Perichoresis (from Greek: περιχώρησιςperikhōrēsis, "rotation")[1] is a term referring to the relationship of the three persons of the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) to one another. Circumincession is a Latin-derived term for the same concept.[2] It was first used as a term in Christian theology, by the Church Fathers. The noun first appears in the writings of Maximus Confessor (d. 662) but the related verb perichoreo is found earlier in Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 389/90).[3] Gregory used it to describe the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ as did John of Damascus (d. 749), who also extended it to the "interpenetration" of the three persons of the Trinity, and it became a technical term for the latter.[2][4] It has been given recent currency by such contemporary writers as Jürgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf, John Zizioulas, Richard Rohr, and others.
Gothic triskele window element
Modern authors extend the original usage as an analogy to cover other interpersonal relationships. The term "co(-)inherence" is sometimes used as a synonym.[5]
"Perichoresis" is derived from the Greek peri, "around" and chōreō, "to go, or come". As a compound word, it refers primarily to "going around" or "encompassing", conveying the idea of "two sides of the same coin".[6] Suggested connections with Greek words for dancing ("choreia", spelled with the short letter omicron not the long omega) are not grounded in Greek etymology or early Christian use, but are modern in origin.[7][8] The Latin equivalent circumincession comes from the Latin circum, "around" and incedere meaning "to go, to step, to march along",[9][10] and was first by Burgundio of Pisa (d. 1194).[2] The form "Circuminsessio" developed from the similarity in sound.[2]
Usage
A trinitarian action of grace is implied in sacred art of the type Anna selbdritt: creator Father, redeemer Son, reflexive procession of the Holy Spirit, with the divine Christ-child pointing back at his human mother and grandmother.
Adherents of perichoresis believe it intensifies their indwelling relationship with the Triune God. This indwelling expresses and realizes fellowship between the Father and the Son. In Chapter 17 of the book of John, Jesus is believed to compare the oneness of this indwelling to the oneness of the fellowship of his church from this indwelling: "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us" (verse 21, KJV). A 12th century Cistercian reformer, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, spoke of the Holy Spirit as the "kiss of God," the Holy Spirit being thus not generated but proceeding from the love of the Father and the Son through an act of their unified will.[11]
If, as is properly understood, the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit, for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son, their unshakable bond, their undivided love, their indivisible unity. – St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in Sermon 8, Sermons on the Song of Songs[12]
The property of divine grace in the Trinitarian mission is distinct for each person or hypostasis of the Holy Trinity yet united, communing, indwelling, in Trinitarian love. All is God's gift from the Father, through the Son's Incarnation, in the gift of the Holy Spirit.[13] This relational co-inherence is often represented as Borromean rings or the Scutum Fidei.
The relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was not explicitly expressed in the writings of Ante-Nicene Fathers exactly as it would later be defined during the First Council of Nicaea (325)[dubious – discuss] and the First Council of Constantinople (381), namely as one substance (ousia) and three persons (hypostaseis). A hermeneutic of the one-in-three principle slowly approached the synthesis understood today as perichoresis.[citation needed]
The crucial point, in a word, is that the relation to God, and to others in God, that establishes the individual substance in being is generous. The relation itself makes and lets me in my substantial being be. This "letting be" implies a kind of primordial, ontological "circumincession", or "perichoresis", of giving and receiving between the other and myself. What I am in my original constitution as a person has always already been given to me by God and received by me in and as my response to God's gift to me of myself ― indeed, has also, in some significant sense, been given to me by other creatures and received by me in and as my response to their gift to me.
― David L. Schindler, "THE EMBODIED PERSON AS GIFT AND THE CULTURAL TASK IN AMERICA: Status quaestionis" Communio 35 (Fall 2008)[14]
Pope John Paul II taught a series of catecheses on the mystery of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the sacramental life of the faithful Christian. The anthropological aspects of the agency of the human heart—its capacity for the gift of love and to give love in return—lived out in moral acts of social justice has since become known as his Theology of the Body. Seen more specifically as a development in perennial wisdom of Church dogma, the Natural Law, the indwelling of God in the human heart is, as taught by St. Augustine a gift of grace, perfecting nature. This philosophical approach to a deeper theological truth of the human person's need for God was developed into a systematic metaphysics by St. Thomas Aquinas, Man as the image of God.
Interpretations of the incarnational mystery of the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God were frequently executed by artisans in relational form, most recognisably as Madonna, some works depicting three generations as in Metterza. The mutual reciprocity contained in a personalist phenomological approach to the philosophy of being draws attention to man's need for transcendence, that a duality between good and evil is not sufficient to explain the mystery of human social relations in community. John Henry Newman popularised the Latin aphorism "cor ad cor loquitur" or heart speaks unto heart (first coined two centuries before by the Doctor of the Church Frances de Sales, "cor cordi loquitur"[15][16][17]) to describe adequately communicating the graced intimacy of man's conformity to Jesus' loving obedience to his Father's divine will unto death. Similarly, St. Augustine had written a millennium before, "Sonus verborum nostrorum aures percutit; magister intus est", that when a teacher speaks worthily of divine things, as the sound of the words strike our ears, it is no longer mere words but God himself who enters.[18]
The sacramental economy of grace indwelling in Mother Church is implied in sacred art of the type Holy Trinity: creator Father, reflexive procession of the Holy Spirit through the sacrificial kenosis on the Cross, celebrated on the Altar
... these analyses implicitly presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being
― Pope John Paul II in "Memory and identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium"
This existential, social aspect of divine grace indwelling in human action is what heals the divisions of a society rent by the irrational dictates of reductionist relativism of mind over matter that equates the physical impulse with vice and cerebral indifference with virtue:
Were this... to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.
― Pope Benedict XVI on the nature of love in "Deus Caritas Est" (God is love)
Radiation of Fatherhood
The Carmelite mystic Saint John of the Cross sketched his vision of this perspective (from the head of the cross looking down upon those gathered at the foot) corresponding to the Father's love radiating down on the priest and congregation worshiping at the altar. Salvador Dalí was inspired to paint his monumental work Christ of Saint John of the Cross after a spiritual crisis saw him revert to his childhood faith upon reading John's classic Dark Night of the Soul.
Protestant and Catholics differ in their interpretation of communio as model of ecclesial unity binding on members of the Mystical body of Christ. A dyadically reduced trinitarianism underpins the Barthian school of thought.
"The Father remains the sole principle, because the Son has nothing he has not received from this source. But the Trinity is asymmetrical reciprocity, not a symmetrical hierarchy proceeding from the Father. Its asymmetry is precisely the root of its dynamism as eternal Act, eternal "perichoresis"[19] On this logic, Barth's pneumatological minimalism cannot be inherently rooted in the filioque. My own hunch is that Barth's binitarianism is more deeply planted in that other culprit Jenson identifies: the "merely two-sided understanding of human community and so of historical reality, inherited from the 'I-Thou' tradition of 19th-century German philosophical anthropology"
― Aaron Riches, "Church, Eucharist, and Predestination in Barth and de Lubac: CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE IN COMMUNIO" Communio 35 (Winter 2008).[20]
^ abcdCross, F.L.; Livingstone, E.A., eds. (1974). "Circumincession". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^Prestige, G.L. God in Patristic Thought SPCK (1964) p. 291
^Ott, Ludwig. Manual de Teología Dogmática Barcelona: Herder (1969) p. 131
^Prestige, G.L. God in Patristic Thought SPCK (1964) pp. 290ff; & Bettenson, Henry. The Early Christian Fathers OUP (1976) p. 286; & Brown, Colin Karl Barth and the Christian Message London:Tyndale (1967) p. 74; & Catholic Culture.org Dictionary
^Prestige, Leonard (1928). ".ΠEPIXΩPEΩ AND ΠEPIXΩPHΣIΣ IN THE FATHERS". The Journal of Theological Studies. 29 (115): 242–252. doi:10.1093/jts/os-XXIX.115.242. JSTOR 23950946. Retrieved February 4, 2021 – via JSTOR.
DURAND, Emmanuel. La périchorèse des personnes divines : immanence mutuelle – réciprocité et communion, Paris: Cerf (Cogitation Fidei; 243), 2005, 409 p.
Hikota, Riyako C., "Beyond Metaphor: The Trinitarian Perichōrēsis and Dance", Open Theology 8 (2022), p. 50-63, Open Access: Beyond Metaphor: The Trinitarian Perichōrēsis and Dance
Lane G. Tipton, "The Function of Perichoresis and the Divine Incomprehensibility", Westminster Theological Journal, Fall 2002.
David J. Engelsma, Trinity and Covenant, Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2006.
Stamatovic, Slobodan, "The Meaning of Perichoresis", Open Theology 2 (2016), p. 303-326, Open Access: The Meaning of Perichoresis
External links
Look up perichoresis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Institut Périchorèse at Atelier d'iconographie (French language icon workshop) based in Montreal (Quebec) Canada
May 03, 2023
perichoresis, this, article, technical, most, readers, understand, please, help, improve, make, understandable, experts, without, removing, technical, details, december, 2019, learn, when, remove, this, template, message, from, greek, περιχώρησις, perikhōrēsis. This article may be too technical for most readers to understand Please help improve it to make it understandable to non experts without removing the technical details December 2019 Learn how and when to remove this template message Perichoresis from Greek perixwrhsis perikhōresis rotation 1 is a term referring to the relationship of the three persons of the triune God Father Son and Holy Spirit to one another Circumincession is a Latin derived term for the same concept 2 It was first used as a term in Christian theology by the Church Fathers The noun first appears in the writings of Maximus Confessor d 662 but the related verb perichoreo is found earlier in Gregory of Nazianzus d 389 90 3 Gregory used it to describe the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ as did John of Damascus d 749 who also extended it to the interpenetration of the three persons of the Trinity and it became a technical term for the latter 2 4 It has been given recent currency by such contemporary writers as Jurgen Moltmann Miroslav Volf John Zizioulas Richard Rohr and others Gothic triskele window element Modern authors extend the original usage as an analogy to cover other interpersonal relationships The term co inherence is sometimes used as a synonym 5 Contents 1 Etymology 2 Usage 2 1 Social trinitarianism 3 Church Fathers 4 Human body as icon of the communio personarum 4 1 Radiation of Fatherhood 5 Doctrinal differences 6 References 7 Bibliography 8 External linksEtymology Edit Perichoresis is derived from the Greek peri around and chōreō to go or come As a compound word it refers primarily to going around or encompassing conveying the idea of two sides of the same coin 6 Suggested connections with Greek words for dancing choreia spelled with the short letter omicron not the long omega are not grounded in Greek etymology or early Christian use but are modern in origin 7 8 The Latin equivalent circumincession comes from the Latin circum around and incedere meaning to go to step to march along 9 10 and was first by Burgundio of Pisa d 1194 2 The form Circuminsessio developed from the similarity in sound 2 Usage Edit A trinitarian action of grace is implied in sacred art of the type Anna selbdritt creator Father redeemer Son reflexive procession of the Holy Spirit with the divine Christ child pointing back at his human mother and grandmother Adherents of perichoresis believe it intensifies their indwelling relationship with the Triune God This indwelling expresses and realizes fellowship between the Father and the Son In Chapter 17 of the book of John Jesus is believed to compare the oneness of this indwelling to the oneness of the fellowship of his church from this indwelling That they all may be one as thou Father art in me and I in thee that they also may be one in us verse 21 KJV A 12th century Cistercian reformer St Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the Holy Spirit as the kiss of God the Holy Spirit being thus not generated but proceeding from the love of the Father and the Son through an act of their unified will 11 If as is properly understood the Father is he who kisses the Son he who is kissed then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son their unshakable bond their undivided love their indivisible unity St Bernard of Clairvaux in Sermon 8 Sermons on the Song of Songs 12 The property of divine grace in the Trinitarian mission is distinct for each person or hypostasis of the Holy Trinity yet united communing indwelling in Trinitarian love All is God s gift from the Father through the Son s Incarnation in the gift of the Holy Spirit 13 This relational co inherence is often represented as Borromean rings or the Scutum Fidei Social trinitarianism Edit Further information Social trinitarianismChurch Fathers EditFurther information Trinitarianism in the Church Fathers The relationship between the Father Son and Holy Spirit was not explicitly expressed in the writings of Ante Nicene Fathers exactly as it would later be defined during the First Council of Nicaea 325 dubious discuss and the First Council of Constantinople 381 namely as one substance ousia and three persons hypostaseis A hermeneutic of the one in three principle slowly approached the synthesis understood today as perichoresis citation needed Human body as icon of the communio personarum EditFurther information Catholic theology of the body The crucial point in a word is that the relation to God and to others in God that establishes the individual substance in being is generous The relation itself makes and lets me in my substantial being be This letting be implies a kind of primordial ontological circumincession or perichoresis of giving and receiving between the other and myself What I am in my original constitution as a person has always already been given to me by God and received by me in and as my response to God s gift to me of myself indeed has also in some significant sense been given to me by other creatures and received by me in and as my response to their gift to me David L Schindler THE EMBODIED PERSON AS GIFT AND THE CULTURAL TASK IN AMERICA Status quaestionis Communio 35 Fall 2008 14 dd Pope John Paul II taught a series of catecheses on the mystery of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the sacramental life of the faithful Christian The anthropological aspects of the agency of the human heart its capacity for the gift of love and to give love in return lived out in moral acts of social justice has since become known as his Theology of the Body Seen more specifically as a development in perennial wisdom of Church dogma the Natural Law the indwelling of God in the human heart is as taught by St Augustine a gift of grace perfecting nature This philosophical approach to a deeper theological truth of the human person s need for God was developed into a systematic metaphysics by St Thomas Aquinas Man as the image of God Interpretations of the incarnational mystery of the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God were frequently executed by artisans in relational form most recognisably as Madonna some works depicting three generations as in Metterza The mutual reciprocity contained in a personalist phenomological approach to the philosophy of being draws attention to man s need for transcendence that a duality between good and evil is not sufficient to explain the mystery of human social relations in community John Henry Newman popularised the Latin aphorism cor ad cor loquitur or heart speaks unto heart first coined two centuries before by the Doctor of the Church Frances de Sales cor cordi loquitur 15 16 17 to describe adequately communicating the graced intimacy of man s conformity to Jesus loving obedience to his Father s divine will unto death Similarly St Augustine had written a millennium before Sonus verborum nostrorum aures percutit magister intus est that when a teacher speaks worthily of divine things as the sound of the words strike our ears it is no longer mere words but God himself who enters 18 The sacramental economy of grace indwelling in Mother Church is implied in sacred art of the type Holy Trinity creator Father reflexive procession of the Holy Spirit through the sacrificial kenosis on the Cross celebrated on the Altar these analyses implicitly presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being Pope John Paul II in Memory and identity Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium dd This existential social aspect of divine grace indwelling in human action is what heals the divisions of a society rent by the irrational dictates of reductionist relativism of mind over matter that equates the physical impulse with vice and cerebral indifference with virtue Were this to be taken to extremes the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence and would become a world apart admirable perhaps but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life Pope Benedict XVI on the nature of love in Deus Caritas Est God is love dd Radiation of Fatherhood Edit The Carmelite mystic Saint John of the Cross sketched his vision of this perspective from the head of the cross looking down upon those gathered at the foot corresponding to the Father s love radiating down on the priest and congregation worshiping at the altar Salvador Dali was inspired to paint his monumental work Christ of Saint John of the Cross after a spiritual crisis saw him revert to his childhood faith upon reading John s classic Dark Night of the Soul Doctrinal differences EditThe neutrality of this section is disputed Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met January 2021 Learn how and when to remove this template message Protestant and Catholics differ in their interpretation of communio as model of ecclesial unity binding on members of the Mystical body of Christ A dyadically reduced trinitarianism underpins the Barthian school of thought The Father remains the sole principle because the Son has nothing he has not received from this source But the Trinity is asymmetrical reciprocity not a symmetrical hierarchy proceeding from the Father Its asymmetry is precisely the root of its dynamism as eternal Act eternal perichoresis 19 On this logic Barth s pneumatological minimalism cannot be inherently rooted in the filioque My own hunch is that Barth s binitarianism is more deeply planted in that other culprit Jenson identifies the merely two sided understanding of human community and so of historical reality inherited from the I Thou tradition of 19th century German philosophical anthropology Aaron Riches Church Eucharist and Predestination in Barth and de Lubac CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE IN COMMUNIO Communio 35 Winter 2008 20 dd References Edit Liddell amp Scott perseus uchicago edu a b c d Cross F L Livingstone E A eds 1974 Circumincession The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 2 ed Oxford Oxford University Press Prestige G L God in Patristic Thought SPCK 1964 p 291 Ott Ludwig Manual de Teologia Dogmatica Barcelona Herder 1969 p 131 Prestige G L God in Patristic Thought SPCK 1964 pp 290ff amp Bettenson Henry The Early Christian Fathers OUP 1976 p 286 amp Brown Colin Karl Barth and the Christian Message London Tyndale 1967 p 74 amp Catholic Culture org Dictionary Prestige Leonard 1928 PEPIXWPEW AND PEPIXWPHSIS IN THE FATHERS The Journal of Theological Studies 29 115 242 252 doi 10 1093 jts os XXIX 115 242 JSTOR 23950946 Retrieved February 4 2021 via JSTOR Liddell amp Scott artflx uchicago edu Why Choose such a Word as Perichoresis Trinity in You Retrieved February 4 2021 Online Latin lexicon Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary at Perseus entry for incedo Kenneth Baker S J Fundamentals of Catholicism God Trinity Creation Christ Mary New York Ignatius Press 1983 p 108 Generation and Spiration The Processions of the Trinity Thomas L McDonald of the Catholic Channel at Patheos com Hosting the Conversation on Faith Sermon 8 on the Song of Songs St Bernard of Clairvaux Retrieved 10 3 11 http www scborromeo org ccc p1s2c1p2 htm IV Catechism of the Catholic Church CCC IV THE DIVINE WORKS AND THE TRINITARIAN MISSIONS http www communio icr com articles PDF schindler35 3 pdf THE EMBODIED PERSON AS GIFT AND THE CULTURAL TASK IN AMERICA STATUS QUAESTIONIS Communio 35 Fall 2008 online pdf reprint Location blog citation in Idea of a University chapter entitled University Preaching Text of Idea of the University online treatise at Newman Reader Traite de la Predication by Francis De Sales online Google books in original Latin see Caput V Analecta Biblica 69 Interiority and Covenant A Study of ei nai en and menein en in the First Letter of John Edward Malatesta 1978 Trinity and Creation An Eckhartian Perspective Communio International Catholic Review 30 no 4 Winter 2003 696 714 Past Issues Communio www communio icr com Bibliography EditDURAND Emmanuel La perichorese des personnes divines immanence mutuelle reciprocite et communion Paris Cerf Cogitation Fidei 243 2005 409 p Hikota Riyako C Beyond Metaphor The Trinitarian Perichōresis and Dance Open Theology 8 2022 p 50 63 Open Access Beyond Metaphor The Trinitarian Perichōresis and Dance Lane G Tipton The Function of Perichoresis and the Divine Incomprehensibility Westminster Theological Journal Fall 2002 David J Engelsma Trinity and Covenant Reformed Free Publishing Association 2006 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain Chambers Ephraim ed 1728 Perichoresis Cyclopaedia or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences 1st ed James and John Knapton et al Stamatovic Slobodan The Meaning of Perichoresis Open Theology 2 2016 p 303 326 Open Access The Meaning of PerichoresisExternal links Edit Look up perichoresis in Wiktionary the free dictionary Institut Perichorese at Atelier d iconographie French language icon workshop based in Montreal Quebec Canada Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Perichoresis amp oldid 1149577964, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
