceeds eternally from Father and Son. The Filioque is the Trinitarian foundation of the entire theology of grace.
The Father generating the Son in the Trinity was, for Scheeben, the cause and exemplar of the regeneration of the soul. He explores the intelligibility of Christianity’s supernatural mysteries and their deep connectedness, ultimately demonstrating that Christian theology constitutes a science before the court of human reason, even as its object transcends human comprehension.
The Bottom Line
No Filioque, no coherent Trinity. No coherent Trinity, no intelligible Incarnation. No intelligible Incarnation, no real grace. No real grace, no deification. No deification, no salvation. Scheeben saw this with the clarity of a saint and the precision of a scholar, and he said so with unflinching conviction.
The Filioque shows that the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the love between Father and Son.
The best places to encounter this teaching directly are The Mysteries of Christianity and the Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, Vol. 2, both now available in English from Emmaus Academic.
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