Saturday, May 17, 2014
Trinity Sunday ~ Person & Perichoresis
Trinity
Sunday
Lectionary
Year A ~ May 18, 2008
Holy
Trinity & St. Anskar
Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image,
according to our likeness…”
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
In the end, we can only adore the
Trinity. We approach in words but we quickly fall silent. I just did. Language
does not offer the right pronoun: I can’t say “we approach it” too impersonal
for the One Who is if anything MORE personal than we are; “Him” fails on both
number and gender. “Them” suggests polytheism. As the medieval tradition holds,
in the Most Holy Trinity, we confront a “supernatural mystery” – a
Reality beyond the capability of natural thought, Who cannot be known except by
the grace of divine revelation; and Who even then cannot be comprehended, but
only adored.
Our pragmatic, modern culture has little patience for this kind of thing.
Dangerously close to nonsense – too close. What does it matter? Fair enough
question. And our answer to it is all we have to offer the world, as
Christians: the vision of God revealed as Love. Christianity is very simple:
God is love. But that is a kind of code: it has to be elaborated, if it is to
mean anything. That is why the Trinity is so important: because it is the
outcome of reflection on the revelation that God IS Love. And that matters
because it has to do with who are as human beings.
Love is a relational term. Love is also a personal term. Only persons
can love. You can’t be a person by yourself, and you can’t be a lover
by yourself. There must be ANOTHER for you to love, another one for whom you
break through the isolation of your individuality into communication,
community, communion. This individual-in-relationship we call person. (per-sona.)
If God were simple unity, God would not be personal – at least not before the
creation. But we say that God IS Love. And that means that God has always been
Love, that there never was when God was NOT Love. So there must be complexity as
well as unity in the divine nature. There must be more than one Person.
God has always been personal, and to be personal requires another person. Two
persons would suffice for this, but two implies an opposition and a tension,
like yin and yang. However complementary they may be, however
harmonious and balanced, they are always in opposition. Trinitarian theology
insists that there is no tension or opposition in the divine Being, only Love.
So the Third Person establishes the complete solidarity of the personal nature,
strong and indivisible, like a triangle – that strongest of
constructions.
The triangle also may give us an analogy of the nature of the relationship of
the Three Persons. (Caveat: the Doctrine of God is always analogical,
and we must remember that analogies are never definitive.) St. John of
Damascus, the last great Father of the Church, who lived in a monastery in the
desert just east of Jerusalem, and whose Resurrection poetry adorns our hymnal,
coined the word perichoresis (dancing around). He
elaborated it to suggest that the Three Persons interpenetrate one another.
Anglicans have translated the relationship of the Three Persons as coïnherence.
And one sometimes runs across interpenetration as a description of the perichoresis
of the Three Persons: a relationship in which each Person lives in the
other two without losing her own distinct identity. Let’s go back to that
equilateral triangle. It is useful as just here, I think, because it offers an
analogy of this interpenetration. Each angle is composed of two
sides. But each of these sides is also the side of another of the angles. Each
angle itself is part of the other two, although wholly distinct from them at
the same time. The three angles interpenetrate each other. And
the figure could not exist without all three of them. Take away any of the
angles and there is no triangle anymore, only a line with two ends. So with the
Trinity. No angle is of greater importance than any other, none is prior
to any other. Although we confess that the Father is, somehow, the source of
the other two Persons, we also say that they are co-equal in glory.
But the reason we get into all this near-babble about the Trinity is the
all-important revelation that the essence of God is Love. God is Love:
the Community of Love. It is their perfect Will to Love that binds the Three
Persons together. The essence of God is the Relationship of the Three Divine
Persons: their interpenetration, their coïnherence, perichoresis.
This is an audacious thing for a monotheist to say. It sounds as though we were
talking about three gods. That is because of the analogy to human persons.
Every human relationship, infected by sin, is in danger of breaking. In God
there is no such danger, because in God there is no sin. Although the love
among the Three Persons is freely willed, it can never fail, because a decision
not to love is sin, and God will not sin.
Genesis quotes God as saying “Let us
make humanity in our own image.” Christians anciently saw in this phrase a
reference to the Three Persons. Modern Christians claim that the whole notion
of the human person grows out of the revelation of the supernatural Mystery of
the Most Holy Trinity that came in the Incarnation of the Second Divine
Person. Through Him, we learned directly that God IS Love. And his own
Beloved Disciple elaborated: whoever loves is born of God and knows God.
Those who do not love do not know God, for God IS Love. Those who love are
born of God, that is, they are born as Persons, a new kind of creature in the
Image of the Three Divine Persons, born into the Communion of Love.
The Church is the visible sign of this Reality: heaven on earth, the foretaste
of Salvation – of created life healed and freed from sin and death. This, too,
is a mystery and an audacious thing to say. Why does the Trinity matter?
Because it asserts that the basic realty of the cosmos is Love, Love that is
stronger than death – even now.
The power of death is broken. Death may cause us to part, but it cannot destroy
Love. Even among us mortal humans, Love continues after death. And this
Community of love, the Communion of Saints, is nothing other than triumphant,
invincible life in the Community of the Most Holy and Lifegiving Trinity.
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY
IS THE LORD OF
HOSTS.
HEAVEN AND EARTH
ARE FULL OF YOUR GLORY.
AMEN
