Home - About the Fellowship - People and Places - Future Events - Reports - Forerunner Archive - Links - Site Map - Visitors - Contact

Empathy and the 'Filioque'

When I introduce myself as an Orthodox Christian the particular theological differences from the Roman Catholic tradition that most people recall are Orthodoxy's lack of the Papacy and the non-use of the filioque in the Nicene Creed. In most people's minds their approach to both of these ideas is simply to ask, 'What difference does it make?'. I will not say anything here about the Papacy but want to look at what I see as a possible result of the unthinking use in the Creed of the filioque.

I have always disliked the use that is made of the word empathy but until now I have mistakenly regarded it as derived from Greek; and meaning 'to feel within'. However consulting a modern dictionary, I found that it is a back formation from the German Einfühlung, meaning ‘one feeling’. It just appears to be Greek, to be used in conjunction with sympathy which is from the Greek.

My primary objection to empathy has always been that it denies the individuality of the other person and so is a non-Christian concept. The discovery of the word's invention by German speaking psychologists in the nineteenth century made me look again at how such a concept of one person experiencing emotions identical to those of another could have come about. The Austrian/German region is the source of the Protestant Reformation three centuries earlier. One of the things that happened with the Protestant Reformation was its unthinking taking over of the western form of the Creed with the filioque. Taken to its philosophical extreme the filioque accepts that two persons can have an identical relationship with another. ? This may not seem serious. How many people take things to a logical extreme? This happens more often than we might suppose. We all know of the "What if?" scenarios. How this cause us to hypothesise, and, before we know where we are, we have reached an extreme position.

If then the filioque is accepted without question, then the seed of there being identical relationships with another person is sown, then the Einfühlung of the German psychologists is seen as perfectly reasonable. This gets exported in a pseudo-scientific format and is taken on by people everywhere.

The word empathy or its nearest equivalent in modern Greek means 'antipathy or hatred' towards the other person, not 'compassion' or 'sympathy'. In the Bible the concept of empathy is totally absent. What is there are the feelings of compassion; pity and sympathy, most commonly compassion; and that is found most frequently in the books of Psalms, Isaiah and Jeremiah and only rarely in the New Testament. Compassion is seen as a quality of God and it is to be imitated by men in their striving to be perfect as their 'Father in heaven is perfect'.

Compassion is of course derived from the Latin; sympathy from the Greek. They mean suffering with or alongside, the Greek prefix V u m carrying the same meaning as the Latin co-, (com-). It is this co-suffering which is the important concept, the kenosis, that complete self-emptying so that one is able to endure with the other person and share in their suffering but not take away their individuality.

The worst excess of the filioque is the depersonalisation of the Holy Spirit, in the same way that the excess of empathy is the taking away the personhood of the other. When I hear anyone using the word empathy I hope that they know what they are saying. Often though the impression is given that they are merely using the jargon of the age and are copying Humpty Dumpty's; "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean." This Humpty Dumpty use of words perpetuates and even legitimises the heresies of our forefathers and so the acceptance of identical relationships made possible / respectable through the unthinking acceptance of the filioque is introduced into the professional life of Orthodox Christians.

Empathy is not a concept I find helpful. No-one knows, or can know, how I feel, but what they can do is have sympathy with my situation and be a co-worker-out of my problem. Any one who claims empathy with me makes me run a mile. They can’t know how I feel, and to me what they are doing is accepting a dangerous heresy that denies the individuality of the persons, just as the filioque tends to deny the individuality of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity.