page_title: Perichoresis
section_title: Usage
hierarchical_section_title: Perichoresis / Usage
caption_attribution_description: Unknown painter of XV century, St. Anna Metterza, fresco, 1450 ca, Oratorio di San Lorenzo all’Alpe Seccio, Boccioleto, Vercelli, Italy
context_page_description: Perichoresis is a term referring to the relationship of the three persons of the triune God to one another. Circumincession is a Latin-derived term for the same concept. It was first used as a term in Christian theology, by the Church Fathers. The noun first appears in the writings of Maximus Confessor but the related verb perichoreo is found earlier in Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory used it to describe the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ as did John of Damascus, who also extended it to the "interpenetration" of the three persons of the Trinity, and it became a technical term for the latter. It has been given recent currency by such contemporary writers as Jürgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf, John Zizioulas, Richard Rohr, and others.
  Modern authors extend the original usage as an analogy to cover other interpersonal relationships. The term "coinherence" is sometimes used as a synonym.
  Since humans are made in the image of God, a Christian understanding of an adequate anthropology of humans' social relations is informed by the divine attributes, what can be known of God's activity and God's presence in human affairs.
context_section_description: The relationship of the Triune God is intensified by the relationship of perichoresis. This indwelling expresses and realizes fellowship between the Father and the Son. It is intimacy. Jesus compares 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" (John 17:21). The great 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.
  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
  Together, they breathe forth the Holy Spirit. In John 15:26, Jesus says, "But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me." Earlier, in the first millennium, theological tradition had viewed the indwelling as fellowship. John of Damascus, who was influential in developing the doctrine of the perichoresis, described it as a "cleaving together." Such is the fellowship in the Godhead that the Father and the Son not only embrace each other, but they also enter into each other, permeate each other, and dwell in each other. One in being, they are also always one in the intimacy of their friendship.
  The devotion of themselves to each other in the Spirit by the Father and the Son has content. Not only does the procession of the Spirit from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Father express their mutual love, as they breathe after each other, but also it gives each to the other. In the procession of the Spirit from the Father, the Father gives himself to the Son; in the procession of the Spirit from the Son to the Father, and in this use of the word "procession" from the Son is meant the sending of the Holy Spirit as the Son teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, the Son gives himself to the Father in prayer, for the procession of the Spirit, like the begetting of the Son, is the going forth of the being of the Father to the Son and the going forth of the being of the Son to the Father as the Holy Spirit.
  The property of divine grace in the Trinitarian mission is distinct for each person or hypostase of the Holy Trinity yet united, communing, indwelling, in Trinitarian love. All is God's gift from the Father, through the Son's Incarnation and in the gift of the Holy Spirit. This relational co-inherence is often represented as Borromean rings or the Scutum Fidei.
  The tombstone of the twentieth-century Swiss mystic and Catholic convert Dr. Adrienne von Speyr features a three-dimensional monolithic stone carving resembling the bas-relief two-dimensional carved eternal-knot symbol of Norse mythology, the valknut, used to eulogize legendary valor surpassing human understanding. The mysterious beauty of three-fold symmetry is evident in even more ancient forms of the Triskelion such as the spinning three-legged flag of Sicily with its pre-Byzantine roots in Greek culture and the carved lozenge near the main entrance of the prehistoric Newgrange monument in County Meath, Ireland, with its characteristic iron-age Celtic swirl using the spatial-motion symmetry of an Archimedean spiral from around 3200 BCE.
caption: 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.
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