perichoresis and love and circumincession and learning to love

On one level the Doctrine of Perichoresis, the interpenetration or "cleaving" of members of the Trinity to each other, makes no sense. Greek philosophical terms are employed to lay out the problem of unity and separation, but then, when the going gets tough, John of Damascus reverts to pictures. Well, maybe I shouldn't frame it that way. Maybe I should say that he just does what we all do when pushed into a corner with our intellectual terminology. We have to revert to images in order to make ourselves understood. But then the images themselves have problems because they must be understood from the perspective of human relations, and human relations only imperfectly teach us the truths that theologians want us to understand.

Thus, when John says that the members of the Trinity "cleave" to each other but don't "commingle," how are we to "picture" this? I see in my mind's eye little prickly things that stick on my clothes in the summer time when I have worked in the garden. These little buggers certainly "cleave" even though they don't "commingle." But that isn't what John means, because he also believes that these subsistences, as they "cleave" to each other, actually share the same nature with each other. The three subsistences have one "motion" and "one impulse" and so really, as it were, draw their life from one another--quite different from my pricker on the sleeve image. But I think there is a way that the perichoresis of the members of the Trinity may make sense, though to have it make sense one must use the language of love.

First, One More Picture

The 1993 quotation from the OED on the Celtic Knot illustrating the principle of perichoresis encouraged me to give you a picture of a simple celtic knot. Here is is.

Don't you just love the interweaving in the knot? Now, can't you just see perichoresis?

Perichoresis and Love

I think it is clear by now that I have "intellectual" or "conceptual" difficulties with the notion of the Trinity. I don't "understand" how three co-equal bodies are truly one, and I don't "understand" how they can relate to one another. My inclination is, therefore, to throw out the doctrine because I can't understand it. But before I do that, I need to pause and realize that the language that John of Damascus gives us, to try to explain perichoresis, is really the language of love. And, as any person who is committed to love and loving knows, love has its own language and logic that defies and trumps what we might call Greek logic (which we were taught at the university).

Let me illustrate what I mean from Argentine tango (I take lessons every Monday night). My instructors tell me that tango is a dance in which the woman ought to be able to tell in the first 30 seconds whether the man (her partner) would make a good husband. Why? Because there is something in the attentiveness of the man to his partner, the communication that takes place through gentle touching, the engagement through being "centered" or "square" with each other, that communicates to the other person that he is capable of and interested in being content with her alone. He isn't interested in showing off for the crowd or in twisting and turning in his own world. Love and fidelity, then, are believed to be communicated in the first 30 seconds.

Can that possibly be true? I can't vouch for its truth, of course, but I have the "teaching" of generations of tango instructors that this is, indeed, the case. And, it seems as if there could be some truth in the idea, even if a man can "fool" a woman every once in a while. But somehow the idea of love is communicated during the magical dance we know as Argentine tango.

Let's think of this, then, with respect to the doctrine of perichoresis. The doctrine teaches us that members of the Trinity "cleave" but do not "intermingle." They keep their essences and are distinct from one another, but they are inseparable from one another. Thus, identity and interdependence are both preserved, and taught, in the doctrine of perichoresis. Isn't that, in its most fundamental sense, what love is about? Doesn't love suggest that partners really do cleave to each other, depend upon one another, live with each other and really live "in" each other, even though their identities are never confused and never intermingled? That is, the life of love is a life where unique identity as well as joint cleaving are affirmed. Do members of the Trinity each have their own "function" or "specialty?" Of course. One generates, one is generated, one processes (whatever that means). Do members of the Trinity have their own dependence on each other? Of course, because, as the Scripture says, the Son is in the Father and the Father is in the Son.

Wishing for Love

So, that is my "bottom line" on perichoresis. We understand the doctrine if we understand love. If we are strangers to love, or only intermittently have felt the powerful pull of that force, we will only scoff at and be skeptical that there can be any such thing as the perichoresis of the Trinity. We will come up with all kinds of critical questions, such as how can a relationship of three teach us about a relationship of two? or how can things be co-eternal? Tons of questions, and good questions, will be on our lips. But if we know love, we are willing to grant love's existence elsewhere in the universe. Especially in God.

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