Perichoresis and the Common Energy

If the Father is the sole cause, what holds the three together on the other side of that asymmetry? Two answers, both patristic and neither a metaphor: the three dwell wholly in one another (perichoresis), and they have one will and one operation toward everything outside God. This file states both precisely, dates the vocabulary honestly — the noun is late and does not belong to the Cappadocians — and corrects two errors that have grown up around the word in modern usage.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Two Doctrines

The monarchy of the Father secures that God is one by grounding the Son and the Spirit in a single personal source. Two further doctrines secure that the three are not three centres of activity standing side by side.

The first is perichoresis (περιχώρησις): each of the three is wholly in the others, without confusion and without any part standing outside. Its scriptural warrant is the Johannine “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (John 14:10–11; cf. 10:38; 17:21).

The second is the single operation: whatever God does outside himself, he does as one, in a single act which is from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

The History of the Word, Told Straight

The noun perichōrēsis is late, and this collection does not backdate it.

The verb περιχωρέω appears in a Trinitarian context only rarely before the sixth century, and its important early use in St. Gregory the Theologian is Christological, not Trinitarian: in the letter to Cledonius he speaks of the natures in Christ as passing into one another (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101 [To Cledonius]; trans. Williams and Wickham, Popular Patristics 23). The technical use of the noun follows the same path: St. Maximus the Confessor deploys perichōrēsis of the two natures and two operations in Christ, and it is from that Christological usage that it was transferred to the Trinity.

The transfer to Trinitarian theology is attested in Pseudo-Cyril‘s De sacrosancta Trinitate, a work of uncertain date on which St. John of Damascus drew, and it is the Damascene who fixed the term for the tradition: the hypostases “are made one not so as to commingle, but so as to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other (tēn en allēlais perichōrēsin) without any coalescence or commingling” (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.8; and I.14, where the doctrine is stated again; trans. NPNF II/9). The classic study of the term’s history is Verna E. F. Harrison, “Perichoresis in the Greek Fathers,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 35 (1991): 53–65; see also G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1936; rev. 1952), whose chapter on coinherence established the standard account.

So: the doctrine — that each is wholly in the others — is Cappadocian and older, and is what Gregory the Theologian means when he says that no sooner does he distinguish the three than he is carried back to the One. The word is eighth-century in its Trinitarian sense. Attributing the noun to the Cappadocians is a common and avoidable error.

Two Corrections

The word has nothing to do with dancing. A widely repeated modern gloss derives perichōrēsis from περιχορεύω, “to dance around,” and yields the image of the Trinity as a “divine dance.” The etymology is false. Perichōrēsis derives from περιχωρέω, “to go around, to pass through, to permeate” — from χωρέω, “to make room for, to contain, to give way to,” and χώρα, “space.” The two verbs are distinct, and the resemblance is accidental. The image is not patristic and, worse, it misdirects: the doctrine is about mutual indwelling and containment, not about motion or relationship-as-activity.

The Latin rendering is ambiguous and the ambiguity is instructive. Burgundio of Pisa, translating the Damascene in the twelfth century, rendered perichōrēsis as circumincessio — from incedere, to move into, a term of active penetration. Later Latin theology often wrote circuminsessio — from insidere, to be seated within, a term of static indwelling. The difference of one letter changes the accent from mutual permeation to mutual repose, and the two words continue in parallel use.

What Perichoresis Does and Does Not Do

It secures that the distinction of hypostases does not fragment God. Because each is wholly in the others, there is no divine act, no divine knowledge, and no divine life that belongs to one of the three apart from the others. Where the Father is, the Son and the Spirit are, entirely.

It does not replace the monarchy of the Father as the ground of unity, and this is worth saying because a strand of modern theology has tried to make it do so — proposing that the three are one in virtue of their mutual indwelling and interrelation rather than in virtue of the Father’s causality. The Fathers do not argue this way. In the Damascene, perichoresis follows from the fact that the Son and the Spirit have their being from the Father and possess his whole nature; it is a consequence of the monarchy, not an alternative to it (see The Father as Sole Cause).

Nor does it license the use of the Trinity as a social model. That the three coinhere without confusion is not a template for human community, because the reason they coinhere — one identical nature possessed wholly by each — has no created analogue. Persons who used the doctrine this way in the twentieth century were generally aware of the difficulty; the popular derivatives usually are not.

The One Operation

The second doctrine is more consequential in practice, and it is the one that actually answers the charge of tritheism.

St. Gregory of Nyssa states it in Ad Ablabium: “Every operation which extends from God to creation and is designated according to our differing conceptions of it has its origin from the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit” — and is therefore a single operation, not three of the same kind (Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium; GNO III/1; trans. NPNF II/5). St. Basil makes the same point of sanctification and of creation (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16.37–38).

Three things follow, and they are not obvious.

The formula is not a division of labour. “From the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit” does not mean the Father supplies the plan, the Son executes it, and the Spirit finishes it. It means one act, in which the three are distinguished by their manner of being the one agent — a distinction which is again a relation of origin and not a function.

The appropriations are a manner of speaking. Creation is appropriated to the Father, redemption to the Son, sanctification to the Spirit, and this usage is scriptural and liturgical. But it is appropriation, not attribution: the Father creates through the Son in the Spirit, the Son redeems by the Father’s good pleasure and the Spirit’s cooperation, and the Spirit sanctifies with the Father and the Son.

The Incarnation is the one hypostatic exception, and it proves the rule. Only the Son became man. But the Damascene is careful: the Word alone was incarnate, “by the good pleasure of the Father and the cooperation of the Holy Spirit,” so that the incarnating is the act of the whole Trinity while the being incarnate is proper to the Son alone (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.1–2, 6). The distinction between what is common (the act) and what is hypostatic (the assumption of flesh) is exactly the ousia/hypostasis distinction doing work in Christology (see Christology).

The Energies Are Common

The doctrine of the single operation reaches its dogmatic form in the Palamite settlement. The uncreated energies of God — his grace, his light, his life — are the operations of the one divine nature, and are therefore common to the three: they proceed from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, and they are not the property of one hypostasis.

This has a direct consequence for the doctrine of deification, and it is the reason the Trinitarian and the ascetic parts of Orthodox theology are one subject. The saint who is united to God by the uncreated energies is united to the Trinity, not to one of the three; the light of Tabor is the light of the whole Godhead. Nothing here is restated at length, because it is settled dogma treated elsewhere (see The Palamite Settlement; How Participation Is Possible; St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction).

Theology and Economy

One further distinction belongs here, because Section 08 turns on it.

The Fathers distinguish theologia — what God is eternally in himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — from oikonomia, what God does in time for our salvation. The order of the economy is not simply the order of the eternal relations. In the economy the Spirit is sent by the Son, rests on the Son, is poured out by the risen Christ; in eternity the Spirit proceeds from the Father. St. Photius made this distinction the hinge of the whole Orthodox case against the Filioque: the scriptural texts about the Spirit’s being given, sent, and poured out speak of the economy, and do not reach the timeless relation by which the Spirit is (see St. Photius: The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit).

There is a real correspondence between the two: God does not act in the economy in a way that misrepresents what he is, and the economy is the only access we have to the theology. Modern Western theology has sometimes stated this correspondence as an identity — Karl Rahner’s axiom that “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity” (Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel, London: Burns & Oates, 1970). Orthodox theology affirms the correspondence and declines the identity, for the sufficient reason that the economy is free and the Trinity is not: God need not have created or become incarnate, and what is contingent cannot be simply identical with what is eternal. The distinction is not a technicality. It is the difference between confessing that the Spirit is sent by the Son and confessing that he derives his being from the Son, and it is the whole substance of the next section.

References

John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.8, 14; III.1–2, 6. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 9.
Gregory of Nyssa. Ad Ablabium (On “Not Three Gods”). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5; Greek in Gregorii Nysseni Opera III/1.
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 16. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Gregory the Theologian. Epistle 101 (To Cledonius). Trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, On God and Christ, Popular Patristics 23. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2002.
Harrison, Verna E. F. “Perichoresis in the Greek Fathers.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 35 (1991): 53–65.
Prestige, G. L. God in Patristic Thought. London: SPCK, 1936; rev. ed. 1952.
Rahner, Karl. The Trinity. Trans. Joseph Donceel. London: Burns & Oates, 1970.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.