Surely, there are few pleasures more acute, more delightful to savour, or with a more superb after-taste, than that of watching another human impaled, wriggling, writhing, on the horns of a dilemma.
In a recent post I relished the fact that the Anglo-Saxon Council of Hatfield, which promulgated filioque, was presided over by a Syrian monk of Byzantine culture, S Theodore. I wondered how those rather precious 'Orthodox' for whom it really matters to prove that the Saxon Church was "Orthodox" would get around that amusing little quirk of history.
Happily, my fishing hook did not lie upon the water long without making a catch. The suggestion duly appeared that the filioque in Hatfield represents a deliberate Filioquist perversion of the authentic text of Hatfield. Oh frabjous day!
To make that hare run, it will need the attachment of at least four bionic legs. Our account of Hatfield rests upon a text of Bede which is commonly constituted on the basis of four manuscripts all of which are eighth century. And there is, at this point, no variant reading in their texts. Their hypothetically "corrupted" archetype cannot therefore be much later than the time of Bede himself. Whether the alleged filioquist perverter of the text of Hatfield is ipsissimus Baeda or someone very soon after Bede wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica, we would still be left with a very embarrassing piece of evidence for the filioquist enthusiasm of the Anglo-Saxon Church (is S Bede, BTW, regarded as a Saint by "Saxon Orthodoxy"?).
But more. It is a slight simplification to say that Hatfield sanctioned filioque. The text actually reads "et filio". In other words, the Council, using a minutely different lexic for saying precisely the same thing, sanctioned the substance of filioque before the advocates of that formula had even decided to promote it in exactly that verbal form.
Tally Ho! The bloodlust of the hunt! I feel an immense surge of adrenalin! Whom shall I go out and kick next? Yes! You're right! It has to be SWISH! Tomorrow, then, I shall ride out as an avenging knight to vindicate the wounded honour of that most Romanist of all proto-Ordinariate Romanisers, papalist S Wilfrid the Good and the Great.