Perichoresis
Perichoresis ( ancient Greek περιχώρησις perichóresis , Latin circumincessio ) is the complete mutual penetration, which leads to a unity without merging.
The term is derived from the verb perichorein , which literally means to walk around, to wander through, to penetrate and to pass over to someone. It is mainly used in Christian dogmatics . In Trinity theology he explains the unity of the three divine persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit through the metaphor of mutual penetration. The identity of the people should be stated without giving up their differences. The trinitarian model of perichoresis shows that God's nature is relational. The relationality of Father, Son, and Spirit is extensive and radical. In Christology it denotes the union of human and divine nature in Jesus Christ .
Philosophy and Theology in Antiquity
Etymologically, the noun perichoresis in Greek consists of peri , i.e. around something , and chorea, i.e. H. swing . It denotes a dynamic relation. The Stoic philosophy of nature already developed the idea of a unity with simultaneous integrity of the united objects. Examples of this were the mutual penetration in the mixture of water and wine or in the heating of fire and iron. The basic idea of perichoresis in the relationship between the persons father and son can be traced back to the Gospel of John , when it is said that the father is in the son and the son in the father, cf. Joh 10.38 EU , 14.11 EU and 17.21 EU . The Christology has also already adopted this idea early, especially in the metaphor of the iron-baked. Deity and humanity in Christ form a unity, but they do not merge, rather they maintain their integrity even in the unity.
The verb perichorein was first used by Gregory of Nazianz in a theological context. For him, the perichoretic unity does not mean that the hypostases Father, Son and Holy Spirit merge into one another. Because then they would cease to be what they are. Gregory of Nazianz describes the dynamic unity from the three hypostases and begins with the father as the epitome of divine unity,
"[...] from which the others start and to which they return, not in order to mix, but in such a way that they are connected."
The noun perichoresis then makes it clear in Maximus Confessor that the unity of the person of Jesus Christ is to be reconciled with the duality of natures as true man and as true God, precisely because the two natures, like fire and iron in a glowing sword, are mutually exclusive penetrate.
Pseudo-Cyril later transfers the idea of perichoresis to the Trinity as well . With the mutual interpenetration of the three divine hypostases Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he describes the Trinity as a state between separate coexistence and complete fusion.
John of Damascus
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John of Damascus adopted the concept of perichoresis from Pseudo-Cyril. According to John, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit abide and live in one another. They are inseparable and unmixed into one another without merging or dissolving. The Son is in the Father and Spirit, the Spirit is in the Father and Son, and the Father is in the Son and in the Spirit, without any dissolution, fusion or intermingling taking place. There is unity and identity in movement. The three people would only have one movement and only one activity. John described an identity and not a resemblance: an identity of movement and activity, of essence, of effectiveness of will, of power, of strength and of goodness. Despite all identity, there is also difference. Let the ungenerated father beget the son who is so different from him. Let the spirit emerge, which is thus also different from him. Creation and emergence are different relations, therefore son and spirit are also differentiated. Procreation and emergence are principal relationships that must not be thought of in terms of space and time, neither movement nor activity, essence, will, power or force. John differentiated between a factual and a logical-conceptual consideration:
“In all creatures, the difference between the hypostases is objectively considered. So, from a factual point of view, Peter and Paul are separated from one another. The commonality, the togetherness and the unity are viewed logically and conceptually. For we think with the understanding that Peter and Paul are of the same nature and have a single, common nature. [...] With the holy, over-essential, all-sublime, incomprehensible Trinity, however, it is the other way round. For here what is common and one is objectively considered because of the equality and identity of essence, the effectiveness of the will, because of the agreement of the mode of thought and the similitude of power, strength and goodness. I did not speak of similarity, but of identity and uniformity of activity. For it is a matter of an essence, a goodness, a force, a will, an activity, a power, one and the same, not three similar, but one and the same activity of the three persons. Each of them has no less unity with the other than with itself, that is, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in everything, with the exception of the non-begotten, the begotten and the outcome. Conceptually, however, they are different. Because we know a God. Only in the peculiarities of fatherhood, sonship and outcome, with regard to the principle [ie the cause] and the principle [ie the caused] and the perfection of the hypostasis, namely the mode of existence, do we think the difference. "
Greek Orthodox teaching
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In the Greek Orthodox tradition, perichoresis is finally extended to the relationship between man and God. According to the Greek Fathers of the Church, there is a relationship of mutual penetration between man and God. God is in us and we are in God in the sense of a mutual participation in which creator and creature are not separated, but are nevertheless different from one another. Man's creatureliness cannot be exceeded. In spite of all the essential distance between God and man, he can experience the gifts of the Spirit and enlightenment beyond the knowledge of God and participate in the divine qualities. This is not a privilege of a few, but is basically possible for every person according to the measure of his personal devotion and calling. But it cannot be forced through one's own performance. Participation in the beginningless energy as God's own life is not accessible to man by nature, but is promised as a gift. Grace is the energy in which God's self-communication to man and man's participation in God is expressed. The participation in God is possible because it takes people into the life of his spirit into it, such as in particular the Makarios falsely attributed homilies emphasize the real author is unknown:
“God liked to allow us to share in his divine nature. [...] In his unlimited, indescribable and incomprehensible love and tender compassion he liked to live in this work of his hands. "
The teaching of Gregory Palamas was particularly influential up to the present day dogmatics of the Orthodox Churches : through divine grace, light fills the spirit and soul and a perfect perichoresis of the Creator with his deified creature takes place. Man becomes an instrument of the Holy Spirit because he is filled with the energy that is identical to the energy of the deifying entity.
Karl Barth
According to Karl Barth , God's being is to be conceived in concrete terms. According to this, God is eventful a distinguished and in itself differentiated being. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are different from one another in that they are related to one another. The self-relatedness of the divine being is based on the relationships between the three divine modes of being. It is to be thought of as a community in which the being of God happens concretely. This communion is given by the full participation of each mode of being in the other modes of being. Being and becoming are originally here together. The concrete unity of God's being is the unity of oneness, which is always also a becoming one. The relationship of the modes of being to one another occurs as participation in one another: as perichoresis. It is about a step into one another, by which an intervention of one mode of being against another is excluded. According to Barth, perichoresis causes
"[...] that the divine modes of being mutually condition and permeate each other so perfectly that one always takes place in the other two like the other two in her."
The point of the doctrine of perichoresis is to understand the unity of God's modes of being among themselves as the concreteness of God's being. The unity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit among themselves corresponds to their unity outwardly. God's being is to be understood as an event. He reveals Himself as Father, Son and Spirit, because he God as Father, Son and Spirit is . In the self-centeredness of God's being, the divine modes of being give themselves to one another. Thereby the devotion of God, in which he is ours, is made possible and represented in advance. For Karl Barth, the being of God as a historical event is concrete in the manifestation of God. The communion of God with people comes about in God's self-communication. All three divine modes of being are at work. God's being can only be understood through his work as revelator, revelation and being revealed and thus in the difference between three modes of God's being, as it is explicated in the difference in the works of creation, reconciliation and redemption.
Jürgen Moltmann
According to Moltmann's theology of the Trinity , perichoresis ingeniously combines the trinity and the unity, without reducing the trinity to the unity or dissolving the unity into the trinity. The unity of the Trinity lies in the eternal perichoresis of the Trinitarian persons. The perichoretic life of God is the reason for the intervention of the triune God in history and in creation.
“In the power of their eternal love, the divine persons exist so intimately with one another, for one another and in one another that they constitute themselves in their unique, incomparable and complete unity. [...] The intra-trinitarian relations and the trinitarian perichoresis are complementary to each other. "
The perichoretic unity of the Triune God is in this respect an inviting and unifying unity. It is also a unity that is open to people and the world. The relationship of the divine persons is so wide that the whole world has space in it.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Even Hans Urs von Balthasar sees the Trinity of God perichoretisch. He uses a dialogic model with which he distinguishes himself from Hegel's dialectic: while the dialectic makes the other the negation of the one, in order to then combine both in a higher synthesis, the other is met with appreciation in the dialogue. The other remains unconquerable as such, it is left standing. In principle, this encounter as love does not want to come to an end. Trinitarian self-fulfillment thus becomes the fulfillment of the reciprocal giving of the one godhood. The essence of the persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be described as their being in one another, their circumincessio . This coexistence is personal and at the same time essential. The one divine self-giving persists in the process of development and in perichoresis : God is love. In God's being of love, people are as relations by virtue of their being. The essence of God is not a rigid identity block. It's a transition:
“[...] something communicated in the father, received in the son, given to the spirit by father and son, owed to the spirit by son and spirit.
God's nature is not outside of this process of productive and productive. "
The person does not divide the essence of God into three different forms of existence. The own relational subsistence of persons communicates the essence of God as the one being God. The people are distinguished from one another only relationally, but not real. Persons are inherent in the divine being, in that they carry and possess it.
Gisbert Greshake
Gisbert Greshake describes the divine unity in such a way that in and with each person the others are given without losing their uniqueness. Every person has their whole being only from and towards the others. Your own being is mediated in and through others. Every single person cannot be thought without the others and is not without them. The whole of the relational structure as well as the rest of the people are present in every single person. This is precisely what the traditional term perichoresis expresses.
Perichoresis thus becomes a trinitarian interplay of love. In their rhythm, each person is themselves only in the other. In the fulfillment of their own personhood, they bring the other people into themselves and surround them. Greshake compares divine communion with a game that takes place in divine love. Each person plays it whole, but not alone and for themselves. The perichoretic game turns out to be a dance in which the lovers dance around. Both the unity and the differences between people are based on the mutual relationship between people:
"The trinitarian interpenetration (perichoresis) is the fundamental and highest archetype of life as a community, where unity and diversity are fully and simultaneously expressed."
See also
literature
- Hans Urs von Balthasar: Spiritus Creator. Sketches for theology 3 . Einsiedeln 1967
- Hans Urs von Balthasar: Theodramatic IV. The endgame . Einsiedeln 1983
- Hans Urs von Balthasar: Theologics II. Truth of God . Einsiedeln 1985
- August Deneffe: Perichoresis, circumincessio, circuminsessio. A terminological study . In: Zeitschr. for cath. Theologie 47 (1923), p. 497 ff.
- Gisbert Greshake: The Triune God. A trinitarian theology . 4th edition Herder, Freiburg 2001
- Eberhard Jüngel : God's being is in the process of becoming. Responsible speech about the being of God with Karl Barth; a paraphrase . 4th edition Mohr, Tübingen 1986
- Georgi Kapriev: Philosophy in Byzantium . Königshausen & Neumann 2005
- Jürgen Moltmann : The unity of the triune God . In: W. Breuning: Trinity. Current perspectives in theology . Herder, Freiburg 1984
- Jürgen Moltmann: God in the project of the modern world . Gütersloh publishing house, Gütersloh 1997
- Jürgen Moltmann: Perichoresis. An Old Magic Word for a New Trinitarian Theology . In: MD Meeks (Ed.): Trinity, Community and Power . Kingswood Books, Nashville 2000
- Jürgen Moltmann: Trinity and Kingdom of God . Kaiser, Munich 1980
- Markus Mühling: Farewell to perichoresis? Asymmetrical reciprocity as a condition of withdrawal in the being of God . In the S. u. M. Wendte (Ed.): Withdrawal in God . Utrecht 2005, pp. 187-204
- Thomas Schumacher: Perichorein. On the convergence of pneumatology and christology in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theodramatic draft of a theology . Institute for the Promotion of the Doctrine of Faith, Munich 2007
- Ciril Sorc: Drafts of a Perichoretic Theology . Lit, Münster 2004
- Ciril Sorc: The perichoretic relationships in the life of the Trinity and in the community of men . In: Evangelische Theologie 58 (1998), p. 100 ff.
- Peter Stemmer : Art. Perichoresis . In: Joachim Ritter u. a. (Ed.): Historical dictionary of philosophy. Schwabe, Basel 1971 to 2007
- Peter Stemmer: Perichoresis. To the history of a concept . In: Archive for Conceptual History 27 (1983), p. 9 ff.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Eberhard Jüngel, Art. Perichoresis , RGG, 4th ed., Vol. 6, 1111
- ↑ See Peter Stemmer, Art. Perichorese , in: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, Vol. 7, Basel 1989, Col. 255
- ^ Gregor von Nazianz, Ep. 101. MPG 37, 181 C
- ^ Gregor von Nazianz, Or. 42, 15-16
- ↑ Maximus Confessor, Disp. c. Pyrrho. MPG 91, 337 CD
- ^ Pseudo-Cyrill, De trin. 24. MPG 77, 1165 CD
- ↑ Peter Stemmer, Art. Perichorese , in: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, Vol. 7, Basel 1989, Col. 256
- ↑ John of Damascus, De fide orth. , 1, 8, BKV 44, 42
- ↑ Johannes von Damascus, De fide orth. , 1, 8, BKV 44, 24 ff.
- ↑ Johannes von Damascus, De fide orth. , 1, 8, BKV 44, 23 f., From the Greek. translated by Dionys Steinhofer, Munich 1923
- ↑ Georgi Kapriev, Philosophy in Byzanz , Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, p. 301
- ↑ Karl Mühlek: MAKARIUS THE EGYPT. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 5, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-043-3 , Sp. 596-597.
- ↑ Makarios, Geistliche Homilien , in: Chr. Lib. 1, 130 ff.
- ↑ Cf. Dumitru Stăniloae , Orthodoxe Dogmatik , Vol. I - III, Guetersloher Verlagshaus 1985 to 1995; ders .: The life and teaching of St. Gregory Palamas , 1938
- ^ Gregorius Palamas, De participatione , 21 (II, 156, 9-12)
- ↑ Gregorius Palamas, Triades III , 1, 33 (I, 645, 17-19)
- ^ Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik , Vol. I / 1, Munich 1932, p. 389 f.
- ^ Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik , Vol. I / 1, Munich 1932, p. 390
- ↑ Cf. in detail Eberhard Jüngel, God's being is in the process of becoming. Responsible speech about the being of God with Karl Barth; a paraphrase . 4th edition Mohr, Tübingen 1986, in particular p. 41 ff.
- ↑ Jürgen Moltmann, Trinity and Kingdom of God , Kaiser, Munich 1980, p. 191
- ↑ Jürgen Moltmann, Trinity and Kingdom of God , Kaiser, Munich 1980, p. 174
- ↑ Jürgen Moltmann, The Unity of the Triune God , in: W. Breuning, Trinity . Current perspectives in theology. Herder, Freiburg 1984, p. 108
- ↑ Jürgen Moltmann, God in the Project of the Modern World , Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 1997, p. 110
- ↑ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik II: Truth of God , Einsiedeln 1985, p. 40
- ↑ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik II: Truth of God , Einsiedeln 1985, p. 127
- ↑ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik IV: Das Endspiel , Einsiedeln 1983, p. 66
- ↑ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Spiritus Creator. Sketches for Theology 3 , Einsiedeln 1967, p. 95
- ↑ Father, Son and Holy Spirit
- ↑ Gisbert Greshake, Der dreieine Gott , Freiburg 2001, p. 199
- ↑ Gisbert Greshake, Der dreieinige Gott , Freiburg 2001, pp. 187 ff. And pp. 205 f.
- ↑ Gisbert Greshake, Der dreieine Gott , Freiburg 2001, p. 189