I don't see any argument of substance here against the Filioque. The only ones that may look substantial are really only assertions.
Your commission report is one long assertion, but yet you quote it, at least its footnotes.
The east "rid" themselves of Arianism by paying the Arians in real gold to move west, which they did, of course and there is a clear record of that bit of human migratory influence in the west.
The Goths were paid as barbarians, not Arians, and they were settled in Thrace. The East later rid the entire West of the Arians (which were persecuting the Orthodox of the Catholic Church), except in Spain where the Arians were paid off by corrupting the Nicene Creed.
The brief explanatory passage from St. Gregory is taken out of St. John Damascene so it did go through a bit of updating but that is relative since both Holy Fathers seem to be agreed.
with each other but not with your council of Toledo, your supreme pontiff Leo IX, nor the Vatican. Your quote doesn't have even claim St. John did any "updating" which is particularly unlikely as he explicitely denies the meaning your are trying to read into it:
Further, it should be understood that we do not speak of the Father as derived from any one, but we speak of Him as the Father of the Son. And we do not speak of the Son as Cause [Text, αἴτιον: variant, ἀναίτιον causeless] or Father, but we speak of Him both as from the Father, and as the Son of the Father. And we speak likewise of the Holy Spirit as from the Father, and call Him the Spirit of the Father. And we do not speak of the Spirit as from the Son [cf. St. Maximus Epistle to Marin; ἐκ τοῦ Υἱοῦ δὲ τὸ Πνεῦμα οὐ λέγομεν. See also ch. xii., καὶ Υἱοῦ Πνεῦμα οὐχ ὡς ἐξ αὐτοῦ, and at the close of the Epist. ad Jordan, Πνεῦμα Υἱοῦ μὴ ἐξ Υἱοῦ "The Spirit of the Son not of/from the Son"] but yet we call Him the Spirit of the Son. For if any one hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His [Rom. viii. 9., saith the divine apostle\. And we confess that He is manifested and imparted to us through the Son. For He breathed upon His Disciples, says he, and said, Receive ye the Holy Spirit [St. John xx. 29]. It is just the same as in the case of the sun from which come both the ray and the radiance (for the sun itself is the source of both the ray and the radiance), and it is through the ray that the radiance is imparted to us, and it is the radiance itself by which we are lightened and in which we participate. Further we do not speak of the Son of the Spirit, or of the Son as derived from the Spirit,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209.iii.iv.i.viii.htmlSo it would be odd if St. John plucked a citation from obscurity to contradict his own views.
The complaint about this originating passage being a "throw away" is not sustained since St. John Damascene did not throw it away but used it.
Did he? I am becoming a little suspicious about that: your document elsewhere cites the Kotter edition of the complete works of St. John, but not here. Your footnote (which you did not continue to quote) ends with a quote of St. Maximos the Confessor which Migne (the "substantiation" of the St. Gregory/St. John quote) even labels "questionable and dubious."
The rest are unsubstantiated assertions, so I won't comment till I see something more than assertion being offered here.[/quote]
Unlike your Vatican's commission, from which your footnote is taken
http://www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/PCCUFILQ.HTMhttp://books.google.com/books?id=qQoWBB6gqQQC&pg=PA90&dq=Gregory+Nyssa+John+Damascene+PG+46.+1109+BC&hl=en&ei=yLObTb7vDauO0QGq-tDNAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Gregory%20Nyssa%20John%20Damascene%20PG%2046.%201109%20BC&f=falseI gave you the entire quote-or what is left of it. St. Gregory wrote thousands of lines on the Trinity, the Son, and the Spirit, and yet the Vatican rummages down in the bowels of Migne to pull out this reputed fragment. Since many of those lines explicitely contradict the filioque (and St. Gregory is said to have drafted the wording in 381) like St. John, that should-though I understand why it doesn't-cause you to wonder why pull up this buried cherry. That's if it is even authentic.
It is still the position of the west that the Father is monarch and the filioque illuminates the relationship between the Father and the Son, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
That is the position only of the heretical West, not the Orthodox one. Not the position, for instance, of the OCA, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America, the WRO vicarates, the Orthodox Episcopal Conference of Italy and Malta, the Romanian Episcopate of Italy, including the bishop at Rome, etc.. Nor, IIRC any longer of some Episcopalians, Altkatholisch, PNCC, etc.
In my way of thinking they found the best of both worlds to be most illuminating and edifying.
The mind of the Church and the phronema of the Fathers found it damnable in this world and the next, most corrupting and destructive.