Tomos of the Synod of Blachernae (1285)

After the death of Michael VIII Palaiologos the church of Constantinople repudiated the union he had made. The Tomos is its doctrinal judgement. It opens by describing a storm that had lately fallen on the church: a “peace” and an accommodation, offered with oaths that nothing more was intended, which had served to bring in a foreign doctrine. It names John Bekkos, the patriarch under the union, as the doctrine’s host, with Constantine Meliteniotes and George Metochites.

It then sets out what the synod holds and what it rejects, in a series of paragraphs. The Father is the only source and cause of the Godhead; the Spirit has existence from the Father; those who say that the Spirit has existence through the Son and from the Son are cut off from communion. Where the fathers speak of the Spirit as “through the Son”, the Tomos explains, they mean the Spirit’s eternal shining forth, not its coming into being.

The heading under which Migne prints the text calls it an “exposition of the Tomos”; a dissertation in the same volume gives the same opening words for the synodal Tomos itself. The joint Orthodox–Catholic statement of 2003 treats it as the work of the council of Blachernae (The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?).