Testimonials to Experience of the Trinity (Studies in Spirituality Supplements, 37) 9789042945692, 9789042945708, 9042945699

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STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY SUPPLEMENT 37

Titus Brandsma Institute

TESTIMONIALS TO EXPERIENCE OF THE TRINITY by Dale M. Schlitt

PEETERS

TESTIMONIALS TO EXPERIENCE OF THE TRINITY

STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY SUPPLEMENTS Edited by Kees Waaijman – Marc De Kesel – Inigo Bocken Titus Brandsma Institute – Nijmegen – The Netherlands

TITUS BRANDSMA INSTITUTE STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY Supplement 37

TESTIMONIALS TO EXPERIENCE OF THE TRINITY by Dale M. Schlitt

PEETERS LEUVEN - PARIS - BRISTOL, CT 2021

© 2021, Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven ISBN 978-90-429-4569-2 eISBN 978-90-429-4570-8 D/2021/0602/176 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

CONTENTS

IX

Acknowledgments Introduction. Trinity, Experience, Testimonial Trinity Experience Testimonial

1 2 3 8

Part I – The Founding Experience Chapter 1. Jesus, Spirit-empowered Son of Abba Jesus Prays to Abba Jesus, through Whom the Spirit Works Jesus and His Disciples

17 22 27 30

Part II – Early Testimonials Chapter 2. Paul of Tarsus: An Appeal to the Galatians Galatians 4:6 Luther on Galatians 4:6 Paul, Luther, and Us

43 45 56 62

Chapter 3. Basil of Caesarea: An Argument in the Spirit The Experiences to Which Basil Gives Testimony Underlying Experiential Dynamics The First Council of Constantinople and Beyond

65 68 73 78

Part III – Medieval and Early Modern Testimonials Chapter 4. Abbot Suger: A Trinitarian Space The Saint-Denis Chapel An Architectural Testimonial

87 91 107

VI

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 5. Julian of Norwich: Spiritual Memoirs The Short Text: Visions Recounted The Long Text: A Spiritual Memoir Julian’s Gift to Us

111 114 119 135

Chapter 6. Andrei Rublev: A Trinity Icon Rublev and His Times The Beauty of Rublev’s Icon Gazing upon the Icon A Unique Testimonial

137 138 139 150 154

Chapter 7. Marie de l’Incarnation: Spiritual Autobiography Autobiographical Highlights Marie’s Visions, Experiences of the Trinity Testimonial

157 158 166 177

Chapter 8. Charles Wesley: Trinity Hymns The Road to Personal Conversion Hymning the Trinity Remembering and Recognizing

181 183 187 200

Part IV – 20th and 21st Century Testimonials Chapter 9. The Azusa Street Revival: Pentecost Testimonials Pentecostal Experience The Azusa Street Revival Pentecost Testimonials

207 207 211 226

Chapter 10. Raimon Panikkar: Intrareligious Dialogue Humankind’s Religious Experience Three Forms of Spirituality The Trinity Intrareligious Testimonials

235 238 241 247 254

Chapter 11. Raimon Panikkar: Cosmotheandric Insight The Triadic Myth The Theanthropocosmic Invariant Cosmotheandric Spirituality Cosmotheandric Testimonials

259 264 267 276 286

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VII

Chapter 12. Leonardo Boff: Trinitarian Societies The Earlier Boff on Experience of the Trinity The Trinity, Societies, and Liberation Testimonials to Liberating Experience of the Trinity

291 293 299 316

Chapter 13. Charles Nyamiti: An Ancestral Trinitology Toward an African Ancestral Trinitology Trinitarian Ancestral Relationship Ancestral Trinitological Testimonials

323 324 328 343

Chapter 14. John Polkinghorne: A Science-Religion Dialogue Science and Theology Scientific and Trinitarian Perspectives on Reality Exploring Reality Further Science-Religion Dialogue as Testimonial

351 353 355 368 372

Chapter 15. William Paul Young: The Shack, Novel The Novel Story and Narrators Plot and Participants Timelines The Novel as Testimonial

377 378 380 382 389 391

Chapter 16. Stuart Hazeldine: The Shack, Movie From Novel to Movie Several Visualized Experiences The Movie as Testimonial

399 399 404 410

Conclusion. Discipleship Jesus’ Spirituality Discipleship Spiritualities

415 416 419

Bibliography

437

Index

469

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Titus Brandsma Institute, Research Centre for Mysticism and Spirituality, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, along with Peeters Publishing, Leuven, Belgium, for graciously accepting to include this study in the prestigious series, Studies in Spirituality Supplements. I am especially grateful to Ms. Wendy M. Litjens, Editorial Secretary, Titus Brandsma Institute, for kind encouragement and overall professional as well as editorial guidance during the process of review and in the earlier stages of preparation for publication. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Mr. Ingemar Spelmans, Editorial Assistant at Peeters Publishing, for continuing, important editorial work at Peeters Publishing and for offering wise, greatly appreciated counsel in the later stages of preparation and then publication. A special word of thanks to Dr. Bruce Ryhal, M.D., for reading through the manuscript, commenting wisely, and offering helpful insights and suggestions. My deep appreciation to Rev. Allen Maes, OMI, for systematically reviewing the text from literary as well as linguistic perspectives and then recommending improvements. Sincere thanks to librarians whose ongoing help greatly facilitated access to various resources. Ms. Maria M. Garcia, Director of the Oblate School of Theology’s Donald E. O’Shaunessy Library, San Antonio, Texas, for overall support and research help and to Ms. Carmen Rodriguez, Library General Services Manager, O’Shaunessy Library, for so diligently hunting down and obtaining often hard-to-find items through interlibrary loan. Ms. Donna Church, Public Services Librarian, Kristine Kay Hasse Memorial Library, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, for kindly providing ongoing library loan privileges from the largest Lutheran library collection in the United States. Librarians at the Pius XII Library, St. Louis University, and at the John M. Olin Library, Washington University, both in St. Louis, Missouri, for assuring helpful access to their wide-ranging libraries. Chapter 1 is a somewhat expanded version of ‘Jesus, Spirit-empowered Son of Abba’, published in Offerings: Journal of Oblate School of Theology 10 (2017), 40-57, included here with the kind permission of Prof. Cliff Knighten, editor of Offerings. Chapter 4 originally appeared as an article, ‘Abbot Suger: A Trinitarian Space’, in: Studies in Spirituality 28 (2018), 189-209. Biblical quotations, apart

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

from translations provided by specific authors, are taken from two sources: New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV), copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, used by permission, all rights reserved; New American Bible, revised edition (NABRE), copyright The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.

DEDICATION

It gives me great pleasure to dedicate this study to participants in several doctoral seminars on spirituality of the Trinity offered at Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, Texas, in conjunction with the School’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Spirituality. They came from countries around the world and contributed creatively through research and discussion. Their contributions have enriched this study in important ways. Participants included: Sr. Ha Dinh, OP, Ph.D.; Melody V. Escobar, Ph.D.; Rev. Raquel C. Feagins, Ph.D. student.; Prof. J. August Higgins, Ph.D.; Sr. Jacinta Kioko, CPS, Ph.D.; Prof. Cliff Knighten, Ph.D.; Rev. Raymond Mwangala, OMI, Ph.D.; Sr. Duong Pham, LHC, Ph.D. In heartfelt appreciation. Dale M. SCHLITT, OMI Professor Emeritus

INTRODUCTION TRINITY, EXPERIENCE, TESTIMONIAL

Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God was profound, an experience richly differentiated in two main forms it took. Jesus prayed to God in an intimate way and recognized that he healed through the power of God’s Spirit. Subsequently his disciples have, over two millennia, sensed that their own experience of God and their expression of it depended on that of Jesus. Through the ages and around the world, they have continued to reflect prayerfully on his experience and on their own in the light of it. In their communal reflection, they have typically come to speak of God in trinitarian terms. Many of them have done so as well in their individual reflection. About 20 or 25 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul of Tarsus reminded Christians in Galatia, now part of Turkey, that the Spirit of God’s Son cries out in their hearts, Abba, Father. In the late 300s, Basil of Caesarea argued impressively to the Spirit’s equality in honor and divinity with the Father and the Son. By the 1100s, Abbot Suger rebuilt key parts of his monastery’s chapel outside Paris. He created a building whose triply structured façade and interior space reminded those who entered it of the Trinity. About two and a half centuries later, over in England, Julian of Norwich wrote at length of her experiences of the Trinity. Around the same time, a Russian Orthodox monk named Rublev painted his Trinity icon. It is perhaps the best-known icon in the world. In the 1600s, a French nun, Marie de l’Incarnation, sailed to Quebec in the New World. There she wrote about the experiences of the Trinity which she had earlier in France and how they motivated her to become a missionary to Canada. A little more than a century later, back in England, Charles Wesley found that he could, with his trinitarian hymns, encourage people to recognize their own experience of the Trinity. In the early 1900s, Pastor William J. Seymour launched the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. Many offered testimonials to experience of the Spirit. There arose a serious debate among early Pentecostals concerning God as Trinity. About 60 years later, Raimon Panikkar, of Indian and Spanish descent, explored trinitarian experience within himself. He wrote of the experience, which took the form of intrareligious dialogue among various world religions.

2

INTRODUCTION

Several decades later, he wrote further of trinitarian experience; this time on a scale inclusive of all of reality. He spoke of cosmotheandric insight involving the world, humankind, and God in trinitarian relationship. Around the same time, and far from India, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff encouraged establishing more egalitarian, just societies patterned after the divine trinitarian society. Late in the 20th and on into the early 21st centuries, in Kenya, Charles Nyamiti called upon African ancestral traditions to develop an understanding of God as Trinity. About the same time, in England, John Polkinghorne brought quantum physics and trinitarian theology together in a dialogue between science and religion. In 2007, over in North America, William Paul Young published a novel, The Shack. Ten years later, Stuart Hazeldine directed a movie of the same name. In novel and movie, a father grieves the tragic death of his six-year old daughter. He finds healing, reconciliation, and redemption when he spends a weekend with the three divine Persons. In various ways, each of these many authors and creators has given witness to experience of the Trinity. But, before reviewing their testimonials in detail, we should first spell out what we mean here by Trinity, experience, and testimonial. Trinity Two historical references shed light on what we mean when we refer to ‘the Trinity’ and, secondarily, ‘Trinity’.1 The first of these two references is to the fourth-century council known as the First Council of Constantinople. It met in 381, in what has since come to be known as Istanbul in Turkey, after prolonged disputes about who was fully divine. For over three hundred years, Christians had prayed and reflected on their experience, variously referring to God as God, Christ, and Spirit as well as Father, Son, and Spirit. Disputes arose about who truly was God or, again, who God truly was. In 325, the Council of Nicaea had affirmed that Jesus Christ was ‘true God of true God’. Over 50 years later, the members of the First Council of Constantinople took up and discussed at length the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation and sanctification. Over the course of these discussions, the Council opted for what was, in effect, a modification of the then current Greek thought about substance. In that thought, substance tended to be considered either as a single, concrete individual or as a more general, abstract nature. The Council members effectively embraced a third understanding of substance when they concluded that God was one 1

‘The Trinity’ with the definite article will refer to the triune God. ‘Trinity’ without the definite article will generally refer to the notion of the Trinity and to trinitarian theology. In each case, context will help clarify the specific way or ways in which these words are being used.

TRINITY, EXPERIENCE, TESTIMONIAL

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concrete substance in three divine Persons. More specifically, they said that ‘the Father, the Son and the holy Spirit have a single Godhead and power and substance, a dignity deserving the same honour and a co-eternal sovereignty, in three most perfect hypostases, or three perfect persons’.2 The Council members did not define in greater detail what they meant by persons. But they made it clear that they were thinking of one God in three identifiably different divine Persons. The second of these historical references is to the World Council of Churches. The WCC was founded in Amsterdam in 1948, almost 1600 years after the First Council of Constantinople. Today it brings together, in various ways and to differing degrees, a good majority of Christians. Many Christian churches and communities are formal members of the WCC. Others work with it in partnership by fostering dialogue and informal cooperation. In the process of describing itself, the WCC refers to the Trinity in succinct and non-technical phrasing. ‘The World Council of Churches is a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures, and therefore seek to fulfil together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.3 Together, the First Council of Constantinople, in its declaration, and the WCC, in its self-definition, give brief expression to what we generally mean by ‘the Trinity’ when we recount testimonials to experience of the Trinity. Variously phrased, the Trinity is three divine Persons as one God, one God in three divine Persons, and one God as three divine Persons. Experience We should note up front that ‘experience’ is indeed a slippery word.4 It has many meanings, depending on what we are referring to as indicated by the ways in which we use it. We seem to know what it means until we try to define and 2

3

4

First Council of Constantinople, ‘A Letter of the Bishops Gathered in Constantinople [382]’, Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed August 8, 2016, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ ecum02.htm#A%20letter%20of%20the%20bishops%20gathered%20in%20Constantinople. In this quotation the bishops speak of the three divine persons, each one named, as having one divine substance in the three divine persons. To put it more generally, they move from three to one to three. World Council of Churches, ‘What the World Council of Churches Is’, accessed October 12, 2017, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/about-us. The description moves from the Lord Jesus as God to one God, with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in apposition to ‘one God’. When we refer to the word ‘experience’, we are speaking of the multiform reality which it signifies and, as well, often to the notion which it expresses.

4

INTRODUCTION

describe it. And, if we are not careful, we come to understand it so widely that its various meanings are diluted to the point where it is almost impossible to pin down what we mean when we use the word. As we review various testimonials, we will come to recognize specific ways in which the word ‘experience’ is being used, hence particular meanings we are giving it. In addition, considering contexts in which the word is used will contribute further to clarifying its specific meaning or meanings in those contexts. Already now, though, it will be good to describe several uses and, thus, meanings of the word ‘experience’. Concrete examples will help to identify them. More specifically, examples taken from sporting events enjoyed by a large gathering of fans will serve well in this regard. Among such events, we might, for instance, think of a basketball game, football games (whether World Cup, American or Canadian), or a sometimes slightly rough hockey game. At first, we might find such references somewhat strange. Yet, even such large sporting events seem at times to take on a quasi-religious character. Perhaps, then, this reference may not be as far-fetched as it might at first seem. Here, I am thinking specifically of games which I have had the pleasure of attending in their home locations. They involve the St. Louis baseball Cardinals, the Green Bay Packers football team, a local soccer or European football team playing in Mainz, Germany, the San Antonio basketball Spurs, or the Ottawa hockey Senators. These games, and others like them, are events which have several things in common. The games themselves and the situations in which they are played are complex, involving many players considered both individually and as teams, and usually larger numbers of fans in the stands enjoying the games. The complex character of these games provides a wealth of concrete relationships, actions, and results to which we can refer in spelling out what we mean by experience. These three, namely, relationships, actions, and results, will in turn exemplify various realities, so to speak, to which the word ‘experience’ refers and, thus, to its specific meanings. Meanings will often overlap, reflecting reference to several forms of experience at the same time.5 5

On experience more generally, see Dale M. Schlitt, Experience and Spirit: A Post-Hegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 89-201. On experience, with an eye toward theology, see Peter D. Neumann, Pentecostal Experience: An Ecumenical Encounter (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012). Neumann draws attention to the helpful study by George P. Schner, ‘The Appeal to Experience’, in: Theological Studies 53 (1992), 40-59, and to the important works by Donald L. Gelpi, Experiencing God: A Theology of Human Experience (New York: Paulist, 1978) and The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology (New York: Paulist, 1978). On the relationship between experience and theology, see also Dale M. Schlitt, Theology and the Experience of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). On experience from a particularly relevant, enriching Pentecostal perspective, see various books by Amos Yong, including his reflections, in a theological and spirituality-studies context, in Spirit – Word – Community:

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5

We could refer to almost any team sports event watched by a larger group of spectators.6 In most such events, we can presume that our favorite team has had its ups and downs over the season so far. We are all too aware of our team’s record of gains and losses in the season until now. Quite an experience of such ups and downs. Experience as cumulative and accumulated over time. In moving now to the game, we will work back from the end of the game to the initial arrival of the players on the field. After the game, we can encapsulate this meaning of experience, namely, looking back at the game considered as a whole, when we say, ‘That was quite an experience’. In this way, experience refers to the whole situation or event. On leaving the game, several friends and I share a sense that we had participated in something special. We were a part of something greater than ourselves. We were part of the game. Attending the game was truly an experience. We witnessed struggles on the field and we collectively regretted the fact that our team lost the game. The game may as well still be something important to talk about the next day. In a sense, later reflection on a lived experience is itself a prolongation of that experience. We can as well think of the crowd attending the game. It is as if we, as a group, formed a temporary community enjoying something together. Experience as communal, exemplified by such things as orchestrated hype of the crowd watching a professional basketball game, the spontaneous roar of a crowd when its

6

Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002). For a wide-ranging summary of various uses of the word ‘experience’ and its variants, see, for example, ‘experience’ and related forms of the word in The Oxford English Dictionary, Being a Corrected re-issue with an Introduction, Supplement, and Bibliography of a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961). Since I am most familiar with baseball games, perhaps I can be permitted to refer specifically to them and, through them, at least indirectly to other sporting events as well. For a recent, entertaining reflection on baseball, and at times touching on relationships between fans and game being played, see Alva Noë, Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), especially the introduction, 1-28. For an imaginative reference to a ballpark’s spatial infinity expressed by the expansive move outward from home base to the outfield, and the game’s in principle temporal infinity implied by the game’s not having a determined limit to its duration, see Paul Goldberger, Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), vii-xiii. On this volume’s dust jacket, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld says that ‘baseball inspires a religious devotion for me and its many followers’. Googling ‘baseball as a religion’ beings up myriad references to this topic. For a randomly selected example of reference to other sports as somehow religious in character, in this case football/soccer, see Andrew Dampf’s colorful article with special focus on Diego Armando Maradona, ‘For Napoli Fans, Catholicism and Soccer Battle for Religious Top Spot’, in: CRUX: Taking the Catholic Pulse, accessed February 21, 2020, https://cruxnow.com/churchin-europe/2020/02/for-napoli-fans-catholicism-and-soccer-battle-for-religious-top-spot.

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INTRODUCTION

football, soccer, or hockey team scores, or the wave effect created by coordinated, sequential crowd movement at a baseball game.7 And yet each one of us individually enjoyed the game, especially if our favored team would have won. Experience as individual. Our experience of the game was not ours alone, in the sense of something merely inside us. We were watching two teams, following their moves. Our experience was that of ourselves in relation to the teams and their players. They themselves were experiencing some rough moments as they competed, one team and its members against the other team and its members. Still, it was an event buttressing our relationship with the team, our loyalty to it, despite the loss. Experience as the relationship between the one or ones experiencing something and that which they experience. Often the experience of the teams and their members, experience as shared, was initiated by the other team either as a whole or through one or more of its members.8 As to us in the crowd, the experience was, sadly, often enough that of a feeling of discouragement, caused at times by a regrettable error on the part of our team. Experience as something we feel happens to us, my or our experience. We at times feel some emotion deeply, anything from exhilarating joy to true despair. Or we may be thinking about something that we experienced earlier in the game. In either case, experience as something within us, namely, feeling and thinking someway about something. As to the players, at the beginning of the game they had quickly entered the field. We applauded, knowing they were great players and, hopefully, our heroes this time. They were highly experienced players. Experience as something which qualifies someone.9 So, experience can mean something which happens over a longer duration of time or is the result of what has happened. It can as well refer to a whole situation, one presently occurring or past. It points to a relationship between a group 7

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David Kagan describes the wave effect in a crowd at a baseball game: ‘The fans in one section stand up, raise their hands, shout, and sit back down. Then the fans in the neighboring section do the same, causing the wave effect to roll around the stands in the park surrounding the playing field. While the wave moves throughout the stands, the fans never roam from their seats’. ‘The Physics of the Wave’, The Hardball Times, accessed March 29, 2019, https://tht. fangraphs.com/the-physics-of-the-wave. Peggy Noonan has written that baseball is ‘a team sport in which each player operates on his own’. ‘The Why, How and What of America’, Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2019, 7:08 pm ET, accessed September 23, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-why-how-and-what-of-america-11562191723. Her phrasing captures something of the experience of a team on the field, a shared experience which is, at the same time, that of each player in his own way. In describing various forms of experience, we have moved from result to arrival of players on the field. We could have continued in this direction back farther to the day before the game, experience as more immediate anticipation. Or even farther back to when we bought tickets several weeks ago. Experience as longer-term anticipation.

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and something or someone else or, equally, an individual and something or someone else. Experience always involves a relationship between us and another or others, even if that other is simply our own emotions or thoughts. An experience may be initiated by us, but often it is something initiated by another or others. With these sports examples and this brief generalization in mind, we can in preliminary fashion note a few examples of meanings of the word ‘experience’ which help clarify what we mean when we refer to ‘experience of the Trinity’. We will be looking at affirmations of various forms of experience of God as three divine Persons. Such experience may be communal and cumulative within the Christian community, perhaps over centuries. Persons affirming such experience may not personally have had the experience in question. On the other hand, they may be referring to an experience which they themselves have also personally lived. In this latter case, it may be something both personal and individual.10 There are several aspects of forms of experience of the Trinity to which we will want to be particularly sensitive. One of these aspects is the fact that the three divine Persons are traditionally the ‘others’ who initiate such experience. They establish a relationship of love with those to whom they reveal themselves. Those who experience the three divine Persons and are aware of that experience usually find themselves gifted with a specific relationship with each of the three. Such relationships, such experiences seem almost always to bring with them a sense of joy or well-being. Thinking about them often becomes, in a way, a prolongation of such experiences which then allow one, whether as a community or individually, to return to the experience in a yet more appreciative way. Ultimately, in experiences of the Trinity the three divine Persons seem to reveal themselves as one God when they, together, embrace a community, a family, two or more friends, or an individual. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before we go on to examine specific testimonials to experience of 10

‘Personal’ and ‘individual’ can often be used as relatively synonymous. Generally, ‘individual’ will be used to refer to a specific person experiencing something. But, in certain cases, ‘personal’ will be used to make such a reference. Often the question of choice of term rests somewhat flexible, subject to various factors such as sense of appropriateness in a specific situation or to capture various nuances in addition to the simple notion of an individual person. This sense of openness or flexibility in choice of word will show itself, for example, in our review of Boff in his descriptions of testimonials to experience of the Trinity which focus heavily on the societal. In his case, ‘personal’ tends to soften the notion of ‘autonomy’, which latter is often presumed to relate to and stress that of ‘individual’. ‘Personal’ can also carry with it the idea that the one experiencing something may do so while at the same time being part of a group or community which, as group or community, is the principle subject doing the experiencing.

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INTRODUCTION

the Trinity, we need to consider what we mean by ‘testimonial’ as such. Then we will be better situated to speak more exactly of specific testimonials and the experiences of the Trinity to which they give witness. Testimonial Generally stated, testimonials are a form of witnessing to something. More specifically, though, by testimonial here we mean two things, namely, witnessing and encouraging. To illustrate the two, we can, as we did regarding the word ‘experience’, call upon a concrete example of a specific type of testimonial. Many of us have attended a gala dinner in honor of a person who has been particularly generous with money or time and energy in support of a worthy cause or causes. Or perhaps to honor a group or an organization which has exhibited exemplary charitable activity. One or more presenters specially invited to the gala will, over the course of the dinner, present the honoree or honorees and describe the reasons for which they are being honored. One or more presenters will, in various ways, laud their generosity. They will then invite those being honored to come forward to receive some form of recognition, perhaps a commemorative plaque, certificate, or autographed work of art. They will have offered a testimonial or appreciative witness to something laudable which an individual, a group, or an institution has done. But this is not all that is involved in offering a testimonial in approval of laudable activity and those who do it. As mentioned, there is a second element. In offering such praise, the presenter or presenters and those who organize the gala, together with the honorees, usually want to encourage those in attendance themselves not only to admire such worthy activity but also to support it and engage in it or something like it. By extension, in speaking of testimonials to experience of the Trinity we will, with appropriate adjustments, be working with this twofold character of a testimonial, namely, recognizing and then encouraging. In our example of a gala testimonial dinner, the presenter or presenters witnessed to and lauded something done. Here, regarding testimonial to experience of the Trinity, those offering the testimonial will witness to and affirm such experience with the intention of inviting and encouraging others to reflect on their own possible experience of the Trinity. Or at least be open to some form of that experience in the future. Strikingly, something said or done in testimonial to experience of the Trinity may not only serve as invitation and encouragement. It may itself, at times, become the occasion for such an experience. We come now to the question of selecting specific writings or other forms of expression we can identify as testimonials. As we will see in part 1 of our study, the most important factor in selecting testimonials will be Jesus of Nazareth’s

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experience of God as available through early reflection on it. When considered in the wider context of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, Jesus’ experience lays the foundation for the experience of God which Jesus’ disciples enjoy in their own lives. It provides a pattern directly influencing the ways in which they experience God. And it furnishes them with language they use to interpret their own experience. This part 1 will open the way to parts 2, 3, and 4, in which we will examine testimonials to experiences of the Trinity mentioned briefly above. The testimonials will be presented as ones offered by persons variously identified as disciples of Jesus, with discipleship taken here in a wide sense of the word. The presentations will follow in an overall chronological order based on the approximate dates of creation of the testimonials. This order will prove a practical way to proceed while respecting the fact that several of the testimonials have influenced one or more of those coming after them. Later testimonials seem often, and in various ways, to presume the witness of certain earlier ones. Selecting from the great number of significant testimonials offered over two millennia becomes a challenge. Any effort at comprehensive coverage of so many would be frustrating, to say the least. For our purposes, though, it is not necessary. Our overall aim is, through sampling, to come to appreciate the wide range of testimonials available over many centuries.11 In any case, it will always be possible to point to further testimonials, worthy of notice, beyond what is included here. Each would have its own value. Yet, even with our more modest aim, such a wealth of potentially important testimonials called for a certain due diligence in order reasonably to select specific ones for presentation. That process of selection proceeded in four steps. The first involved a review of material in more traditional, historical and systematic courses and seminars on Trinity I had earlier on participated in or later offered over many years. The second step involved greater focus on the subject matter at hand. It consisted in offering doctoral seminars on the spirituality of the Trinity. Participants came from Africa, Asia, South and North America. We examined, and then further discussed, various testimonials. Participants drew attention to some testimonials which seemed to be of special interest. There was 11

In our present use of testimonial as witnessing to experience of the Trinity we are not limiting it to witness offered regarding someone else’s or some other group’s experience than that of the one offering the testimonial. The testimonial being offered may witness to the experience of the one offering the testimonial, to others than the one offering it, or to both. Of background note, I have previously reflected more abstractly or philosophically on the notion and reality of ‘experience’ as well as of ‘experience of the Trinity’ (references in n. 5 above). It seemed important, then, to consider references to more concrete, lived experiences as well. I also wanted to see if drawing upon various elements from more philosophical analyses could help highlight and perhaps clarify various aspects of concrete experiences in a way which does not distort what has been said in witness to them.

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INTRODUCTION

a desire to include a variety of testimonials to be chosen from various periods in the history of the Christian community, with ample room for more recent ones. There was, as well, a strong interest in ones drawn from varied geographical, cultural, and religious contexts. Finally, we recognized that humans express themselves and, more specifically, give expression to their own experiences and those of others in many ways. The testimonials selected should, then, reflect something of that rich variety of ways in which humans generally express themselves and what they understand concerning others. So, testimonials treated here reflect various forms of such expression such as architecture, art, music, film, and literature. Literary and other written forms of testimonials will be those of theological argument, memoir, autobiography, pastoral reflection, dialogue among religions and between science and religion, expression of constructive social concern, communal affirmation in a cultural context. The third and fourth steps were less chronological in character. The third step consisted in a certain ongoing and more spontaneous, but hopefully not arbitrary, decision-making rooted in long familiarity with a range of testimonials which could be selected for consideration. The fourth step involved remaining open to the inevitable discovery of further relevant material over the course of research and writing. This four-step selection process has produced a gathering of widely varying forms of testimonial to communal, shared, and individual experiences of the Trinity. In addition, then, to our overall aim of appreciating the wide range of testimonials available over many centuries, I will, in the conclusion, make several more specific proposals concerning them and the experience to which they refer. Among such proposals, I will suggest that we see each testimonial and the experience to which it refers as, when taken together, providing an example of a concrete trinitarian spirituality. * *   * There are two considerations which affect ways in which the selected testimonials will be presented. The first is the ultimately distinct nature of each of them. Some share certain characteristics. For example, those more theological in form require more direct attention to just what is written and the ways in which it is written. Yet, each one of them arises within a specific cultural context influencing its approach and choice of language. Again, many written testimonials come in forms other than that of the formally theological. Still other testimonials are expressed through non-linguistic or not-only-linguistic mediums. In each case, to a certain extent at least, the medium determines the approach to be taken and the language to be used in presenting the testimonial under consideration. Furthermore, the precise form a given testimonial itself takes will condition the way in which it is to be approached and presented. Approach and vocabulary

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11

should be appropriate to, and respectful of, the medium or mediums through which a specific testimonial gives witnesses to experience of the Trinity and the form it takes in doing so. The second consideration affecting our presentation of testimonials is the realization that studies in spirituality are almost invariably self-implicating.12 Such studies involve questions of universalizing significance. They affect, in various ways, those carrying them out as well as those considering the results of such efforts. Again, in spirituality studies we approach lived experience from a variety of perspectives.13 In the present case, our perspective is that of experience as 12

13

Sandra M. Schneiders, ‘Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality’, in: The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 29-31. Regarding spirituality studies more generally, Prof. Schneiders has stressed lived experience as subject matter of spirituality studies and has been a major force in the successful establishment of spirituality studies as a full-fledged area of academic research, especially in the world of English-language research and publication. For further reflection on the nature of spirituality studies, see, for example, Rossano Zas Friz de Col, ‘The Future of the Study of Spirituality’, in: Studies in Spirituality 28 (2018), 5-18, with his reference to Transforming Spirituality: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Studies in Spirituality, selected and introduced by Rossano Zas Friz de Col, foreword by Kees Waaijman, Studies in Spirituality Supplement 27 (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), and note in this volume especially the seminal study by Kees Waaijman, ‘Transformation: A Key Word in Spirituality’, 43-77. See, as well, Elizabeth A. Dreyer & Mark S. Burrows (Eds.), Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), containing several studies considering or at least touching on various testimonials we present in our present volume. See especially ‘Afterword: Emerging Issues and New Trajectories in the Study of Christian Spirituality’ (363-72), and ‘Further Reading’ (373-77), with helpful remarks and a more developed general definition of ‘spirituality’ in the preface (xiv-xv). The presentations emanating from the recent conference, ‘The Study of Christian Spirituality e la Teologia Spirituale: Metodologie in Evoluzione, Evolving Methodologies’, Joint Conference, SSCS (Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality), FPTSI (Forum dei Professori di Teologia Spirituale in Italia), 25-28 Settembre 2019 (Sponsor: Pontificia Università Antonianum, Rome), are now available in the online journal Mysterion, Rivista di Ricerca in Teologia Spirituale 12, no. 2 (December 2019), accessed May 14, 2020, http://www.mysterion.it/Mysterion_2-2019.pdf. On the notion of experience as self-implicating, along with consideration of it as normative, transformative, and life-integrating, see the recent insightful article by J. August Higgins, ‘Sandra Schneiders and the Question of Normativity: Spirituality Studies and the Post-Modern Situation’, in: Mysterion 12, no. 2 (2019), 203-15. For a wide-ranging, synthesizing analysis of various aspects of spirituality and studies of it, see the monumental volume by Kees Waaijman, Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods, Studies in Spirituality Supplement 8 (Leuven: Peeters, 2002). In a particularly synthesizing moment, Waaijman writes, ‘(1) The area of spirituality can be defined as a divine-human relational process: a bipolar whole in which the divine and the human realities take shape reciprocally (material object). (2) This area of reality can be properly studied as a process of transformation’ (426). Without attributing the following to Waaijman, in coming upon this summary I noted that what I have meant (see Experience and Spirit, n. 5 above) by the structured movement of

12

INTRODUCTION

made available through testimonials which encourage those attending to them to be open to that which is being witnessed to. In turn, those receiving the testimonials often spontaneously find themselves responding to them in positive, perhaps negative, or even a mixture of the two ways. In any case, we are seemingly drawn into what we are reading about, studying, looking at, or participating in. An important way to understand and appreciate lived experience so witnessed to is from early on to empathize with it. Expressing ourselves in the first-person plural will be a helpful way to acknowledge and facilitate such empathizing. This is especially true in the case of testimonials expressed in more directly participatory forms such as art and music. This form of first-person expression can, then, take on meaning deeper than it usually conveys in many other areas of study. Finally, we want to appreciate, indeed celebrate, the wide range of testimonials to experience of the Trinity offered over an approximately two-thousand-year span in varied historical, religious, and cultural contexts. In doing so, we will need to acknowledge the differences between those who offer them and us, between their time and place and ours. Still, it is possible respectfully to span these chronological, religious, and cultural distances. First, we should note that the testimonials themselves seem to reach out beyond their own times and places to speak to us today in our varied cultural, social, and religious settings. They take on a certain ages-spanning life of their own. Then, spending a lengthy time reading, viewing, or participating in, and reflecting on, them helps us feel close to those who offer them. Through these testimonials, we come to know more personally, at least to some extent, those who offer such witness. One or the other may become a friend.14 We appreciate more fully the desire of those who

14

‘enriching experience’, namely, experience, as a relationship between self and other resulting in an enriched self, corresponds at least in some ways to his reading of spirituality. Perhaps we could say that spirituality takes the form of, and is, enriching transformational lived experience. Spirituality studies would, then, be studies of such experience. Bernard McGinn complements considerations on spirituality as transformative when he writes regarding Christian mystics more generally: ‘One thing that stands out in the accounts of all the Christian mystics is that their encounter with God transforms their minds and their lives. God changes the mystics and invites, even compels, them to encourage others by their teaching to open themselves to a similar process of transformation’. Introduction to The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (New York: Modern Library, 2006), xvii. I would suggest that his remark concerning mystics’ encouraging others to experience a similar form of transformation as the mystics’ own can be applied as well to those who offer testimonials to their experience of the Trinity as well as that of others. They invite those who attend to their testimonials to be open to ‘a similar process of transformation’. By way of anticipatory example, we might note that Grace M. Jantzen writes concerning Julian of Norwich, ‘I wish to express public thanks to Julian herself, with whom I have lived as with an invisible soul friend, often half-heartedly, sometimes with deeper attention, never without

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offer them to provide affirming witness to experiences of the Trinity. We may even sense that they would be happy to see their insightful concern and commitment continuing to reverberate down through the ages. For our part, interest in what they communicate may be essentially personal and spiritual in nature. It may also lie in the possibility of learning, at various levels, from what they bring to our attention. What they are saying can, for example, contribute to further critical and constructive reflection in areas of study such as spirituality, theology, and philosophy of religion.15 With these interests in mind, we turn now first to Jesus’ founding experience of God and then to the various testimonials themselves concerning experiences on the part of Jesus’ disciples.

15

her steady reminder that “love was his meaning’’’. Julian of Norwich, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK Classics, 2000), vii. A further note on our approach to testimonials and those who offer them. As has usually been considered appropriate in carrying out studies in spirituality, we will focus here more directly on understanding and appreciating what is being said in a testimonial, using the word ‘said’ in a wide sense to include non-verbally expressed testimonials. On the wider question of the truthfulness and trustworthiness of testimonials from a more philosophical perspective (in which consideration of the notion of testimonial can easily become very technical, quite interesting but beyond our more immediate interests) stressing the advantage of privileging both truthfulness and trustworthiness, see, for example, Matthew Kent Siebert, ‘Testimonial Truthfulness: Truthfulness and Trust’, in: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2018), 249-76. Siebert concentrates on spoken or written testimonials. But what he says can be applied, with appropriate adjustments, to non-verbally expressed testimonials as well. Siebert provides abundant references to other related studies and discusses a good number of them. Tangential to these remarks is the interdisciplinary character of spirituality as area of study. For a systematizing consideration of spirituality studies in relation to a variety of humanities and social sciences studies, see Waaijman, Spirituality, 392-424.

PART I THE FOUNDING EXPERIENCE

CHAPTER 1 JESUS, SPIRIT-EMPOWERED SON OF ABBA

Jesus of Nazareth (4 BCE–C. 30 CE) was a Jew who spent most of his life in rural Galilee and the city of Jerusalem.1 He experienced God from within his own religious and historical context. Yet his multifaceted experience of God in life and mission has transcended that context. It has profoundly influenced the ways in which his disciples have come to experience God down through the ages and across continents. In a sense, it has become for them a model of what a richly rewarding experience of God’s love and power would entail. Jesus’ experience has made it possible for them to recognize and give expression to their own rich and complex, communal and personal, shared and individual experiences of God. In effect, the disciples of Jesus have over the centuries come to express their belief in him as Lord within a wider, we could say divine, context. More often than we might think, they have spoken, in community and personally, of having experienced God as Trinity. We would like to appreciate and profit from what many of Jesus’ followers have said concerning such experiences. To do so, it would seem best, then, to turn first to Jesus of Nazareth himself and his experience of God. But this is easier said than done. For the last two hundred or so years, there has been considerable discussion as to whether we can get back through the Gospels to Jesus. They were written after his resurrection, which obviously affected all that his early disciples thought of and said about him. Still, we would like in some way to be with him as he prayed and preached, healed and taught before the resurrection. We need, indeed, to acknowledge the fact that the Gospels are postresurrection documents. And we should as well note that they were written to recall the memory of Jesus in relation to the ways in which things were 1

E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin/Allen Lang, 1993), xi, with 10-14. On the approximate dates of Jesus’ birth and death, especially Jesus’ death, see 282-89. Sanders interestingly, and at great length, situates Jesus within his historical context. For a fuller discussion of the geographical extent of Jesus’ ‘mission to Israel’, as Eckhard J. Schnabel puts it, see his two-volume study, Early Christian Mission, vol. 1, Jesus and the Twelve (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 227-62, with abundant overall bibliography on the question of early Christian mission in vol. 2, Paul and the Early Church, 1629-1796.

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developing and problems arising in various early Christian communities. Even so, we continue to feel that it is important for us not only to be inspired by the Gospel texts themselves but also to try to head back, so to speak, to Jesus in pre-resurrection Galilee and Jerusalem.2 His human life and experience have much to teach us about experiencing God in our own lives. To head back, though, it will be necessary to find a way to base our return on reasonably solid ground. I suggest that such solid ground can be found in some of the New Testament Gospel traditions. These traditions will be ones traceable in a reasonably reliable way to Jesus himself. The Gospels themselves remain among the earliest available written documents directly concerning Jesus, with various other writings about him and his life appearing especially in the second century.3 Indeed, the Gospels were composed, at least in part, in light of the spiritual experience and the varied concerns of Jesus’ disciples in early Christian communities. They were, in effect, an effort further to encourage and give direction to such experience and provide daily guidance for Christian living at the time when they were written. As we see now two thousand years later, they have continued to offer such guidance. It is important to acknowledge these original intentions and 2

3

See the succinct and carefully nuanced conclusions James D. G. Dunn draws regarding the value of ‘Jesus Remembered’ in relation to his pre-resurrection life. Christianity in the Making, vol. 1, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 881-84, with spiritually inspiring formulation on 892-93. Already here we can note Dunn’s major contribution to further reflection on appropriate ways in which to approach the question for so long described as the quest for the historical Jesus. See, for example, Terrence W. Tilley’s review of the work in this area by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, James D. G. Dunn, and Larry Hurtado, ‘Remembering the Historic Jesus: A New Research Program?’, in: Theological Studies 68 (2007), 3-35. It may be, though, that Dunn stresses more accessibility to Jesus of Nazareth himself as remembered through oral tradition than Tilley would. For a wide-ranging review of research on the historical Jesus, see Tom Holmén & Stanley E. Porter (Eds.), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), with a long listing in the Index, vol. 4: 3616, of references to James D. G. Dunn, indicating his importance as a reference and dialogue partner. We should note that Joanna Dewey directly challenges Dunn’s approach to, understanding of, and valuation concerning the reliability of oral tradition in relation to historical knowledge. For her, oral tradition is not concerned with such knowledge. Though one could well suggest that it might be a concern for early Christians. ‘The Historical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark’, in: Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols, ed. Tom Holmén & Stanley E. Porter, vol. 3, The Historical Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1849-50. Tuomas Havukainen presents and reviews critiques of Dunn’s approach. See his study, ‘The Quest for the Memory of Jesus: A Viable Path or a Dead End?’ [Ph.D.?] diss. (Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2017), 142-52 with further remarks 279-86, accessed June 2, 2020, available at core.ac.uk > download > pdf. Subsequently published as The Quest for the Memory of Jesus: A Viable Path or a Dead End? (Leuven: Peeters, 2020). For a succinct listing of the earliest main sources regarding Jesus traditions, see Petr Pokorny, Jesus in Geschichte und Bekenntnis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 35.

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concerns on the part of those responsible for providing us with the Gospels. But we can still find a way to head back in time through the Gospels, at least metaphorically speaking, to Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem. The Gospels include within them oral traditions about Jesus which were valued by the earliest members of various Christian communities. Through them, we can have access to what such members were variously remembering and saying about Jesus.4 The final authors of the Gospels had worked with these early oral traditions, some of which had over time probably taken on written form. They selected stories and sayings they considered it important to preserve, further develop, and often adapt to differing community situations and needs. They brought them together in creative ways, in line with their various theological frameworks. In this way, they made these stories and sayings available to members of their local Christian communities and, as well, to members of the increasingly wide-spread Christian movement. In effect, in reading the Gospels we are, to use a visual image, looking at Jesus through several lenses. Lenses do not necessarily distort our vision and understanding. They often magnify, and help focus on, that which is in some way already there in what we are looking at through them. In other words, we can work with the idea that, for example, Mark’s and Matthew’s are testimonials which help see more clearly who Jesus was for members of their own and other communities. They indeed continue to serve a similar function for us who read them almost 2,000 years later. And they bear witness to what many early Christians had experienced and were thinking about Jesus, what they remembered in various ways and then retold about him. They have served down through the ages to encourage Christians to reflect ever anew on what Jesus of Nazareth, now the Risen One, means for them. While thinking about this challenge to look with and through these Gospels back to Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee and Jerusalem, I came upon two works by a highly respected New Testament scholar, James D. G. Dunn. One of them was his more recent and wide-ranging, 2003 study, Jesus Remembered. In it, he complements and at times further refines what he had said earlier on in a book published in 1975. This latter book is his more focused study, Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First

4

Of many studies on such memories of Jesus, see, for example, by way of more recent entry into this question: Dunn, Jesus Remembered; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006); Robert B. Stewart & Gary R. Habermas (Eds.), Memories of Jesus: A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2010), esp. James D. G. Dunn, ‘In Grateful Dialogue: A Response to My Interlocutors’, 287-323.

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Christians as Reflected in the New Testament.5 It has become something of a classic in its field. While appreciating clarifications he makes in Jesus Remembered, I found his overall approach in Jesus and the Spirit most enlightening. In it, he chose specific, pertinent Gospel verses whose study, he argued, would permit him to speak of Jesus’ experience of God. I saw that, under Dunn’s guidance, we could choose key verses from Mark and Matthew as bases for our reflection. These verses would, in line with our present interest in Jesus’ experience of God, provide a reasonably reliable way back through the Gospels to Jesus of Nazareth himself.6 In Jesus and the Spirit, Dunn has, then, written at length of Jesus’ experience of God.7 He sums up this experience in terms of Jesus’ sense of sonship and consciousness of the Spirit. But he does not try to recapture the inner life of Jesus or write his biography. Rather, he wisely focuses on what he claims we can see of Jesus’ experience of God as reflected, among various ways, in Jesus’ prayer, exorcisms, and healing. He does not speak of the development of Jesus’ experience. He simply says that here ‘we can see something of the experiential basis of Jesus’ faith in God’.8 Dunn’s careful approach leads me to believe we can indeed 5

6

7 8

James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1975). Italics in quotations from this work are in the original. Dunn’s later volume, Jesus Remembered, tends to treat more directly of the processes by which the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke came to be while Dunn’s earlier volume, Jesus and the Spirit, treats more directly of the result of those processes, namely, what is said in the Synoptic Gospels themselves concerning Jesus’ experience of God and consequent selfawareness. (In the earlier volume, Dunn also writes of Paul and John regarding early religious experience.) Of special note, in Jesus Remembered Dunn works especially with the notions of the disciples of Jesus in their encounter with him and of his impact on them through that encounter during his lifetime as well as after his death and resurrection. In Jesus and the Spirit, Dunn works more with the notion of experience to describe Jesus’ relationship with God. In both volumes, he comes basically to the same conclusions regarding his reading of that relationship. For further remarks by Dunn on how he sees ‘impact’ tying in with the one making the impact and how encounter with or experience of Jesus gives access to Jesus’ experience of God, see ‘In Grateful Dialogue’, esp. 292-95, 303, 321. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, esp. 11-92, 363-94. Ibid., 13. Already now we can note a certain caution concerning reference to God as Father when Marianne Meye Thompson argues against speaking in terms of experience of God in excessively individualistic terms, given the Old Testament context within which Jesus lived. Important as this cautionary warning is, I would suggest that ‘experience of God’ can be considered as communal, shared among several, and personal or indeed individual without one form excluding the other. Rather, one form can be compatible with and even supportive of the other. Jesus lived and thought in an overall communal Jewish context. But it would still seem that there is room for him to have personally and even individually, so to speak, experienced God as his Father against the background of God as Father of the Jewish people. Thompson writes carefully, for example: ‘Because the imagery [of God as Father] is first and

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follow Dunn’s lead. In so doing, we need to acknowledge the continuing discussion in scholarly New Testament circles as to whether we can move back from Gospel verses more directly to what Jesus of Nazareth himself said. With that discussion in mind, it would seem best not to pursue the specific question as to whether certain Gospel verses might in their entirety reproduce the words of Jesus. Even so, we can still focus, with Dunn, on a couple verses from Mark’s Gospel. This Gospel seems for the most part to have taken final form early on, around 69 or 70, some relatively short 40 or so years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. We will as well want to look briefly at a verse from Matthew’s Gospel, often considered as dating from around 85 or 90. In this case, it would have been written approximately 15 or 20 years after that of Mark and about 55 years or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection. We will then be able to note that such verses, in their Gospel contexts, continue to have an important effect on the prayer of Jesus’ disciples and on their Christian self-understanding. Given the oral traditions behind the Gospels, the Gospel verses to which we will refer reflect something of great importance to members of the Christian communities with which Mark and Matthew were concerned. The final authors certainly considered these verses of such importance. We will work with the idea that they, in their full present phrasing, may well express something of the then current experience of various early communities concerned. At the same time, we will consider them as providing some access to Jesus’ own experience of God. With Dunn’s guidance, we can better understand what Mark and Matthew are indeed saying. I propose, then, that we follow Dunn’s overall presentation in Jesus and the Spirit. We will draw upon it selectively, but I hope fairly, and with an eye to further comments by Dunn in Jesus Remembered. For present purposes, we will analyze and reflect on what Dunn writes in relation to three verses. One of them, Mark 14:36, is part of Mark’s sketching of the scene of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He may well be writing for one or more communities. And, we quickly add from our perspective, for us today. There in the Garden Jesus prays in anguish to God, whom he addresses as Abba, my Father. In a second verse, Matt. 12:28, Matthew presents Jesus as

foremost collective, it raises further questions against undue emphasis on God as experienced as Father, unless one carefully considers this in terms of its corporate implications’. The Promise of the Father: Jesus and God in the New Testament (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 175. N. T. Wright provides a brief but helpful reminder that Jesus’ addressing God as Abba had, within Jesus’ Jewish context, wide-ranging implications. Such as, for example, his remark that ‘spiritual depth and renewal come, as and when they come, as part of the larger package. But that package itself is about being delivered from evil’. The Lord and His Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 3-11, with quotation on 6.

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one who claims to chase out demons through the power of the Spirit of God at work in and through him. And in a third verse, Mark 1:9-11, Mark reflects on the significance of Jesus’ baptism by John. Jesus Prays to Abba And he said, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; take this cup away from me. Yet, not what I want but what you want’ (Mark 14:36).9

The Gospel of Mark is the only one of the four Gospels to include the Aramaic word Abba in its recounting of events in Jesus’ life. And the word appears only once in the Gospel, namely, on this occasion when Jesus prays to God, his Father, on the night before his death. There has been much scholarly discussion as to how the disciples would know of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden. Mark says they fell asleep while Jesus prayed at a slight distance from them. Dunn has suggested a possible solution. It may well be that the reference to the disciples’ falling asleep is simply an addition by Mark, who often presents the disciples in a less positive light than do the authors of the other Gospels.10 Again, regarding the word Abba itself, Mark is calling upon oral traditions concerning the way Jesus addressed God in prayer. Though some have questioned whether Jesus prayed to God using the word Abba, I remain with what seems to me to be a fairly strong consensus that he did so pray.11 But it may well be that after tracing the word Abba back to Jesus himself, 9

10 11

Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 18. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of New Testament verses in the present chapter are those of Dunn. Those indicated NRSV are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version, accessed August 13, 2016, http://www.biblestudytools.com/nrs. We should also acknowledge the complex question of how to approach, in our day, Jesus’ experience of God. Today we are working to widen and further clarify our understandings of God, even from a biblical perspective, in both male and female terms. For present purposes, though, I have decided to follow the example of the eminent process theologian, John B. Cobb, Jr., who remains with the gendered word and notion of Abba, Aramaic for ‘Father’. In our hearing, it does not as such stress specific culturally conditioned notions of male and female. For Cobb’s careful remarks, see Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015), 12-14. Cobb has managed to refer to God exclusively as Abba, but even in this chapter I have found it necessary also to speak of God using the word ‘Father’, and to do this regularly in the rest of the present study. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 19-20; ———, Jesus Remembered, 714n40. The highly respected historian of religion, Martin Hengel, has picked up on and defended the attribution of the use of Abba to Jesus as the way in which he addresses God. Various aspects of the question of Jesus’ prayer to God as Abba continue to be disputed. But I myself am convinced by Hengel’s literature review and argumentation in his 2004 study as well as by the further literature indicated below that the word Abba itself reflects Jesus’ own way of

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Mark or others before him drew upon one or the other Hebrew scripture passage to complete Jesus’ prayer. At first sight, we might consider these two moves, namely, tracing Abba back to Jesus himself and completing the sentence with words from a further scripture text, as different and unrelated. Yet, they may be more closely linked than we might at first think. For Jesus himself would have applied scriptural texts creatively to his own situation when he prayed to God as Abba. Intriguingly, he seems to have drawn upon, and in a distinctive way made his own, various scripture references to God as Father when he addresses God as Abba.12 Jesus was indeed a Jewish rabbi. He was a teacher who interpreted Hebrew scriptures in relation to himself and for application to others in his own time and place.13 There would seem to be a certain parallel in play here. Jesus takes up and applies a Hebrew usage to himself. In parallel fashion, Mark may have drawn upon a Hebrew scripture text to spell out further Jesus’ attitude in prayer toward God as Abba. In effect, the final author of Mark and perhaps others before him seem to have gathered variously remembered oral traditions, some of which may have in part or whole taken written form. He has then interpreted them and presented them in his Gospel stories in general and this one about the garden scene in particular. Jesus remembered.14 Now to turn more directly to the text of Mark 14:36 itself. In this verse, we usually think that the Greek for Father (ὁ πατήρ), following right after the Aramaic Abba, serves as a translation of the Aramaic word. Thus, ‘Abba, Father’. But there is another possibility. One could argue on philological bases that in Mark Abba is an equivalent name for God. A more complete translation of

12

13

14

prayerfully understanding, and giving expression to, his relationship with God. Martin Hengel, ‘Abba, Maranatha, Hosanna und die Anfänge der Christologie’, in: Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Beiträge zur Gotteslehre: Festschift für Ebehard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Johannes Fischer, & Hans-Peter Großhans (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 145-83, esp. 171-83. Further studies tracing the usage of the word Abba in relation to God back to Jesus of Nazareth himself are too numerous to cite here but a selection of them are included in the bibliography. An alternative position should be cited, that which Mary Rose D’Angelo takes in ‘Abba “Father”: Imperial Theology and the Jesus Traditions’, in: Journal of Biblical Literature 111 (1992), 611-30. She concludes that, to state her position very generally, the use of Abba probably does not find its origin in Jesus. Rather, it reflects more a critical attitude toward the Roman emperor and his inacceptable actions as ‘father’ of the Roman empire (628, 630). See also Mary Rose D’Angelo’s further development of her argument in ‘Theology in Mark and Q: Abba and “Father” in Context’, in: The Harvard Theological Review 85 (1992), 149-74. Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 176. Dr. Sylvester David, Auxiliary Bishop of Cape Town, South Africa, drew my attention to this point on Jesus as teacher. This is Dunn’s phrase, but using it does not indicate an intention to attribute to Dunn my wording immediately preceding it.

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‘ἀββὰ ὁ πατήρ’ would then be ‘God, my Father’.15 In either case, Mark clearly presents Jesus addressing God as Abba. Numerous New Testament texts refer to Jesus as Son16 in relation to God, his Father. These texts are generally accepted to have been written from about the years 49 to 95. They originated from or were sent to Christian communities, in diverse geographical regions. They included, for example, Rome, central and western Turkey, Greece, northern Israel, and Syria. Christians in these regions seem often enough to have been in communication with one another. References, over such a widespread area, to Jesus as Son of God who is his Father form the wider context or, perhaps better, background for our reflection. They seem to echo Jesus’ own way of addressing God in prayer. Among them, Mark’s direct and specific attribution of Abba to Jesus in Mark 14:36 appears to be especially reliable. Dunn has considered it at some length. As part of his study of this verse he explores various aspects and uses of this Aramaic word around the time of Jesus.17 I would suggest again that we can profitably call upon Dunn as a guide to help unpack and appreciate what Mark is saying. What Mark says is of great importance to those for whom he is writing. For example, he underscores Jesus’ remaining steadfast before Abba despite the suffering and immanent death Jesus foresees. This steadfastness on the part of Jesus will have had direct implications for his disciples who are facing various difficulties and will themselves be persecuted, even put to death. Dunn stresses the significance of the fact that Mark presents Jesus in prayer. He recalls the old saying that, if we want to know someone, we should see what that person does in her or his solitude. In following this adage, Dunn turns to the place of prayer in Mark’s portrayal of Jesus’ life and ministry. He calls upon the classic study by Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus. He works with Jeremias, focusing especially on Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. There Jesus utters his prayer shortly before being arrested. Dunn qualifies several of Jeremias’ conclusions, especially those concerning possible prior Jewish references to God as Father. But he remains in agreement with Jeremias that Jesus’ use of the word in addressing God as Abba is truly distinctive. In Jesus Remembered, 15

16

17

Vernon S. McCasland, ‘Abba, Father’, in: Journal of Biblical Literature 72 (1953), 79-91, accessed December 6, 2015, http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/ pdfviewer?vid= 3&sid=91b150a3-86ac-4cdc-b497-658bb4e5e277%40sessionmgr111&hid=106. Perhaps it would have been more precise to spell ‘Son’ with a small ‘s’ when referring directly to Jesus in his earthly sense of his sonship and then to capitalize ‘Son’ when referring to him from later, post-resurrection points of view. But it became too difficult to be consistent in so distinguishing. On Jesus’ sense of sonship, see Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 17-27, 37-40. See also James D. G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), 30-50, esp. 45-49; ———, Jesus Remembered, 708-24.

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Dunn clarifies further what he means by the distinctiveness of Jesus’ prayer to God as Abba. ‘The obvious qualification thus called for to Jeremias’ claims is that it was not so much Jesus’ use of abba in his prayer which was distinctive, but the fact that abba was his consistent and unvarying form of address to God’.18 Readers of Mark’s Gospel discover a way of speaking to God that in the Jewish world was special. Mark’s Jesus speaks regularly to and of God as Abba in a personal, intimate way. He consistently used this word which arose out of family life and indicates a sense of closeness and intimacy. We might well think, then, that Jesus’ reference to God as Abba, my Father, was colored both by family life in general in his day and by his own experience of family life.19 More generally, in the Old Testament ‘Father’ referred to one who was both an authority with his own will, on one hand, and a protective and caring presence, on the other – authority and tenderness. As we can sense, then, authority and tender care on the part of the father and parallel obedience and love on the part of the Son both find expression in Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer.20 In effect, Jesus’ usage implies unconditional commitment on the part of God21 and, we should add, of Jesus’ own freely offered commitment to the will of God as well. This word Abba gives expression to his existential and emotional relationship with God. Jesus addressed God with this word not only in the Garden of Gethsemane but seemingly during much of his life in Galilee and Jerusalem as well. There is a strong similarity between Jesus’ praying to God as Abba and the opening of the Our Father in Matt. 6:9 (πάτερ ἡμῶν) and Luke 11:2 (πάτερ). Though, in these two post-Markan texts, the Aramaic word Abba is not found alongside the Greek form of address to God as our Father or simply Father. Disciples of Jesus were to pray that God’s will be done, and that God care for them. They were to trust in God as Abba, their Father. God was an authority with his own will which was to be followed. God was equally one who loved 18

19

20 21

Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 716-17. Dunn makes this point already in Jesus and the Spirit, for example, 23, 26, 366n71. There Dunn had written that ‘it is difficult therefore to escape the conclusion that Jesus said “Abba” to God (…) because it expressed his attitude to God as Father, his experience of God as one of unusual intimacy’ (23). Of note, Wolfhart Pannenberg writes carefully, ‘The intimacy implied by invoking God as Abba typifies the relation of Jesus to God, but we should not set it in antithesis to the Pharisaic piety of the time’. Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 260, with reference to further literature on the necessary qualification of Jeremias’ thesis concerning Jesus’ possibly unique way of addressing God on 260n5. Of note, Joachim Jeremias also indicates another use of Abba in the time of Jesus as ‘a title of honour taken by some teachers as a permanent title, referring to Matt. 23:9’. He adds that Abba seems to have also been used as ‘a title of teachers ordained in Galilean schools’. Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 244n35. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, for example 37-38, 40. Cobb, Jesus’ Abba, 12.

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and cared for them. This basic, doubled sense of the word Abba characterized not only Mark’s presentation of the relationship between Jesus and God. It was to characterize the disciples’ relationship to God as well. Jesus’ intimate relationship with God was to qualify and color the way the disciples addressed and related to God. Their feeling of such intimacy arose out of and was dependent on that of Jesus himself. In calling God Abba, Jesus had given expression to his distinctive relationship to God as God’s Son. He invited his disciples to share in that relationship.22 We will do well to prolong, for a moment, our present reflection. Jesus was familiar with Hebrew Scriptures. He would have been deeply aware of God’s freeing of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. That he would then pray to the Lord of history as Abba is truly remarkable. He remained, but in a new way, Jewish to the core of his human reality. And, during night-long prayer, Jesus would in his time have seen a star-filled sky greater in clarity and brilliance than so many of us do where we live today. We, in a sense regrettably, live in an age in which widely present bright lights often dim our view of such a starry sky. That Jesus would address as Abba the God who was both forever faithful throughout Jewish history and generous creator of land and sea and sky is striking. That he would encourage his disciples to address that same God as, in their own dependent way, their Abba is even more striking. Through Mark and the early disciples, Jesus is in effect encouraging later disciples down through the ages to call that same God Abba. That we, who two millennia later are aware of a universe of trillions of stars and billions of galaxies, are to call that same God Abba is almost mind-boggling. Yet, at the same time, extremely comforting. Jesus spoke with his disciples of God as Abba and, then, as their Abba. In so speaking, he is prolonging and spelling out further his own lived experience of God as his Father and, consequently, of himself as God’s Son. He is prolonging that experience by giving it further expression in thought and word. More specifically, when he teaches his disciples how to pray, he is perhaps even clarifying in his human consciousness his own profound experience of Abba. We can only imagine how his further clarified human consciousness of God as Abba and of himself as Son may have affected him. It could, for example, have enriched his self-awareness in prayer and heightened his concern for those to whom he preached. In regularly praying the simple word Abba, Jesus offered his disciples and indeed the wider world a distinctive way of relating to God. In retaining the Aramaic word Abba, Mark is sharing with his readers his understanding that Jesus lived such a freely entered, deep relationship with God. He is giving testimony to that relationship. Dunn writes, ‘He [Jesus] experienced a relation of 22

Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 24-26.

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sonship – felt such an intimacy with God, such an approval by God, dependence on God, responsibility to God that the only words adequate to express it were “Father” and “son”’.23 This was a relationship both intimate and challenging. He had prayed, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; take this cup away from me. Yet, not what I want but what you want’ (Mark 14:36). It was a relationship into which he felt it vital to invite others. Jesus, through Whom the Spirit Works [But] if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out [the] demons, then has come upon you the kingdom of God. (Matt. 12:28)24

After our remarks on Mark’s telling, in 14:36, of Jesus’ prayerful relation to Abba, we can now address a second aspect of Jesus’ experience of God to which Dunn refers. That aspect is Jesus’ awareness of the Spirit of God working in and through him.25 We could do this by turning to Mark 3:22-30, where, in this text from the earlier Gospel, Mark includes many of the elements found in Matt. 12:28 and its immediate context. Among these elements there is the questioning of Jesus’ exorcisms and the power by which he does them. Further elements to be noted are references to a kingdom and to the Spirit working through Jesus. But Matt. 12:28 brings these elements to the fore in a more direct and explicit fashion. We will do well here again to follow Dunn’s lead. He chooses to work with Matthew’s presentation of Jesus and to defend the eschatological or end-time character of his preaching and healing. That healing included the healing of the mentally deranged and/or the demon-possessed, as well as of those suffering from physical ailments. In his reflection on Matt. 12:28, Dunn recalls long, late nineteenth- into twentieth-century theological discussions. They revolved around whether Jesus’ own outlook regarding the kingdom of God was to be understood as more eschatological and end-oriented or more focused on the present. To understand better the importance of this question of present or future kingdom, it will be helpful to consider Dunn’s remarks on Matt. 11:4-5. There Matthew speaks of Jesus as the anointed one. He writes, ‘Jesus answered them [John’s disciples], “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are 23 24 25

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 45. On Jesus’ consciousness of Spirit, see Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 44-49, including commentary on Matthew 12:28. On this verse, see also his brief remarks in Jesus Remembered, 458-60, 694-95, 407-8, 443n296, 459, 695.

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raised, and the poor have good news brought to them”’ (NRSV). Without claiming that these are the exact words Jesus used, Dunn takes them to represent his awareness that he is the one who fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah 61:1: ‘The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners’ (NRSV). As Dunn insightfully remarks concerning Jesus’ mission, which includes both healing and preaching, ‘His [Jesus’] awareness of being uniquely possessed and used by divine Spirit was the mainspring of his mission and the key to its effectiveness’.26 But for present purposes it will be sufficient to remain with Dunn’s helpful discussion of Matthew on Jesus’ healing through exorcisms. Such healing activity is generally accepted as characteristic of Jesus’ ministry. More specifically regarding Matt. 12:28, Dunn notes that there is considerable discussion concerning the phrase which expresses by what means Jesus says he casts out demons. In Matthew, the phrase is ‘by the Spirit of God’. The parallel text in Luke 11:20 reads ‘by the finger of God’. In the end, though, Dunn concludes that the phrases are equivalent, each one expressing the power of God. We will continue, as Dunn does, working with the phrase ‘by the Spirit of God’.27 In Matthew’s Gospel presentation, Jesus finds himself in a controversial exchange with some Pharisees. They have accused him of chasing out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the ruler of demons. He responds that if he did so by the power of Satan, the kingdom of Satan would be divided and fall. He then turns the accusation against the Pharisees and wonders if it is not their own sons who exorcise demons by the power of Beelzebul. Jesus himself calls attention to 26

27

Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 54. On Dunn on Isaiah 61:1 and its significance for an understanding of the presence of the kingdom of God in Jesus’ exorcisms, healing, and preaching, see 53-62. On tracing back Matt. 12:28/Luke 11:20 to earlier sources, see James D. G. Dunn, ‘Matthew 12:28/Luke 11:20: A Word of Jesus?’, in: The Christ and the Spirit: Collected Essays of James D. G. Dunn, vol. 2, Pneumatology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 187-204. Of interest, John P. Meier argues that Luke 11:30 reflects, in a historically reliable way, the expression of Jesus himself, and then we can add the expression in Matt. 12:28. A Marginal Jew, vol 2, Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994), for example, 429-30, and see 422-32. James M. Robinson argues to the overall historical character of Matt. 12:28 (referred to as being traceable back to Q 11:20) on the basis of his analyses of written or at least proposedly written texts in which ‘kingdom of God’ or variants on the phrase appear in ‘Q, Thomas, Mark, Matthew, and Luke’. See especially Robinson’s remarks under the heading ‘5. The Kingdom of God in Jesus’ Own Usage’, in ‘Jesus’ “Rhetoric”: The Rise and Fall of “The Kingdom of God”’, in: Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols, ed. Tom Holmén & Stanley E. Porter, vol. 4, Individual Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3201-20. He closes his study with, ‘For Jesus the kingdom of God, or, more accurately translated, God reigning, is something that took place in his actions during his public ministry. It was, after all, his rhetoric for talking about religious experience, not doctrine about last things’ (3220).

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the Spirit as the eschatological power of God come upon him. The Spirit is the power by which he heals and liberates from demonic possession. In these healings and exorcisms, the kingdom of God has come upon those whom Jesus heals and liberates. God reigns in their lives. At the time when Jesus lived and preached, the general Jewish expectation was that the kingdom or reign of God would be eschatological. It would be realized in the future, at the end-time. The expectation was even apocalyptic, focusing exclusively on an end-time realization. But, when Jesus is speaking of the Spirit acting in the present through him, he is making a clear distinction. He distinguishes between the final, end-time realization of the kingdom of God and its inbreaking already now in his healing and freeing from demonic possession. In this short verse 12:28, Matthew presents Jesus of Nazareth as someone who is aware of the Spirit working in a unique way through him. Something new is happening through him. The Spirit, as the power of God, is enabling him to heal and free others. Dunn says that to heal and free here means ‘to restore and make whole’. Satan is already being overcome. A new age has dawned as the kingdom of God comes upon those with whom Jesus is speaking. The Spirit who spoke through the Old Testament prophets is now active in Jesus in a new and unique, final and powerful way. Jesus is aware of an ‘otherly power’,28 something beyond himself. He is convinced that this power is the eschatological Spirit of God present now within him, enabling him to act effectively and preach with authority. He is aware of that effectiveness and authority as he carries out his mission. Jesus has, in effect, seen the power of God active in him in such a way that he could only conclude the kingdom of God was present in and through him. His awareness of the Spirit acting in the world through him constitutes, in good part, his self-understanding.29 In his preaching and healing, Jesus seems to be prolonging, and spelling out further for himself and others, his own lived experience and awareness of the 28 29

Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 47. On the other hand, Sanders seems hesitant to assert that Jesus saw the Kingdom of God present in his healings and exorcisms. ‘Jesus might have thought that the kingdom was “somehow” present in his own words and deeds; I cannot prove that he did not think this. I only note that no passage clearly says so. Jesus doubtless thought that the power of God was present, both in his own life and elsewhere; but in view of the lack of good evidence, it is unlikely that he meant that the kingdom was fully present wherever he happed to be’. Historical Figure of Jesus, 177-78, with reference to Matt. 12:28 on 175. Yet, earlier Sanders had written regarding Matt. 12:28: ‘We should note both the proclamation and the “if”. We see the recognition that the miracles as such did not establish the presence or impending arrival of the kingdom but did so only if Jesus acted with the power of the Spirit. There can be no doubt that he thought that he did’ (168).

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Spirit. In preaching and especially here in healing and freeing, he clarifies in his human consciousness his own experience of God as Spirit and shares this awareness with others. He realizes that where the Spirit is present and submitted to, there is the reign of God. ‘[But] if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out [the] demons, then has come upon you the kingdom of God’ (Matt. 12:28). Jesus and His Disciples Continuing to follow Dunn’s lead, we refer now to Jesus’ baptism by John as told in Mark 1:9-11.30 In these verses, Mark helps in understanding the relationship, as he gives expression to it, between Jesus’ being Son of the Father and the one in and through whom the Spirit works. In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. (NRSV)

Dunn concludes that Jesus’ being Son of the Father and the one through whom the Spirit works are but two aspects of the same experience, ‘two sides of the one coin’.31 No final priority is to be given to one over the other. Dunn insists that ‘it is the interaction of sonship and Spirit that gives Jesus’ ministry its distinctive behavior’.32 Of note though, at least in these verses 9 to 11, there is mention first of the Spirit and then announcement of Jesus’ sonship. We might think as well of other New Testament texts following a similar move. Among them, for instance, the narratives of the birth of Jesus would seem to say the Spirit brings about Jesus in his human reality and, by extension, in his sonship. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, for Paul the Spirit confirms, even establishes, the disciples of Jesus as adopted daughters and sons of God. For the Spirit is present in their hearts, crying out ‘Abba, Father’. In so identifying the Spirit’s fundamental role, we find ourselves in good company, namely, that of Paul in Romans 1:3-4 as read by Dunn. Regarding these two verses, Dunn concludes, ‘In Paul’s view the sonship of the earthly Jesus was constituted by the Holy Spirit. He was Son of God because the Holy Spirit was in him and because he lived in

30

31 32

On Jesus’ baptism, see Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 62-67. On John’s baptism more widely considered, including Jesus’ temptation following Jesus’ baptism, see Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 339-82. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 66. Ibid., 90.

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obedience to that Spirit’.33 In their relationship to the Spirit and to Abba, the disciples participate, in their own dependent ways, in Jesus’ relationships to Spirit and Abba. Jesus himself relates to the Spirit as one who is present within him and active through him. His stance in relation to Abba is that of one ‘looking to’. We might go so far then as to say that Jesus is the Son of Abba in the Spirit. And through adoption his disciples participate in his sonship in the Spirit.34 But we need to return more directly to Mark 1:9-11. Dunn reminds us that there remain serious questions concerning the more exact interpretation and significance of these verses.35 He goes on to treat with great sensitivity the description of the descent of the Spirit on Jesus in the form of a dove. He comments carefully as well on the voice proclaiming that Jesus is ‘my son, the Beloved’. In this descent and proclamation, Dunn sees indications that Jesus’ baptism was of great import and, we should add, especially in Mark’s reading.36 Jesus’ baptism launches his own mission and ministry. Here we have an indication of the presence of the Spirit as the power of God; whereas, for John the Baptist, the Spirit remained an end-time reality. Mark’s Jesus stands in relationship to God as son to father and, with Matthew, as the one in and through whom the Spirit, the power of God, works. For Mark, it was in prayer that Jesus 33

34

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36

James D. G. Dunn, ‘Jesus – Flesh and Spirit: An Exposition of Romans 1:3-4’, in: The Christ and the Spirit: Collected Essays of James D. G. Dunn, vol. 1, Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998, essay originally published 1973), 142-43. I am grateful to Sr. Ha Dinh, O.P., for various bibliographical references and for insights and phrases taken, especially at this point, from a research paper for a Ph.D. seminar on spirituality of the Trinity. See Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 62-65. Dunn concludes that ‘it remains quite probable that Jesus never spoke directly of what happened at Jordan, but made some allusions which have provided the basis of the earliest account. (…) [W]e may say with some confidence that Mark’s narrative is a quite justifiable interpretation of the event at Jordan’ (65). See Dunn’s further, careful remarks concerning the event of Jesus’ baptism by John and the following ‘anointing with the Spirit’. Jesus Remembered, 372-77, with 376-77n179 where Dunn refers to a critique of his view in Jesus and the Spirit, 63-65, made by Meier in Mentor, Messenger, and Miracles, 108-9. See Dunn’s early analyses, in a revision of his 1968 doctoral dissertation, of the Gospel presentations of what we generally refer to as Jesus’ baptism. Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament Teaching on the Gift of the Spirit in Relation to Pentecostalism Today (London: SCM, 1970). He writes of Jesus’ ‘experience’ rather than Jesus’ ‘baptism’ (for example, 33). That experience includes two events, namely, the rite of immersion and the anointing with the Spirit, the latter of which is the more important for Dunn from various points of view (35). Dunn indicates in Jesus Remembered, 377: ‘All we can say is that in the formulation of the Jesus tradition, from the earliest days, so far as we can tell, the disciple story-tellers had no doubt that Jesus had been anointed by the Spirit at Jordan and was cherished by God as his son from that time or earlier’.

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addressed God as Abba, his Father. For Matthew, it was in ministry that Jesus acknowledged the healing and freeing Spirit at work in and through him. On these bases, namely, his intimate relationships with Abba and with the Spirit as the power of God working through him, Jesus spoke and acted with authority. Jesus’ overall relationship with God involves, in Dunn’s phrase, an otherly givenness. Jesus’ overall experience of this otherly givenness includes both rational reflection and other elements such as emotion, decision, and subsequent action. Jesus gives expression to this experience in his proclamation and in his exercise of power which, together, lead to healing and wholeness.37 In his preaching, clearly connected with his healing, the kingdom of God is present. The Spirit of the end-time is active in the various aspects of his ministry. Jesus’ whole ministry is inextricably linked with the kingdom of God. More particularly, the temporally imaged reign of God is presently realized in and through Jesus. The kingdom of God is still to come in its universally present and effective power of God reigning over and in all. This is the kingdom as the spatially imaged realm of God. And yet already now Jesus’ relationship to Abba and Jesus’ acknowledgment of the Spirit working through him impel him freely to love and obey Abba. This twofold relationship, namely, to Abba and to the Spirit, enables Jesus as well to liberate those ill or demon possessed. Mark and Matthew present a Jesus whose twofold relationship with God is, then, both distinctive and unique. He shares this relationship with his disciples. But it is always his relationship which he shares. We can briefly move beyond Dunn to a somewhat more generally expressed reading of Jesus in relation to Abba as well as to the Spirit working through him. We begin by referring again to an otherly givenness. We note anew that, for Mark and Matthew, Jesus of Nazareth’s human relationship to God entails a doubled reference to God as other than himself. The God of Israel is the one to whom he prays. And the Spirit is the power of God working in and through him as he frees and heals. Jesus’ relationship to God is, in effect, intimate and empowering, a relationship with two points of reference. One point of reference is God as Abba. Jesus is then in correlative fashion the Son. His intimate relationship with God was profoundly emotional. It was emotional to the point where he would, in loving obedience, put himself into God’s caring hands. He did this even in some of his darkest moments, including his moment of agony in the Garden. The other point of reference, to which we will shortly return, is the active presence of the Spirit. But now let us consider further the first point of reference, namely, God as Abba. It is not hard to envision ourselves on the way, with Jesus, from the 37

See Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 88.

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temple in Jerusalem down the hill and across the Kidron valley to the Garden of Gethsemane. Many of us have had the privilege to follow this way when we visited Jerusalem. Jesus stops with his disciples at the garden of olive trees, perhaps a mile from Jerusalem. The garden is situated on the way up the steep Mount of Olives that then leads on to nearby Bethany, home of his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Today there is a reminder of this garden in the form of an ancient group of olive trees found low on the mountainside. Arriving at the garden as it was in his day, Jesus senses the imminent danger he is in and goes off a bit farther to pray.38 We can begin to imagine something of the emotion Jesus felt if we recall what the great theologian Romano Guardini (1885–1968) eloquently wrote in his meditation on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.39 In that meditation, he speaks of Jesus as bearing the weight of a sinful world and as seeing all in relation to his view of God as Abba. Guardini hesitates to say much about the Father beyond his leaving Jesus to go through a horrendous moment of isolation and solitude. Jesus feels an indescribable loneliness here in the Garden. Guardini describes him as being deeply troubled and terribly sad. As feeling forlorn. As dreading what is to come. Such isolation. ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; take this cup away from me’. Yet Jesus prays precisely from these depths of emotion to which Mark gives expression. ‘Not what I want but what you want’. Guardini picks up especially on the sense of anguish and fear which seems at times to consume Jesus in Mark’s telling of the scene in the Garden. But, as we have noted, in Mark Jesus ends in freely expressing a more serene attitude, ‘Not what I want but what you want’. Some say that these two, anguish and serenity, reflect the fact that the author of Mark’s Gospel is combining two stories told about Jesus in the Garden. One of them, perhaps the earlier one, would have brought out Jesus’ human agony. The other, perhaps a story formulated somewhat later, would have stressed Jesus’ being in better control of the situation. It then culminates in ‘Not what I want but what you want’. Whether Mark has brought together two stories or worked with one, he has left an extraordinarily

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Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700, 5th revised and expanded edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 146-47. Romano Guardini, The Lord (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954), 381-85. Guardini later published a related study, The Humanity of Christ: Contributions to a Psychology of Jesus (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2018). It is a carefully phrased and qualified study, perhaps well characterized as a spiritual meditation. But in it Guardini explicitly mentions Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane only occasionally (for example, 102, 103,108, 154, 158).

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compelling retelling of Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane. In it, he never fails to invite us who read it to enter ever more deeply into that experience itself.40 We turn now to the second point of reference in Jesus’ relationship to God. It is the Spirit of God, the power of God working through the prophets. But now the Spirit, the divine power of the end-time, already works definitively in and through Jesus. In Matthew’s Gospel, considered together with that of Mark, Jesus becomes aware of the Spirit within himself, directing him outward to the welfare of others as he heals and liberates. In what Jesus says and does, he shows a profound self-assurance rooted in his relationship to Abba, who loves him, and to the Spirit as the power of God working through him. Let us now prolong our meditative reflection a bit. We can say that Jesus’ intimate, twofold or doubled relationship with God brings with it wholeness and integration in three ways. First, Jesus sees his whole life and ministry as one of proclaiming the reign of God present already now in his preaching and healing. His life and even his death take on a fullness of meaning. Everything he says and does and undergoes is ultimately integrated in his experience of resurrection. Second, there is a direct impact on those whom he liberates and heals, a resultant integration and wholeness in their lives. Third, the promise of a final wholeness and integration takes the form of a world presently longing for, and at the end effectively rejoicing in, the fullness of the reign of God in the realm of God. In each of these cases, wholeness is the result of a form of enriching experience had by a community, shared by several people, or lived individually. Or, any combination of these three forms of enriching experience. In each of these cases, we can refer to the one or ones having the experience as an enriched self. We are here taking the notion of an enriched self in a wide sense. That self can be a whole community, several persons, an individual, a combination of them or, again, even the whole of creation. This last would especially be the case when we think of creation in relation to the Parousia or end-time when it experiences fullness in the Trinity. If we wished to say much more we would, as Dunn says, need to consider the first Easter. Perhaps we would even need to refer, to some extent, to that Easter to ground what we have said. And it would be fascinating at this point to rush on, for example, to Paul, who also refers to God as Abba. He writes of God as the one whom early Christians address in this way. We can take Paul’s 40

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, for example, argues, based on the presence of phrases repeated twice in Mark’s recounting of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, that the author of Mark’s Gospel has brought two stories together. The one focusing on anguish arises earlier and the other stressing Jesus’ serenity somewhat later. ‘What Really Happened at Gethsemane?’, in: Keys to Jerusalem: Collected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 77-106. He then goes on to discuss in various ways his conviction concerning the true historical character of Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane.

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reference to God as Abba to apply reasonably to later disciples of Jesus as well. For Paul and for Jesus’ disciples, it is the Spirit of God’s Son who cries out in ecstatic exclamation to God within him and them. Paul first writes of this experience around the year 54 in his letter to the Galatians 4:6, and then again around 58 in his letter to the Romans 8:15. He develops, in further ways, the idea that Jesus invited his disciples to share in, while being dependent on, his relationship with Abba. But we best leave that for the next chapter. For now, we should linger a bit longer with Mark and Matthew, while making another brief reference to Paul. Mark and Matthew can help appreciate Paul’s writing of the early Christians’ experiences of God as ones which occur according to a certain pattern. Indeed, that pattern reflects aspects of Jesus’ own experience of God. Regarding Abba, for example, we have turned to Mark 14:36, probably written in final form around the year 70. In Mark, it is Jesus himself who addresses God as Abba. In Galatians and Romans, written about 15 years earlier, it is in Galatians the Spirit who cries Abba within Christians and in Romans the Christians who so cry, with their cry witnessed to by the Spirit. Paul had, early on, linked together Christians’ experience of the Spirit and their intimate relationship with Abba. Regarding the Spirit, in Matt. 20:28 perhaps written down in final form around 85 or 90, it is the Spirit who heals and frees through Jesus. With Paul in mind, we can say that early Christians lived and died as disciples of Jesus. For they themselves experienced God as Abba and as Spirit working through them. The Gospel verses we have referred to become, in effect, testimonial references. In them, Mark and Matthew give witness to Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God as Abba and of the Spirit as divine power working in and through him. They invite those who read them to follow Jesus and to share in his experience of God.41 Down through the ages, Mark’s and Matthew’s testimonials to Jesus as Son of the Father and the one in and through whom the Spirit of God works have guided Christians in life and in prayer. They have come to serve as points of clear reference. Over the centuries, these and such other similar texts have inspired those of us who read them in the context of our own concrete situations and in relation to our communal and personal experiences. We have come to interpret them in various ways as we reflect more deeply on them from the perspectives of our own times and experiences. And now we draw upon and 41

Bauckham provides an extensive reflection on the Gospels as eyewitness testimony to Jesus of Nazareth. He stresses trust as essential component in the effectiveness of testimony. See his closing chapter in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 472-508, esp. 505-8. He is, however, not using ‘testimony’ in quite the way in which ‘testimonial’ is being used here regarding Mark and Matthew. I am using ‘testimonial’ in a more focused way as witness to and affirmation of Jesus’ experience of God. Mark’s and Matthew’s intention is to encourage readers to see their own experience of God in the light of that of Jesus.

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learn from critical historical and biblical studies as we continue to meditate on these and other New Testament texts. At the same time, we feel ourselves free and indeed justified to go beyond what might in more circumscribed fashion be concluded from a specifically scholarly and especially historical perspective. Those of us who have read the Gospels from a faith perspective42 over the past two millennia have felt ourselves to be in touch with Jesus who lived in Galilee, visited Jerusalem, and is now risen Lord.43 It will be helpful briefly to consider a more recent example of one who learns from, and yet does not limit himself to, what a strictly critical scholarly approach alone might seem to justify. We find such an example in Pope John Paul II. He carried out much of his reflection on Scripture and Christian living from the perspective of his prolonged encounter with contemporary, and especially personalist, thought. In a General Audience at the Vatican on March 3, 1999, he said: 2. Jesus’ experience is the basis for this specific revelation of the Father. It is clear from his words and attitudes that he experiences his relationship with the Father in a wholly unique way. (…) 4. The Gospel of Mark has preserved for us the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ (cf. Mark 14:36) with which Jesus, during his painful hour in Gethsemane, called on God, praying to him to let the cup of the Passion pass him by. (…) Jesus uses it [Abba] in an original way to address God and, in the full maturity of his life which is about to end on the cross, to indicate the close relationship which even at that 42

43

Dunn argues that already in Jesus’ earthly ministry faith was an important component of the disciples’ acceptance of what Jesus was preaching and doing, just as it is an important component of his disciples in their relationship to him after his death and resurrection. ‘Remembering Jesus: How the Quest of the Historical Jesus Lost Its Way’, in: Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols, ed. Tom Holmén & Stanley E. Porter, vol. 1, How to Study the Historical Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 187-90. These remarks remain general. Without doing justice to the carefully nuanced approach Dunn takes to New Testament studies on Jesus, it is interesting to note he does not seem to limit one to saying what can be historically verified in a technical sense. See, for example, Robert B. Stewart, ‘From Reimarus to Dunn: Situating James D. G. Dunn in the History of Jesus Research’, in: Memories of Jesus: A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered, ed. Robert B. Stewart & Gary R. Habermas (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2010), 26-30, with Dunn’s response in ‘In Grateful Dialogue’, 288-89. There Dunn writes, ‘More fully, my argument is that the impact made by Jesus was first expressed more or less by his disciples in sharing stories about Jesus and in reflecting on forms of his teaching that were integral to the disciples’ own preaching and teaching, both before Jesus’ death and after his resurrection’ (289). Here Jesus’ impact on the disciples seems to imply that they have experienced him in various ways. Their experiencing Jesus would include, in our context, his having prayed to God as Abba and having been empowered by the Spirit of God. Of further note, many of the entries in Memories of Jesus treat of various aspects of Dunn’s methodology. See also in these regards, Dunn, Jesus Remembered, for example 125-36.

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critical moment binds him to his Father. (…) Through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, the only Son of this Father, we too, as St Paul said, are raised to the dignity of sons and have received the Holy Spirit who prompts us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’ (cf. Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).44

And in his Encyclical ‘Dominum et vivificantem’, dated May 18, 1986, John Paul II wrote: 20. The theophany at the Jordan clarifies only in a fleeting way the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth, whose entire activity will be carried out in the active presence of the Holy Spirit. (…) Jesus rejoices at the fatherhood of God: he rejoices because it has been given to him to reveal this fatherhood; he rejoices, finally, as at a particular outpouring of this divine fatherhood on the ‘little ones’. And the evangelist [Luke] describes all this as ‘rejoicing in the Holy Spirit’. (…) 21. That which during the theophany at the Jordan came so to speak ‘from outside’, from on high, here comes ‘from within’, that is to say from the depths of who Jesus is. (…) [W]hat he says of the Father and of himself – the Son – flows from that fullness of the Spirit which is in him, which fills his heart, pervades his own ‘I’, inspires and enlivens his action from the depths.45

In true personalist fashion, John Paul II sees Jesus establishing his identity in and through his relationship with an other, indeed with God the Father and with the Spirit. In looking back now from our vantage point with John Paul II, we come again to Jesus of Nazareth himself. We do this with the help of unique testimonials to his experience of God offered by Mark and Matthew and, we might add, various early communities of Jesus’ disciples through them. With their help, we discover ever anew that Jesus’ experience of God was indeed characterized by a specific pattern. He prayed to Abba and was empowered by the Spirit of God to heal through exorcism. Added to this, we find that devotion to Jesus himself flourished already in the earliest years of the Christian movement. Such devotion included prayer, hymns, religious experience, and the witness of martyrs.46 Through his words and deeds, the earliest Christians recognized Jesus as 44

45

46

Pope John Paul II, ‘Jesus’ Experience of God as Father and His Intimate Relationship with Him’, General Audience, March 3, 1999, accessed June 20, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1999/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_03031999.html. Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Dominum et vivificantem, May 18, 1986, accessed June 20, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_ 18051986_dominum-et-vivificantem.html. See: Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003); Anne Hunt, ‘The Emergence of Devotion to Jesus in the Early Church: The Grass-Roots Derivation of the Trinity’, in: Australian E-Journal of Theology issue 4 (February 2005), accessed July 20, 2020, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/ 37047/20051019-0000/dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/aejt_4/hunt.

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the Spirit-empowered Son of Abba. In their own regard, they quickly expanded this pattern of Jesus’ twofold experience of God. They transformed it into a de facto triply structured one which included explicit reference directly to Jesus himself. This triply structured pattern has become characteristic of much Christian prayer. It provides a structure for the most commonly accepted Christian creed, the Nicene Creed. The Creed gathers Christian beliefs, summarizing them in relation to Father, Son, and Spirit in that order. Disciples of Jesus have come to live a triply structured, experience-based relationship to God as Spirit within them, as the risen Jesus, and as Abba. They experience the reign of God through the active presence of the Spirit in them, an experience leading to a sense of communal and personal renewal, freedom, and consequent wholeness. Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospel texts to which we have referred give expression to several convictions of early Christian communities concerning Jesus. They give witness to his having experienced, and lived in, a deeply intimate relationship with Abba and with the Spirit of God. And they exhort the disciples of Jesus to learn from and follow him. Mark’s and Matthew’s testimonials even contain many of the words Christians often use to express their experiences of the Trinity. Jesus’ experience provides the disciples of yesterday, today, and tomorrow with grounding for, and guidance in, recognizing their own experiences of the Trinity. The personal experience Jesus has of Abba and Spirit becomes the founding moment in the two-millennia-long Christian experience of God as Trinity.47 Over the course of these two millennia, those who are disciples of Jesus have participated in this founding experience especially when they prayed ‘Our Father’ in community, with family and friends, or individually. They have raised mind and heart to God in their own names as well as in those of their communities and that of humankind as such. They have the privilege of praying as well in the name of creation, which finds its voice in a special way through them. Thus, they and all creation itself take part in Jesus, the Spirit-empowered

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htm#_ftnref24. Hunt discusses Hurtado’s study, as well as several somewhat earlier studies by Sebastian Moore concerning the proposed inner psychological development of early Christian consciousness in the direction of ‘Trinity’. After writing this chapter, I was pleasantly surprised to find that John J. O’Donnell had in chapter 3, ‘Jesus, the Son and Bearer of the Spirit’, in The Mystery of the Triune God (New York: Paulist, 1989), 40-56, 175, also followed closely Dunn’s overall order of presentation in Jesus and the Spirit concerning Jesus’ addressing God as Abba, the Spirit’s working through Jesus to exorcise evil spirits, and the significance of Jesus’ baptism. O’Donnell brings in a considerable number of further, supportive references and concludes the chapter concerned with a well-phrased remark: ‘Our reflections in this chapter have sought to situate later church formulations of the Christian experience of God in the New Testament data and more particularly in the foundational experience of Jesus himself. We have seen that there is good reason to believe that Jesus thought of himself as Son of God and bearer of the Spirit’ (56).

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Son of Abba’s experience, which then becomes for them their founding experience. Following that experience, they, indeed many of us, now pray the Our Father in the context of prayerful reflection on Mark’s reading of Jesus’ baptism: In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. (Mark 1:9-11 NRSV)

PART II EARLY TESTIMONIALS

CHAPTER

2

PAUL OF TARSUS An Appeal to the Galatians

Mark and Mathew, in effect, offer testimonials to Jesus’ experience of God when they present Jesus as the spirit-empowered Son of Abba. Their testimonials have permitted us to go back, so to speak, in prudent fashion to Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem. It is, in turn, Paul of Tarsus (4 BCE? to c. 62–64 CE) who offers the earliest written testimonials available concerning what we would today refer to as Christian experiences of the Trinity. Joseph Maleparampil1 writes of the early witness value of Paul’s succinct, threefold references to God as Father, Son, and Spirit. He focuses on seven excerpts from four of Paul’s letters. They are 1 Corinthians 12:4-6; 2 Corinthians 1:1-22; 2 Corinthians 13:13; Galatians 4:6; Romans 8:11; Romans 15:15-16; and, Romans 15:30-32. Galatians 4:6 may well be the earliest of these seven. In it, Paul makes explicit mention of the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit. He does this within the context of a threefold reference to God. This is, then, a concrete example of his referring to what we would tend to call experience of the Trinity. We begin our review of varied testimonials to such experience with a study of this verse from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul is universally acknowledged as the author of the letter, probably having dictated most of it. There has been some discussion as to whether he himself may have founded the churches in Galatia.2 At the least, Paul says in Gal. 1:8 that he had preached the Gospel to the Galatians prior to writing his letter. There seems to be even more discussion concerning where the Galatians to whom 1

2

Joseph Maleparampil, The ‘Trinitarian’ Formulae in St. Paul: An Exegetical Investigation into the Meaning and Function of Those Pauline Sayings Which Compositely Make Mention of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), and see 15, 260. This is a revised version of his doctoral dissertation defended at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Hans Dieter Betz, for example, speaks often of Paul as having founded the churches in Galatia. See his study, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 2, 4, 5, 10, 11.

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he wrote lived and when he composed it.3 Some argue that Paul was addressing Christian communities in what is called North Galatia, the north central part of present-day Turkey. Others hold that he sent it to Christian communities in what is called South Galatia, a more southerly but still central part of Turkey. If Paul sent his letter to Christians in North Galatia, he may have written it somewhere around the years 57 or 58, but possibly as early as about 54. If to those in South Galatia, then he wrote it somewhere between 48 and 55. According to these calculations, Paul would have sent his letter to the Galatians somewhere between 18 and 28 years after Jesus’ death, which perhaps occurred in the year 30. For present purposes, I would suggest that a date around 54 will serve well, namely, about 24 years after Jesus’ death.4 In any case, we may, as mentioned, reasonably consider Gal. 4:6 our earliest available written testimonial to what we have come to speak of as Christian experience of the Trinity. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul defends the Gospel he had previously preached in their communities. He had shared with the Galatians this Gospel which he had received ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 1:11-12). In it, he taught that justification came through faith in Jesus Christ. But now he hears that some in Galatia are saying both Jews and Gentiles need to be circumcised to be justified. In response, Paul is quick to remind the Galatians that such practice implies one then conform to Jewish law as well (Gal. 5:2-3). A fiery Paul gets upset when he hears of this different gospel. He even refers to the Galatians as foolish for thinking justification comes through carrying out the precepts of the law (Gal. 3:1). He asks the Galatians, ‘Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?’ (Gal. 3:5, quotations here from NRSV). He insists that believers in Christ are free from the obligations of the law, a line of thought he pursues throughout the letter. Paul is stressing freedom from the precepts of the Jewish law in his argument against Judaisers. He argues against those who, after his departure from Galatia, would impose circumcision. In so doing, they would be threatening the gratuity of justification through faith in Jesus Christ. They would ultimately be rejecting a Christian life freely lived in faith and love.5 3

4

5

For a succinct discussion of the date and recipients of the letter, see Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 474-77. I am grateful to Prof. Normand Bonneau for drawing attention to this succinct but most helpful reference. He has kindly provided wise counsel and insight concerning many parts of this chapter touching more directly on Paul. But I am responsible for my use of them. Betz writes, ‘The years between 50-55 as the date of writing may be accepted as a reasonable guess’. Galatians, 12. For a lengthy and subtle discussion of a long-held reading of Paul on justification through faith in relation to works and a more recent interpretation, see James D. G. Dunn, ‘The New

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Galatians 4:6 As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’6

From the beginning of the third chapter of Galatians on, Paul has been assembling a series of arguments in support of the gospel message he previously preached to the Galatians. They, and he speaks of himself as well, are justified by faith in Jesus Christ. Not by circumcision and works of the law. He is writing to convince them that they should not impose circumcision on either Jews or Gentiles. With Gal. 4:1-7, we reach his fifth and final, indeed climactic, argument. The Galatians are not slaves to the law but heirs and children of God. Reviewing and reflecting on this argument will provide valuable access to ways in which Paul, early on, speaks of the Galatians’ and his own differentiated relationship with God. In our review of the text itself, we will first take inspiration from and follow Maleparampil’s exegetical analyses of these verses.7 Our focus here will be on the Galatians’ and Paul’s experience of God. We will complement this review with further insights drawn from Wesley Hill’s recent study, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters.8 Hill will help us describe more precisely how Paul understands the God to whom he offers testimony in Gal. 4:6.

6

7 8

Perspective on Paul: Whence, What and Whither?’, in: The New Perspective on Paul, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 1-97. To put Dunn’s complex argument rather roughly, Dunn seems to be arguing that Jews also were saved by faith, but that specified works played a role no longer necessary. Gal. 4:6, NABRE. Most references to Paul’s letter to the Galatians will be to the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). But references to Gal. 4:1-7, will be to the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE). Its translation reflects more explicitly the interpretation of the Greek text of the pericope and of Gal. 4:6 with which I am working. NRSV, accessed May 12, 2019, http://www.biblestudytools.com/nrs; NABRE, accessed May 13, 2019, http://www.usccb.org/ bible/books-of-the-bible/index.cfm. Abba will be italicized when it is simply my use of the word. But when it appears in a quoted verse from a New Testament text it will not be italicized unless so done in the translation. Maleparampil, ‘Trinitarian’ Formulae, 113-44, 241-42, and 259-60. Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), with abundant bibliography related directly or indirectly to the theme of Paul and the Trinity. Paul and the Trinity, 173-95. Hill’s book is the result of his doctoral dissertation work at Durham University. He dialogues at length with opinions with which he is not in agreement. Unfortunately, given our focus, space does not permit addressing these alternative views. Prof. Normand Bonneau kindly brought this study to my attention.

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The Galatians’ and Paul’s Experience of God In Gal. 4:1-7, Paul argues that the Galatians are not slaves but heirs, to use a judicial term which opens to a ‘family of God’ metaphor.9 The Galatians are children of God by adoption. They are slaves neither to the Jewish law nor, as he will conclude more widely, ‘to beings that by nature are not gods’ (Gal. 4:8 NRSV). Now for a closer look at verses 1-7. We find that, in the first verse, Paul opens his argument with the recognition that Jewish-Christians were heirs who had not yet come to their inheritance. They were owners under the law but could not exercise that ownership. As well, they ‘were enslaved to the elemental powers of the world’ (Gal. 4:3 NABRE). ‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption’ (Gal. 4:4-5 NABRE). In verse 6, Paul reminds the Galatians that ‘God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba, Father!”’ He concludes, ‘So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God’ (Gal. 4:7 NABRE). We are now ready to focus on verses 4 to 6, which bear citing together to make it easier to see how they work as a whole and in relation to one another: (4) But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, (5) to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption. (6) As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’ [ἀββὰ ὁ πατήρ] (Gal. 4:4-6 NABRE)

In verses 4 and 5, Paul has moved from the time before redemption in Christ (Gal. 4:1-3) to God’s having sent God’s Son to ransom believers in Christ who are now God’s adopted children. In verse 6, he brings in a second, parallel sending clearly distinguished from that of the Son. This second sending is that of the Spirit of his Son into our hearts. ‘Our’ indicates here that he is including himself with the Galatians as recipients of this sending. It is of some importance, then, to continue to recall that Paul speaks and writes from personal experience as well as from what he has observed in his communities. The present participle form of the verb ‘crying out’ indicates that the Spirit’s work in ‘our’ hearts is ongoing. The wording of verses 4 and 6 concerning the parallel sendings, by God, of his Son and of the Spirit of his Son involves phrasing original with Paul. This phrasing gives rise, among others, to two questions of interpretation. The first of these two questions concerns the link between the two sendings, on the one hand, and the Christian condition of adopted sonship, on the other. We could translate the opening of the Greek text of verse 6 as ‘because you are children’ 9

Maleparampil, ‘Trinitarian’ Formulae, 116, 118.

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(NRSV). Then we might well, though not necessarily, think that the sending of the Spirit occurs based on our already being God’s children due to the sending of the Son. But we might also translate that opening as ‘proof that you are children’ (NABRE). Then it is the sending of the Spirit of God’s Son which concretely constitutes believers as children of God. After his analysis of the Greek text, Maleparampil opts for the second interpretation. He concludes that Paul meant to say it is the sending of the Spirit of God’s Son into the Galatians’ hearts, and into his as well, which makes them children of God.10 Maleparampil also recalls the parallel text in Paul’s letter to the Romans 8:14-16, most probably written somewhat after Paul’s letter to the Galatians. In this parallel text, it is clearly the presence of the Spirit which makes one a child of God. ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” [ἀββὰ ὁ πατήρ] it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Rom. 8:14-16 NRSV).11 A second question arises. Are God, Christ, and Spirit presented as truly distinct in verse 6? On the one hand, with verses 4 and 6 we have two clearly distinct sendings by God, one of the Son and the other of the Spirit. On the other hand, some say that Paul’s phrase ‘the spirit of his Son’ simply equates the resurrected Christ with the Spirit. Equating Christ and Spirit would then probably leave us with a merely twofold reference to God in verse 6.12 It has often been argued that there is a certain ambiguity in Paul’s thought regarding the relation between the resurrected Christ and the Spirit.13 Simply identifying 10 11 12

13

Ibid., 118-20. On the question of some manuscripts reading ‘you’ for ‘our’ here, see 113n1. Ibid., 120. For instance, Betz writes that ‘the expression “Spirit of his son” is unique in Paul, but similar expressions occur elsewhere in his letters, indicating that both are identical: the Spirit “of his son” in effect means the present reality of Christ’. Galatians, 210. For a brief, helpful reference to this ambiguity, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ‘Pauline Theology’, in: The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer & Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 1396. On the other hand, Christopher Kavin Rowe argues succinctly but well, for example, that ‘the Lord is the Spirit’ in 2 Cor 3:17a is not, in its context, ambiguous and does not identify Jesus and the Spirit. ‘Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics’, in: Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002), 303-4. Hill supports Rowe’s position but goes far beyond it in identifying the Spirit as being active already in the related Hebrew Bible text, Exodus 34:34: ‘Whenever Moses entered the presence of the LORD to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out again. On coming out, he would tell the Israelites all that he had been commanded’ (NRSV). Hill writes that for Paul ‘the Lord whom Moses met at the tent of meeting was already the Spirit, the same Spirit whom Paul’s addressees are encountering when they behold “the glory of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18)’. Paul and the Trinity, 153 (italics in the original). 2 Cor. 3:18 reads: ‘All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit’ (NRSV).

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the resurrected Christ with the Spirit could conceivably lead to an excessive conflating of ‘risen Christ’ and ‘Spirit’ in Paul. But, for example, in Rom. 8:11, a text we are here considering as written after Gal. 4:6, Paul seems to make a clear distinction between Jesus and the Spirit of him who raises Christ Jesus from the dead. ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ [in Greek, ‘Christ Jesus’] from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you’ (Rom. 8:11 NRSV). In various places, Paul seems to refer to the Spirit in such a way as to attribute to the Spirit a certain identity and function in parallel with those of the Father and of the Son. It is possible to recognize a certain evolution in Paul’s thought on, or at least his expression of, the relationship between Spirit and Son. But these parallels also permit us reasonably to read already in Gal. 4:6 a threefold way of referring to God, namely, Father, Son, and Spirit. At this point it will be helpful to recall further examples of Paul’s threefold ways of so referring when he speaks of Christians’ relationship with God. (4) Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; (5) and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; (6) and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. (1 Cor. 12:4-6) (21) But it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us (22) by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment. (2 Cor. 1:21-22) The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. (2 Cor. 13:13) (15) Nevertheless on some point I have written to you rather boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God (16) to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. (Rom. 15:1516, all here NRSV)

Gal. 4:6 is a one-verse sentence elegant in style, marvelously dense in theological content, and dynamically rhythmic in movement. It moves forward from the establishment of a share in divine sonship as adopted children of God, thus tying this verse with the previous two verses. It rushes on from them to God’s sending of the Spirit of God’s Son into, as Paul says, our hearts which are the Spirit’s destination. The purpose of the Spirit’s sending, hence the Spirit’s own purpose, is to cry out ‘Abba, Father’. For Paul, this seemingly ecstatic outburst is the Spirit witnessing to the Galatians’ adoption, and his own, as children of God who are thus made free.14 In this summary verse 4:6, the movement is from God sending, to the Spirit of God’s Son being sent, to a return to God in and through the hearts of the Galatians where the Spirit cries out ‘Abba, Father’. 14

Maleparampil, ‘Trinitarian’ Formulae, for example, 122, 127, 138, 142.

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But in a second look at this verse, we see that the experiential move is from the reception of the Spirit of the Son to that Spirit’s leading the Galatians, in an outcry, to God the Father. Paul indeed appeals to the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit.15 This appeal serves to bring to a climax his overall argument in favor of Christian freedom from the need for circumcision and subservience to Jewish law. He says this experience attests that the Galatians are now adopted children of God. But he cannot speak of that experience of the Spirit without reference to God’s Son and to the Father. To do so would make it impossible for him to refer unequivocally to this experience of the Spirit. According to his testimony here, neither Paul nor the Galatians separate their experience of the Spirit from reference to God’s Son. For they cannot identify the Spirit without such a reference. And they likewise cannot speak of that experience without reference to the Father. This latter reference belongs to the essence of the experience. For God, as Father, is the one to whom the experience leads.16 This experience Paul refers to is an experience of the active presence of the Spirit of God’s Son.17 It is a personal experience Galatians live in their hearts, an immediate, emotional, and affective experience. In it, the Spirit seems to take on a somewhat more personal role, initiating a cry, ‘Abba, Father’. Here, in Gal. 4:6, it is the Spirit who cries out in believers’ hearts, including Paul’s. But, as has been mentioned, by the time of the writing of the parallel text in his letter to the Romans, Paul stresses more that believers themselves cry out. Yet he maintains that in this cry the Spirit is bearing witness. ‘For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Rom. 8:15-16 NRSV). In either case, but perhaps more explicitly in Romans, Paul sees in this activity the creation of a deeply personal relationship between the Spirit and the one in whose heart the Spirit cries out. That relationship is one in which the Spirit in effect urges those experiencing the Spirit’s presence to turn outward from themselves. They are

15

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In bringing together consideration of Paul’s remarks in Gal. 3 and in Rom. 8:14-16 with Gal. 4:6, James D. G. Dunn says, ‘It is clear that this reception of the Spirit was a conscious experience’ (italics in the original). Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament Teaching on the Gift of the Spirit in Relation to Pentecostalism Today (London: SCM, 1970), 113. See, for example, Christopher Kavin Rowe, ‘The Trinity in the Letters of St. Paul and Hebrews’, in: The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. Gilles Emery & Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 41-54, esp. 49-53. For a wider, contextualizing presentation of Paul on experience of the Spirit, see James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), § 16.4.

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sons and daughters who turn, in an intimate way, to God as their Father.18 In familial trust and confidence, indeed, in faith, hope, and love, they look to God their Father who is the goal of their lives. Indeed, the Spirit is ‘the dynamic principle of Christian life’.19 Maleparampil helpfully summarizes various roles of the Spirit which Paul indicates in his letter to the Galatians. The main functions of the Spirit regarding the life of the believer in Christ in the letter to the Galatians are implicitly pointed out in this affirmation of the presence and activity of the Spirit in Gal 4:6. In the Letter to the Galatians they are: 1. To give us the gift of divine sonship, to witness and assure it (Gal 4:6, 29); 2. To lead and guide the believer in Christ in faith, love and confident hope for its final fulfilment, namely, eternal life (Gal 5:5-6, 13, 18-29). 3. To lead those who live in the Spirit definitely to eternal life (Gal 6:8). Spirit is absolutely necessary (Gal 2: 5, 13-14) because from the gift of the Spirit of promise derives the sonship (Gal 4:6) which finds its fulfilment in eternal life (Gal 6:8).20

We might well think of Paul’s reading of this experience of the Spirit as, to use a more modern expression, phenomenological. It is a reading of human experience as something immediately lived and felt. In addition, that reading of human experience includes the aspects of understanding and of purpose, goal, or end-result which make up and contribute to a fuller understanding of human experience as such. There is, then, the more immediate experience of the active presence of the Spirit creating a relationship between the Spirit and the person living the experience. There is as well the Galatians’ experience of God’s Son expressed in the phrase ‘the spirit of God’s Son’. This is the experience of the meaning of what is going on in the light of the example of the Son of God sent into the world. We see this indicated in the immediately preceding verses 4 and 5. These verses lead the Galatians to a fuller understanding of the words ‘of the Son’. Following upon this fuller understanding, there is the Galatians’ experience of being adopted children of God. And Jesus of Nazareth, now the Risen One, is the Son who through his life, teaching, death, and resurrection becomes the example of what it means to live in the Spirit. There is one especially important way in which Jesus becomes, for the Galatians, an example of how they are to live as adopted child of God. This example is made more explicit when Paul refers to God as Abba.21 His reference witnesses to memories retained and recounted by the Galatians over the 20 to 25 years 18

19 20 21

Betz stresses this self-understanding, as sons and daughters, of those in whom the Spirit cries out. But that self-understanding is perhaps more explicitly indicated in Rom. 8:15-16, where, again, it is the Galatians themselves who cry out. Galatians, 211. Maleparampil, ‘Trinitarian’ Formulae, 131. Ibid., 140-41. See Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 716.

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since the death of Jesus. Paul is building on these memories when he refers to the experience of the Spirit crying out to God as ‘Abba, Father’. He links the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit with Jesus’ own experience of God as his Father. It is as if the Galatians and Paul are echoing Jesus’ prayer. When he and the Galatians identify the Spirit as the Spirit of God’s Son, they are affirming a personal relationship between them and Jesus of Nazareth, now the Risen Lord. A relationship brought about by the Spirit. Jesus serves as example for them because their own status as adopted children is, again, dependent on, and a participation in, his own sonship. The active presence of the Spirit of God’s Son in their hearts makes that status real for them. The experience of the Spirit of God’s Son makes Paul and the Galatians children of God. It leads them, in outcry, to an intimate relationship with God. This relationship is patterned on and dependent on that of Jesus. It is, in effect, for them a personal experience of the Spirit turning them to God as their Father. They recognize in the Father the purpose and goal of their lives, the one for whom they live in the Spirit through the Risen Son of God. Their lives are themselves outcries, ‘Abba, Father’.22 In Gal. 4:6, we find Paul offering a testimonial to the Galatians’ and to his own Spirit-rooted experience of God as their Father. It is an experience understood according to the example of Jesus who offered himself in generous self-gift to his Father on their behalf. Paul testifies, we may recall, to the Galatians’ experience taking place in what is modern-day Turkey at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. In Romans 8:14-16, he will provide a further testimonial to the same experience. In this latter instance, his testimonial will concern the experience of the early Christian community far to the west of Galatia. Paul had not yet visited Rome when he wrote his letter to the Galatians. Nor when he wrote to the Romans. But he wanted the Christians in Rome to know that he shared with them such a Spirit-rooted experience, of which he must have heard in their regard. His writing the same message to such geographically distant settings as Galatia and Rome witnesses approvingly to widespread early Christian experiences of God as Spirit, Son, and Father. With this message, he is encouraging the readers of his letters to become more aware of such experiences in their lives.

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Gordon D. Fee writes in relation to Gal. 4:6 and other references to Paul, ‘Crucial here is that the reception of the Spirit is then the way Paul experiences – and therefore relates to – both the Father and Christ’. ‘Paul and the Trinity: The Experience of Christ and the Spirit for Paul’s Understanding of God’, in: The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, & Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 66, and see also 55-56 on Gal. 4:6.

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The God to Whom Paul Gives Witness In Paul and the Trinity, Wesley Hill has provided further insight into Paul’s understanding of God. His insight will help us express more precisely who the God is that Paul and, expressed indirectly through him, the Galatians have experienced. To develop that insight, Hill builds upon a certain continuity which he sees between, on one hand, trinitarian discussion in the fourth century leading to the doctrine of the Trinity and, on the other, the ways in which Paul understands who God is. He does not anachronistically impose later trinitarian thought on Paul. Rather, he identifies certain trinitarian conceptualities from that fourth-century period. He then tests, in studies of Pauline texts, whether such conceptualities will clarify various aspects of Paul’s references to God. The principal conceptuality Hill works with is that of relation. As he states early on in his book, ‘Despite their [various fourth-century trinitarian theologies’] mutually exclusive formulations, they all emphasize the mutual involvement of the trinitarian persons in the identities of the other persons: each person is only identifiable by means of reference to the others’.23 In line with this idea of relation-based identity, Hill approvingly quotes Christopher Kavin Rowe regarding Gal. 4:4-6. God the Father (theos is always the Father in Galatians) exists in relation to his Son as well as in relation to the Spirit of the Son. The Spirit of the Father’s Son, in turn, testifies (in the hearts of believers) to the Father of the Son. This relationship between the Father, his Son, and the Spirit of the Father’s Son is mutually constitutive, which is to say that the economy of the one God, the creator of the world, is here spoken of in a way in which each of the three ‘persons’ are immediately interrelated: The Father is the Father of his Son; the Son is, obviously, the Son of his Father; and the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son of the Father.24

Rowe’s remarks set the stage for Hill’s extended study of Paul and the Trinity. Hill first attends at some length to several Pauline texts concerning, more specifically, the relationship between God and Jesus. Among them, we should consider several verses in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Already when Hill discusses Gal. 1:1, he stresses that Paul brings Jesus and God the Father into close relationship. ‘Paul an apostle – sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead’ (NRSV). In effect, the phrase ‘who raised him from the dead’ translates what in the Greek text is a participle (the [one] having raised him/τοῦ ἐγείραντος). Paul uses it to identify and describe who 23 24

Hill, Paul and the Trinity, 44 (italics in the original), and see 43-47. Rowe, ‘Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics’, 304, cited by Hill, Paul and the Trinity, 29.

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God the Father is, namely, the one who raises Jesus from the dead. For Paul, this is God’s identity. For Hill, the participle serves as an identifying descriptor or identifying description.25 Consequently, Jesus is identified as the one raised by God the Father. The relationship between the two is mutual. Furthermore, Jesus is the Son of God the Father, as Paul will make explicit in Gal. 4:4. Then in Gal. 1:3 Paul writes, ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord [κύριος] Jesus Christ’ (NRSV). Paul’s describing Jesus as Lord is important. And, by way of background remark, we should note that the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible usually translates YHWY, Hebrew referring to God, as κύριος, Lord. Paul himself works with, or at least alludes to, various phrases from the Hebrew Bible wherein such translation occurs. He often rephrases them, applying what they say to Jesus, to whom he then refers as κύριος, Lord. Against this background, we can see that when Paul refers here in Gal. 1:3 to Jesus as Lord he is describing him as one who shares the title Lord with God the Father. ‘The overlapping use of κύριος for both God and Jesus (…) becomes an assertion of oneness between the “persons” of Father and Son [with specific reference here] in Phil 2:6-11’.26 Paul, in effect, presents Jesus as being on the same divine level as God the Father. Indeed, God is not Father without the Son and the Son is not Son without the Father. Equally, as mentioned, Paul has identified and distinguished them, respectively, as one who raises from the dead and the other who is so raised.27 Now, under Hill’s guidance, we can return directly to Gal. 4:4-7.28 We want to identify further the God to whom Paul gives witness. As we have seen, in verse 4 Paul writes that ‘God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the 25 26

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Hill, Paul and the Trinity, 64-70. On this practice of identifying Jesus as Lord, see Hill, Paul and the Trinity, 93-96, with the quotation on 96. By way of example of what Hill says regarding God and Jesus sharing the name κύριος, Hill writes concerning 1 Cor. 8:6, ‘κύριος is the name of the “one God”, a name that picks out the same being as Θεός does in Deut 6:4, and that name is now applied to Ἰησοῦς Χριστός. Jesus is thereby identified with God as the co-bearer of the divine name’ (117). Here and elsewhere we are barely touching the proverbial tip of the iceberg, but hopefully not unfairly, of Hill’s extended, enriching study of various Pauline texts. In selecting from Hill’s study what we need here, we are indeed barely touching the surface of Hill’s multifaceted argumentation concerning the equality of, and distinction among, Father, Son, and Spirit in Paul’s writings. Stated generally, Hill appeals to trinitarian thinking in which we speak of the Trinity in two ways, namely, with reference to oneness in essence and threeness in distinction. In parallel fashion, he affirms, at times within one specific pericope in Paul, both oneness of and distinction between God and Jesus and among Father, Son, and Spirit. They are, from different perspectives, one and yet distinct. Being both one and distinct are not in competition with one another. See Paul and the Trinity, for example, 99-110. Hill, Paul and the Trinity, esp. 141-43.

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law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption’ (NABRE). Father and Son are now the one sending and the one sent. For Paul, Father and Son cannot be identified without reference in this way to one another. Their identities are established by various mutual relationships and, as Hill then immediately notes, by mutual relationships between the Spirit and each one of them. ‘Here it is a striking indication that the kind of mutually determining language of the God who sends and Jesus as the υἱός [Son] who is sent (…) is opened up to include a third, the Spirit, within its ambit’.29 Indeed, Paul continues in v. 6 with a second sending, namely, that ‘God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father”!’ (NABRE). God is sender and the Spirit is the one sent – with the Spirit being equally the Spirit of God’s Son. Paul identifies the Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son. As Hill remarks, The Spirit’s identity is in this way understood to be ‘of the Son’. (…) The Spirit is the one who joins in the Son’s cry of ‘Abba, Father!’ and the Galatians, in turn, participate in that cry. The Spirit thus completes or confirms the sending of the Son. Or to put it in terms of the Galatians’ experience, the Spirit is the corroborating evidence of their sonship, their adoptive relationship with the Father through the Son.30

Hill will go on to describe a certain mutuality between the Spirit, on the one hand, and the Father and the Son, on the other. For it is by and through the Spirit that the Father raises the Son from the dead.31 Regarding the Spirit in relation to Jesus, Hill entitles his section on Rom. 1:3-4, ‘The Spirit Identifies Jesus as Son-of-God-in-Power’. These verses 3 and 4 read as follows: ‘The gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord’ (NRSV). For Hill, then, ‘Jesus is appointed or determined as “Son of God in power” by the action of the Spirit of holiness in raising him from the dead’.32 Finally, in a thorough study of Paul’s phrase ‘the Lord [κύριος] is the Spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:17), Hill concludes that the Spirit shares in the divine name Lord along with God the Father and the Son.33 29 30 31

32 33

Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 159-63, where Hill discusses Paul’s letter to the Romans 8:11: ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you’ (NRSV). Hill, Paul and the Trinity, 156 (italics in the original). Ibid., 143-53. Hill has argued that we should not first think of God the Father as the fullness of God. And only then try to fit Jesus and the Spirit on a vertical axis relating them closer to

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Hill argues convincingly that Paul understands God from one perspective as three who share the same divine ambit. He stresses that Paul equally understands God from another perspective as three who are identified and characterized among themselves by their mutual relations. Hill insists that he has not imposed a later notion of Trinity on Paul and, we could add, through Paul on the Galatians. He is simply calling upon various trinitarian conceptualities, and especially that of relation, to clarify further our understanding of Paul on God as Father, Son, and Spirit. This, then, is the God whom Paul and, in his reading, the Galatians as followers of Jesus Christ have experienced in their lives.34 Followers of Jesus have continued to read, reflect on, and pray over Paul’s letters ever since Paul wrote them. Through them, he has greatly influenced Christians in their prayer and reflection. Though there are myriad examples of such subsequent influence, one stands out. That example is the impact Paul’s thought had on Martin Luther (1483–1546), who is himself in turn one of the more influential figures in Western history. Luther interpreted at great length Paul’s writings in relation to his own and his fellow Christians’ experience of life in their day. Paul’s letter to the Galatians served as one of Luther’s most important references. Luther took inspiration from it as he stressed salvation by faith. In so emphasizing the unique role of faith, he focused on the experience of the Christian community and its members as believers. With his stress on faith, he seems as well to have inaugurated what we might call a turn in Western Christian theology to the subject, in this case a subject who has an experience of God. Looking with Luther at Gal. 4:6 will permit us to prolong our reflection on Paul’s testimonial to experience of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. It will help us appreciate the impact Paul has had on subsequent Christian experience and reflection.

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or farther from the full divinity of the Father. Rather, we should see God, for Paul, as being Father, Son, and Spirit on the same horizontal axis. By way of anticipation, we might remark that, in so understanding God, Hill makes a correction regarding the reading of Paul which resembles in a certain sense a move made by Basil of Caesarea and the other Cappadocian Fathers about 300 years later. As we will see in the next chapter, Basil modified the more vertical and descending Neo-Platonic metaphysical scheme of the one, the intellect, and the world soul by raising intellect or what came to be called the second Person of the Trinity and the Spirit or third Person of the Trinity to the same divine level as the one of God the Father. He replaced the Neo-Platonic vertical schema with a horizontal one. For wider New Testament consideration, from a more systematic theology perspective, of mutual relations giving rise to distinctions among the divine Persons, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 308-19. For a summary of his thought on this point, see Dale M. Schlitt, German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016), 153-57. See more general remarks by Hill, Paul and the Trinity, 170-71.

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Luther on Galatians 4:6 Martin Luther prided himself, in a good sense of the word, on his office and title as ‘Doctor of Sacred Scripture’.35 The title underscores his devotion to the Word of God and indicates the overall parameters of his Christian, theological concern. His fundamental insights grew out of meditation and commentary on the written Word of God in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. More specifically, he creatively interpreted Paul’s teaching for his own turbulent times. He worked with Paul and his thought to come to terms with matters of grave pastoral and theological concern. Of the many texts he commented on, none was dearer to him than Paul’s letter to the Galatians. He once described it as ‘my epistle, to which I am betrothed. It is my Katie von Bora [the name of his wife]’.36 In it, he works through the notions of law and Gospel, Christian freedom, and especially justification by faith. This last notion is one inextricably linked with and dependent on the question of the saving presence of God to and in the Christian. We will focus mainly on Luther’s two published commentaries on Gal. 4:6 to gain insight into the ways in which Luther reads Paul from within his own late Medieval and early Modern context. Of great spiritual concern to Luther and the people of his time was the question of how to overcome the rampant anxiety about the way to assure one’s salvation. The then current stress on pilgrimages, gaining indulgences, and the like did not seem to provide such assurance. Luther lectured on Galatians twice, first in 1516–1517 and then again in 1531. He published a commentary in 1519 based on his earlier lectures and another in 1535. This second published commentary was put together from student transcripts of the later lectures. He had lectured for the first time on Galatians at Wittenberg in Germany, where the plague was in full force.37 In those lectures, he dedicated only about 10 lines to comments on Gal. 4:6. For him, being children or, as he says following the wording in the Greek and Latin texts, being sons of God means being redeemed from servitude. The Spirit is

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For example, Martin Luther, ‘An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality as to the Amelioration of the State of Christendom’, in: Martin Luther, Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 403-5. Jaroslav Pelikan cites this quotation in his ‘Introduction to Volume 26’, in: Luther’s Works, vol. 26, Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan with Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), ix. The Latin text of the lectures is found in Martin Luther, ‘Divi Pauli Apostoli ad Galatas epistola’, in: D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 57 (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus, 1939), 5-108, with commentary on Gal. 4:6 on 30.

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poured into our hearts because they are the small vessels (vascula) of the Spirit.38 Already in this early commentary Luther underlines the Christian exclamation ‘Father’ in contradistinction to a cry made in fear to a lord or judge. He makes his most significant point in a marginal note, where he insists that we are made sons because the Spirit has been sent and not the other way around. Already in these first lectures he insists on the unconditioned priority of the Spirit in relation to human salvation. In his somewhat lengthier, published commentary of 1519 on Gal. 4:6,39 we see a subtle transfer from the Spirit crying in our hearts, as Gal. 4:6 reads, to our crying forth. In this transfer, Luther may have been influenced by Rom. 8:14-15 with its affirmation about our crying forth. He dwells briefly on the nature of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the same Spirit as was in the Son of God and is therefore the Holy Spirit sent into us as sons of God. Of interest, he remarks that as the Son lives in the Spirit so does the Father. This is an unusual turn of phrase in view of the priority usually given to the Father in such cases. Finally, of great note, he introduces the important question of salvation or justification by faith alone. He explains that if faith is truly present and we are truly sons, the Spirit will not be found lacking. It is in his published commentary of 153540 where Luther develops several insights of special interest to us. Here we see most clearly how he creatively reworks Paul’s testimonial in Gal. 4:6. from the perspective of his own difficult

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Of note, when Luther reads ‘our’, he understands it as applying not only to those to whom Paul was writing, with Paul including himself among them, but to Christians of his own day. Martin Luther, ‘In Epistolam Pauli ad Galatas M. Lutheri commentarius, 1519’, in D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1884), 436-618, with commentary on Gal. 4:6 on 536-37, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.archive.org/ stream/werkekritischege02luthuoft#page/436/mode/2up/‘Lectures on Galatians, 1519’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 27, Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 5-6, Lectures on Galatians, 1519, Chapters 1-6, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan with Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia, 1964), 151410, with commentary on Gal. 4:6 on 290-91. Martin Luther, ‘In Epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas commentarius ex praelectione D. Martini Luthers (1531) collectus 1535’, in: D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 40, part 1 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1911), 1-688, with commentary on Gal. 4:6 on 571-93. Student notes of the 1531 lectures are printed on the top of the page and the parallel text of the published commentary of 1535 are printed on the bottom half of the page. The text was accessed April 17, 2021, http://www.lutherdansk.dk/WA/D. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe - WA.htm/‘Lectures on Galatians, 1535’, in: Luther’s Works, vol. 26, Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan with Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 1-461, with commentary on Gal. 4:6 on 374-89. References will generally be to the English translation, though the presentation here is based on the Latin text itself. The English translation indicates, at the top of each page, the pages of the Werke to which the text of the English translation on that specific page corresponds.

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times. In this commentary, he splits his remarks in two sections. The first is based on verse 6 up to ‘in your [our] hearts’ and the second on the words, ‘crying, Abba, Father’. In so dividing his commentary it may well be that Luther was simply being practical. But it may also be that he sensed two different moments in this experience referred to in Gal. 4:6. Or at least he found two different thematic concerns within the verse. In the first half of his commentary,41 he treats two points at some length. They are the double sending of the Spirit and the certainty which a Christian is to have concerning her or his salvation. He distinguishes two sendings of the Spirit, with the first being a sending into the primitive Church in the visible forms of fire and a dove to help establish it.42 The second sending is an inner sending of the Spirit through the Word into the hearts of believers. This second, interior sending is the one which continues throughout history. The spoken Word forms the exterior aspect and occasion for the Spirit’s sending.43 Luther then turns at great length to the question of the certainty a Christian has of being saved. As mentioned, this was a vexatious problem for him personally and of great concern to many in the late middle ages. He acknowledges that having the Spirit is not evident.44 But, paraphrasing more closely here to include some of Luther’s terminology, we can say that we have the testimony of our consciences, we might say, the experience of what our consciences are telling us. Such testimony confirms, against the perverse judgment of the world, that we have received the divine gift, that we believe in Jesus Christ, and that we confess him before the world. This testimony is enough to be sure that we have the divine gift.45 Externally the Christian is not much different from another socially upright person. Still, we should not doubt the presence of the Spirit, that is, justification. If we so doubt, ‘we are denying that Christ has redeemed us and completely denying all his benefits’.46 Of signal importance, already from early on in his remarks Luther has introduced the word ‘believers’ in parallel with and partially replacing ‘sons’. He does this, for example, when he speaks of the Spirit as being sent ‘into the hearts of believers’ (in corda credentium).47 In the second part of his commentary on verse 6,48 Luther concentrates on the Spirit’s crying out ‘Father’. With admirable insight and sensitivity, he

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Luther’s Works, 26:374-80. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 375. Ibid., 375. Ibid., 375. Ibid. 380. Luthers Werke, 40/1:572 lines 16-19/Luther’s Works, 26:375. Luther’s Works, 26:380-89.

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observes that Paul purposely says ‘crying’ and not ‘praying’.49 He does this to indicate the trial of a Christian who still believes weakly. Luther refers to Romans 8:26 when he describes this crying as ‘sighs too deep for words’ (gemitus inennarabilis).50 At times it seems that only the bare Word is there to sustain one. Yet the cry ‘Abba Father’ reaches all the way to God. ‘And His [the Spirit’s] cry vastly exceeds, and breaks through, the powerful and horrible cries of the Law, sin, death, and the devil. It penetrates the clouds and heavens, and it reaches all the way to the ears of God’.51 This same cry which sounds loudly in heaven is to us, amidst our infirmities, a sigh of which we are hardly aware. Luther says, beautifully, that the sigh is too deep for words when ‘we are weak and tempted’.52 At one point, as he did in the 1519 commentary, he shifts briefly to describing these cries as ‘ours’,53 as belonging to the believer. But here again he rapidly refers them back to the Spirit. Luther speaks of the Spirit as truly present and working in the weak believer.54 Luther then returns to the question of the certainty of salvation, of grace or, better, of the presence of the Holy Spirit. This certainty is found ultimately in the Word of God, in the promise God makes, and in Christ the mediator. In the last analysis, certainty comes not from the Spirit as such but from that which is external, namely, from the Word as giving the Spirit.55 Luther closes his commentary with a brief return to the idea that a Christian addresses not a tyrant but, in view of the Gospel, a Father. And there is but one cry arising from Gentiles and Jews.56 We should at least note several further points of interest in Luther’s 1535 commentary. Luther’s adversaries easily included both papists and Anabaptists. At one point he called the Anabaptists, who were considered radical and extreme, fanatical spirits. In Luther’s eyes, both represented works-righteousness. At one point, Luther seems to create a word, omniinfirmi, which Pelikan translates as ‘all-weak’,57 to bring out the notion of total human inability before God. In 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 380. Luthers Werke, 40/1:579 line 34/Luther’s Works, 26:380. ‘Et clamor ipsius longissimae superat et perrumpit clamores fortissimos ac horribiles legis, peccati, mortis, Diaboli etc., penetrat nubes et coelum ad pertingit usque ad aures Dei, etc’. Luthers Werke, 40/1:580 line 27-581 line 10)/Luther’s Works, 26:281. In the student Rörer’s lecture notes of 1531, the Latin ‘Diaboli’, ‘of the devil’, is given in German as ‘über den Teufel’. Luthers Werke, 40/1:580 line 8. We can almost hear Luther burst into German when he refers to the devil. Luther’s Works, 26:381-82. Ibid., 382. Ibid., 384. Ibid., 386 and see 387. Ibid., 389. Luthers Werke, 40/1:583 line 17/Luther’s Works, 26:383.

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another connection, he colorfully uses ‘gemitulus’ or ‘little sigh’ for the cry of the Spirit.58 As early as 1516, Luther had clearly insisted on the absolutely unconditioned priority of the Spirit in the question of our becoming sons or daughters of God. There was already then for Luther no thought of making the Spirit dependent on the human. By 1519, he had written the 95 theses and subsequently refused to recant his teachings. Now, in his 1535 commentary, he speaks briefly of the divinity of the Spirit. But his comments on and interpretation of Paul reflect especially various pastoral and theological concerns of his day. He shifts emphasis in the last part of the commentary to the question of justification by faith alone and reinforces his use of believers for sons. In this way, he helps move the discussion from works-righteousness to faith. Faith is all that is required to receive God’s offer of salvation. Unfortunately, here he does not seem to make clear a certain priority to be given to the Spirit. He does not explicitly mention that faith too is a gift of God given through God’s Son and with the internal presence of the Spirit. In Luther’s eyes, the Anabaptists of his day had indeed joined the ranks of the papists. For him both were justification-by-works people. In response to them, as he had begun to do in 1516, here Luther clearly makes a shift in his interest concerning the work and effect of the Spirit in the Christian. It bears repeating that the certainty of salvation was such a burning question for Luther. We might have thought that he would have found the resolution of this question first and foremost in the real presence of the Spirit who cries, ‘Abba, Father’. But he was confronted with the Anabaptist position. In reaction to what he perceived as their works-righteousness, he stresses the Spirit’s being received ex auditu fidei and by the proclaimed word. God’s promise, that which is exterior, becomes the ultimate source of certitude when seen in conjunction with the interior role of the Spirit. Regin Prenter has, in his study Spiritus Creator,59 worked through the complex relations between Word, faith, and Spirit in Luther’s overall thought. Following his lead, for present purposes we can summarize at least certain aspects of these relations. The Word is necessary but insufficient without the presence of the Spirit to provide and found justification and its certainty. Faith, in turn, as gift of God is the result of the preaching of the Word and the giving of the

58 59

Luthers Werke, 40/1:592 line 20/Luther’s Works, 26:389. Regin Prenter, Spiritus Creator: Studier i Luthers Teologi (København: Samlerens Forlay, 1946)/Eng. transl.: Spiritus Creator (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1953). The English translation does not reproduce the full work in Danish. Prenter’s is a wide-ranging, seemingly definitive study of Luther on the Holy Spirit. Prenter stresses the ‘real presence’ of the Spirit, seeing that in Luther’s thought it makes the difference between an unacceptable imitation of Christ and true conformity to Christ (English text, 222-25).

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Spirit. Yet it is also the only attitude of the person which allows Word and Spirit to become effectively, truly present. Despite a certain hesitation related to his concern about the Anabaptists, in his various remarks concerning the Holy Spirit Luther shows a marvelous sensitivity to the New Testament as it witnesses to a pluriform divine activity leading to justification.60 God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba, Father’. Luther spontaneously, and with a seemingly connatural feeling for the scriptural text, spoke and wrote of what the Spirit did. He does not limit himself to remarks concerning what one would attribute to the Spirit as in some way more appropriate than to the Father or the Son. Rather, he specifically identifies a certain role or roles directly as those of the Spirit as Spirit.61 When Luther speaks here of the Spirit, he matches his sensitivity to the scriptural text with an equally sensitive, we might even say phenomenological, reading of what the Spirit is doing through us. The Spirit and we sigh in our temptation. But God hears a cry or a shout. Luther sets up our relationship to God as one arising from the Spirit crying out within and through us. He, likewise, though in the case of our present text much more briefly, attributes faith to hearing the Word, effectively here the Son of God. We, then, find our justification outside of ourselves (nos extra nos) in the doubled priority of Spirit and Son and in their coordinated divine activity. Their interaction leads us to God the Father. The biblical witness has indeed led Luther to speak more directly of the varied roles of each of the three divine Persons in justification.

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For an impressive study of Luther on the Trinity, see Christine Helmer, The Trinity and Martin Luther: A Study on the Relationship between Genre, Language and the Trinity in Luther’s Works (1523–1546) (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1999). Helmer works with ‘representative texts of three genres: the disputatio, the hymn and the sermon’ (267), stressing the importance of Luther’s rootage in medieval thought and his working creatively with the distinction between inner and outer Trinity. She provides a comprehensive review of the literature on 5-30, with Bibliography on 275-91. Below, I have borrowed some language she has proposed to describe Luther’s understanding of the Trinity and of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though I remain responsible for a somewhat simplified usage. On Luther’s stress on the Spirit’s roles, see, for example, the helpful, more focused study by S. Femiano, ‘The Holy Spirit in Luther’s Commentary on Galatians’, in: Canadian Journal of Theology 8 (1962), 43-48, accessed July 10, 2019, https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/cjt/08-1_043. pdf. Femiano summarizes the role of the Spirit: ‘The Holy Spirit is present at the first moment of justification, influencing a man to receive the work of the Gospel in faith. It is he who then empowers one to live a truly Christian life and to do the works of the Law as they should be done. It is he who is our great support in temptation and who preserves us from despair. Finally, it is he who intercedes for us with the Father’ (43). Femiano further says that it is God alone who, through the work of the Spirit, justifies a person (47), that Luther never discusses how the Holy Spirit dwells in the Christian (43), and that the interaction between faith, the Word and the Spirit is one of the more difficult questions in Luther’s theology (44).

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Paul, Luther, and Us Almost 2,000 years ago, Paul wrote to the Galatians. Over 450 years ago, Luther read Paul in relation to his late Medieval and early Modern concerns. We today continue to read, appreciate, and meditate on Paul’s extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of the Galatians and indeed to that of the Romans as well. In effect, Paul shares that sensitivity with those of us who read what he has written. He invites us to become aware of God’s sending the Spirit of God’s Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father’. And again, with his assurance in Gal. 4:4-5, Paul invites us to recognize God’s sending of his Son into our history and our lives. We see, then, that already nearly 2,000 years ago Paul sensed something of a parallel, active divine presence. That two-fold divine presence consists in an interior presence of the Spirit of God’s Son within us and a presence of God’s Son in our history. Paul writes of identifiably different sendings of Spirit and Son. Seemingly, over time he had clarified somewhat for himself his own understanding of them and their relationship to one another.62 The presence of the Spirit of sonship crying ‘Abba, Father’ in us is proof that we are adopted children of God free to believe in God, to hope to live forever with God, and to love God above all else. And the Son of God’s presence among us in history has left an invitation to share in his own intimate relationship with God. In accepting this invitation, we become adopted children of God, the Son’s sisters and brothers. Such freedom and such dignity are rooted in a richly expressed experience of God to which Paul provides succinct testimonial. So many centuries after Paul, Luther has in his own way prolonged Paul’s testimonial, making it newly available in and for his own time. He has picked up on the experience of a doubled divine presence, of which Paul wrote, of Spirit and Son leading to God the Father. To counter his and others’ anxiety concerning salvation, Luther introduces the notion of faith on our part in relation to the Word and the Spirit. He speaks interchangeably of believers and sons. In so speaking, he has shifted somewhat from working with a term such as sons which is seemingly open to a more ontological interpretation. He comes to use this other term, namely, believers, to stress what one is, in a more passive and less ontological or ‘substantialist’ sense of the word. Believers are, in effect, ones who in conscience recognize that they are saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus. ‘Believers’ is, as a matter of which they to whom it refers are consciously aware, more conducive to an experiential interpretation of what Paul is saying. It is, almost, to speak now anachronistically, an existential self-

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See, for example, by way of recall Paul’s position expressed in Rom. 8:1-17, probably written somewhat after Gal. 4:1-7.

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understanding focusing on one’s stance before salvation offered in Jesus Christ.63 There is great subtlety of thought in this shift from referring to us as sons and daughters to describing us as being saved or justified by faith. Luther remains within the overall concern of his time, namely, for what we need to do to be saved. But he no longer expresses that need in terms of various activities on our part. Instead, he focuses on faith, aiming to allow us to trust in God’s saving act alone. One might argue that in his overall interpretation of Paul and his shift from sons to believers he has not necessarily reflected exactly Paul’s various positions. But he has in effect worked within his own framework of concern. In the process, he has brought together, we might even say coordinated, the sending of the Spirit with that of the Son. In affirming this doubled divine presence, Luther also recognizes and validates the two sides to what we are as human persons. Those two sides are the interior and the exterior, with all that such an understanding implies for an appropriate theological anthropology.64 He identifies the Spirit’s presence as an interior presence when he speaks of the Spirit sighing in and with us while crying out to the Father. He stresses the Son’s more exterior role when he portrays the Son as speaking to us of the promise of the Father. Spirit and Son orient us to the Father who Himself sends the Spirit into our hearts and speaks to us through His Son. Luther has provided a fascinating prolongation of Paul’s testimonial to what we would today refer as experience of the Trinity through experience of the Spirit. But to Paul belongs the honor of being the earliest we know of to have provided a testimonial to a triply expressed Christian experience of God as 63

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Luther seems to have shared with Paul a certain emotional and even at times combative character. Neither was afraid of referring to what he was living and going through. It might be of interest to note the reference to Luther’s ‘experience’ in an English text already from 1719: ‘I (said Luther) out of my own (b) Experience, am able to witness, that Jesus Christ is true God; I will be no Epicure, I know full well, and have found what the Name of Jesus has done for me’. [John Owen], Dr. Martin Luther’s and Mr. John Calvin’s Opinion concerning the Trinity, from the Original (…) With a Prfce by a Divine, The Second Edition (London: Joseph Marshall, T. Harrison, A. Dodd & J. Roberts, 1719; reprinted Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Print Editions, printed on demand December 2011), 5, copy of the original available at Google Books. Regarding such a theological anthropology, one might for example think of Karl Rahner, who would himself seem to be sensitive to Paul’s foundational insight. Rahner seems to put together Paul’s two sendings, namely, those of the Son and the Spirit as found in Gal. 4:4-6 with Luther’s further reflection on them in Luther’s commentary on Gal. 4:6. We hear echoes of Paul and Luther in Rahner’s thought when Rahner works out an understanding of Trinity in terms of a doubled, parallel divine presence in history (truth, the Son) and in spirit (love, the Holy Spirit). See Karl Rahner, The Trinity (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), 83-99. For further comment on Rahner on Trinity, see Dale M. Schlitt, Theology and the Experience of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 37-40; ———, German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016), 125-46, 343-50.

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Spirit, Son, and Father. He has observed, affirmed, approved, and encouraged such experience of the three who share the name ‘Lord’ and are distinct according to their saving interaction and, consequently noted, identifying relations with one another.65 With this focus on divine unity and relation-based individual distinction, Paul seems to be acknowledging that Christians find themselves in a divine embrace, so to speak, of Spirit and Son. For Paul, Spirit and Son, in their own specific ways and yet together, bring us to salvation, that is, to the Father. Such experience entails our being concomitantly free as children of God. With this focus on the Spirit and Son in our lives, Paul seems to be saying, to use a term he might like, that we live our Christian lives to the glory of God the Father in such a divine embrace. Indeed, we might even go so far as to say that, in so living, we have an ongoing Spirit-empowered, Wordinitiated, and Abba-oriented godly experience.

65

Fee writes, ‘All of these [numerous references to Paul in letters accepted as his] (…) in some form or another reflect the threefold activity of Father, Christ, and Spirit in effecting salvation’. ‘Paul and the Trinity’, 56.

CHAPTER

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BASIL OF CAESAREA An Argument in the Spirit

About 320 years after Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Basil of Caesarea (329 or 330–379) wrote what may well be the most important post-New-Testament work on the Holy Spirit. Entitled appropriately On the Holy Spirit,1 it was quickly translated into various Eastern languages and into Latin as well. This widespread availability helped assure the work’s great influence on later reflection concerning the role and nature of the Holy Spirit. Basil was born of a wealthy, noble Christian family. Of ten children, he and two of his brothers became bishops. One of his sisters was the holy woman, St. Macrina. Basil, highly educated, had studied rhetoric and philosophy in Constantinople and Athens. He was baptized at about 27 years of age, waiting with baptism still being customary enough in his time. Having given his life to God, he went into solitude before visiting Egypt and other areas in the East to learn more about monastic life. He founded several monasteries. Basil wrote what would come to be called his rule of monastic life2 and came to be known as the founder of Eastern communal monasticism. He is likewise recognized as an important reformer of the liturgy. Ordained deacon and then, in 364, priest, in 370 he became bishop of Caesarea, an ancient district of East Asia Minor in what is today modern Turkey. As bishop, he showed great care for the poor. On a wider ecclesiastical level, he was well placed to influence the appointment

1

2

Basil of Caesarea, Sur le Saint-Esprit, Sources chrétiennes, vol. 17bis, 2nd ed., ed. Benoît Pruche (Paris: Cerf, 1968, reviewed and augmented 2002), Greek text with French translation/‘The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto’, in: A Select Library of [the] Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Letters and Selected Works, 2nd series, vol. 8, St. Basil: Letters and Selected Works, ed. Philip Schaff & Henry Wace, transl. Blomfield Jackson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 1-50, reprint of the American edition: New York: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1893, copy of the 1893 edition available at Google Books. For a recent translation of the ‘shorter rule’, see The Rule of St Basil in Latin and English: A Revised Critical Edition, transl. Anna M. Silvas (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013). This ‘rule’ consists in a series of questions addressed to Basil and to which he responded.

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of other bishops in his area at a time when there was much discussion and argument concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit.3 In 325, the Council of Nicea had professed its belief in Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God, consubstantial with the Father. But its creed ended simply with the phrase, ‘And [we believe] in the holy Spirit’.4 There followed prolonged and heated argument over whether the Holy Spirit was fully divine. Basil saw that the Christian faith itself was at stake in this argument. He felt strongly that it was essential to assure equal honor to Father, Son, and Spirit, thereby acknowledging the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. To put it in a nutshell, for Basil if the Spirit were not divine there would be no sanctifying salvation. It was the role of the Spirit to insure such salvation. He proposed to argue to equality of honor by appealing to an experience of intellectual illumination which enabled one to recognize in Jesus Christ, as Son of God, the image of the Father. Then, the Son would lead one to the divine beauty of the Father.5 But, if the Spirit were not fully divine, the Spirit could not fulfill this role. Basil argued his position at length in his just-mentioned study On the Holy Spirit. He wrote it around 374 or 375 in response to a request for guidance regarding the nature and roles of the Holy Spirit. The request came from his friend Amphilochius, the young bishop of Iconium in Cappadocia in modernday Turkey, to whom he was in effect a mentor. In his lengthy response, Basil developed various arguments for the equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. They often followed a similar structure, namely, that of moving from what the Holy Spirit did to who the Holy Spirit was, from effect to cause. In his argumentation, Basil appealed to Scripture and to unwritten tradition to help him identify various roles or functions of the Spirit. He said that both Scripture and unwritten tradition witnessed to the full equality of the Spirit. He often borrowed vocabulary and insights from various strands of Greek philosophy 3

4

5

Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature from the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1960), 204-5. Stephen M. Hildebrand presents Basil’s life in more extended fashion in The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of Greek Thought and Biblical Truth (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 18-29 and, from a more spiritually focused point of view, Stephen M. Hildebrand, Basil of Caesarea (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014). For a profoundly contextualizing discussion of Basil’s life, work, writings, and relationships, see Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). A copy of the Nicene text in English is available online, ‘First Council of Nicea – 325 A.D.’, Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed August 3, 2016, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ ecum01.htm. For a brief but insightful review of early Christian thought on the role of the Holy Spirit in sanctification, see Benoît Pruche, ‘L’expérience chrétienne de la sanctification aux premiers siècles de l’Église’, in Le Saint-Esprit, auteur de la vie spirituelle (Paris: Cerf, 1944), 34-51.

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of his time but reworked them in new and creative ways. In his overall argument, he subordinated Greek philosophy to the demands of Christian faith as properly identified and interpreted in Scripture and through tradition.6 Formally speaking, Basil worked from effects, identified through reference to Scripture and tradition, to roles of the Spirit who causes the effects. But there seems to have been something more basic to which he was referring. Joost van Rossum draws attention to this something when he refers to ‘the experience of the Holy Spirit and His role in the sanctification of human persons’.7 For Scripture itself reflects Christian communal and individual experiences of faith as well as encouraging them. Tradition is, then, the further accumulation and integration of such ongoing experiences, in effect giving further expression to those experiences. We would be remiss in not noting as well Basil’s own lived Christian experience. It is easy to imagine that, in his writing, he gave expression as well to this experience. If we recall again Basil’s moves from effects to roles, we see that by effects he is referring to results of the active presence of the Spirit in the lives of Christians. Speaking of results is one sense in which we can speak of experience, namely, as that which results from an encounter between a community or an individual and an other or others. Experience can also refer to that which one or more persons have when they encounter others. These others may be ideas, words, events, persons, a whole community of persons and so forth. Experience may as well refer to both meanings of the word at the same time. Here in our review of Basil, the contexts within which we identify experiences will often help us see the specific way or ways in which ‘experience’ is being used, and thus its specific meaning or meanings in the various contexts. These two senses of experience are in a sense two sides of the same coin. They are result of an encounter and what the one encountering lives and goes through. In relation to Basil, we can further note that these two senses, namely, result and process leading to that result are both brought about by the active presence of the Spirit. Together they constitute what Basil would be referring to as Christian experiences of the Spirit. And, while Basil’s focus is on the Spirit, we will see that these experiences are equally experiences of the Trinity. They are such

6

7

Concerning Basil’s ways of arguing to the equality of the Spirit with the Son and the Father, see: Benoît Pruche, ‘Introduction’, in: Basil of Caesarea, Sur le Saint-Esprit, Sources chrétiennes, vol. 17bis, 2nd ed., ed. Benoît Pruche (Paris: Cerf, 1968, reviewed and augmented 2002), 9-248 (1968 ed.); Hildebrand, Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea. I am here taking guidance from both Pruche’s more focused introduction and Hildebrand’s more widely framed study. Joost van Rossum, ‘The Experience of the Holy Spirit in Greek Patristic and Byzantine Theology’, in: Communio Viatorum 53 (2011), 25-39, with 25-28 on Basil, quotation on 26. Dr. J. August Higgins kindly drew my attention to this article.

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because Basil insists on the equality, in divinity, of the Spirit, the Son, and the Father. The Three work together, in line with their proper characteristics. The Experiences to Which Basil Gives Testimony The way of the knowledge of God lies from One Spirit through the One Son to the One Father, and conversely the natural Goodness and the inherent Holiness and the royal Dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit.8

When Basil emphasizes one Spirit, one Son, and one Father, he is stressing that the three are each fully on the side of divinity as compared to creation’s being characterized by multiplicity. He also distinguishes between the way of knowledge and the flow of goodness, holiness, and dignity. When he speaks of the way of knowledge, he refers to and describes the direction in which the Christian experience of the Trinity moves. ‘From one Spirit’ indicates that movement’s point of departure. And, given his concern to defend the full divinity of the Spirit, he will stress the role of the Spirit. He identifies experiences and the results of such experiences which for him can only be explained by the active presence of that divine Spirit.9 Basil locates that active presence especially but not exclusively within Christian communities and in their members. Basil discusses the effects of the Spirit’s active presence, and thus the roles of the Spirit, especially from chapter 9 of the book On the Holy Spirit on through to the end of the text in chapter 30. We will focus on several moments in the presentation of his overall argument in favor of the full equality of the Spirit 8

9

Basil, ‘The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto’, 18.47. Quotations from this text, including reference to titles and effects of the Spirit, will be from the 1895 edition, translated by Blomfield Jackson (see, n. 1 above). In quotations, italics are in the translation text. Reference to this text will, for practical purposes, generally be by the English title On the Holy Spirit except in one or the other footnote where, to avoid possible confusion of reference, it will be cited as ‘The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto’. In either case, reference here in our text as well as in notes will be by chapter and numbered article to facilitate consulting various editions and translations. For example, 10.26 refers to chapter 10, article 26. In a letter ‘to the ascetics under him’, Basil writes concerning this movement from Spirit through Son to Father, ‘For our mind, enlightened by the Spirit, looks at the Son, and in Him, as in an image, beholds the Father’. ‘Letter 226’, in: Basil of Caesarea, A Select Library of [the] Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Letters and Selected Works, 2nd series, vol. 8, St. Basil: Letters and Selected Works, ed. Philip Schaff & Henry Wace, transl. Blomfield Jackson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), art. 3, p. 269, written about 375, reprint of: New York: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1893, copy of the latter available at Google Books. Cited by Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 261n142.

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with the Father and the Son. I suggest we look more especially at two chapters, along with further reference to several particularly pertinent remarks he makes in other chapters. The first of these two is chapter 9, in which Basil makes a list of the effects or results of the Spirit’s active presence. His list almost becomes a litany of praise of the Spirit. The second is chapter 16. There he develops, in somewhat more systematic fashion, his reading of the roles of the Spirit acting within Christian communities and in their members. The text of chapter 9 consists of numbered articles 22 and 23. In the first of them, Basil begins by saying that we cannot but be ‘lifted up in soul’ by the hearing of the titles of the Spirit such as ‘Spirit of God’, ‘Spirit of truth’, ‘Holy Spirit’. He is, in effect, saying that hearing a word can occasion the experience of being uplifted. It can even cause that uplifting. Among many characteristics, the Spirit is ‘generous of Its gifts’. Basil then runs, so to speak, with and through his list of effects of the Spirit within Christians. We can get a sense of this quickmoving list if we highlight several phrases in his own enthusiastic wording: ‘To whom [the Holy Spirit] all things turn needing sanctification, (…) helped on [by the Holy Spirit] toward their natural and proper end; perfecting all other things’. The Spirit is experienced as ‘Supplier of life (…) origin of sanctification (…) light perceptible to the mind (…) supplying (…) through Itself, illumination to every faculty in the search for truth (…) communicated only to the worthy’. As Benoît Pruche puts it succinctly, the Spirit is source of sanctification.10 Basil understands sanctification to be a result of the human experience of the Spirit as light perceptible to the mind. In article 23, Basil writes that the Spirit ‘will show thee in Himself [taken here to refer primarily to Christ] the image of the invisible, and in the blessed spectacle of the image thou shalt behold the unspeakable beauty of the archetype [the Father]’. The effect of this active presence on the part of the Spirit in Christians is that they experience the following, paraphrased closely. Their hearts being lifted up, advancing to perfection, being made spiritual by fellowship with the Spirit, sharing what they receive with others, receiving knowledge of the future, understanding mysteries, having joys without end. They have ‘foreknowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, apprehension of what is hidden, distribution of good gifts, the heavenly citizenship, a place in the chorus of angels, joy without end, abiding in God, the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God’. For Basil, the active presence of the Spirit leads Christians to experience sanctification as divinization occurring through enlightenment of the mind. Throughout chapter 9, Basil’s language regarding the role and effects of the Spirit is truly experiential.

10

Pruche, ‘L’expérience chrétienne’, 46.

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It is in chapter 16 that Basil makes explicit, in a more structured way, what he means by sanctification and thus by experience of it. The text moves in four steps. From a consideration of the Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son (article 37) to a presentation on the effects of the Spirit on creation and especially on angels (article 38). Then, on to effects of the Spirit on Jesus and the Church in the light of those on creation and the angels (article 39) and to remarks concerning the role of the Spirit even at the end-time (article 40). With his remarks culminating in article 40, Basil will have reinforced what he had initially said in article 37. That is, the Spirit is always inseparable from Son and Father. In that article 37, Basil repeats what he holds to, namely, that we must never forget the Spirit is, in action and in being, never separated or separable from the Son and the Father. To confirm this inseparability, he cites 1 Cor. 12:4-6. There Paul writes, ‘There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone’ (NRSV). Basil takes the opportunity to assure his reader that he is not now ranking Spirit, Son, and Father in reverse order from lower to higher. Rather, he says Paul was working with ‘our habits of thought’. For Basil, we think first of the distributor of the gift, then the sender, and finally the fountain and cause.11 In article 38, Basil turns more explicitly to the distinct roles of Father, Son, and Spirit in creation with special focus on that of the Spirit as one of sanctification. To make his point, he speaks of the creation of things visible and invisible and turns first to the example of the invisible, namely, angels. This reference to the angelic realm permits a certain celestial clarity. Once established, such clarity will then make it easier to delineate the respective roles of Father, Son, and Spirit in creation as such. Basil argues that we can learn from ‘things created at the beginning’ about the fellowship of the three divine persons. He sets up the rest of the article concerning creation with the following: And in the creation bethink thee first (…) of the original cause of all things that are made, the Father; of the creative cause, the Son; of the perfecting cause, the Spirit; so that the ministering spirits subsist by the will of the Father, are brought into being by the operation of the Son, and perfected by the presence of the Spirit. Moreover, the perfection of angels is sanctification and continuance in it.12 11

12

Here Basil in effect presents a New Testament text supporting his remark concerning the movement in knowledge from the Spirit through the Son to the Father. See ‘The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto’, 18.47. It seems that Origen (185–c. 253), the first to distinguish systematically the three divine Persons, has in a general way influenced Basil in his distribution of the functions of the three divine Persons. For example, Origen writes, ‘Having made these declarations regarding the Unity of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, let us return to the order in which we began the discussion. God the Father bestows upon all, existence; and participation in

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Basil then moves quickly to the creation of angels as invisible and immaterial beings. During his reflection on angels, he weaves back and forth from reference to God, to creation as such and including humans, to more explicit reference to angels. He seems to want to make sure the roles of the Holy Spirit are understood as applying to all levels of creation. Regarding his decision to refer to angels, he says we can speak of them based on our ability to move from things seen to ‘an analogy of the unseen’. He prolongs his descriptions of Father, Son, and Spirit with several further remarks. To preserve the oneness of God in creation, he writes that the Father creates through the Son and perfects through the Spirit. The Father’s work does not as such ‘stand in any need of the Son’. Yet, the Father wills to create and to create through the Son. In similar fashion, the Son is not dependent on the Spirit in creation. But, the Son wills to ‘make perfect through the Spirit’. ‘You are therefore to perceive three, the Lord who gives the order, the Word who creates and the Spirit who confirms’. And such confirming is ‘perfecting according to holiness’. Since the powers of heaven are not holy by nature, there is for them ‘no sanctification without the Spirit’. If this is the case for the powers of heaven, we can conclude it is the case even more so for humans. The powers of heaven exist in ordered reality according to various degrees of angelic status. They remain constant in freely willing to praise God. In this order and constancy, they, as intelligent and immaterial beings, are dependent on the active presence of the Spirit to them. Dependent, as Basil says, ‘through the communion of the Spirit’. He then picks up again on several effects of the Spirit which he had introduced in chapter 9, article 23. The angels, to use Basil’s own expressions, foretell events, reveal mysteries, live a blessed life, and behold the face of God only in the power of the Spirit. What he says here in article 38 is consistent with his remarks in the earlier article 23. It is as if Basil is inviting his readers, in effect including those then and now, to imagine what Christ, in respect of His being the word of reason, renders them rational beings. From which it follows that they are deserving either of praise or blame, because capable of virtue and vice. On this account, therefore, is the grace of the Holy Ghost present, that those beings which are not holy in their essence may be rendered holy by participating in it. Seeing, then, that firstly, they derive their existence from God the Father; secondly, their rational nature from the Word; thirdly, their holiness from the Holy Spirit, – those who have been previously sanctified by the Holy Spirit are again made capable of receiving Christ, in respect that He is the righteousness of God; and those who have earned advancement to this grade by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit, will nevertheless obtain the gift of wisdom according to the power and working of the Spirit of God’. Origen, De Principiis [On First Principles], in: Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson, vol. 4, Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Part First and Second, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe (New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), chap. 3, art. 8, accessed May 15, 2019, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/coxe-ante-nicene-fathers-volume-4.

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we might call the experience of angels who find themselves willed by the Father, created by the Son, and perfected in holiness by the Spirit. At least by implicit comparison we can, then, with that angelic experience better understand our own. Angels are ‘perfect from the moment of the creation’. Yet ‘there is in [their] creation the presence of the Holy Spirit, who confers on them the grace that flows from Him for the completion and perfection of their essence’. And, for Basil we might add, even more so for us. In article 39, Basil moves on from creation to what we could describe as Jewish and Christian religious history. He mentions the role of the Spirit in relation to the Old Testament. He points to figures such as the patriarchs and prophets, to legislation, ‘feats in war’, and various signs. Then he dwells at greater length on events around the Incarnation with all taking place ‘through the Spirit’, whether in the Old Testament or now in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Basil refers to the unction and anointing of Jesus, whose ‘every operation was wrought with the co-operation of the Spirit’: the temptation of Jesus, his exorcisms, his breathing of the Spirit on the disciples. At this point he refers briefly to the Church. ‘The ordering of the Church is effected through the Spirit’. Apostles, prophets, teachers, miracles, healing, governments, tongues, all ordered in line with, and as, the gifts of the Spirit. In so speaking of the omnipresent Spirit active in Jewish and Christian religious history, Basil has in effect at least implicitly pointed to Jesus’ experiences. He points as well to those of the Church and its members through the centuries after Jesus’ death and resurrection on to Basil’s own time, and beyond. In article 40, Basil moves beyond history to the end-time to show that the Spirit is present and active there as well. He notes that some seem to think there will no longer be a role for the Spirit at the judgment. But he argues to the contrary. If it is by the active presence of the Spirit in us that we can progress in holiness and sanctification, then it would be unreasonable not to think that the final gift at the end-time is the full presence of the Spirit. ‘The crown of the righteous is the grace of the Spirit’. There is one point at which Basil will admit the Spirit is no longer present. That point is the moment at which some are found in judgment to have ‘grieved the Holy Spirit by the wickedness of their ways’. In chapter 16, Basil has moved in articles 38, 39, and 40 from the initial moment of creation through what we have referred to as Jewish and Christian religious history on to the end-time. He has, in principle, covered the entire sweep of time, namely, past, present, and future. He argues that the Spirit is actively present throughout that sweep, with the one exception just mentioned. Basil has, so to speak, covered all his bases. From our present perspective, we would add in more explicit fashion that angels and humans have experienced the active presence of the Spirit in diverse ways. And they have done this

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throughout the trajectory from creation through history to the end-time. What Basil has done is to focus on the role of the Spirit in sanctification. He has, consequently, concentrated on what angels and humans, more specifically here Christians, have experienced and what is the result of such experiences. For Christians often have a certain sense of increasing in holiness and becoming more perfect in what they are. In line with Basil’s classic identification of the movement from Spirit through Son to Father, this experience of the Spirit is equally experience of the Son and of the Father. The Spirit’s fundamental role is to provide intellectual illumination enabling Christians to recognize and celebrate the risen Lord as image of the great beauty of the Father. Basil is, herewith, providing testimonial to Christians’ experience of the power of the Spirit who turns them to the risen Lord and on to the Father. At this point, without attributing what I am saying to Stephen M. Hildebrand, I find that he has been of great help in insightfully identifying the key to understanding what Basil is about regarding intellectual illumination. He locates this key in a specific quote from Paul, 1 Cor. 12:3. ‘No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit’.13 As we have seen, Basil is concerned with the Trinity, and especially the Spirit, primarily in relation to creation rather than with the Trinity considered as such. We might even go so far as to say he seems to be implying that creation itself experiences, perhaps in a somewhat attenuated sense of the word, the Trinity. This idea of creation experiencing the Trinity would flow from the roles he attributes to Father, Son, and Spirit in creation, who all work together in any action. Creation’s experience seems, then, to come to expression in the more explicit and self-aware experiences of angels and Christians. There is so much more we could glean from a close reading of his extraordinarily rich text. But we have at least gotten a taste of what Basil is up to, and that of and to which he is providing testimonial. Underlying Experiential Dynamics At this point, we can now ask what might be going on underneath what Basil has written about the roles of the Spirit and the effects of the Spirit’s active presence, especially within Christian communities and in their members. In writing about these roles and effects, he is referring to experiences he himself had and which he found members of his and other Christian communities lived 13

The translation is that of Hildebrand. See Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea, for example, 172, 173, 185, and the whole of chapter 6, 173-87, with references to the many places where Basil cites this verse.

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as well. At times, he seems even to have referred to experiences occurring at a communal level. I would suggest that these various forms of individual and communal experience are experiences of newness of life, integration and wholeness, and freedom.14 Basil himself, members of various Christian communities, and whole communities seem to have experienced newness of life. We may recall that he was baptized at the age of 27, after receiving a high-level education. He writes, ‘For (…) to me (…) my baptism was the beginning of life’ (10.26 and see 15.35 and 36), a life to be lived according to the ‘pattern life [of Christ] described in the Gospels’ (15.34).15 His baptism had a deep impact on his life. He regularly refers to Matt. 28:19: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (NRSV) (see, for example, 10.24). He argues that Christians make a profession of faith in Father, Son, and Spirit when baptized. But, if they now do not accept the Spirit as co-equal with Father and Son, they are reneging on their faith itself (10.26). For they were baptized in three immersions with three invocations (15:35). I would suggest that Basil is not merely proof texting when he cites this verse from Matthew. Rather, he is using the text to refer to Christians’ and his own experience of baptism into newness of life brought about through the active presence of the Spirit. For Basil, Christians were called to, and many did, live differently after baptism. He even identified that living differently as what we refer to in theology as divinization. They now share in the divine life of the Trinity itself. We can, then, justifiably suspect that Basil recognized the experience of newness of life in communal monastic settings16 and, again, in himself as well. He had spoken of his admiration for the monks whom he had visited early on in his adult life: I admired their [the monks’] continence in living, and their endurance in toil. I was amazed at their persistency in prayer. (…) [A]lways, as though living in a flesh that was not theirs, they shewed in very deed what it is to sojourn for a while in 14

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In what I would see as a related remark, Rousseau writes concerning Basil as he shifts his reference concerning the Spirit to tradition and those worshipping in that tradition, ‘Greater concentration on the action of the Spirit (…) allowed Basil to reflect more explicitly upon the personal experience of the worshipper’. Basil of Caesarea, 266-67. On baptism as sacrament of the Holy Spirit in which Basil says he and others experience illumination of the mind and moral regeneration, see, for example, the recent study by Timothy P. McConnell, Illumination in Basil of Caesarea’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress 2014), 31-70. Decades ago, Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Mühlenberg had briefly spoken of this possibility in a doctoral seminar at Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University. But I am responsible for the use of his remark made here.

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this life, and what to have one’s citizenship and home in heaven. All this moved my admiration. (…) And I prayed that I too, as far as in me lay, might imitate them.17

He was deeply struck by the way monks could move toward greater perfection along the road to sanctity and holiness. As we read in what is referred to as his ‘Small Rule’, Basil was asked about the commandment to love God. He responds in a personal and intense way, which deserves quoting at greater length. The utterly ineffable love of God – as I at any rate experience it [sentire, in the Latin text] – which can be more easily experienced than spoken of, is a certain inexplicable light. Even if speech should cite or compare a lightning flash or a dazzling brilliance, still, the hearing cannot take it in. Invoke if you will the rays of the morning star, the splendours of the moon, or the light of the sun itself – in comparison with that glory they are all more obscure and murkier by far than an ink-black night and the gloom of a dense fog compared with the flawlessly clear light of the noon-day sun.18

Something occurred in the life of Basil and in the lives of monks which was not attributable to them alone. That something which they found could only be explained by reference to the Spirit turning them to the risen Lord and then, through him, to the beauty of the archetype, the Father. Whether regarding Christian baptismal life or the more specific form of that life as a monk, Basil found there was an experience of increase in holiness and a perfecting movement in sanctification. This experience provided Christians, and monks in a special way, with a sense of at least momentary wholeness and integration in their lives. They now lived in the Spirit, recognizing the risen Lord and praising the Father. Basil’s abundant remarks about the many effects of the Spirit refer in various ways to this sense of wholeness. It was experienced within oneself and by one’s community living united with God in prayer and concern for others. This sense of resultant wholeness becomes even clearer when Basil speaks about the angels who do not so much progress in sanctity as remain holy through communion with the Spirit. Over the course of his text on the Holy Spirit, Basil regularly refers in various ways to divine and Christian freedom. By way of example regarding divine freedom, we should note what he writes of the Paraclete, ‘There is then on the 17

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Basil of Caesarea, ‘Letter 223’, in: A Select Library of [the] Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Letters and Selected Works, 2nd series, vol. 8, St. Basil: Letters and Selected Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, transl. Blomfield Jackson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), art. 2, reprint of the original New York edition published by the Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1893, copy available at Google Books, quoted by Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, 205. Basil, Rule of St Basil, 59.

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one hand a natural glory, as light is the glory of the sun; and on the other a glory bestowed judicially and of free will ab extra on them that are worthy’ (18.46). And we can note Basil’s emphasis on ‘will’ as regards the Father and the Son. ‘The Father, who creates by His sole will, could not stand in any need of the Son, but nevertheless He wills through the Son; nor could the Son, who works according to the likeness of the Father, need co-operation, but the Son too wills to make perfect through the Spirit’ (16.38). On the side of creation, Basil recalls that the angels have free will, as seen in some of them having revolted against God (again, 16.38). He stresses the freedom of Christians and notes that such freedom was a primary characteristic of Christian newness of life. The Spirit is a gift from God (24.57) making them free (24.55). In baptism, the Spirit frees them from defilement (15.35). As children of God they have the liberty ‘to call God our Father’ (15.36, see 13.29, 24.57). These and many other examples lead to the conclusion that for Basil the experience of freedom is a characteristic result of Christians’ experience of the Spirit and, in the Spirit, of the Son and the Father. His stress on divine and Christian freedom is even more striking in the context of his Roman and Greek world. That world was tinged with, if not perhaps even more strongly characterized by, a determinist and fate-conditioned outlook on life and reality in general. By way of example, we could cite the Neo-Platonic structure of reality which, I would suggest, reflects something of the deterministic character of the Roman and Greek world. In that Neo-Platonic philosophical system, the hen or ‘one’ gave rise, through emanation in descending fashion to the nous or ‘intellect’. The intellect in turn was followed, again at a lower level of emanation, by psychē or ‘soul’, and on an again lower level to enfleshed souls and finally to that which is purely material. This philosophical system explained reality in terms of the ‘one’ and the ‘many’. The emanation posited did not occur through ‘will’ but by the nature of the one. Such emanation would, from a Christian perspective, seem deterministic. It did not allow for the possibility that the divine might not create. In turn, the movement from individual ‘souls’ or humans upward through soul to intellect to the one seemed as well to occur, in Neo-Platonic thought, not ultimately as a movement of will but in a more deterministic fashion. Basil greatly stressed divine and human freedom, especially by regularly referring to will. It was as if he was reacting against the Neo-Platonic worldview. He certainly favored the Christian form of, and emphasis on, divine and human freedom. We might well say Basil transformed the Neo-Platonic worldview into one in which Father, Son, and Spirit are all three to be found in the divine realm. Son and Spirit, then, for Basil freely enter the created realm due to divine will rather than divine necessity. And for Basil the point of contact between divine and created is the Spirit, a much softer and more delicate divine presence in

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creation than the Father’s direct presence would have been. Such a softer divine presence allows for a space, so to speak, within which angels and humans can exercise their own freedom of the will. In appealing to Scripture and tradition, Basil has, through such an appeal, given expression to Christians’ experience of the Trinity. He described this experience as one of salvation. He expressed salvation in terms of an intellectual illumination of the mind enabling it to recognize the risen Lord. We might wonder about the notion of such an understanding of the work of the Spirit in terms of intellectual illumination, especially if it might be taken on its own without further reference to other aspects of the human person. Basil clearly develops his thought in line with the idea that the experience of the Spirit involves the whole human person, body and soul, thinking and willing, feeling and doing. Despite this apparent tension in his thought, we must still find Basil’s understanding admirable and impressive. We might, at the same time, hazard a guess. Perhaps the tension in Basil’s thought reflects something of a residue of a certain stress characteristic of Greek thought. To put it without nuance, Greek thought seems to privilege the intellect and the mental as compared with the material. Whether this be the case or not, Basil has, in his descriptions of the concrete effects of the Spirit, maintained the more typically Christian emphasis on the whole person. This emphasis is rooted in Jewish thought and in belief in the Incarnation. Basil provides a richly rewarding reading of the effects of the Spirit on the Christian. In so doing, he has as well set forth an understanding of the Christian experience of the Trinity. That experience is one rooted in the immediate experience of the active presence of the Spirit within Christians. He may have spoken less explicitly of experience of the Trinity than we have here in our presentation. Indeed, our focus has more generally been on the Trinity. He himself discusses the effects of the Spirit and reflects on the Spirit’s roles in co-operation with those of the Father and the Son. Still, in this discussion and reflection, Basil has come to formulate an impressive understanding of God as triune in relation to creation. His concern for that relationship implies and presupposes an experience of the Trinity rooted in experience of the Spirit. His is a most impressive testimonial to such experience in the sense that he is affirming and appreciating it as individual and communal. In writing this testimonial, he is also encouraging others to become more aware of such experience in their lives and that of their communities. The result of Basil’s discussion and reflection was to arrive at an understanding of the Trinity as being one concrete essence or substance existing in and as three persons or hypostases.19 We might well consider this discussion and 19

Pruche, ‘Introduction’, in: Basil, Sur le Saint-Esprit, 163-64.

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reflection a sort of prolongation, in the more focused realm of thought, of the wider and more humanly inclusive experiences to which he refers. In this prolongation, Basil laid the groundwork for further dogmatic decisions to be taken at the First Council of Constantinople. The Council met about six years after his writing On the Holy Spirit and two years or so after his death in 379. He had, in effect, well established what would come to be considered the orthodox understanding of the triune God as one substance in three persons.20 The First Council of Constantinople and Beyond After Basil’s death, discussion concerning the divine status of the Holy Spirit continued. In what turned out to be a tumultuous meeting, Eastern bishops gathered in 381 at what has come to be called the First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople.21 Among various concerns, they took up the question of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa and Basil’s friend Gregory of Nazianzus both attended the Council. Gregory of Nazianzus, who had become bishop of Constantinople, presided over part of the Council. Also present was Amphilochius of Iconium, to whom Basil had addressed his work, On the Holy Spirit.22 They shared Basil’s general understanding of the Trinity and of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Basil had great influence on the Council, an influence which took several forms. Certainly, the recent memory of his great work as bishop remained important to a good number of the bishops who were present. Many of them greatly appreciated his writings, and especially that on the Holy Spirit. And, as mentioned, he was in a special way present to the Council bishops in the persons of his brother, of his friend, and of the one to whom he was a mentor. We might add that the Emperor Theodosius’s own strong anti-Arian stance may also have at least indirectly bolstered Basil’s influence. 20

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But see the nuanced evaluation and remarks made by Hildebrand concerning Basil’s terminology. Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea, 98-101. And see more briefly, Andrew RaddeGallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 169. The documents of the First Council of Constantinople along with a general presentation of the Council are available online, Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed August 7, 2016, http:// www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum02.htm. ‘Historical Introduction’ to ‘The Second Ecumenical Council, The First Council of Constantinople’, in: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, ed. Philip Schaff & Henry Wace, vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church, ed. Henry R. Percival (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900; reprint Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 162. 1900 text accessed August 8, 2016, http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ halsall/basis/const1.txt.

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A letter from the Synod of Constantinople, written in 382, formally declared that the Council bishops believed ‘the Father, the Son and the holy Spirit have a single Godhead and power and substance, a dignity deserving the same honour and a co-eternal sovereignty, in three most perfect hypostases, or three perfect persons’.23 The Council did not as such define what they meant by ‘person’. But the language they used and their insistence on one God in three divine persons who are distinct from one another, yet equal in dignity, sound close to what Basil had said. With their reference to equality in dignity, they were certainly echoing Basil more directly. The Council further developed a form of the Creed previously promulgated in 325 by the First Council of Nicea. This resultant, extended NicenoConstantinopolitan Creed or simply Nicene Creed no longer ends somewhat abruptly with ‘and [we believe] in the holy Spirit’. Citing it in full will help put the added remarks about the Holy Spirit in their wider context: We believe in one God the Father all-powerful, maker of heaven and of earth, and of all things both seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the onlybegotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all the ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came to be; for us humans and for our salvation he came down from the heavens and became incarnate from the holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, became human and was crucified on our behalf under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried and rose up on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; and he went up into the heavens and is seated at the Father’s right hand; he is coming again with glory to judge the living and the dead; his kingdom will have no end. And in the Spirit, the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding forth from the Father, co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets; in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. We confess one baptism for the forgiving of sins. We look forward to a resurrection of the dead and life in the age to come. Amen.24

The Creed follows the order which Basil had referred to as a movement in which ‘the natural Goodness and the inherent Holiness and the royal Dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit’ (18.47). Its order finds 23

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First Council of Constantinople, ‘A Letter of the Bishops Gathered in Constantinople [382]’, Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed August 8, 2016, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ ecum02.htm#A%20letter%20of%20the%20bishops%20gathered%20in%20Constantinople. First Council of Constantinople, ‘The Exposition of the 150 Fathers’, Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed August 8, 2016, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum02.htm#The%20exposition%20of%20the%20150%20fathers (italics added to indicate the addition concerning the Holy Spirit). The Greek text is available in August Hahn & Georg Ludwig Hahn (Eds.), Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der Alten Kirche, rev. ed. (Breslau: Verlag von E. Morgenstein, 1877), 81-82, copy available at Google Books.

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parallels in many liturgical, and especially Eucharistic, prayers offered in Christian communities down through the ages. The Creed’s added words ‘the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding forth from the Father, co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets’ are strikingly like Basil’s own phrasing. A text such as this to some degree biblical in terminology is something Basil himself would have been ready to write.25 Perhaps it is not too bold to say that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and its summary references to Father, Son, and Spirit make Basil’s testimonial to experience of the Trinity through experience of the Spirit available far beyond its day. The Creed encourages this experience, through its summary reference to Father, Son, and Spirit, not only among Christians in the fourth century but in future generations as well. The Creed’s trinitarian structure reflects various baptismal formulas of faith. To an important extent, it mirrors the structure of Christian liturgical prayer as well. In so reflecting and mirroring Christian sacramental and liturgical practice, it serves in its own way as a further communal testimonial to experience of the Trinity. The Council’s Creed is more than a reiteration of Basil’s thought on Spirit and Trinity.26 But, with its additions concerning the Holy Spirit, the Creed has 25

26

The following comparison of phrases from the Creed and those from Basil’s On the Holy Spirit is based on a comparison of the Greek texts, but various limitations require reference here only to the English translations. So then, for example, the Creed’s ‘And in the Spirit, the holy [one]’ finds a similar phrase in Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, ‘It’s [the Spirit’s] proper and peculiar title is “Holy Spirit’’’ (9.22). The Creed’s ‘the lordly and life-giving one’ and Basil’s yet another testimony which distinctly calls the Spirit Lord: ‘“The Lord”, it is said, “is that Spirit”’ (21.52) and the Spirit ‘living not as needing restoration, but as Supplier of life’ (9.22, and see 24.56). The Creed’s ‘proceeding forth from the Father’ and Basil’s ‘the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father [John 15:26]’ (16.38, and see 9.22). The Creed’s ‘co-worshipped’ and ‘co-glorified’ and Basil’s ‘even in our worship the Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son’ (26.64, and see 11.27) as well as ‘Thus we ascribe glory to God both “in” the Spirit, and “with” the Spirit. (…) We have stated that so far as the sense goes it is the same to say “glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost”, and glory be to the Father and to the Son with the Holy Ghost’ (27.68, and see 18.45, 25.59 and 60, 26.63). The Creed’s ‘the one who spoke through the prophets’ and Basil’s ‘the blessings of the patriarchs, (…) the prophecies, (…) all is through the Spirit’. The English texts of the Creed are from First Council of Constantinople, ‘The Exposition of the 150 Fathers’, and Basil’s English texts are from Basil, ‘The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto’. The Greek texts of the Creed are in Hahn & Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbole, 82, and Basil’s Greek texts are in Basil of Caesarea, Sur le SaintEsprit. On Basil’s influence on the Creed of Constantinople, see: Stephen Hildebrand, introduction to On the Holy Spirit, transl. Stephen Hildebrand (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 21; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, 207. Johannes van Oort seems to argue as well to a more direct link between the Council’s addition to the Creed and experiences of the Spirit when he refers to Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon during the First Council of Constantinople. In that sermon, Gregory of Nyssa admiringly spoke of several bishops from Mesopotamia who themselves continued in their day to experience the

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made some of Basil’s own important reflections on the Spirit known throughout the East. It has done this especially through its prayerful and communal recitation. A couple hundred years after the Council, Pope Gregory the Great enthusiastically accepted the Creed and doctrinal statements on behalf of the Western Church. His acceptance of the Council’s declaration of one God in three divine persons and of the further elaboration of the Creed on the Holy Spirit made aspects of Basil’s thought on the Holy Spirit still more available. It has been regularly recited for centuries up to the present day in major Western Christian communities.27 * *   * We will do well to return for a moment to our reflection on Basil’s at times direct and at other times more indirect description of the Christian experience of God as triune. Now we want to focus more on its structure and movement. Basil argued in favor of the equality and honor, in divinity, of the Spirit with the Father and the Son. Over the course of that argumentation, he identified the Christian experience of sanctification, and indeed of Christian life, from baptism on as a move from the Spirit through the Son to the Father. If these and other prepositions he used were not so important, we could be tempted simply to indicate this move with arrows: Spirit→Son→Father. Still, this briefest of diagrams captures Basil’s reading of the overall direction of the Christian experience of God. And it reminds us that, for Basil, sanctification is the experience of the Spirit illuminating our minds. For, with this illumination, we can recognize the Son who, as revealing image, turns us to the archetypal beauty of the Father. But we should still, for a moment, dwell further on several of the various prepositions Basil associates, though not always exclusively, with each of the three divine actors in what we might call this structured divine movement. For Basil, our experience of God begins from the Spirit who in baptism launches us on a road of progressive movement toward perfection in sanctification. Basil points to the ongoing experience of newness of life as a result of this perfecting role of the Spirit. For him, such newness of life cannot be explained simply by reference to ourselves. It requires the active presence of a divine

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charisms of the Spirit. Oort writes: ‘This testimony [by Gregory of Nyssa], once again, bears witness to the fact that the confessional sentences about the Holy Spirit in the NicenoConstantinopolitanum were based on knowledge of actual experiences of the Spirit. This fact may further contribute to a deeper understanding of the Creed’s wording’. ‘The Holy Spirit and the Early Church: The Experience of the Spirit’, in: HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 68 (2012), accessed July 13, 2019, #art. 1154, 7 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102. However, over time with the addition of the phrase that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father ‘and the Son’.

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source, other than us, which freely and indeed generously gives of itself to us. Basil gives expression to this sense of a divine source when he speaks of the Spirit as being equal in honor and dignity with the Son and with the Father. Along with this from and this with, Basil works especially with in to help further describe where the Christian experience of sanctification takes place. On the one hand, it takes place within Christian communities and those who are their members. It is truly something they experience. On the other hand, their experience of sanctification takes place in the Spirit. It occurs only in communion with the Spirit, in and with, to use the prepositions here slightly differently, whom they are now free to cry with the Son to God our Father. As a result of their experience of progressive sanctification in the Spirit, they sense a certain momentary, and sometimes longer-perduring, wholeness in their lives as children of God who live for God and for their sisters and brothers. The crowning experience of such wholeness will come at the end-time in which the Spirit will have fully accomplished the Spirit’s work in them. For Basil, this experience of the Spirit sanctifying Christians28 occurs as a perfecting of what they are, namely, children of God. The Spirit enlightens them so they can come to recognize the Son as the true and full image of God. In this enlightening, they in effect experience the Son. He freely offers his life and death and resurrection as the example according to which they are called to live as children of God. Basil gives expression to this exemplary role of the Son when he speaks of the Son’s role in creation and redemption. For Basil, the Son is the one who, in line with the originating and freely willed design of the Father, is the creative cause bringing them into being in the image and likeness of God.29 The Father accepts the Spirit’s perfecting and ordering of what the Son creates. They are created in the image of God, with reason and free will. They are to grow ever closer in likeness to God through becoming a Christian and following the example the Son freely gives them in and through his life, death and resurrection.30 He makes this increase in likeness possible when, again in oneness with the will of the Father, he sends into their hearts the Spirit of truth. The 28

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Here we are focusing more on Christians, namely, on ecclesial and monastic communities and individuals in those communities. But Basil also stresses the roles of the Spirit in relation to creation, including angels, and holy persons and phenomena identified in the Hebrew Bible. On humans in the ‘image and likeness of God’, see, in a general way, Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 9.23. For more explicit references to be found in Basil’s various works, see: Maximos Aghiorghoussis, ‘Applications of the theme “Eikon Theou” (Image of God) according to Saint Basil the Great’, in: The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 21 (1976), 265-88, especially 268-76, with the remark, ‘In the last analysis, we can say that in Saint Basil’s theology, the image is seen on an “ontological” level, as a matter of “nature”. Likeness is seen on an ethical level, as a purpose to achieve’ (276); Hildebrand, Basil of Caesarea, 19-22. See more generally, Basil, ‘The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto’, 8.18.

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Spirit’s active presence enlightens them, enabling them freely to recognize the Son. It is this interaction of Spirit and Son, rooted in the initiating and holy presence of the Spirit, which forms the context in which they, as children of God, grow in sanctification. Again, for Basil, in recognizing the Son who is the image of the archetype, those gifted with the Spirit come through the image to see the beauty of the Father who is the fount and source of all that is. As image, the Son reflects that of which the Son is image. In so doing, the Son is the way through which they come to the archetype. Basil is more reserved in his reference to the Father. He seems simply to indicate that experience of the beauty of the Father is experience of the one who freely gives himself to them through the Son and the Spirit. The Father is the one to whom they look and, ultimately, the one for whom they live. The Spirit enlivens them and, indeed almost 1700 years later, we can say us. The Spirit makes it possible for us to freely embrace the Son and, through him, turn to the Father. For Basil, it is in our experience of the Spirit that we experience the Son as the one through whom we come to experience the beauty of the Father. In so describing our experience of Spirit, Son, and Father, Basil is prolonging in further reflection his own experience and that of various Christian communities and their members.31 He provides an outstanding testimonial to experience of the Trinity based in experience of the Spirit. His testimonial takes the form of an extended argument in favor of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. His presentation of such Spirit-based experience of the Trinity is appreciative and at times somewhat indirect. And, through the expanded Nicene Creed, it serves to encourage all who recite it to recognize the roles of the one Spirit, the one Son, and the one Father in their lives. In closing, we might well say again that Basil of Caesarea, called the Great, has left in his writing On the Holy Spirit the most important post-New-Testament work on the Holy Spirit. It is important both in its content and its influence. With it, Basil leaves an impressive legacy of insight into the generosity of the Spirit and of the Trinity.

31

Dr. J. August Higgins kindly authorized drawing upon his unpublished seminar paper on Basil of Caesarea, though without necessarily attributing to him what I have written here. I have learned a great deal from him about Basil.

PART III MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TESTIMONIALS

CHAPTER 4 ABBOT SUGER A Trinitarian Space

In part 3, Medieval and Early Modern Testimonials, we now consider several testimonials expressed in various ways from the 1100s to later in the 1700s. The first to be considered is the Saint-Denis chapel as reconstructed by Abbot Suger (1081–1151). The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis was a Benedictine abbey in what is now the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The origins of the abbey chapel date back to a church dedicated in 475 to Saint Denis.1 From early on, the royal chapel of Saint-Denis served as a burial place for kings and certain members of royal families. Since 987, all but three of France’s kings were buried there.2 The chapel stood at one corner of the Abbey and survived the Abbey’s destruction during the French Revolution. Today it stands on its own with its west façade facing a square. Over time it has come to be known in France as the Saint-Denis Basilica, though for me it will always remain the royal chapel. It now serves as the Cathedral Basilica of the Diocese of Saint-Denis, established in 1966. The abbey and its chapel were dedicated to and named for Saint Denis, held to be the first bishop of Paris. It is fascinating to recall that, in the ninth century, the identity of the Saint Denis for whom the abbey and chapel were named was further enhanced by conflating three figures. The first of these figures was the Saint Denis who was ‘a third-century martyr sent with two companions, Rusticus and Eleutherius, to convert the people of Gaul’.3 He is honored as the apostle of France and considered its patron. The second was the philosopher 1

2 3

Sumner McKnight Crosby, The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis: From Its Beginnings to the Death of Suger, 475–1151 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 14. My sincere thanks to Prof. David H. Pereyra, Liturgy Seminar, Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto. He has offered most helpful guidance on Church structures and experience of the Trinity. Crosby, Royal Abbey, 7. Paula Lieber Gerson, ‘Suger as Iconographer: The Central Portal of the West Façade of SaintDenis’, in: Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, ed. Paula Lieber Gerson (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 183 and see 186, with further bibliography concerning this conflation of figures on 195n6. On the conflation, see also: Crosby, Royal Abbey, 3-5;

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Dionysius the Areopagite, described in the Acts of the Apostles as one who joined Paul and became a believer (Acts 17:34). The third was an apparently late fifth- or early sixth-century Syrian theologian and philosopher who identified himself vigorously with the Dionysius in Acts. The Syrian’s writings were translated from Greek into Latin and became influential in Western Europe. Today we usually refer to him as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Over the course of its history, the royal chapel of Saint-Denis has undergone various modifications and reconstructions.4 Among such changes, of interest to us are the reconstructions led and overseen, or at least begun, by Suger. He served as abbot from 1122 to 1151. He seems to have had various reasons for reconstructing and enlarging the chapel. Among them, on a more practical level, he says he wanted to provide easier entry to it for the growing number of pilgrims and to enlarge it in order better to accommodate them.5 From a more political perspective, he seems to have wanted to enhance the role of the king of France through his reconstruction. Suger linked the king’s roles in religion and in society, in part at least, by emphasizing the divine right of kings. He himself wielded great political influence in France. In 1147, the Pope named him regent of France while King Louis VII went off on the Second Crusade.6 For present purposes, however, we will focus on what we will call his more spiritual interests. Suger regularly noted his intention to maintain a certain continuity with the previous chapel structure.7 Yet he oversaw major changes to the then-existing

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Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 103-6. See Crosby, Royal Abbey. Abbot Suger, Libellus alter de consecratione ecclesiae sancti Dionysii/The Other Little Book on the Consecration of the Church of St.-Denis, in: Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, edited, translated, and annotated by Erwin Panofsky, 2 nd ed., ed. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1979), 86-89 (abbreviated Consecration). See, for example, John F. Benton, ‘Introduction: Suger’s Life and Personality’, in: Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, 6; Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 61-90. See remarks by Crosby, Royal Abbey, 212. Eric C. Fernie seems rightly to stress the sincerity of Suger’s insistence on continuity with the past chapel construction. But he could have recognized more explicitly what is truly new in Suger’s work and that of the master mason. ‘Suger’s “Completion” of Saint-Denis’, in: Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Kathryn Brush, & Peter Draper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 84-91. We will refer, with some care, to Suger’s intentions as to what he constructed and what he said about it. Some attribute less importance to Suger and more to the unknown master mason, not only regarding specific construction solutions but also artistic considerations. See, for example, Crosby, Royal Abbey, 156, 212. But Crosby himself, while stressing the role of the master mason, does not thereby attribute less importance to Suger in these regards. Suger wrote after the completion of the various reconstructions and may indeed have

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chapel, including replacing two parts of it during his lifetime. More specifically, around 1135 he began construction of a new west front or façade and narthex or vestibule and entrance area. Both were completed in 1140. He then replaced the east end of the chapel with a chevet or choir composed of a more open ambulatory and a series of altars forming a half-circle around and behind the main altar. The chevet was completed in 1144. Archeological evidence shows that Suger had begun building a new nave or central section of the chapel between the reconstructed entrance area and the chevet. That evidence also suggests he intended the nave to have a three-storey elevation.8 About a century later, one of Suger’s successors completed the new nave with such a three-storey elevation. The present abbey chapel, but especially the chevet completed under Suger’s leadership, represent the beginnings of Gothic church architecture. They incorporate elements such as the pointed arch, the buttress, and later the flying buttress as well as the rib-vault. Such elements as these make it possible to fill the walls with greatly enlarged windows. Suger’s constructions combine these elements in a new and creative way. The combination results in something more than the mere sum of these elements. More widely speaking, Nicholaus Pevsner has described such a procedure, namely, bringing various elements together in a new way, as the development of a new architectural style. He calls such a style an integral whole.9 Given such a planned reconfiguration, the result is again, and now generally stated, more than the sum of its parts. This is the case with the new, Gothic architectural style which William W. Clark calls a spatial synthesis.10 According to Pevsner, ‘What the Gothic style brought to these motifs [elements] was their combination for a new aesthetic purpose. This purpose was to enliven inert masses of masonry, to quicken spatial motion, to reduce a building to a seeming system of innervated lines of action’.11 As mentioned, we want to turn more directly to the question of Suger’s intentions considered from a more spiritual perspective. More specifically, we will address the question of whether Suger’s constructions can be considered an

8

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had reasons to emphasize certain interpretations of them. Simson underscores Suger’s own architectural contribution. Gothic Cathedral, 96-98. I suggest that we consider Suger’s writings both helpful and basically reliable concerning structures and interpretations he gives to them. William W. Clark, ‘Suger’s Church at Saint-Denis: The State of Research’, in: Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium, 105, 114. And see Crosby, Royal Abbey, 267-77 (esp. 276-77), 279, 288. And an earlier reference, Erwin Panofsky, introduction to Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 27. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2009), 52. Clark, ‘Suger’s Church at Saint-Denis’, 116. Pevsner, Outline of European Architecture, 56.

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architectural testimonial to experience of the Trinity. But, before doing so, we should briefly note some general architectural considerations. The architecture of a building and its setting can in various ways convey a more specific, identifiable message, with message here understood in a wide sense.12 We think of a building in terms of, among others, place and space.13 Of place, in that its being situated in a specific setting often speaks reams about its significance and purpose. For example, a building set facing a town square gains a certain importance by the mere fact that it is centrally located at the crossroads of various avenues of traffic and commerce. It naturally draws attention to itself. Again, a carefully planned and well-constructed building’s outward appearance in relation to its surroundings often helps identify the building for what it is. Its appearance tells us something of what the ones who designed and built it had in mind for it when they constructed it. Prominent characteristics of a building’s various external elements and an appropriate proportion among them can convey an important first message. These elements may include entries or roofs, walls or niches, vertical and horizontal lines, textures and types of materials used, reflection of daylight and nocturnal illumination, placement of windows, ornamentation, and so forth. Considered individually, but especially when taken 12

13

By way of general remark concerning the important role of architecture in relation to human wellbeing, including religious wellbeing, one would do well to consult the delightful book by Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Vintage International, 2008). Our concern here is more with ‘place’ as ‘physical situatedness and external appearance’ and with ‘space’ as that which is internal to a specific building. For more developed senses of place and of space, see: Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity, The Hulsean Lectures 2000 (London: SCM, 2001), esp. chap. 1: ‘A Sense of Place’, 1-32, chap. 2: ‘Place in Christian Tradition’, 33-63 with specific reference to the SaintDenis chapel, 52-61, and chap. 6: ‘Re-Placing the City’, 147-71; ———, ‘Place’, in The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 494-96; ———, Explorations in Spirituality: History, Theology, and Social Practice (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2010), 157-95; ———, The Spiritual City: Theology, Spirituality, and the Urban (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 117-36. I came late upon the following volume of insightful studies: Spiritual Spaces: History and Mysticism in Michel De Certeau, Studies in Spirituality Supplements 24, ed. Inigo Bocken (Leuven: Peeters, 2013). The notions of place and space with which I am working are based more on directly architectural considerations while this collection of studies discusses what we could call Certeau’s markedly more metaphorically understood notions of place and space. Working directly from what I understand to be Certeau’s perspective might well lead to different emphases from the ones in the present chapter. For instance, in so working one might stress more the nomadic coming to the chapel and then leaving it. As well, one might pay more attention to the chapel’s ironic present socio-cultural context. For an insightful consideration of Certeau’s working with place and space in relation to contemporary spirituality studies, see Inigo Bocken, ‘Nomad and Layman – Spiritual Spaces in Modernity: Mysticism and Everyday Life in Michel de Certeau’, in: Spiritual Spaces, 111-23.

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together, they spontaneously reveal something of a building’s significance and purpose. As to space, and we might perhaps better speak of spaces or enclosed places, size or volume matters. A good number of considerations regarding place apply as well to space, especially those of layout and line, proportion, materials chosen, direction of attention, ornamentation, windows, and overall form. In addition, a small space or group of spaces can, when so planned, easily suggest coziness and comfort. A large or especially impressive space often brings with it a sense of finding ourselves in something much greater than us, something truly beyond us while englobing us. Shape becomes important as well. A theater in the round invites us to become more involved in a play being presented there. A large opera house, carefully planned by experienced acoustics experts, permits the sound of music to roll over us in ecstatic waves. It can equally permit quiet murmurings to entrance us and pull us more deeply into the sense and feeling of the moment. Architectural lines draw us forward, upward, downward, to one side or the other. Light, whether brilliant or subdued, from outside or provided from within, can color a space with deep emotion. Size, shape, line, light, when brought together can creatively invite us to experience being at home in a specific space within a given place.14 The Saint-Denis Chapel Back in 1968, I was studying theology in Rome and spent the summer working at a hospital in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a Paris suburb. My intention was to improve my spoken French. During this stay, I visited the Saint-Denis chapel, important in the history of the development of Gothic church architecture. But, as far as I can remember, at that time the only thing catching my attention was the wonderful thinness of walls no longer needing to support the full weight of the ceiling. Much previous church construction was characterized by thick walls and smaller windows. Now these thin walls permitted architects and masons to include great windows flooding the chapel with light. Beyond that, the chapel struck me as impressive, but not much more. 14

On architecture in relation to theology and spiritual experience, see: Philip Sheldrake, ‘Reading Cathedrals as Spiritual Texts’, in: Studies in Spirituality 11 (2001), 187-204, where he treats creatively of interpreting cathedrals as classic spiritual texts, with texts taken in a wide sense, and appreciating them in contemporary contexts; Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); also see Sheldrake as cited in note 13 above. For widely cast, spiritually enriching reflections on Gothic cathedrals, see Robert Barron, Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Great Cathedrals (New York: Crossroad, 2000).

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Many years later, in 2016, participation in a longer study session in Aix-enProvence in southern France provided an occasion to revisit the chapel.15 In preparing for this return visit I read up on the chapel, its history, and especially its design and reconstruction overseen by Abbot Suger. It became clear that he and the people of his day, their history in effect, were different from what we are and live today. Their present, now past, was so to speak other than our present. What we presently have are Suger’s chapel and writings about it. They both come from the past and yet are present to us today.16 Of primary importance for us, then, are the chapel itself and what Suger himself wrote and reflected on concerning its design and reconstruction. In his writings, he indicates something of what he intended with the chapel. He likewise interprets its design and the results of its reconstruction.17 Respect for such otherness conditions the ways in which one would reflect on the chapel and its significance. Precisely to respect that past in its otherness,18 it seemed important to review several studies on the chapel itself and the medieval world in which it was built. They will help us appreciate better its actual design and the possible impact such design might have on those who experience it in individual and communal ways.19 I took time as well for further reading 15 16

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Many Internet sites provide pictures. Search ‘Pictures of Saint-Denis’. Marian Füssel discusses the relationships between past and present in the chapter, ‘Writing the Otherness: The Historiography of Michel de Certeau SJ’, in: Spiritual Spaces, 25-44, with reference on 29-30. Many of the other studies in this volume also touch on questions of history, the past, and the present, all in relation to and dialogue with the thought of Michel de Certeau. Abbot Suger, Sugerii Abbatis Sancti Dionysii Liber, De rebus in administratione sua gestis/The Book of Suger, Abbot of St.-Denis, On What Was Done under His Administration, in: Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 40-81 (abbreviated Administration); ———, Consecration, 82-121; ———, [Ordinatio A.D. MCXL vel MCXLI confirmata]/[Ordinance Enacted in the Year 1140 or in the year 1141], both in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 122-37 (abbreviated Ordinance). Panofsky dates the writing of Ordinance between July 14, 1140, and the end of 1141, Consecration between the second half of 1144 and 1146–1147, and Administration between the end of 1148 and the beginning of 1149. ‘Preliminary Remarks, the Texts: Dates, Transmission, and Readings’, in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 142-43. Regrettably, I have not had direct access to the collection edited by Dominique Poirel, L’abbé Suger, le manifeste gothique de Saint-Denis et la pensée victorine, Actes du Colloque organisé à la Fondation Singer-Polignac (Paris) le mardi 21 novembre 2000 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). ‘Respecting the past’ is a phrase taken from Philip Sheldrake but perhaps used in a slightly different way here. ‘Spiritual Horizons: Michel de Certeau, Everyday Practices & The City’, in: Spiritual Spaces, 77-86, with reference on 84. There has been considerable discussion concerning the rise of ‘individualism’ and, of present interest, ‘religious individualism’ in the Gothic age and whether it is compatible with communality and convergence. See Charles Caspers’s helpful overview and response based on several of Michel de Certeau’s insights into the medieval world. In a paragraph worth quoting

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concerning the medieval world around the time of the chapel’s reconstruction. It became ever clearer how different the medieval world was from that of our own day. Without trying in one way or another to reconstruct that world, I saw it would be helpful to be aware of some of those differences on returning to the chapel. They included, for example, a greater stress on and importance given to numbers and their significance. It seemed as well that medieval persons valued ‘seeing’ a great deal and would understand it as involving a more active role on the part of the one looking at something. Seeing seemed to involve a projection of some form of light on an object which was then reflected back to the one doing the seeing. ‘Ideas’ appeared to be given a certain deeper reality than simply their realizations in the material world. And images were more than symbols. They somehow conveyed the presence of that to which they gave access. All of this in a thoroughly Christian world as compared with ours of today. It seemed important to keep these insights and this information in mind while returning to the Saint-Denis chapel itself. They would, in a sense, be part and parcel of a renewed experience of the chapel, now considered a possible testimonial to experience of the Trinity.20 West Façade On this second visit to the chapel, Mr. Harald Happel joined me in Paris. He had many years ago served most competently as my research assistant. Now four eyes would be better than two. We would complement one another well in making our own observations concerning the chapel and in commenting on

20

at length though not specifically concerning experience of the Trinity, Caspers sees compatibility between individual and communal when he writes: ‘[My] discussion of three components of Eucharistic piety – “ocular communion”, the fixation on the praesentia realis, and the contemplation of the suffering of Christ – is not intended to demonstrate that there was no rise in individualism whatsoever in the later Middle Ages. On the contrary, each of the three forms of piety demanded that its practitioner act with a certain Selbstverständnis. It should be clear, however, that this is not a matter of seeing historical reality exclusively from this perspective. After all, religious life was conspicuously defined by communality and convergence. Perhaps the greatest error in the debate over late medieval religiosity was (and often still is) the equation of inwardness with individualism’. ‘Mysterium depopulatum: Understanding Late Medieval Worship and Piety with the Aid of Michel de Certeau’, in: Spiritual Spaces, 45-58, with reference on 57. Transposing the question slightly to one of individual and communal experiences, I would suggest they are not easily compartmentalized. There would seem to be a certain compatibility and complementarity between them based in the fact that each is, as experience, in some sense personal. R. Kevin Seasoltz, A Sense of the Sacred: Theological Foundations of Christian Architecture and Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), 136-47, esp.141-42; and see Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, 58.

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those of one another. As we walked from the Saint-Denis Metro station to the chapel, we noted the Middle Eastern and North African character of the area around the chapel. The setting of the chapel was different from that in the Middle Ages. I had arrived a day earlier and got thoroughly lost trying to find the way from the Metro station to my hotel. I had to work my way through an impressive, twice-weekly local bazaar crowded with stands and shoppers. This morning there was no bazaar. So, we moved more quickly to the square in front of the Saint-Denis chapel.21 Suddenly, we were standing in the square with the chapel directly in front of us and a carousel resting quietly off toward the side of the chapel on our left. Medieval chapel and contemporary electric carousel. We focused more directly on the chapel itself and its present setting. The chapel immediately impressed us with its imposing presence. Formerly with two towers, it now had only one. I mentioned to Harald how beautiful the chapel seemed since the whole west façade we were facing had been thoroughly cleaned. It was no longer covered with centuries of grime. Despite the grey Parisian sky, the stone exterior shone warm and inviting in its light tan color. Pamela Z. Blum describes the façade as made of ‘creamy, fine-grained twelfth-century limestone’.22 In gazing at the façade, we immediately felt a certain shared sense of stability, balance, and harmony.23 It seems that much medieval architecture aimed to reflect such characteristics, especially that of harmony. We were then struck by the façade’s repeated rhythm of threefold structuring. Vertical lines mark out three main sections to the façade. This sense of the vertical is strongly complemented by three horizontal rows of panels setting one above the other across the façade. Each of the three parallel vertical sections begins from one of the three portals or entrances to the chapel. In Suger’s reconstruction these three portals replace the previous façade’s single entrance.24 The three sections continue their rise above the portals with a middle-level, horizontal row of panels. The middle-level panel in each of these three vertical sections contains a series of three arches. Each of the three vertical sections culminates in a third, uppermost horizontal panel. The left and right uppermost panels each contain three arches while the central one is filled in with a rose window inside 21

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For brief but fascinating descriptions of the medieval cathedral placed in relationship to the town surrounding it, see: Seasoltz, Sense of the Sacred, 136-39; Sheldrake, Spiritual City, 65-69. Given the chapel’s dominant position not only today but already when it was attached to the abbey, Seasoltz’s and Sheldrake’s remarks provide helpful insight concerning the chapel both in its earlier and present-day settings. Pamela Z. Blum, Early Gothic Saint-Denis: Restorations and Survivals (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 20. On the west façade and its restorations, see Crosby, Royal Abbey, 167-213. Suger, Administration, 44-45.

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Saint-Denis chapel, Paris (12th century), west façade (photo D. Schlitt).

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a square frame. This was perhaps the first time that a fuller rose window was placed in the façade of a church. Of the original two towers, only the one on the viewer’s right remains. It is set back from the façade and tops it off. Harald insightfully pointed out that, when we consider the façade from a somewhat more mathematical perspective, we find a yet more complex pattern. This pattern appears in the upper two levels of each of the left and right vertical sections. In the middle level of each of the left and right vertical sections, two of the three arches, namely, the two outer ones are mortared in (blind arches). The center arch is a window. In the upper level panels of each of the left and right vertical sections, the two outer arches are open as windows and the center arch mortared in (blind arch). When considered together, the windows in the middle and upper panels of the left vertical section make groupings of three blind arches and three windowed arches. The same was true of the middle and upper panels of the right vertical section. More so than in our case, persons in the Middle Ages would have more immediately noticed this repeated pattern of ‘threes’ and thought spontaneously of the Trinity.25 When somewhat later Harald and I entered the chapel, we found there an explanatory note identifying the overwhelmingly triadic structuring of the façade as ‘trinitarian’: ‘This harmonious façade with two towers is conceived according to a ternary rhythm, in reference to the Trinity: three portals, three levels, triple windows. A crenulated top edge completes the façade proper’.26 Suger himself had noted the significance of the three portals on the west façade and one portal to the chapel around the corner on the chapel’s north side. He did this when he described the composition and movement of the inaugural procession going through and passing in front of various portals of the chapel during its consecration: 25

26

Of interest, Barron’s remark concerning the Chartres cathedral: ‘The cathedral of Chartres is filled with the number three, the mystical figure of the Trinity: there are three portals, three main aisles, three elevations and three rose windows. Pilgrims making their way through this space are meant to be “trinitized”, ordered according to the number which is God’s inner life’. Heaven in Stone and Glass, 107. On the symbolism of numbers in the Middle Ages, see Joseph Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstatung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters, mit Berücksichtigung von Honorius Augustodunensis Sicardus und Durandus (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1902), with more specific reference to ‘three’ and its symbolic meanings on 70, 71, 72, 75, 81, 82, 126, 140, 150, 163, copy available at Google Books. Brief description of the cleaned and restored west façade, viewed in the chapel on October 7, 2016 (my translation). Note also, for example, a more general remark concerning the three portals in the façade of Gothic cathedrals, ‘Usually, the west portal also consisted of three entryways to mirror the doctrine of the Trinity’, from ‘The Gothic Cathedral: Height, Light, and Color’, in: Science and Its Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery, ed. Neil Schlager & Josh Lauer, vol. 2, 700-1449 (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), World History in Context, accessed July 5, 2019, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CV2643450147/ WHIC?u=san66643&xid=78165a43.

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We brought about that the chapel of St. Romanus be dedicated to the service of God (…) by the venerable man Archbishop Hugues of Rouen and very many other bishops. (…) There were dedicated in the lower nave of the church two chapels (…) by the venerable men Manasseh, Bishop of Meaux, and Peter, Bishop of Senlis. The one glorious procession of these three men went out through the doorway of St. Eustace; it passed in front of the principal doors with a huge throng of chanting clergy and exulting people, the bishops walking in front and performing the holy consecration; and, thirdly, they reentered through the single door of the cemetery which had been transferred from the old building to the new.27

One procession but three men processing out of and past three doors and reentering by one door. As Abbot, Suger would have had a certain more direct responsibility for the organization of this inaugural procession so involving one and three, a reference to the Trinity.28 Harald and I recalled this procession as we continued to admire, at some length, the overall façade. We paused for a moment to note again vertical and horizontal lines, symmetry of triple windows, the disposition and decoration of the various sections and panels, and the three famous portals. It struck us that in most pictures of the façade and tower the vertical lines seem to predominate. But, as we stood there facing the façade, it was the horizontal lines which appeared to come to the fore. They brought with them a sense of stable presence. In any case, then, for a moment we were mesmerized by the overall beauty of this façade. It was welcoming in its light tan color, evident in its recall of the Trinity, soothing in its harmony. For a moment, we forgot about the nearby carousel and the other buildings giving shape to the square. We simply gazed at the façade as it stood there before us, taking in its beauty. Central Portal But then it was time to go across the square to the chapel itself. We approached the central portal with its intricately sculpted tympanum or triangular space over the doors and within the arch. The overall theme of the portal was the last

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Suger, Administration, 45-46. Erwin Panofsky summarizes the overall movement of this inaugural procession: ‘And the consecration ceremony of the new narthex was carefully planned to symbolize the idea of the Trinity: there was “one glorious procession of three men” (one archbishop and two bishops) that performed three distinct motions, leaving the building by a single door passing in front of the three principal portals and, “thirdly”, reentering the church by another single door’. Introduction to Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church, 21. See also the remarks by Crosby, Royal Abbey, 282-83.

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judgment.29 We stood in front of the portal and looked up at this magnificent medieval sculpture. Our eyes quickly rose to the fourth and outer, highest archivolt or row of ornamental molding of sculptures in the tympanum. There we found the carving of a dove in the center of the archivolt at its highest point. Then, guided by the figure of the dove, our gaze shifted down to the third archivolt, immediately below and within the outermost one. In the center of this third archivolt, we found the carving of a human figure holding an oval disk. Within the disk rested a lamb whose body was carved in highly realistic fashion. The four archivolts, indeed the whole tympanum, flow down and outward from the dove, the human figure, and the lamb. These three carvings appear at the apex of the tympanum and the four archivolts. The three upper archivolts in the tympanum are peopled by Old Testament patriarchs and the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. The lowest and innermost archivolt is filled with representations of the just and the damned. Much of the artwork in the archivolts was restored or even recut in the nineteenth century. But, of present interest, the dove, the human, and the lamb still represent well enough what was originally set there at the top of the central portal under Suger’s overall guidance. We can imagine that the original figures of the dove and the human were more realistically represented than they are today. We can say this because much of the stone representation of the body of the lamb dates to the time of Suger himself. It is sculpted in such realistic fashion.30 What we have, then, is evidently a unique representation of the Trinity and is ‘the first recorded appearance of the Trinity in a monumental sculptural program’.31 It includes the traditional way of representing the Holy Spirit by a dove and the Father by a human figure. The Son, in turn, is represented by the lamb. Given the surrounding sculptures of the twenty-four Elders, this carving of the lamb recalls the Lamb in the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation 5:8. ‘When he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense,

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On the central portal, see Crosby, Royal Abbey, 167-213; Gerson, ‘Suger as Iconographer’, 183-98. On its restorations and survivals, Blum, Early Gothic Saint-Denis, 27-122. Blum, Early Gothic Saint-Denis, 61-62. On the presentation of the Trinity in the tympanum, see especially Gerson, ‘Suger as Iconographer’, 192-94 with the quote on 192, notes and further references on 197-98 with references to several subsequent representations of the Trinity indicated on 197n36. See also Crosby, Royal Abbey, 180-82. After indicating, on 180-81, even more ‘three’s’ than noted here above, Crosby, renowned archeologist and historian of the Saint-Denis chapel, makes an important statement: ‘If we can be certain about any of the details of Suger’s church, it is that he intended the three portals as well as the entire façade to embody a reference to the Trinity’ (181). On 213, Crosby offers further remarks concerning Trinity.

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Trinity sculpture over the central portal, west façade (photo D. Schlitt)

which are the prayers of the saints’ (NRSV).32 With its placement at the apex of the central portal, this sculpture of the Trinity gives thematic focus to the chapel as a whole.33 We looked at the façade, enjoying its beauty and especially that of the intricate carvings in the central portal. Suger writes often of such beauty of structure and ornamentation as leading those who see it to an experience of the source of that and all beauty.34 After sharing various reflections concerning the beautiful 32

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Crosby, Royal Abbey, 182; and see Gerson, ‘Suger as Iconographer’, 188. Furthermore, Gerson suggests that the image of the Father holding the oval disk recalls the idea of creation with the Father as Creator and the oval disk representing the cosmos. The ‘Lamb and the Cross stand for the sacrificed Christ, who died on the Cross to make his relationship to the cosmos visible to us’ (193-94). For a description of the overall dynamic of the central portal leading above the doors to ‘the crucified Christ, also the judge, [who] will select those who will enter the Celestial Kingdom to see the Trinity “face to face”’, see Crosby, Royal Abbey, 191-92. See, for example, Abbot Suger, Sugerii Abbatis Sancti Dionysii liber De rebus in administratione sua gestis, in: Oeuvres complètes de Suger, recueillies, annotées et publiées d’après les manuscrits

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architectural creations we had just seen, we passed through the right-hand portal, feeling sure we were entering a spiritual, indeed sacred, space. Narthax and Nave On arriving inside, what struck Harald and me the most was the relative darkness of the narthex or entrance area in comparison with the natural brightness of the square in front of the chapel. The entrance area was built in two storeys with massive columns and divided into several bays covered by ribbed vaults. The second storey, which was not open for a visit, contained two or so abandoned chapels. Though the entrance area had undergone various modifications over the centuries, we understood that it maintained its overall twelfth-century look.35 We did not linger in this area, being drawn quickly to descend several steps into the chapel proper. We entered the chapel’s nave or main body constructed after Suger’s death, but generally in line with Suger’s plans.36 In moving from the entrance area to the nave, we headed east in the direction of the altar. It seemed as if we were entering another world different both from

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pour la Société de l’histoire de France par A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris: chez Mme Ve Joules Renouard, 1867), 189, copy available at Google Books. Several of the verses on the door of the chapel encouraged those who see the doors to admire the ‘bright’ work which ‘brightens’ minds, leading them to Christ, ‘true door’ to ‘True Light’. Portarum quisquis attollere quaeris honorem, Aurum nec sumptus, operis mirare laborem, Nobile claret opus, sed opus quod nobile claret Clarificet mentes, ut eant per lumina vera Ad verum lumen, ubi Christus janua vera. The Latin text, along with an English translation, is also available in Administration, 46-49. We should note that these central portal doors are now long gone. Gerson identifies the poem from which these five verses are taken as a paraphrase of the first chapter of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. ‘Suger as Iconographer’, 186 with 195n11. See Crosby, Royal Abbey, 121-65. On the general lines of Suger’s intention regarding the new nave, see Crosby, Royal Abbey, 102. Of note, Edward B. Foley discusses at some length various aspects of the interior layout of the Saint-Denis chapel from the perspective of his concern for the liber ordinarius ‘Ordinary’, namely, manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 526, describing in great detail the various spiritual and more practical aspects of prayer during the liturgical year at the chapel. The First Ordinary of the Royal Abbey of St.-Denis in France (Fribourg, Switzerland: The University Press, 1990). See chapter 4, ‘Spatial Deployment’, 183-260. The manuscript dates from between 1234 and 1236 (58), with the nave then still that of the time of Abbot Suger. In his well-documented study, Foley refers often to Abbot Suger. The back cover to his volume stresses the continuing influence of Suger on liturgical and common prayer at the Abbey: ‘Reflecting the work of Abbot Suger (d. 1151) this codex, written c. 1234, documents the state of worship in the hybrid Gothic-Carolingian church which existed until the late thirteenth century’.

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the square in front of the chapel and the chapel’s entrance area. The move more specifically from entrance area to nave seemed like one from night-to-day. The relative darkness and closer quarters of the entrance area rendered the shift to the nave even more striking. There we found ourselves in a world of great height, slender columns, an impressive open space, large windows, and light.37 There was no longer that feeling of a certain stability previously engendered by gazing at the façade. Now it was all dynamic thrust upward. We quickly looked up and around. Up because the first impression was one of great height. The vertical architectural lines led the eye dramatically upward.38 Then around as well, but especially straight ahead. We went a little farther into the nave and examined the vertical lines more closely, noting that each of the two side walls of the nave rose as a series of three storeys of arches. Probably persons of the Middle Ages would have noticed them more quickly than we did and spontaneously thought of the Trinity. But for us it was reading ahead of time which had alerted us to the fact that Suger meant to draw ‘explicit attention to the Trinitarian symbolism of three-storey elevation’.39 Harald and I spent some time looking at and thinking about these threestoreyed walls, each of which forms a harmonious whole. We had found no indications in our reading as to whether one might identify a specific storey and its row of arches with a specific divine Person. But we felt comfortable thinking along such lines. The lowest of the three storeys of arches, the nave arches, open onto side aisles from which smaller windows offer relatively less direct light to the nave. Perhaps, in what may simply have been our imagination running a bit wild, we thought this storey of arches hinted at the way in which the Spirit is 37

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On the move from darkness to light in Gothic churches, see: Seasoltz, Sense of the Sacred, 139; Barron, Heaven in Stone and Glass, 21-27; and remarks by Aline Kiner and pictures by François Guénet in the magnificent volume, La cathédrale: livre de pierre (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2004), 60-63. Caroline Astrid Bruzelius remarks that this sense of the vertical is complemented in the 13thcentury nave by an emphasis on the horizontal, resulting in not only a feeling of height but also of great volume or interior space. The 13th-Century Church at St-Denis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), for example 6. She provides a thorough description and study of the nave and reconstructed upper levels of the chevet or choir. Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, 52. A fuller citation reads as follows: ‘The basic three-storey elevation of Gothic form (main arcade, triforium and clerestory) cannot be explained purely by progress in engineering. Both Rupert of Deutz and Abbot Suger in the twelfth century drew explicit attention to the Trinitarian symbolism of three-storey elevation’. See also Christopher Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral: The Architecture of the Great Church 1130–1530 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 65: ‘The early 12th-century writer Rupert of Deutz specifically mentions the three-storey elevation as a symbol of the Trinity, and there seems little doubt that both he and Suger (…) were only articulating formally what most medieval clergy would have taken for granted’.

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envisioned in many Christian traditions. Christians often think of the Spirit as present in and to them in a somewhat more discrete, but always foundational, fashion. The Spirit dwells in them and refers them to the risen Lord (for example, John 14:16-17, 26). In this lowest storey, these nave arches support and point upward to the second storey or triforium. This storey and middle row of arches is shorter in height than the other two, but its windows open directly onto the nave. It sheds brighter light on persons in the nave below. The arches themselves are more intricately carved. In their intricacy they remind us of the concrete detail and chronological sequencing of the earthly life of Jesus, now the risen Lord. The arches in this second storey, in turn, point upward to the third and highest of the three storeys, the clerestory. It is in height taller than the triforium but shorter than that created by the nave arcades. And its windows are large. They flood the nave below with light even on a somewhat cloudy morning. The light would have been bright, but especially colorful, had more of the original medieval glass windows survived.40 Harald and I immediately thought of this third storey as reminding us of God the Father, our goal as the source of light and indeed of all that is. It is as if the structure itself of the lower walls of the Saint-Denis chapel were reminding us of the Spirit who turns us upward to the Son. Then both Spirit and Son lead us farther upward to the Father. In this upward movement, the two walls converge as the vaults of the ceiling over the nave spring forth from between the windows on each side of the clerestory and meet in the center.41 Our overall impression was that strong vertical lines and three storeys of arches pointing up combine to give one the feeling of a threefold movement upward to an overarching ceiling. The ceiling, as well as other ceilings throughout the chapel, were made up of ribbed vaults, in shape triangular and possibly themselves recalling the Trinity. Filled with triangles, the ceiling and the arch-filled walls descending from it in turn dynamically and yet serenely embraced, even englobed, us and the immense volume of the nave.42 It was as if the Trinity had embraced the whole cosmos as represented by the harmonious ordering of the interior of the chapel.43 40 41

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Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone, 109; Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 3-4. Of note, the series of windows in each clerestory arch climax in a triangle of three round windows, two across the bottom and one above them, soaring together into the arched roof. Kieckhefer refers to A. Welby Pugin (1812–1852), important architectural figure in the Victorian Gothic Revival: ‘For him [Pugin], a church was meant to declare the three doctrines of redemption, Trinity, and resurrection (…) the Trinity in the triangular arches and in the subdivision of a church into sanctuary, choir, and nave’. Theology in Stone, 141. Regrettably, I have so far not been able to locate such remarks by Pugin directly in his writings. Simson writes that ‘the cathedral is perhaps best understood as a “model” of the medieval universe’ and ‘at once a “model” of the cosmos and an image of the Celestial City’. Gothic

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When speaking above about the west façade, we mentioned that Suger had written of what we might describe as another form of movement upward. He spoke several times of the ability of beautiful structure and ornamentation to lead one from them, that is, from the material, to the spiritual. Now, standing in the nave, Harald and I recalled that Suger had also spoken thus of beautiful furnishings such as bejeweled gold and silver crosses and sacred vessels.44 Most if not all of them, worthy of a royal chapel, have long since disappeared or been removed from the chapel. But, standing there in the nave, we could at least take a moment to listen to Suger as he spoke rapturously of the experience of moving from that which shines and sparkles to the ultimate source of such beauty. When (…) the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.45

Chevet At this point Harald and I continued to explore the nave, each on his own for a while. I myself moved farther down the nave to the place where it and transept aisles intersect in front of the sanctuary. Looking up toward the chevet or choir which seemed to crown the sanctuary, I was struck by the way in which the whole area where I was standing was flooded with bright, white light. It streamed down from the upper windows of the chevet and in from those in its individual chapels.46 Suger himself had highlighted a certain brightness as well when he

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Cathedral, 35 and 37. See Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, ‘Suger’s Liturgical Vessels’, 282-93, and William D. Wixom, ‘Traditional Forms in Suger’s Contributions to the Treasury of Saint-Denis’, 294-304, both in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium. Suger, Administration, 63, 65. On the windows in the chevet, see: Madeline Harrison Caviness, ‘Suger’s Glass at Saint-Denis: The State of Research’, 269-72, and Louis Grodecki, ‘The Style of the Stained-Glass Windows of Saint-Denis’, 273-81, both in Gerson, Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium. Conrad Rudolph, ‘Inventing the Exegetical Stained-Glass Window: Suger, Hugh, and a New Elite Art’, in: Art Bulletin 93 (2011), 399-422, came to my attention after completing this chapter. There has been some discussion as to whether Suger’s chevet included two upper storeys of arches. Crosby proposes that there was a three-storey structure to Suger’s original chevet. See his proposed diagram in Royal Abbey, 264-65. Clark agrees with Crosby’s proposal. ‘Suger’s Church at Saint-Denis’, 114-15. Bruzelius too understands that Suger’s chevet had a threestoreyed elevation. 13th-Century Church at St-Denis, 82-84. Of note, Wilson recalls that Abbot

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wrote in poetic form as part of the inscription marking the consecration of the chevet that the new part, to be identified with the chevet, is joined to the church enbrightens the rest of the church. And Suger underscores as well that he led the construction project.47 Impressive as the light from the chevet windows is today, it is not hard to imagine that it would have been even more attractive in Suger’s day. Then the windows were filled with multicolored stained glass. Crosby has imagined how the beauty of the light shining through the stained-glass windows would have appeared. Imagine the prismatic effects of multicolored light enhanced by the oblique angles of the windows and the concentration of illumination on the altars in the center of each chapel, with flickering candles supplementing the light from the windows during the celebration of the masses. The extraordinary brilliance within this crown of light still stimulates the imagination and quickens emotions.48

After such reflections, I again looked at the upper windows of the chevet and turned from left to right, gazing as well at the upper windows in the transept or cross aisle. The presence of such bright light was overwhelming. Suddenly, I no longer sensed my feet upon the chapel floor. Everywhere there was light in which I seemed suspended, feeling transported to an ethereal realm without limits or borders. At that point Harald joined me. We talked of this effect and, to use a somewhat more banal comparison, concluded it resembled what happens when one looks at a scene on an IMAX screen. There occurred a certain dissociation from anything beyond the immense, brightly lit space. We found ourselves within a kind of infinity. At this point, we recalled Suger’s fascination with light and its varied significance. Suger described its importance and impact in the chapel, an impact made possible by architectural innovations. As mentioned, he spoke, for example, of the brightness with which windows from the chevet filled the chapel, ‘And bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light’. On the original bronze doors, he referred to ‘the True Light where Christ is the true door’.49 He seemed to be reflecting various strands of Christian thought on God as light and

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Suger wrote the chevet was constructed in three years and three months. Gothic Cathedral, 66. See Suger, Administration, 49. ‘Pars nova posterior dum jungitur anteriori, / Aula micat medio clarificata suo. / Claret enim Claris quod clare concopulatur, / Et quod perfundit lux nova, claret opus / Nobile, quod constat auctum sub tempore nostro, / Qui Suggerus eram, me duce dum fieret’. Suger, De rebus in administratione sua gestis, in: Oeuvres complètes de Suger, 190. English translation, as well as Latin text, Suger, Administration, 50–51. Crosby, Royal Abbey, 258-59. Suger, Administration, respectively 51 and 49.

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on light as that which God sends forth upon us. We immediately called to mind several biblical texts. Among them we thought of Hebrew Bible texts such as Genesis 1:3-4, ‘God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good’. Or, Psalm 27:1, ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear’. And in the New Testament: John 1:9, ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world’; John 8:12, ‘Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world’’’; and, 1 John 1:5, ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’ (all quotes from NRSV). For centuries after the formulations of the Nicene Creed in 325 and 381, Christians had professed their faith: ‘And in one Lord Jesus Christ (…) light from light, true God from true God’.50 In drawing upon our prior reading, we recalled several short excerpts from texts by Augustine in the West and from PseudoDionysius in the East. Such brief texts illustrate something of the ways in which the two wrote about God and light. We thought about them because both were influential in medieval times and seem to have influenced, to some degree at least, Suger’s thinking and architecture.51 From Augustine we can cite the following example of remarks particularly pertinent to our consideration of God in relation to light. He [Christ] is light of the Father, who is light. (…) The Son (…) is Wisdom of wisdom, namely the Father, as He is Light of light, and God of God; so that both the Father singly is light, and the Son singly is light. (…) [T]hen, too, since He [the Holy Spirit] is God, He is certainly light; and since He is light He is certainly wisdom. (…) Therefore, the Father is light, the Son is 50

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Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, vol. 1, Nicea to Lateran V (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), 5 and 24. For nuanced considerations of Augustine’s and Pseudo-Dionysius’s influence on Suger, see the following two helpful texts: Bernard McGinn, ‘From Admirable Tabernacle to the House of God: Some Theological Reflections on Medieval Architectural Integration’, in: Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Kathryn Brush, and Peter Draper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 41-56, esp. 48-51; Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, 52-58. There seems to be a tendency in recent years to stress less the possible influence of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius on Abbot Suger’s thinking and, consequently, on the architecture he proposes. Foley, though, finds Pseudo-Dionysian/Sandionysian influences in the 1234 or so Ordinary he studies in great depth. He calls them ‘detectable’ and carefully notes that further study in this area is needed. But at the same time he stresses the importance of PseudoDionysian manuscripts in the abbey’s library and the study of them there. He finds this influence enhanced by the conflation of Dionysius the Areopagite, the martyr Saint Denis, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Of special note concerning the Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 526 manuscript, he concludes that ‘we believe that it is not an overstatement to suggest that A [the manuscript] outlines not so much a liturgy at St.-Denis as a liturgy of St.(-)Denis, and therein do we discover the true character of this worship’. First Ordinary of the Royal Abbey, 266-68, with the quotation on 271.

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light, and the Holy Spirit is light; but together not three lights, but one [spiritual] light.52

And from Pseudo-Dionysius, who argues in complex fashion to a Trinity beyond that which is manifest, that which is thought, light, and even being as such.53 Yet each of the three divine Persons can be referred to in terms of light. We learn from the sacred scriptures that the Father is the originating source of the Godhead and that the Son and the Spirit are, so to speak, divine offshoots, the flowering and transcendent lights of the divinity.54 ‘Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights’ [James 1:17]. (…) Inspired by the Father, each procession of the Light spreads itself generously toward us, and, in its power to unify, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the oneness and deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in. (…) Let us, then, call upon Jesus, the Light of the Father, the ‘true light enlightening every man coming into the world’ [John 1:9] ‘through whom we have obtained access’ [Romans 5:2] to the Father, the light which is the source of all light. (…) We must lift up the immaterial and steady eyes of our minds to that outpouring of Light which is so primal, (…) and which comes from that source of divinity, I mean the Father. (…) But we need to rise from this outpouring of illumination so as to come to the simple ray of Light itself.55

These biblical, Augustinian, and Pseudo-Dionysian text extracts help provide a theological context for Suger’s creative chapel constructions. They may also, perhaps at least indirectly, shed further light on the trinitarian significance of the three storeys of arches and their windows framing the nave and probably structuring Suger’s original chevet. Each of the storeys of arches provides in its own way light and, we might say in the spirit of Suger, divine light. Harald and I remained a moment longer at the intersection of the nave and transept aisles. We discussed further some of these texts regarding light in 52

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Aurelius Augustinus, On the Trinity, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, St. Augustin: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1887), bk. 7, chap. 3, arts. 4 and 6, pp. 107-9, accessed December 15, 2016, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/augustine-a-select-library-of-the-niceneand-post-nicene-fathers-of-the-christian-church-vol-3, available at Google Books. In citing excerpts from Pseudo-Dionysius on Trinity, I am taking guidance from John N. Jones, ‘The Status of the Trinity in Dionysian Thought’, in: The Journal of Religion 80 (2000), 645-57. The Divine Names, in: Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, transl. Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1987), chap. 2, art. 7, p. 64. The Celestial Hierarchy, in: Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, chap. 1, art. 2, pp. 145-46. Concerning Pseudo-Dionysius’s qualifying of references made to the three divine Persons, see The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, chap. 2, art. 7, pp. 63-64.

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relation to Suger’s rejoicing in the brightness of his reconstructions. It seemed easy, with Suger, to move in imagination from earthly light to the divine light of heaven. We turned back toward the entrance to the chapel, passing again through the darkness of the narthex or entrance area. As we walked out into the now much brighter square in front of the chapel, we saw the carousel turning around and round to the delight of several children riding on it. It was a pleasant Saturday afternoon. We headed across the square to a small restaurant to enjoy a leisurely French meal and further views of the chapel’s façade. Then Harald headed back to his home in Charlemagne’s town of Aachen, in Germany. An Architectural Testimonial The next morning, Sunday, was the feast of Saint Denis, patron of the chapel known as a basilica and now serving as the cathedral of the relatively new Diocese of Saint-Denis. I arrived early for the 10:00 a.m. Mass and sat about midway down the nave on one of the typically French wicker chairs. My mind wandered back to Abbot Suger and his day. It was fascinating to see how we can come to know persons from the distant past after reading at length what they have written and seeing what they have done. While respecting their being past, we still find ourselves feeling comfortable with them. We have a sense of what they are about. This is how I felt about Abbot Suger that morning. He was proud of his magnificent constructions which had brought together pointed arch, buttresses, large windows, and rib-vaults made up of triangles. On the outside, but especially inside, such elements as the chapel’s dynamic lines, harmony, proportion of parts, varied volumes of internal space as well as the interplay of darkness and light all combined to bring about something new. The chapel was a creative and inclusive space marked, from our point of interest, by many series of ‘threes’. With this feeling of knowing Suger, it now seemed easier to appreciate what he had intended and done. In bringing together varied elements of construction, he had created a trinitarian space. With it, he was in effect celebrating the centuries-long Christian experience of the Trinity. And he was encouraging his fellow Christians to come to a deeper awareness of the Trinity. He invited them to pass through a portal marked by the last judgment, leading upward to the Trinity, and, finally, to a rose window. In its circular form and blue-tinted glass, the window symbolized integration, harmony, wholeness, and infinity.56 Inside, dynamic vertical lines of pillars and arches 56

Yet Wilson notes as well that the rose window’s main purpose may simply have been to provide light to the upper level of the narthex. Gothic Cathedral, 34, 69.

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guided our gaze upward. Especially from on high, bright light flooded in upon a great volume of interior space created by walls of three series of arches pointing to rib-vaulted ceilings full of triangles. Suger invited those entering the chapel and rejoicing in such great light to proceed from narthex to nave to sanctuary. They were entering a sacred space, often referred to as heaven or the New Jerusalem.57 It is, then, as if he were creating a sense of spiritual place, and indeed more specifically sacred space, for us in which we could freely be our true Christian selves. With the creation of this spiritual place and space, Suger hoped to affect more deeply the lives of those who would see and then enter the chapel. It would seem he had a plan for them. As they moved forward toward the altar, they could for a moment at least sense that they were entering into the Trinity itself.58 Being embraced by the rib-vaulted ceilings and the three-storeyed walls would provide them with the opportunity to experience, together and in their own personal ways, the divine trinitarian embrace. They would be participating in the mutual love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, as Mass began, my attention focused more directly on the good number of people gathered here in common prayer. In looking around, I recalled a particularly important remark Philip Sheldrake had made in his writing on the Saint-Denis chapel. He stressed the importance of Augustine’s emphasis on ‘the church as a community of people, of the faithful who make up the Body of Christ. This is the tabernaculum admirabile, the “wonderful tabernacle” of Augustine’s sermon on Psalm 41 (in the Vulgate)’.59 Now here we were, the ‘wonderful tabernacle’, celebrating the Eucharist in this magnificent chapel. Organ and choral music enthralled us. Incense rose, creating shafts of light from 57

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See, for example, Hugh Honour and John Fleming, ‘In Context, the Gothic Cathedral, the New Jerusalem’, in: A World History of Art (London: Laurence King, 2009), 378-80. Sheldrake writes, ‘To enter the cathedral was to be transported into heaven on earth by the vastness of the space, by the progressive dematerialization of walls with a sea of glass and a flood of light and by the increasingly elaborate liturgies in which, sacramentally, the living Church was united with the whole court of heaven’. ‘Reading Cathedrals as Spiritual Texts’, 194. Abbot Suger had referred to Ephesians 2:19-22 when writing about his new construction. Consecration, 105. ‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saint and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God’ (NRSV). Erwin Panofsky notes that, by means of various additions to the citation from Ephesians, Suger applies Paul’s remarks to his own material construction. ‘Commentary upon the “Libellus Alter de Consecratione Ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii’’’, in: Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 241-42. Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, 53. And see Barron on the community gathered for prayer in the heavenly temple of the Gothic cathedral. Heaven in Stone and Glass, 119-25.

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on high. We moved in procession to receive Communion. By the end of Mass, I wondered how many here might have been aware of and appreciated Abbot Suger’s intention to provide us with this beautiful chapel as a testimonial to experience of the Trinity. Some may well have been tourists walking through and admiring a building important in the history of architecture. Others like me today and Harald yesterday would have prepared for the visit to better appreciate and then hopefully be inspired by Suger’s testimonial. Many in the gathered community would have read the remarks in a display inside the entrance to the chapel. These remarks would have alerted them to the trinitarian significance of the west façade and, consequently, of the significance of the chapel as a whole. Of import, we in our worshipping community had celebrated the Eucharist, during which we professed our faith by reciting the Creed with its trinitarian structure. In so celebrating within the Saint-Denis chapel, we became at least for a moment the fullest expression, perhaps better, realization of Suger’s architectural testimonial to experience of the Trinity. Suger’s testimonial, originally expressed in stone, glass, and light, had led many of us to experience an at least momentary sense of communal and personal wholeness. We had a momentary feeling of well-being in relation to one another and to the world to which we were returning. As we left the chapel, I noticed the carousel was quiet. But its horizontal, round shape now reminded me of the vertical, round shape of the rose window high up on the chapel’s façade. And the sun was shining.

CHAPTER 5 JULIAN OF NORWICH Spiritual Memoirs

From Paris at the time of Abbot Suger, now somewhere around 250 years later we cross the English Channel and head 100 miles north of London to the busy merchant town of Norwich. Julian of Norwich lived there much of or all her life. She was born around late 1342 and died after 1416. Her mystical experiences and what she wrote about them have become the subject of ever-increasing interest.1 As many have commented, we know relatively little about her personally.2 She did not write much about herself, which seems to reflect her desire to focus instead on what God has shown her. Still, her own strong personality and deeply spiritual life come through in her writing. We do not, though, even know her given name. The reference to her as Julian of Norwich seems to follow a traditional approach toward anchoresses, persons who, with the blessing of the 1

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Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 165. For an excellent, easily accessible overview of Julian and of themes in her writings, see Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 5, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550) (New York: Herder & Herder/Crossroad, 2012), 425-70. I am grateful to Melody Escobar, Raquel Feagins, and Misty Garcia for information concerning introductory and overview materials on Julian of Norwich. Veronica Mary Rolf, Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life & Revelations of Julian of Norwich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013), 15-222, provides a wide-ranging, yet at times imaginative, presentation of the various personal, family, religious, social, political, and overall civil contexts within which Julian lived, prayerfully reflected, and intriguingly wrote; and, more succinctly, Grace M. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK Classics, 2000), 3-50. In his recent magisterial study, Julian of Norwich: ‘In God’s Sight’ – Her Theology in Context (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), Philip Sheldrake expertly provides a widely contextualizing study of Julian’s theology. For instance, in chapter 1, ‘Julian in Context’ (18-46), he situates Julian within her time and place. He examines what we know of her life, education, and religious background. His study presents, in careful synthesis, results of his analyses of Julian’s texts, along with critical discussion of previous interpretations of her writings. In his discussions and notes, he helpfully references much literature on Julian, her experiences, and her thought. For example, Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 3.

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Church, dedicated themselves to a life of comparative isolation and prayer. Her enclosed dwelling, a cell or anchorhold, was attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. Hence, her name.3 We can well surmise that she came from a family of merchants and workers. Some suggest she entered a convent or was at least closely connected to one earlier on in life.4 Others claim she was married and had at least one child before becoming an anchoress.5 In her day, she does not seem to have been well known beyond her own region. But there she was recognized as a valued spiritual counselor. The nature of her early education has been much discussed. In any case, over the course of her life she developed great skills in research and writing. She is ‘the earliest known woman writer in English’.6 Julian lived in a tumultuous era. With Veronica Mary Rolf,7 and using her own expressions, we can say, almost assuredly in understatement, that Julian lived in a time of great uncertainty. Weather often decided if people had enough to eat. The Hundred Years War with France, recurrent plagues which were later called the Black Plague, a short adult life expectancy, violence in the streets, family feuds, foreign invasions. These all contributed to an unstable situation. The era was equally one of difficulties in the Church. A papal schism with multiple popes, persecutions of those wishing to work with the vernacular Bible, restrictions on women in the area of theological reflection. It is a wonder, we could almost say a miracle, that in such difficult times Julian was able to write with such great tranquility.8 She shows serene confidence in the triune God who is pure love bereft of any anger or desire for revenge. Julian’s sense that God is pure love is rooted in her visionary experience9 of, as she expressed it, our suffering Lord Jesus. As Julian indicates, she fell deathly ill in 1373 at the age of about 30. During that illness, she had an experience of the suffering Christ. On May 13th, some would suggest May 7th, she had a series

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Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, 4. As noted by McGinn, ‘Julian of Norwich’, 425. For example, Sister Benedicta, SLG, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Kenneth Leech & Sister Benedicta, SLG, Julian Reconsidered (Fairacres, Oxford: SLG, Convent of the Incarnation, 1988), 21-25; Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 138. Sheldrake reviews several opinions regarding Julian’s possibly being a widow. In God’s Sight, 26-27. McGinn, ‘Julian of Norwich’, 425. Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 15. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., & James Walsh, S.J., introduction to Julian of Norwich: Showings, translated from the critical text with an introduction by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., & James Walsh, S.J. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978), 26. The expression is taken from Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, for example 15, and Nicholas Watson, ‘The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, in: Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Routledge, 2012), 71.

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of visions which she called ‘showings’ (Middle English, schewynge).10 After recovering from the illness, she spent time in prayerful reflection on these showings and their meanings. She may have written what we have come to call her Short Text within the first few years after the illness and the visions or even several years later. She says in chapter 86, of what is referred to as her Long Text, that she wrote it ‘fifteen years after [the showings] and more’ of further prayer, study, reflection, and confirmatory spiritual experiences. We will examine several excerpts from each of these two texts. The excerpts chosen are ones which will help see Julian’s texts as expressions of, and testimonials to, her experience of the Trinity. Regrettably, working with such excerpts will not permit us to appreciate the overall rhythms of her literary composition as well as we would like. 10

The text in Julian’s Showings, Long Text, revelation 1, chapter 2 herself identifies the date of her showings or visions as May 13, 1373. Julian’s Showings, Short Text, chapter 2, gives her age, ‘thirty and a half years old’, at the time of the visions. Among several translations of Julian’s writings, I will in effect privilege the ‘critically established’ Middle English texts as found in Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., & James Walsh, S.J., part 1: Introduction and the Short Text, part 2: Introduction and the Long [title page reads Short] Text (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978). We should take note as well of the recent edition, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson & Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), with which Sheldrake works primarily. In God’s Sight, 9, and see 7-10, 161-64, 165 on Julian’s texts. For practical purposes, reference will be to the modern translation of Julian’s two texts, namely, the Short Text and the Long Text in Julian of Norwich: Showings, translated from the critical text with an introduction by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., & James Walsh, S.J. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978), abbreviated Showings and referred to in notes simply as Showings. Reference to the Short and Long Texts will be by chapter since the chapters are relatively short. The one exception will be quotations from chapter 51 in the Long Text. These quotations will be referenced by page as well (usually within the text) since the chapter is long. Occasionally references in the Long Text will include indication of the revelation (Julian’s 16 revelations or visions listed in chapter 1 of the Long Text) to which a specific chapter is related if such noting may be of possible help, interest, or importance. Working with this modern translation may at times involve losing some of the literary character of Julian’s Middle English texts. For a full discussion of the overall Julian manuscript tradition, see Colledge & Walsh, Introduction and the Short Text, 1-33. Though I accept that Julian is the author of her texts, none of the presently available manuscripts comes from her hand. We might note that, rather than working with a critically established text, some researchers prefer to work directly with one or more of the Julian manuscripts themselves. Sometimes one seems to gain a sense of special closeness to Julian when working directly with a specific manuscript. An example of someone who so works is Julia Bolton Holloway, Julian Among the Books: Julian of Norwich’s Theological Library (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Of note, in reviewing the overall manuscript tradition, Holloway stresses the role of women religious in preserving and transmitting Julian’s texts (246-88). Julian herself identifies the date of her showings or visions. Showings, Long Text, revelation 1, chapter 2. In Showings, Short Text, chapter 2, she gives her age at the time of the visions.

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For instance, she artfully interweaves references to the past with remarks on the future. Nor will we be able to recognize in any detail the equally artful ways in which she, in her ‘biblically learned’ and ‘theologically daring’ thought, worked innumerable scriptural texts or allusions to them into her own texts.11 Even so, perhaps here and there we can glimpse something of the high literary quality of her writing. We turn then first to the Short Text. The Short Text: Visions Recounted The Short Text is a more straightforward recounting of Julian’s visionary experience and Julian’s subsequently developed understandings of it. Philip Sheldrake speaks of it as ‘the earlier more personal Short Text that directly expresses her visionary experiences’.12 We might call it an early spiritual memoir. It consists in 25 chapters, which include further prayerful reflection on her experience. As a result of this process of further reflection, the Short Text itself becomes a complex writing, while remaining more direct in its recounting than the Long Text. Already in the Short Text, we meet Julian as a profound mystic who wants to share her experience and understanding of it with others. Given our present interests, we will examine several excerpts from the Short Text gathered under three headings, namely, Experience, Trinity, and Testimonial. We will then turn to the Long Text. Experience As Denise Nowakowski Baker has well established, Julian’s ‘concentration on the suffering of Christ’s humanity situates Julian within the culture of affective spirituality that pervaded popular religious life during the late Middle Ages’.13 Affective spirituality stressed seeing Christ in his suffering, accompanying him in it, and indeed identifying with him in it. Julian reflected this religious and 11

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See the excellent article by Annie Sutherland, ‘“Oure Feyth Is Groundyd in Goddes Worde”: Julian of Norwich and the Bible’, in: The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 1-20. Sheldrake estimates, however, that Colledge’s & Walsh’s list of Julian’s biblical parallels and evaluation of Julian’s theological resources have been overly generous. In God’s Sight, 26 and see 3-4. Sheldrake, In God’s Sight, 3. He further notes that ‘the Short Text is basically a scene-by-scene account of her visionary experience in twenty-five chapters and roughly eleven thousand words’ (28). Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 15. I will be taking guidance concerning the reading of the Short Text especially from Baker. She discusses this text at some length (15-62) in relation to affective spirituality.

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spiritual outlook when, in chapter 3, she wrote of her initial vision of ‘our Lord Jesus’. ‘Suddenly I saw the red blood trickling down from under the crown, all hot, flowing freely and copiously, a living stream, just as it seemed to me that it was at the time when the crown of thorns was thrust down upon his blessed head’. Julian refers to such corporeal vision as a ‘bodily vision’ (bodylye syght), stressing in this way the physical nature of the vision and its content.14 In her descriptions of various bodily visions of the suffering Lord Jesus, Julian may well have been influenced by what she saw and heard in everyday life before she became an anchoress. Religious paintings, passion plays, or even gruesome public executions may have provided images coloring ways in which she expressed what she experienced.15 Julian also refers to a ‘spiritual vision’ or ‘ghostly sight’ (gastelye syght). By this type of vision, of the Trinity as such for example, she means one which comes to her in a more ethereal form. It often concerns and further develops a more immediately seen bodily vision.16 This spiritual vision is part and parcel of her overall visionary experience, with bodily vision and spiritual vision at times occurring in the same experience. In chapter 7, Julian mentions what I would call additional prayerful reflection as a further element in this overall experience with which she is working in this text. ‘All this blessed teaching of our Lord was shown to me in three parts, that is by bodily vision and by words formed in my understanding [vndyrstandynge] and by spiritual vision’. As I see it, Julian believes that this understanding is a process led by our Lord. It includes such activities as study, reflection, reasoning, and imagination.17 This 14

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Julian’s references to bodily vision, in translation sometimes referred to as corporeal sight, can be found for example in chapters 4 and 7. Paul Molinari describes what Julian means by bodily sight or bodily vision. ‘We may conclude that the salient feature of the “bodily sights” is that they have reference to a corporeal object – mainly the Humanity of Christ – which is by its nature perceptible to the senses [taken in a wide sense to include, for example, imagination, sense-memory, and so forth], and thus may be described in a detailed and realistic way’. Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a 14th Century English Mystic (London: Catholic Book Club, 1958), 36. Concerning several possible influences on Julian’s description of the suffering Christ which, however, do not necessarily call into question the authenticity of her visions, see Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 40-62, and Sheldrake, In God’s Sight, 153, who agrees with Baker. Even in the context of the Trinity, though, the second Person can appear in a more concrete way, given the Incarnation. Julian’s references to ‘spiritual vision’ can be found, for example, in chapters 5 and 7. Molinari describes such spiritual vision or ghostly sight. It ‘is a vision granted freely by God himself without direct and intrinsic connection with any senseexperiences. It is exclusively concerned with purely spiritual objects (mainly God himself) which are not described in detail’. Julian of Norwich, 41. Molinari, Julian of Norwich, offers helpful remarks concerning Julian’s use of ‘understanding’ on 47 with n. 2. On 42-48, he comments on further, more complex ways in which Julian writes of spiritual or ghostly experience.

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threefold pattern of bodily vision, understanding, and spiritual vision describes the process Julian goes through. It results in her writing down her experience as well as her subsequent further reading of it. In describing this overall process, she would seem to be identifying what we today would likely call a wider and more inclusive notion of experience. This threefold pattern is repeated in various ways throughout the Short Text and especially the Long Text. It is usually present, one way or another, whenever she recounts her visionary experience. In this way, that experience comes to fuller and richer expression when considered in, and through, all three of these forms of experience: bodily vision, spiritual vision, and understanding. Trinity Here, in the Short Text, Julian mentions the Trinity explicitly and at length in only three of its 25 chapters, namely, chapters 12, 15, and 17.18 We find her first interpretation of her visions, with explicit reference to Trinity, in chapter 12. Strikingly, she opens the chapter by noting a marked shift in the bodily or corporeal vision of her Lord Jesus. Her Lord’s appearance changed from one of great suffering to one of joy. Her Lord says he would have gladly suffered more for love of her if he could have. And this made Julian herself joyful. With this double reference to joy, Julian shifts the whole tenor of her presentation. She now speaks of the Trinity and of each of the divine Persons touchingly in terms of various emotions. She says that her ‘understanding was lifted up into heaven, and there I saw three heavens; (…) all are of the blessed humanity of Christ. And none is greater, none is less, none is higher, none is lower, but all are equal in their joy’. Julian then considers each of the three heavens. We will do well to paraphrase her expressions closely here as we refer to them. The first heaven is the Father seen in a non-corporeal likeness. He rewards his Son, Jesus, with the joy he takes in him. This first heaven, the Father, is full of bliss. And Jesus’ joy resides both in what he did for our salvation, as Julian says, and in the gift from his Father. She goes on to sum up her understanding of the Trinity in terms of joy, bliss, and endless delight. ‘By “joy” [ioye] I understood that the Father was pleased, by “bliss” [blysse] that the Son was honoured, and by “endless delight” [endeles lykynge] the Holy Spirit’.19 When interpreting these emotions with which she describes Father, Son, and Spirit, we would not want to fetter Julian’s creative, 18

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And of further note, in chapter 24 Julian mentions the attributes (properte, propertees) of the Trinity twice, seemingly more in passing. It may be of general interest to note, in an Eastern Orthodox context, that ‘according to St. Gregory Palamas [Cap. Phys., 37], in the heart of the Trinity, the Spirit is “the eternal joy

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and warmly inviting, use of such emotion-based language. Such use can engender a wide variety of feelings and insights in those who read and pray over or meditate on the texts themselves. Even so, we might note, for instance, that her linking Father with joy while saying all three are equal in joy seems to pick up on the thought that the Father is the origin of the Trinity. Speaking of the Son in terms of bliss captures Jesus’ happiness in what he has received from the Father and at doing all he can out of love for us. And referring to the Spirit as endless delight recalls both the idea that the Spirit is the love between Father and Son and the role of the Spirit in our hearts enabling us to enjoy the Trinity. Julian continues, ‘The Father is pleased, the Son is honoured, the Holy Spirit takes delight. Jesus wants us to pay heed to this bliss for our salvation which is the blessed Trinity, and to take equal delight, through his grace, whilst we are here’. In effect, Julian identifies our salvation with participation in the joy of the Trinity. By speaking of heaven, indeed, three heavens, she seems to be referring both to the Trinity she has experienced as our final goal, namely, our ultimate salvation, and to our bliss even now. Julian’s is a truly affective, experiential reading of the Trinity. In chapter 15, Julian works with and builds upon robustly Middle English words to explain further her vision-based understanding of Trinity.20 She does this at a moment when Middle English was coming back into its own. Overall, for several centuries Latin and French had dominated in literary, ecclesiastical, and political circles. In what is perhaps her most famous phrase, she writes that our good Lord said: ‘I will [wille] make all things well, I shall [schalle] make all things well, I may [maye] make all things well and I can [can] make all things well; and you will see that yourself, that all things will [schalle] be well’. Interestingly, Julia Bolton Holloway21 proposes that this sentence is a direct translation of the word shalom from the Hebrew text of 2 Kings 4:23, 26. There, it indicates ‘all’, ‘wholeness’, ‘all being well’.22 In her fine literary style, Julian here

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(…) where the Three delight in each other”’. Cited by Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood, 1990), 3. For a succinct discussion of various forms of English in relation to Julian’s own writing and to the various manuscripts on which today’s texts of Julian’s Showings are based, see Sheldrake, In God’s Sight, 161-64. Holloway, Julian among the Books, 28-29, 51, 68-69. The reference to shalom is noted as well by Anne Hunt, The Trinity: Insights from the Mystics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 103. In these references, Elisha the prophet brings back to life the deceased son of a Shunammite woman. ‘He [the Shunammite woman’s husband] said, “Why go to him [Elisha] today? It is neither new moon nor sabbath”. She [the Shunammite woman] said, “It will be all right” (…) [Elisha said to Ghazis his servant] run at once to meet her [the Shunammite woman], and say to her, “Are you all right? Is your husband all right? Is the child all right?” She answered, “It is all right”’ (2 Kings 4:23, 26 NRSV).

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repeats the first word ‘I’ and the last word ‘well’ in a succession of clauses.23 She reinforces, in cumulative fashion, what she is saying. Truly, all shall be well. In interpreting these words of her Lord, Julian may be more sensitive to some possible Middle English verbal distinctions than we would be in using them today. She understands ‘may’ as applying to the Father, ‘can’ to the Son, ‘will’ to the Holy Spirit, and ‘shall’ to the ‘unity of the blessed Trinity’. In effect, then, Julian seems to be referring first to the Spirit (wille). With ‘may’ she seems, among various possibilities, to be stressing the freedom of the Father. With ‘can’ she describes the ability and resources the Son has which permit him to make all things well. And with ‘will’ she identifies the present and future intention on the part of the Holy Spirit. She takes ‘shall’ to express the idea that making all things well is the work of the Trinity as a whole. With ‘you will see that yourself’ she understands all humankind who will be saved in the Trinity. Julian brings her reflection in chapter 15 to a close with further comment on the work of the Trinity. She sees the Trinity at work both in creation from nothing and especially at the end-time. ‘For just as the blessed Trinity created everything from nothing [nought], just so the same blessed Trinity will [schalle] make well all things which are not [nought] well’.24 With chapter 17, Julian fills in, somewhat more, certain ecclesially oriented aspects of her thought on the Holy Spirit as endless delight. She refers to her complex distinction between the animal will and the good will. The animal will is located in the lower part of the soul where it can sin. The good will acts in the upper part of the soul where, like the Trinity, it can only will the good. She is struggling here in a preliminary way to understand how there can be sin. And yet she says that God, ‘in the completeness of his love’, finally sees in the human soul only that which is good. It is in this context that she spells out in more detail what the Holy Spirit as endless delight might mean in the Church. She herself regularly professed fidelity to the Church, a point significant especially in its then tumultuous time. She names David, Peter and Paul, Thomas of India, and Mary Magdalen. They were sinners for whom the Spirit ‘turns bitterness into hope of God’s mercy’. For Julian, then, the Spirit inspires those who feel themselves despicable to develop a sense of contrition for sin, to acknowledge and confess their sins with sorrow, and to accept penance. The wounds of sin are honors. Strikingly, Julian writes that sin is rewarded in heaven when God sees, in loving regard, only the good will.

23 24

Colledge & Watson, Introduction and the Short Text, 249n2. Sheldrake notes that in Middle English of ‘shall’ brings with it more the notion of ‘necessity’ than does ‘will’. In God’s Sight, 124.

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Testimonial Already early in the Short Text, in chapter 6, Julian writes that our Lord Jesus’ love for her and her love for all her fellow Christians impels her to share what he has shown her. ‘Everything that I say about myself I mean to apply to all my fellow Christians [evynn cristine], for I am taught that this is what our Lord intends in this spiritual revelation [schewynge]’. She hopes that all will joyfully consider what Jesus has shown her as being shown to them for their profit. Ultimately, what our Lord has shown her is meant for all because God loves all and shall make all well. She writes, ‘I speak of those who will be saved, for at this time God showed me no one else’. Toward the end of the Short Text, in chapter 22, Julian confirms anew her intention in writing about the showings. ‘This teaching and this true strengthening apply generally to all my fellow Christians’. Indeed, the Short Text is a way for Julian to share with her fellow Christians her experience of the Trinity and the joyful message it brings for them. The Long Text: A Spiritual Memoir Julian wrote her Long Text years after her original, indeed initial, visionary experience.25 As with the Short Text, the Long Text is a recounting of her 25

‘Original’ and ‘Initial’ refer from different perspectives to her same 16 early visions or showings. ‘Original’ tends more to identify them as they stand on their own. ‘Initial’ tends to imply that there are further reflections which in a sense prolong these original visionary experiences, now in a more reflexive and conceptual fashion. In general, I will be taking guidance on the Long Text especially from Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 63-164. More specifically concerning Julian on the Trinity and especially as presented in the Long Text, the following have proven most helpful: Joan Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 73-96; Nicholas Watson, ‘Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, 61-90, first published in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exetor Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991), 79-100; Alexandra Barratt, ‘“No Such Sitting”: Julian Tropes the Trinity’, in: A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), 42-52; Hunt, Insights from the Mystics, 98-121; Philip Sheldrake, Explorations in Spirituality: History, Theology, and Social Practice (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2010), 83-89; Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, 108-26; as well, Sheldrake’s recent book, In God’s Sight, deals mainly with the Long Text. In addition, Elizabeth A. Dreyer briefly reviews Julian’s experience of the Trinity with an eye to its helpfulness as a source in further theological reflection. ‘The Trinitarian Theology of Julian of Norwich’, in: Studies in Spirituality 4 (1994), 79-93, esp. 85-93. And note the excellent study by Kerrie Hide, Gifted Origins to Graced Fulfillment: The Soteriology of Julian of Norwich (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001). She treats of soteriology or theology of salvation from the perspective of the Trinity, concentrating on the Long Text. Though she brings the Trinity into her considerations throughout

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visions, but now much more. Sheldrake writes of it as ‘later, much longer and theologically more complex (…) the fruit of at least 20 years’ further intense reflection, (…) a rich and original work of theological-spiritual teaching’.26 In the Long Text, Julian refers to her visions as revelations (reuelation) and continues to speak of them as showings. In it, she more clearly distinguishes the 16 revelations from one another and distributes the text’s 86 chapters among the successively presented 16 revelations. In chapter 66, she says fifteen revelations took place on the day of her illness with a sixteenth occurring the following night. Here in the Long Text she treats the various visions at greater length than she did in the Short Text, including considerable additional reflection on their meaning. These further insights are the fruit of prayer over, theological reflection on, and confirmatory spiritual experiences concerning the visions experienced many years earlier. The Long Text is, then, in effect a more fully developed spiritual memoir. From it we will excerpt several texts and reflect upon them. As we did with the Short Text, we will gather them under the headings of experience, Trinity, and testimonial. Experience Julian describes her bodily vision of her suffering Lord in chapter 4, which she relates to the first revelation. This description corresponds with the one we have already seen in chapter 3 of the Short Text. In chapter 9 of the Long Text, she identifies the same threefold pattern of modes or forms of experience we have previously found in the Short Text’s chapter 7. The three modes are, again, bodily vision, understanding, and spiritual vision. In both texts, she is speaking of this threefold pattern in relation not only to her first vision but to all of them taken together. Particularly striking here in the Long Text, though, is the amount of further material included. Julian’s many years of prayerful reflection have borne much fruit. Julian counts these years more precisely while, in chapter 51, writing of the fourteenth revelation. ‘For twenty years after the time of the revelation

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the study, she helpfully makes an overall presentation of Julian on the Trinity in chapter 3, ‘Oneing Through the Trinity’, 45-60. Chapter 2, ‘A Hermeneutic for Interpreting the Showings, 19-42, provides helpful insights into, among others, Julian’s complex ways of relating experience and reflection on that experience. Sheldrake, In God’s Sight, 3. He further notes, ‘The move from an earlier Short Text to a later Long Text represents a shift from a more experience-based narrative by Julian as participant to a teaching-centered presentation by Julian as interpreter, informed by extensive reflection and also, apparently, by further divine revelation. (…) [T]he eighty six chapters of the Long Text, (…) at around sixty-three thousand words is roughly six times longer [than the Short Text]’ (28-29).

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except for three months [so, February 1393], I received an inward instruction’ (270).27 Concerning experience, then, here we encounter a situation and process more complex in character than the one Julian spoke of in the Short Text. This is the case especially if we say, as we are presuming for present purposes, that the Short Text was written some years before the Long Text. In approaching the Long Text, we can continue to speak of her visionary experiences. But we need as well to be aware of the long period of time between them and the writing of this text. Julian herself was rightly convinced of the importance of her experience of prayer and reflection subsequent to her initial revelations or visionary experiences. Over the years, that subsequent experience (understanding and further spiritual experience) had contributed considerably to her appreciation and further interpretation of her initial experiences. When we refer to her experience of the Trinity, we need to pay attention to her initial experiences and her first reflections as well as later ones. At least in principle, we should include in that reference all that followed and contributed to her Long Text insights concerning the Trinity. It is as if experience comes to refer to the initial visionary experiences, their spiritual and theological meaning she discovers through many years, and even her writing of the Short and Long texts. The writing of the two texts has provided her with the occasion to reflect anew on the initial experiences. Over the years, Julian seems to have tested, imaginatively, what she might consider further faithful expressions of those experiences. We can be justified in seeing such reflection on her initial experiences as a way of prolonging the experience, using the singular here to bring those experiences together. But now even the expression of her overall initial experience takes the form of more reflexive and constructive thinking about it. In effect, her reflection and writing have permitted her to return in a new way to her initial visionary experience. She does so with a richer and fuller understanding of it.28 27

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Julian is speaking specifically of the parable of a lord and a servant, to which we will turn shortly. Julian seems to have lived a varied and wide-ranging overall spiritual experience. She gave expression to this experience centuries before major efforts were made to develop a more complete, philosophically expressed understanding of what we mean by experience. For example, Baker in Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 7, 11-12, 168, draws upon the philosopher Peter Moore to work with notions of incorporated interpretation and raw experience to handle the question of cultural and religious influence on Julian’s mystical experience and Julian’s understanding of it. Baker refers, among others, to Moore’s study, ‘Christian Mysticism and Interpretation: Some Philosophical Issues Illustrated in the Study of the Medieval English Mystics’, in: The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium IV, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), 154-76. We might also recall the philosopher John Dewey’s three forms of experience: primary non-reflective experience; reflective experience; and, consummatory, enriched return to that primary experience. Respectively, to put it generally, they are the original experience, reflection on and further thought about that experience, and a return in

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Trinity Throughout the Long Text, Julian refers to Trinity more obliquely when, among various ways, she mentions several of what Anne Hunt identifies as traditional trinitarian triads. For example, Julian’s triads such as power/wisdom/ goodness and memory/reason/will recall ones which Augustine of Hippo had proposed many centuries earlier. Julian’s use of such triads in general, and especially these just mentioned, probably reflects Augustine’s indirect if not direct influence on Julian’s trinitarian understanding of her visions.29 Julian again refers explicitly to the Trinity, as she had done in the Short Text. But now, in the Long Text, she does so with greater frequency and at greater length. In two

29

a new and richer way to the original experience. In my reading of Dewey, ‘Reflected experience and consummatory experience are then, each in its own way, prolongations and developments of gross or primary experience’. On Dewey, see Dale M. Schlitt, Experience and Spirit: A PostHegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 100-7, with notes on 125-29 and quotation on 104. See especially the second edition of Dewey’s important volume, Experience and Nature in The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 1, 1925, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981, 1st ed. originally published 1925, 2nd ed. 1929). Regarding Dewey in relation to Julian, it would not be hard to see in her experience and writing something of what he was getting at regarding three forms of what we refer to overall as experience. We could think of the development of her overall experience of the Trinity, as she presents it, in terms of her initial visionary experience (bodily and spiritual), her prayerful reflection on and study of it, and her enriched understanding of it (possibly including further ‘revelation’) during and as the result of her writing about it. Hunt helpfully brings together several of these triads and identifies where they appear in the Long Text. Insights from the Mystics, 111-15. For ongoing commentary on several more oblique references to the Trinity in the Long Text, see Colledge & Watson, Introduction and the Short Text, 71-196, and to a lesser extent in the introduction to Showings, 23-119. Another, and perhaps more famous, example of Julian’s more oblique references to the Trinity is her recounting of her vision of something like a small, round hazelnut which represents creation as seen by God. Julian writes, ‘The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it’. The same wording is found in Showings, Short Text, chapter 4 and Long Text, chapter 5. ‘Creator’, ‘lover’, and ‘preserver’ are generally accepted as references by Julian respectively to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. On various more general references by Julian to triads, Sheldrake says that ‘her overall use of three-fold imagery echoes her rich theology of the Trinity as the in-built meaning of everything’. In God’s Sight, 60, see also 91, and his remark that Julian is ‘profoundly trinitarian in tone’ (83). To return to the question of triads, Denys Turner lists a good number of them, remarking that ‘she (…) plays with a variety of triadic variations of Trinitarian vocabulary, each serving via its resonances with our human experience to evoke some different experience of God’. Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 24-26, with quotation on 24. Melody Escobar kindly drew my attention to this study. In it, Turner sees Julian’s experience and thought as thoroughly trinitarian. For example, he writes, ‘As concerns her shewings, all that Julian ever sees in them is the Trinity, and all that Julian ever reads from what she sees is that in the Trinity all is love, a love that is absolutely unconditional’ (121).

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instances of explicit reference in the Long Text to the Trinity, these references to and descriptions of the Trinity correspond closely to what she says in the Short Text. The first case of such repeated reference occurs in the Long Text’s chapter 23. Here she speaks of the Trinity in terms of joy, bliss, and endless delight. The second case comes up in chapter 31, when she again refers to the verbs ‘may’, ‘can’, ‘will’, and ‘shall’ in relation to the three divine Persons.30 Then, in the Long Text there are, in striking moments of reflection, three further explicit references to the Trinity not found in the Short Text. Focusing on them will provide a particularly important insight into her thought on Trinity. Such focusing will prove especially helpful in documenting her testimonial to experience of the Trinity. In the first and shortest of these three moments of reflection, Julian describes her first vision or revelation in trinitarian terms. In the second, she provides a trinitarian understanding of her famous parable of a lord and a servant. And, in the third, she refers to both her Lord Jesus and the Trinity as Mother. The first of these three explicit references to the Trinity occurs in chapter 4. It is one of 9 chapters gathered together in relation to the first revelation Julian received. This first reference consists in several sentences not found in her graphic portrayal of the suffering Jesus as found in the Short Text’s chapter 3. Her remarks now in chapter 4 of the Long Text merit citing in full: And in the same [the first] revelation, suddenly the Trinity filled my heart full of the greatest joy, and I understood that it will be so in heaven without end to all who will come there. For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity. The Trinity is our maker, the Trinity is our protector, the Trinity is our everlasting lover, the Trinity is our endless joy and our bliss, by our Lord Jesus Christ and in our Lord Jesus Christ. And where Jesus appears the blessed Trinity is understood, as I see it.

Coming toward the beginning of the Long Text, this reference to the Trinity sets the tone for Julian’s fuller trinitarian explanation of her visions developed

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‘May’, ‘can’, ‘will’, and ‘shall’ is the order of verbs Colledge & Watson opt for here in the Long Text locution or what the Lord says. In this Long Text chapter 31, the order of verbs in the locution reads somewhat differently than that in the Short Text chapter 15. The locution in chapter 31 reads: ‘I may [may] make all things well, and I can [can] make all things well, and I shall [shalle] make all things well, and I will [wylle] make all things well; and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will [shall] be well’. This order differs from the order in the locution in the Short Text (see the Short Text quotation above in the presentation of that text’s chapter 15). In each of the two texts, Short Text chapter 15 and Long Text chapter 31, the order of verbs followed in Julian’s expositions is the same, namely, ‘may’, ‘can’, ‘will’, and ‘shall’. Colledge & Watson hold that the Long Text version of the order of these verbs in the locution ‘reports Julian more accurately’ than does the order in the Short Text. Showings, 229n135.

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over the course of the rest of the text. That tone is one of serenity and great consolation. With this trinitarian reference in chapter 4, Julian has shifted briefly from the brutal scene of Jesus crowned with thorns to the joyful attitude characteristic of her presentations of the Trinity.31 Already here she identifies the Trinity with heaven, where all will be joy. The Trinity is our lover, endless joy, and bliss now, but especially and definitively at the end-time. In each case, namely, now and at the end-time, Julian says we should always see the Trinity in relation to our Lord Jesus Christ. And, of great importance, she writes that ‘where Jesus appears the blessed Trinity is understood’. In principle, then, to provide a full accounting of all Julian says about the Trinity we would have to consider what she says whenever she speaks of or even refers to our Lord Jesus. The second instance of more explicit reference to the Trinity not found in the Short Text comes in the Long Text’s chapter 51. It is in this chapter, related to the fourteenth revelation, that Julian presents and interprets the famous parable of a lord and a servant. She explains that she had not brought it to the fore earlier because she had not understood the true, and I would add trinitarian, meaning of the parable. Only after years of prayer and reflection could she present and explain it.32 Chapter 51 is one of the 22 chapters Julian devotes to discussing prayer, the parable, and various further considerations linked to the fourteenth revelation.33 It is the longest of the Long Text chapters and can be considered ‘a key to Julian’s major theological insights and teachings’.34 31

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Already here at this transitional moment from a sorrowful view to a more joyous one, we should mention that Robert Llewelyn has captured something of the joyful spirit Julian displays especially over the course of the Long Text. He wrote, ‘Into this climate of theological cheerlessness and doom Julian’s message burst like a joyous song’. All Shall Be Well: The Spirituality of Julian of Norwich for Today (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 21. The following have proven particularly helpful in working with Julian’s parable of a lord and a servant: Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 83-106; Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, 167-202 esp. 190-201; Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 115-34, with 117 and 120-34 on his trinitarian interpretation of the parable, Turner sees the first half of the Long Text as Christocentric and the second half more trinitarian (131); Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 462-93; and especially Philip Sheldrake, ‘Two Ways of Seeing: The Challenge of Julian of Norwich’s Parable of a Lord and a Servant’, in: Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 17 (2017), 1-18. Sheldrake’s article captures with great clarity what Julian is saying as she recounts and interprets the parable. He most helpfully situates chapter 51 well in relation to earlier chapters leading up to and following it. See also Sheldrake, In God’s Sight, 66-82, which as he notes on 81n1 reproduces key elements of this article. Sheldrake writes that the ‘inner Trinitarian relationships and the way these are reflected in the status of humankind before God become the hermeneutical key to the parable’ (68). Colledge & Watson suggest a way of seeing and relating the various chapters gathered in relation to revelation 14. Introduction to Showings, 23-25. Sheldrake, ‘Two Ways of Seeing’, 1, 17, citing Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 83-106.

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Let us then imagine ourselves accompanying Julian as she writes this important chapter. She calls her parable of a lord and a servant an ‘example’ (exemplum). In Medieval times, such an example meant what we might today call an illustrative story useful in preaching.35 It usually had a certain orientation toward the future and the end-time.36 In this chapter, we find Julian filling the story with remarks relevant to various aspects of her experience and thought. But here we will focus more directly on her explicit references to the Trinity. She wrote them after presenting the parable, spelling out in greater detail her understanding of it resulting from many years of prayerful reflection. We move with Julian into chapter 51, noting that she has in the previous chapter expressed her deep concern over how to come to terms with her recognition of the reality of sin. On the one hand, she was faced with that reality and, on the other hand, with what she saw in her visions. In these visions, God looked lovingly at her and her fellow Christians, finding only good in them. Now, at the beginning of chapter 51, she shares a response she finally found to this quandary. She found it in a deeper understanding of the parable of a lord and a servant which the Lord Jesus had shown her many years earlier. In the first part of this chapter, she proceeds to retell the parable as such. We will do well to paraphrase closely what she writes. Such paraphrasing will help us follow along with her in her writing. It will reproduce here something of the dynamic involved in the way she presents the parable. We hope as well to get a taste of her concrete style and wording. Julian was shown a lord and a servant, ‘two persons in bodily likeness’ (267). The lord sits in rest. Before him stands a servant respectful and ready to do what his lord may ask. The lord in turn looks lovingly on the servant. Upon learning the lord’s will, the servant rushes off to fulfill it. But he falls into a ditch, severely injured. He could not escape and was unable to look on his lord, who continued to regard him with love. He suffered seven great pains: bruising; clumsiness; weakness; being blinded and perplexed as if he had ‘almost forgotten his own love’ (268); unable to rise; being all alone in the ditch; finding himself terribly confined in the ditch. Julian says she looked at the servant to see any fault but found none, only his good will and desire to please his lord. Two figures, their relationships, the pain the servant suffered, the love of the servant for the lord and the love of the lord for the servant. Julian has been reflecting on all these

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Colledge & Watson, Showings, 257n222. On Julian’s use of ‘example’ in her presentation of the parable of a lord and a servant, see Sheldrake, ‘Two Ways of Seeing’, 1-2, and Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 480-82. Again, see Sheldrake, ‘Two Ways of Seeing’, 1-2, citing Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 78-80.

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things over the years as she struggled to understand the parable and its message. While retelling the parable, Julian decides to interrupt briefly her recounting of this first part of her vision. She interjects a remark made in view of the second part of the vision. She describes the lord’s look on the servant as characterized by a double aspect. Outwardly, as we have seen in her description of the first part of the parable, the lord looked with great compassion on the servant. Now, in a more inward and spiritual aspect, the lord rejoices at the honorable rest and nobility to which the lord will lead the servant. Julian finds herself elevated to the level of the lord and takes on his perspective. This may well be a reference to her being elevated up into heaven as mentioned above in relation to the ninth revelation.37 Julian continues to underscore this more spiritual attitude on the part of the lord as she concludes her recounting of the vision of the parable of a lord and a servant. The generous lord says that it is most fitting for him to reward forever the poor servant beyond what he was before the fall. At this point, Julian moves from recounting the parable to spelling out the understanding of it to which she had come over many years. Still, during all these years the original vision did not leave her. She continued to notice many different characteristics in the servant, whom she will identify as Adam. She begins to describe the process of her further prayerful reflection and the results to which it led. She succinctly summarizes what she sees as the three attributes or what I would like to call moments in the overall process through which she had passed. ‘The first is the beginning of the teaching which I understood from it at the time. The second is the inward instruction which I have understood from it since. The third is all the whole revelation from the beginning to the end, which our Lord God of his goodness freely and often brings before the eyes of my understanding. And these three are so unified, as I understand it, that I cannot and may not separate them’ (269). This process provided her with great consolation and confirmed her in her conviction that all she had come to understand was of divine revelation. In the rest of the chapter, Julian spells out the understanding of the parable to which she has come. She includes many insights rich in spiritual significance. In accompanying her here, we will focus more specifically on key aspects of her explicitly trinitarian interpretation of the parable. We will highlight important elements in her interpretations of the lord, the servant, the relation between them, and the pain which the servant suffers. We will look with her at these four points, keeping in mind various perspectives from which she considers them. She will be considering, and we with her, the way in which the lord looks 37

Showings, Long Text, chapter 23, and Short Text, chapter 12. See Colledge & Watson, Showings, 268n233.

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on the servant. We will come to understand that this way is heaven’s perspective, indeed that of God. We will as well consider the way in which the servant, who is Adam and more, both looks to the lord and is, on his own, unable to see him. Julian first alerts us, the readers, to various details about the lord and the servant which she will interpret in her effort to identify whom they signify. Among them, I looked at the lord and the servant, at how the lord was sitting and the place where he sat, and the colour of his clothing and how it was made, and his outward appearance and his inward nobility and goodness; and the demeanour of the servant as he stood, and the place where and how, and his fashion of clothing, the colour and the shape, his outward behavior and his inward goodness and willingness. (270)

Julian then writes that she understands the lord as God. The context of her remarks shows that she means God the Father. She understands the servant as Adam, indeed Adam as one person who includes all of humankind. In God’s sight, all humans are one and one is all humankind. She understands that Adam is weakened, unable to look upon his lord and yet remains good in the eyes of his lord. Julian says she sees the lord happy with the servant’s will. But the servant is unaware of the lord’s happiness. He suffers in not seeing either the loving look of his lord or what he is in the eyes of the lord. Whereas the pain of the servant punishes him, the lord looks only to lead the servant to his bliss. And Julian would mean leading every Christian to her or his bliss. The lord is, and here we are again picking up on several of Julian’s own words, seated on barren ground, alone, his clothing ample, azure blue. He is handsome, merciful, pale brown of face, with black eyes. His is an attitude of loving, especially in his regard upon the servant when the servant falls into the ditch. The lord shows both what Julian calls earthly pity and heavenly bliss. She then interweaves further remarks about the lord with several about Adam, in this way stressing the relationship between the two. As she writes, ‘The compassion and the pity of the Father were for Adam, who is his most beloved creature. The joy and the bliss were for the falling of his dearly beloved Son, who is equal with the Father’ (271). Here Julian introduces a fundamental insight, namely, linking Adam and the Son of God based on the servant’s fall into a ditch. To put it inadequately, Adam falls into sin and the Son of God falls from the Father into the womb of Mary. The servant represents, perhaps better said is, both Adam as an individual and all of humankind, on the one hand, and the Son of God, on the other. The Son accompanies humankind until ‘we come up to heaven’. Julian then returns to considering the lord. Though God the Father showed himself as a human, he is not. That the Father sits on the ground shows he is waiting for humankind

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to be brought back by his beloved Son, through hard labor, from its fall into pain and suffering. Julian continues, eloquently. ‘The blueness of the clothing signifies his [the lord’s/the Father’s] steadfastness; the brownness of his fair face with the lovely blackness of the eyes was most suitable to indicate his holy solemnity; the amplitude [of his clothing], billowing splendidly all about him, signifies that he has enclosed within himself all heavens and all endless joy and bliss’ (272). The lord rejoices greatly over the restoration to be brought about by the Son. Julian then says she saw the servant ‘standing respectfully before his lord’ (272). She recognizes in the servant a double significance. Outwardly he is poorly dressed and remains off to the lord’s left. Inwardly he shows a ‘love which he had for the lord, which was equal to the love which the lord had for him’. As we saw in the parable, the servant rushes off to carry out the lord’s will, which is to prepare a treasure, a ‘food which is delicious and pleasing to the lord’ (273). Though Julian does not mention a garden explicitly, it is as if the servant is to prepare a garden from which to bring food pleasing to the lord. She then confirms what she has been saying in the following important remarks. In the servant is comprehended the second person of the Trinity, and in the servant is comprehended Adam, that is to say all men. And therefore when I say ‘the Son’, that means the divinity which is equal to the Father, and when I say ‘the servant’, that means Christ’s humanity, which is the true Adam. By the closeness of the servant is understood the Son, and by his standing to the left is understood Adam. The lord is God the Father, the servant is the Son, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is the equal love which is in them both. (274)38

Julian then writes that the Son was destined by the will of the Father to come to earth. The Son, while truly divine and equal to the Father, was servant already in eternity as he awaited the right moment to join humankind. At that moment, he rushed off to do the Father’s will. ‘And soon he fell very low into the maiden’s womb, having no regard for himself or for his cruel pains’ (275). In the parable, Julian sees the Son as servant having told the Father he is ready to rush to earth to glorify the Father. And, so the Son did. All humankind appeared in Jesus ‘for Jesus is in all who will be saved, and all who will be saved are in Jesus’ (276).

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The explanation continues: ‘When Adam fell, God’s Son fell; because of the true union which was made in heaven, God’s Son could not be separated from Adam, for by Adam I understand all mankind. Adam fell from life to death, into the valley of this wretched world, and after that into hell. God’s Son fell with Adam, into the valley of the womb of the maiden who was the fairest daughter of Adam, and that was to excuse Adam from blame in heaven and on earth’ (274-75).

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Julian reflects further on who the lord and the servant are. Among many touching details, we might note that the lord’s, here the Father’s, sitting ‘symbolizes the divinity, (…) for in the divinity there can be no labour; and that he shows himself as a lord symbolizes our humanity’ (276). That the servant stands before the lord symbolizes labour, and that he stands to the left his unworthiness before the lord. His standing to the left also represents the Father’s permitting ‘his own Son in human nature to suffer all man’s pain’ (277) for love of us. Here Julian expresses the Son’s suffering in words like those she had used earlier on to describe her suffering Lord. But now the Son’s clothing is ‘new, white and bright’. The Father’s clothing was blue, but the Son’s is now ‘a fair and seemly mixture’, richer than the Father’s. The lord no longer sits on the ground but on a noble seat. The Son stands ‘immediately before the Father, richly clothed in joyful amplitude, with a rich and precious crown upon his head. For it was revealed that we are his crown, which crown is the Father’s joy, the Son’s honour, the Holy Spirit’s delight, and endless marvelous bliss to all who are in heaven’. Julian has moved from her initial vision of Jesus crowned with a crown of thorns to the glorious crown of the Father, namely, Julian and her fellow Christians loved by the Father. Finally, the Son sits at the Father’s right hand, ‘in the highest nobility of the Father’s joy. (…) Now the Son, true God and true man, sits in his city in rest and in peace, which his Father has prepared for him by his endless purpose, and the Father in the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Father and in the Son’ (278).39 So it is that Julian ends this key chapter in the Long Text. She has come to understand the parable.40 The lord is the Father, pure joy. The servant is both the Son and Adam, with Adam taken as an individual and all of humankind. The Son is heavenly bliss, which is likewise Julian’s and her fellow Christians’ goal. The loving relation between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit, 39

40

Julian says, though, that this is not a literal sitting of one person aside another but an indication of being ‘right in the highest nobility of the Father’s joy’. Showings, Long Text, 278. Barratt, ‘Julian Tropes the Trinity’, 52, proposes that medieval artistic renditions of Father and Son sitting next to one another may have subliminally suggested the image to Julian. Again, it is of note that Julian’s writings in general are full of allusions to Scripture. Regarding the parable of a lord and a servant, Colledge & Watson point out that the parable recalls the notion of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. The parable and its understanding seem to draw as well upon the first three chapters of Genesis. Introduction to Showings, 71-72. For listings of references in Isaiah on the Suffering Servant, see Colledge & Watson, part 2: Introduction and the Long [title page reads Short] Text, 513-14n3 (note to text line 3). On echoes of the first chapters of Genesis and of New Testament Pauline and Johannine writings in the parable, see Colledge & Watson’s notes throughout the text of chapter 51 (513-45). Turner, in turn, sees Julian’s parable as intended to ‘gloss’ Jesus’ parable of the father and the prodigal son. Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 126-28. There Turner draws out further insight into Julian’s parable by making a more detailed comparison of the two.

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endless delight. The three love their created world and God the Father sees only good and good will in it and in Adam. With this reading of the parable, Julian comes to understand how it is that, in her visions, she only sees God loving the world and not angry or revengeful. God recognizes only good in it.41 She sees the world from God’s perspective. She seems to draw from her visions and subsequent understanding of them that all will be saved. At the same time, she understands that sin is real, for it is the pain and suffering which we see from our own perspective and everyday experience.42 Falling into the ditch caused the servant to suffer such pain. Yet, at the same time, the lord continued to look lovingly on the fallen servant. In several chapters which follow, Julian continues to explore these insights and their implications concerning a fuller understanding of humankind. She thinks prayerfully about them in the light of the Trinity’s love for humankind and humankind’s love for the Trinity. We need, though, to move ahead quickly to join Julian at chapters 58 and 59. They continue her writing linked to the fourteenth revelation. In chapter 58, she reflects especially on her lord Jesus, our Mother. In chapter 59, she extends this reflection explicitly to the whole Trinity, presenting the Trinity as our Mother. These two succinctly written chapters make up a third instance of Julian’s more explicit reference to the Trinity not found in the Short Text. In turning to them we listen again to Julian.43 Julian opens her reflection in chapter 58 with a reference to the Trinity and the creation of humankind.44 It was the Father’s eternal purpose to create human nature in view of the Father’s own Son’s incarnation. ‘And when he [here apparently both the Trinity and the Father] wished, by full agreement of the whole Trinity he [here the Father] created us all once’. This creation brought forth a union of us with the Father, a union assuring our remaining as ‘as pure and as noble as we were created’. In this union, we in turn love and delight and 41

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Llewelyn speaks of the ‘overwhelming generosity of God’ which Julian experiences and of which she writes. All Shall Be Well, 24. Baker argues convincingly that Julian does not follow the Augustinian stress upon sin seen from the point of view of its cause in human will. Rather, Julian develops an end-time oriented understanding of sin. She stresses that what God ultimately sees is the good in each person. Her stress upon the end-time rather than on causality permits her to develop her own theologically creative response to sin in which she avoids attributing wrath to God. See Baker’s wideranging remarks in Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 6-82. Regrettably we will not be able to treat of Julian’s complex anthropology, including the idea that ‘our soul is a created trinity’. Showings, chapter 55. On Julian’s theological anthropology, see Sheldrake’s focused treatment, In God’s Sight, esp. 102-19. See also what we might call a more philosophically driven presentation by Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 167-204. In working with chapter 58, we will again paraphrase Julian’s writing closely to capture something of Julian’s enthusiasm evidently expressed there.

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rejoice endlessly in our Creator. ‘And so, in our making, God almighty is our loving Father, and God all wisdom is our loving Mother, with the love and the Goodness of the Holy Spirit, which is all one God, one Lord’. In contemplating the Trinity’s work, Julian says she understood three properties. They are ‘the property of the fatherhood and the property of the motherhood, and the property of the lordship in one God’. Over the course of the rest of the chapter she rehearses these characteristics of each of the divine Persons in several different ways. Our Father protects us in what Julian calls our created natural substance. The Son perfects us in knowledge and wisdom more specifically regarding our humanity in its sensual nature, for he is our ‘Mother, brother and savior’. Our good Lord the Holy Spirit is ‘our reward and our gift for our living and our labour, endlessly surpassing all that we desire’. In the Father we have being, in the Son increase, in the Spirit fulfillment or, again, respectively, nature, mercy, and grace. Julian says that, in our substantial or created nature, ‘the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord’. Then Julian focuses at some length on the second Person, our Mother substantially and, with the Incarnation, our Mother sensually. ‘And our substance is in our Father, God almighty, and our substance is in our Mother, God all wisdom, and our substance is in our Lord God, the Holy Spirit, all goodness, for our substance is whole in each person of the Trinity, who is one God. And our sensuality is only in the second person, Christ Jesus, in whom is the Father and the Holy Spirit’. In several further chapters, Julian develops at great length what she means by saying that Jesus is our Mother, an image not uncommon in medieval literature. By way of example of the concrete way in which she understands Jesus as Mother, we can simply cite a brief remark she makes in chapter 63. For her, ‘the child does not naturally despair of the mother’s love, the child does not naturally rely upon itself, naturally the child loves the mother and either of them the other’.45 Julian works with these thoughts and many others concerning the loving notion of mother to describe the familiar46 and close relationship between Jesus and us, us and Jesus. 45

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Julian becomes concrete in her descriptions of Jesus as Mother. For example, ‘The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament’. Showings, chapter 60. See Sheldrake, ‘Two Ways of Seeing’, 2, on the greatest gift of ‘being familiar’ that a lord can bestow on a servant in the context of shifting relationships between lord and dependents in Julian’s day. In the Long Text’s chapter 77, Julian writes: ‘For our courteous Lord wants us to be as familiar [homily] with him as heart may think or soul may desire; but let us beware that we do not accept this familiarity [homelyhed] so carelessly as to forsake courtesy’. On

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‘Christ Jesus, in whom is the Father and the Holy Spirit’. With these words from chapter 58 quoted above, Julian seems to be recalling what she had said earlier on in chapter 4. ‘Where Jesus appears the blessed Trinity is understood’. It is as if Julian is preparing us for her further insight into the Trinity itself as Mother. She elaborates on this insight in chapter 59.47 Here, Julian provides a sort of summary of what she had said in the previous chapter. ‘As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. Our Father wills, our Mother works, our good Lord the Holy Spirit confirms. (…) [We] love our God in whom we have our being, (…) mightily praying to our Mother for mercy and pity, and to our Lord the Holy Spirit for help and grace’. It is important to note that here Julian refers to Father, Son, and Spirit respectively in terms of nature, mercy, and grace.48 Based on this triad, at the end of the chapter she expands the notion of divine motherhood to each of the three divine Persons. ‘I understand three ways of contemplating motherhood in God. The first is the foundation of our nature’s creation [Father]; the second is his taking of our nature [Son], where the motherhood of grace begins; the third is the motherhood at work [Spirit]. And in that, by the same grace, everything is penetrated, in length and in breath, in height and in depth without end; and it is all one love’. In effect, while Julian stresses the motherhood of our lord Jesus she is at the same time, and equally, saying that the divine Persons instantiate specific ways of understanding divine motherhood and that the Trinity is our Mother. Her attractive, touching insight into the Trinity as our Mother is unique and may well be ‘unparalleled in the Christian tradition’.49

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a related but more generalized point, several scholars speak of Julian’s insight into God’s love as ‘homely love’. These words convey the idea that in her descriptions of God’s love for us Julian is concrete, down to earth, and home-oriented. See, for example, Molinari, Julian of Norwich, 149-76; Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter, 73-79, where Nuth underscores that for Julian God’s love is our home and we are God’s home, 77; Hunt, Insights from the Mystics, 109-10, with further literature on this theme cited in 109n12. On Jesus as Mother, hence, putting it generally, the Trinity as Mother, see Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 519-20. Noted in a pastoral and spiritual context by Anne Cliff Boris, ‘Julian of Norwich, The Loving Motherhood of God’, Priscilla Papers 22 no. 1 (Winter 2008): 21-22, accessed June 7, 2017, https://www.cbeinternational.org/sites/default/files/pp221_jon.pdf. Hunt, Insights from the Mystics, 115-16. As Sheldrake puts it succinctly, ‘Ultimately, the Trinity is our Mother’. Explorations in Spirituality, 86. In a more general phrasing, Caroline Walker Bynum writes that Julian of Norwich’s ‘vision of God as Mother is one of the greatest reformulations in the history of theology’. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 136. Bynum refers more explicitly to Julian’s using ‘motherhood to speak of the Trinity’ (151). And see Nuth’s important conclusion in Wisdom’s Daughter, 94. ‘What is unique here is Julian’s understanding of the property of motherhood as an essential attribute of the Godhead. (…) The one and triune

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Testimonial As she did in the Short Text’s chapter 6, in the Long Text’s chapter 8 Julian writes, ‘Everything that I say about me I mean to apply to all my fellow Christians, for I am taught that this is what our Lord intends in this spiritual revelation’. Again, as Julian did in the Short Text’s chapter 22, here in the Long Text she assures us, in chapter 68, that ‘all this teaching and this true strengthening apply generally to all my fellow Christians’.50 Over the course of writing the Long Text, Julian speaks at times in the singular ‘I’ but often in the plural ‘we’ and in the possessive plural ‘our’. She is intentionally writing in the plural.51 As we read the text, this use of the plural ‘our’ subtly draws us into it. We easily begin to identify with, and in our own way make ours, what Julian is saying. Among many possible examples of such identification, the ‘our’ helps us see ourselves as Adam, who in the parable of a lord and a servant is all humankind. And even when Julian refers to her story as an example, namely, again in the medieval context a story one might typically use in preaching, she is making a point. In her own delicate way, she is preaching. She tells her message of God’s endless love for creation and each one of her fellow Christians. Julian’s great literary effort in the Long Text indicates a personal desire to understand more fully Julian’s original visionary experience. But there is more to this effort. It points to the fact for example, as Baker writes, that Julian ‘hones her descriptive powers in order to present her own visions in a manner designed [better] to elicit her reader’s compassion for the suffering Christ’.52 I would expand on this,

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God can be said to be our mother in her threefold function of motherhood toward us [citing Showings, Long Text, revelation 14, chapter 59, p. 297]’. For a recent reading of Julian artfully interweaving her experience and understanding of the Trinity as Mother with an overview of her writing, especially the Long Text, see Melody Escobar, ‘Anchoress as Ally: An Exploration of the Prophetic Spirituality of Julian of Norwich and Her Relevance Today’, in: Offerings: A Journal of Christian Spirituality and Practical Theology 12 (c. 2019), 29-51. See also Showings, Long Text, chapter 79. Sheldrake points out that ‘the language of the Long Text is much more plural than the Short Text; it uses “we” rather than the more subjective “I”’. In God’s Sight, 28. Throughout his study, Sheldrake stresses Julian’s writing about her experiences and what she has learned from them not so much for herself as for her fellow Christians. Here we can also apply this specifically to Julian’s experiences of the Trinity. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, 51 with 179n24, and see 144-45, even 135-64, for further remarks on Julian’s efforts to improve her communication with her fellow Christians. For a further consideration of Julian’s efforts ultimately to address an open and inclusive audience in oral and, of present interest, especially written communication, see Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Julian of Norwich’s “Modernist Style” and the Creation of Audience’, in: A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 139-53. Robertson stresses the open-ended nature of Julian’s audience. ‘Not only does Julian tell us to

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saying that her intention is likewise to bring her experience of the Trinity and its meaning to her fellow Christians for comfort and consolation. The process through which Julian moves from an original visionary experience on through years of prayerful reflection, including further contemplative experience, to her writing of the Short and Long Texts is wonderfully complex. In its totality, it constitutes, in a real sense, her overall experience of the Trinity.53 Not just her original vision, but the whole process of initial vision, reflection, and writing together make up her experience of the Trinity. She experiences the Trinity in each of these modes, and in ways appropriate to each of them. Vision brings with it a certain immediacy. Reflection provides her with the opportunity to imagine and test for herself various ways of faithfully expressing what she initially experienced. Recounting her initial experience and bringing in understanding gained from further reflection and contemplative experience results in written texts. These texts express her enriched appreciation of her initial visionary experience. In effect, the initial experience remained with her throughout the whole process. In a sense, then, her three-formed experience of the Trinity becomes her true testimonial to experience of the Trinity. It is this testimonial, as available through the Short and Long Texts, which she offers her fellow Christians.

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whom she addresses her work – to her “evencristen” (…) – but also the idea of an audience is very much part of Julian’s formulation of her account of her visions. She describes an audience that is both general and universal rather than particular and individual and that imagined audience (…) is fundamental to the text’s meaning. Julian’s goal, especially in her Short Text (also in a somewhat different way in the Long Text), is to recount a series of visions she had of Christ in such a way that we, the audience, experience those visions just as she did – and she invents a variety of stylistic strategies to achieve this goal’ (139 and see also, for example, 143 and 153). For Robertson, Julian’s ‘fundamental impulse (…) to open her visions wide’ is one of ‘dilation’ (146). In a parallel way, Turner writes that for Julian the cross ‘is Julian’s experience as a whole – her shewings, the Church’s teachings, and her own human perceptions of how things are’. Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 22. Within such a process, now considered more generally as including description of the relationship between the Short Text and the Long Text, Barry Windeatt stresses continuity between the Short and Long Texts as well as development of the former in the latter. ‘Julian’s Second Thoughts: The Long Text Tradition’, in: A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 101-15. Robertson speaks of Windeatt’s description of the process of development from the Short Text to the Long Text not as one of ‘replacement’ but of ‘amplification’. ‘Julian of Norwich’s ‘Modernist Style’, 145.

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Julian’s Gift to Us Julian witnesses that the Trinity has generously gifted her with a profound spiritual vision arising out of a bodily vision of our suffering Lord.54 The Trinity invites Julian to see the inner dynamics of mutual love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But Julian is touched55 by them in a way beyond what we usually mean by ‘mere’ seeing. Her experience of the Trinity is more holistic, blessing her with a sense of being loved by each of the divine Persons in specific ways and without reserve. The Father is her generous creator. The Son, her loving Lord, is familiar to her in deeply emotional ways as her Mother. The Spirit is her Lord, seemingly in line with the description of the Holy Spirit in the Nicene Creed. She feels the Spirit converting her and her fellow Christians from sin, consoling her in the trials of life of which she knew many,56 and confirming her endless delight in her love for Father and Son. Her experience of the Trinity has provided her with a liberating divine perspective on what she humanly sees as a world often scarred by sin and a sense of guilt. The Trinity shows her that all shall be well, that all will be whole.57 In effect, the Trinity shows Julian that she and all will forever be enclosed in the Trinity’s loving, maternal embrace.58 Such is the loving gift that Julian has received from God. And such is the gift that she herself, then, in love for her fellow Christians wishes to share with them. Indeed, by expressing in writing the gift she has received, she makes it available at least in principle to all her fellow Christians down through the 54

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As Jantzen has stated, and we have not had a chance to develop sufficiently here, ‘It is clear that this (…) desire of Julian’s, longing to long for God, is reciprocated by – is indeed a reflection of – what she sees as God’s longing for her’. Julian of Norwich, ix. See, for example, in Showings, Long Text, various references: to the ‘touch of the Holy Spirit’, chapter 6; and ‘I had a partial touching’ (here without specific reference to the Holy Spirit), chapter 56; having ‘contrition by the blessed touching of the Holy Spirit’, chapter 74. Julian in turn speaks of our fleeing to and touching our Lord, chapter 77. Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 486-87. Among Jentzen’s many helpful observations in Julian of Norwich concerning Julian on Trinity, I have found two of special importance: ‘The extent to which Julian’s thinking is permeated by a rich Trinitarianism becomes increasingly obvious, but, as already pointed out, this is no abstract divine ontology but connects at every point with Christian experience’ (120); ‘Julian, while arguably being aware of scholarly teaching, and having great respect for it, wishes to focus explicitly on the aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity which have a bearing on the development of our spiritual wholeness in the love of God’ (113); and see also 92-93. Indeed, for Julian the embrace is mutual. Hide reminds us, in her succinct phrase, of Julian’s ‘depiction of mutual enclosure between the Trinity and humanity’ (55). Gifted Origins, 55, where she quotes Julian: ‘We are enclosed in the Father and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Spirit. And the Father is enclosed in us, the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy Spirit is enclosed in us, almighty, all wisdom and all goodness, one God, one Lord’. Showings, Long Text, chapter 54.

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centuries. Including we who are her fellow Christians of today.59 Her various, experientially based theological convictions would seem to permit us to go a step further, extrapolating from what she teaches. Among them, she is fully convinced that in the Trinity all will be well, especially at the end time. In the meantime, God continues to see only the good in us. And, in her parable she understands that ‘God’s Son could not be separated from Adam, for by Adam I understand all mankind’.60 She would be happy to have all those who are in some way in search of God or at least something ‘more’ read her recounting and memoir, in effect, her two spiritual memoirs.61 That searching can itself be considered, in the logic of her initial experience and further reflection, a form of the Trinity’s own longing at work within us today. We can, finally, recapture something of her deep, emotional, and affective experience of the Trinity, which she leaves in legacy, by recalling her speaking of the three divine Persons in terms of joy, bliss, and endless delight. In these three sayings: It is a joy, a bliss and an endless delight to me, there were shown to me three heavens, and in this way. By ‘joy’ I understood that the Father was pleased, by ‘bliss’ that the Son was honoured, and by ‘endless delight’ the Holy Spirit. The Father is pleased, the Son is honoured, the Holy Spirit takes delight. Jesus wants us to pay heed to this bliss for our salvation which is in the blessed Trinity, and to take equal delight, through his grace, whilst we are here.62

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In her re-edition of Julian of Norwich, see, for example, vii-viii, Jantzen is more hesitant about saying ‘we’ and ‘us’ in relation to us today than she was in the earlier edition of her book. She draws attention, for example, to Julian’s not possibly being able to envision today’s world and we who inhabit it. Her helpful remarks remind us to be careful in using ‘we’ and ‘us’ when we refer to ourselves as Julian’s fellow Christians. But an example, from another perspective, might help as well. Augustine of Hippo could not have envisioned what a world would be like 1,500 years later. Yet, his Confessions speak meaningfully to many people today. In his case, he had taken up profoundly human concerns and written about them in often emotional terms, which made his thought travel well down through the ages. In a similar way, Julian’s working with such concerns and often expressing her thought in terms of emotions makes her writings attractive and of interest even today. We easily find meaning in them for ourselves. Indeed, many forms of written text take on a life of their own over time. Julian put the texts out there, so to speak. We can make them ours while acknowledging and respecting what she herself wrote. Showings, Long Text, chapter 51, 274. From a different perspective, Sheldrake stresses the potential impact of Julian’s writings on a wider group of readers when he opens In God’s Sight with the remark that ‘she [Julian] has the capacity to inspire a wide range of people, whether they identify themselves as religious or not’ (x). On a related question, namely, that of Julian’s possibly holding a universalist position, meaning that all will be save, see the discussion by Sheldrake, In God’s Sight, 132-36. See Showings, Short Text, chapter 12.

CHAPTER 6 ANDREI RUBLEV A Trinity Icon

After looking at Jesus of Nazareth’s founding experience of God, we have reviewed several testimonials to experience of the Trinity. We began with two written testimonials. They were Paul’s appeal to the Galatians and Basil’s argument ‘in the Spirit’. We have visited and walked through Suger’s royal SaintDenis chapel before reading Julian of Norwich’s written recounting of, and then fuller memoir concerning, her experiences. We moved from the first and fourth centuries in what is today Turkey to twelfth-century France on to fourteenthand fifteenth-century England. Now we cross Europe to fifteenth-century Russia to look at what we will see as a different form of testimonial. There we encounter an icon painted or, some would say, prayed into existence. Over many centuries, icons have attained a unique status in most Eastern Christian Churches. Eastern Christians revere them along with Sacred Scripture. They are gateways to God,1 openings to participation in sacred mysteries, and means of contact with the saints. They are an extension of the Incarnation and, as such, epiphanic or revelatory. Icons render present what they depict, in the first place, to communities in their liturgical celebrations,2 then to those in households as well as to individuals in personal prayer and meditation. In liturgical celebration, they are revered, kissed, and incensed. In a household, they are often placed high on a wall so they can be looked up to and honored. Whether in church or at home, individuals gaze upon them in prayerful contemplation, often for long periods of time. Centuries of icon development have led to conventions or certain agreed standards concerning composition, form,

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‘Gateway’ is Tony Castle’s expression. Gateway to the Trinity: Meditations on Rublev’s Icon (Middlegreen, Slough, England: St Paul Publications, 1988), 34. More directly on Rublev’s icon in its liturgical context, see Gabriel Bunge, The Rublev Trinity: The Icon of the Trinity by the Monk-Painter Andrei Rublev, transl. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 84.

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and color. In summary, by their beauty icons invite prayerful union with God, participation in sacred mysteries, and communion with the saints.3 Rublev and His Times Andrei Rublev was born between 1360 and 1370. He died in 1427 or 1428. We do not know a great deal about him, but we do know that he lived in tumultuous times. The Tatars (Tartars) had ruled Russia from 1237 until they were defeated in 1380. They returned from time-to-time to plunder and ravage, creating chaos and great suffering among the people.4 In addition to such social and political turmoil, we should note a series of anti-trinitarian currents in Russia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Especially in the region of Novgorod and Pskov, north of Moscow, there were those who denied that God was triune. Such anti-trinitarian currents further complicated the context within which Rublev lived and painted.5 Before turning briefly to Rublev himself, we need to mention Sergii of Radonezh (1314?–1392), who stands out during this turmoil and amid such a confusing theological situation.6 He was a trinitarian mystic recognized as a saint already in his lifetime. He felt called to preach and teach the Holy Trinity at a time when it did not seem to be a central focus in Russian Orthodox traditions.7 For Sergii, ‘a life in communion with the All-holy Trinity in and through the Holy Spirit is the meaning and end of the Christian life’.8 In a troubled Russian

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For an extensive exposition of what icons are and do, see Paul Evdokimov, who writes with great sensitivity to Russian Orthodox icon traditions. The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood, 1990), 163-238; and, in more condensed fashion, Castle, Gateway to the Trinity, 11-18. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 69. And see Anita Strezova, Hesychasm and Art: The Appearance of New Iconographic Trends in Byzantine and Slavic Lands in the 14th and 15th Centuries (Canberra, Australia: The Australian National University, 2014), 190 with n. 88 referring to Lindsey Hughes, ‘Inventing Andrei: Soviet and Post-Soviet Views of Andrei Rublev and His Trinity Icon’, in: Slavonica 9 (2003), no. 2, 88, Strezova’s study accessed July 11, 2017, http://press-files. anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p291911/pdf/5.-The-Icon-of-the-Trinity-by-Andrei-Rublev.pdf. See Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 207-8. On Sergii of Radonezh, see: Paul Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 244-45; Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 59-67; Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 184-86. The last two both provide further helpful references. Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 185-86. See also Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 78, where he remarks, ‘The spirituality of St Sergii of Radonezh was, therefore, so traditional in itself, that the saint appears to be the first – or one of the first – on Russian soil to plant this spirit-filled Trinitarian mysticism’. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 77.

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world, he founded the Holy Trinity Monastery, a place of peace and serenity9 which was to become the spiritual center of the Principality of Moscow. A disciple of Sergii, Nikon of Radonezh, succeeded Sergii as abbot or hegumen. Nikon asked Rublev to paint an icon of the Trinity in memory of Sergii. Rublev proved eminently qualified to carry out Nikon’s request. He was a painter-monk who had already worked with various artistic mediums, including producing frescoes and painting icons. He painted the icon with his friend and fellow painter-monk, Daniil. Rublev found in Sergii and his life a source of great inspiration as he painted the icon. Sergii seems to have influenced Rublev so greatly that he was said to have been present during its painting.10 As Gabriel Bunge points out, the overall monastic situation and its history tracing back to Sergii reflected ‘the spiritual climate in which Rublev beheld and painted his Troitsa [the Holy Trinity Icon]’.11 The Beauty of Rublev’s Icon Rublev seems to have painted his icon somewhere around 1425.12 It is painted in egg-tempera and is large, some 56 inches high and 45 inches wide. The icon found its place on the iconostasis or separation between nave and sanctuary in the newly constructed stone church, the Trinity Cathedral of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra or Monastery.13 Now, it is on display in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.14 Over the centuries, a layer of a drying oil, typically used in Rublev’s day to cover icons, had darkened. As well, colors were painted over, and a golden frame added. Specialists restored the icon and removed the frame in the early 1900s. Since then, its original beauty shines through more brightly.15 Now we see more clearly that Rublev has shown extraordinary restraint, while 9 10 11 12

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Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 184. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 101. Ibid., 60. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 246. And see Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 70. Strezova opts for 1425– 1427. Hesychasm and Art, 183. Some have suggested the icon was initially placed elsewhere, perhaps at Sergii’s grave. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 79. I myself have not had the opportunity to visit the Gallery. Fr. Clyde Rausch, OMI, resident iconographer at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX, has spent time gazing upon the icon in Moscow. I am grateful to him for guidance and counsel concerning icons in general and especially Rublev’s icon, though remarks here are finally my responsibility. ‘Explanation of Andrei Rublev’s Icon of the Trinity’, accessed July 12, 2017 (apparently no longer available on the Internet, May 18, 2019), http://www.sacredheartpullman.org/Icon%20 explanation.htm. Strezova refers to several Russian studies on the restoration of the icon. Hesychasm and Art, 189.

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Andrei Rublev, The Trinity (1408-25), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (photo from private collection)

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including inexhaustible riches, as he painted the icon under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Extraordinary restraint in that he reduces to certain essentials the biblical story upon which the icon is based. Inexhaustible riches in that he, in sheer genius, brings harmoniously together many elements to express the mystery of the Trinity and various aspects of it. Among these elements: figures, shapes and sizes; light, lines and layout; icono-classic use of both delicate and brilliant colors; faithfulness to iconographic traditions and creative, original insight; and, dynamic movement within the icon as well as from outside the icon into it. The harmony achieved among these elements in the icon ensures its beauty, a beauty which immediately attracts the attention of those who gaze on it. There is reasonable consensus that Rublev’s icon represents a, if not the, high point in Russian Orthodox iconography. This beautiful icon has become the Russian Orthodox Church’s festal icon of Pentecost.16 On Pentecost Sunday, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the feast of the Trinity ‘in the Spirit’. Extraordinary Restraint First, then, extraordinary restraint, especially regarding the biblical scene of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah on which Rublev based the icon. We find the scene in Genesis 18:1-15, with further remarks related to it in the following chapter. Abraham and Sarah receive three men, referred to in Genesis 19 as angels, whom they see at the entrance to their tent. They invite the three to stay for a meal. Abraham asks Sarah to prepare cakes and he orders a tender calf to be readied. Over the course of the conversation during the meal, the Lord, namely, the three now seemingly referred to in the singular, says next year Sarah will have a son. Sarah laughs, since she and Abraham are advanced in age. But the Lord assures them she will have a son. Rublev brings together selected elements of this story in his icon. He does this in a way that respects tradition while at the same time being creative.17 The icon stands out as the climax to a long history of Christian interpretation of Abraham and Sarah’s reception of the three men, as mentioned, but referred to shortly later as angels.18 Through the ages, interpreters have read the scene in various ways. Some have seen it in Christological terms. They present the central figure of the three as Jesus the Christ, with the other two in subordinate roles. Others have seen its potential for revealing something about the Trinity, 16 17

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Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 79, 90. For a succinct list of many elements in Rublev’s original icon-presentation of the Genesis account, see Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 86-87. Ibid., 20, 56.

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presenting the three figures as representing the three divine Persons of the Trinity.19 There is one aspect of the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah which seems to have especially encouraged interpreters to read it in trinitarian terms. Throughout the story, reference to the three visitors shifts back and forth from singular to plural, plural to singular. The story opens by saying the Lord appeared to Abraham. But then there are three men who appear. Abraham addresses them in the singular as Lord. Not one but three respond that they accept the invitation to a meal. During the meal, the three ask Abraham where his wife is. Abraham says she is in the tent. The Lord, now referred to in the singular, tells Abraham that his wife will have a son. This back and forth between singular and plural seems to have rendered the story open to being interpreted in trinitarian terms, namely, in relation to one God in three divine Persons.20 This is not to say that Rublev himself necessarily thought specifically in this way regarding singular and plural references. But, along with others, he sees in the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah an Old Testament scene he can work with to represent the Trinity. Rublev reduces greatly from that biblical scene the number of elements which he includes in the icon. Doing this permits him to focus on the three angels.21 He no longer includes Abraham and Sarah. The background references to tent and landscape are stylized. There is no bread or anything else on the table around which the three sit, only a chalice. Rublev has painted a small, oblong opening in the front side of the table, which many see as a reference to creation. With great economy of detail, he has transformed the scene of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah into an image of the Trinity. He has combined simplicity with depth.22 In this simplified form, the icon presents the Trinity as a conversation among the three divine Persons around a table, a conversation in which the beholder or beholders are invited to participate. Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality has become the hospitality of the Trinity.23 19

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On the history of Christian interpretations of Genesis 18, with a special concern for this text considered in relation to the Trinity, see Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 23-57, and Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 173-82. Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition (Crestwood, NJ: St. Valdimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), 140. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 87. The phrase is that of Fr. Clyde Rausch. Many have commented on this invitation to the beholder or beholders to join in the conversation. For example: Henri J. M. Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria, 1987), 20; Castle, Gateway to the Trinity, 74; implicitly, Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Toronto: Novalis, 2003), 57. For a contextualizing discussion about Rublev’s icon in relation to several other Trinity icons painted shortly before or after Rublev’s own, see remarks here and there throughout Priscilla

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Inexhaustible Riches In reading about the icon’s inexhaustible riches, I have come across several specialist studies which are particularly helpful and upon which I will draw for inspiration and insight.24 Often enough these studies differ, at least to some extent, in their interpretations of various aspects of the icon and elements in it. Such differences are understandable in view of the seemingly inexhaustible richness of form and content to be found in the icon itself. They are justified as well by the important role played in interpretation by those who view the icon. For those viewing it do so from varying perspectives. They bring with them specific concerns and interests as they look upon the icon. Furthermore, they may be viewing it while celebrating together in a liturgical context, praying before it in a family setting or with friends or, again, simply gazing upon it in more individual, prayerful contemplation. Faced with such divergent interpretations, I will occasionally offer insights of seminar participants and several of my own. But most insights brought forward here will be those taken from various specialists. Insights included are ones which seem to reflect particularly well what seemed to us in the seminar to appear in the icon itself. The overall concern when choosing which insights to include will be those which seem best able to help us appreciate it as a testimonial to communal, shared, and individual experience of the Trinity. As we consider selected major details of Rublev’s icon, we need to keep a specific point in mind. Medieval Russia stressed the importance of seeing the icon as a whole, while being sensitive to the interrelationships among its various

24

Hunt, ‘Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity Icon: Problems of Meaning, Intertextuality, and Transmission’, in: Symposion: A Journal of Russian (Religious) Thought, ed. Roy Robson, 7-12 (2002-2007), 15-46, accessed July 12, 2017, http://www.phslavic.com/Priscilla_Academic/Publications_files/Symposium7-12colorslidesopt.pdf. See also, more widely, Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 203-19. Among these specialized studies, of special note: Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 243-57; Bobrinskoy, Mystery of the Trinity, 140-43; Priscilla Hunt, ‘Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity Icon in Cultural Context’, in: The Trinity-Sergius Lavr in Russian History and Culture: Readings in Russian Religious Culture, vol. 3, ed. Deacon Vladimir Tsurikov (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2006), 99-121, esp. 100-2, 109-15, 118-20, accessed July 13, 2017, http://phslavic.com/Priscilla_Academic/Publications_files/Rublevcoloropt.pdf; Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 86-112; Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 191-203; Russian Orthodox Church, Baltimore, USA, ‘The Holy Trinity, Andrei Rublev’s Icon of the Holy Trinity’, Transfiguration of Our Lord, accessed April 13, 2019, http://www.holy-transfiguration.org/library_en/ lord_trinity_rublev.html. Several of these studies provide further important references to relevant Russian literature. Strezova offers a particularly detailed analysis of the icon. The Russian Orthodox Church site references Grigorii (Krug), inok, Mysli ob ikone (Thoughts on Iconography, by monk Gregory Krug) (Moskva: [s.n.], 1997).

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elements.25 In a more general sense, even in recent times it seems that the Russian mind places great importance on the notion of the ‘all’ or the ‘whole’.26 We should keep this emphasis on wholeness in mind as we look at the icon in four steps. First, describing the content which appears to us in an initial viewing. Second, interpreting that content. Third, considering shapes and interrelationships of various parts of the icon as they present themselves to us in further reflection on the icon. Fourth, appreciating the dynamic movements occurring within the icon and revealing more profoundly to us what it symbolizes and offers to make real in our lives. Description. When we first look at the icon, what strikes us are three angels in bright clothing sitting around an oblong table covered, in contrast, by white. The angels stand out against a yellow background originally gold in color. The angel on the left, as we face the icon, looks at the other two angels. They, in turn, incline their heads toward the angel on the left. All three hold vertically placed staffs. Identical halos or luminous circles surround their heads. A chalice with the head of a lamb or perhaps a calf in it sits on the table in the center, though slightly to the right.27 The lower front side of the table is marked, again in the center, by an oblong opening or insert painted with an indication of perspective or depth. Including such an instance of perspective is something unusual in icons. They usually do not depict perspective, apparently because it is something limited to finite space and time. The stylized image of a house stands in the background above the first angel from the left. Slightly right of center, a tree spirals upward above the central angel and inclines toward the angel on the left. A stylized image of a mountain rises above the angel to the right. The mountain itself inclines slightly toward the angels in the center and on the left. Putting these elements in the background permits Rublev to bring forward the three angels. He has found a way to focus on the Trinity itself. Interpretation. We now enter the realm of interpretation. It is obvious that Rublev has intentionally placed the three angels up front rather than framing them within something else. The three angels are essentially of the same size, though the central one seems more robust than the other two. They all sit on 25

26

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Hunt writes: ‘Both Rublev’s theme and medieval Byzantine-Russian esthetic requires that his icon be approached as an integral wholeness in which all aspects are functionally interrelated’. ‘Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity Icon in Cultural Context’, 100-1. By way of brief example, we might recall the famous Russian philosopher Solovyov’s emphasis on inclusive, integral wholeness. See Dale M. Schlitt, German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016), 96-97, 104, 336. ‘Lamb’ according to Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 191. ‘Calf’ according to Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 103, 110, and Russian Orthodox Church, Baltimore, USA, ‘The Holy Trinity’.

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the same type of throne. The features of the central angel are clearer and more distinct, while those of the angels on either side of the central angel are somewhat less distinct. All three angels sit in elegant pose. Rublev gives each one a certain lightness and even ethereal appearance by painting their bodies as elongated in relation to their heads. In face and posture they are calm, even serene, as they take part in a divine conversation. There has been much discussion concerning whether each of the angels makes present a specific divine Person of the Trinity. And, if so, which angel is to be identified with which divine Person?28 For present purposes, I suggest we follow the more common interpretation in identifying the angel on the left with the Father, the angel in the center with the Son, and the angel on the right with the Holy Spirit.29 Among many considerations, this order from left to right follows that of the creedal presentation of Father, Son, and Spirit. More specifically, the angel on the left sits upright. The angel is clothed in a heavenly azure-blue, sometimes called Rublev’s blue, inner garment and an outer one of translucent, pale purple adorned in gold. The outer garment covers most of the azure inner one. With features less distinct, this angel on the left makes present the Father who is unseen. The house above the angel, formerly the tent of Abraham and Sarah, can signify creation whose head is the Father.30 We can also call it the house of the Father. The angel in the center is clothed in an earthen red undergarment overlaid by an outer garment of the same blue as the inner garment of the angel on the left. These colors, earthen red and azure-blue, can justifiably be understood as symbolizing, respectively, the humanity and the divinity of the Son. The tree above reminds us of the tree of life which becomes the tree of the cross. The angel’s

28

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On interpretations of which divine Persons the various angels may represent, see Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 194-95. Bobrinskoy suggests it would be tedious to discuss the identification of specific angels with specific divine Persons, especially since in the authentic iconographic tradition neither Father nor Spirit are to be represented in human form. For neither was incarnate. Indeed, for Bobrinskoy, Rublev’s icon has special status as a figurative icon. Mystery of the Trinity, 140-42. Evdokimov suggests, rather, that the central angel makes the Father present. He bases this interpretation on the apparent identification of the central angel as the Father in another icon painted around the time when Rublev was painting icons. Art of the Icon, 248-49. Bunge argues that the text to which Evdokimov and some others refer does not identify individual angels with divine Persons. It simply lists the three divine Persons. Rublev Trinity, 42 and 44. Bunge follows the more traditional identification, in the order from left to right, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 44 with 89, 96-99. As do, for example: Hunt, ‘Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity Icon in Cultural Context’, for example, 113-14; Strezova, Hesychasm and Art, 196-97; Russian Orthodox Church, Baltimore, USA, ‘The Holy Trinity’. Russian Orthodox Church, Baltimore, USA, ‘The Holy Trinity’.

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head inclines toward the angel to the left. With head so inclined, the angel in the center easily represents the Son who recognizes his coming from the Father. The angel on the right wears an undergarment of the same blue as that of the angel on the left, but the outer one is translucent green in color. These two colors, blue and green, recall respectively divinity and creation. Of note, in the Russian Church green is traditionally the liturgical color of Pentecost and the symbol of new life. The head of this angel on the right is slightly more deeply inclined toward the angel on the left, suggesting again origin in the Father. The mountain in the background overhead can serve as the earth, whose ‘face is renewed by the Spirit’. Predominance of translucent green, inclination of head, renewed earth all bring us to see the angel on the right as the creator Spirit, the Giver of Life.31 With basically equal bodily proportions, similar staffs representing authority and pointing upward, shared presence around the table, and being seated on similar thrones, Rublev stresses equality among the three. At the same time, he clearly and creatively distinguishes each of them from the other two. The three angels are seated on three sides around the oblong white table, the feet of the angels on left and right barely touching their footrests.32 They join in serene conversation. The Father sits straight, his face calm and strong, as if he is the basis for such serenity. His body is angled toward the other two angels but with a certain openness forward on the icon. The body of the angel in the center faces forward and that of the angel on the right inclines toward the angel on the left, again with a certain openness forward. The angels in the center and to the right bow their heads to the angel on the left. The Son seems to be saying ‘Your will be done’. The Spirit, in turn, seems ready to confirm the work of the Son. There is in each of the three figures a slight hint of sadness.33 Some suggest this sense of sadness may be reflective of something discernible in the Russian spirit.34

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References to color and several further details here are taken mostly from Bunge, Rublev’s Trinity, 96-99, with Bunge’s quote, on 99, taken from the Russian Orthodox Vesper psalm 103:30. Bunge’s reading of colors of the angels’ garments is generally representative of what many others, though certainly not all, say in this regard. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 252. On the icon’s properties more generally, Strezova writes: ‘The movement in Rublev’s Trinity is described with attention to the icon’s properties of quietness, gentleness, anxiety, and sorrow; or the mood permeating the icon, which is often described as detached, meditative contemplative, intimate, gentle and direct’. Hesychasm and Art, 197. Evdokimov refers especially to the sadness of the Father. Art of the Icon, 254-55. Nouwen writes, ‘Their [the three angels’] seemingly melancholic beauty – the Russians speak about their joyful sorrow – evokes the words of Jesus: “Can you drink the cup?”’, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, 25.

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To identify the subject of conversation among the three, we need to turn our attention briefly to the chalice prominently placed toward the front of the table in the center and slightly to the right. The right hand of the angel in the center reaches delicately to the chalice. In the chalice, there is the head of a lamb or a calf. It is easy to think of Eucharist, and of the Son’s sacrifice. We need as well to consider the oblong indentation on the front of the table, in the middle. Below the chalice, this indented oblong at first mystifies. Why is it there? The most reasonable explanation I have found is that it represents creation, its four corners recalling the four corners of the world.35 The chalice and the insert are central to the icon. From this, we can quickly conclude the subject of divine conversation is the salvation of the world. When we recall that the three angels surround the chalice and the oblong insert, we come to sense that Rublev is imaging here a certain inclusive wholeness: angels, table, chalice, insert and all they represent. With his Trinity icon, Rublev is saying that the Trinity encompasses humankind and indeed all of creation in serene conversation concerning their salvation.36 Shapes and Forms. With this initial description and interpretation in mind, we now take a further look at the icon. This look involves reflection on shapes or forms of, and interrelationships among, various elements of the icon. Most striking of all is the way in which Rublev has avoided drawing a circle and then placing the three angels in it. Rather, in innovative fashion he forms the circle by the way he places the angels themselves and has their wings touch or overlap.37 The angel on the left sits so that the angel’s legs, with appropriate lines created by the draping of the outer garment, lead from straight body toward the lower central part of the icon. There they point to the feet and legs of the angel to the right. This angel’s legs, again draped with an outer garment whose lines lead upward and to the right, continue the circle. Head and body, inclined to the angel’s right, lead on to the slightly higher and centrally placed angel. The two angels’ wings touch, reinforcing the impression of a circle. The body of the angel in the center faces forward, as if to cause us to pause for a moment before this central angel. The circle then continues to the angel’s right, following

35 36

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Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 249; Castle, Gateway to the Trinity, 75-76. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 111, though at this point Bunge does not refer either to the insert or to creation’s salvation. In his meditation, he remains with the thought of ‘my salvation’. Castle makes an interesting suggestion as to how to appreciate the circle. ‘Take off a ring, (or use something similar) hold it up to your eye and view the Icon through it, so that the ring encompasses the three figures. You will discover how breath-takingly circular the arrangement is and that the centre of the circle comes where the two fingers of the central figure lay on the table’. Gateway to the Trinity, 34.

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the direction in which the angel’s head is inclined. This angel’s wing falls partially behind that of the angel on the left of the icon. The circle is complete. Slightly to the right in the center of the circle stands the chalice. Its location there, as well as that of the oblong insert in the center at the front of the table, give added significance to the all-encompassing circle. The chalice itself is a circle. Some viewers see the chalice motif repeated, this time on a grander scale. That is, they draw attention to the space between the angels on the left and the right. This space, so framed in front of the angel in the center by the angels on left and right, seems to form a large chalice.38 A few have also seen a cross through the center of the circle. The vertical beam of the cross, moving upward from the bottom of the icon, would be formed by the insert, the chalice, and the spiraled tree above the central angel. The horizontal beam would be composed of a proposed line between the three angels at the level of their halos.39 Some see as well that the overall circle formed by the angels is subdivided into three distinct parts by the way in which the three vertically directing staffs are placed. The circle of three angels, then, includes, within it, insert, chalice or chalices, staffs, and perhaps cross. Rublev has given careful iconic expression to various aspects of the Trinity. He has established clear distinctions among the angels while at the same time providing a symbol of divine unity. He has integrated, in one overall whole, the Trinity and the Trinity’s divine activities of creation, incarnation, salvation. Movement. We are now ready to take another look at Rublev’s icon, this time to note several dynamics at play in the overall disposition of its content. There are, I would suggest, three major circular movements going on simultaneously within the icon. Bunge has noted them all in one way or another and to one degree or another. Others have often stressed one over the others. We can identify each of these three movements by the point at which they begin, that is, from where we consider the eye of the beholder to be falling as it regards the icon. First, for many that point of entry is the central angel since that angel is rich in color and robust in figure. In this movement, this angel, the Son, is the way to the Father. He guides our attention to the angel on the left, the Father. He asks the Father to send the angel on the right, the Holy Spirit, into the world. Robes and posture of the angel on the left lead the eye to that angel on the right. Robes and posture of the angel on the right lead the eye back to the angel in the center. Bunge identifies a similar circular movement beginning, again, with the central angel. He does so, based not on where the eye of the beholder 38 39

See Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 250-51. Ibid., 251; Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, 25.

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would fall but on who among the angels launches the intra-trinitarian conversation regarding salvation.40 A second circular movement begins from the angel on the right, the Holy Spirit. Bunge gives this movement from the Holy Spirit a certain priority.41 Tony Castle as well identifies this same movement from the Holy Spirit.42 He justifies his identification of this movement and its starting point by observing that in newspapers, for example, the important and eye-catching part of the page is on the right. In this case, the angel on the right’s posture and positioning draws the eye of the beholder to the feet and lower part of the angel’s body. Angles of the legs, the draping of the outer garment covering them, and the staff all bring the eye upward. With head inclined toward the central angel, the Holy Spirit directs attention to the Son. The Son in turn, as the way to the Father, guides the eye to the Father. A third circular movement begins from the angel on the left, from the Father. We can ground our location of the beginning of this movement in an observation made often enough in layout circles. In a picture or painting the eye tends to rest first in the upper left-hand quarter of the picture. We can exemplify this tendency by considering where painters seem to work with it when they distribute the contents of a painting. At times, though, an artist will intentionally place larger items in the lower or upper right-hand areas of a painting. In so doing, they are providing a counterbalance to the eye’s tendency to land first in the upper left-hand area. Placing elements in the picture or painting in this way gives it a certain sense of overall balance. But, to return now to the eye’s tendency to fall on the upper left-hand area of a work of art. We should note that Bunge does not as such appeal to this tendency in his identification of a circular movement beginning with the Father on to the Son and then to the Holy Spirit. It is a movement whose direction is enshrined in many Christian creeds and liturgical prayers. With these second and third major circular movements recognized in the icon, Bunge in effect has identified a movement from the Spirit through the Son to the Father and another from the Father through the Son to the Holy Spirit.43 It is striking that he has noted two movements Basil of Caesarea had so described many centuries earlier. As we saw in chapter 3 above, for Basil the movement from the Holy Spirit through the Son to the Father was one considered from the point of view of knowledge or experience. The movement from

40 41 42 43

Bunge, Rublev Icon, 105. See also Williams, Dwelling of the Light, 49-57. Bunge, Rublev Icon, 110. Castle, Gateway to the Trinity, 38. Bunge, Rublev Trinity, 105-6.

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the Father through the Son to the Holy Spirit was one occurring from the point of view of the outflowing of divine glory. These three overall movements, starting from the Son, from the Holy Spirit, and from the Father, are easily discernible in the disposition of and interrelationships among various elements in the icon. There are many other movements and dynamics in it which we could point out. Of them, we might well note dynamics which Rublev may have brought into the icon simply as a great iconographer who had a good, but perhaps less consciously aware, instinct for presentation. He does this, for example, by the way in which he positions the angels to the left and the right of the icon. Their posture and arrangement tend continually to bring the eye back into the icon rather than letting it wander off one side or the other to something else. And from above in the icon, the tree and mountain bending left and downward help the eye remain focused on the core of the icon situated below them. With these dynamic movements, Rublev has given great life to the icon. At the same time, he has managed by means of them to encourage the beholder to rest serenely within the icon. Our effort to describe and interpret the icon as well as to identify shapes and movements will prove important, even necessary. We will need to take shapes and movements into consideration as we continue reflecting on the icon. But, from a spiritual perspective, the most important thing to do is simply to linger for a while in prayerful gaze on it. Gazing upon the Icon Eastern Christian spiritual traditions stress the importance of ‘seeing’ or ‘sight’ as a way to God which complements that of hearing the Scriptures. Henri Nouwen writes, ‘Gazing is probably the best word to touch the core of Eastern spirituality’.44 It was helpful to review several dictionaries to unpack what we might understand or at least imply when we use the word ‘gazing’. Among them, an older one, Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, offers an entry which seems to capture well the word’s meaning. It helps make explicit various levels of meaning perhaps only implied, or taken for granted, in the word’s use. ‘To fix the eyes and look steadily and earnestly; to look with eagerness or curiosity, as in admiration, astonishment, expectancy, or study’. And, in connection with several synonyms, ‘To look with fixed and prolonged attention, awakened by excited interest or elevated emotion, (…) to look at intently’.45 44 45

Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, 13. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Dorset & Baber, 1983), ‘gaze’, 759.

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A look focused, prolonged, interested, expectant, emotional – these are some first insights the dictionary entry provides into the rich meaning of the word gazing. With these insights, we have now set the stage for our further reflection directly on Rublev’s icon. As we speak about gazing upon it, we will find that the word takes on additional characteristics further enriching its basic dictionary meaning. The first way in which we will want to stretch, perhaps better enhance, the meaning of gazing will be to use it in parallel with ‘painting’ and ‘praying’, that is, writing the icon under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In writing the icon, Rublev and his friend Daniil brought with them inspiration drawn from the preaching of Abbot Sergii and encouragement offered by Abbot Nikon who had invited them to paint the icon. They were acutely aware of the importance of their effort to paint an icon of the Trinity in honor of Abbot Sergii. They must have prayerfully reflected long and hard on how best to present the three divine Persons as equals, thus assuring a truly Orthodox trinitarian view of God. We might well consider this prayerful process an imaginative gazing on what they could paint. They would be considering various options and approaches. Indeed, they were known for spending hours in prayerful meditation before icons.46 They continued to gaze on what they were accomplishing, step by step, as they moved through the various stages in painting the Trinity icon.47 In a sense, the whole process by which they brought the icon into existence was for them a form of experience of the Trinity. They painted what they felt. The process of their prayer, their imaginative and ongoing gazing at what they were producing, and their act itself of painting resulted in a glorious icon. The process and result formed, in their own ways, for Andrei and Daniil an experience of the Trinity. The resulting icon found its place in a liturgical setting. There it would first and foremost be gazed upon in communal celebration. Yes, individuals and smaller groups would have gazed upon the icon outside of liturgical services such as Eucharist and Divine Office. But the icon’s first and natural setting was within the liturgy. Over the course of a celebration, those gathered in the church-setting would at times focus on or, better, gaze upon a specific icon. On the Pentecostal feast of the Trinity, those who had access to Rublev’s icon would gaze upon it. They would perhaps have reverenced the icon more personally with a bow or a kiss before a celebration. Then the clergy would incense it during the celebration, and all would gaze upon it at various moments of sonorous 46

47

Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 245. Rublev was apparently already in his own day considered a trinitarian mystic. Fr. Clyde Rausch confirms that a close look at the icon reveals indications of some of Rublev’s original designs which Rublev modified over the course of the painting of the icon.

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Russian chant. Some would continue to admire it after the celebration. The notion of gazing thus gains further depth as a communal activity on the part of monks and others participating in a liturgical celebration. Within this overall liturgical context, including music, incense, readings, processions, and communion, we can even speak of a communal experience of the Trinity. Gazing together upon Rublev’s icon engendered, or at least contributed greatly to, this communal experience of the Trinity. That experience was no longer directly possible once it was transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Reproductions of the icon as well as variations on it have, however, facilitated such communal experience in varied liturgical settings. Thanks to these reproductions, or on a visit to the Gallery in Moscow, we today can continue to gaze on the icon in the more common sense of the word ‘gaze’. That is, we individually or in small groups can spend a prolonged period looking at the icon in a prayerful and profound way. Yet, especially in this case, gazing takes on a considerably more specific, profound meaning. It means that we look at the icon, focusing at this point on the angel on the right, the Holy Spirit. The angel invites us, by placement and posture, to enter the divine conversation made present by the icon. We enter through the opening at what appears to us to be the front of the table, namely, between the angels on right and left. That opening is our place at the table. In effect, we replace Abraham and Sarah. We are prayerfully transported into the Trinity and its serene conversation about us, our salvation, and that of creation. Encouraged and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we turn to the central angel, the Son of God, who died and rose that we might have newness of life, life forever. The Son, in turn, directs our attention toward the angel on the left, the Father, the author of divine serenity and calm well represented by the icon. When we join in this serene trinitarian conversation, we come to experience the Father as our Father. The Lord of creation and of history is our Father. We experience the Son as our savior and the Spirit as our comforter and support. We could have simply visited a church or a museum and looked at the icon or a reproduction before going on to another icon or work of art. In this case the icon would simply be a painting, though a beautiful one. But in our reflection so far, we have considered the icon as something much more than a beautiful painting. We have considered it as a work prayed into existence under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has, in turn, blessed us as we prayerfully reflect on the icon. That is, as we gaze on it. More specifically, we have thought of Andrei and Daniil gazing imaginatively on possibilities and the results of their ongoing painting. We have referred to those in a household who together honor a reproduction of the icon. We have treated of those who have in the past had the privilege of gazing together on the icon itself in a liturgical setting, or more recently on a reproduction of it in such

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a setting. We have recognized the important case of individuals or even several together today prayerfully gazing on the icon or a reproduction. I would suggest that there is something going on here common, in a general way, to each of these forms and instances of gazing on the icon. In each case it would seem the beauty of the whole icon, when considered initially, catches the attention of us who behold it. We find that such beauty invites us to turn to the icon, to be open to it in a trusting, expectant way. We have a certain faith in the icon and what it appears to be. Seeing becomes believing. We then recognize that the beauty of the icon gives rise in us to a longing for something special. That something is more than what we now are and have. In effect, the icon seems to offer hope, and in this case hope especially of a certain serenity and calm in our lives. For those in Rublev’s day, gazing on the icon would have freed them, at least for a while, from the fear of invasion and political turmoil. They came to see they could live through and beyond such devastating experiences. In our day, that certain serenity and calm achieved in meditating on the icon could well take the form of a deep, inner liberation from the devastation of what has become for many a regrettably too common experience. We suffer from various types of self-enslavement, whether communal, shared by friends or those in a household, or again individual. Perhaps, dulling routines, unhealthy dependencies or addictions, inability to forgive, and in themselves seemingly unjustifiable suspicion of groups and individuals different from us. In each of these cases, the icon itself offers to reveal the freeing beauty of God which takes the form of an invitation to join in the loving trinitarian conversation. But we, in turn, in response to this loving divine self-offer discover that the only way to participate in this beauty is to accept the invitation. We must let go of ourselves in our distance from the icon. If we try to obtain or possess such beauty on our own terms, we do violence to what the icon offers. It is only by our own loving self-gift to the Trinity in accepting the invitation that we enter fully into the serene and calm divine conversation. In its fullest sense, then, gazing at the icon takes on the form of a faithful and trusting turning to the icon, a hopeful longing for the beauty that it offers, and a loving, Spirit-inspired gift of ourselves to the Trinity. A liberating moment.48 In Orthodox spiritual traditions, gazing upon the icon comes to mean much more than looking at it intensely for a longer time. When the community gazes 48

Nouwen recounts his own experience in gazing on Rublev’s icon during a difficult moment in his life. ‘As I sat for long hours in front of Rublev’s Trinity, I noticed how gradually my gaze became a prayer. This silent prayer slowly made my inner restlessness melt away and lifted me up into the circle of love, a circle that could not be broken by the powers of the world. Even as I moved away from the icon and became involved in the many tasks of everyday life, I felt as if I did not have to leave the holy place I had found’. Behold the Beauty of the Lord, 21.

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at the icon it does so in many ways, especially when done in a liturgical context. When we as friends, members of a household, or individuals do so, such gazing involves us holistically, in our full personhood. Gazing in its fullest sense means entering the Trinity itself, which the icon makes present. It is no longer so much we who are looking at the icon, but the icon which acts upon us. When we consider the icon with the help of the Holy Spirit, it becomes the Trinity’s selfrevelation to us.49 Through the icon, the Trinity welcomes us and our world into its conversation. With this welcome we, in turn, sense an at least momentary wholeness and personal integration. A sense of being at peace with ourselves and others. Prayer has led to silent conversation. We feel a certain well-being in relation to an often-turbulent world around, or even to turbulence within, us. In truly gazing upon Rublev’s icon, we experience the Trinity as our home. Nouwen would say, the house of love.50 A Unique Testimonial Behold Rublev’s icon, a truly unique testimonial to experience of the Trinity. In painting the icon, Rublev has indeed remained faithful to many iconographic traditions while creatively introducing original insights. He has fully exemplified the equality of the three divine Persons and clearly distinguished them in line with their roles in creation and salvation.51 At the same time, he has painted them in such a way as to affirm, in visual representation, their divine unity. His icon testifies to experience of the Trinity by its beauty arising out of the harmonious integration of many elements. Among them, we may recall figures, shapes and sizes, light, lines and layout, icono-classic use of both delicate and brilliant colors, and dynamic movement within the icon as well as from outside into it. Angels, glorious color, brightness of presentation, interrelationships among the angels, all these together draw our attention to the icon. They invite us to share in the serene trinitarian conversation about salvation which it makes available to us. Rublev’s icon is unique as testimonial first in that it testifies, through its iconic beauty, to experience of the Trinity. The icon is unique as well in that it not only testifies to such experience but itself, as icon, arises in a special way more directly out of such experience. 49

50 51

Hunt states this in a more general way. ‘Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity Icon in Cultural Context’, 100. Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, 27. Of theological note, once Rublev depicts the Trinity as a serene conversation among the three divine Persons, he seems to be opening the way to considering the interrelationship among them not only in terms of relations of origin but of mutual relationships on the part of each one to the other two.

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Taking ‘experience’ now in a wide sense, we can say that it provides witness to experience of the Trinity in several different communal and individual ways. And, though we have only briefly referred to it, even a shared experience, for example, in a family setting or between friends. Regarding the experience of the Trinity, then, the icon first recalls ancient Orthodox trinitarian traditions and points back to the long development of the Genesis account of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah as a resource for imaging the Trinity. It honors and represents as well, and more immediately, Sergii’s ongoing preaching about the Trinity. It gives iconic expression to the peace and calm experienced in the Holy Trinity Monastery. Second, it arises out of Rublev’s and Rublev’s friend Daniil’s prayerful meditation as they bring it into existence under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Third, as result of this prayerful process, the icon provides the occasion for a liturgical community, families or friends together, and individuals to gaze upon it and in so doing to accept its invitation to participate in the serene conversation. The icon thus gives affirming witness to previous experience of the Trinity. And, it encourages us who behold it to be open to such experience in our own lives. That experience leads to a certain sense of wholeness, personal integration, and well-being within us and in relation to the world around us. But, importantly, the icon itself provides the concrete occasion for prayerfully entering such an experience. The beauty of the icon brings us into the serene conversation of the three divine Persons. It gives special meaning to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s enigmatic expression, written several centuries after Rublev, that beauty would save the world.52

52

Fyodor Dostoieffsky, The Idiot, transl. Frederick Whishaw (London: Vizetelly & Co., 1887), 257, copy available at Google Books.

CHAPTER 7 MARIE DE L’INCARNATION Spiritual Autobiography

We turn now from the world-saving beauty of Rublev’s icon to the intensely personal spiritual autobiography of Marie Guyart. Marie lived somewhat more than two and a half centuries after Rublev. She was born in 1599 in the city of Tours, central-western France and died in 1672 in Quebec City, New France. Known in religion as Marie de l’Incarnation, she was a person ‘whose human experience was exceptionally rich and varied’1 – child-mystic, wife, mother, businesswoman, French Ursuline nun, missionary to Quebec. Marie sailed to Quebec in 1639, remaining there for the rest of her life. She is considered one of the founders of Canada. Pope John Paul II declared her the Mother of the Church in Canada.2 Pope Francis recently declared her a saint. Marie’s writings provide much insight into not only Marie’s own spiritual life and mystical experiences but also life in general in seventeenth-century New France or French Canada.3 She established the Ursuline Order in New France and carried on a daring apostolate with those now known in Canada as the First 1

2 3

‘Son experience humaine a été exceptionnellement riche et varié’. Robert Michel, ‘La spiritualité de Marie de l’Incarnation’, in ‘Colloque Marie de l’Incarnation: 350ème anniversaire du départ pour le Canada’, Tours, France, April 29 and 30, May 1, 1989, 61 (privately distributed, my translation). Fr. Michel kindly guided my initial reading in Marie de l’Incarnation and choosing texts on which to concentrate. Michel, ‘Spiritualité de Marie’, 59. On Marie more generally, see the following helpful presentations: Guy-Marie Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, in: Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 10 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), cols. 487-507; Irene Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation: Selected Writings, ed. Irene Mahoney (New York: Paulist, 1989), 5-40; Mary Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin, ed. Mary Dunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1-40. We should note the classic study by Marie’s son, Claude Martin, La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation (Paris: Loüis Billaine, 1677; facsimile edition, Sablé/-sur-Sarthe: Solesmes Abbey, 1981). For a listing of Marie’s writings and a history of their transmission, see: Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, cols. 491-97, with a detailed chronology of the writings, cols. 494-95; Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 34-40.

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Nations. She learned several of their languages, wrote dictionaries, and opened the first school for girls in North America.4 Among her many talents, she is said to have had a lovely singing voice and enjoyed singing.5 Of special interest to us now, she achieved an amazing balance and profound unity in all she experienced and did. We might well have expected to find her living a life torn between action and contemplation. But, quite to the contrary, she was intensely active while remaining deeply anchored in mystical contemplation. Her life, life’s work or mission, and visions were intimately interwoven, as we will see in our review of the way in which she read them. Then we will turn more directly to her recounting of her visions of the Trinity. Autobiographical Highlights Robert Michel’s study, Living in the Spirit with Mary of the Incarnation,6 will serve as our basic guide as we note highlights of Marie’s reading of her spiritual life. We will base our selection of highlights on their pertinence to our interest in her visions, especially her trinitarian visions, and their interweaving with her mission.7 Michel’s approach is especially helpful because he anchors 4

5

6

7

Mahoney notes the founding of the school in her introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 3. As to dictionaries, Mahoney lists ‘an Iroquois dictionary, a French-Algonquin dictionary, an Algonquin-French dictionary, and a catechism in Huron’ (35). For further remarks on Marie in relation to the First Nations of Canada, see Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son, 20-24, with bibliography on 3-4n5. Guy-Marie Oury, Marie Guyart (1599–1672), transl. Miriam Thompson ([Cincinnati, OH: Specialty Lithographing Company], 1978), 107. Marie had other talents as well. Marie-Florine Bruneau writes, ‘She [Marie] also learned embroidery, a skill at which she later excelled, and by which she earned a living after she was widowed; embroidery (…) was a trade also practiced by men. A woman of many trades, she also learned to wield hammer and saw; later, in Quebec, she carved and painted on wood for the decoration of the convent chapel’. Women Mystics Confront the Modern World: Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) and Madame Guyon (1648– 1717) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 34. Robert Michel, Living in the Spirit with Mary of the Incarnation (Montréal: Bellarmin, 1986, French original, 1975). Marie regularly referred to her ‘visions’ (vision) and used the verb ‘to experience’ (expérimenter) to describe what she was living and going through. I will speak of vision, experience, and visionary experience. ‘Vision’ will usually refer more directly to the way in which Marie expressed herself regarding what happened to her. In more direct reference to Marie, ‘experience’ will usually refer to one or more emotions or other aspects of what she finds occurring within her. Depending on the context in which the word is used, ‘experience’ will at times also refer to an overall situation, which includes Marie as the one experiencing and that which she is experiencing (example, ‘that was quite an experience’). At other times, it will refer to what she is aware of in feeling, understanding, or immediately intuiting what or who is present to her (example, Marie ‘experienced the three divine persons’). ‘Visionary experience’ will in

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his spirituality-oriented analysis and summary of Marie’s life in meticulously noted references to Marie’s own writings.8 He lets Marie tell her own story, a story she, in her Relation of 1654, structures in terms of thirteen states of prayer.9 These states of prayer mark important steps in her spiritual experience. In the Spirit, she moves back and forth from descent to ascent. She descends into sadness over her own imperfections and awareness of times of spiritual drought. She ascends to ever closer forms of union with her Lord and the Trinity. In her spiritual life, she ultimately arrives at a state of permanent union with the Trinity. Michel reviews these states of prayer through which she passes. He comes to see her life as one of growth in the Spirit through four distinct chronological periods. For present purposes, we will focus on these four periods or stages of Marie’s life as Michel identifies them: Making use of the information Mary herself gives us, I shall divide her life into four periods: the years of preparation before 1620 (the first state of prayer); her ‘secular life’ from her ‘conversion’ to her entry with the Ursulines in 1631 (the second to the seventh state of prayer); her religious life in Tours, from 1631 to

8

9

effect permit us to bring together ‘vision’ and ‘experience’. In so doing, we will be able to speak of the overall situation through which Marie has lived while at the same time stressing the way in which what she is experiencing appears to her. We will at times complement Michel’s presentation with further, primarily chronological data drawn from the following: Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, cols. 487-91; Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 8-19, 24-34; Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son, esp. 5-20. In the presentation of Marie de l’Incarnation, we will concentrate especially on the following works by her: Relation de 1633, in: Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 1, published by Claude Martin and edited by Albert Jamet (Paris: Desclée-de Brouwer, 1929), 135-343 (hereafter Relation de 1633 and so referred to in the notes)/partial translation, ‘Fragments from the Relation of 1633’, in: Marie of the Incarnation: Selected Writings, ed. Irene Mahoney (New York: Paulist, 1989), 179-93 (hereafter Relation of 1633 when referring to the Relation itself); Relation de 1654, in: Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2, publ. Claude Martin, ed. Albert Jamet (Paris: Desclée-de Brouwer, 1930), preface, 129-50, index 151-57, text 159-476 (hereafter Relation de 1654 and so referred to in the notes)/The Relation of 1654, in: Marie of the Incarnation: Selected Writings, ed. Irene Mahoney (New York: Paulist, 1989), 41-178 (hereafter Relation of 1654 and so referred to in the notes); Correspondance, new edition by Guy Oury (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1971)/partial translation: ‘Selections from the Letters, 1639–1670’, in: Marie of the Incarnation: Selected Writings, ed. Irene Mahoney (New York: Paulist, 1989), 220-76; Dunn, From Mother to Son, 41-223. Mahoney mentions that ‘“relation”, the French word for “account” or “report”, has been the only title given to these works [of 1633 and 1654]’. Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 6n3. For the sake of convenience, quotations and references to Marie’s works will be to English translations where available. For Marie’s own listing and description of the 13 states of prayer, see ‘Letter 153, October 26, 1653’, in: Dunn, From Mother to Son, 125-28.

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1639 (the eighth to the eleventh state of prayer); her missionary life in Canada from 1639 to 1672 (the twelfth and thirteenth state of prayer).10

We begin with the first period, the years of preparation (1599–1620).11 This period covers the first twenty years of Marie’s life, up to what she calls her conversion. Marie was born at the end of the sixteenth-century wars of religion. She was the fourth child of Florent Guyart, who was a master butcher, and Jeanne Michelet. Already at about seven years of age she had a vision which she implies took the form of a dream. It was a premonition of her future mystical life. Marie herself describes it many years later. During my sleep one night when I was about seven years old, it seemed to me that I was playing some childhood game with one of my companions in the yard of a country school. I was looking upward when I saw the heavens open and Our Lord Jesus Christ in human form emerge and come toward me. (…) As this most adorable Majesty approached me, my heart felt on fire with love for him and I started to open my arms to embrace him. Then he, the most beautiful of all the children of men, took me in his arms and with a look full of indescribable sweetness and charm, kissed me with great love and asked me, ‘Will you be mine?’ I answered, ‘Yes!’ Then when he heard my answer, we saw him return to heaven.12

Following this visitation, she grew in her ‘inclination to do good’.13 Vain things no longer attracted her. But, as the years went by, her parents did not see her fitting in with cloistered life and had her married in 1617,14 at about 17 years old, to a master silk worker Claude Martin. Then three events changed her life. First, a son was born on April 2, 1619, also named Claude Martin. He later became a Benedictine and a mystic in his own right. After his mother’s death, he edited his mother’s works. Second, Marie’s husband, Claude, died in September or the beginning of October 1619. Third, at his death he left his workshop on the brink of bankruptcy.15 Marie took over and ably worked her way through various subsequent legal proceedings and painful events. Over these 10

11 12

13 14 15

Michel, Living in the Spirit, 18 (italics in the original), and see his first chapter, ‘Growing in the Spirit’, 17-41. Throughout his book, Michel carefully presents various aspects of Marie’s spiritual experience. Each chapter merits careful reading and reflection. For another important study of Marie’s spiritual journey and her mystical experiences, see Maria-Paul del Rosario Adriazola, La connaissance spirituelle chez Marie de l’Incarnation: la ‘Thérèse de France et du Nouveau Monde’ (Paris: Anne Siguier/Cerf, 1989). Michel, Living in the Spirit, 18-20. Relation of 1654, 41-42; Marie’s son Claude Martin writes that ‘the kiss of God is the Holy Spirit’, cited by Mahoney, Marie of the Incarnation, 42n2. Relation of 1654, 42. Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son, 5. Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 488.

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early years, she grew stronger in her desire to be united with her Lord. As Michel says, ‘We can already see in this first state of prayer the whole outline of Mary’s future spiritual life [for example, commitment to Christ], in a way that was even then leaning towards passive mysticism. (…) Even though she was not consciously aware of him, the Spirit was already powerfully at work within her’.16 Passive, because Marie does not initiate various mystical experiences. Rather, she is the one to whom they come and in whom they occur. The second period or stage in Marie’s life was her ‘secular’ life (1620–1631).17 During this period, she moved from a moment of conversion on through the following years to her entry into religious life. On March 24, 1620, she had a first mystical experience as an adult. She called it a grace of conversion. One day, on the way to work, she suddenly saw her sins. Then, immersed in the Blood of the Son of God, she felt responsible for his suffering for her and her salvation. Marie says this experience led to a complete change in her life. She reflected on this and subsequent events, writing years later in 1654, ‘One must admit that the Holy Spirit is a great master [teacher]’.18 Early on in this period of her life she accepted to help her sister and brother-in-law in their large household. In this she proved able, carrying out even the humblest tasks. When she was about 21 years old, her brother-in-law Paul Buisson recognized her business acumen and asked her to help with his business. This she did well and with great care.19 Over these years of her secular life, she had several further visions or spiritual experiences which affected her deeply. She lived in continual self-abasement, following her suffering Lord with whom she ever more profoundly desired a spiritual marriage. On Pentecost Monday, May 19, 1625, she had a vision of the Trinity. She was 25 years old. Many years later, Marie wrote, ‘This great light [the vision of the Trinity] led me into an entirely new state. For a long time, I was unable to turn from my absorption in the three divine Persons’.20 Michel observes, ‘Henceforth her dwelling place would be in the Trinity and, nothing, not even the most absorbing business, could distract her from it’.21 Two years later, on or near Pentecost 1627, Marie had a second vision of the Trinity. During this vision, her desire for a mystical marriage with the Word of God was fulfilled. She found herself in a loving ecstasy (extase amoureuse), a deep 16 17 18 19

20 21

Michel, Living in the Spirit, 20. Ibid., 20-30. Relation of 1654, 53. Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 13. Unfortunately, it will not be possible here to explore in any detail Marie’s great devotion to and service of the poor during this time in her life. Relation of 1654, 75. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 25.

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interior solitude.22 Marie later wrote, ‘This adorable Person [the Divine Word] seized my soul and embracing it with indescribable love united it to himself, taking it as his spouse’.23 Michel comments, she became the ‘bride of the Incarnate Word in the Holy Spirit’.24 Marie says she was then moved by the Spirit to a renewed interest in the religious life.25 The Ursulines had recently established a house at Tours. Their perspective on contemplation and action, to be carried out in a certain balance, proved attractive to her.26 After confiding her eleven-year-old son Claude to her sister’s care,27 she entered the Ursulines on January 25, 1631. The third period of growth in Marie’s spiritual life was that of her life as a religious in Tours (1631–1639).28 Marie remained strongly attracted to an apostolic life. But after years of family and business concerns, she now settled into religious life, where she rejoiced in her loving union with Jesus, her Spouse. As Michel writes, ‘The Spirit of the Incarnate Word was leading her into a new state of union which kept her soul in silence even when it came to the loving exchanges’.29 On March 17, 1631, around two months after entering the Ursuline convent, Marie was blessed in a climactic way. It was the evening or so before she took the religious habit. She experienced a third vision of the Trinity.30 Now Father, Son, and Spirit possessed ‘her fully and allow themselves to be possessed by her’.31 By way of anticipation, we can already now quote Marie in her 22 23 24

25

26

27

28 29 30 31

Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 489. Relation of 1654, 81. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 27. See Relation of 1654, 82: ‘The soul realizes that in all this, it is the Holy Spirit who is the moving power, enabling it to act thus with the Word [as its Spouse]’. Regarding this renewed interest in religious life, Michel, Living in the Spirit, 29, refers to Correspondance, 836-37 (see Marie’s letter 247, July 30, 1669, in: Dunn, From Mother to Son, 207-90). Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 14-15. For an earlier and more detailed account of her decision to join the Ursulines, see ‘Fragments from the Relation of 1633’, fragment 55, 182-85. Young Claude was devastated. He tried in many ways to convince his mother to return home, but without success. Attitudes toward child-rearing differed considerably in Marie’s day from what they are today. Still, this was a most difficult time for both Claude and his mother. On this vexing topic, see, for example: Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son, 5-12, 32-40. And in a more complex treatment, Mary Dunn, The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood and the Christian Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). See Marie’s own remarks written close to the time when she left her son, ‘Fragments from the Relation of 1633’, fragments 58-61, 185-87. For more extensive remarks, see Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 1, 268-77. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 30-34. Ibid. 31. See Relation of 1654, 98. Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 489; Mahoney, Marie of the Incarnation, 99n4. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 31.

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description of this vision and experience. ‘The Eternal Father was my father; the adorable Word, my Spouse; and the Holy Spirit was he who by his action worked in my soul fashioning it to support the divine impressions’.32 As often happened over the course of her life, Marie then experienced several years of spiritual trial and temptation of various sorts. During Lent of 1633, her spiritual director Jesuit Father de la Haye freed her from these interior sufferings when he confirmed that it was the Holy Spirit guiding her. On December 26 or 27, 1633, her life took a further turn toward Canada.33 She said at that time she did not even know of a place called Canada, though this would seem hard to take literally.34 Jesuit activity in Canada had been well publicized in France. In any case, she had a dream in which she saw Our Lady seemingly speaking with Jesus about a vast country and his plan for her there. Around 1635, at about 35 years old, Marie came to see her King and source of salvation, Jesus, as King of the universe and source of salvation for all. Under the guidance of the Spirit, she would pray to her Father that Jesus’ kingship be recognized in all the countries she visited from time-to-time in prayer. Her sense of mission flowed at this point more directly from her experience of Jesus.35 Then God focused her attention on Canada when He spoke to her. ‘It is Canada that I have shown you; you must go there to build a house for Jesus and Mary’.36 Before leaving for Canada on February 22, 1639,37 Marie ‘saw in a vision the endless row of crosses and the frightful spiritual solitude she would have to endure in Canada’.38 The fourth and final period or stage in Marie’s spiritual growth was that of her missionary life in Canada (1639–1672).39 On landing in Canada, Marie recognized the country she had seen years before in a dream at Christmas. Shortly after arrival, she entered a three-year period of deep internal turmoil and rebellion against God. Yet, at the same time she was named superior of the Ursuline community. Around 1643, her sense of rebellion diminished considerably. She could again enjoy her loving relationship with her Spouse. She continued in her efforts to establish a seminary or school for Indian girls and to work out a constitution for her religious community appropriate to circumstances in Canada.

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Relation of 1654, 100. Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 489. Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 18. Michel, ‘Spiritualité de Marie’, 64-65. Relation of 1654, 116. Ibid., 130-31. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 34. Ibid., 35-41.

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In 1647, on the feast of the Assumption, Marie prayed to Mary to be freed from her rebellious condition. Michel recounts that she said she received this grace ‘in a flash’. Then, in December 1650, she had to face the burning of the Ursuline monastery during the Iroquois harassment of that year.40 At God’s insistence, she had the monastery rebuilt. Michel writes, ‘After 1651, she entered upon a state of continual victimhood, more interior and intense than usual, wherein in different ways the Holy Spirit kept consuming her’.41 Over the following years, she lived in continual exchange with God. ‘This same Spirit moves me to speak at one time to the Eternal Father, and then to the Son, and then to the Spirit itself’.42 This final state to which the Spirit led Marie from 1647 on was clearly apostolic. Yet she continued to be both, namely, apostolic in her concern and contemplative in her being. Already now we can see, as Michel concludes, that these are for her ‘two dimensions [of her spiritual life which] live together in harmony in the thirteenth state of prayer’.43 Ultimately, though, ‘the great mystical graces, and even her spiritual marriage, were given “in view of Canada”’.44 After much illness and suffering, she died on April 20, 1672,45 in Canada, where she had found her home.46 Before turning more directly to Marie’s three visions of the Trinity, we should make a few further remarks concerning Marie’s spiritual outlook as we have briefly seen it reflected in her autobiographical writings. We quickly note that in many ways she mirrors the religious spirit of her times. She exemplifies several themes dear to the French School of Spirituality of her day. From about the middle of the 17th century on, the School and those who belonged to it had a great devotional impact on the Catholic Church. The School’s spiritual traditions continue to influence Christian spirituality even today. In the School, members stressed a personal experience of Jesus and the search for holiness. Several of the School’s core themes find succinct expression in the title of a recent symposium on French spiritual traditions, ‘Surrender to Christ for Mission’.47 It is easy to see that these core themes characterize Marie’s spiritual 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 490. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 38. Relation of 1654, 175. Michel, Living in the Spirit, 40. Ibid., 41. In her letter 263, September 17, 1670, to Father Joseph-Antoine Poncet, S.J., Marie writes, ‘There are no visions or imaginings in this state [referring apparently to her present state of prayer]. The one you know about happened to me formerly and was only in view of Canada’. In Mahoney, Marie of the Incarnation, 276. Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 490. Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 34. Professors Wendy Wright and Philip Sheldrake were principle organizers of the symposium which was held at Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas, November 16-17, 2016.

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experience. ‘Surrender’ brings with it the notions of self-abnegation and spiritual victimhood. ‘To Christ’ finds exemplary expression, especially in Marie’s sense of mystical marriage. ‘For mission’ becomes, concretely, in Marie’s life an undying commitment to the Canadian mission. At the same time, Marie’s spiritual experiences and her reflection on them are original. This is the case especially regarding certain emphases which come strongly to the fore in her recountings of these experiences. We have, for instance, noted the striking way contemplation and action, mystical experience and life work or mission are harmoniously interwoven. Her autobiographical remarks lead us to see that she has brought together exterior and interior adventures. She has indeed, in a particularly forceful way, integrated contemplation and mission. Her whole life gives concrete expression to the notion of ‘for mission’. We may well suspect that the Canadian context, in which she worked and prayed, had an important influence on various aspects of her experience of action in relation to contemplation and the relation between them. This even though she lived in a cloistered convent. The Canadian context must have colored her later re-reading of earlier spiritual experiences.48 Life, contemplation, and mission are, then, harmoniously interrelated. But, more than that, in Marie’s case they become one. For they find their ultimate unity in her commitment to the mission in Canada. In addition to her great emphasis on mission, we will see that Marie’s experiences, as she recounts them, led Marie to give further personal nuance to two French School of Spirituality themes. The first of these two themes is the foundational role of the Holy Spirit in her spiritual life and missionary work. As we will see, she continually places great stress on that role. A second theme arising out of her experiences is deep devotion to the Trinity. As we have just seen, the French School of Spirituality stressed the importance of a personal relationship with Christ. But Marie clearly affirms distinct personal relationships with each of the divine Persons in the Trinity. It is as if Marie’s visions have led her to expand what in the French School was a direct personal relationship with Christ to direct personal relationships with each of the three divine Persons.49

48

49

See Philip Sheldrake (Ed.), Surrender to Christ for Mission: French Spiritual Traditions (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018). Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son, 30-32. For further remarks concerning the influence of the New World on ‘Marie’s distinct brand of spirituality’, Dunn refers on 30n100 to Anya Mali, Mystic in the New World: Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) (Leiden: Brill, 1996), esp. 164-73. On Marie in relation to the French School of Spirituality, see John Farina, ‘General Introduction’ to Marie of the Incarnation: Selected Writings, edited by Irene Mahoney (New York: Paulist, 1989), 1; Dunn, introduction to From Mother to Son, 26-32. On the French School more generally, Dunn refers on 26n83 to Yves Krumenacker, L’école française de spiritualité:

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Marie’s Visions, Experiences of the Trinity Marie experienced her three visions of the Trinity from mid-1625 to early 1631. She was blessed with these visions relatively early on in life, from around the age of 25 to about 30. As compared, for example, with Julian of Norwich who speaks little of herself, she exemplifies in her visions a growing shift taking place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This overall shift was especially evident in philosophical and theological circles. Greater emphasis was now being placed on the individual or, we might say, the subject. In Marie’s case, this emphasis shows up in the way in which Marie regularly recounts her visions in the first person. She is speaking of her own individual and personal experiences when she tells of them.50 With Marie, we have come upon an understanding of experience with which we commonly work today. When we speak of experience, we usually focus directly on the person involved passively, actively, or both in relationship with the ‘object’ or ‘other’ being experienced. We think of the one experiencing. Marie’s visions involve an ‘other’ she experiences, which other is personal and active in the relationship. Indeed, that other is the initiator of the relationship. In Marie’s visions, she experiences the three divine Persons of the Trinity who interact with her. But let us turn more directly to Marie to allow her to speak more for herself.51 Marie refers to and comments on her three visions of the Trinity at various points in her writings. But, most importantly for us, she tells of her visions, her personal visionary experiences, in several specific places in her writings. She recounts them in three such places in her Relation of 1654, a text which seems to have gone through two drafts before its final writing. This Relation was written about 24 years after her last vision of the Trinity, primarily in response to

50

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des mystiques, des fondateurs, des courants et leurs interprètes (Paris: Cerf, 1998). And see Wendy M. Wright, ‘Seventeenth-Century French Mysticism’, in: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia A. Lamm (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 437-51, esp. 444-47. From a somewhat different perspective, though one treating as well of this era of change, Bruneau writes insightfully of Marie and her life within a male-dominated historico-religious scene. Women Mystics, esp. 33-122, 233-47. Bruneau’s reading of Marie’s life is remarkably different from most, usually more traditional, readings. By way of example, see Bruneau’s short summary of Marie’s life (33-35). Of special interest as well, Bruneau’s presentation of Marie’s impressive understanding of Indian women, as reflected in Marie’s writings. See especially Bruneau, chapter 5, ‘The Confrontation between “Civilized” and “Savage” Femininity in the New World’, in: Women Mystics, 101-22. For a somewhat older, but insightful, meditative reflection on psychological aspects of Marie’s visionary experiences of the Trinity, see Paul Renaudin, Une grande mystique française au XVIIe siècle: Marie de l’Incarnation, Ursuline de Tours et de Québec, Essai de psychologie religieuse (Paris: Blond et Gay, 1935), 77-99, 115-18.

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an insistent request from her son Claude Martin.52 He had become a Benedictine monk and, as previously mentioned, was a mystic in his own right. A second text is the one Marie had written many years earlier at the request of her spiritual director. We refer to it as her Relation of 1633. It was written relatively soon after Marie’s experiences of the Trinity, perhaps only a couple years after the last of her three visions. Unfortunately, most of the text has been lost. What we have consists in fragments her son inserted here and there in his biography of his mother. What remains tends to be more concrete, direct, and less developed in its presentation. We will consider fragmentary texts from the Relation of 1633 which clearly concern her second and third visions in addition to texts from the Relation of 1654 concerning her three visions. Marie also writes of aspects of these three visions in a third text. It takes the form of a letter written to her son in response to his request for further information about what she has learned in her visions of the Trinity. She dates her letter October 8, 1671, about 17 years after the Relation of 1654 and a year before her death. The parts of these three texts more directly recounting Marie’s visions are rich in information conveyed both in what she says and the ways in which she says it. We will perforce focus on selected aspects of what she says in these particularly relevant parts of her writings. They are helpfully identified as numbered articles. We will only occasionally refer to remarks she makes elsewhere in her writings concerning her visions, indeed her experience, of the Trinity. In reporting on these selected articles, we will highlight elements in them which will help us appreciate two points. The first is to see what is specific to each of her visionary experiences. The second, to describe the ascent toward ever greater unity with the Trinity which Marie sees taking place in the progression from one vision to another. We begin with selections from Marie’s two Relations before turning to her letter to her son. The Relations of 1633 and 1654 The First Vision, 1625. In her Relation of 1654, at the beginning of numbered article 18,53 Marie sets the stage for her description of her first vision of the 52

53

Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, col. 490. Also, her spiritual director ordered her to write the Relation of 1654. See Relation of 1654, 41. On this first vision, see Relation of 1654, Sixth State of Prayer, art. 18, 74-75 (with the last numbers indicating pages). The numbered articles of the Relation of 1654 are relatively short. So quotations from such articles which are explicitly cited by number in our text and which are referenced in a note by page or pages will usually not be further referenced by specific page or pages when it is clear enough that the quotations are taken from the numbered article being discussed. When discussing here Marie’s three visions, we will refer not only to the article with its page numbers but also to ‘State of Prayer’ in view of Marie’s remarking, done from

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Trinity. That is, she first notes that the Divine Majesty prepared her for this special gift with a prior experience of humiliation and self-abasement. She then continues, in the same article, with the description of this first vision itself. She writes that it occurs in a specific place and at a specific time. Marie was attending Mass in the Feuillant Fathers’ chapel on Monday after Pentecost. She looked briefly at the little images of angels at the base of the candlesticks. ‘My eyes suddenly closed and my spirit was raised and absorbed into a vision of the Most Holy and August Trinity, in a way I cannot express’. As Jean-Claude Sagne remarks, so began the fuller ‘founding experience of all her [Marie’s] mystical life’.54 ‘In a way I cannot express’. Even allowing for this hesitation concerning the way in which she has experienced the Trinity, Marie continues her description in a short and dense few paragraphs.55 She finds a French word that helps. That word is ‘imprint’ or ‘impression’ (impression). It will come back time and again as she works to convey what she has experienced in her various visions of the Trinity. In effect, she is saying that her experience of the Trinity is something like the imprint of a seal in wax, but now in her soul. She uses a material image to give some understanding of an immaterial act. With this image, Marie is saying at least three things. First, that she experiences the Trinity itself. Second, that there is a real effect of this experience within her. And, third, that her role in this experience is passive and receptive.56

54

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time-to-time, that the visions lead to new and higher states of prayer. Reference to numbered article facilitates reference to the French text. There are occasional remarks concerning this first vision of the Trinity in ‘Le supplément à la Relation de 1654’, preface 144-79, text 48198, in Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2, published by Claude Martin and edited by Albert Jamet (Paris: Desclée-de Brouwer, 1930), art. 7, p. 486, but we will not discuss them in our review of Marie on this first vision. Regarding the Relation of 1633, Mahoney points out that only a small fragment remains concerning this vision. Marie of the Incarnation, 74n1. Two insightful studies of Marie’s recounting of her first vision: Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 169-76; Jean-Claude Sagne, ‘La vie des trois personnes divines, source de la mission’, in ‘Colloque Marie de l’Incarnation’, 350ème anniversaire du départ pour le Canada’, Tours, France, April 29 and 30, May 1, 1989, 75-81. For a contextualizing study of the occurrence of the first vision, see Oury, Marie Guyart, 95-100. ‘L’expérience fondatrice de toute sa vie mystique’. Sagne, ‘Vie des trois personnes divines’, 78 (my translation). There is another brief description of one or the other aspect of the first vision in ‘Le Supplément à la Relation de 1654’, in Martin and Jamet, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2, 486. Sagne, ‘Vie des trois personnes divines’, 77. On ‘imprint’ or ‘impression’ (impression) see the helpful remarks in Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 172, 175, 234n1.

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Marie then describes the content of her vision, presented as a movement from the Trinity to creation and again to the Trinity.57 First, she speaks of the three divine Persons themselves, of what we often call the immanent Trinity. In a moment I saw the divine interchange among the three divine Persons: the love of the Father who in contemplating himself begets his Son in an eternal generation. (…) I was engulfted in [spiritual] light. Then I understood [entendait] the mutual love of Father and Son which generates the Holy Spirit by a reciprocal immersion of love, yet without any confusion of persons.

‘In a moment’, Marie says, she understood the unity and distinction of the divine Persons and their operations among themselves and outside the Trinity. Among themselves and outside themselves without temporal succession from the point of view of the Trinity. But outside themselves with temporal succession from the point of view of their effects.58 Second, Marie writes that she understood how the Trinity acts outside. Here she focuses more specifically on the Trinity in relation to the ‘supreme hierarchy of angels, cherubim, seraphim, and thrones to whom it makes its holy will known without intermediary of any created spirit’. She sees the Father in relation to the thrones, indicating the ‘purity and stability of his eternal thoughts’. The Word in relation to the cherubim, communicating himself ‘through the splendor of his lights’. The Holy Spirit in relation to the seraphim, ‘filling them with his ardent love’. She concludes by saying that the entire Trinity in unity ‘communicates itself to this supreme hierarchy’. The angels are arranged in hierarchical fashion. But Marie does not speak of the divine Persons in such a way. Rather, she is concerned with asserting the distinctions among them. Her reference to angels is an example of her continuing insistence that they are distinct from one another yet equal in the unity of the divine essence. Third, Marie sees the three divine Persons in relation to created humankind. She writes, ‘As I was enlightened, I understood [entendait; in French here, ‘my soul understood’] and experienced [expérimentait] how I was created in the image of God: that the memory is related to the Eternal Father, the understanding to the Son, and the will to the Holy Spirit’. The Trinity is three Persons in one divine essence and the soul is ‘three according to its faculties but one in substance’. Marie brings this brief threefold recounting of the vision to a close, noting that it continued through the time allotted for several Masses. In article 19,59 Marie comments on this first vision. Among her many remarks, we should note that she now finds herself in an entirely new interior 57

58 59

Sagne speaks of this movement and brings out further, more complex moments within it. ‘Vie des trois personnes divines’, 78. See Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 172. Relation of 1654, Sixth State of Prayer, art. 19, 75-77.

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state of prayer and unity with God. Her experience is that of ‘absorption in the three divine Persons’. In various ways, this absorption continues after the occurrence of the vision. It continues even though she has the vision during the time in which she is working for her brother-in-law and is taken up with many business activities. She notes as well that her experience of light was one of light and love intermingled. Then Marie returns to the immanent Trinity or the Trinity within. ‘The soul understands that he [the Beloved] is in the bosom of the Eternal Father where he rests in the mutual love from Father to Son and from Son to Father and that their delight – this very breath of love – is God the Holy Spirit’. In this experience of the Trinity, the divine Persons appear to Marie and come to dwell in her soul. With this appearance and self-gift on their part, Marie understands in an immediate way who they are. Her understanding, based in this divine presence in her soul, is far more profound than an understanding gained merely through sermons or reading. Marie closes this article 19 with a remark about the Holy Spirit. ‘I did not intend to write all this but the Spirit led me to do so’. The Second Vision, 1627. Marie has a second vision of the Trinity two years after her first one. We are fortunate that her son Claude Martin had included some, if perhaps not all, her earlier recounting of the vision as found in her Relation of 1633.60 We have as well her account in her Relation of 1654.61 We will first look at the 1633 recounting before going on to that of 1654. In fragment 34 of the Relation of 1633, Marie tells of her second vision of the Trinity in more general terms. She begins directly. ‘Our Savior raised me once more, and in the way of love, to the knowledge of the mystery of the very holy Trinity, whose greatness was shown to me in the unity of the three divine Persons, but in a way completely different from that which I had been taught, [and this] in regard to knowledge and love’.62 In this state, Marie understood the Trinity by means of the three divine Persons’ direct presence to her. Whereas in the previous vision Marie remained, as she says, more in admiration than in love and in enjoyment, now she finds herself more in enjoyment 60

61

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On this second vision, see Relation de 1633, fragment 34, 204-8. Translations of this fragment will be my own. On this second vision, see Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 22, 81-83 and note further remarks in art. 23, 83-84. On Marie’s recounting of her second vision, see Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 178-205. For a contextualizing study of the occurrence of the second vision, see Oury, Marie Guyart, 107-11. ‘Notre-Seigneur m’éleva de nouveau, et d’une manière toute d’amour, à la connaissance du mystère de la très sainte Trinité, dont la grandeur me fut montrée en l’unité des trois Personnes divines, d’une façon tout autre que ce qui m’en avait été enseigné, en ce qui regarde la connaissance et l’amour’. Relation de 1633, fragment 34, 204.

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and in love. She moves seamlessly from her opening remarks to her vision of the Word generated eternally by the Father. Word and Father are equal in majesty. Together they, in their mutual love, give rise to the Spirit of love who is equal in all to them. This she now sees, in what she calls the way of beatitude, a simple rejoicing of the soul in love of the Word come to her. She finds herself completely absorbed in the Word, to the point of forgetting about the Father and the Holy Spirit. ‘He [the Word] made [my] soul experience that he was all to her and she all to him by union and embrace in which he held [her] soul captive’.63 The Word shared all with Marie and she with him. She then wants all for him and nothing for herself. But, in effect, the Word was as well her captive, and this by his own sweet decision. At this point, Marie returns momentarily to remember the Father and the Holy Spirit, whom she adores and loves. But she turns again to the embrace of the Word in which she feels herself lost without neglecting the divine unity. ‘It was there [in this embrace] that I knew and experienced that the Word is truly the Spouse of the soul. (…) I never experienced a greater grace’.64 Thereafter, this experience of union with the Eternal Word never left her. She colorfully writes, here closely paraphrased, that this Eternal Word is a continuing nourishment for her and a fragrant perfume for her soul. Marie’s second retelling of this vision of 1627 is to be found in article 22 of her Relation of 1654.65 It is slightly longer than what we have of what she had written about 21 years earlier. Her description is somewhat denser in composition and more explicit in its references to the three divine Persons. It is more explicit especially regarding her mystical marriage with the Eternal Word. Before coming to tell of her second vision, she had already mentioned that the effects of the first vision had remained with her for at least a year.66 She had as well reflected further on the relationship between light and love in her vision. Whereas in presenting that first vision she seems to have concluded that light and love were intermingled, she has, immediately afterward and on further reflection, by now concluded that light comes from love.67 She again reminds us, as she did concerning the first vision, that such great graces are prepared for by a period of personal suffering, spiritual and sometimes physical. But there

63

64

65 66 67

‘Il lui faisait expérimenter qu’il était tout à elle et qu’elle était toute à lui par une union et un fort embrassement où il la tenait captive’. Relation de 1633, fragment 34, 205. ‘Ce fut là que je connus et expérimentait que le Verbe est véritablement l’Époux de l’âme. (…) Je n’ai jamais expérimenté une plus grande grâce’. Relation de 1633, fragment 34, 207 (italics in the original). Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 22, 81-83. Relation of 1654, Sixth State of Prayer, art. 21, 79. Relation of 1654, Sixth State of Prayer, art. 19, 76-77.

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is as well, in one way or another, a foretaste of future peace as part of such preparation.68 As Marie begins to recount her second vision, she first compares her previous vision with the present one. The first time, the impression I received principally affected my understanding. (…) [T]he Divine Majesty had acted in order to instruct me. (…) This time (…) it was the will which was important because this grace was concerned entirely with love, and through love my soul found itself wholly in the intimacy and enjoyment of a God of love.69

She then found herself engulfed in the presence of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, ‘adoring him in the awareness and acknowledgement of my lowliness’. As in the Relation of 1633, Marie again moves seamlessly to focus on the Divine Word. He reveals himself as the ‘spouse of the faithful soul’. She clearly indicates that at this precise moment ‘this adorable Person seized my soul and embracing it with indescribable love united it to himself, taking it as his spouse’. She immediately clarifies that by ‘embrace’ she means something beyond earthly understanding. Yet she remains concrete in her description of her spousal embrace and subsequent relationship with the Divine Word. We need to cite her own description. ‘It was through his divine touches and by being enfolded in his love that I in return loved him, in a union so complete that I was no longer aware of myself, having become one with him’.70 Marie briefly sees the Father and the Holy Spirit again while remaining fully captive in her Spouse. She insists that the three divine Persons remain distinct in their actions. Father and Holy Spirit contemplated the Word in his action. Each divine Person remained distinct and free in that Person’s action, which ‘did not hinder their unity’. Marie then insists strongly that ‘it is the Holy Spirit who is the moving power, enabling it [the soul] to act thus [as spouse] with the Word’. She brings her immediate recounting of her second vision to a close with a final remark about her spiritual marriage with the Divine Word. Her text is seemingly somewhat ambiguous concerning who the gracious initiator is. She writes that ‘the soul constantly experiences [expérimente] the action of this gracious initiator [seemingly the Divine Word] who by this spiritual marriage has taken possession of it with so gentle and sweet a fire that it cannot be described’. Her language of spiritual marriage and of a bridal hymn ‘comes from that sweet melody of the mutual embrace of the soul and the adorable Word which, through the kisses of his divine mouth, fills her with his spirit and his life. Thus, 68 69 70

Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 22, 81. Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 22, 81. Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 22, 81-82.

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this bridal hymn is the return and requital of the soul to its beloved Spouse’.71 Then, at the beginning of the following article 23, Marie says that ‘with the spiritual marriage the soul has completely changed its state’.72 For the rest of her life, she will remain in this state of spousal union with the Divine Word, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, through spiritual experiences of agony and ecstasy. The Third Vision, 1631. About four years after her second vision of the Trinity, Marie had a third such vision. Her son has preserved a fragment of her Relation of 1633 concerning it.73 As she did regarding her earlier visions, Marie here recalls moments of preparation for what would be coming. At least in reference to more immediate preparation, she seems to stress moments of encouragement just before this vision. In a more general reference to God, she says he asked her to ‘give me your heart. At these words I [Marie] felt myself melt completely into him and it seemed to me that by this word, so sudden and so tender, he drew everything out of me, taking me for his own’.74 On the feast of the Guardian Angels, March 17, 1631, about two months after Marie had entered the convent, she felt herself drawn by the Master of the angels. It was as if he were leading her to some greater grace. Three or four hours of agitation accompanied her sense of being drawn to something more. She then went to the chapel for prayer. Before the Blessed Sacrament, she felt she had to sit down. She was too weak to kneel. Again, as Marie did regarding her two previous visions of the Trinity, she has identified a specific time when, and place where, this third vision occurred. ‘Instantly, my understanding was illumined with a vision of the most Holy Trinity’. She says that she had previously experienced being absorbed in the Word. ‘But this time all three Persons of the Holy Trinity absorbed me in such a way that I could not see myself in one person without seeing myself in the others. (…) What touched me most was that I saw myself in this Majesty like a pure nothing lost in the All. (…) I was nothing, yet I was entirely apt for him who is my All’.75 It would be hard to overstress the fact that Marie considered herself as nothing in relation to the Trinity. She mentions it five times toward the end of her 1633 recounting of the vision.76 71 72 73

74 75 76

Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 22, 82-83. Relation of 1654, Seventh State of Prayer, art. 23, 83. ‘Fragments from the Relation of 1633’, fragment 67, 298-300. On Marie’s recounting of her third vision, see Adriazola’s particularly insightful reading of Marie’s presentations in the Relations of 1633 and 1654. Connaissance spirituelle, 230-39. For a contextualizing study of the occurrence of the third vision, see Oury, Marie Guyart, 146-56. ‘Fragments from the Relation of 1633’, fragment 66, 191. ‘Fragments from the Relation of 1633’, fragment 67, 192. Noted by Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 238.

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Marie’s recounting in the Relation of 1654, article 33,77 is similar in length to what we have of the Relation of 1633. But it includes several additional insights into her vision and its results. These insights are the fruit of her years of reflection and further spiritual experiences over the approximately twenty years following the text she had written in 1633. Marie now writes that she waited to see what her Spouse had prepared for her. At evening prayer, ‘a sudden inner transport ravished my soul’. Interestingly, she interprets the words of the Word as indicating the presence of the three divine Persons. She quotes John 14:23: ‘If anyone loves me, my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling with him’. With these words, she comes ‘to understand [connaître] and to experience [expérimenter]’ the action of the divine Persons in her soul. She experiences the Trinity in its unity taking possession of her soul which the Trinity made ‘capable of this divine imprint’. This ecstatic experience is the highest of her three visionary experiences of the Trinity. It results in her sense of the three divine Persons being in fullness of union with her and she with them. To appreciate the intensity and immediacy of this experience, we will do well to cite two of her descriptions exactly as she wrote them. First, Marie expresses the development among the three visions by formulating an understanding of it in the first person, seemingly attributed by her to the whole Trinity so speaking. ‘The first time I revealed myself to you it was to instruct your soul in this great mystery; the second time was for the Word to take your soul for his spouse; this time, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are giving themselves in order to possess your soul completely’. Second, she succinctly describes the result of this fullest presence of the three Divine Persons in her soul. She is possessed by the three Persons and, in turn, possesses them. Full, mutual self-revelation. She indeed has a personal relationship with each of them. ‘The Eternal Father was my father; the adorable Word, my Spouse; and the Holy Spirit was he who by his action worked in my soul fashioning it to support the divine impressions’. Guy-Marie Oury complements these remarks made by Marie. He does this from the point of view, so to speak, of the three divine Persons. ‘It was a mutual possession in which each Person received Marie according to his own nature: the Father as a Father, the Son as a Bridegroom, the Holy Spirit as One who empowered her to receive their divine communication so as to act as daughter and spouse’.78 As in the Relation of 1633, here too in that of 1654 Marie repeats several times that she is nothing before the Great All. And yet, in humbling herself, she ‘experienced [expérimentait] a manifestation of love for which no human 77 78

Relation of 1654, Eighth State of Prayer, art. 33, 99-100. Oury, Marie Guyart, 152.

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language has words’. We might note that the French text is more tender in its formulation. There it reads that she ‘experienced caresses of love’ rather than simply saying ‘a manifestation of love’.79 Marie brings these autobiographical remarks to a close by noting that the impression she underwent lasted about half an hour. This highest form of union with the three divine Persons provided an outstanding preparation, and subsequently ongoing support, for her over the following years. She remained in this union as she received her religious habit, continued in religious life, and, about eight years later, went off to mission in Canada. Marie’s Confirmatory Letter About 17 years after writing the Relation of 1654, Marie’s son Claude Martin asked Marie for clarification concerning the mystery of the Trinity. She responded, writing on October 8, 1671 a long letter from Canada to her son back in France.80 This was a year or so before her death. In approximately the first two-thirds of the letter, Marie recalls and confirms much of what she had previously written. She focuses mostly on her first vision, doing so as a reasonable response to her son’s request. For this vision is the one she had described as providing her with understanding of the Trinity. She says that before the vision she herself was basically uninstructed in the mystery of the Trinity. What she then came to know she had gained from her vision and, more exactly, from the impression the Trinity made in her soul.81 All of what she learned about the Trinity in her vision took place, she says, instantaneously. She goes to great lengths to insist that what she describes should not be understood in terms of the senses. There was nothing material about her visionary experiences. Rather, as she had said many years earlier, it was God who worked all in her. ‘The whole [the Trinity] contemplated itself in this impression. (…) [T]he soul saw the mystery of the eternal generation in an instant, the Father begetting his Son and the Father and the Son producing the Holy Spirit, without mixing or confusion’.82 She reminds her son again of her nothingness before and in the Trinity. Nevertheless, God shared with her soul the secrets of the ‘divine interaction between the Father and the Son, and between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit by means of their embrace and mutual love’.83 79

80 81

82 83

Relation of 1654, Eighth State of Prayer, art. 33, 100. French text, ‘et mon âme expérimentait des caresses qui ne sauraient tomber sous la diction humaine’, Relation de 1654, art. 33, 287. ‘Letter 274, October 8, 1671’, in Dunn, From Mother to Son, 218-23. Dunn says that ‘throughout this letter, Marie’s [sic] makes a robust appeal for the authority of lived experience over theological training’. From Mother to Son, 219n357. ‘Letter 274’, in Dunn, From Mother to Son, 219. Ibid., 220.

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Marie recalls what she had written many years earlier regarding the relationships between the various divine Persons and the hierarchy of angels. The Father in relation to the thrones, the Word in relation to the cherubim, and the Holy Spirit in relation to the seraphim, with the Holy Trinity so communicating to them and through them to the other angels. She repeats here almost exactly what she had written about the divine Persons and the angels when, in her Relation of 1654, she describes what she had seen in her first vision. About these and other points she had made, she now writes, ‘These great things are never forgotten, and I still remember them as clearly as when they happened’.84 Of special interest is the way in which she discusses her just-mentioned description of the three Divine Persons in relation to the angels. Her description follows closely what Saint Denis had written. By Saint Denis she means the one who wrote a major theological and mystical treatise, probably, we would say today, in Syria around the end of the fifth century. Today we often refer to this late fifth- or early sixth-century Syrian theologian and philosopher as Pseudo-Dionisius. Her spiritual director had given her a copy of a recent printing of the translation of Saint Denis’ works. In reading them, Marie concludes that she indeed did not learn of the Trinity from his writings or those of others. For she had been instructed concerning the three divine Persons in her visions, and this through the impressions the divine Persons made in her soul. She did acknowledge, though, that she found Saint Denis to have put into words what she had seen in her visions better than anyone else she had read. She was ‘convinced that this great saint had the light of the Holy Spirit’85 when he wrote of such things. Toward the end of her letter, Marie again attributes what is going on in her life to the Spirit. When I said to you [her son] above that my soul experiences [expérimente] the signification of the actions it produces, I meant to say that my soul is pushed along by the spirit. The spirit guides me according to what I see and experience in its attraction, which doesn’t permit me to do anything else. If what I see and experience are things of love, as the one that I love is only of love, the actions it makes me do are all actions of love, and my soul, which loves the love, understands that it is completely love in him.86

Marie is struggling to explain to her son what she finds happening in herself. She writes that she regrets they are not nearer to one another. She wishes that her son could be her spiritual director. 84 85

86

Ibid., 220. Ibid., 221. For further remarks on sources behind, we might say, Marie’s reflections, see: Oury, ‘Marie de l’Incarnation’, cols. 497-98; Mahoney, introduction to Marie of the Incarnation, 19-22. ‘Letter 274’, in: Dunn, From Mother to Son, 223.

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Testimonial As we have seen, Marie has given witness to her visionary experiences of the Trinity in written, autobiographical form. It is such personal witnessing as this which carries great weight today. Her first major testimonial is available in what we have of her Relation of 1633, a text written at the request of her spiritual director. Her second, and for us presently most important, major testimonial is the one found in her Relation of 1654, written at the insistence of her spiritual director and especially at the insistence of her son. Along with remarks she has made in several other documents, these two texts of the Relations constitute a particularly valuable direct witness to her experiences. Through the decades, her language to express them remains strikingly consistent. The original visionary experiences must have made a deep impression on her. As spiritual autobiography, her various texts tell much about her life. It was one characterized by the interweaving of visions and action, but ultimately of visions leading to action. ‘Visions leading to action’ sums up the dynamic movement of Marie’s life from childhood to young adulthood to religious life and missionary service in Canada. In speaking of her visions, Marie often refers to what she herself is experiencing. Usually, when she speaks of ‘experiencing’, she tells us what is or was going on within her. She shares what she understands and feels about the Trinity and about herself, based on the ever-fuller presence of Father, Son, and Spirit in her soul. This ever-fuller presence is a movement, to put it more abstractly, from truth in the first vision to spiritual marriage in the second on to total possession in the third. Again, from initial explanation to personal involvement and then to totalizing moment. In relating this development in her experience of the Trinity, Marie speaks ever humbly of herself. Likewise, in recounting her experience she provides us with an extraordinary example of trusting openness. She is open to the enlivening work of the Spirit which leads to a deeply personal relationship with the risen Lord, to the glory of God. The Spirit enables her, and thus frees her, to participate in a spousal relationship with her Lord and to address God as her Father.87 We have referred more specifically to Marie’s regular use of the word ‘experience’ to tell what Marie herself has felt within her. But we can also speak briefly of her visionary experience in a wider and more inclusive sense. We can consider her experience in terms of mutual relationships between the three divine Persons and Marie. She not only speaks of the three divine Persons, but directly to them. 87

Michel concludes his study as follows: ‘The Holy Spirit, the source of true freedom, has set her [Marie] free and permits her to converse freely with her Spouse while lovingly and faithfull[y] serving him in her vocation’. Living in the Spirit, 253.

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She recognizes among them clear distinctions within unity of being and action. For her they are distinct and yet one. In their distinction and unity, they provide a spiritual embrace within which she herself lives and out of which she acts. To return to what Marie is herself experiencing, within this divine embrace she knowns each of the three divine Persons through what has been called affective knowing (connaissance affective).88 She knows the divine Persons through love for them, a form of knowing including, but greatly surpassing, regular understanding. And the three divine Persons actively experience her, so to speak, in their love for her. The love of the three divine Persons for Marie means that they give themselves to her. And the love of Marie for them means that she in turn responds by giving herself to them. We have highlighted several aspects of Marie’s experience of the Trinity to which Marie gives witness. These were especially aspects of the mutual relationships between the three divine Persons and Marie. We should consider her experience of the Trinity as well from the perspective of the results to which these relationships lead in her life. That is, we should note again the way knowledge of the Trinity leads to missionary vocation in her recountings of her experiences. As we have seen, Marie herself had said, in effect, that her visions of the Trinity and other visions brought her to mission in Canada. Maria-Paul del Rosario Adriazola summarizes, simply but strongly, what Marie had learned. ‘To know God is to participate in the interior communication of his life and of his love in order to be able thus to cooperate in his exterior work of the redemptive Incarnation’.89 Sagne, French social psychologist and specialist in spirituality studies, helps us reflect further on the movement from trinitarian experience to missionary vocation. He does so in a talk given during a colloquium held in Tours, France, in 1989, on the 350th anniversary of Marie’s departure for Canada.90 He focuses on Marie’s experience of Jesus’ redemptive love, an experience taking place within the overall context of Marie’s experience of the Trinity. Among many possible points, Sagne proposes four which he finds particularly helpful. First, he underscores Marie’s deepening of her sense of redemptive love. Jesus had given his blood for her because he loved her. Second, Sagne points to Marie’s sense of a deepening spousal calling. With her spiritual marriage, Marie comes over time to feel she is called to mission. She prayerfully visits many countries 88

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Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 195, where she cites several authors concerning this notion. My reading of affective knowing differs slightly from what Adriazola and those she cites seem to say about it. ‘Connaître Dieu, c’est participer à la communication intérieure de sa vie et de son amour, afin de pouvoir ainsi coopérer à son œuvre extérieure de l’Incarnation rédemptrice’. Adriazola, Connaissance spirituelle, 238 (my translation). Sagne, ‘Vie des trois personnes divines’, 80-81.

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where her Spouse is not yet well known. For Sagne, there is a third point convincing Marie of her missionary calling. In her visions, she realized her own nothingness and sinfulness, her need for Jesus’ redeeming love. Through her feeling of her own sinfulness, she comes to recognize sinners’ spiritual distress. Sagne brings the previous three points together in a fourth one. He focuses on Marie’s recognition of Jesus the Redeemer’s expansive and world-englobing love for the universe and all of history. Marie, in turn, wants to spread knowledge of that love and lead others to love the one who so loves them. She lived her last years in a state of prayer, of life we might say, which was ‘clearly apostolic’.91 In her various writings, Marie has told of the goal-oriented nature of her life, namely, her calling to mission in Canada. As essentially autobiographical writings, her two versions of the Relations and her letter to her son are fitting testimonials to her experience of the Trinity. They witness affirmingly to that experience and make it available first to her spiritual director and then to her son. In her humility, she seems to want both director and son to keep her texts to themselves.92 But her spiritual experiences are powerful, and their inner dynamic is outward orienting. It would seem simply impossible for spiritual directors or even her son to keep, as a private possession, information about them. Powerful experiences followed by, in their own way, powerful texts. Yet, these texts themselves remain, in a sense, but the tip of the iceberg. Marie took strength and guidance from her visions of the Trinity throughout the rest of her life. She did this in communal settings, at home, at work, in the convent, with those whom she served. I would suggest that Marie’s fullest testimonial to experience of the Trinity is, then, the whole of her life. Over the course of her life, she lived ever more fully under the impulse of the Spirit in union with her Spouse, addressing God as her Father. It is with her life, her work, and the continuity of expression throughout her writings that, under the guidance of the Spirit, she gives witness to her experience of the Trinity. By her example, taken in such a wide sense, she encourages others to live in the Trinity. We can in closing, then, well

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Michel, Living in the Spirit, 39. Bruneau discusses and questions the idea that Marie acts out of humility when she requests that her writings be kept secret. Rather, she argues that Marie chose to submit her writings to her clerical directors and her son, the latter of whom would also be considered her spiritual, again clerical, director. (I would suggest that, if this is the case, it strengthens the idea that Marie was offering a testimonial in the full sense of the word. For she would want her writings to be eventually more widely known through her directors, thus encouraging readers to be aware of and become interested in experience of the Trinity.) Women Mystics, 66-76, with reference to Marie’s request for secrecy made on 75. Bruneau writes here at some length on Marie’s working with spiritual directors and her son in relation to her autobiographical recountings.

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appreciate Sagne’s brief summary of various elements of Marie’s experience of the Trinity as expressed in his final evaluation of Marie. It would well seem that she [Marie] is the greatest mystic of the French 17th century for two reasons: the depth of her insights into the mystery of the Trinity and the fecundity of her apostolic action in Canada. And the dominant line [which runs through both] spells itself out in her in this trinitarian grace which has served as the foundation and living source of her whole life and of the totality of her self-gift, all the way to the end of her life in Canada.93

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‘Il semble bien qu’elle soit la plus grande mystique du XVIIème siècle française, à cause de ces deux aspects: la profondeur de ses lumières sur le mystère de la Trinité et la fécondité de son action apostolique au Canada. Et la ligne dominante s’est jouée en elle dans cette grâce trinitaire qui a été la foundation et la source vive de toute sa vie de prière et de tout son don d’elle-même, jusqu’au terme de sa vie au Canada’. Sagne, ‘Vie des trois personnes divines’, 81 (my translation).

CHAPTER 8 CHARLES WESLEY Trinity Hymns

With Charles Wesley (1707–1788), we move from France and Canada to England. Charles was the younger brother of John Wesley (1703–1791). Together they led the early Methodist movement. Of the two, John more often bears the title of founder because of his outward-going nature and leadership qualities. Both were known for their preaching. And they both went through similar religious experiences of personal conversion, John shortly after Charles.1 With few exceptions, their theological views on most points did not differ greatly.2 They each stressed the importance of belief in, and personal experience of, the Trinity. John wrote of both and preached on them in his often-delivered sermon on the Trinity.3 1

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3

For an excellent recent biography of Charles Wesley, see John R. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), with a helpful bibliographical essay, ‘A Note on the Sources’, 340-47. For a wide-ranging, well-documented series of studies on Charles Wesley, see Kenneth G. C. Newport & Ted A. Campbell (Eds.), Charles Wesley: Life, Literature and Legacy (Peterborough, UK: Epworth, 2007), with an extensive secondary literature bibliography, Donald A. Bullen, ‘Bibliography’, 533-64. The following came to my attention after finishing the manuscript: Erik K. R. Stalcup, ‘Chapter 15: The Wesleys, Charles and John’, in: Hymns and Hymnody: Historical and Theological Introductions, vol. 2, From Catholic Europe to Protestant Europe, ed. Mark A. Lampert, Benjamin K. Forrest, & Vernon M. Whaley (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2019), 210-25. Randy L. Maddox & Jason E. Vickers, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, ed. Randy L. Maddox & Jason E. Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8. ‘The Sermon of John Wesley: Sermon 55, On the Trinity’, Wesley Center Online, especially articles 17 and 18, accessed September 1, 2017, http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-55-on-the-trinity. A critical edition of the text in print form: The Works of John Wesley, vol. 2, Sermons II, 34-70, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1985), 373-86. For further review of John’s preaching on the Trinity, see Fred Sanders, ‘Chapter 10: The Trinitarian Theology of John Wesley’, in: Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 241-51. On John Wesley’s trinitarian theology and experience, see also Fred Sanders, ‘John Wesley on Experiencing the Trinity’, in: Seedbed, posted February 10, 2014, accessed October 7, 2017, http:// www.seedbed.com/john-wesley-experiencing-trinity. Sanders says that John regularly quoted Gaston de Renty (1611–1649), a Roman Catholic mystic. And see John Wesley (published

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But when it came to hymns, of fundamental importance in Methodist spirituality, Charles clearly took the lead. John composed a few, though probably no more than one or the other on the Trinity.4 Charles, in turn, wrote between six and nine thousand hymns on various religious topics over the course of his life,5 with a good number dedicated to the Trinity. He was an itinerant preacher who, it was said, would often come up with a hymn while riding on horseback from one town to another. Many of his hymns on various religious subjects continue to be sung in Methodist churches. And a wide spectrum of other Christian communities throughout the world have made their own a good number of them. Among the more than four hundred of his hymns still found in hymnals today, many will immediately recognize, ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ and ‘Christ the Lord Has Risen Today’.6 Charles’s hymns and John’s sermons have each had a great influence on Methodist and other Christian spiritual traditions. But it may well be that Charles’s hymns have had the wider and longer-term spiritual impact.7

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by), An Extract of the Life of Monsieur De Renty, A Late Nobleman of France, 4th ed. (London: R. Heawes, 1778), copy available at Google Books. In this volume, de Renty is quoted as having written to his spiritual director: ‘I have in me ordinarily an experimental verity, and a plenitude of the presence of the most Holy Trinity, which elevates me to a simple view of God, and with that I do all that his providence enjoins me, not regarding any thing for their greatness or littleness, but only the order of God, and the glory they may render him’ (7). Sanders says that ‘Wesley’s imagination on this topic [informed personal experience of the Trinity] was captured by the[se] words of Gaston De Renty’. Remarking in a similar vein, Wilma J. Quantrille, ‘The Triune God in the Hymns of Charles Wesley’ (Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1989), 11 with n. 26 citing Timothy Dudley-Smith, ‘Charles Wesley: A Hymnwriter for Today’, in: The Hymn 39 (1988), 7. Quantrille, ‘Triune God’, 2, citing: John R. Tyson, ‘Charles Wesley’s Theology of the Cross’ (Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1983), 67; Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, vii-viii, 255. For online access to hymns Charles wrote, see: ‘Charles Wesley’s Published Verse’, The Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, Duke Divinity School, accessed September 2, 2017, https://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives/cswt/charles-published-verse, with the descriptive comment, ‘This subsection of the collection gathers the nearly 4,400 distinct poems and hymns published during Charles Wesley’s life that scholarly consensus traces to his pen’; ‘Charles Wesley’s Manuscript Verse’, The Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, Duke Divinity School, accessed September 2, 2017, https://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives/cswt/charles-manuscript-verse, with the descriptive comment, ‘This body of verse [left in manuscript at his death, most of which is still extant] includes both manuscript precursors to many items in Wesley’s published collections and over 4,420 distinct new hymns and poems that remained unpublished at his death’. First editions of Charles Wesley’s collections of hymns can be found in pdf copy in ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/ charles-john-wesley-works. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, vii. Sanders, ‘Trinitarian Theology of John Wesley’, 249, referring to Barry E. Bryant, ‘Trinity and Hymnody: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Hymns of Charles Wesley’, in: Wesley

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The Road to Personal Conversion Charles Wesley was born in 1707 in an England rife with political and religious turmoil. John R. Tyson describes him as ‘impetuous, short-tempered, and given to outbursts of feeling’.8 But he was as well a man of personal warmth, meekness, and humility. He made friends easily. Such qualities as these latter, positive ones continued to characterize him throughout his life. He entered Oxford University in 1727. A university directive encouraged instruction in Christian duty, reading of Scriptures and books which ‘promote Christianity, sound principles, and orthodox faith’. Charles later saw his ‘religious awakening’ linked to ‘the method of study prescribed by the University’.9 He observed the university directive, earning him the nickname ‘Methodist’ or one who follows a method. Charles gathered a group of students into what became known as the Holy Club. He and those with him adopted, in varying degrees, a practice of fasting, frequent reception of the Sacrament, and almsgiving. They modeled life on Acts 2:42-45. As Tyson remarks, ‘The Oxford Methodists intended to recapture the spiritual experience and vitality of the early church’.10 Charles obtained his master’s degree at Oxford in 1733. In 1735, Charles and John Wesley went on mission to the British colony of Georgia in North America. But by December 1736 Charles, in poor health, had already returned to England. His short stay in the colony was a painful one. He finally interpreted his difficult relationship with the colonists in a spiritual way as ‘the unavoidable persecution of all Christians’.11 Even before leaving for Georgia, he had not wanted to go there. ‘Charles, who was thriving at the university, [thought he] was unprepared and ill-suited for life on the American frontier’.12 Won over by his brother John, he quickly but reluctantly accepted ordination as deacon and priest in preparation for the mission. On October 21, 1735, he and John joined a cohort of colonists sailing from England to the new world. They ministered to the colonists on the boat throughout the long and

8

9 10 11 12

Theological Journal 25 (1990), 66. Quantrille makes a similar remark concerning the importance of the hymns, but more specifically concerning their influence in relation to the ongoing theological scene in the Wesleys’ day. ‘Triune God’, 9. On the spread of Methodist spirituality, see, for example, Frank Whaling, introduction to John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns, Journal Notes, Sermons, Letters and Treatises (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981), 62-64. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 6, and see 1-58, where he describes the early life of Charles leading to his experience of conversion. Tyson is the primary source of information and insights presented here concerning these early years. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 9. Ibid., 15. Charles Wesley, quoted, without direct reference to source, by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 37. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 21.

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difficult voyage. Tyson notes that in his preaching Charles did not yet stress God’s liberating grace, divine love, and the Spirit’s power as he would after his future experience of conversion. During a particularly terrifying storm at sea, Charles listened to some Moravians singing with the sureness of faith.13 He saw how powerful congregational singing could be as a source of spiritual experience.14 Once arrived in Georgia, he served as secretary to the head of the colony and continued to minister to the colonists. Administrative tasks weighed heavily on him. And he found that many colonists grew increasingly dissatisfied with him and his ministry. He wrote a hymn reflecting his truly unhappy situation. In the third stanza of one of his hymns written around this time, Charles seems to anticipate a future experience of conversion. O G o d , mine inmost Soul convert, And deeply on my thoughtful Heart Eternal Things impress, Give me to feel their solemn Weight, And tremble on the Brink of Fate, And wake to Righteousness.15

On his way back to England, Charles stopped in Charleston, South Carolina. There he saw first-hand the all-too-often cruel treatment of slaves by their owners. Later he, but especially John, would strongly oppose slavery.16 After seeing for himself this terrible treatment of slaves, Charles headed north to Boston, where he boarded a ship for England. Charles was happy to return to England. Though at one point he thought anew about returning to Georgia, his health again failed him. In England, he continued farther along the road toward an experience of personal conversion. Over the course of his spiritual journey, he found his own experience deeply 13 14

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Ibid., 26-27. Diane Severance, ‘Charles Wesley’, Christianity.com, accessed October 6, 2017, http://www. christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1701-1800/charles-wesley-11630230.html. Published as ‘An Hymn for S e r i o u s n e s s ’, in: Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Bristol: Felix Farley, 1749), hymn VII, (p.) 34, copy available at ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/charlesjohn-wesley-works. The medial s is replaced by the modern s here and elsewhere in quotations from Charles Wesley’s 18th-century texts. Quoted as well by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 34. See S T Kimbrough, ‘Charles Wesley and Slavery’, Proceedings of the Charles Wesley Society 13 (2009), 35-52, accessed October 5, 2017, http://divinityarchive.com/bitstream/handle/11258/ 6062/S%20T%20Kimbrough%20Jr%2c%20Charles%20Wesley%20and%20Slavery%2c%20 35-52.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. On John Wesley, see Brycchan Carey, ‘John Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery and the Language of the Heart’, in: The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 85 (2003), 269-84, accessed October 5, 2017, http://www. brycchancarey.com/Carey_BJRL_2003.pdf.

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embedded in a series of relationships with others. His journey took the form of a process in which he moved from one relationship to another. It climaxed in his conviction that he was saved. Charles began to meet with a series of people who would influence him in various ways as he thought over what he was to do in the future. For example, he met with his former spiritual mentor, William Law. Charles found him to be exceedingly unhelpful in the meeting. Then, in the spring of 1738, ‘Peter Böhler, a Moravian missionary, had been visiting Wesley and pressing him about matters like justification by faith and the inner witness of the Spirit’.17 Charles asked Peter to pray for him. Peter in return asked if Charles wished to be saved. Charles spoke of all the good he had done, but Peter was not impressed with this answer. Charles was at this point chagrined. On May 11, 1738, the English Moravian John Bray met with Charles. They prayed for faith. But over the next few days Charles felt lost, without Christ. And, due to his illness, various pains seemed to increase. A friend of his, Mr. Holland, stopped by to see him. He gave Charles a copy of Luther’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Both Mr. Holland and Charles ‘were deeply moved by Luther’s insights about justification by faith’.18 Luther’s influence on Wesley was, at this point, profound. Then, on the evening of May 19, a Mrs. Turner visited Charles. He asked her many questions, such as whether she was at peace with God. She responded each time with the firm conviction of faith, profoundly impressing Charles. Mr. Bray again visited Charles and came upon a scripture passage, Matt. 9:1, according to which Jesus sees the faith of those who bring a paralyzed man to him and says the man’s sins are forgiven. Bray felt this verse promised Charles Christ’s forgiveness and physical healing. ‘The next day was Pentecost Sunday, and Charles was hoping for a Pentecost of his own’.19 That morning, a Mrs. Musgrave, who helped take care of him, said to him, ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe, and thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities’.20 Charles wrote that he felt ‘a strange palpitation of the heart. (…) I said, yet feared to say, (…) I believe! I believe!’21 Tyson writes, ‘The bondage to sin and the darkness of doubt were broken and driven away when Christ came into the poet’s life. (…) Newfound freedom leads directly to Christian discipleship’.22 During these days around the time of his conversion, Charles wrote a hymn with an autobiographical 17 18 19 20 21 22

Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 43. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46. Mrs. Musgrave, as quoted by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 47. Charles Wesley, as quoted by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 47. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 50.

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cast to it. In stanza 5, he acknowledges the role of the Holy Spirit in his experience of conversion and in his liberation from sin and guilt: Still the small inward Voice [of the Holy Spirit] I hear, That whispers all my Sins forgiv’n; Still the atoning Blood is near, That quench’d the wrath of hostile Heav’n; I feel the Life his Wounds impart; I feel my Saviour in my Heart.23

Charles called his 1738 religious experience one of conversion. He no longer referred to his own efforts when he spoke concerning assurance of forgiveness. Instead, he spoke of faith and of the power of the Holy Spirit. He would continue to stress the role of human efforts but not in relation to justification and its assurance. They were, rather, under the guidance of the Spirit a means of progression in holiness24 and of effective social concern.25 Tyson well summarizes Charles’s religious experience when he speaks of it as Pentecost becoming personal for Charles.26 The experience Charles had of personal conversion lies at the basis of his hymns, and especially his Trinity hymns, to which latter we will turn in a moment. Tyson writes, ‘Charles Wesley responded to the event of his evangelical conversion by writing several hymns to commemorate the day and communicate that experience. This microcosm can safely stand for the macrocosm of the Wesley and hymnological corpus’.27 Quantrille makes a similar remark, but with more specific reference to the Trinity hymns. 23

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Published as ‘F r e e G r a c e ’, in: John Wesley & Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: Strahan, 1739), (p.) 118, copy available at ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/charles-john-wesley-works. Quoted as well by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 50. See, for example, the distinction Charles made, around the time of his experience of conversion, between justification and subsequent sanctification, as discussed by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 232, with remarks on 57, 85. And note Charles Wesley’s brief remark made already in 1738 rejecting predestination or God condemning some persons independently of their will, as quoted by Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 101. Of interest from the point of view of the wider question of the ‘quest for perfection’ and the recounting of several experiences of the Trinity, Geoffrey Wainwright, ‘Trinitarian Theology and Wesleyan Holiness’, in: Orthodox and Wesleyan Spirituality, ed. S T Kimbrough, Jr. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 78, and see on trinitarian visions 76-78. J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns (Burlington, IN: Meetinghouse, 2006, originally published 1941), 249, for an interesting consideration of Charles’s experience of conversion as expressed in hymns, see 247-54. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Rattenbury’s study. Tyson entitles his third chapter ‘Pentecost Becomes Personal’. Assist Me to Proclaim, 40-58. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 255.

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The hymns, including the reflections on the Triune God, would never have been written had it not been for Wesley’s personal, life-changing religious experience of Whitsunday [Pentecost], 1738. ‘For any poetry to be written there must be both consummate craftsmanship and a powerful urge’. His hymns are based on a personal assurance of the forgiveness of sins.28

Hymning the Trinity Charles Wesley’s life, religious experience, hymns, and evangelization, including social concern, are closely interrelated. They find their unity in evangelization, a move reminiscent of Marie de l’Incarnation’s profoundly interwoven life, visions, and mission being united in the mission to Canada. Charles found that his experience of conversion, namely, his coming to believe fully in justification by faith, led him to redirect his efforts at evangelization in a more enthusiastic, evangelical way. He celebrated that conversion in hymns which he hoped would lead others to their own experience of conversion. His hymns reflected, in many ways, various aspects of his own life and experience as well as those of his fellow Christians, past and present. He wrote devotional hymns on deeply personal topics as wide-ranging as childbirth and birthdays, marriage, fatherhood, and dying. In such hymns, he would universalize topics like these. Thus, he led others to reflect with him, from a Christian evangelical perspective, on the realities celebrated. His hymns worked at both communal and individual levels when a congregation sang them.29 Though Charles was highly educated, he was in effect a man of one book, the Bible. His biblical scholarship was sound. In his hymns, he picked up on many Old Testament texts, which he then versed in relation to Christ. His hymns often involved creative re-reading and innovative integration of various New Testament themes and stories. He wrote numerous hymns on various moments in Christian life and on theological subjects, giving them an experiential grounding. While doing so, he remained faithful to inherited Christian practice and doctrine. Charles often stressed basic aspects of Christian life and 28

29

Quantrille, ‘Triune God’, 5. She quotes Frank Baker, Charles Wesley’s Verse (London: Epworth, 1964), 2. And see Rattenbury, Evangelical Doctrines, 33. For a brief but particularly insightful study of Charles Wesley’s sermons and hymns on the Trinity, see Jason E. Vickers, ‘Charles Wesley and the Revival of the Doctrine of the Trinity: A Methodist Contribution to Modern Theology’, in: Charles Wesley: Life, Literature and Legacy, ed. Kenneth G .C. Newport & Ted A. Campbell (Peterborough, UK: Epworth, 2007), 278-98. On Charles’s ‘musicality’, see Carlton R. Young, ‘The Musical Charles Wesley’, in: Charles Wesley: Life, Literature and Legacy, 414-45, with Young speaking of Charles’s sure musical instinct, 436.

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experience, especially the need for repentance and the joy of Christian living. He wrote hymns on a wide variety of theological themes. J. Ernest Rattenbury lists many of them: ‘God and His character; the Holy Trinity; Man, fallen and rebellious; Christ, His Person, Incarnation and Atonement; the Holy Spirit; the Authority of the Bible; and the doctrines of Church and Sacraments’.30 And he memorialized a wide range of events such as those in family life, in various societal situations and even in the political realm. In his hymns, including his Trinity hymns, Charles conveys message and feeling by means appropriate to the art form with which he works. He often chooses words with various layers of meaning, words rich in biblical and, to a lesser extent, other literary allusions. He usually rhymes the words with which two lines end, either following one another or a second line later. This rhyming creates a sense of at least momentary completion and wholeness in those who read or sing the rhymed lines. He often suggests melodies to accompany the hymns, some of which seem particularly apt in reinforcing the message and mood of a given hymn. Where the stress falls on various syllables in a line is important. Syllables on which it falls are considered long, whereas the others are then short. This identification of syllables as long or short permits Charles to group them into twos or threes.31 Such grouping establishes the basis for various meters or repeated rhythmical patterns of long or stressed syllables and short ones.32 There are usually from 3 to 12 syllables to a line of verse. Patterns of grouped syllables give dynamic structure and movement to the lines of verse in a stanza. Over the years, Charles works with an increasingly diverse array of such 30

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Rattenbury, Evangelical Doctrines, 116. Many points in the present paragraph draw from Rattenbury’s considerably further developed remarks on 32-54. On 54-60, he considers, as he puts it, alleged literary defects in Charles’ hymns. He notes that many of the hymns were of high literary quality while others were less so. For an extended and more technical discussion of Charles’s hymns, their vocabulary, structure, meter, rhymes, and so forth, see Charles Wesley, Representative Verse of Charles Wesley, selected and edited with an introduction by Frank Baker (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1962), ix-lxi and 396-403. Rattenbury provides an example. The stressed syllables (e.g., ó with acute accent indicating simply stress), in ‘O fór/a thoú/sand tόngues/to síng’, identify and group the syllables into stressed or long (e.g., ō with macron) and unstressed or short (e.g., ŏ with breve) syllables: ‘Ŏ fōr/ă thoū/sănd tōngues/tŏ sīng’. Each group of two syllables, or in other cases three syllables, is called a ‘foot’, which is indicated by forward slashes. Thus, the line here cited has four feet. Rattenbury, Evangelical Doctrines, 342. ‘Meter’ here refers in more limited fashion to the rhythm established by the repeated arrangement of stressed and non-stressed syllables. For a wider understanding of meter taken ‘to summarize the complex combination of line-length, stanza-length, rhythmic pattern and rhyme-pattern’, see Baker, Representative Verse, 396. For a richly insightful interpretation of rhythm in music and poetry but going beyond them to the whole of reality, see Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 38-50, and here below in chapter 11.

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meters. With them, he evokes a variety of sentiments, emotions, and overall feelings in line with what he wishes to communicate through singing the hymn. These meters create varied senses of tempo and movement in a line from beginning to end. Repeating or varying that movement from one line to the next helps bring about a specific mood or moods in those singing. This is especially the case over the full length of a hymn. Charles chooses rhythms and suggests melodies for hymns which, then, reinforce and give further expression to what he intends to say. They enhance the possible experience of the specific mood, or perhaps moods, he wishes to create when the hymn is sung. A mood may, for example, be more reflective and somewhat inward-looking in a penitential hymn. Or, again, it may be more energetic and outward directed in a hymn of praise. Rattenbury speaks of various pairings of meters with moods. And, we could add, melodies. One example of such pairing is joyous hymns whose meters are ‘“jigs”. They produced a desire to beat time with hands and feet in the people who first sang them’.33 When a congregation, a family, or an individual, sings a hymn, the whole congregation, family, or person is active. Singing involves hearing, seeing, vocalizing, and, depending on context and culture, facial expression and movement of the body in whole or part.34 Charles published most of his Trinity hymns in three collections, with several other Trinity hymns included in further collections of his and John’s hymns. He also refers to the Trinity and the three divine Persons in many of his other hymns.35 His first collection of Trinity hymns appears in his 1740 volume, 33

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Rattenbury, Evangelical Doctrines, 39. Remarks concerning elements of the hymn are drawn from 32-54 with the quote on 39. And see his ‘Appendix III: Elementary Note on Methodist Prosody’, 341-44. Relationships between vocal and instrumental music, on the one hand, and experience of God, on the other, are highly conditioned by various cultures and religious traditions. See Mary Collins, David Power, & Mellonee Burnim (Eds.), Music and the Experience of God (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989). In his ‘Editorial Conclusions’, 148-51, David Power speaks more generally of music as mediating or, we could say, facilitating experience of God. He suggests that more attention should be paid to music itself and not just to the words sung. Music as such helps interpret the words and is, in its instrumental and vocal forms, prior to simply understanding the words as such. Music creates a special moment in space and time, a moment in which experience of God can occur. We should also note several volumes in the series ‘Music and Spirituality’, published by Peter Lang with reference to them online, accessed October 7, 2017, https://www.peterlang.com/search?q1=Music+and+Spirituality&searchBtn. Of note, A. M. Allchin remarks that Charles reflects a certain sense of Trinity wider than the Western tendency to stress oneness would seem to permit. ‘The Trinity in the Teaching of Charles Wesley: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Orthodoxy?’, in: Proceedings of The Charles Wesley Society 4 (1997), 82-83, accessed October 17, 2017, https://charleswesleysociety.org/ resources/proceedings-archive. We might add that perhaps this tendency is due, in part, to his sensitivity to New Testament texts and their explicit references to Father, to Son, and to Spirit.

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Hymns and Sacred Poems. In it, we find seven short Trinity hymns.36 They are meant to be sung both by a congregation and in family settings. Charles brought them into his second publication, the 1746 pamphlet collection entitled Gloria Patri; or Hymns to the Trinity.37 There they serve as the first seven of the collection’s 24 Trinity hymns. His third publication is a 1767 volume of 188 hymns on Christ, the Spirit, and the Trinity. It is entitled Hymns on the Trinity.38 We will focus on three hymns which reflect various ways in which Charles addresses the Trinity with his hymns. Gloria Patri; or Hymns to the Trinity Charles Wesley’s pamphlet, Gloria Patri; or Hymns to the Trinity, was reprinted nine times during his lifetime. Of the 24 Trinity hymns included, we will select two from the first seven previously published in 1740 and included in Gloria Patri. The two are hymns 4 and 7. This selection is based on several factors. First, Charles wrote these two hymns within a year or so after his 1738 experience of conversion. They have a freshness about them which makes them particularly interesting. Second, they stand out for consideration since they ‘are the best examples of the contents’ of the 24 hymns in Gloria Patri.39 Third, and perhaps most important, they provide good access to much of the overall message and mood Charles wishes to convey through his Trinity hymns. Hymn 4: 1

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P r a ī s e bĕ/tō thĕ/Fāthĕr/gīvĕn! C h r ī s t Hĕ/gāve Ūs tŏ/sāve, Nōw thĕ/Heīrs ŏf/Heāvĕn. Pāy wĕ/ēquăl/Ādŏ/rātiŏn Tō thĕ/Sōn:

John Wesley & Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: Strahan, 1740), 100-4, copy available at ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/charles-john-wesley-works. [Charles Wesley], Gloria Patri; or Hymns to the Trinity (London: Strahan, 1746), copy available at ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/charles-john-wesley-works. [Charles Wesley], Hymns on the Trinity (Bristol: William Pine, 1767). A facsimile of the First Edition, Bristol: Felix Farley [so indicated], 1767 (Madison, NJ: The Charles Wesley Society, 1998), is available. Original text, accessed January 6, 2020, is also available through the website of The Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, Duke Divinity School, https://divinity. duke.edu/initiatives/cswt/charles-published-verse. Barry E. Bryant, ‘Trinity and Hymnody: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Hymns of Charles Wesley’, in: Weslyan Theological Journal 25 (1990), 71.

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Hē ă/lōne Wroūght oŭt/oūr Săl/vātiŏn. Glōry/tō the Ĕ/tērnăl/Spīrĭt! Ūs Hĕ/seāls, C h r ī s t rĕ/veāls, Ānd ăp/pliēs Hĭs/Mērĭt. Wōrshĭp,/Hōnoŭr,/Thānks ănd/Blēssĭng, Ōne ĭn/Threē, Gīve wĕ/Theē, Nēvĕr,/nēvĕr/ceāsĭng.40

What immediately strikes us in reading or singing this hymn is the distribution of the content in its stanzas. Charles dedicates each of the first three stanzas to one of the three divine Persons, in the creedal order of Father, Son, and Spirit. The fourth stanza honors the ‘One in Three’,41 whom the readers or singers address directly with the singular ‘thee’. With this use of the singular, Charles clearly affirms divine unity in three distinct but equally divine Persons. The first stanza succinctly praises the Father as the one who gives the Son with the intention of saving us. We thereby become the ‘heirs of heaven’. The second stanza invites us to adore the Son who alone works our salvation. Charles both affirms Christian theology and strongly echoes what he came to believe during his experience of conversion. The third stanza offers glory to the Spirit who realizes the Son’s work of salvation in us. The Spirit ‘seals’ us and ‘reveals’ Christ, again an echo of his experience of conversion which the Spirit had effected. In the first three stanzas, Charles has clearly and carefully delineated the distinct roles of Father, Son, and Spirit. Then, in the fourth stanza, he calls on those singing the hymn to respond in unending praise offered to the One in Three. He has, in effect, given expression to classic Christian understandings of the roles of Father, Son, and Spirit. At the same time, he roots that expression more immediately in his own experience of conversion. The first and last lines of each of the four stanzas move rhythmically as a series of four groups or feet consisting of one long and one short syllable. This structure gives the lines a sense of joyous movement.42 The rhyming of the last 40

41

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[Charles Wesley], Gloria Patri, hymn IV, (p.) 4. The indication of stressed or long (for example, ā) and unstressed or short (for example, ĕ) syllables is my own. But as far as I can see it corresponds with that of Baker, Representative Verse, 158, 400. The indication of long and short vowels in scansion can vary depending, for example, on which syllables one senses the stress falling when the text is read out loud. ‘One in three’, rather than ‘Three in one’, is similar to what the First Council of Constantinople affirmed. See chapter 3 above. For the score whose melody enhances the joyous movement of each stanza in this hymn, see ‘Trinity Hymn. 1-8 & 2-6s’, in Harmonia Sacra, or A Compilation of Psalm and Hymn Tunes,

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words in the first and last lines of each stanza brings us to a sense of overall completion. This is especially the case at the end of the fourth line in the last stanza. There the rhyming qualifies the sense of completion as a ‘never ceasing’. The second and third lines move from a long and short syllable to a final long syllable. In the first three stanzas, this rhythmic movement strongly asserts the distinct identities of each of the three divine Persons, ending as the second and third lines do on a stressed syllable. The overall meters or rhythmic movements of each of the first three stanzas are identical. This identity of meters and movements strengthens the sense of the equality of the three divine Persons, though perhaps in a more subliminal way. In the fourth stanza, the movement of the second and third lines affirms the divine unity. It leads readers and singers to turn in worship to the One in Three. As in the first three stanzas, the rhyming of second and third lines in the fourth stanza reinforces the specific point made in it. This hymn is one of perhaps 300 Trinity hymns Charles penned. In it we find exemplified two basic points which characterize many of these hymns. First, it is not a hymn about the Trinity but to the Trinity. Charles is saying that trinitarian thought is at its best when it takes the form of praise, when it is doxological. And joyful hymns are a preferred way of expressing that praise. Second, Trinity and salvation are intimately related. Salvation is the result of the generosity of the Father. It is the meritorious work of the Son and the application of that work to each of us by the Spirit. Of note, from our perspective, personal salvation begins with the action of the Spirit within us as the Spirit applies Christ’s merit to us.43 Hymn 7: 1

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F ā /t h ĕ r ŏf Mān/kĭnd Bĕ ē/vĕr ădōred44 Thy Mēr/cy wĕ fīnd,/Ĭn sēnd/ĭng oŭr Lōrd, Tŏ rān/sŏm ănd blēss/ŭs; Thy Goōd/nĕss wĕ praīse, Fŏr sēnd/ĭng ĭn J ē /s ŭ s’ Sălvā/tiŏn by Grāce.

collected from the ‘Most Celebrated European Masters’, as Published in the Different London Editions by Thomas Butts; to Which Are Added Several Select Pieces from GREEN and HANDEL (Andover: Flagg and Gould, 1816), 89, accessed September 18, 2017, http://petrucci.mus. auth.gr/imglnks/usimg/4/46/IMSLP211647-PMLP353826-harmoniasacraorc00butt_bw.pdf. ‘The Holy Spirit was bound to take priority with Wesley because of the present-oriented experience to which he calls the singers of the hymns’. Quantrille, ‘Triune God’, 89, and see 99, 101 (regarding the ‘immediate presence of the Spirit to every person’ in the context of corporate worship). Quantrille also speaks of the interest on the part of Charles in ‘corporate holiness’, 161. Also stressing the fundamental role of the Spirit, Vickers, ‘Revival of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, 283, 293. This line could be scanned as follows, ‘Făthēr/ŏf mănkīnd/bĕ ē/vĕr ădōred’, thus bringing it more in parallel with the first lines of the following two stanzas and then requiring a slight reinterpretation.

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Ŏ Sōn/ŏf hĭs Lōve,/Whŏ deīgn/ĕst tŏ diē, Oŭr Cūrse/tŏ rĕmōve,/Oŭr Pār/dŏn tŏ buȳ; Ăccēpt/oŭr Thănksgīv/ĭng, Ălmīght/y tŏ sāve, Whŏ ō/pĕnĕst heāv/ĕn, Tŏ āll/thăt bĕliēve. Ŏ Spīr/ĭt ŏf Lōve,/ŏf Heālth,/ănd ŏf Pōwer, Thy wōrk/ĭng wĕ prōve;/Thy Grāce/wĕ ădōre, Whŏse īn/wărd Rĕveāl/ĭng ăppliēs/oŭr Lŏrd’s Bloōd, Ăttēst/ĭng ănd seāl/ĭng ŭs Chīl/drĕn ŏf Gōd.45

Hymn 4 consisted of four stanzas. The first three addressed respectively, Father, Son, and Spirit, with the fourth praising the three divine Persons together. The present hymn 7 has only three stanzas, each dedicated to and praising one of the three Persons. It does not end with a stanza stressing oneness in threeness. In this versification according to the original edition, the longer lines in each of the three stanzas permit somewhat more developed descriptions of each of the three Persons. In the first stanza, Charles describes the Father as Father of ‘mankind’. He is to be adored, is merciful, sends our Lord to ransom us, and is full of goodness. We are thus saved by grace. In the second stanza, the Son is Son of the Father’s love, who wills to die as ransom for us. We offer thanksgiving to the ‘Almighty’ who saves and opens heaven to believers. The ‘Almighty’ could in principle refer to the Son or to the Father, given the way Charles refers to both as ‘Jehovah God’ in various places. Though, of note, in our previously seen hymn 4, ‘saving’ and making us heirs of heaven is linked with the Father. In the third stanza, the Spirit is the Spirit of love, of health, and of power. As with the Son, now the Spirit is described in terms of love. Both references reflect the fact that Charles ultimately sees the Trinity in terms of love. ‘Health’ recalls that for Charles sin is a sickness from which we are to be healed. Salvation is a healing.46 We prove the Spirit’s work freely carried out in us. The Spirit works inwardly, applying our Lord’s blood. The Spirit attests to and seals our being children of God. We certainly hear Charles alluding here to Romans 8:14-16 and Galatians 4:6, where the Spirit cries out ‘Abba, Father’, in our hearts.

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[Charles Wesley], Gloria Patri, hymn 7, (p.) 5. The indication of stressed or long and unstressed or short syllables is my own. Baker divides the lines differently, making the somewhat complex rhyme pattern more apparent. The presentation here follows the original versification as found in the first edition of Gloria Patri. As mentioned in n. 40 above concerning hymn 4, also here my identification of long and short vowels seems to correspond with that of Baker, Representative Verse, 23, 401. By way of further note, salvation as healing seems at least indirectly to link what Charles is saying here with the New Testament’s repeated description of Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry as one of healing.

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Of special note, Charles writes in stanza 3 ‘Thy working we prove’. Tyson explains that Charles uses ‘prove’ in several ways in his hymns.47 Among these several ways, at times for him it means to demonstrate or to test and verify. But most often it means to experience. Here, in this hymn 7’s third stanza, he is saying that we experience within us the working of the Spirit as he himself did in his experience of conversion. Charles also uses ‘prove’ in relation to the Father. In the first stanza of hymn 19, for example, he writes: T h e e Father of Men And Angels we Praise, Whose Wonders are seen In Nature and Grace Throughout thy Creation, Whose Goodness we prove, And boundless Compassion And infinite Love.48

We see here the pairing of ‘prove’ and ‘love’ in partial rhyme, a pairing important to Charles who identifies the Trinity as love. We should note as well that Charles uses a variety of other verbs to express, in various ways, the believer’s experience of the three divine Persons. In addition to ‘prove’, he writes of ‘feeling’, ‘knowing’ in a biblical sense as a ‘wholistic encounter’,49 and ‘tasting’ as ‘a synonym for receiving or experiencing God’s grace or forgiveness’.50 Charles often employs the verb ‘feel’ to describe our experience of the blood of Jesus applied to us. For example, in hymn 46 in his 1767 collection of Hymns on the Trinity Charles writes: His true divinity, denied By an ungrateful world, we own, Who feel the blood divine applied, And sav’d by grace thro’ faith alone, Shall soon behold his open face, And our eternal Saviour praise.51

Tyson helpfully cites an example of the way Charles works with all four experiential words in one of his hymns from a collection published in 1762. The 47

48 49 50 51

On ‘prove’ and the following ways in which Charles indicates he is speaking of ‘experiencing’, see John R. Tyson’s important article, ‘Charles Wesley and the Language of Evangelical Experience: The Poetical Hermeneutic Revisited’, in: The Asbury Journal 61 (2006), 25-46, accessed October 6, 2017, http://place.asburyseminary.edu/asburyjournal/vol61/iss1/4. [Charles Wesley], Gloria Patri, hymn 19, (p.) 9 (emphasis added). Tyson, ‘Language of Evangelical Experience’, 37. Ibid., 39. [Charles Wesley], Hymns on the Trinity, hymn 46, (p.) 31 (emphasis added).

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following wording differs slightly from the version Tyson presents, but includes the same four experiential words: JESUS, on me the want bestow, Which all who feel shall surely know Their sins on earth forgiven; Give me to prove the kingdom mine, And taste in holiness divine The happiness of heaven.52

With this brief review of several key verbs Charles uses, we come to appreciate the great care with which he chooses concrete words to describe experience of the three divine Persons and their effects occurring through the Spirit. Returning now directly to hymn 7, we should note that he phrases the lines of this hymn predominantly in a series of groups of three syllables, two short and one long or stressed. The second and third stanzas, those concerning Son and Spirit, start out with a short syllable, ‘O Son’ and ‘O Spirit’, while the first stanza begins with the stressed syllable in ‘Father’. In my scanning, the first syllable in this first line of verse is long – there is nothing before it, nothing before the Father. More generally, Rattenbury points out that use of the arrangement of three syllables, two short and one long, in hymns was an innovation. ‘His [Charles’s] use of it [this three-syllabled foot] was prosodically brilliant, and a distinct departure from the conventional in hymn-writing. The thrilling emotion of early Methodists found expression in the employment of three-syllabled feet; Charles Wesley’s merry metres were a distinctive symbol of the Revival’.53 Words, rhythm, and melody come together in the hymns Charles wrote to create wonderful examples of what has come to be described as ‘experimental theology’ or, we would say today, ‘experiential theology’.54 Charles honored and respected the authority of Scripture and dogma. But he knew that they need to 52

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Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, vol. 2 (Bristol: Farley, 1762), hymn 19, (p.) 129 (emphasis added), copy available at ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/charles-john-wesley-works. See Tyson, ‘Language of Evangelical Experience’, 37 with 45n82. Rattenbury, Evangelical Doctrines, 343. Baker says this probably represents ‘Wesley’s first venture into an anapaestic [short, short, long] metre’. Representative Verse, 23. Tyson, ‘Language of Evangelical Experience’, 26-28. Regarding the Wesleys, Tyson refers, within the Lockean context of British empiricism, to a form of religious empiricism, or appeal to experience as evidence, within which they thought. Of note, John Wesley describes his 1780 hymnbook, A Collection of Hymns, for the use of the People Called Methodists, in the preface to that collection, as ‘a little body of experimental and practical divinity’. This could be applied to Charles Wesley’s own collections of hymns as well. The Works of John Wesley, vol. 7, A Collection of Hymns for the use of the People Called Methodists, ed. Franz Hildebrandt & Oliver A. Beckerlegge with the assistance of James Dale (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983), 74.

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be confirmed through the Spirit in personal experience to make them real in the life of the believer. That experience leads to what is for him the most appropriate and effective way to relate to, think of, and speak about the Trinity. His hymns are doxological, that is, they are songs of praise and worship sung to the three divine Persons of the Trinity. Hymns on the Trinity In 1767, twenty-one years after the publication of Gloria Patri, Charles published a larger collection of 188 hymns entitled Hymns on the Trinity. Over these two decades, he and his brother John became concerned about growing disinterest in, or even denial of, the Trinity both in the Church of England and in British society at large.55 In that same year, 1767, William Jones of Nayland published a third, expanded edition of his defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, The Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity.56 He anchored trinitarian doctrines in the Scriptures. Charles took up this study and followed its overall structure and content in the first four parts of his new collection of Trinity hymns.57 In effect, he put into hymn form much of what Jones had written, even using the same titles of subsections as Jones had done in his own book. Of special interest to us, Charles added a final section to his collection and gave it the title ‘Hymns and Prayers to the Trinity’.58 Here Charles included 52 original hymns no longer based on Jones’s study. They reflect to a much greater extent his own 55

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On the trinitarian controversy at the time, see Quantrille, ‘Triune God’, 20-30. Laura A. Bartels takes Charles Wesley’s defense of the doctrine of the Trinity as a defense of the status quo. She writes, ‘While his brother’s commitment to the Church of England was equivocal, Charles’s was not. During this period of church history, the defense of the Trinity should be seen as the defense of both the Established Church and the state government’. ‘Hymns of the Status Quo: Charles Wesley on the Trinity’, in: Methodist History 41 (2003), 25-32 with the quote on 30. It is true that Charles was attached to the Church of England. But it might be too much to speak of him as a status quo trinitarian. Though Charles wanted to remain in the Church of England, he clearly wanted to influence its religious renewal and to combat social evils in society. As far as I can see, he understood experience of the Trinity as personal and communal, with implications for Church renewal and at least some important social change. On Charles and his overall attachment to the Church of England, see Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 215-29. William Jones of Nayland, The Catholic Doctrine of a Trinity proved by above an hundred short and clear arguments, expressed in the terms of Holy Scripture, 3rd ed. (London: J. Rivington; Robinson and Roberts; and S. Withers, 1767), various editions available at Google Books but apparently not this one. The titles of the first four parts are: ‘Hymns on the Divinity of Christ’; ‘The Divinity of the Holy Spirit’; ‘The Plurality and Trinity of Persons’; and, ‘The Trinity in Unity’. [Charles Wesley], Hymns on the Trinity. On ‘Hymns and Prayers to the Trinity’, see Rattenbury, Evangelical Doctrines, 139, 146-50.

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experimental or experiential approach.59 For Charles, trinitarian doctrine without experience of the Trinity was dry and ineffectual. Among these hymns and prayers to the Trinity found in this final section, we will consider hymn 10, in which he addresses the three divine Persons together in each of the four stanzas. So he directs all four stanzas to the Trinity, yet at times addressing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or, later in the hymn, Holy Ghost and, at other times, God in the singular.60 In the first stanza, he combines this wider address with what would seem to be more of a reference to the Father. In the second stanza, he refers specifically to the Son, ‘the great Jehovah died’. In the third stanza, he seems to recall the Holy Ghost when he refers to the ‘Comforter’. In the fourth stanza, he petitions Father, Son, and Holy Ghost together with the singular ‘thy’ and ‘thee’. Here is the text of Hymn 10: 1

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TRĪŬMPH,/hāppy/soūl, tŏ/whōm, Gōd thĕ/heāvenly/sēcrĕt/tēlls, Fāthĕr,/Sōn, ănd/Spīrĭt/cōme, Ōne ĭn/Threē Hĭm/sēlf rĕ/veāls! Whāt frŏm/mān thoŭ/coūld’st nŏt/knōw, Thoū ărt/trūly/taūght ŏf/Gōd, Whēn Hĕ/dōth thĕ/faīth bĕ/stōw, Wāsh theĕ/īn thy/Sāvioŭr’s/bloōd. Fūlly/cērtĭ/fiēd thoŭ/ārt Bȳ thăt/sācrĕd/bloōd ăp/pliēd, Hē whŏ/dwēlls wĭth/īn thy/heārt, Gōd, thĕ/greāt Jĕ/hōvăh/diēd: Nōw, ănd/nōt ’tĭll/nōw thoŭ/knōwst (Mȳst’ry/leārnt by/faīth ă/lōne) Fāthĕr,/Sōn, ănd/Hōly/Ghōst, Gōd ĭn/Pērsŏns/Threē ĭs/Ōne. Gōd ĭn/Pērsŏns/Threē, ăp/peār Gōd tŏ/ēvery/troūblĕd/breāst, Shōw Thy/sēlf thĕ/Cōmfŏr/tēr, Bē thĕ/weāry/sīnnĕr’s/rēst: Strāngĕr/tō thy/peōplĕ’s/peāce, Būrthĕn’d/wīth oŭr/sīns wĕ/groān; Cōme, thăt/āll oŭr/griēfs măy/ceāse,

Ibid., 137-40. As we have now seen and Geoffrey Wainwright notes, ‘We find three main patterns of trinitarian reference [in the hymns]. First, thanks and prayers may be addressed to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Second, the divine Persons may be invoked either separately or in succession. Third, praise may be ascribed to all three persons together’. ‘Chapter Seventeen: Why Wesley Was a Trinitarian’, in: Methodists in Dialogue (Nashville, TN: Kingswood/Abingdon, 1995), 270-71.

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Tāke pŏs/sēssiŏn/ōf thy/ōwn. Fāthĕr,/Sōn, ănd/Hōly/Ghōst, Heāl thy/creātŭre’s/mīsĕr/ȳ; Theē, thĕ/Peārl whĭch/Ādăm/lōst, Gīve ŭs/tō rĕ/cōvĕr/Theē, Gīve ŭs/īn pŭre/lōve rĕ/nēw’d Hīghĕr/bȳ oŭr/fāll tŏ/rīse, Īmăge/ōf thĕ/Trī-ŭne/Gōd, Hoūse ŏf/Ōne whŏ/fīlls thĕ/skiēs.61

Howard Snyder summarizes the important message in this hymn. ‘Its key theme is that the work and the experience of salvation is the work and experience of the Holy Trinity’. We see this identification already in the first stanza. There God tells and reveals that God is Father, Son, and Spirit. We know this through faith bestowed by God who washes us in the Savior’s blood. This theme continues, and is given further precision, in the second stanza. In the death of the great Jehovah, the Son, all three Persons ‘participate in self-giving for us’. In Christ we know the Trinity in a wholistic way, through faith. Charles then writes in the third and fourth stanzas that with the coming of the Trinity we are healed of sin, which he refers to as an illness. As Snyder notes, ‘Salvation is more than forgiveness and justification; it is coming to know God intimately, bringing rest and healing’. Happy and healed is the soul to whom God has so revealed Godself. The fourth stanza ends by affirming we rise higher after the fall. As image of the Triune God, we in our experience of the Trinity become, paradoxically as again Snyder notes, the ‘House of One who fills the skies’.62 In this hymn, Charles celebrates the identification of experience of salvation and experience of the Trinity. This identification will be key to understanding the nature of his testimonial to experience of the Trinity. To confirm the identification, we will do well, then, to call upon his brother John, with whom Charles agrees concerning such experience. John speaks of it in his famous sermon 55 on the Trinity:

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[Charles Wesley], Hymns on the Trinity, hymn 10, (pp.) 95-96. The indication of stressed or long and unstressed or short syllables is my own. On hymn 10, see Howard A. Snyder, ‘Charles Wesley’s Hymn and Prayer to the Trinity’, in: The Asbury Journal 61 (2006), 109-12, accessed September 22, 2017, http://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11 05&context=asburyjournal. My reading of the hymn follows that of Snyder. For brief but helpful contextualizing remarks on Hymns on the Trinity, see S T Kimbrough, Jr., preface, iii-vi, Wilma J. Quantrille, introduction, vii-xiii, advertisement, xiv-xv, all three in Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity, a facsimile of the First Edition, Bristol: Felix Farley, 1767 (Madison, NJ: The Charles Wesley Society, 1998). Snyder, ‘Charles Wesley’s Hymn’, 111.

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I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he ‘hath’, as St. John speaks, ‘the witness in himself;’ till ‘the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;’ that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, ‘even as he honours the Father’. Not that every Christian believer adverts to this; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty: But if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes.63

Geoffrey Wainwright comments at length on this quotation concerning the identification of the experience of salvation and that of the Trinity. He remarks: ‘Our salvation is for [John] Wesley the differentiated but united work of the Three Persons of the Godhead; it sets us into an appropriate relation to each Person, and it gives us (…) a share in their divine communion’.64 John Wesley’s comments in his sermon on the relationship between salvation and the Trinity represent, as mentioned, the thought of Charles as well. Fred Sanders complements John’s comments. He recalls that for John, and we would add again for Charles, ‘Trinitarianism was also uniquely experiential. It terminated not in an objective or factual declaration about the gospel, but in personal experience of the three persons’.65 For Charles, it is worth repeating, we become the ‘House of One who fills the skies’. This hymn affirming the experience of salvation and the Trinity, indeed of being this house, opens with ‘Triumph, happy soul’. Charles helps create a sense of joy and happiness in those who sing the hymn. He does this in many ways. Two of them are by repeating a simple rhythm and by proposing an appropriate accompanying melody. First, he sets up each line of verse with a rhythm established by a series of three feet or groups of syllables. Each group consists of one long or stressed syllable followed by one short syllable. The line then ends with a single long or stressed syllable. This simple, straight-forward repeating of long and short syllables gives a sense of lightness and easy movement, almost as if the singers are carried along with the rhythmic flow of alternating stressed syllables. Almost as if they could bounce along with the hymn and its accompanying melody. 63

64 65

‘Text Sermons: John Wesley: On the Trinity’, SermonIndex.net, accessed April 17, 2019, http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=6128. Geoffrey Wainwright cites this portion of the sermon. ‘Why Wesley Was a Trinitarian’, 261, referring to John Wesley, Sermon 55, ‘On the Trinity’ (1775), in: The Works of John Wesley, vol. 2, Sermons II, 34-70, ed. Albert Cook Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1985), 2:373-86 and, for the quotation, 385, articles 17 and 18. For further access to this important sermon, see n. 3 above. Wainwright, ‘Why Wesley Was a Trinitarian’, 269. Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life, 245.

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Second, as to melody, in an initial remark Charles specifies that the hymn should be sung to John Lampe’s tune for ‘Happy Magdalen, to whom’.66 By way of parenthesis, we should note that Charles had not necessarily intended for all of his poetic writing to be sung. Sometimes he was simply carrying out his own reflections in poetic form. But here, in the last part of Hymns on the Trinity, Charles clearly meant for the hymns to be sung. He metered his first 24 hymns in this part to fit Lampe’s melodies found in a hymnbook he previously published.67 The tune Charles linked with hymn 10 is Spanish, as arranged by Benjamin Carr in 1824.68 It accompanies hymn 10 particularly well. The pairing of one note of the melody with each syllable of the hymn creates a further sense of lilting lightness. In a recent doctoral seminar on experience of the Trinity, we were discussing Charles and his Trinity hymns, especially the present one. We were five students and I who were coming to appreciate what Charles had accomplished through his hymns, and specifically this one. We were in the process of discussing the hymn and listening to a recording of the suggested melody. After hearing it several times, the students spontaneously and joyfully sang ‘Triumph, happy soul, to whom’ according to this Spanish melody. The words and melody carried us along with them.69 We came to appreciate the great difference between reading the stanzas of a song and singing them, especially singing them together as a group. Singing the hymn transformed the way in which we experienced its simple and yet profound emotional impact. For a moment, we together appreciated what Charles had created when he tapped into the power of music universally present at some deep level in all of humankind. Remembering and Recognizing Charles Wesley’s overall testimonial to experience of the Trinity takes on a special, indeed comprehensive, character. It touches on past, present, and future in explicit ways. It involves reference to communal or congregational, shared as for example in a family, and individual or, perhaps better in all these cases, personal experience of the Trinity. The communal and shared forms of experience of the Trinity always include the individual, personal form. Charles witnesses in an appreciative way to past and present communal and shared experience. At the 66 67

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Snyder, ‘Charles Wesley’s Hymn and Prayer to the Trinity’, 110. Kimbrough, preface to Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity, a facsimile of the First Edition, v-vii. Benjamin Carr’s score and recorded tune are available online, accessed September 26, 2017, http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/h/a/p/happymag.htm. Rev. Raquel Feagins and Rev. John Feagins kindly helped in locating melodies Charles Wesley assigned to his various Trinity hymns.

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same time, he anchors individual experience of the Trinity in an experience of personal salvation, identifying the two. In his own case, he in effect traces his experience of the Trinity back especially to his experience of conversion. As we have seen, in a hymn about his conversion experience he wrote that he heard the small inner voice of the Holy Spirit and felt his Savior in his heart. Along with his brother John, Charles, then, invites those who sing his hymns to recognize their own communal or congregational and shared as well as individual and always personal experience of the Trinity. Remembering In his hymns, Charles brings Scripture and doctrine together with personal experience of salvation. This link with personal experience gives his hymns great power when congregations, families, or individuals sing them. We see that he takes up Jones’s scripturally based arguments in favor of the Trinity. He paraphrases Old and New Testament wording in creative ways and gives fresh, insightful interpretations to biblical events. Given his emphasis on experience and the experiential, Charles feels truly at home with biblical texts. They are themselves, in effect, references to and reflections on Hebrew and early Christian experiences of God. More specifically, he gives Old Testament texts Christological and often trinitarian interpretations. He seems spontaneously to sense something shared between such Hebrew as well as early Christian, experiences and Christian experience of the Trinity in his day. It is as if he builds on a certain commonality or connaturality between them.70 Charles sees doctrine as a needed and necessary point of reference when he refers to communal, shared, and individual experience of the Trinity. Needed but insufficient, because without such experience doctrine would remain sterile. This sense of intimate relationship between doctrine and experience suggests that, again in this case, he saw something doctrine and experience share. He found, between them, that certain connaturality. He sensed it because doctrine itself also arose out of experience. This idea of the origin and rootage of doctrine in experience seems to continue in Methodist, and indeed other, Christian traditions. By way of example, we may well recall The Encyclopedia of World Methodism’s experience-based reading of the early Christian doctrine of the Trinity: The formulation of the doctrine [of the Trinity] arose out of the religious experience of the early Christian community. (…) They [first Christians and God’s people Israel] knew him [God] as the holy one far beyond them. (…) God was not only beyond. He also came to confront them [God’s people] in Jesus Christ.

70

In a similar vein, Tyson, ‘Language of Evangelical Experience’, 27.

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(…) Beyond and before, God was also within them [the disciples of Jesus]. (…) That presence was called the Spirit. (…) In its own experience the Church knew God in three ways – God beyond, God before, God within. (…) This threefold nature of God was not simply limited to man’s experience. (…) The church insisted (…) the threeness was intrinsic in His [God’s] very nature.71

Once the doctrine of the Trinity is formulated, it contributes to the experience of later Christians by providing them with a common point of reference. It alerts them to prior communal, shared, and individual experience of Trinity. It helps them understand and appreciate their own experience of the Trinity. In bringing together Scripture, doctrine, and personal experience in his hymns, Charles is in effect remembering in a positive and affirming way past communal or congregational, shared, and individual experience of the Trinity.72 Remembering such experience brings it into the present. Recognizing Charles and John sought to evangelize those with whom they ministered. They wished to help them live their Christian calling more personally and meaningfully. One of the major goals Charles and John had in evangelizing was to help them to recognize that their experience of salvation was itself an experience of the Trinity. We have seen that John expressed this intention in his sermon on the Trinity, a point of view with which Charles agreed. John said, ‘Not that every Christian believer adverts to this [the role of Father, Son, and Spirit in the experience of salvation]; perhaps at first not one in twenty: but if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes’.73 At various times John elaborated further on the fact that for him each believing Christian experiences the Trinity. But, he adds, only a relatively few become 71

72

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Lykurgus (?) M. Starkey, Jr., ‘Trinity, The Holy’, in: The Encyclopedia of World Methodism, ed. Nolan B. Harmon, vol. 2 ([Nashville, TN]: United Methodist Publishing House, 1974), 2366, accessed September 27, 2017, https://archive.org/stream/encyclopediaofwo02harm# page/n1/mode/2up. We have spoken of scripture, doctrine, and experience in the light of the present concern for experience of the Trinity. On a wider level, we should note what has come to be called the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, constituting for John Wesley elements leading to proper theological understanding of Christian experience, with ‘experience’ used here in this last reference in a wide sense. See Albert C. Outler, ‘The Wesleyan Quadrilateral in Wesley’, in: Wesleyan Theological Journal 20 (1985), 7-18, accessed October 11, 2017, http://wesley.nnu.edu/fileadmin/imported_site/wesleyjournal/1985-wtj20-1.pdf. Without attributing it to either John Wesley or to Outler, I would suggest that even ‘reason’ is a form of experience. See Dale M. Schlitt, Experience and Spirit: A Post-Hegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), e.g., 141-44. John Wesley, Sermon 55, ‘On the Trinity’ (1775) (for references, see nn. 3 and 63 above).

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fully and intensely aware of this experience. Among those with whom John corresponded concerning their more explicit experiences of the Trinity, we might well note Ann Cutler who, on April 14, 1790, wrote to him to tell him of her experience: ‘I have union with the Trinity thus: I see the Son through the Spirit, I find the Father through the Son, and God is my all in all’.74 John encouraged her in a letter written a day later. My dear Sister, There is something in the dealings of God with your soul which is out of the common way. But I have known several whom he has been pleased to lead exactly in the same way, and particularly in manifesting to them distinctly the three Persons of the ever blessed Trinity. You may tell all your experience to me at any time: but you will need to be cautious in speaking to others, for they would not understand what you say.75

Charles and John needed to find a concrete way to help those with whom they ministered to recognize their experience of salvation as experience of the Trinity. What that concrete way might be was the question. It seems that Charles found an answer in an experience he had on the voyage by boat to Georgia, an experience which impressed him greatly. He heard the Moravians on board singing together in the middle of a storm. At that moment, he recognized the power of congregational singing and of singing in general. Now he and John faced a new storm. It was one of anti-trinitarian attitudes threatening the experience of salvation. They needed to combat such attitudes in order to safeguard believers’ personal experience of salvation as freedom from sin and guilt, freedom for holiness. So, they, but especially Charles, provided congregations and families with Trinity hymns, often of great quality. John himself had spoken of the quality of hymns in his 1780 hymnbook. We can apply the same evaluation to many of the Trinity hymns. He writes, ‘Here are (…) both the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English language – and at the same time the utmost simplicity and plainness, suited to every capacity’.76 Furthermore, the Trinity hymns engaged the singers personally in the praise of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Tyson writes that the thousands of hymns Charles wrote, and we here are focusing on the Trinity hymns, were ‘loaded with (…) vibrant emotion. Set in first-person form [we, I], they placed 74

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Ann Cutler, quoted by William Bramwell, A Short Account of the Life and Death of Ann Cutler (Leeds: A. Newsom, 1798), 10, copy available at Google Books. Related by Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life, 247. Sanders refers to Wainwright, ‘Trinitarian Theology and Wesleyan Holiness’, 78, and see on trinitarian visions 76-78. The text of the quotation from John Wesley’s letter is taken from Bramwell, Account of the Life and Death of Ann Cutler, 4. John Wesley, ‘The Preface’, in: The Works of John Wesley, vol. 7, A Collection of Hymns for the use of the People Called Methodists, ed. Franz Hildebrandt & Oliver A. Beckerlegge with the assistance of James Dale (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983), 74.

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biblical words and experiences upon the singer’s lips. (…) [The hymns] were intended not simply to narrate evangelical doctrines and experience, but to induce them. (…) Wesley was able to make the singers of his hymns participants in the experiences they sang about. This (…) brought his hymns their hallmark sense of immediacy’.77 As Quantrille points out, in their experiences as worshippers, the faithful become for Charles ‘transcripts of the Trinity’,78 recordings of the experience of the actions of the three divine Persons. With his Trinity hymns, Charles leaves a particularly powerful testimonial to experience of the Trinity. He affirms that experience in the past and works to help those with whom he ministers to recognize their own experience in the present. He intends his hymns to serve in the future as an invitation to recognize, especially, personal experience of the Trinity. The hymns provide those who sing them with the means to express such experience with words and melody, rhythm and gesture in ways that capture something of its joy and richness. They bring to the fore emotion and concern, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness.79 They permit those singing them to express themselves in metaphor and with allusion, alliteration, and intended repetition. In them, rhyming brings with it a sense of wholeness and completion which subtly echoes the joyful inclusion and wholeness of the Trinity itself. It is as if, in continuity with his conversion experience, Charles Wesley has come to know seemingly instinctively that singing hymns to the Trinity can lead to an awareness of experience of the Trinity. Indeed, for Charles, remembering the past and recognizing in the present lead to renewed experience of the Trinity in the future.

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Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim, 57-58. Quantrille, introduction to Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity, a facsimile of the First Edition, xixii. Quantrille’s reference is found in the hymn, ‘Sinners turn, why will you die? God your Maker asks you why’, stanza 7, second line of verse: You, whom He ordained to be Transcript of the Trinity, You, whom He in Life doth hold, You, for whom Himself was sold, You, on whom He still doth wait, Whom He would again create, Made by Him, and purchas’d, why, Why will you forever die? This hymn is found in [Charles Wesley], Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love, [2nd series?] (London: Strahan, [1742]), Hymn 15, (p.) 44 (emphasis added), copy available at ‘List of Wesley Hymns Collection’, Hymnology Archive, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/charles-johnwesley-works. In the background, there lies, as well, the whole question of the relationships between singing and music more generally, on one hand, and persons and the human brain, on the other. Scientific studies are finding rich interconnections between the two.

PART IV 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY TESTIMONIALS

CHAPTER 9 THE AZUSA STREET REVIVAL Pentecost Testimonials

We move now from Medieval and early Modern testimonials to a series of testimonials in the twentieth century on into the twenty-first. More immediately, from Charles Wesley, a founder of the Methodist movement in eighteenthcentury England to a new world. There we turn first to early twentieth-century Pentecost testimonials offered especially in Los Angeles. These testimonials trace their lineage back, in a way, to those of Charles and his brother John. To put the importance of these Pentecost testimonials in perspective, we should quickly note the size of contemporary Pentecostal and charismatic movements. They have grown exponentially over the twentieth century. Today, the number of Christians around the world identifying in one way or another with these movements is estimated at around 500 million.1 Estimates vary, depending on various factors such as how we define ‘Pentecostal’. Many Christians may have experiences typically linked with Pentecostalism as, for example, stressing the importance of experiencing the Spirit in their lives. But they may not necessarily identify themselves as Pentecostals. Those who do so identify, and others who share in their spiritual outlook, live their Christianity in a truly vibrant way. It is particularly those who identify as Pentecostals who trace their origins back to the Azusa Street Revival which took place in Los Angeles from 1906 to 1909. Pentecostal Experience Before turning more directly to the Revival, we should familiarize ourselves with what Peter D. Neumann has called the ‘Pentecostal Experience’.2 There is 1

2

Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., suggests a number closer to 670 million worldwide today. ‘Series Foreword’, in: How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles: The Story behind the Azusa Street Revival (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 2017), 5. Peter D. Neumann, Pentecostal Experience: An Ecumenical Encounter (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012). Dr. J. August Higgins kindly drew my attention to this important study.

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indeed something that Pentecostals share. Their sense of having something in common finds recognition in the fact that we tend to speak more generally of the Pentecostal movement in the singular. But there are differences as well. The highly respected Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong has spoken of modern Pentecostal movements in the plural.3 In so doing, he acknowledges that we can distinguish various movements based on the emphasis they place, or do not place, on specific doctrines. For example, some movements may stress the immanent return of the Lord and others not. It is also possible to differentiate Pentecostal movements in line with varied, more historical considerations. For present purposes, it is helpful to identify three historically distinguishable twentieth-century Pentecostal movements. First, Classical Pentecostalism, which generally traces its beginnings to the Azusa Street Revival and events leading up to it. Second, Neo-Pentecostalism, which is, in effect, the mid-twentieth century charismatic movement appearing in many mainline Christian churches. Third, the phenomenon of the world-wide spread of Pentecostal and quasi-Pentecostal churches and communities.4 The modern Pentecostal sense of mission was present from early in the twentieth century. But that effort has borne particularly important fruit in the second half of the twentieth century.5 It is especially Classical Pentecostals who trace the remote origin of their movement back to the original Pentecost event described in Acts, chapter 2. In Jerusalem, a violent wind arises, tongues of fire rest upon those gathered there, and they are filled with the Holy Spirit. They begin to speak in diverse languages. This personal and shared communal experience of the Spirit brings the early Christian community into existence. The experience empowers Peter the Apostle to witness to others that God ‘will pour out his Spirit’ as they wait for the ‘coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day’. Those who call ‘on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ (Acts 2:17-21 NRSV). Following upon the descent of the Spirit, Peter gives witness to the resurrection of the Lord. ‘This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear’ (Acts 2:31-33 NRSV). Some who hear Peter ask what they should do. He 3

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Amos Yong, ‘Instead of a Conclusion: A Theologian’s Interdisciplinary Musings on the Future of Global Pentecostalism and Its Scholarship’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, ed. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., & Amos Yong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 313. Donald W. Dayton briefly identifies these three movements. As an example of the third movement, he mentions the establishment of certain African Independent Churches. Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1987), 31n22. Yong also distinguishes these three movements in a similar way. ‘Instead of a Conclusion’, 313-14. For a series of regional studies on Pentecostals, see chapters 4 through 8 in: The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, 73-171.

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responds, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins maybe forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 2:38 NRSV). The early Christian community is then presented as holding all in common. It becomes an example to others (Acts 2:43-47). According to a particularly prominent early Pentecostal point of view, this first Spirit-based community died out after a time. It was reborn of the Spirit around the beginning of the twentieth century in anticipation of the second coming of Christ. This rebirth is sometimes called the ‘latter rain’. The reference to two rains recalls the phenomenon, in Israel, of early spring rain at the time of planting followed by a second rain in the fall right before the harvest. Just so, there is a first outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and now another with the rebirth of the Pentecostal community.6 This early twentieth-century rebirth followed nineteenth-century developments in understandings of holiness and sanctification. These developments arose especially out of the Methodist movement founded by John Wesley and his brother Charles.7 As we saw in our previous chapter, Charles Wesley had himself longed for, and then had, his own personal Pentecostal experience. He called it an experience of conversion. Now, especially in North America, a growing number of people were desirous of having their own personal Pentecostal experiences. Such stress on personal experience and its value as a form of evidence seems to have fit in well with the overall later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American context. In that context, the idea of pragmatic verification, that is, verification based on effects, became important. For

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Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 26-28, with helpful bibliography in the notes on 32-33, and his ‘Bibliographical Essay’, 182-85. Dayton refers to D. Wesley Myland’s ‘classic expression of this doctrine’, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power (Chicago: Evangel Publication House, 1910, 2nd ed., 1911), copy of the 1910 edition available at Google Books. For an example of an enthusiastic sermon on the latter rain, see Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings (Los Angeles: Bridal Call Publishing House, 1919), 444-47, copy available at Google Books. On the Methodist theological roots of the twentieth-century Pentecostal movement, see Donald W. Dayton’s ‘Chapter II: Methodist Roots of Pentecostalism’, and ‘Chapter III: The American Revival of Christian Perfection’, in Dayton’s book, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1987), respectively 35-60 and 63-84. And see Dayton’s ‘Bibliographical Essay’ in this volume, 183-86. Throughout this study, Dayton’s notes provide helpful reference to older materials concerning the various topics he covers. Of importance as well, Melvin E. Dieter, ‘Wesleyan-Holiness Aspects of Pentecostal Origins: As Mediated through the Nineteenth-Century Holiness Revival’, in: Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, ed. Vinson Synan (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1975), 55-80, complemented by William W. Menzies, ‘The Non-Wesleyan Origins of the Pentecostal Movement’, in: Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, 81-98.

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example, its popularity created an atmosphere conducive to the idea of verifying experience of the Spirit through speaking in tongues.8 Modern Pentecostalism has taken many forms, but all of them are experiential.9 That is, experience and, more especially, experience of the Spirit is their basic point of reference in relation to belief. Religious and cultural contexts influence this experience and the ways in which it finds expression.10 Still, experience is what speaks to the Pentecostal. The following comparison may be stated a bit too roughly. But it can perhaps be of help. For Charles and John Wesley, experience did not as such give rise to dogma. Rather, it rendered such dogma personal and compelling. In Pentecostal circles, experience remains more basic than dogma and teaching. And, within certain scriptural and theological parameters, it can also give rise to them.11 Though Pentecostals agree on the fundamental importance of experience, the various Pentecostal Churches and communities tend to stress some forms of experience more than others. For example, some see the experience of glossolalia or speaking in tongues other than one’s own as an essential condition verifying the validity of an experience of the Spirit. Others do not see it as such an essential criterion. It may simply follow from the experience of the Spirit. Still, there are certain experiences which resonate within most if not all Pentecostal Churches and communities. Donald W. Dayton has identified a ‘common fourfold pattern’, a ‘four-fold gospel’ of fundamental teachings: ‘salvation, healing, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the second coming of Christ’. Given the foundational role of experience in Pentecostal life and teaching, I would suggest we can consider these teachings as pointing to four experiences. They are the experience of salvation, of baptism in the Holy Spirit, of healing, and of

8 9

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See Neumann, Pentecostal Experience, 148-60. See Neumann, Pentecostal Experience, 5-8. In chapter 2, ‘Pentecostalism and Experience of the Spirit’, 100-61, he provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of Pentecostal experience as such and in relation to the context within which modern Pentecostalism arose early in the twentieth century. This is the overall argument of Neumann’s Pentecostal Experience, here stated generally but without reflecting his nuanced presentation. I have not been able to attribute this comparison between the Wesleys, on the one hand, and Pentecostals, on the other, more concretely. The relationship between scripture and theology to Pentecostal experience is complex. Of note, Neumann, Pentecostal Experience, 6, cites Harvey G. Cox as calling Pentecostal experience of God a means by which God becomes known. God alone, rather than experience, remains ‘source’ of the experience and its resultant knowledge in the strict sense. Neumann (6n23) refers to Cox’s study, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 316-17.

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awaiting, even longing for, the second coming.12 Dayton cites the founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Aimee Semple McPherson’s summaries as being particularly helpful. Quoting one of these summaries will provide a sense of McPherson’s succinct phrasing. ‘Jesus saves us according to John 3:16. He baptizes us with the Holy Spirit according to Acts 2:4. He heals our bodies according to James 5:14-15. And Jesus is coming again to receive us unto Himself according to 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17’.13 Dayton says that he has found this four-fold pattern in Classical Pentecostal, charismatic or neo-Pentecostal, and third-world Pentecostal manifestations.14 His findings and our brief remarks on Pentecostalism provide a thematic backdrop to the following review of events prior to the Azusa Street Revival, during the Revival itself, and in the years following it. The Azusa Street Revival The Los Angeles Azusa Street Revival took place early in the twentieth century. It stands at the beginning of modern Pentecostalism.15 At times, the Revival is described as modern Pentecostalism’s founding moment. At other times, it seems rather to be considered the crystalizing event launching the world-wide Pentecostal phenomenon.16 In either case, it remains an important key to

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Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 21, and see 21-23, 28. Dayton identifies the fourfold Pentecostal pattern of themes but does not, on these pages, speak explicitly of them as experiences. Neumann notes that some authors object to a possible Christological overemphasis in Dayton’s identification of a four-fold Pentecostal pattern. Pentecostal Experience, 104-5 and see overall 104-10. But perhaps this objection presents us with less difficulty in our present reflection since we will be focusing especially on the Azusa Street Revival experience of baptism of the Spirit. These summaries are available in Raymond L. Cox, The Four-Square Gospel (Los Angeles, CA: Foursquare, 1969), 9, quoted by Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 21 with 31n21, where he provides further background bibliography. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 31n22. Prof. Keri Day, Princeton Theological Seminary, kindly drew my attention to the Azusa Street Mission and Revival as well as to its importance. For more recent remarks on the varied interpretation of the significance of the Azusa Street Revival for Pentecostalism, see, for example: Anthea Butler, ‘Constructing Different Memories: Recasting the Azusa Street Revival’, in: The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, ed. Harold D. Hunter & Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 193-201. Butler argues that the Azusa Street Revival was, at its core, African American but open to whites as well and to members of all social classes. It stood in opposition to attitudes dominant in the then contemporary white and black churches (196, 200). For a reading of the Azusa Street Revival from an African American perspective, see Leonard Lovett, ‘Black Origins of

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understanding Pentecostalism.17 The Revival and indeed the Mission or community itself where the Revival took place are important for many reasons. For example, both were African American-based but multiracially and ecumenically open. And women held leadership roles in them.18 For present purposes, we will selectively refer to persons, activities, and events related to the Revival and the Mission, based on their potential to help in identifying possible testimonials to experience of the Trinity. We will pay special attention to a specific experience at the heart of the Revival and of Pentecostalism in its subsequent development. That experience is baptism in the Spirit.19 Our review will cover aspects of this experience as well as various events and considerations related to it. As mentioned, it will touch on three time-periods, namely, prior to, during, and after the Revival.

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the Pentecostal Movement’, in: Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, ed. Vinson Synan (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1975), 123-41. On historiographical considerations concerning the ways in which the Azusa Street Revival story has been told, see Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., ‘The Origins of Modern Pentecostalism: Some Historiographical Issues’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, 13-30. The 100th anniversary of the Azusa Street Revival in 2006 was the occasion for the publication of a good number of impressive studies on the Revival and its legacy. They provide convenient access to older and rarer items of research on the Revival while bringing forth new perspectives on it. We will draw upon several of these publications. Roberts Liardon, The Azusa Street Revival: When the Fire Fell, an In-Depth Look at the People, Teachings, and Lessons (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2006), 151-80, with further reference to Estrelda Alexander, The Women of Azusa Street (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2005). Still, Dayton has noted that ‘perhaps even more characteristic of Pentecostalism than the doctrine of the baptism of the Spirit is its celebration of miracles of divine healing as part of God’s salvation and as evidence of the presence of divine power in the church’. He traces this stress, along with baptism of the Spirit, back to nineteenth-century revivalist and holiness movements. Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 115. On Dayton’s review of events and publications concerning healing and the imminent second coming of the Lord, see Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 115-41, 188-89 (healing) and 143-71, 189-90 (second coming). Regarding healing, Dayton writes: ‘By the turn of the century most of the currents that had adopted the doctrine of Pentecostal baptism in the Spirit had also begun to teach a variation on the theme of divine healing’ (136). And, ‘healing becomes [in a more distinctly Pentecostal vein] more a manifestation of Pentecostal “power”’ (137). This is indeed the case even though, throughout the nineteenth century, healing seemed to be attributed primarily to Jesus. Regarding the second coming, Dayton cites Martin Wells Knapp, editor of the periodical God’s Revivalist, who in 1897 wrote that the aim of the revivalist is ‘to present a Pentecostal experience as the basis of genuine revival life in the individual and the Church. (…) [A]nd that every fullydeveloped Pentecostal experience includes this Pentecostal expecting of the coming of the King’. Dayton takes his citation of Knapp from A. M. Hills, A Hero of Faith and Prayer; or, Life of Rev. Martin Wells Knapp (Cincinnati, OH: Mrs. M. W. Knapp, 1902), 154, copy available at Google Books.

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Prior to the Revival Dayton helpfully examines the overall nineteenth-century shift that took place in the ways in which baptism in the Spirit was understood. Earlier on in the century, there was a more general, Methodist- or Wesleyan-based tendency to stress that such baptism brought about Christian sanctification and holiness. But, by the end of the century, baptism in the Spirit had come to be understood in a more Pentecostal way as empowering for ministry and service. We can get a sense of this development by citing three examples Dayton provides. In 1856, the British Methodist William Arthur ended his book, The Tongue of Fire, with a prayer: ‘And now, adorable Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, descend upon all the Churches, renew the Pentecost in this our age, and baptize thy people generally – O, baptize them yet again with tongues of fire! (…) a revival (…) greater than any “demonstration of the Spirit” ever yet vouchsafed to men!’20 Dayton also draws attention to a remark by W. B. Godbey concerning his own Methodist struggle. Methodists stressed the second coming of the Lord after a thousand years of God’s reign. But Pentecostals would hold more to the second coming before that reign. Godbey wrote, ‘I was born a Methodist – my father was a Methodist preacher, but when the Lord baptized me with the Holy Ghost and fire in 1868, He cremated the Methodist’.21 Then, by 1895 Reuben A. Torrey, the later head of the Moody Bible Institute, described baptism in the Holy Spirit as follows: 1 There are a number of designations in the bible for this one experience. (…) baptized with the Holy Ghost (…) filled with the Holy Ghost. (…) 2 (…) The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is a definite experience of which one may know whether he has received it or not. (…) 3 The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is a work of the Holy Spirit separate and distinct from His regenerating work. (…) 4 The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is always connected with testimony and service.22

With the identification of these four characteristics, we come close to what will be the Pentecostal understanding of baptism in the Holy Spirit for ministry and service. Already in a student paper, Dayton had provided some of his early 20

21

22

William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire; or, the True Power of Christianity (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 354, copy available at Google Books. Cited by Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 74. W. B. Godbey, An Appeal to Postmillennialists (Nashville, TN: Pentecostal Mission Publishing, n.d.), 5-6, quoted by Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 165. Reuben Archer Torrey, The Baptism with the Holy Spirit (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1895 and 1897), 9-14 (italics in the original), copy available at Google Books. Cited by Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 103.

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insights into the nineteenth-century development toward a Pentecostal understanding of baptism in the Holy Spirit. In that paper, he refers, by way of example, to two books written by Asa Mahan, one in 1839 and the other in 1870. Dayton succinctly, even starkly, says ‘the shift in terminology [in these volumes] involved (…) a shift from Christocentrism to an emphasis on the Holy Spirit’.23 We have briefly reviewed several North American and British developments in the shift toward a more recognizably Pentecostal understanding of baptism in the Spirit. We will shortly look at aspects of that understanding in the Azusa Revival itself. But, before doing so, we should quickly refer to three major preAzusa events, namely, occurrences of at least Pentecostal-like experience of baptism in the Spirit. We turn first to Topeka, Kansas, and Jess LaPointe’s succinct summary of what happened there: On January 1, 1901, former Methodist preacher (and founder of the Apostolic Faith movement) Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929) laid hands upon Agnes Ozman to initiate the baptism in the Holy Spirit at his bible school in Topeka, Kansas. When Ozman began to speak in tongues, Parham concluded that tongues (glossolalia) was the Bible evidence of the Pentecostal baptism, which came as a third blessing after the experiences of justification (forgiveness of sins) and sanctification (transformation from sinner to saint).24

A second event of historic importance and of wide-spread impact on religious life throughout Great Britain and beyond was the Great Welsh Revival of 1904– 1905. In Wales, a preacher prayed over a young Welsh coal miner, Evan Roberts 23

24

Donald W. Dayton, ‘From “Christian Perfection” to the “Baptism of the Holy Ghost”’, in: Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, ed. Vinson Synan (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1975), 39-54, with the short quotation taken from 48. The two books by Asa Mahan to whom Dayton refers are Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection (Boston: D. S. King, 1839), copy available at Google Books, and Baptism of the Holy Ghost (New York: W. C. Palmer, Jr., 1870), copy available at Google Books. Yet it will be helpful to recall that in this second book Mahan added, a ‘result of this baptism [of the Spirit] is conscious “fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ”’ (54, italics in the original). Jess LaPointe, with material from Vinson Synan, Robbie Kagarise, Benjamin Robinson, and Michael McClymond, ‘Azusa Street Revival’, in: Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 49-50. For fuller consideration of Parham, especially in his complex relationship with the Azusa Street Revival scene, see: Liardon, Azusa Street Revival, 63-86, with reference to Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham (Birmingham, AL: Commercial Printing Co., 1930; New York: Garland, 1985); Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., The Azusa ST Mission & Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 40-52. Liardon stresses more than some others the direct importance of Parham in early Pentecostalism when he describes him as the ‘Father of Pentecost’. On the early Parham, see Larry E. Martin, The Life and Ministry of William J. Seymour and a History of the Azusa Street Revival (Pensacola, FL: Christian Life Books, 1999 and 2014), 21-30.

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(1878–1951). Roberts received baptism in the Spirit. He then began revival preaching on October 31, 1904. Some say the revival had started earlier with Roberts’ baptism in the Spirit, others with the emotional crying out of belief by a young woman during a revival session. That woman, Florrie Evans, shouted out, ‘I love the Lord Jesus with all my heart’. In either case, over the course of approximately a year, 100,000 or more found themselves renewed in spirit during the revival. Of note, the revival itself was characterized by a heavy emphasis on music, by high emotion, and by long revival sessions. Favorable reports of it even reached those participating shortly later in the Azusa Street Revival.25 A third event took place in India. Sarasvati Mary (Pandita) Ramabai (c. 1858– 1922) had committed herself to improving the social and economic positions of women and young girls. She converted from Hinduism to Christianity and continued her commitment, now in the name of Jesus Christ. She founded the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon in Maharastra State, Western India. Stanley M. Burgess describes the situation there: It was at Mukti that dispossessed women and children (especially child widows and orphans) experienced one of the greatest outpourings of the Holy Spirit in modern times. In January 1905 Ramabai issued a call for prayer. Five hundred fifty women met twice daily for intercessory prayer. By June, thirty young women went out to preach the gospel in the villages. On June 29, 1905, evidence of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was reported, with several ‘slain in the Spirit’ and others experiencing a burning sensation said to evidence their baptism in the Holy Ghost ‘and fire’. Soon the Mukti girls were praying for more than 29,000 individuals by name daily. The revival continued into 1906, when participants also experienced glossolalia.26

The Mukti experience provides an example of early Pentecostal or at least Pentecostal-like experiences leading to concern for social justice or reinforcing 25

26

Much of the information here concerning the Great Welsh Revival is taken from the short but helpful study by John Hayward, ‘How Did the Welsh Revival of 1904-5 Start?’, 1-4, with the quotation on 3, accessed November 9, 2017, https://www.churchmodel.org.uk/Back04. pdf. There seem to have been serious disputes as to whether the revival was primarily Evangelical or truly Pentecostal. Evangelicals stressed more the atoning work of Christ and Pentecostals the work of the Holy Spirit. Evangelicals appear to have considered it an evangelical revival but not a Pentecostal one. Pentecostals tended to consider it in some way as the beginning of British Pentecostalism. See Kyuhyung Cho, ‘The Importance of the Welsh Religious Revival in the Formation of British Pentecostalism’, in: The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 30 (2010), 20-33. Stanley M. Burgess, ‘Pentecostalism in India: An Overview’, in: Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies 4 (2001), 85-98, with the quotation on 88. On 87-88, Burgess discusses other pre1906 Pentecostal-like outpourings of the Spirit in India. For brief remarks on Pentecostal experience at Mukti from a more Azusa-oriented point of view, see Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 253.

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already existing concern for it.27 Topeka in Kansas, Wales in Great Britain, Mukti in India, and many other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Pentecostal or Pentecostal-like experiences. They represent a veritable explosion of interest in, and experience of, the Spirit at that time. But now, on to the Azusa Street Revival whose ‘story is unique to the birth of Global Pentecostalism’.28 William J. Seymour and the Revival We cannot speak of the Azusa Street Revival without referring to the African American William J. Seymour (1870–1922). He led the Revival and founded the Azusa Street Mission. He was the heart and soul of the Revival, though he would have insisted that the Holy Spirit fulfilled both roles.29 Seymour himself was impressively meek and humble in his prayerful pastoral leadership of both Revival and Mission.30 His early life had prepared him well for his ministry. 27

28

29

30

See Paulson Pulikottil, ‘Azusa Missionaries in the Context of the Caste System in India’, in: The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, ed. Harold D. Hunter & Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Eugene, OR: Wifp & Stock, 2006), 169-71. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 8 and see 239, where he speaks of ‘the birthplace of global Pentecostalism’ in view of the Azusa Street Revival’s worldwide outreach. The subtitle of the book is The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement. Throughout his book Azusa ST Mission & Revival, Robeck discusses together Mission and Revival on the one hand and Seymour and his pastorate on the other. Robeck will serve as an important source of information concerning the three, namely, the Mission, the Revival, and Seymour himself as pastor. In his book, Life and Ministry, Larry E. Martin complements Robeck’s study, especially with a specific focus on Seymour and explicit reference to early sources. He provides much detailed information of interest concerning Seymour, along with pictures from the days of the Mission and the Revival. Further important studies on Seymour: an extended study, Vinson Synan & Charles R. Fox, Jr., William J. Seymour: Pioneer of the Azusa Street Revival (Alachua, FL: Bridge Logos, 2012), with the articles signed by Seymour in the Mission’s newspaper, The Apostolic Faith (169-249), and the full text of Seymour’s The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, Cal. (1915) (261-355); Gastón Espinosa, ‘Ordinary Prophet: William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival’, in: The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, ed. Harold D. Hunter & Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 29-60. These studies provide abundant further bibliography. For important chronicles on the Azusa Street Revival and related events, see Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles: The Story behind the Azusa Street Revival (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 2017), originally published as How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles: As It Was in the Beginning (Los Angeles: n.p., 1925); ———, Azusa Street (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1982), originally published as Another Wave Rolls In (Northridge, CA: Voice Christian Publications, 1962). On Seymour as effective pastoral leader, see the extended treatment in Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 89-128. Robeck writes, ‘Seymour understood his role in leadership as one of empowering his people for the work of ministry’ (125).

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It permitted him to develop what many in his day recognized as evident pastoral talents. Today we would easily describe his ministry as one of servant leadership. Seymour was born in Louisiana of parents who were themselves born into slavery but were then freed. As was traditional in Louisiana at the time of his birth, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.31 Over the next two decades or so, he identified with more Methodist- and Wesleyan-influenced congregations. He travelled to the Midwest and then south to Houston in search of spiritual guidance. In Houston, Seymour followed a course with Rev. Charles F. Parham, who was a white preacher. Being black, he could not attend class with the whites. He sat in the hallway outside the classroom door. At this point, Seymour had moved beyond the more Wesleyan-based perspective on baptism in the Spirit. He found himself in agreement with Parham’s ‘teaching on the baptism in the Spirit with the Bible evidence of speaking in other tongues, his emphasis upon divine healing, and his premillennial position on the Second Coming’. Seymour did not agree with Parham on some other points, though he was at this time ‘fully committed to speaking in tongues playing the evidential role in baptism in the Spirit’.32 During his study with Parham, Seymour received an invitation from Mrs. Hutchins, a pastor in Los Angeles, to minister there. After further discussion with Parham, he headed out West. On Thursday, February 22, 1906, he arrived in the growing city of Los Angeles, population 238,000. In his first pastoral assignment there, Seymour ran afoul of Mrs. Hutchins. She and many others in the various holiness traditions identified conversion, sanctification, and baptism in the Spirit. For his part, Seymour now held that the three were separate experiences. As Robeck summarizes Seymour’s position, baptism in the Spirit was ‘an empowering encounter with the Holy Spirit that was evidenced by speaking in tongues. But it came only to those who had been saved and sanctified’.33 31

32

33

For a fuller treatment of Seymour and his early family life, see Martin, Life and Ministry, 47-64. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 49-50. Subsequently, Seymour seems to have shifted away from seeing tongues as direct and exclusive evidence for baptism in the Spirit. He shifted to stressing love as the prime indication of that baptism, thus bringing an ethical dimension to his understanding of baptism in the Spirit. See Charles R. Fox, Jr., ‘Seymour’s Theology’, in: Vinson Synan & Charles R. Fox, Jr., William J. Seymour Pioneer of the Azusa Street Revival (Alachua, FL: Bridge Logos, 2012), 69-84, 93-98, with reference to the ethical dimension of baptism in the Spirit on 78. See also Larry E. Martin (Ed.), The Complete Azusa Street Library, vol. 7, William J. Seymour, The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, California (Pensacola, FL: Christian Life Books, 2000, 2012, originally published in Los Angeles in 1915), 78n. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 51-63, with the quotation on 63.

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Seymour left this first pastoral ministry position with Mrs. Hutchins. He then met for several weeks with a small group in friends’ houses. There he continued preaching and encouraging the desire to be baptized in the Spirit, which would be accompanied by speaking in tongues. A great outpouring of the Holy Spirit followed. During this time, Seymour accepted to pray over two people, each of whom dropped to the floor and began to speak in tongues.34 But he himself had not yet been baptized in the Spirit. He received his Pentecostal baptism a few days later, on April 12, 1906. Seymour and a companion had been praying for this baptism, with his companion growing ‘weary and discouraged’. But Seymour insisted they continue in prayer. ‘I’m not going to give up’, he said. As Larry E. Martin notes, ‘In a short time, he [Seymour] came through to the baptism and spoke in tongues. He [Seymour] testified that it was like a “sphere of fiery, white-hot radiance falling upon him”’.35 According to Martin, another witness said ‘Seymour “fell under the power of the Holy Ghost like he was dead, and spoke in unknown tongues”’.36 Martin quotes Seymour as saying later, ‘We had prayed all night, when at four o’clock in the morning, God came through the window’.37 Over the course of these first weeks, the number of those who attended Seymour’s prayer sessions and were enthused by the Spirit continued to increase. He and his followers found it necessary to find a larger meeting place. Already on April 13, 1906, they leased a partially fire-damaged former church property at 312 Azusa Street. The rent was eight dollars a month.38 His fledgling mission attracted increasing numbers of visitors, seasoned preachers, and general participants.39 Many of these participants were able to join the revival from across the Los Angeles area and, in turn, to spread out from Azusa Street to surrounding areas thanks to the streetcar system.40 He added staff, whom he encouraged to move ahead under the guidance of the Spirit. There were reports of as many as 1,500 persons showing up for the increasing number of prayer sessions.41 The Revival had taken off. Such intense revival activity continued until 1909. 34 35

36

37

38

39 40 41

Ibid., 66-67. Martin, Life and Ministry, 148, quoting Seymour as cited by Douglas J. Nelson, ‘For Such a Time as This: The Story of Bishop William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival: A Search for Pentecostal/Charismatic Roots’, Ph. D. diss., University of Birmingham, England, 1981, 58. Martin, Life and Ministry, 148, quoting Russell Chandler, ‘Pentecostals: Old Faith, New Impact’, in: Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1976, I 22. Martin, Life and Ministry, 148-49, quoting Seymour as cited by John G. Lake, ‘Origin of the Apostolic Faith Movement’, in: The Pentecostal Outlook, September 1932, 3 (originally written in 1911). Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 70. For a more detailed description of the 312 Azusa Street building with pictures, see Martin, Life and Ministry, 155-64. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 100. Ibid., for example 7, 204-5. Ibid., 82.

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Pastor Seymour preached regularly over the course of the Revival, though ‘he willingly and regularly shared the preaching ministry with others’.42 It will be helpful to get a glimpse into his overall mindset already toward the beginning of the Revival. He set a certain tone for the Revival in an excerpt recorded from one of his relatively early sermons at the Azusa Street Mission. That sermon bore the title, ‘River of Living Water’: In the 4th chapter of John, the words come, ‘Jesus answered and said unto her, if thou knewest the gift of God and who it is that saith to thee Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of Him and He would have given the living water’. Praise God for the living waters today that flow freely, for it comes from God to every hungry and thirsty heart. Jesus said, ‘He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his inmost being shall flow rivers of living waters’. Then we are able to go in the mighty name of Jesus to the ends of the earth and water dry places, deserts and solitary places, until these parched, sad, lonely hearts are made to rejoice in the God of their salvation. We want the rivers today. Hallelujah! Glory to God in the highest! In Jesus Christ we get forgiveness of sin, and we get sanctification of our spirit, soul and body, and upon that we get the gift of the Holy Ghost that Jesus promised to His disciples, the promise of the Father. All this we get through the atonement. Hallelujah!43

In this sermon excerpt, Seymour contextualizes his understanding of baptism in the Spirit. He sees it as the key moment in Christian experience following upon the experiences of forgiveness and sanctification. He links forgiveness and sanctification with Jesus and mentions the Spirit promised by Jesus, the Spirit as the promise of the Father. Forgiveness, sanctification, and gift come through Jesus’ atonement. We should note as well that, throughout the Revival, Seymour often preached on baptism in the Spirit. Of special interest, he spoke at some length on this

42

43

Ibid., 115. On Seymour’s styles and ways of preaching, see 115-19. We have only excerpts from Seymour’s sermons and not complete copies, 116. Quoted from William J. Seymour, ‘River of Living Water’, The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 3, Los Angeles, CA, November 1906, 2 (document 1906_11 on the Internet site, which site is available as indicated below in this note). LaPointe and others cite the text in ‘Azusa Street Revival’, 50. The excerpts from the text of the sermon are available as well in Douglas Harrolf and William J. Seymour, William J. Seymour & His Azusa Street Sermons (n.p.: HJPublishing, 2016), 9-12, with quotation on 9. The thirteen issues of the Azusa Street Mission newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, were published from 1906 to 1908. Copies of them are available online at The Consortium of Pentecostal Archives, accessed November 24, 2017, https://pentecostalarchives.org/search/index. cfm?fuseaction=search.FullTextResults, entering the following limits: Search For ‘The Apostolic Faith’; Date Range, ‘1906-1908’; Country, ‘USA’; Denomination, ‘All’; Publication, ‘Apostolic Faith (Azusa Street)’, and choose the appropriate document.

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baptism in excerpts we have available from a sermon entitled ‘The Baptism with the Holy Ghost’. In part, these 1907 excerpts read as follows: We read in Acts 1:4,5, ‘And being assembled together with them, [Jesus] commended them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith He, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence’. (…) Jesus reminded the disciples about this baptism that John had preached to them in life. (…) Math. 3:11 [‘One who is more powerful than I is coming after me. (…) He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire’ NSRV]. (…) God is sending our [sic] His precious ministers to preach repentance to the people and turn them from their sins and cause them to make restitution according to their ability, and to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. Glory to God! And then they must get sanctified through the precious Blood of Jesus Christ. (…) ‘When the day of Pentecost was fully come (…) there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing, mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance’. Acts 2:1-4 (…) The rivers of salvation had come and had filled the whole place, and they all were immersed or baptized in the Holy Spirit. Praise God! (…) When we receive the baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire, we surely will speak in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance. We are not seeking for tongues, but we are seeking the baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire. (…) In seeking the baptism, first get a clear, definite witness in your soul that you have the abiding Christ within. Then there will be no trouble in receiving the Pentecostal baptism, through faith in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, for it is a free gift that comes without repentance. Bless His holy name!44

Here Seymour again frames his understanding of baptism in the Spirit within a certain context. He opens with a reference to Jesus’ promise. Then he speaks in a certain order. First, he lauds ministers sent out to preach the forgiveness of sins. Second, he mentions sanctification through the blood of Jesus. Third, there follows Pentecost with the descent of the Holy Spirit on all together. They were filled with the Spirit, each one speaking in tongues. For Seymour, important as speaking in tongues is, what is to be sought is baptism with Spirit and fire. It follows easily upon abiding witness to Christ within and is received through 44

Cited from William J. Seymour, ‘The Baptism with the Holy Ghost’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 6, Los Angeles, CA, February-March 1907, 7 (document 1907_02 on the Internet site). Printed version: Harrolf & Seymour, William J. Seymour & His Azusa Street Sermons, 30-32.

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faith in Jesus. In his exposition, insofar as we have access to it, Seymour is guided by the way and order in which things occur in Acts, chapters 1 and 2. Seymour’s preaching on justification, sanctification, and baptism in the Spirit as three consecutive events finds more institutional expression, so to speak, in the first issue of the Azusa Street Mission newspaper, The Apostolic Faith. Justification is that act of God’s free grace by which we receive remission of sins. (…) Sanctification is the second work of grace and the last work of grace. Sanctification is that act of God’s free grace by which He makes us holy. (…) The disciples were sanctified before the Day of Pentecost. (…) The Baptism with the Holy Ghost is a gift of power upon the sanctified life; so when we get it we have the same evidence as the Disciples received on the Day of Pentecost.45

We have noted several aspects of the important leadership role Pastor Seymour played in the Azusa Street Revival at the Mission in Los Angeles. We have as well, through reference to Seymour, gained some insight into what the Revival itself was about. Before turning our attention more explicitly to the ways in which what we have been reviewing brings forth Pentecost testimonials, we should again recognize the importance of the Revival in the history of Pentecostalism. Robeck underscores this importance in his initial summary of the Revival and its significance. He calls the summary ‘The Azusa Street Revival in a Nutshell’.46 He lists four interrelated characteristics of the Mission and Revival which help explain the Revival’s revered status in many Pentecostal and charismatic communities. The first of these four characteristics is the speed with which the Mission grew due to the Revival. The Mission was, as he says, aggressively evangelistic, moving from about 15 members at the beginning to an ‘internationally acclaimed congregation of hundreds in just three months’. Within six months of its founding, the Mission established related congregations around the Los Angeles area. Shortly thereafter missionaries were reaching out along the West Coast. By December 1906, 16 missionaries had travelled to Africa. Then within a couple months missionaries entered ‘Mexico, Canada, Western Europe, the Middle East, West Africa, and several countries in Asia’. The influence of the Mission, and the Revival taking place there, continued to spread.47 45

46 47

‘The Apostolic Faith Movement’, quoted from The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 1, Los Angeles, CA, September 1906, 2 (document 1906_09 on the Internet site). In The Apostolic Faith there is no indication of authorship, but in a separate flyer the text is signed ‘W. J. Seymour, Azusa Street’, as noted by Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 120, where he reproduces the text in flyer form. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 4-15. Ibid., 6-8, with the two quotes respectively on 6 and 8. For a fuller treatment of this evangelizing of a continent, see 187-234, and of the world 235-80.

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Second, the story of Azusa Street had a profound influence on other congregations. Some felt threatened. In response, they opposed what was going on there. Others enthusiastically embraced the Revival and its emphasis on experience of the Spirit, speaking in tongues, sharing stories of conversion, and healing. Again, other congregations lost many members who simply came together to form new congregations with slightly modified names. ‘Alongside the FreeWill Baptist Churches, for instance, a new group, a group that took signs and wonders and speaking in tongues in its stride, the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Churches sprang into existence’.48 By 1908, several Wesleyan-holiness congregations across the country had followed the Azusa example. Third, ‘“Azusa Street” rightfully continues to function as the primary icon expressing the power of the worldwide Pentecostal movement’. Robeck describes this icon in two ways. He underscores the Mission’s teaching that salvation comes from Jesus Christ. And if those who are saved wish to be ‘effective witness for Christ they needed to be baptized in the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:8). They were expected to pursue God, and then to be overwhelmed and transformed by God in the resulting encounter’.49 Along with healings and the experience of charismatic gifts, speaking in tongues was considered a manifestation of the Spirit’s power. With this ‘distinctive teaching, the Azusa Street Mission continues to play a foundational role in the ongoing pursuit and understanding of Pentecostal and Charismatic spirituality’.50 At the iconic Azusa Street Mission, ‘people spoke in tongues, prophesied, preached divine healing, went into trances, saw visions, and engaged in other phenomena such as jumping, rolling, laughing, shouting, barking, and falling under the power of the Holy Spirit’.51 Fourth, ‘the Azusa Street Mission and revival (…) continues to serve as an example for its outreach to the marginalized – the poor, women, and people of color’.52 To which we should add, embracing Latino leadership.53 Seymour understood Luke 4:18-19 not only in a spiritual but also a literal sense. The Spirit of the Lord leads to preaching good news, freeing prisoners, releasing the oppressed. Those participating in the Mission and the Revival were committed to working with prisoners. They welcomed people of all races. They celebrated ‘the ministry of women as legitimate and as equal with that of men’.54 These four characteristics are, then, the quickly growing acceptance of the Azusa Street message, Azusa Street’s influence on other congregations, its iconic 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

8-10 with the quotation on 10. 10. 10-11. 12. 13. 196-98. 13-15, with the quotation on 15.

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status within Pentecostalism, and Spirit-driven commitment to working with the marginalized. They confirm the original and continuing significance of the Azusa Street Mission and Revival. The Mission, and here especially the Revival, have been recognized and celebrated for over a hundred years. In their day, they responded to an individual and communal yearning for a deeper spiritual experience. They and their story continue to influence great numbers of individuals and congregations. Even today they seem to respond to such deeply felt yearning. Following the Revival The Azusa Street Revival effectively ended in 1909. There had been tensions and difficulties within it almost from the beginning. Despite them, through 1908 and into 1909 it provided large numbers of people the opportunity to experience an enlivening Pentecostal baptism in the Spirit. And Pastor Seymour encouraged those sensing a missionary call to spread the good news of the new Pentecost around the world. But, already in 1908, the Mission and the Revival suffered from a series of setbacks. There was the question of potential leaders finding a place at the Mission. Was there a major role for a white preacher at the Mission? As Robeck has consistently noted, ‘The mission was first and foremost an African American congregation in which many Latinos, whites, and Asians participated’.55 One of the leaders at the Mission left for Portland, Oregon. In so doing, she effectively gained the leadership of Pentecostal congregations on the West Coast north of Los Angeles. The editor of the Mission newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, also moved to Portland. She took the paper with her. Such challenges as these weakened the revival, with participation in worship dwindling at the Mission. The Revival, which had begun in April 1906, had in effect come to an end by late October 1909. As Robeck put it, the fire had cooled.56 But Seymour remained the pastor of the Mission until his death on September 28, 1922. At that time, his wife Jennie Seymour took on the leadership. These were difficult years for the Seymours and then for Mrs. Seymour alone.57 For example, in 1930 an older man claiming to be a missionary in Africa joined Mrs. Seymour. Shortly thereafter he forced her to move upstairs in the Mission and he took over the main sanctuary. Robeck remarks, ‘In January 1931, the situation exploded into an argument that reduced both parties to throwing hymnals at 55 56 57

Ibid., for example, 297-301, with quotation on 297-98. On the revival’s winding down, see Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 287-312. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 315. On Seymour and his wife’s later years at the Mission, see Martin, Life and Ministry, esp. 323-37.

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one another’.58 Mrs. Seymour won the court case about control of the Mission. But the original building had already been torn down. She and her followers returned to the home where it all had begun 26 years earlier. She died in 1936. The Mission came to an end, but not before the revival at the Mission had launched global Pentecostal and, perhaps less directly, charismatic movements. There is still one moment in the post-revival history of the Mission which we need to consider before turning more directly to the question of Pentecost testimonials. That question is the disagreement about the baptismal formula and the consequences stemming from it. Already in 1902, Parham had temporarily baptized in the name of Jesus, following such a way of baptizing mentioned in Acts 2:38. ‘Peter said to them [to whom Peter had preached about Jesus’ resurrection], “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”’ (NRSV). The regular baptismal practice at the Mission during the revival was to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, as commanded in Matthew 28:19. ‘Go therefor and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (NRSV). These baptisms often involved large numbers of people and took place in locations ranging from the Pacific Ocean to local rivers and lakes.59 Azusa revivalists generally considered water baptism to be one of three ordinances or commands from Jesus.60 The question of the name with which immersion was to be carried out came to the fore in 1913. The important Apostolic Faith World Wide Camp Meeting took place from April 15th to the end of May in the Los Angeles at Arroyo Seco, where earlier revival camp meetings had been held. A number of those at the Camp Meeting insisted that baptism should be carried out according to what was called the apostolic formula, namely, ‘in the name of Jesus’. They stressed Acts 2:38 and interpreted Matthew 28:19 in line with it. As David Reed remarks, ‘The link between the two was developed by harmonizing Matthew 28:19 and Acts 2:38, whereby the name “Jesus” was interpreted to be the singularly revealed name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’.61 Those who baptized in the name of Jesus insisted that 58 59 60

61

Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 320. Ibid., 173, 225-26. Along with water baptism, the other two were the celebration of the Last Supper and washing of the feet. See ‘The Ordinances Taught by Our Lord’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 10, Los Angeles, September 1907, 2 (document 1907_9 on the Internet site). A printed text is available in Liardon, Azusa Street Revival, 231-38. And see the later document published in 1915 by Seymour, Doctrines and Discipline, 40-41 (see, n. 32 above). On the actual practice at the Mission, see Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 225-27. David Reed, ‘Aspects of the Origins of Oneness Pentecostalism’, in: Aspects of PentecostalCharismatic Origins, ed. Vinson Synan (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1975), 143-68,

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anyone baptized with the trinitarian formula be rebaptized in that name alone. It was apparently this insistence which upset those baptized with the trinitarian formula.62 Pastor Seymour ‘rejected baptism “in the name of Jesus only” and maintained his commitment to the traditional Trinitarian understanding’.63 We find Seymour’s rejection officially stated in his role as Founder of the Azusa Street Mission. Seymour made this statement of rejection in the opening ‘Apostolic Address’ to his 1915 document, The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, California. The original front cover of the published document also read, ‘With Scripture readings by W. J. Seymour, Its Founder and General Overseer’.64 He wrote: ‘We don’t believe in being baptized in the name of Jesus only. We believe in baptizing in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, as Jesus taught His disciples (Matthew 28:19-20)’. Seymour confirmed his position further on in the Doctrines and Discipline document. ‘We believe in water baptism. Our mode is immersion only, and single, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Matt. 28:19,20; 2 Cor. 13:13’.65 Baptism in the name only of Jesus led, seemingly inexorably, to further reflection on the proper understanding of God. With this emphasis on single-name baptism, it was easy enough to take a further step. This step involved identifying Jesus as the only divine Person, with the Father and the Holy Spirit understood in various ways, though not as divine Persons. Hence, those who affirmed only one divine Person have come to be called Oneness Pentecostals. Among their concerns, they thought speaking of three divine Persons seemed to deny the full and complete divinity of Jesus himself. As mentioned, Seymour rejected the practice of baptizing only in the name of Jesus. He spoke and wrote forcefully in favor of the more traditional trinitarian understanding of God. We can recall that he had earlier linked the overall Pentecostal experience with specific reference to the three divine Persons. ‘In Jesus Christ we get forgiveness of sin, and we get sanctification of our spirit, soul and body, and upon that we get the gift of the Holy Ghost that Jesus promised to His disciples, the promise of the Father. All this we get through the atonement. Hallelujah!’66 Seymour stresses Jesus’ role. At the same time, he seems to be saying that the distinct roles of Father, Son, and Spirit are

62 63 64 65 66

with quotation on 147. Reed, ‘Origins of Oneness Pentecostalism’, 152. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 318. Seymour, Doctrines and Discipline, with reproduction of the original cover on 6. Ibid., 40. Seymour, ‘River of Living Water’, 2.

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important. Acknowledging them permits a proper appreciation of the nature of God’s loving relationship with Christians. His argument has a Wesleyan ring to it. Then, years later, in his Azusa Street document Doctrines and Discipline he explicitly confirms trinitarian doctrine. ‘Of Faith in the Holy Trinity. There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost (Matt. 28:19-20; 1 John 5:6-9)’.67 Following this statement, he continues by describing in more detail the role of the Son of God in relation to God the Father and by referring again to the Holy Spirit. The year 1915 had been a particularly tumultuous one at the Azusa Street Mission. As Reed remarks, ‘The final showdown [between Oneness Pentecostals and Trinitarian Pentecostals] came in October 1916, at the Fourth General Council of the [recently founded] Assemblies of God held in St. Louis. When the dust had finally settled, over one-fourth of the ministerial and assembly membership was missing’.68 Pentecost Testimonials Yes, there were difficulties and disagreements concerning doctrine and leadership over the course of the Revival at the Azusa Street Mission. But witnesses repeatedly described the meetings as loving encounters among those present. For example, a Chicago evangelist William H. Durham wrote about what he felt during his first full-day meeting at the Azusa Street Mission on February 10, 1907. ‘The first thing that impressed me was the love and unity that prevailed in the meeting, and the heavenly sweetness that filled the very air that I breathed’.69 It is as if Durham had sensed something of the feeling of liberation which accompanied the various experiences at the Azusa Street Revival and Mission, despite difficulties and disagreements. Harold D. Hunter and Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., have 67 68

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Seymour, Doctrines and Discipline, 45-46 (italics in the original). Reed, ‘Origins of Oneness Pentecostalism’, 165. For a complete recounting of the overall disagreement between Oneness Pentecostals and Trinitarian Pentecostals as well as more immediately resulting developments, see David A. Reed, ‘In Jesus’ Name’: The History and Beliefs of Oneness Pentecostals (Blandford Forum, Dorset, UK: Deo, Blandford Forum, 2008), 75-223. For a strongly critical view of various aspects of Oneness Pentecostal thought and preaching, see Gregory A. Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals & the Trinity: A World-wide Movement Assessed by a Former Oneness Pentecostal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992). William H. Durham, The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 6, Los Angeles, CA, February-March 1907, 4 (document 1907_02 on the Internet site).

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expressed this insight latent in all we have seen concerning the Revival and Mission. ‘At the Azusa Street Mission, the teaching that the charismatic dimension of the Holy Spirit brought liberation from sin, sickness and divisions based on class, race, gender or age was a fact of daily life’.70 Yet worship at the Mission was to some extent still a work in progress, especially given the emphasis on experience of baptism in the Spirit and subsequent speaking in tongues. As we have mentioned, at times there were mass baptisms at varied locations. Pastor Seymour and the Azusa Street congregation also held many celebrations in which they commissioned preachers and sent missionaries forth to various parts of the United States and around the world. But worship ceremonies more typically began with forceful, emotionally expressed testimonials by various individuals to their experience of baptism in the Spirit or with widely varying forms of personal healing. Often a biblically based sermon by Seymour or by others followed and would lead to an altar call. Those responding would advance to the altar or head upstairs to a special room set aside for prayer. In either case, individuals would pray for the gift of the Spirit. Seymour or others would often impose hands on them, providing the occasion for them to be baptized in the Spirit. In our effort to identify possible testimonials to experience of the Trinity, we should now first listen to several testimonials explicitly referring to the experience of baptism in the Spirit. These testimonials focused mainly on deeply emotional and profoundly affecting personal experiences of the Holy Spirit. In these experiences, the Spirit empowered those baptized to minister to others and to serve those in need. The Mission newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, reported a good number of testimonials to baptism in the Spirit, many of which took place at the Mission while others occurred elsewhere. Robeck has carefully selected six representative testimonials concerning baptism in the Spirit at the Mission.71 We will cite and focus on three of them to exemplify that to which those baptized in the Spirit are giving witness. These examples will help us appreciate the personal ways in which those, so baptized, experience the Spirit and share that experience with others. William H. Durham, the Chicago evangelist, offers the first of these three testimonials to his Spirit-baptism experience at the Azusa Street Mission. He says that, before his actual experience, he had fallen on the floor on two separate

70

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Harold D. Hunter & Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, introduction to The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, ed. Harold D. Hunter & Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 26. On the leadership role Seymour played in attaining interracial harmony early on at Azusa, from the point of view of his theology, see Fox, ‘Seymour’s Theology’, 100-5. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 177-86.

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days under the power of God. In each case, he lay there for two hours. Following his report of these two experiences, he continues: On Friday evening, March 1 [1907], His [the Spirit’s] mighty power came over me, until I jerked and quaked under it for about three hours. It was strange and wonderful and yet glorious. He worked my whole body, one section at a time, first my arms, then my limbs, then my body, then my head, then my face, then my chin, and finally at 1 a. m. Saturday, Mar. 2, after being under the power for three hours, He finished the work on my vocal organs, and spoke through me in unknown tongues. I arose, perfectly conscious outwardly and inwardly that I was fully baptized in the Holy Ghost, and the devil can never tempt me to doubt it. First I was conscious that a living Person had come into me, and that He possessed even my physical being, in a literal sense, in so much that He could at His will take hold of my vocal organs, and speak any language He chose through me. Then I had such power on me and in me as I never had before. And last but not least, I had a depth of love and sweetness in my soul that I had never even dreamed of before, and a holy calm possessed me, and a holy joy and peace, that is deep and sweet beyong [sic] anything I ever experienced before, even in the sanctified life. And O! Such victory as he gives me all the time.72

Durham’s baptism in the Spirit itself was a physical and emotional event. As he says, it affected his whole body over a period of three hours. The Spirit, God’s mighty power, even led him to speak in unknown tongues. He was fully aware of the reality of his baptism. Of special interest, he insists that he encountered the Holy Spirit as a living Person who had come to him. With this encounter, he experienced great power, love, sweetness, calm, joy, and peace. He clearly distinguishes this encounter and its results from his prior experience of sanctification. Here, then, Durham is testifying to what many others at Azusa and elsewhere likewise confirmed. Baptism in the Spirit, as direct encounter with the Spirit followed by speaking in tongues, constitutes the core of the Pentecostal experience of God. This is the case both when these experiences occurred at the Azusa Street Mission and Revival and when they were reported, from elsewhere, in The Apostolic Faith. The second of these testimonials is that of Adolph Rosa, who arrived at the Azusa Street Mission in September 1906. The report in The Apostolic Faith reads as follows: Rev. Adolph Rosa, a Portuguese brother from Cape Verde Islands, was baptized with the Holy Ghost in Oakland and is now in Los Angeles preaching the full 72

William H. Durham, ‘A Chicago Evangelist’s Pentecost’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 6, Los Angeles, CA, February-March 1907, 4 (document 1907_2 on the Internet site). For brief, contextualizing descriptions of Durham’s and the following two witnesses’ baptisms in the Spirit, see Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 178-83.

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Gospel. (…) He was sanctified about four years ago, and is now conducting Pentecostal meetings in the People’s church in Los Angeles. (…) [He said in witness] I was convinced that every minister of the Gospel should receive the same baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire that the disciples received on the day of Pentecost, before they are prepared to preach the Gospel. (…) [T]he disciples were justified before Christ ascended, but they never were baptized with the Holy Ghost until the day of Pentecost. (…) [T]he third day [of meetings] as I arose to testify in the audience, the only words I could say were: ‘What does God think of me?’ Then I could only weep for some minutes and the power of God came upon me until I dropped to the floor. I was under the power of God for about an hour and a half, and it was there that all pride, and self, and conceit disappeared, and I was really dead to the world, for I had Christ within in His fullness. I was baptized with the Holy Ghost and spoke in a new tongue.73

Rosa identifies his baptism as one with the Holy Spirit and fire as had occurred on Pentecost. He distinguishes between justification and this baptism. Of special interest, in his recounting of his baptism in the Spirit, he links it clearly with Christ. For now, he ‘had Christ within in His fullness’. For Rosa, then, baptism in the Spirit is fundamentally experience of, we should perhaps add encounter with, the Spirit leading to a sense of having Christ within, in his fullness. He experiences Christ through his encounter with the Spirit. In conjunction with this reference to Christ, it is interesting to note a lecture or bible lesson on ‘The Baptism with the Holy Ghost’ delivered at the Mission in 1908. That lecture opens by contextualizing baptism in the Spirit in relation to justification and sanctification. This is done by presenting all three of these events in relation to Jesus. ‘Sanctification is the Lord Jesus Christ crowned in your heart and the baptism with the Holy Spirit is His power upon you. It is all holiness. It makes you more like Jesus. It is Jesus in justification [forgiveness of sins], Jesus in sanctification and Jesus in the baptism with the Holy Ghost’.74 73

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Adolph Rosa in ‘A Portuguese Minster Receives His Pentecost’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 2, Los Angeles, CA, October 1906, 1 (document 1906_10 on the Internet site). Larry E. Martin (Ed.), The Complete Azusa Street Library, vol. 6, William J. Seymour and others, Azusa Street Lectures, Letters, & Bible Lessons: What the Faithful Believed and Taught at the Pentecostal Revival in Los Angeles (Pensacola, FL: Christian Life Books, 2008), 185. Martin lists the preacher of ‘The Baptism with the Holy Ghost’ as author unknown, though he suspects the author was Seymour (20). See, The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 11, Los Angeles, CA, October to January 1908, 4 (document 1907_10 on the Internet site). In an excerpt from a sermon identified as being preached by Seymour, ‘The Holy Ghost and the Bride’, he says, ‘Every man and woman that receives the baptism of the Holy Ghost is the bride of Christ. (…) The Spirit also calls the believer to come to Jesus and get sanctified. He points the sanctified to Jesus for his baptism with the Holy Ghost. When you are baptized with the Holy Ghost, you will have power to call sinners to Jesus, and they will be saved, and sanctified, and baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire. Amen!’ Seymour interweaves the roles of Jesus

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The third testimonial is reported in the November 1906 issue of The Apostolic Faith: Sister Lucy M. Leatherman writes from 231 Second Avenue, N. Y., of her work there witnessing to the Pentecost. (…) [She wrote], ‘While seeking for the Baptism with the Holy Ghost in Los Angeles, after Sister Ferrell laid hands on me, I praised and praised God and saw my Savior in the heavens. And as I praised, I came closer and closer, and I was so small. By and by I swept into the wound in His side, and He was not only in me but I in Him, and there I found that rest that passeth all understanding, and He said to me, you are in the bosom of the Father. He said I was clothed upon and in the secret place of the Most High. But I said, Father, I want the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the heavens opened and I was overshadowed, and such power came upon me and went through me. He said, Praise Me, and when I did, angels came and ministered unto me. I was passive in His hands, and by the eye of faith I saw angel hands working on my vocal cords, and I realized they were loosing me. I began to praise Him in an unknown language’.75

After seeking the baptism of the Spirit followed by the laying on of hands, Sister Leatherman saw her Savior in the heavens. She continues to reflect further on what she had seen. She was small, found herself in his side, he in her and her in him. She rested in the bosom of the Father. She asks for the gift of the Spirit. In words slightly reminiscent of the description of the Spirit coming upon Mary (Luke 1:35), she was overshadowed by the Spirit. Great power came over her. She became passive before the Father who asked her to praise him. She did so in an unknown language. Sr. Leatherman describes her encounter with the Spirit by placing it within a wider context of her seeing her Savior and resting in the bosom of the Father. Seeing her Savior and resting in the Father led to and climaxed in her reception of the empowering Spirit. It is with interweaving of the roles of Father, Son, and Spirit that Sister Leatherman witnesses to her baptism in the Spirit.76

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and the Spirit. A fuller explanation of baptism in the Spirit requires, at least for him and for the large majority of those with whom he worked, reference to them both. William J. Seymour, ‘The Holy Ghost and the Bride’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 2, no. 13, Los Angeles, CA, May 1908, 4 (document 1908_5 on the Internet site). Printed text in Harrolf and Seymour, William J. Seymour & His Azusa Street Sermons, 68. For another insistence by an early witness to Azusa that the work of the Spirit is to reveal ‘Christ in a fuller way’, see Bartleman, Azusa Street, 90. Sister Leatherman, in ‘Pentecostal Experience’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 3, Los Angeles, CA, November 1906, 4 (document 1906_11 on the Internet site). On Sister Leatherman, see Liardon, Azusa Street Revival, 171-75; Alexander, Women of Azusa Street, 71-79. Of related interest, Neumann summarizes aspects of Frank D. Macchia’s recent efforts to broaden the notion of Spirit-baptism along, among others, trinitarian lines. Pentecostal Experience, esp. 172-81, with primary reference to Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global

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In the first testimony, Durham witnesses to a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit. More than the other two testimonials, he stresses an overall sense of wellbeing. ‘I had a depth of love and sweetness in my soul that I had never even dreamed of before, and a holy calm possessed me, and a holy joy and peace, that is deep and sweet beyong [sic] anything I ever experienced before, even in the sanctified life’. In his survey of testimonials, Cecil M. Robeck sees this result characterizing some of the testimonials.77 In many others, such a sense of wellbeing and wholeness would seem to manifest itself less in verbal expression. It would express itself more in the ability, resulting from baptism in the Spirit, to dedicate oneself to service and missionary work. In some testimonials, the sense of wholeness took both forms of expression. In the second testimony, Rosa witnesses to such an encounter having as a result a sense of having Christ in his fullness. In the third testimony, Sister Leatherman witnesses to seeing the Savior, resting in the bosom of the Father, and then receiving the Spirit. It is as if the three testimonies reveal various ways in which we can consider baptism in the Spirit to be an experience of the Trinity. In the first, Father and Jesus are more implied, with Father presupposed as source of the gift of the Spirit and Jesus as the one who prepares the way for such baptism. In the second, the Father remains presupposed as source of the gift, but Jesus enters the picture directly. In the third, Jesus is seen directly, the Father gives the gift which is then received. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that wherever the Spirit is encountered in baptism of the Spirit, there the Father and Son are experienced in various ways as well. We have already noted the three experiences of God enumerated in a specific order in the first issue of The Apostolic Faith: first, justification, also referred to as conversion, namely, belief in the forgiveness of sins; second, sanctification or becoming truly holy; third, baptism in the Spirit. We have also seen that Pastor Seymour himself maintained the same listing and order.78 These three, namely, conversion, sanctification, and baptism in the Spirit are regularly treated as personal experiences of God.79 Jesus converts and sanctifies, leading to the

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Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), esp. 89-154, where he writes of ‘Spirit Baptism in Trinitarian Perspective’. Robeck writes, ‘Some [of those offering testimonials] had visions. As they focused upon Christ, several were overwhelmed by a sense of well-being or wholeness, in which they felt God’s power, God’s love, God’s peace, God’s joy, and God’s presence’. Robeck, Azusa ST Mission & Revival, 186. As compared with these experiences, it will be helpful to recall that water baptism was considered at Azusa more an activity and event carried out in response to a command by Jesus. Fox provides a particularly helpful reading of Seymour’s views on justification, sanctification, and baptism in the Spirit as consecutive experiences. ‘Seymour’s Theology’, 63-69. According to Fox, Seymour distinguishes justification as forgiveness of sins and sanctification as

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Father sending the gift of the Spirit. This Pentecostal ordering takes literally the chronological order found in the New Testament and especially in the Acts of the Apostles. It then applies that order directly to the process of Christian initiation. Such a Pentecostal ordering opens the way for us to consider the idea of testimony to experience of the Trinity, with this experience taken in a more cumulative and multi-phased sense. I would suggest that those who offer testimonial to their being baptized in the Spirit are then, in effect, witnessing at least implicitly to experience of the Trinity. But they, at least those foreseeing a certain movement toward baptism in the Spirit, are witnessing as well to a certain more progressive and cumulative form of that experience. It takes place as a movement from conversion to sanctification to baptism in the Spirit. This reading of the movement from conversion to sanctification to baptism in the Spirit as progressive experience of the Trinity would seem to be consistent with the nineteenth-century Wesleyan-holiness lineage of these three experiences. At least the earlier Wesleyan-holiness traditions supposed a role for each of the three divine Persons in each of these three experiences. At Azusa, then, some modifications were made to ways in which the experiences were understood as well as the ways in which they were further distinguished from one another. This was particularly the case regarding conversion and sanctification, which came to be seen as experiential steps leading to baptism in the Spirit. Within the Azusa Street Mission community, it was especially Pastor Seymour who repeatedly spoke of and defended the understanding of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. He did this on a regular basis over the course of the Revival, and especially during the Oneness Pentecostalism controversy from around 1914 to 1917 or so. As Pastor of the Azusa Street Mission, his references to and defense of the understanding of God as Father, Son, and Spirit were meant to encourage experience of these three divine Persons. His leadership at the Mission, and ‘cleansing. (…) In the act of sanctification, God supernaturally removes the basic desire to sin from the human heart’ (65-66). Also, regarding justification and sanctification as experiences, note, for example, a report in The Apostolic Faith: ‘Praise God for Pentecost. Get your justified experience all in good shape, then get the sanctified experience of a clean heart. Then when your faith takes hold of the promise of the Father and Son, and the Word of God, you will have great joy as they did that went up from Olivet to Jerusalem. Then you can praise and bless God and the Holy Ghost will come in and praise God Himself in unknown tongue’. From a report by G. B. Cashwell concerning events in Royston, GA, February 27 [1907], ‘Hundreds Baptized in the South’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 6, Los Angeles, CA, February-March 1907, 3 (document 1907_2 on the Internet site). Regarding baptism in the Spirit, there is the report without indication of author: ‘When we have the baptism of the Spirit, we have an experience according to Deut. 32:13’. ‘Digging for Oil’, in: The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 6, Los Angeles, CA, February-March 1907, 2 (document 1907_2 on the Internet site).

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especially of the Revival, were and remain themselves a form of testimonial to experience of the Trinity. This experience of the Trinity is a Pentecost experience, one anchored in a direct encounter with the Spirit. He insisted that this experience was climactic, following upon and bringing to completion those of conversion and sanctification. Pentecost testimonials to experience of the Trinity have, then, taken on many forms. Among them, varied forms of testimony to baptism in the Spirit, the insistence that conversion and sanctification lead to the climactic moment of empowerment through baptism in the Spirit, and Pastor Seymour’s ongoing preaching and teaching. But I would suggest that, taken together, these examples of Pentecost testimonials lead to a further and more striking conclusion. Perhaps the fullest form of Azusa Street testimonial to communal and personal experience of the Trinity is to be found in the Revival itself. It stands as witness to various aspects, including effects, of the experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit at the first Pentecost. Those at the first Pentecost were filled with the Spirit. They formed a Christian community in which members shared with and supported one another. Peter was empowered to witness to Jesus’ resurrection and to the Father’s promise of the Holy Spirit. The movement in the Acts presentation of Pentecost is one from the Spirit to Jesus to the Father who had generously promised the gift of the Spirit. Now, the Revival stands as witness to the renewed Pentecost experience at the Azusa Street Mission and elsewhere. As multiform testimonial, it encourages participants and those who hear of it to seek the empowering fullness of the original Pentecost experience of Spirit, Son, and Father through baptism in the Holy Spirit.

CHAPTER 10 RAIMON PANIKKAR Intrareligious Dialogue

Though Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) was born in Barcelona, with him we find ourselves in many ways culturally and religiously shifting to India. His father was a Hindu from the south of India and his mother a Roman Catholic from Catalonia in Spain. In a doctoral dissertation on Panikkar on the Trinity, Camilia Gangasingh MacPherson notes that ‘he grew up in a Hindu-Catholic environment, learning the Hindu Scriptures alongside the Christian Bible’.1 He pursued university studies in Germany during the Spanish Civil War. As the Second World War broke out, he returned to Spain where he earned doctorates at the University of Madrid in philosophy in 1946 and in chemistry in 1958. The Lateran University in Rome granted him a doctoral degree in theology in 1961. Gifted linguist, Panikkar spoke many modern languages and worked regularly with a good number of classical Western and Eastern languages.2 He taught at various universities in Europe, India, and North America. Among them, the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University (1967– 1971), and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1971–1987). His first 1

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Camilia Gangasingh MacPherson, ‘A Critical Reading of the Development of Raimon Panikkar’s Thought on the Trinity’ (Th.D. diss., Saint Paul University [Ottawa, Canada], 1993), 12, accessed April 13, 2018, https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/6648?mode=simple, subsequently published as A Critical Reading of the Development of Raimon Panikkar’s Thought on the Trinity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996). References will be to MacPherson’s dissertation text, which is easily available online. Joseph Prabhu writes, ‘While he [Panikkar] has been widely published in English, it represents only one of the six languages in which he ordinarily composes his works. (…) Add to this his learning in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew and a few other languages’. ‘Introduction: Lost in Translation, Panikkar’s Intercultural Odyssey’, in: The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar, ed. Joseph Prabhu (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 3. Panikkar’s linguistic genius is evident throughout his various writings. He often roots his arguments in various linguistic references which, then, in turn serve to exemplify insights to which he is giving expression. Regrettably, neither in the present chapter nor the next will we be able regularly to cite his discussions of the meanings of words, their origins, and their interconnections within and among various languages.

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visit to India took place already in 1955. About 15 years later he wrote, ‘I “left” [Europe] as a Christian, I “found” myself a Hindu and I “return” a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian’.3 A pioneering mystic, he affirmed that he experienced within himself what it meant to be simultaneously Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian. Panikkar’s religious and cultural background, in-depth education, and wide-ranging experience came together in his teaching, research, and overall way of life. He was well-positioned and eminently qualified to make important, indeed unique, contributions in many areas of interreligious and intercultural life and study.4 Over the course of his impressive career, Panikkar wrote more than 50 books. He treated of the Trinity at least indirectly in several of them.5 His two books specifically on the Trinity will be of most immediate interest to us. The first is his earlier reflection on, and interpretation of, the Trinity, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon – Person – Mystery, published in 1973.6 We will attend to this earlier reflection in the present chapter. The second is The 3

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Raimon Panikkar, The Intrareligious Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 2, referred to by Prabhu, ‘Introduction: Lost in Translation’, 5. Most of the chapters in Intrareligious Dialogue were previously published from 1968 to 1973 as journal articles and chapters in books. Hence its relevance, from a chronological perspective, to our present chapter interest in his 1973 book (see n. 6 below). Of further note, various sources tend to date slightly differently some of the events, stages, and activities in Panikkar’s life. I am generally following MacPherson, ‘Critical Reading’, 6. For further biographical information on Panikkar, see: William Grimes, ‘Raimon Panikkar, Catholic Theologian, Is Dead at 91’, in: New York Times, September 4, 2010, accessed April 13, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/us/05panikkar.html?_r=2&hpw; Raimon Panikkar, Official Site, accessed April 13, 2010, http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/ home.html. This official site provides a bibliography of his major works. In ‘Critical Reading’, MacPherson helpfully contextualizes various aspects of Panikkar’s life and work, including biography (12-14), theological context (15-21), methodology (21-55, with especially clear presentation of Panikkar on ‘experience’ [22-24]), and explanations of special terminology he uses or often even creates (55-67). For an extended review of Panikkar’s life and thought, see Maciej Bielawski, Panikkar: Un uomo e il suo pensiero (Panikkar: A Man and His Thought) (Rome: Fazi, 2013). For a helpful review of recent Italian books on Panikkar, see Marcello Ghilardi, ‘Feature Review: The Italian Panikkar’, in: Philosophy East & West 65 (2015), 316-25. Especially Raimon Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1964); ———, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism: Toward an Ecumenical Christophany, revised and enlarged ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981). On Trinity in these two editions, see MacPherson, ‘Critical Reading’, 71-87 (the earlier edition) and 114-22 (the later edition) with a comparison of the two on 148-55. Raimon Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon – Person – Mystery (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973), hereafter usually cited in the text by page number and abbreviated Trinity in the notes. Italics in quotations from this volume are in the original texts.

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Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity.7 It is based on his 1988 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Published in 2010 shortly before his death, it is a further development of what he had delivered in those Lectures.8 Approximately 37 years separate the publication of these two meditations, as he will describe them. They share much in common. Yet they remain distinct from one another not only chronologically but also in terms of the considerably greater detail and wider scope of material treated in the later work. We turn now to the 1973 publication and will take up the 2010 publication in the next chapter.

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Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, The Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010). We would also do well to recall his more general study, The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2006), previously published as L’Expérience de dieu: Icôns du mystère (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002). For several briefer overviews of Panikkar on Trinity, published before his 2010 study The Rhythm of Being, see, for example: Ewert H. Cousins, ‘Panikkar’s Advaitic Trinitarianism’, in: The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar, ed. Joseph Prabhu (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 119-30; Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, ‘Chapter 8. Raimundo Panikkar: The Cosmotheandric Trinitarian Mystery’, in: Trinity and Religious Pluralism: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Christian Theology of Religions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 119-33; ———, ‘Chapter 23. Raimundo Panikkar: A Cosmotheandric Mystery of the Trinity’, in: The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 336-45. On the overall development of Panikkar’s thought on Trinity in Panikkar’s various works up to and including reference to the transcript of the Gifford Lectures, see MacPherson, ‘Critical Reading’. She provides wide-ranging evaluations, positive and negative, of various elements in and implications of Panikkar’s trinitarian thought (161-253). Two further studies of Panikkar on the Trinity which, again, were written before publication of The Rhythm of Being: from a more hermeneutic perspective, Rudolf von Sinnen, Reden vom dreieinigen Gott in Brasilien und Indien: Grundzüge einer ökumenischen Hermeneutik im Dialog mit Leonardo Boff und Raimon Panikkar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); from a more thematic perspective, Nannu K, Influence of Hinduism on Indian Christian Theology: A Critique Appropriating Panikkarian Trinity (New Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2018), especially 1-23. Nannu K discusses the context and characteristics of Panikkar’s thought as well as methodological considerations concerning and presuppositions in it. He ends the chapter with a summary of Panikkar’s theological thought. His main criticism of Panikkar’s trinitarian thought is that it is elitist. He argues that Panikkar does not include reference to, or indeed speak of, the experience of the ‘subalterns’, namely, those who are in some way inferior to the elite. Here, by subalterns, Nannu K means especially the Dalits, among whom those sometimes considered ‘untouchables’ (65-91). For him, Panikkar’s trinitarian thought does not take sufficiently into consideration the contemporary Indian historical context and the ‘historicity of Jesus’ (78, 80). Of special help, he references studies published in India on Panikkar’s thought in general and on Panikkar’s interpretation of the Trinity in particular.

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Humankind’s Religious Experience Panikkar’s 1973 volume, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon, Person, Mystery, is the result of many years of study, meditation, and dialogue.9 Panikkar explains that ‘this study was written ten years ago in Uttarkāshi in the heart of the Himalayas in a small hut on the shore of the Ganges’. Originally written in French, the manuscript appeared in English translation in 1970 under the title The Trinity and World Religions: Icon, Person, Mystery.10 Panikkar carefully revised the 1970 text in ‘another small, and almost antipodal town, this time on the shores of the Pacific Ocean’ (vii). This town was Santa Barbara in California. He expanded and republished the text in 1973 with, as mentioned, the modified title The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon – Person – Mystery. The revised title makes more explicit his focus on religious experience. In this expanded text, he continues his overall 1970 approach toward reinterpreting the Trinity. That approach, stated generally, was to relate three forms of Hindu spirituality to three major religions and to the three divine ‘Persons’ of the Trinity. He adds an important, indeed prescient, preface. In it, he reflects further on what he has written in the body of the text. In so doing, he stresses several fundamental insights key both to what he is saying in 1973 and to directions his thought will take in the future. Two of these insights will be of special interest as we work to identify his various testimonials to experience of the Trinity now as well as later in relation to his 2010 volume. The first insight concerns the nature of a complex form of religious experience to which Panikkar attests in the 1973 text. He identifies and gives personal witness to that experience. He names the experience in several different ways in his writings from the time around the text’s gestation and final writing. In 1968, within the context of his discussion on interreligious dialogue, he stresses the importance of ‘intrareligious dialogue’. By this he means ‘an inner dialogue within myself, an encounter in the depth of my personal religiousness, having met another religious experience on that very intimate level’.11 In 1971,

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For helpful remarks placing Panikkar’s book in the context of his life and work, see Bielawski, Panikkar: un uomo e il suo pensiero, esp. 162-65. At various points in his study, Bielawski discusses the relationship between Henri Le Saux, a French Benedictine monk who spent many years in India, became Panikkar’s friend, and influenced Panikkar’s thought on Trinity and advaita (154-61). Raimon Panikkar, The Trinity and World Religions: Icon, Person, Mystery (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1970). Raimon Panikkar, ‘The Internal Dialogue – The Insufficiency of the So-called Phenomenological “Epoché” in the Religious Encounter’, in: Religion and Society 15 (1968) no. 3, 55-66, cited from the text included in Panikkar, Intrareligious Dialogue, 40.

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he calls this lived experience a ‘multireligious experience’.12 In the 1973 preface to The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind, Panikkar makes several remarks concerning this experience and its importance as a dialogue with more than one religion carried on within oneself. Toward the beginning of the preface, he refers directly to his own experience as a basis for his insight. He confirms that ‘it has been excruciating to re-enact an experience without being able to express it in at least five hundred pages’ (vii).13 Already now we can say that his overall internal experience of Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism leads him to a deeper appreciation of the Trinity. That appreciation continues to grow over several years as he writes and re-writes about this experience. Further on in the preface, he comments on the importance of the more generally available lived experience of intrareligious dialogue. In writing of it, he ‘believes that he expresses not a private opinion, but a paradigm of an experience which is bound to become more and more frequent in our time: the experience of gathering or rather concentrating in oneself more than one of the human phyla in which mankind’s fundamental insights have accumulated’ (x-xi). Then, at the end of the introduction, following the preface, Panikkar describes his reenactment of his intrareligious experience as ‘far more a meditation than an erudite study, far more a mystical and ‘praying’ theology than an analytical and cogitative philosophy’ (7). Panikkar introduces a second insight which will take on great importance in his further meditation and resultant writing over the coming years. He calls it ‘a cosmotheandric and thus non-dualistic vision of reality’. It ‘may be considered central in the pages that follow’ (xiv). With this insight, he gives expression to 12

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‘Multireligious experience’ appears in the title of, and is discussed in, Panikkar’s article, ‘A Multireligious Experience: An Objectified Autobiographical Fragment’, in: Anglican Theological Review 53 (1971), 219-37, cited here from the text reproduced in Panikkar, Intrareligious Dialogue, iii, with 12-13 specifically on multireligious experience (this text includes endnotes not in the version in the article, which latter includes about 2 pages of text not in the version in Intrareligious Dialogue. The version in Anglican Theological Review and consequently in Intrareligious Dialogue is in turn a shorter version of ‘Fe y creencia: Sobre la experiencia multireligiosa. Un fragmento autobiográfico objetivado’, in: Homenaje a Xavier Zubiri (Madrid: Editorial Moneda y Crédito, 1970), vol. 2:435-59. We should also note that at times Panikkar hesitates to stress his own experience. Still, he arrives at a justification for doing just that. For example: ‘I do not know why I am still allergic to autobiographical references. Not because I consider my bios as private property, but because I think the graphos of my life has no overweening relevance to the words I utter. I speak myself. I do not speak about myself. The importance of what I have to say lies in the truthfulness of my words themselves. And yet more and more I realize that some knowledge, if not of the source of the words, then at least of the channel through which they flow, may be a matter of more than mere curiositas. It may even help to purify them from my own strictures’. The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 4 (italics in the original).

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the deep connection he sees among the cosmos, the human, and the divine.14 He sums up what this insight entails at this point in his thinking. We will pick up on various phrases he uses. First, he notes that all languages exhibit some form of relationships expressed by the singular and plural of ‘I’, ‘Thou’, ‘He/ She/It’. He considers the Trinity to be the ultimate paradigm of such relationships. Second, he points to ‘the radical inter-relationship of everything’, which the Trinity as pure relation epitomizes. Third, he affirms the fundamental unity of reality. He does this by drawing attention to the experience of the human person, who is ‘neither monolithic oneness nor disconnected plurality’. The Trinity ‘offers us the ultimate model of this all-pervading constitution of reality’ (xiv-xv). The cosmotheandric vision gives rise to the recognition of relationships, radical interrelationship, and fundamental unity inclusive of diversity connecting the cosmos, the human, and the divine. Panikkar’s affirmation of these characteristics of all of reality seems to flow from, express, and build upon Panikkar’s previously mentioned insight, namely, the reality of intrareligious experience. With this insight, he had realized that we can honestly and seriously experience more than one specific religious stance without losing our anchor in faith. Now, taken together, these two insights permit him to appreciate fundamentally differing beliefs which, nevertheless, all seem to open onto a more connected view of the cosmos, the human, and the divine. The relationality Panikkar identifies as characteristic of the cosmos, the human, and the divine explains, in part at least, why he can make certain transitions from one to the other with such apparent ease. For example, he shifts effortlessly from a consideration of individual life to life as such or, again, from an individual consciousness to the structure of reality and vice versa.15 Furthermore, his two insights here mentioned, namely, intrareligious dialogue and the cosmotheandric vision, help see how he can begin already here to speak of ‘the intuition of the threefold structure of reality of the triadic oneness existing on all levels of consciousness and of reality, of the Trinity’ (xi). Later he will greatly develop his understanding of the cosmotheandric, indeed trinitarian, unity of the cosmos, the divine, and the human. But already here in the preface he speaks of ‘the trinitarian structure of reality’ (xii).16 14

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Panikkar uses ‘cosmos’, ‘human’, and ‘divine’ in adjectival form in Trinity (x), as in the phrase ‘the human, cosmic, and also the divine interplay’ or, in more general phrasing, in nominal form as ‘God’, and ‘man’, with the world or cosmos more generally indicated (for example, 75). ‘The Cosmos, the Human, and the Divine’, so capitalized, will become a staple way of referring to the cosmotheandric vision of reality later in The Rhythm of Being. See again, for example, Trinity, x-xi, xiv-xv. See chapter 11 below for further remarks on the cosmotheandric character of reality. For extended presentations of the meanings of many of Panikkar’s many neologisms such as

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Three Forms of Spirituality Panikkar dedicates much of his 1973 volume The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind directly to meditative reflection on the Trinity in relationship with humankind’s religious experience. But first he sets the stage for that reflection by focusing, in the book’s first major section, on three main forms of Hindu spirituality. He finds that all three of them are usually present to a greater or lesser degree in most religions. At the same time, each of them serves to characterize the dominant way of salvation as envisioned in one or more specific religions. Recognizing the presence of these forms of spirituality in various religions, and the dominance of one of them in a specific or even several specific religions is important. It helps identify the spiritual dynamics going on in each of these religions. More specifically concerning these three ways of spirituality, Panikkar says that one of them stresses action (karma), another love (bhakti), and the third knowledge (jñāna) (16). They are respectively ‘centered around iconolatry, personalism and mysticism’. The first involves ‘adopting an image, an idol, an icon’. The second embraces ‘an intimate personal relationship’. The third proceeds by intellect and intuition to ‘the ultimate analysis of being’ (10). We turn now to the way in which Panikkar describes each of these three forms of spirituality. In presenting them, he is at the same time preparing for his wider interpretation of classical Christian trinitarian thought, an interpretation, as mentioned, he bases on intrareligious experience of the Trinity. And, already here in his introductory presentations, he seems at least in part to be creatively recasting understandings of these three forms of spirituality. He reinterprets them in at least two ways. First, by the way in which he juxtaposes them here in this first section of the book. Second, by the way in which he will relate them to the three divine ‘Persons’ as he reflects more directly on the Trinity. Iconolatry – Karmamārga In discussing each of these three forms of spirituality, Panikkar works with the ancient Sanskrit word mārga as meaning, generally stated, a path toward or way of reaching salvation. Karma-mārga, then, refers to ‘the way of action (proper performance of one’s religious and ethical duties)’.17 He describes it as the form

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‘cosmotheandric’ as well as of various fundamental terms he uses, see ‘Glossary: Neulogisms and Fundamental Concepts’, at the official Panikkar website, accessed July 12, 2018, http:// www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/glossary.html. ‘Marga, (Sanskrit: “path”) in Indian religions, a path toward, or way of reaching, salvation. ‘The epic Bhagavadgita (or Gita) describes jnana-marga, the way of knowledge (study of philosophical texts and contemplation); karma-marga, the way of action (proper performance of one’s religious and ethical duties); and bhakti-marga, the way of devotion and self-surrender

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of spirituality which stresses action (11-19, esp. 16-17). To illustrate further what he means by karma-mārga, he speaks of ‘idolatry’ and chooses to work with the word, ‘iconolatry’. But referring to idolatry allows him to bring in the notion of adoration. For him, adoration is a primordial human attitude before the divine or mystery. Still, given idolatry’s negative connotations, he prefers to speak of this same attitude as iconolatry. That is, ritual action and adoration before an icon or image of the divine. He illustrates what he means by such adoration when he brings in a paradoxical example. He draws upon Israel and its struggle against false Gods. He sees Israel as maintaining the same attitude and, generally stated, practice of worship as that of other religious groups which Israel condemned. But, in Israel’s case, the object of worship is the true God. Panikkar then argues to a form of mutuality among God, the icon of God, and those who worship God. At the same time, he stresses the need for worshippers to realize that what they worship is beyond the image or icon. Such iconological adoration is ‘an essential dimension in all truly human spirituality’ (16). In Israel in particular, ritual action and following the law led the worshipper from any image or icon to the true God both beyond the icon as well as beyond action and law. Panikkar closes his reflection on karma-mārga with a one-sentence summary. ‘The fundamental attitude (…) of an iconolatric spirituality is the cultic act of adoration of an “image” of God, believed to represent each time the true God’ (18). Panikkar will call on this understanding of iconolatric spirituality, especially as coupled with an apophatic understanding of God, to deepen his trinitarian reading of God the Father. Personalism – Bhaktimārga Bhakti-mārga is ‘the way of devotion and self-surrender to God’.18 Panikkar sees it as the form of spirituality in which loving devotion or, more succinctly, love is stressed (19-24). In his reflection on bhakti-mārga, he moves quickly from Israel to Christianity to Hinduism, and then to the Hindu notion of bhakti or loving devotion. Israel ‘bequested to Christianity (…) her iconological conception of God’ (19). In Christianity, especially in John’s Gospel, Jesus is condemned because he was a threat to the Jewish non-imaged icon of God. Jesus

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to God’. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Marga, Indian Religion’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed April 29, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/ topic/marga-Indian-religion. For remarks on these Hindu margas and Panikkar’s presentation of them, see: MacPherson, Critical Reading, for example, 87-89; von Sinnen, Reden vom dreieinigen Gott, 266-71; Nannu K, Influence of Hinduism, 30-32. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Marga, Indian Religion’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/ marga-Indian-religion.

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himself became the icon of Yahweh. By way of anticipation, Panikkar says that this tension between a non-imaged icon of Yahweh and Jesus as icon can be resolved only with a trinitarian understanding of God. But even such understanding led historically, to some extent at least, either to tritheism or to some ‘so-called divine nature’. What Jews attributed to Yahweh Christians seemed to predicate of Jesus. In hearing Christians, then, Hindus came to think they ‘worship[ed] God under the name and form of Jesus’ (21). In today’s terms, Christians had arrived at personalism. They strove to live a deeply personal, loving relationship with Jesus, their Lord, who loved them. And since they themselves were persons, God too had to be personal – even beyond them in true personhood. If God were not personal, there could be no loving, filial relationship with God. How else could God’s love for them be fatherly? Yet, Panikkar says that love can be pushed to an ultimate extreme in which self-giving love becomes self-defeating. In such a case, the object of love itself might disappear when self-giving would bring about such a union.19 He quickly reminds us that he is not condemning personalism. He had as well not previously condemned iconolatry. Rather, he is trying to avoid unacceptable extremes to which either could lead. Iconolatry could devolve into a simplistic understanding of incarnation, and personalism into anthropomorphism. Panikkar will work with bhakti-mārga as he widens20 his understanding of the Son as Christ. But already at this point he briefly mentions the Upanishads.21 They ‘testify to a conception and an experience of Supreme Reality which fit poorly into the framework of a “personalist” spirituality. This experience refuses to be 19

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One might have expected Panikkar to say here that the human person who loves would disappear in the union. But, rather, he brings in the disappearance of the human person, and more exactly, the finite self when he discusses Advaita – Jñānamārga as the third form of spirituality. ‘Widened’ is used here and elsewhere to refer to Panikkar’s creatively reworking (he says, ‘enlarge and deepen’, Trinity, 42) of Christian ways of describing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as well as the Trinity as such. While it does not capture fully what Panikkar sees as enlarging and deepening, it permits simpler reference to what Panikkar is doing and perhaps avoids the appearance of certain implications of ‘deepening’ which one or the other religion might find less acceptable. The Upanishads are part of Hindu revelation. ‘With the last component of the Vedas, the philosophically oriented and esoteric texts known as the Upanishads (traditionally “sitting near a teacher” but originally understood as “connection” or “equivalence”), Vedic ritualism and the doctrine of the interconnectedness of separate phenomena were superseded by a new emphasis on knowledge alone – primarily knowledge of the ultimate identity of all phenomena, which merely appeared to be separate. The beginnings of philosophy and mysticism in Indian religious history occurred during the period of the compilation of the Upanishads, roughly between 700 and 500 BCE’ [though others date the compilation somewhat differently]. [The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica], ‘The Upanishads’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed April 30, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hinduism/The-Upanishads#ref303643.

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reduced to the outpourings of love of the bhakta’ (24). A more complete understanding of the Trinity will require a further step, namely, attention to a third mārga. Advaita – Jñānamārga Jñāna-mārga is the ‘way of knowledge (study of philosophical texts and contemplation)’.22 Panikkar speaks of it as the form of spirituality in which, again, knowledge takes pride of place. But, as we shall see, ultimately for him that knowledge is not simply rational thinking. It is an experience, in a special sense of the word. His presentation of jñāna-mārga proceeds in seven identifiable steps (25-39). First, Panikkar observes that the Church has not yet come to terms with the challenge of universalism (25-26). The early Council of Jerusalem was concerned with whether to accept non-Jews into the Christian community. Today the Church seems to have remained attached to its Semitic roots, which is good as such. But it has not gone sufficiently beyond its understanding of the Absolute either in iconoclastic or in personalist ways. Indeed, Panikkar appreciates the perduring importance of Israel’s election. But he fears that the Church’s attachment to Semitic and Mediterranean contexts limits the Church’s ability to go beyond them. In a brief second step (26-27), he touches on the question of relativity. By this, he means that we cannot treat of God independently of creation and humankind. God does not ‘worship himself’. God is for us. Panikkar then continues with a third step (27-29). He recalls Christianity’s Mediterranean cultural conditioning and the historical horizon within which that conditioning occurs. Several difficulties arise from this conditioning and, more generally, from a personalist conception of God. Among such difficulties, God appears as an uncaring father demanding the death of his Son. Again, God seems to require prayer, but to answer little. Panikkar asks if ‘an exclusively personalist conception of the godhead does justice to it’ (28). In a fourth step (29), he suggests there is ‘an experience of God that does not lead to interpersonal dialogue’. He proposes an experience which simply involves knowledge and ignorance, an experience he finds referred to in the Upanishads. That Upanishadic experience transcends dialogue. He then hints at what he will say later in this seven-step presentation on jñāna-mārga. ‘The Absolute is discovered in its own realization, i.e. in the experience in which it is attained’.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Marga, Indian Religion’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/ marga-Indian-religion.

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In the fifth step (29-33), Panikkar takes up the question of divine transcendence and divine immanence. He first points out that we commonly speak of ‘God-transcendent’ as commanding from on high and set over against ‘Godimmanent’ within us. In each case, God is the Other, either above or within, above or below, with us ‘at the centre’. But, God as exterior and interior is too limited a way of thinking of God. We need only recall the way mystics have experienced God. God as transcendent and immanent is beyond any real relationship. True divine transcendence thus ‘rejects (…) all religious anthropomorphism whether iconolatrous or personalist’. The experience of true transcendence must come from God’s transcendence ‘and is “earthed” in his immanence’ (30-31). It bears stressing again that, for Panikkar, God’s immanence is itself equally beyond relationship. If a relationship is established, then God is an object, an other and no longer truly immanent. Then, in the sixth and penultimate step (33-37) Panikkar delves more deeply into an Upanishadic understanding of divine immanence. In a dense presentation, he envisions the ‘dimension of immanence like the horizon from which the God of the “religions”, the living and true God himself, emerges’ (33). He works with the Hindu insight and notion of brahman, ‘the ultimate Ground of everything’ (32).23 There is no relation with brahman. For if such a relation existed, it would create a dualism, a cleavage between the finite self and brahman. Instead, the self must fall away in the discovery of brahman. Brahman’s revelation consists in the ‘unveiling of all the veils of existence, including that of the ego’ (35). Panikkar notes that this experience of ‘advaita, the non-dual character of the Real’, not only rejects but also complements that of iconolatry and personalism. Even with this reminder, he nevertheless goes on to work with the advaitic insight to say that God and world are ‘neither one nor two’ (36).24 23

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica provide a helpful, fuller statement. ‘Brahman, in the Upanishads (Indian sacred writings), the supreme existence or absolute reality. The etymology of the word, which is derived from Sanskrit, is uncertain. Though a variety of views are expressed in the Upanishads, they concur in the definition of brahman as eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, and the spiritual core of the universe of finiteness and change. Marked differences in interpretation of brahman characterize the various schools of Vedanta, the system of Hindu philosophy based on the writings of the Upanishads. According to the Advaita (Nondualist) school of Vedanta, brahman is categorically different from anything phenomenal, and human perceptions of differentiation are illusively projected on this reality’. ‘Brahman, Hindu Concept’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed May 4, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/brahman-Hindu-concept. Sangeetha Menon helpfully writes, ‘Advaita is often translated as ‘non-dualism’ though it literally means ‘non-secondness’. (…) The world has no separate existence apart from Brahman. The experiencing self (jīva) and the transcendental self of the Universe (ātman) are in reality identical (both are Brahman), though the individual self seems different as space within a container seems different from space as such. (…) Plurality is experienced because of error

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Panikkar has moved from the church’s challenge to become universal in composition and more comprehensive in theological understanding on to the question of an experience of God not leading to interpersonal dialogue. He then reflects further on the nature of divine immanence. He refers to an Upanishadic option regarding such experience beyond dialogue. Now, in a seventh and final step (37-40),25 he continues to reflect on that option as he further examines advaita as neither one nor two.26 For example, personalist contemplation involves a loving gaze at the other, ecstasy. By contrast, ‘in advaita (…) contemplation is simply the vision of total Reality where the “ego” as such has no longer any place; it is the experience of the Absolute in its simplicity and its complexity, perfect joy attained in the in-stasy of union’ (38). There is no one who ‘has’ the advaita experience. It occurs as the fullness ‘unveiled in itself’. Panikkar will call upon this advaita experience to expand profoundly his view of the Holy Spirit. In the meantime, he leaves us with the question, ‘can the subject itself be known without, by this very fact, being converted into the object of its own knowledge?’ (40). In effect, is it possible to speak of a subject experiencing, without an object? We could add, is brahman not pure knowing/experiencing without an object? As we have seen, karma-mārga involves action, bhakti-mārga love, and jñānamārga knowledge leading beyond rational thinking to an immediate and direct experience of the Absolute. Panikkar will bring these three forms of spirituality, and through them various religions characterized by them, into trinitarian, indeed perichōrētic, relationship.27 Bringing them together will help him resolve difficulties raised by iconoclastic and personalist spiritualities. He will resolve, in good measure, such difficulties by relating to each other both the three forms of spirituality of which he speaks and the three religions to which he refers. He will at the same time bring the forms of spirituality and the religions together in a closer, threefold relationship rooted in the advaita experience.

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in judgments (mithya) and ignorance (avidya). Knowledge of Brahman removes these errors and causes liberation from the cycle of transmigration and worldly bondage’. ‘Advaita Vedanta’, in: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed May 30, 2018, https://www.iep.utm.edu/ adv-veda. We will again briefly take up Panikkar’s reflections on advaita when, in the next chapter, we look at his later volume, The Rhythm of Being. There he treats of advaita in parallel with the overall Christian understanding of Trinity. Again, see Menon, who expands briefly on advaita, as quoted in n. 24 above. ‘Advaita Vedanta’, accessed May 4, 2018, https://www.iep.utm.edu/adv-veda. We should note that in the present study Panikkar only refers explicitly to ‘perichōrēsis’ as ‘the dynamic inner circularity of the Trinity’. See Trinity, 60. As we will see in the next chapter, he will expand this notion considerably in The Rhythm of Being.

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The Trinity In the second major section of The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind, Panikkar interprets the Trinity more widely than is traditionally done in Christian theology. He sets the stage for his widening reflection on the Trinity by noting, for example, that some African languages do not even have words for ‘nature’ and ‘person’. And such words as these do not appear in the New Testament. But, he himself does not intend to develop a doctrine of the Trinity as such. Rather, he wants ‘to show how in the light of the Trinity the three forms of spirituality described above can be reconciled’. He finds that only ‘a trinitarian concept of Reality’ can bring together these various strands of spirituality and their ‘irreducible concepts of the Absolute’ (41). He wishes to ‘enlarge and deepen’ what we mean by the Trinity so that it can express as well that mystery as variously spoken of in different religious traditions. As he enlarges the understanding of Trinity, he wishes to enhance these religious traditions without doing violence to them. Panikkar then offers various reasons to justify his choice of starting with Christianity. He sees a basic continuity between classical Christian trinitarian thought and what he is proposing. And he wants to begin his proposed dialogue among religions from a concrete starting point. He finds it in Christianity, the religion in which trinitarian terminology was established (42-43). The Father Panikkar opens his discussion (44-50)28 concerning the Father in aphoristic fashion, making succinct statements of a basic principle. He insists that the Absolute is One. God is one, the Divinity is one. No difference, only identity. He reinforces these first remarks by refusing to allow the Absolute to be named. He seems here to be presuming, more than further developing, the karma-mārga way of spirituality which stresses ritual action, adoration. To some extent at least, he is also building on the Jewish practice of not even pronouncing the name of God. For, what is worshiped is beyond the image and icon. In Christianity, in turn, he recognizes that the designation of God is ‘Father of Jesus’. But even this is not the Absolute’s or God’s name. Of note, the first references to the Trinity were ‘God, the Christ and the Spirit’, not ‘the Father, the Son, and the Spirit’. For God is one, there is no multiplicity within. Father, Son, and

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On Panikkar’s presentation of a widened view on ‘the Father’, see: MacPherson, ‘Critical Reading’, 89-92; von Sinnen, Reden vom dreieinigen Gott, 272-73; Nannu K, Influence of Hinduism, 36-38.

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Spirit are God, but ‘this “God” (whom they are supposed to equal) does not exist and is nothing outside or separated from the divine persons’ (45). Panikkar goes on to spell out ways in which the ‘deep intuitions of hinduism and buddhism’ contribute to a further understanding of this apophatic reading of the Father. We can indeed say nothing directly of the self of the Father. For in ‘kenosis or emptying’ the Father gives all to the Son. The Son is the ‘is’ of the Father. At this point, Panikkar daringly asks, ‘Is it not here, truly speaking, in this essential apophatism of the “person” of the Father, is this kenosis of Being at its very source, that the buddhist experience of nirvāṇa and śūnyatā (emptiness) should be situated?’29 (46-47). With Panikkar, we might well say Buddhists themselves would happily agree that God created out of nothing (out of himself). In turn, the Upanishads remind us that brahman is not self-consciousness and, by implication, neither would the Father be. The Father knows the Son, but not as an object with the Father who would then be a self. Rather, the Son is ‘the knowledge of the Father’. Consequently, it would make no sense to go directly to the Father. But always through the Son. Before the Father it is necessary simply to be silent. The Father ‘affirms himself only through the Son in the Spirit. He does not affirm himself, he affirms’ (48, see 47-48). Panikkar links, relates we might say in a loose sense, the Father with Buddhism and to a lesser extent with Hindu advaita. He bases this link on the way he sees, perhaps better intuits, that nirvāṇa serves in Buddhism in functionally parallel fashion to the way in which the Father can, Panikkar would seem to say, be identified as non-being in Christianity. With this linkage in mind, Panikkar brings his remarks on the Father to a close, adding several further insights concerning the spirituality of the Father. Among them, we should note that the Father is the source, the ‘Father of Lights’. The Father is apophatic source. We cannot ‘be’ with the Father though 29

Donald S. Lopez explains, ‘Nirvana, (Sanskrit: “becoming extinguished” or “blowing out”) Pali nibbana, in Indian religious thought, the supreme goal of certain meditation disciplines. Although it occurs in the literatures of a number of ancient Indian traditions, the Sanskrit term nirvana is most commonly associated with Buddhism, in which it is the oldest and most common designation for the goal of the Buddhist path. It is used to refer to the extinction of desire, hatred, and ignorance and, ultimately, of suffering and rebirth. Literally, it means “blowing out” or “becoming extinguished”, as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out’. ‘Nirvana, Religion’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed May 5, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/nirvana-religion. ‘Sunyata, in Buddhist philosophy, the voidness that constitutes ultimate reality; sunyata is seen not as a negation of existence but rather as the undifferentiation out of which all apparent entities, distinctions, and dualities arise’. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Sunyata, Buddhist Concept’, in the online edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed July 1, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/sunyata.

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we can be with the Son and in the Spirit. The Father is the goal toward which we tend but cannot reach. ‘Devotion to the Father meets an apophatism of Being; it is a movement towards (…) no place’ (48). The Logos or image of the Father is being, but the Father is non-being. The Father causes us to emerge as sons and daughters. But all we can ‘see of the Father (…) [is] the result of his paternity, namely, the Son’ (49). Ultimately, there is no spirituality of the Father, only the unobjectivised, transcendent infinite. ‘Despair (refusal to hope, being stubbornly shut up in the finite and limited) is the sin against the Father’ (50). The Son In his presentation on the Father, Panikkar focused less on the previously discussed way of action and more directly on the Father. Here, regarding the Son, he again proceeds in similar fashion (51-58).30 He seems to presuppose what he had said about loving devotion. He speaks more directly of the Son to whom such devotion is offered. He opens his remarks on the Son by recalling what he had just said at the end of his reflection on the Father. The Son ‘is, and so is God. He is certainly God-from God and Light-from Light’. This ‘being from’ is not an infinite process. There is a source ‘of-God’. This ‘of-God’ is the Son. The Son acts, all is made through the Son and exists in him. Then Panikkar immediately widens his understanding of the Son when he says the Son is ‘manifested in Christ – who is the Divine Person, the Lord’ (51). His quick linkage of ‘Son’ and ‘Christ’ sets the stage for the rest of what he says about the Son. According to Panikkar, the word ‘Person’ is traditionally used differently, in effect equivocally, in relation to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There can be no analogy within the Trinity among the three members. For there is no foundational similarity among the three. If there were, it would end up being independent of them. But there is no such ‘fourth ultimate principle’ of the Trinity. Furthermore, a merely mental distinction among the three alone would lead to modalism. ‘Only the Son is Person, if we use the word in its eminent sense and analogically to human persons’ (52). Thus, we can have a personal relationship only with the Son. For Panikkar, ‘Christ’ refers not only to Jesus of Nazareth. It means the ‘Lord’, a term indicating the ‘Principle, Being, [or] Logos’ to which various religions point when reference is made to a mediator or link. Panikkar brings his thought on the meaning of Christ together in tight phrasing. ‘The reason I persist in calling it [the manifestation of the divine Mystery] Christ is that it 30

On Panikkar’s widened understanding of ‘the Son’, see: MacPherson, Critical Reading, 92-94; von Sinnen, Reden vom dreieinigen Gott, 273-74; Nannu K, Influence of Hinduism, 38-39.

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seems to me that phenomenologically Christ presents the fundamental characteristics of the mediator between divine and cosmic, eternal and temporal, etc., which other religions call Iśvara, Tathāgata or even Jahweh, Allah and so on’ (54). He acknowledges that the life of the Church is centered on the person of Jesus Christ. But, at the same time, he says the Church does not insist it is the universal religion. Rather, it holds that Christ is fully revealed in it. At the same time, in its everyday piety, the Church often enough seems to have forgotten the Trinity. For Panikkar, various world religions have sometimes retained a better equilibrium among the spiritualities of ‘apophatism, personalism and divine immanence’ than has the Church. The striving of various world religions for a synthesis of these three spiritualities constitutes a moment of mutual fecundation. He feels that we can expect this moment to lead to a ‘fuller integration into human religious consciousness of the experience of the mystery and the life of the Trinity’ (55). Panikkar sees the Church as having evolved from a focus on martyrs as models of the perfect Christian to monks who renounced the world on to a greater contemporary openness to the world around it. In this process, the Spirit is pushing Christian attention beyond ecclesial limits to an engagement with humankind and the cosmos. On the one hand, even world religions are secularizing. On the other, the ‘a-religious’ are becoming more sacralized. ‘The Son, the Lord under whatever name, is the symbol for this process’. Panikkar has now greatly widened the understanding of Christ from being the name of Jesus of Nazareth to any moment of mediation between finite and infinite. Ultimately, any created being becomes a moment of such revelation, what he calls a ‘Christophany’. He brings his presentation on this widening of the Christological together when he says that ‘the only true experience of Christ is in human and cosmic koinonia’ (58). Such experience must expand to that which is truly trinitarian. Panikkar seems to be edging toward his later, more fully developed affirmation of the fundamentally trinitarian structure of reality, both religious and secular, as such. In the spirit of his widened understanding of Christ, Panikkar makes a further universalizing move. He continues his meditative reflection, focusing now on the Spirit which invites Christians to greet all with ‘outstretched arms’. The Spirit Panikkar opens his meditation on the Holy Spirit (58-69)31 with a quick summary of where we have been and where we are going. 31

On Panikkar’s widened insight into ‘the Spirit’, see: MacPherson, Critical Reading, 95-99; von Sinnen, Reden vom dreieinigen Gott, 274-75; Nannu K, Influence of Hinduism, 39-40.

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The revelation of the Father is the revelation of God transcendent – of such a transcendence that, strictly speaking, even the name of God cannot be attributed to him. Thus, for us, pilgrims as we are in space and time, it is the Logos that is God. The revelation of the Spirit, on the other hand, is the revelation of God immanent. (…) [D]ivine immanence (…) is quite a different thing from the divine welling in the depths of the soul. Essentially it signifies the ultimate inner-ness of every being, the final foundation, the Ground of Being as well as of beings. (58-59)

Panikkar sees the Christian understanding of the relative immediacy of the Spirit within our hearts as an insight parallel to the Hindu advaita experience. Parallel enough that he can creatively consider the Spirit from an advaitic perspective. In his rereading of the Spirit, he in effect identifies Spirit with divine immanence and with the advaita experience itself. Panikkar speaks of the revelation of the Father and of the Spirit. But he quickly recalls that the Father would no longer be truly transcendent, and the Spirit would no longer be truly immanent, if they were to reveal themselves. Important to note, the Spirit would then be ‘underlying’ but not immanent. That which is revealed and incarnate is ‘the Son, the Logos, the Icon’. Panikkar carefully reminds us that here, and throughout much of his meditation on the Spirit, he is speaking ‘the language appropriate to meditation, such as springs from the intelligence by a contemplative affinity’ (59). In speaking of immanence, Panikkar is, in principle, concerned with all of reality. But when he speaks of divine immanence, he first puts the stress on divine. Here he refers to God who is ‘immanent to himself’, what only God can be. He reinterprets various traditional characteristics attributed to the Spirit from the perspective of the advaita view of reality, namely, as not one, not two. But he also views the immanence of the ‘immanent’ Trinity itself from this advaitic perspective. The Trinity is a ‘bottomless interiority, infinitely interior to itself’ (59). As is the case in any plunging into the depths of a being, Panikkar says that, as one descends deeper and deeper into the Trinity, one arrives at a point where one leaves the ‘self’ concerned behind. One arrives at the Spirit. The Father gives all to the Son, but something remains, the Spirit. The Spirit then is, as it were, ‘the return to the source’ which the Father is in generating the Son. The Spirit’s return assures the eternal begetting of the Son. The Spirit is also ‘the divine immanence of the Son’ (60). The Spirit is immanent to both Father and Son, passing from Father to Son and from Son to Father. This movement among Father, Son, and Spirit is Panikkar’s rereading of the perichōrētic idea that they are in eternal, interpenetrating relationship. In this interrelationship, there is no self as such. For, and here it is best to cite Panikkar’s tight phrasing more directly, ‘the Self of the Father is the Son, his in-himself is the Spirit. But the Son has no Self; he is the Thou of the Father; his Self in relation to his Father is a Thou’. Panikkar goes on to say that the situation of

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the Spirit is similar. The Spirit is ‘of the Father and Son’. The Spirit has no I. The Spirit is the ‘we between the Father and the Son’. The ‘we’ of the Spirit encompasses, Panikkar says, the whole universe. The Son is the Thou and the Word of the Father, who is known only through his Word. ‘In relation to us the divine I appears only in the thou of the Logos through the we of the Spirit’. The Trinity ‘has no (…) selfhood as such’ (61). Panikkar indeed suggests that we can find great help in understanding traditional questions concerning the immanent Trinity as Father, Son, and Spirit, as both one and three. We can do this when we consider them from what we have said of the God-world relationship, from an advaitic perspective. ‘If the Father and the Son are not two, they are not one either: the Spirit both unites and distinguishes them’ (62). The Spirit is the ‘we’ immanent within them. The Father is beyond name and being. As divine immanence, the Spirit has no name because the Spirit is ‘on this side of every name’. At this point, Panikkar recalls the famous image of the Father as the source, the Son the river, and the Spirit ‘the limitless Ocean where the flux of divine life is completed’ (63). Panikkar continues his advaitic reading of the Spirit by insisting the we cannot have a personal relationship with the Spirit. Rather, with the Spirit we can only have ‘a non-relational union’. He finds this insight throughout the Upanishads with their insistence that ātman32 is identical with brahman (63, 64). This identity can only be realized in the advaitic experience. There, to put it a bit crudely in terms that are more my own than Panikkar’s, the consciousness of being an individual ‘self’ has dissolved, so to speak, into the universal ‘selfhood’ which is brahman. This identification is the ultimate and profound experience of the Spirit as divine immanence, the end or goal of the individual self. After affirming the ultimate identity of ātman and brahman, Panikkar meditates further and more specifically on the spirituality of the Spirit or, we might well say, the experience of the Spirit (64-66). Unlike the spirituality of the Word, that of the Spirit does not involve word or action. ‘Faith in the Spirit’ means that we are, in consciousness, already within (the ultimate) reality. We are, so to speak, ‘enveloped, submerged in knowledge and love, in the beauty that one has with joy penetrated. It is a kind of total passivity’ (64). There is no ‘me’ to be saved. We are a ‘thou’ addressed by an ‘I’ which is ‘the Father through the Son’. The spirituality of the Spirit involves but one way, that of 32

John A. Hutchison phrases the advaitic meaning of ātman and brahman in terms close to those of Panikkar. ‘The climactic and characteristic declaration of the Upanishads is the identity of atman and brahman. (…) In other words, there is a complete identity between the absolute or universal reality [brahman] underlying the objective world and that which everyone may find at the foundation of his or her subjecthood [atman]’. Paths of Faith, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 86.

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silence. A silence ‘of being, of wishing to be, the total silence of the will to be’ (65). In the present time, such spirituality cannot be lived in a full way. Spirit needs to be complemented by Word. Other spiritualities are needed and are to be related in trinitarian integration. True asceticism, Panikkar writes, ultimately requires ‘negation of the self’, a negation not to be feared. Here he refers to the cross as true wisdom. Then he quotes from various Hebrew Bible texts in which God speaks in the first person. Panikkar can write, ‘The Spirit leads man to realise that he is not an I (ego) but a thou (te); that he is only in so far as the one I (ego, aham [Sanskrit, “I am”]) says to him thou’ (66). The Spirit brings us to cry ‘Abba, Father’. In tight phrasing, Panikkar speaks of the Father only to the extent that the Son is the thou of the Father. In a wide sense of the word, we are ‘called’ along with the Son. ‘We are only in so far as we participate in the Logos. Every being is, and is only, a christophany’. Panikkar brings his meditation on the Spirit to a close, suggesting that the Father is ‘Source, the Son, Being, Thou, the Spirit Return to Being (or Ocean of Being), the we’. He ends his meditation on the experience of the Spirit with a reference to the Letter to the Ephesians 4:6, God ‘above all, through all and in all’ (68). Panikkar continues his reflection on the Trinity in the third and final major section (71-82) of this, his meditative writing on the Trinity and humankind’s religious experience. He stresses again the importance of maintaining, in complementary interrelationship, the three forms of spirituality on which he has focused. This complementarity helps avoid one-sided approaches to the experience of God. More positively stated, it assures a fuller and more complete experience of the divine mystery. He also recalls the interrelationship between divine and human which he has mentioned. When we speak of the Trinity, we need to speak of both divine and human. This approach he calls ‘theandrism’. Theandrism is the classical and traditional term for that intimate and complete unity which is realised paradigmatically in Christ between the divine and the human and which is the goal towards which everything here below tends – in Christ and the Spirit. For that reason the term seems to me particularly well suited to characterize the synthesis of the three spiritual attitudes described above and also the three spiritualities developing from them, called respectively the ways of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. (71)

Of note, in the preface added to this text in its 1973 version, Panikkar reidentifies theandrism as a ‘cosmotheandric vision of reality’, bringing in explicit reference to the cosmos. At this point, we come to the end of this prolonged meditation on the Trinity, a meditation which is based in Panikkar’s intrareligious, and humankind’s overall religious experience. Here he makes his view of reality itself and as such more explicit. He writes, ‘Reality itself is theandric’ (75). With this expansive remark, he opens the way to his later Gifford Lectures and the revised lecture texts subsequently published as The Rhythm of Being.

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Intrareligious Testimonials In line with Panikkar’s own observations, we can with Panikkar say that from early on Christians reflected on biblical texts and on their lived experience of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Panikkar tends to say Father, Christ, and Spirit. Over time, they gave varied expression to their individual and communal experiences of God. In doing this, they increasingly worked with philosophical notions available in what had become their mainly Greek cultural context. Such notions included ‘person’, ‘substance’, ‘nature’, and at least implicitly ‘self’ or ‘subject’ and ‘other’. We can complement Panikkar’s remarks by noting that Christians modified such notions, as needed, to express their experience of God. Of further note, in formulating various expressions of their experience, they spontaneously accepted that such experience involved some form of ongoing distinction between self and other. In The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind, Panikkar sets out to reflect on the Trinity from another perspective. He opts for a more ‘Eastern’ one. In line with it, he does not stress such notions as substance and person. And the self/other distinction is not necessarily accepted as universally applicable. Rather, he privileges a notion of experience characterized by an immediacy of experiencing without ultimate recourse to a self-other structure. He does this especially regarding the Father and the Spirit. As we have seen, he interprets the transcendent Father more deeply, widely we could perhaps say, by presenting the Father as the emptiness to which Buddhism refers. The spirituality of the Father, if there can be one, is purely apophatic. He interprets the Spirit more widely by presenting the Spirit, in Hindu advaitaistic terms, as ātman become brahman. The immanence is such that there is no ultimate distinction between the individual self and brahman. Brahman is, we could say, pure experiencing. The Spirit is, then, this immediate experiencing which is the Absolute. The spirituality of the Spirit is a spirituality of silence. Panikkar retains the personalism of the Son or logos as Christ, who is understood to be the mediator in various religious traditions. The spirituality of the Son or logos is a spirituality of the Word. This personalist spirituality is complemented by the immediate experiencing which the Spirit is. Such immediate experiencing helps avoid unacceptable aspects of a personalist spirituality. For Panikkar, the fuller, even we could say full, experience of the Trinity is multireligious. It is an experience of the Father as emptiness, the Son or logos as Christ, and the Spirit as experiencing reality’s being not-one and not-two. All three experiences, and consequently spiritualities, are interrelated in complementary interrelationship and trinitarian union. This multireligious experience of the Trinity is, more exactly, an intrareligious experience in the form of an inner dialogue. Such dialogue involves

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encountering sincerely, honestly, and openly, another religious experience or other religious experiences beyond that of one’s own personal religious tradition.33 To allow space, so to speak, in human consciousness for such a dialogue, Panikkar distinguishes between faith and belief. He sketches out a distinction between the two while affirming complex relationships between them.34 He appeals to this distinction and these relationships to explain that, in such internal dialogue, we do not doubt faith. But we come to experience faith’s expressing itself in various belief systems. For Panikkar, ‘the experience of faith is a primal anthropological act’.35 A person should establish ‘in himself the distinction between his faith (ever transcendent, unutterable and open) and his belief (an intellectural, emotional and cultural embodiment of that faith within the framework of a particular tradition that, yes, demands his loyalty, but not that he betray the rest of mankind)’.36 Without such embodiment, faith would be abstract. ‘Belief, the garb or expression of faith, is part and parcel of faith’.37 Faith is distinct from belief. But it is not the same faith without the belief in which it embodies itself.38 For Panikkar, this distinction helps, as mentioned, identify that space within which we can, without denying our faith, come to live the religious experience of another religious tradition. At the same time, for him this nuanced distinction justifies speaking of religious experience as involving them both. More specifically regarding the Trinity, the fuller experience of the Trinity involves faith as embodied in each of the three major religious traditions, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism. In summary, Panikkar affirms in his 1973 volume a more complex form of fuller experience of the Trinity than is traditionally found or at least implied in more directly Christian trinitarian thought. He confirms and testifies that he has lived such intrareligious experience in his own life and human consciousness (vii). He has had an immediate experience, an awareness, of the Father as emptiness. He has had a personal experience of the Son or logos as Christ, as mediator. And he has had a direct experience, in non-relational union, of the Spirit. Taken together, these three constitute, in their mutually qualifying interrelationships, the fuller experience of the Trinity to which he himself gives witness. But there is another example of this experience of the Trinity to which he testifies as well. He sees his experience as a paradigm which others will also come to experience. What he says in this regard bears citing again. He ‘believes that he expresses not 33 34 35 36 37 38

Panikkar, Intrareligious Dialogue, 40, and see 10. Ibid., 1-23. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21.

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a private opinion, but a paradigm of an experience which is bound to become more and more frequent in our time: the experience of gathering or rather concentrating in oneself more than one of the human phyla in which mankind’s fundamental insights have accumulated’ (x-xi). In addition to these two, more personal instances of his own and others’ fuller experience of the Trinity, we can identify another three to which Panikkar gives testimony. They bear the same overall pattern as the two personal forms but are more collective in nature. These three extend to progressively wider levels of reality and, finally, to the whole of reality. The first of these three occurs, to varying degrees of awareness, within many religious traditions of the world. Indeed, for Panikkar each of these traditions exhibits elements of each of the three spiritualities to which he has referred (6, 9). The second, more collective and widely embracing form is the accumulated religious and, perhaps more by implication at this point in the development of his thought, overall experience of humankind over 6,000 years. Panikkar refers to a third form or instance of what could be called an inclusive trinitarian experience. Again, at this stage in his thought, this experience remains less developed. It is the experience of reality as such. Here ‘of reality’ is both an objective and subjective genitive. Objective in that it refers to what reality is, namely, the trinitarian interrelationship of the cosmos, the human, and the divine. But subjective in that reality expresses itself in and through human consciousness. This experience is the theandric, and finally cosmotheandric, insight that reality itself is trinitarian in character (xivxv, 75). Panikkar has, then, identified and thereby testified to five forms or instances of fuller experience of the Trinity. Two of them are more personal in nature. Three are more collective and increasingly inclusive in reference to, so to speak, experiencer and experienced. It almost goes without saying that Panikkar wishes to encourage such fuller experiences of the Trinity both within individuals and within wider settings. Still, it will be helpful to note that he offers an invitation to consider his proposal in favor of such experiences (xiv). He wishes to share his experience with others (6). And he feels his cosmotheandric vision urgently needs to be developed (76, 74). Indeed, the meditative character itself of his writing represents an effort to engage his readers on a deep, meditational level. He calls his writing a ‘re-enactment’ of his own personal experience (vii). He relives his experience with his readers in the hope that they themselves will experience such an intrareligious dialogue. And in the hope that it will lead them to an enlarged and deepened appreciation of the Trinity.39 39

Panikkar often speaks of intrareligious dialogue in a sense wide enough to permit him to appeal to such dialogical experience in various contexts as, for example, interreligious and intercultural contacts. But here in this 1973 volume he, and we with him, are focusing primarily on

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Panikkar has spoken of intrareligious dialogue as something which occurs within individual persons. But he also suggests that it can also take place analogously within wider settings. A specific religious community can enter such a dialogue internal to it, a form of communal experience. Even more widely, for Panikkar such a dialogue is going on already now within humankind with its gathering of varied religious and secular traditions. And reality itself, through human consciousness, gives expression to itself as an intrareligious, even more widely stated, cosmotheandric experience. In 1973, Panikkar had published The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind and then brought several texts relating to intrareligious dialogue together in his 1978 volume, The Intrareligious Dialogue. In 1996, he spoke again of his experience of being Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist, to which he added secularist as well. In this discussion, he helpfully likened the lived experience of several religious traditions to the experience of learning a second or even more languages. We can learn them so well that we experience and think of the world in one or more languages other than our own first language.40 Then in 2010, close to the end of his life, he published The Rhythm of Being. In it, he seemed to be encouraged by growing interest in intrareligious dialogue. He wrote, ‘The nascent interest in intrareligious dialogue and intercultural studies may have a pioneering function here’.41 Panikkar has affirmed and described various forms, indeed concrete instances, of personal and more collective, fuller experiences of an enlarged and deepened Trinity. His descriptions serve as intrareligious testimonials to such experiences. But it is his own lived experience of intrareligious dialogue, prolonged in his meditative writing, which is his greatest overall testimonial at this point in his meditation on the Trinity.

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intrareligious dialogue among Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism leading to an enlarged and deepened view of the Trinity. Raimon Panikkar, ‘A Self-Critical Dialogue’, in: The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar, ed. Joseph Prabhu (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 262-68. That is, in correcting the tendency to judge the ‘insights of one culture with the intellectual instruments of another’. Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being, 360.

CHAPTER 11 RAIMON PANIKKAR Cosmotheandric Insight

Raimon Panikkar delivered the prestigious, centenary Gifford Lectures some 16 years after his 1973 publication of The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind. From April 25 to May 12, 1989, he offered a series of 10 lectures at the University of Edinburgh. He later cited the title of these lectures as ‘The Dwelling of the Divine in the Contemporary World’.1 The official Gifford Lectures website presents his 1989 lectures as follows: ‘Trinity and Theism’. Panikkar offers a ‘holistic vision’ of how to move beyond cultural and religious divisions by finding a triadic principle – the Trinity in Christian tradition – in all human thought. He proposes alternatives to the various ‘all or nothing’ dualisms of human belief by reviving ‘nondualistic’ ideas in Western and Eastern thought and, in the latter case, ancient Indian philosophy especially. The themes ‘rhythm’ and ‘continuous creation’ (creatio continua) are used to describe various states of nondualism.2 1

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Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, The Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), xxxii, with Panikkar’s text itself usually referred to by page here in the text and generally abbreviated and referred to in the notes simply as Rhythm. At times, references to subsections of Rhythm will be indicated directly in our text. If such subsections are short, namely, around three pages or less in length, no further page reference will be given for specific points drawn from, or brief quotations taken from, Rhythm. Italics in quotations are in the original. As possible, I will incorporate Panikkar’s characteristic and often creative words and wording into the present text. They reveal something of the passion with which he writes and convey the earnest with which he communicates. ‘The Gifford Lectures: Over 100 Years of Lectures on Natural Theology’, accessed May 12, 2018, https://www.giffordlectures.org/lectures?page=2, with a longer description of the lectures at ‘Trinity and Theism’, accessed May 22, 2019, https://www.giffordlectures.org/lectures/ trinity-and-theism. The 1989 printed lecture program gives the title of Panikkar’s lectures as ‘Trinity and Atheism: The Housing of the Divine in the Contemporary World’. It provides a second title as well, ‘The Rhythm of Being. The Theo/Anthropo/Cosmic Trinity (The Dwelling of the Divine)’, (italics in the original). A copy of Panikkar’s Gifford Lectures program is available online at Alastair McIntosh, ‘Raimon Panikkar in Scotland: Documents and

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In keeping with the theme of rhythm, Panikkar’s first lecture began with music.3 He holds the singular distinction of being the only Gifford lecturer to open with music. Panikkar describes his lectures as meditations (14) and his preparation for them ‘as much a spiritual as an intellectural discipline’ (34). Some 21 years after delivering the lectures, he published them in further developed form as The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity.4 He speaks of this book, published many years later, as ‘a contemplative work. The long delay in publication has helped me delete any sentence that is not the fruit of an experience’ (xxxi). His

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Reflections 1989 & 1990’, accessed November 9, 2019, http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/ general/resources/2010-Raimon-Panikkar-Gifford-Scotland.pdf. References to this program will usually be included in parentheses in the text. See Camilia Gangasingh MacPherson, ‘A Critical Reading of the Development of Raimon Panikkar’s Thought on the Trinity’ (Th.D. diss., Saint Paul University [Ottawa, Canada], 1993), accessed April 13, 2018, https://ruor. uottawa.ca/handle/10393/6648?mode=simple, subsequently published as A Critical Reading of the Development of Raimon Panikkar’s Thought on the Trinity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996). References will be to MacPherson’s dissertation text available online. MacPherson had access to the lecture material and interviewed Panikkar at Tavertet, Spain, in August 1990 (127n48). She concentrates on aspects of lecture 6, ‘The Radical Trinity’, 126-34, with reference to the recorded lectures on 260. McIntosh writes, ‘He [Alistair Hulbert] tells me that the lectures were opened by a young woman flautist playing Debussy – he thinks it was “Syrinx”, originally called the “Flûte de Pan”. When Panikkar commenced his lecture (…) he said, “We began with music, not with words”, and went on to observe that none of the previous Giffords had addressed the question of rhythm’. ‘Raimon Panikkar in Scotland’, first of several initial, unnumbered pages. Panikkar treats at length of rhythm in the introduction to Rhythm, 38-50. After reading this book, it is striking to return to the introduction and come to appreciate anew its seminal importance. In his preface, Panikkar briefly summarizes the development from recorded lectures to transcribed texts polished and further revised over the years before final publication. Rhythm, xxvn1. Maciej Bielawski reflects briefly on The Rhythm of Being and its writing, within the context of Panikkar’s retirement move to Tavertet in Spain. Panikkar: Un uomo e il suo pensiero (Panikkar: A Man and His Thought) (Rome: Fazi, 2013), 256-63. The Gifford Lectures Internet site provides brief summaries of each chapter of The Rhythm of Being, accessed July 7, 2018, https://www.giffordlectures.org/news/books/rhythm-being. For an appreciative reading of Panikkar’s trinitarian thought in Rhythm from a Christian perspective, see Gerard Hall, ‘Radicalizing the Trinity: A Christian Theological Reflection on Panikkar’s Radical Trinity’, in: Proceedings: Rhythm and Vision Conference in Memory of Raimon Panikkar, April 8-10, 2011, George Mason University, Fairfax (US-VA), Cirpit Review 3, Supplement, 51-66 (Milan: Mimesis, 2012), accessed July 8, 2018, http://www.cirpit.org/upload/allegati/214.pdf. For a particularly helpful and appreciative overall presentation of ‘a vision of Panikkar, a common thread that runs through his thought’, see Anand Amaladass, ‘Raimon Panikkar’s Quest for Rhythm of Being (Rtatattva)’, in: Raimundo Panikkar: A Pilgrim across Worlds, ed. Kapila Vatsyayan & Côme Carpentier de Gourdon (New Delhi: Niyogi, 2016), 91-115, with quotation on 91.

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lectures and his book are, in effect, an intense argument5 in favor of a paradigm shift in human consciousness. This shift is one in mythos, namely, in the horizon within which various beliefs take on meaning and credibility. Toward the end of this contemplative study, he concludes that ‘we need a new mythos, a deeper horizon from which the mythologoumenon, the Story for our age, may emerge’ (374). That new mythos is cosmotheandric (376).6 Joseph Prabhu helpfully expresses the core meaning of this mythos while at the same time identifying the basic thrust of Panikkar’s book many years in contemplative gestation. He writes, ‘The main thesis that Panikkar wants to proffer here is the triadic structure of Reality comprising the Divine, the Human, and the Cosmic in thoroughgoing relationality’.7 Already in his introduction to this volume Panikkar had described the experience of bringing these three together. ‘The three [man knowing himself, the divine, all things] are here brought together: God, the World, Man. I call this the cosmotheandric experience’ (34).8 As we saw in the last chapter, in 1973 Panikkar had spoken in an 5

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Michael McLaughlin points out that ‘argument’ here needs to be taken in a wide enough sense. ‘The style of thinking is at times more associative than argumentative. He [Panikkar] brings patterns into our view rather than arguing in detail for positions as philosophers normally do’. Review of The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, The Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University, by Raimon Panikkar, in: Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 24 (2011), art. 21, 72-74, accessed May 2, 2019, https://www.giffordlectures.org/news/books/rhythm-being. For extended presentations of the meanings of many of Panikkar’s many neologisms such as ‘cosmotheandric’ as well as of various fundamental terms, see ‘Glossary: Neulogisms and Fundamental Concepts’, at the official Panikkar website, accessed July 21, 2018, http://www. raimon-panikkar.org/english/gloss-radical-trinity.html. Joseph Prabhu, foreword to The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, The Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), xviii. Panikkar often remains with the term ‘Man’ to capture something of the singular importance of Man and Man’s consciousness. Rhythm, 295. For his argument in favor of understanding the Greek anēr as originally not referring to males alone, see Raimon Panikkar, ‘Colligite Fragmenta: For an Integration of Reality’, in: From Alienation to At-one-ness, ed. Francis A. Eigo with Silvio E. Fittipaldi (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1977), 68-69. As part of his justification for interpreting the original meaning of anēr as referring to the human, he appeals to its ‘Indo-European root (cf. the Sanskrit nā …)’ (68n136). To reflect more exactly what Panikkar says in Rhythm, I will use this one-syllable word ‘Man’ when Panikkar does or when what I am closely relating reflects his way of writing. Of further note, in speaking of the Divine, the Human, and the Cosmic, Joseph Prabhu remarks that ‘the terms “God”, “Man”, and “World” are three artificially substantivized forms of the adjectives which together constitute reality’. His remark might open the way to working with Panikkar’s thought while mitigating the use of ‘Man’, given that Panikkar prefers not to work with ‘substances’. Review of The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery, by Raimon Panikkar, in: Journal of HinduChristian Studies 22 (2009), art. 17, 55-58, quotation on 56, accessed July 14, 2018, https:// digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1444&context=jhcs. Also, Panikkar usually capitalizes ‘Divine’, ‘Human’, ‘Man’, ‘Cosmos’, and ‘World’. To stay close to his text,

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initial way of this cosmotheandric experience.9 Now it is as if his seedling intuition has grown into a three-branched tree of impressive insight. Each chapter in The Rhythm of Being reflects something of the interrelatedness of the Divine, the Human, and the Cosmic. Panikkar will, however, ‘concentrate on one dimension of this threefold distinction: the Divine’ (55).10 The book itself is, in effect, divided into two halves. The first consists of the first four chapters.11 They emphasize ‘descriptive analysis and philosophical critique in which the question of Being/Becoming is addressed and possible answers reviewed’.12 Here Panikkar develops his argument in favor of a change in mythos

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that same practice will be followed here in instances where he himself uses capitals or when what I am relating closely reflects his way of writing. It is fascinating to see the extent to which Panikkar has, relatively early on, sketched out many of his initial intuitions and which he will later go on to develop at great length. He does this in ‘Colligite Fragmenta’, esp. 68-91. Panikkar will use the adjective ‘cosmotheandric’ to modify various nouns, depending on the context within which he is thinking and the various aspects of reality to which he is referring. For instance, cosmotheandric intuition, principle, experience, consciousness, vision, insight, knowledge, spirituality, kosmology, trinity, and mythos. See, for example, Raimon Panikkar, The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 1-77, 150-52, as well as other writings and especially throughout Rhythm. He later clarifies that ‘the theanthropocosmic [and thus the cosmotheandric] intuition appertains to human awareness; the cosmotheandric insight is my interpretation of the former’. Rhythm, 55. Prabhu describes Panikkar’s more developed understanding succinctly when he speaks of Panikkar’s ‘philosophical-theological interpretation of world history [as] culminating in a fulfillment of what he [Panikkar] calls “cosmotheandric consciousness” – the realization that God, humankind and the world exist not as independent but as interpenetrating and mutually constituting realities’. ‘Introduction: Lost in Translation’, 4. Two expository and evaluative studies on Panikkar’s cosmotheandric intuition and insight: Rudolf von Sinnen, Reden vom dreieinigen Gott in Brasilien und Indien: Grundzüge einer ökumenischen Hermeneutik im Dialog mit Leonardo Boff und Raimon Panikkar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), esp. 307-15, 351-52; Jyri Komulainan, An Emerging Cosmotheandric Religion? Raimon Panikkar’s Pluralist Theology of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 176-207, 212-14. Two, more exploratory studies: Beverly J. Lanzetta, ‘The Mystical Basis of Panikkar’s Thought’, in: The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar, ed. Joseph Prabhu (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 91-105; Frank Podgorski, ‘The Cosmotheandric Intuition: The Contemplative Catalyst of Raimon Panikkar’, in: The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar, 106-18. Of possible general interest, each of the chapters of Rhythm is subdivided in three sections. For instance, regarding chapter 7, ‘The Divine Dimension’, Panikkar writes that ‘in describing some ways to approach the divine dimension of reality I offer a triadic division so as to keep a trinitarian and traditional pattern’. Rhythm, 323. In Rhythm, Panikkar at times refers to sections of the book as parts (for example, 177) and at other times as chapters (for example, 323). Reference to parts may be a carry-over from the Gifford Lecture texts. In theory, it might be better to refer to sections of the book as parts, since this would recall the nuanced relationship he describes between part and whole. But, to avoid possible confusion, major sections of the book will be referred to as chapters. Remarks concerning the structure of Panikkar’s text come in good part from Gerard Hall’s review of ‘The Rhythm of Being: The Gifford Lecture’, in: Australian eJournal of Theology 18

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by critiquing various philosophical positions and questions. Of principal concern is his rejection of monism and dualism. He carries out his critique of these two philosophical positions, as well as others, by repeated appeal to the advaitic experience of ‘not one, not two’. He rejects seeming dichotomies arising from what would generally be considered various alternative positions. He especially opposes the options of reducing all to one (monism) or holding to a real separation between notions and between things (dualism). Panikkar favors distinction but not separation. He asserts that all is related. The second half of the book presents Panikkar’s own view of reality, namely, his cosmotheandric vision. This second half is made up of the last four chapters. It begins with Panikkar affirming that what he writes from this point on arises out of his own experience. ‘Until now I have been descriptive and critical. From here on I shall be offering my own experience of the Divine Mystery’ (212). Panikkar develops his cosmotheandric interpretation of his experience by working more especially with widened understandings of two ancient insights. The first is the Upanishadic advaita insight that all of reality is, as mentioned, not one, not two. It bears recalling that he calls upon this insight to reject both monistic and dualistic views of reality. The second insight is the Christian idea that within the Trinity the three divine Persons are in full, active interrelationship, which is called in Greek perichōrēsis.13 He expands this insight by applying it to all of reality, namely, to the Divine, the Human, and the Cosmos in their trinitarian relationships. To appreciate his cosmotheandric insight, we will draw upon several of his remarks in chapter 5, ‘The Triadic Myth’. We will then treat more extensively of what he says in chapter 6, ‘The Theanthropocosmic Invariant’, and in chapter 7, ‘The Divine Dimension’. In chapter 5, Panikkar moves quickly to the first subsection of the chapter, which he entitles ‘Advaita and Trinity’. For him, God and the world are not truly distinct (a position affirmed by monism) nor are they ontologically separate as ‘two ultimate realms of reality’ (a position affirmed by dualism). As he had done in the first half of the book, here he reflects on various philosophical problems from an advaitic perspective. He focuses especially on the Divine and related questions (212). It is, then, understandable that he begins his further argument in favor of the cosmotheandric insight with special reference to advaita. In reinterpreting the Trinity, he will continue his

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(April 2011) no. 1, 1-3, with Hall’s quotation on 1, accessed May 2, 2019, http://aejt.com. au/2011/volume_18/issue_1. Writers we are reviewing tend to adopt, though not always fully consistently, one of the following three ways of writing this word, namely, perichoresis, perichoresis, perichōrēsis. In quotations, the author’s way of writing it will be maintained and in a given chapter the general form used will reflect the consistent or at least predominant form the author uses.

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advaita-rooted rejection of monism and dualism. He writes, ‘I submit that the Trinity and advaita are simply two names for this middle way [of advaita, between monism and dualism]’ (215).

The Triadic Myth Any attempt to isolate the Divine fails. Any effort at uniting it with the rest of Being makes it superfluous. The non-quantifiable symbol of the Trinity seems to be able to express the universal range of the human experience when dealing with this problem. It is a non-dualistic experience. (Remarks from the program announcement leading into Gifford Lectures 6 and following.) We introduce the notion of Radical Trinity: the trinitarian intuition is neither an exclusive Christian doctrine, nor a monopoly of ‘God’. It reveals the most fundamental character of Reality. Being is trinitarian. (From the program announcement of Lecture 6, ‘The Radical Trinity’.)

These quotations from the printed program of Panikkar’s Gifford Lectures provide insight into his thinking in 1989. And they alert us to central insights Panikkar develops in 2010 in The Rhythm of Being’s chapter 5, ‘The Triadic Myth’, to which we now turn. Advaita In chapter 5, after more general remarks on monism and dualism, Panikkar provides a longer explanation of advaita (216-24). He, makes several particularly enlightening remarks. For example, he prefers not to translate advaita as nonduality, which would imply a dialectical, reasoning way of seeing. Such a dialectical approach involves a reference to something else. But advaita does not make such a reference. He suggests we translate it as aduality or adualism, which stresses a lack of dualism. In a similar vein, he rejects the idea that reality may be one, which he says would reduce reality to something knowable and intelligible. For one is intelligible, but advaita is beyond rational knowing without being irrational. ‘Adualism simply implies an avoidance of rationalism’ (216-18, quotation 218). It lies in the realm of direct experience and pure consciousness as such. A second remark takes the form of a continuing, longer reflection on advaita (218-24). For Panikkar, advaitic experience is experience of the relation between two poles, not the experience of a subject experiencing an object. The relation is adualist. There are not two poles without the relation and there is no relation without the two poles. In this sense, not-one, not-two. In ordinary, more dialectical thinking, we think of the two poles and then the relation between them. In advaitic experience, what he refers to as loving intellect sees

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the relation as constitutive of the two poles and vice versa. World does not exclude God, spirit does not exclude matter. They are related and different at the same time. ‘Any relation needs at least two poles; but it is not strictly two either, since there are not two relations. The relation is real and yet is not in itself’ (219). We need to complement our mention of these two insights, namely, that advaita is adualist and that it stresses simple experiencing, with a longer quotation before turning to his interpretation of the Trinity. In it, Panikkar brings together much of his thought on advaita. In sum, the object of this awareness is not the individual thing but the net itself, the whole of consciousness, the Whole as such. In other words, the object of the advaitic experience is not an individual thing but a field of consciousness, as it were. As already hinted, there is still more: the subject of the advaitic experience is not an individual mind. The advaitic experience is not that of an individual subject apprehending an individual object. As long as there is ego-consciousness the adualistic awareness will not emerge. (220-21)

Trinity Panikkar’s presentation on the Trinity follows immediately after that on advaita. He begins by saying that ‘formally speaking, Trinity amounts to advaita’ (22427, quotation on 224). To be more precise, he adds that he is not equating or mixing up the two. Each one arises within a cultural, linguistic, and religious world of its own. Yet they function in parallel fashion in those worlds.14 Panikkar is primarily concerned with Trinity insofar as it represents a true human experience. He gets at this experience in a tightly moving argument. The Trinity, ultimate reality, is pure relationality. If so, ‘this relationship also enters all creatures and Man in a special way’ (225). Trinity, then, ‘belongs to the very structure of Being’. There is a relationship between eternity and time, an ongoing, continual creation (creatio continua) (226).15 For Panikkar, Trinity and advaita express the ‘depth of human experience’. He is primarily concerned with this 14

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Panikkar calls this parallel functioning homeomorphic equivalencies. ‘Homeomorphic equivalencies are “functional equivalencies” or deep correspondences going beyond simple analogy that can be established between words and concepts belonging to distinct religions or cultures’. Partial description taken from the fuller text on homeomorphic equivalencies in ‘Glossary: Neulogisms and Fundamental Concepts’, at the official Panikkar website. Panikkar refers to the special relationship he sees between eternity and time as ‘tempiternity, the tempeternal character of reality’. ‘Tempiternity makes manifest that being and time are interrelated in such a way that there is nothing that remains without being touched by time, not even eternity. At the same time, the temporal aspect of all reality is “only a partial aspect of the tempiternal nature of things”’ (italics in the original). Partial description from ‘Glossary: Neulogisms and Fundamental Concepts’, at the official Panikkar website. And see further at n. 21 in the text of the present chapter.

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depth, which he finds expressed in several religions. ‘There must be something universal in this most human experience of reality’ (227).16 This universal something will become the major subject of his concern in his next chapter, chapter 6. Before turning to that chapter, though, we should note a brief comment Panikkar makes in the introduction concerning the book’s subtitle, ‘The Unbroken Trinity’. When he speaks of Trinity, he is referring to ‘the ultimate triadic structure of reality’. Unbroken Trinity, then, describes the ‘radical relativity of the Divine, the Cosmic, and the Human’ (55). All is interrelated in a trinitarian way. Panikkar has indeed expanded the trinitarian notion of perichōrēsis to apply to all of reality, namely, the Divine, the Human, and the Cosmos. In addition to this initial remark in the introduction, before turning to chapter 6, we should as well draw attention to two of the many important points he makes in chapter 5’s last subsection, ‘A Christian Reflection’ (253-62). The first of these two points is the way in which he understands the cosmotheandric trinity as standing in a certain continuity with the Christian trinitarian tradition. For him, his interpretation of the cosmotheandric trinity is not just a copy of what the Trinity is for Christians. On the one hand, he himself does not work by deducing his thought from revelation. On the other, he sees three conditions which must characterize his effort at enlarging and deepening Christian doctrine. It must not contradict the given of faith, must be able to be integrated into the ‘general Christian vision’, and needs to be accepted by a ‘recognized christian community’ (258). The second of these two points in the subsection ‘A Christian Reflection’ concerns what he calls the radical trinity (259-60). Panikkar admires the beauty of what Christian theology has come to call the immanent Trinity, the Trinity in itself. He recognizes the extension of this beauty to creation, the economic Trinity. That is, he wishes to extend further ‘the privilege of the divine Trinity to the whole of reality. Reality is not only “trinitarian”; it is the true and ultimate Trinity’. He roots this insight in his appreciation of Christ as Augustine’s Christus totus (the whole Christ). He links the insight with a reference to John 1:3, which he quotes as ‘all has come to be through me [the Logos]’. Panikkar thus adds to creatio continua the notion of incarnatio continua (continuing or ongoing incarnation). ‘The entire destiny of reality is a christic adventure’.

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Panikkar will continue in chapter 5 to consider some examples of such threeness in various religious or quasi-religious historical contexts (227-32, for example in places such as Egypt, India [Hindu, Buddhist], Greece, Rome, China, Medieval and more recent Europe), various aspects of the ‘tripartite anthropology’, and related questions (232-44).

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The Theanthropocosmic Invariant The cosmotheandric insight aims at doing justice to the deepest intuitions of most human traditions and, carrying the insight a step further, claims to elicit a certain consensus. The data of History of Religions are intriguingly revealing. Everything that is, for the very fact of being, is at the same time cosmic, human, and divine. All the words used are not synonymous, but homeomorphic equivalents. (From the program announcement of Lecture 7, ‘The Cosmotheandric Invariant’.)

Everything is cosmic, human, and divine. Panikkar develops this insight in greater detail in chapter 6, ‘The Theanthropocosmic Invariant’. He spells out what he means when he speaks of a radical, unbroken Trinity characterized by distinction but not separation. From early in the chapter, he announces an open secret evident from human experience and traditions: ‘Reality is threefold’ (265). This is not a cultural universal. He denies such universality. Rather, it is a human invariant, found throughout humankind. By way of example, he says that God, in a theistic sense, may be common in many cultures. But the experience of the Divine as mystery is ever present (269). By theanthropocosmic invariant, then, Panikkar means that ‘we are together with other Men, on a common Earth, under the same Sky, and enveloped by the Unknown. There is an interconnectedness among the three. The triad is a Trinity. I call this Trinity, the theanthropocosmic invariant. Man as Man is conscious of this Trinity’ (268). We turn now directly to the way in which Panikkar describes the, perhaps in a better way to say it here, his cosmotheandric insight: ‘(1) Kosmos [the Cosmos or World], Anthrōpos [Man, the Human]), and Theos [the Divine]’ (278). He contemplates, so to speak, each of these three in chapter 6’s third and final subsection entitled ‘The Triple Interindependence: The Cosmotheandric Intuition’.17 This real and not merely mental ‘inter-in-dependence of these three dimensions of reality is essential to the cosmotheandric experience’ (277).18

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‘“Triple Interindependence” is a philosophical expression inspired by the christian trinitarian perichōrēsis, the buddhist pratītyasamutpāda and the hindu cosmic karma’. Rhythm, 276. Panikkar says explicitly that he would like to share this cosmotheandric experience and intuition. Rhythm, 268-69. Here and later he speaks of three dimensions of reality. One might have expected him to speak of poles, as he did in presenting the advaitic experience in which relation is constitutive of at least two poles. Rhythm, 219. Speaking of dimensions seems to have the advantage of stressing the interpenetration of the World, the Human, and the Divine in their constitutive relationships with one another. Each of these three shares in what is the primary characteristic of each of the other two. Of further note, ‘dimension’ seems to work better here when referring to three than ‘poles’, which latter tends to work well when referring to two.

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In his description of each of these three dimensions of reality, Panikkar follows a pattern characteristic of his overall argument in favor of his cosmotheandric insight. That is, he usually analyzes one or more interpretations of various aspects of reality or even of its nature. He shows why they are inadequate and therefore unsatisfactory. Then he argues in favor of his own more satisfactory, advaita-based interpretations. They account better for the interrelational character of reality, whose dimensions are distinct but not separate. It will be important, then, to look at Panikkar’s contemplative description of each of these three dimensions in more detail. Such a more detailed retelling will help us appreciate some of the ways in which he argues the constitutive interrelationships among them. It will also show how he envisions each of them. We are here at the core of his cosmotheandric insight.19 Kosmos In his description (278-89) of the first of these three dimensions, the Kosmos, Panikkar proceeds in a general way according to the just-mentioned pattern. Too often we understand the Kosmos as being made up of discreet things and consider it as standing over against the Human and especially the Divine. He attributes these ways of understanding the Kosmos to ‘the ordinary way of speaking (…) a one-directional way’ (282). In addition, he criticizes a reductionist conceptual epistemology which does not take into consideration a more symbolic form of direct knowing (280-81). He responds by offering a view of the Kosmos in which it is in a non-dualistic relationship with the Human and the Divine (282-83). He carries out his interpretation of that relationship in two steps. First, he takes as an example a stone one holds in one’s hand (278-85). He contemplates it from various points of view. For example, he considers it as such or in its singularity. He finds that it is characterized by some sense of life which is appropriately attributable to it. The stone manifests as well a certain form of consciousness. It shows elements of what one might identify as freedom. Yet the stone is in his hand. In its individuality, it cannot be fully understood without reference to the Human and to consciousness in general. There is a human dimension to it. And he notes as well a certain sense of mystery about the stone. This sense characterizes the stone as an individual thing. In being mysterious and individual there is, indeed, a divine dimension to the stone. Regrettably, we cannot do justice here to his careful analyses and his justifications of what he affirms. We can, though, with these few remarks appreciate something of his 19

As we will see, chapter 7, ‘The Divine Dimension’, is an important complement to this chapter 6. It approaches the Divine from an experiential perspective.

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carefully nuanced description of the perichōrētic relationship of all of reality from the perspective of the Kosmos.20 In a second step, Panikkar enlarges that to which he refers in describing the Kosmos. He shifts from a small stone to the World as a whole (285-89). At the beginning of this shift, he brings together much of what he has said about the stone. I will now take leave of pebbles and try to describe the status of the question in a more general way. I have been saying with the example of the stone that matter is co-extensive with the Divine, and also contemporal with it, that there is an interindependent penetration between the three dimensions of the real, that the full reality of each ‘thing’ implies the dynamic presence of this radical trinity. (285)

He now approaches the Kosmos from the point of view of God as creator. God, who is eternal, creates the World which is temporal. And God continues as creator through ongoing creation or creatio continua. This notion is to be understood in a way which ‘transcends the spatio-temporal structure of our thinking’.21 The direct implication of such ongoing creation is that God and time are related in an ongoing way. Eternity and temporality stand in a continuous relationship which he calls tempiternity and of which consciousness makes us aware. We participate in eternity and in time. In ordinary thinking, eternity and time, the Divine and the World, are considered as distinct and separate.22 But Panikkar proposes to see them henceforth from an adualist point of view. They are truly distinct but not separate. Neither one nor two, for they stand in constitutive relationship with one another. Panikkar has come to this interpretation of the relationship between God and the World in critical dialogue with various theological understandings of the relationship between them. For example, he briefly recalls the attempt to defend the transcendence of God by saying that the relationship of creation to God is real but not vice versa. He reacts against such understandings as this one. Panikkar appeals instead to his adualist and perichōrētic interpretation of reality to 20

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Of more general note, Panikkar writes that ‘without a tripartite anthropology, without a theory of knowledge that starts from above (the Divine) and not from below (the senses), without an adualistic vision which intuits that God and the world are not two substances, we cannot understand this perichōrēsis of Reality itself; (…) we cannot penetrate into the mystery of reality’. Rhythm, 284. For Panikkar’s further reflection on space and time, including that from an advaitic perspective, see: Raimon Panikkar, ‘Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern – There Is No Outer without Inner Space’ and ‘Concepts of Time: Ancient and Modern – Kalasakti: The Power of Time’, in: Raimundo Panikkar: A Pilgrim Across Worlds, ed. Kapila Vatsyayan & Côme Carpentier de Gourdon (New Delhi: Nyogi, 2016), respectively 198-221 and 222-47. On tempiternity, see also n. 15 above.

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stress mutual relationships among the World, the Divine, and, more indirectly referred to here, the Human. There is no World without God and Man. The Divine and the Human are indeed dimensions of the World, which in turn is a dimension of the other two. The World, the Human, and the Divine are mere abstractions when they are considered independently of one another. ‘The World abstracted from Man and God is not the real world’ (288).23 Anthrōpos Panikkar then contemplates, and describes, the second dimension of reality, Anthrōpos (289-304). That is, the Human or, as he will prefer especially in this section, Man. He opens this description with the observation that anthropology involves ‘the studying subject as much as the studied object’ (290). This fact will serve as a sort of leit-motif or theme underlying his description of Man. He will sketch out the description in three steps. First, he interprets Man in relation to the World via a reference to nature. Second, he rejects the definition of Man as rational animal and sees Man as unique. Third, he views Man as a trinitarian mystery. Throughout this three-step presentation, he continues to follow his overall pattern of referring to unsatisfactory understandings of Man. It is especially toward the end of this section on anthrōpos where he offers a more adequate advaitic interpretation. Man in Relation to the World. Panikkar begins the first of these three sections with a reference to the Sanskrit word Triloka (three-worlds), which he explains as ‘the divine, the human, and the material worlds’ (290-92). With this lead-in, he now reviews various views of Man in relation to Nature. And he says that his review of that relation will serve as a point of reference in his remarks on Man in relation to the Divine. Here he mentions three ways, chronologically sequent, in which the relationship between Man and nature has been understood. The first of these involves ‘Submission of Man to Nature’. He speaks of animism and describes the relationship between Man and Nature, taken together, as an indiscriminate whole. The second way of understanding the relationship between Man and Nature involves the ‘Liberation of Man from 23

Of interest but beyond the scope of the present study, considering Panikkar on the Cosmos and the World in possible relation to Schelling (1775–1854) and his philosophical thought. Concerning the Cosmos, Panikkar writes of its human and divine dimensions, its freedom, its being a whole. When he brings these themes together in relation to the Cosmos, he, in an at least initial way, reminds us of Schelling’s insights regarding nature. It might well be that Panikkar would say Schelling and advaita both provide parallel, even similar, insights because those insights are in some way characteristic of and shared by humankind and reality as a whole.

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the forces of Nature’. This understanding brings with it the discovery of interiority. This is humanism. Nature is demythologized. The third way is identified in self-explanatory fashion as the ‘Domination of nature by Man’. Panikkar follows this sketching of the ways in which Man has related to Nature with a listing of the three worlds Man has confronted over the course of history. First, Man confronts the ‘World of the Gods’. Man tries, and we use here Panikkar’s verbs, to cope with the Gods, tame the world, and appease the Gods. Second, the ‘World of Nature’. The natural sciences help free Man from nature’s control. Third, the ‘World of History’. This is a world in which there is both great human cruelty and efforts to overcome Man’s repression of Man with Man’s taking responsibility for the directions which history takes. To these three ways in which Man has related to Nature, Panikkar adds a fourth. Recent scientific developments have led to what he calls a technocratic civilization or the ‘World of Technocracy’. He is particularly dissatisfied with this world dominated more and more by artificial intelligence. He considers this fourth world a fundamental threat to what he views as the true reality which Man is. His distaste for it is well reflected in his description of where he sees it going. ‘Artificial intelligence is the mechanical device aimed at by artificial Man in order to complete the fabrication of an artificial Nature which may even provide us with an artificial God – if the latter is needed by the designers of “AI” so that they may continue their work on the project undisturbed’ (292). Here he is clearly opposing an artificial World, Man, and God to his own view of them, a view in which he stresses the real. All four ways of viewing Man in relation to Nature which he opposes see Man more as an object of anthropological study. They seem not to have taken adequately into consideration the fact that Man is likewise subject of such study. Man, as Unique. In the second of these three sections on Man considered from the perspective of the cosmotheandric insight, Panikkar rejects the attempt to define Man as rational animal (292-98). At the beginning of his interpretation of anthrōpos, he had briefly mentioned his long-standing position that ‘Man is not a rational animal, a species of the genus animal’ (289). He now offers several arguments against this attempted definition which he considers reductionist and fully inadequate to the reality of Man as he understands it. Among those arguments, two deserve special mention. The first is that Man is not simply an animal defined by Man’s specific difference from animals, namely, rationality. Man is the classifier and could not then be subsumed under the category in which he is being classified. Man is not just an object identified by various attributes. Rather, Man is at the same time the subject. In this case, Man would then ultimately be the single member in a given class. But being a single member in a class renders the notion of classification effectively useless. Man’s

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animality would be rationality since reason would pervade Man as Man. And, in Panikkar’s perhaps quaint reference, a cat’s animality would be feline animality. There would be no common genus. Panikkar continues this critique when he speaks of the effort to describe Man as a human being rather than as Man. Again, in this case Man would be one type of being among other beings, creating a classification. Classified in this way, Man would be one of many, identified by number. This approach is an equally reductionist reading of what Man is (295-96). Speaking of what Man is brings Panikkar to a further consideration. Here he appeals to ‘a philosophical indic tradition’. That tradition deflects the question from ‘What Man is’ to ‘Who I am’ (296). In this way, the subject becomes the focus of reflection without reducing it to an object. He argues against defining Man in terms of a difference from something else. He disdainfully refers to such an approach in this way: ‘What is Man? His specific difference!, the first method declares: rationality’. He then offers the indic alternative: ‘What is Man? Be it!, the second method says, and you will know it’ (297). This remark, ‘Be it’, opens the way for Panikkar to take up the question of human awareness, self-awareness, and God-awareness. In his advaitic interpretation of Man’s being Man, he says that ‘we understand the knowledge of God here in the double, but not dualistic, sense of the “genitive” (that which begets): the objective and the subjective’. In a following, tightly phrased expression, Panikkar links self-knowledge and knowledge of God. ‘The knowledge of God is both our knowledge of God, of Reality, of (our) true Self, and knowledge of God as divine knowledge, as the “own” knowledge that the Self has’ (298). Panikkar continues his critique of the definition of Man as rational animal with an appeal to the experiential (298-300). That critique takes the form of a further reflection on the notions of awareness and consciousness. He suggests that we make them more precise by speaking of ‘intellectual experience[,] that immediate touch with the thing that makes the concept of it superfluous; we do not need then to objectify in order to know’. He refers to a good number of experiences which exemplify this immediacy of knowledge without directly involving conceptual knowledge. Among examples, he lists such experiences as pain, imminent death, waiting for a bus, seeing children play, praying, a mother noting her daughter’s glance. In these moments, we see that we are more than something ephemeral. We are not classifiable. Such intellectual knowledge defies rationality but is not irrational. It is not feeling, which may follow. Not profound thought, which may come later or be remembered. Not love, which is perhaps an aftermath. In these experiences, the Self is not the ‘object of our knowledge’. Man, as Trinitarian Mystery. Panikkar then moves on to the third and final section of his present consideration of the cosmotheandric insight, this time

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considered from the perspective of Man as a trinitarian mystery (301-4). He reminds us that he is interpreting his own inner experience. His interpretation is subject to all the factors conditioning human thinking. But this is simply the way in which we express our experience. We should add that this is also the way in which he shares it with us. He continues, insisting on the important role of Man in the cosmotheandric vision of reality. He says, ‘I am able then to say that I embody in my limited way the awareness that I am part and parcel, an icon rather, of a Whole that we may call reality about which we cannot have any objective knowledge since we are part of it’ (301-2). Then he shifts to speaking in the third person since his consciousness is ultimately not his own. This consciousness is beyond the ego. I understand here that Panikkar means to say the subject is itself immediate consciousness of itself as (universal) subject (ātman is brahman) but not as object of that consciousness. He quickly moves on to the question of what is natura. Man’s nature is not to be a spotless animal but ‘an offspring of an infinite Being’ (303). Given the cosmotheandric insight, Man is not the center of reality. For there is no such center. ‘A cosmotheandric vision of Man is aware of a threefold horizon when describing Man, that Mediator between Heaven and Earth. This is the trinitarian mystery’. He briefly refers to Christ as the icon of reality, encompassing matter (the Cosmos), consciousness (the Human), and infinity (the Divine). He stresses that Man, however, is still trinitarian mystery, as he puts it, in fieri, in potency. He brings his interpretation of anthrōpos to a succinctly formulated close: Man may not be the center of reality, but we stand at the crossroads of all we are able to do, think and say. The three realms of which we are aware meet in Man, but we are not the center – and are aware of it. We are a meeting point of those three dimensions, which we discover above, within and below us: the spiritual the intellectual, and the material (…) stressing once again that distinctions do not mean separations. (304)

Theos Theos is the third dimension of reality of which Panikkar speaks (304-18). Here he will remain with a more general understanding of theos than he worked with in chapter 5. In reaction against both an anthropomorphic God and the denial of the Divine, he proposes as a human invariant a pervasive consciousness of a ‘more’ beyond sense and ordinary reason. Again, he proceeds in three steps. First, he will distinguish between faith and belief. Then he will consider apophatism and various ways of knowing the Divine. Finally, he will look at three features of the Divine which are particularly characteristic of the Divine but are also dimensions of all of reality.

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Faith and Belief. In distinguishing faith and belief, Panikkar describes faith as the pre-conceptual, to use a word that is not his own, awareness of the ‘more’ which he has mentioned (305-8). He describes it in various ways. On the one hand, faith is, for example, a basic human invariant, is ontologic-pneumatic and not merely subjective in character. And it cannot have an object. This would seem to be Panikkar’s way of referring here to what Panikkar has previously spoken of as pure consciousness, the immediate experience of brahman. Though he does not use this last term here. Faith is not something we think about. Rather, it is pure awareness and prior to thought but not against it. As he says, ‘Faith is a constitutive dimension of our being: an openness to the more, the unknown, transcendence, the infinite: openness to the given’. Yet in it we are presently still on the way. On the other hand, belief can be rational belief. For example, we believe our senses. But of present interest is what he calls religious belief. Here we are not dealing with what is empirically or rationally verifiable. These ‘beliefs are concrete cultural translations or interpretations of faith’, of our experience of that ‘more’ which many refer to as the Deity. Panikkar brings his reflection on faith and belief to a close, tying together several threads to which he has drawn attention. ‘I take the word theos as a symbol for that Mystery about which we are aware because of our faith and which Man formulates in a variety of beliefs’. Apophatism. In a second step, entitled ‘Apophatism’ (308-11), Panikkar reflects on three ways in which we have proposed, over the centuries, to refer to the Divine. He first calls the conviction that God and God’s essence is unknowable a universal tradition. He then identifies three main attitudes regarding the ways in which we can speak of Deity. The first is the irrational. That is, to hold that all such speaking and thinking about God is, as he says, meaningless. The second is dialectical. Here one makes an affirmation about God and immediately negates it. The third is dialogical. The logos cannot say something about God without a concomitant impulse of the spirit leading the logos. Panikkar is appealing to an advaitic union of the word with the spirit. They are distinct but not separate in such a way of referring to God. We can have a ‘positive awareness of the Divine’, though it does not take the form of conceptual or rational knowledge. Features of the Divine. Panikkar turns to the third and, for our purposes, most important step in his effort to speak of theos. Under the title ‘Features of the Divine’ (311-18), he chooses three features which he will describe in greater detail. Before taking them up, however, he introduces what he identifies as the Christian trinitarian notion of communicatio idiomatum or circumincessional interpenetration among Father, Son, and Spirit. He applies this notion more

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widely to all of reality, namely, to the three dimensions of the Divine, the Human, and the World or Cosmos. This widened application of attributes permits him to see them as characterizing all of reality. At the same time, he can see certain features as being more properly attributable to one of the three dimensions. In the present case, he chooses three features properly characteristic of the Divine. They are, then, divine attributes. Though Panikkar does not say so here, it seems that his interpretation of advaita and the advaitic experience also underlies this, his widened reading of circumincessional interpenetration. He interprets that experience as focusing on the relationship constituting poles of that relationship (31).24 We might well say that the polarity of these three dimensions refers to the interrelationships of them as interpenetrating poles in the theanthropocosmic invariant. With the notion of circumincessional interpenetration and the advaitic experience of relationality in mind, Panikkar identifies three divine features on which he will concentrate. They are nothingness, freedom, and infinity. These features are not conceptual traits. They are ‘words that symbolize some aspects of that [the Divine] Mystery’ (311). It is not surprising that Panikkar would choose nothingness as a feature of the Divine, given his interpretations of faith and of the apophatic character of human reference to the Divine (312-15). He recalls the three approaches to and attitudes toward the Divine. ‘The radical negation of the Divine (nihilism), the negation of all our affirmations (dialectical approach) and the awareness of an empty “space” where the Divine dwells (adualistic experience)’. He rejects the first two approaches as inadequate and unsatisfactory, embracing in their place the third. In so doing, he prefers to speak of emptiness (śūnyatā) because it does not imply negations such as that of being. Rather, emptiness stresses being vacant. He calls upon the Spanish and Portuguese word nada to help in understanding emptiness as being ‘“prior” to birth, “prior” to existence, even to Being rather than their negation’. For Panikkar, emptiness is that which surrounds being. It is this emptiness of which we are aware. There is an empty space between the symbol and what it symbolizes. In this advaitic experience, we are aware of the Absence together with the Presence of which emptiness is the absence. Absence and Presence are distinct but not separate. It is perhaps somewhat more surprising that Panikkar chooses freedom and infinity as the second and third features of the Divine. Though, in so identifying them, he consequently sees them as the dimension of the Divine in the World and in Man. Emptiness seemed to flow seamlessly from his prior, more introductory remarks concerning the dimension of the Divine. Now he interprets 24

Here I am calling upon what Panikkar says in the introduction regarding ‘poles’ to facilitate an interpretation of what he is saying in the present context concerning the Divine, the Human, and the World.

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freedom and infinity in ways consistent with what he had previously said. Freedom is neither indeterminism nor irrationality (315-17). ‘Freedom is the freedom of being’ allowed by emptiness. Noting several of his remarks about this freedom will help grasp that to which he is pointing. Surrounded, so to speak, by emptiness, there are no constraints on freedom. Panikkar argues that we need to recognize that a God who dictates from on high or imposes laws in an external fashion does not exist. Freedom is authentic spontaneity. Since freedom is freedom of being, we are aware of this freedom. Indeed, reality as such is free. ‘The identity of Being is its Becoming’. This form of spontaneous, selfconstituting freedom is a feature of the Divine and an aspect or attribute of the World and of Man as well. Panikkar speaks only briefly, but interestingly, of the Divine and, consequently, all of reality as infinite (317-18). In a somewhat Hegelian way, 25 if I may be permitted that remark, he writes that ‘reality is unlimited; its very limits would belong to reality’. We experience this infinity in its present, imperfect form as a ‘reflection of an infinite God’ or perhaps as ‘belonging to the nature of reality itself’. Panikkar goes so far, from an advaitic perspective, as to say that every being is, to put it here with less than the proper nuance Panikkar brings forth, itself infinite. ‘The “self” of the “itself” is infinite’. Panikkar ends this chapter 6 on the theanthropocosmic invariant with a tantalizing suggestion. ‘The reader may have surmised that this threefold aspect of the theos as emptiness, freedom, and infinitude corresponds to the trinitarian paradigm of Father or Source, Son or Logos, and Spirit or Love irreducible to the Logos. (…) I refrain from commenting except to say that the trinitarian perichōrēsis is not a mechanical or automatic connection but a real inter-in-dependence’ (318). But, we in turn might suggest that, within a Panikkarian perspective, there is enough evidence to warrant such an affinity, and even correspondence. Cosmotheandric Spirituality Worship persists. (…) Prayer remains. (…) Love is not split into service of God and concern for our fellow-beings. The ‘Presence of God’ is not an act of the memory or the will. (…) Each being recovers its dignity and human freedom is not reduced to making choices. Ethics finds its basis in the very nature of Being. (…) [T]he experience of the divine dimension is compatible with different ideas 25

On Hegel (1770-1831) on limit, see for example Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012), 162-74, esp. 164-72. Prabhu briefly mentions similarities and differences between Panikkar and Hegel on Trinity. Foreword to Rhythm, xviii-xix. There are several such similarities between the two in the areas of Trinity and Christology.

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about the Deity according to the diverse religious traditions of humankind which are then seen as concrete expressions of the deeper cosmotheandric intuition. We are Divine as much as the Divine is Human – without confusion and division. (From the program announcement of Lecture 8.)

Panikkar gives further expression to these spiritual insights in chapter 7, ‘The Divine Dimension’. It is, in effect, a long and rich meditation on the divine dimension of reality. In this chapter, he considers the Divine especially from the perspective of its being a dimension of the Human. Panikkar is writing here from a more experiential perspective as compared with his previous, more general reflections (319). He is working as well from a more subjective approach (323). He argues that his radical trinitarian proposal is less iconoclastic than might at first sight seem to be the case. He is trying to correct an understanding of the Divine as a supreme being out there and divorced from the rest of reality. He is aware that ‘dimension’ might seem to destroy a true spirituality, but he has not found a better word for that to which he is referring. This divine dimension is distinct but not separate from the World and Man. It is truly present within both, not something merely external to them. The divine dimension is a dimension of the whole. Without it there would be no whole. He argues ‘that a cosmotheandric experience not only does not destroy spirituality and religion but purifies them’. (319-21, quotation 321). It will not be possible here to provide a nuanced commentary on his many intriguing insights found throughout this complex chapter. I would suggest, rather, that we concentrate on his notion of cosmotheandric spirituality. At the same time, it should be possible at least to allude to various other points he makes over the course of the chapter. Panikkar divides this chapter into three sections, as he has done in his other chapters, in keeping with his trinitarian theme. The various parts of his book are ‘intrinsically related to each other’ (323). This holds as well for the parts within a given chapter. The three sections into which he divides the present chapter are three meditations. The first on silence, the second on the logos, and the third on personalism. He begins to speak more explicitly of a cosmotheandric spirituality only about halfway through the meditation on logos and continues thereafter when speaking of personalism.26 This umbrella expression ‘cosmotheandric spirituality’ will help bring together several of Panikkar’s insights concerning the various interrelated approaches to God characteristic of that expression and the experience to which it refers. More specifically, we will focus on aspects of insights more directly related to our interest in testimonials to experience of the Trinity. 26

Rhythm, with the first explicit reference to cosmotheandric spirituality being found on 349 and thereafter mentioned regularly enough throughout the rest of the chapter.

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Silence Silence is the subject of the first of these overall meditations (323-37). As Panikkar presents it, silence proves to be truly constitutive of cosmotheandric spirituality. It is prior to Being, so it is the ‘symbol for the absence of everything’. Something strange to a world characterized by noise and words and information overload. Indeed, ‘God cannot be experienced in words or even by thinking or doing, but just by silence, that is, by being, because Being is silent’ (324). Silence opens us to the Divine. It does this at three levels, those of sense, of reason, and of the third eye, a way of seeing which involves letting go.27 Silence of the Body. Panikkar interprets the three levels or forms of silence widely. First, he speaks of silence of the body (325-28). Our body consciousness touches on universal consciousness ‘not by the subjugation of the body but by the enhancement of the body, discovering its divine dimension, the ātman, the “temple of the spirit”, the risen body’. Silence of the body takes the form of ways in which our bodies involve absence. They do this when they do not direct attention to themselves. Panikkar provides a homely example. When various parts of the body such as the stomach work well, we do not notice them. In effect, ‘the experience and the cultivation of our bodily silence are an introduction to the experience of the divine dimension of reality’. Bodily silence opens us to the silence of the mind. Silence of the Mind. Second, he reflects at greater length on silence of the mind (328-34). Panikkar is speaking of the more subjective or experiential side to his earlier advaitic insistence that there is a realm of consciousness and pure awareness. That realm is beyond the rational but not as such irrational. He provides several examples to help explain this. In one of them, he speaks of a square circle, which is self-contradictory. Thus unthinkable. In trying to think of it, we come up against a barrier. ‘Our mind stops here. (…) Our spirit, however, seems to not want to stop here’ (330-31). He says it is possible to jump to another realm. The mind points to this realm when it accepts that it can go no further beyond the principle of self-contradiction. This is, then, silence of the mind, even the absence of the mind. ‘Silence is a symbol for the divine dimension. It is a void of sound, empty of content, absent of Being. It is a symbol, not a concept. It symbolizes the Origin, the Beginning, Emptiness, the Abyss, 27

‘Panikkar often likes to speak of the “third eye”, a concept from the 12th-century Victorine school. The medieval theologian and mystic Richard of Saint Victor used to say that God created man with three eyes: one corporeal (oculus carnis, sensible reality), another rational (oculus rationis, the reality that my reason reveals to me), and a third, the eye of contemplation (oculus fidei, religious and mystic vision)’. Partial description of ‘third eye’ from ‘Glossary: Neulogisms and Fundamental Concepts’, at the official Panikkar website.

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the Ungrund, the Father, fons et origo totius Trinitatis [font and origin of the whole Trinity] as ancient Councils loved to repeat’ (333). Silence of the Will. Third, he affirms the silence of the will (334-37). Here he leads on from silence of the body and silence of the mind to the ultimate spiritual self-detachment or letting go. He distinguishes between desire and aspiration, both of which are will’s free acts. They are indeed both ‘movement[s] of the will, but while desire elicits the will from the outside presenting a “desirable” to be reached, aspiration moves the will from the inside as a result of an inspiration coming from the indwelling spirit of Man’. As an important aspect of the spiritual life, silence of the will prepares for the experience of the divine dimension of all reality. On the one hand, the will desiring seeks an object. In so doing, it becomes an obstacle. On the other, the will aspiring simply finds itself open to that divine dimension. It does not reduce God to a supreme entity or object. That we are brought to aspire in this way is a gift, a grace, which does not necessarily point to a supreme cause as such. But we could add, in the spirit of Panikkar’s thought, that it does point to Panikkar’s radical Trinity. At the end of this meditation, Panikkar pulls together several of its various strands. Among them, he says this silence of the will ‘opens us to the discovery of the divine dimension of reality by helping us to realize that not all depends on will and that there is a dimension of freedom in every being’. Logos Logos is the subject of the second of Panikkar’s three overall meditations in this chapter on constituent elements of cosmotheandric spirituality (337-59). For Panikkar, ‘logos means language, but also word, reason, intellect, and love as well’ (338). He says that silence needs the word and the word needs silence, from which it is begotten. The fact that we talk so much about silence provides an example confirming this mutual need and relationship. He takes a further step in his reflection on logos when he rehabilitates Aristotle’s definition of Man as rational animal. Man is begotten with the begetting of the logos. This shared gift makes it possible for Man to converse in speech with fellow beings, with the Divine in worship, and with things or the World in action or, as he says, doing. These three activities become occasions for experience of the Divine dimension of reality. Speech. ‘Man is a conversant being’ (338-41, quotation 338). Through speech Man enters into conversation with others, establishes public places such as the plaza, the agora, a commons. Panikkar tells of the surprise of some peoples when they learn that a bazaar is often considered by others as a marketplace rather than a meeting place. He refers as well to brahman’s being considered the

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primordial word from which comes the word giving rise to all things. Of special interest, he suggests that when we speak in an authentic way, ultimately creatively and out of silence or nothing, we are ‘experiencing a divine power’ (339). The Word is a ‘divine dimension of the real’ (340). Worship. Though Panikkar announces two ways in which we relate to the Divine in worship (342), he discusses three (341-48). The first of these is in offering glory (342-45). Here he brings in two spiritual themes. One of them is a sense of thanksgiving. It takes the form of adoration in a theistic context. But for Panikkar it is not necessary to be thankful to someone or some supreme being. One can simply be thankful that the Divine is, or in a certain sense, exists, that Man is or exists, and that one’s neighbor is or exists. He calls this thankfulness an explosion of joy. He reminds us that ‘the divine dimension of reality that is manifest in every being triggers this spontaneous reaction of praise and glory’. We awaken to our participating in reality as a whole. Cosmotheandric spirituality moves us beyond, as he calls them, the merely anthropomorphic and monarchic aspects of praise and glory. It helps avoid a restrictive understanding of a phrase such as ‘my God’, as if we possess God. Rather, from the cosmotheandric perspective, it expresses a ‘most sublime experience of intimacy’. In so doing, cosmotheandric spirituality frees us from ego concerns and frees the Divine from the ‘burden of being “God”’. Following his thought on glory, Panikkar continues to reflect on worship when he takes up the spiritual topic of prayer (345-47). He treats of prayer as a basic human attitude. We live in a world of suffering and are clearly not selfsufficient. Prayer is an expression of our solidarity, he says, with one another and ‘of our communion with that aspect of the universe that we have been calling the Divine Mystery’. Paradoxically, prayer is at the same time an indication of our powerlessness and our powerfulness. We are weak, and we pray. But we are then strong in the energy released when we are thus freed from dependence on our own ego. As third and final form which worship takes, Panikkar speaks of the spiritual activity of true listening (347-48). He opens this meditation with several references. To the Christian ‘who has ears to hear, let them hear [Matt. 13:9]’. To the Japanese ‘thus I have heard’ as response to ‘thus has been said’. To several Buddhist scriptures. And to the Vedic Sruti ‘what has been heard’. With the speaking of the Word, there is creation and the distinction but not separation between Creator and creature. With the Word, we have come out of silence. To speak authentically, we must speak out of that silence. Only then are we free of conflicts in our speaking. True listening ‘is hearing the divine dimension’ of reality. As Panikkar says directly here, ‘In listening lovingly to each being we discover its divine dimension, or in the language of the Gospel, we reach eternal life’.

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Doing. Following his reflections on speech and worship as realizations of logos, Panikkar continues with a third one (348-59) in which he speaks of engaged attitude and action. ‘Logos “is” or rather does something more’ (348). He recalls that in many cultures the word is creative. It involves sound and action. In this consideration of logos as doing, we find Panikkar fully engaged with the World. This section is almost a hymn to cosmotheandric engagement with it. He chooses three topics especially relevant to a cosmotheandric spirituality. In the first topic, he spells out his commitment to fostering a radical transformation of the Cosmos. In a second, he continues with remarks on the human household. He closes the reflection with a third topic which takes the form of several thoughts on political involvement. In each of these cases of Man’s interaction with the World, he discovers ways in which Man experiences a dimension of the Divine. The first topic Panikkar takes up is the cause of, as he phrases it, transformation of the Cosmos (349-53). He situates Man as the center of reality’s consciousness. To help us appreciate Panikkar’s situating Man as active partner with the Divine in relation to the World, we can bring in some of Panikkar’s own phrases. For Panikkar, Man is the middle ‘between the cosmic and the divine’, the platform from which we see reality, the watchtower. Man is both microcosm and microtheos (351). Again, for Panikkar cosmotheandric spirituality echoes, but goes beyond, traditional Christian ideas of the divinization of created reality and the ‘ātman-brahman realization of hinduism’ (349). It implies that the World we know, when considered beyond the merely rational, is already what might be referred to as that other world. With its stress on adualistic interrelationality, the cosmotheandric spiritual insight leads to a transformed world ‘with less hatred and more love, with less violence and more justice’ (351). This radical, cosmotheandric transformation of the Cosmos is, for Panikkar, something far beyond and more radical than anything previously experienced in human history. Given our roles in relation to the Cosmos, we realize that the divine dimension is integrated in us. We discover the divine dimension of both the Cosmos and us. ‘[H]uman consciousness (…) cooperates in the transformation of the cosmos with all that this entails. We share in the divine dimension’ of the whole of reality (353). The second topic is the human household (353-55). Treating of the notion of household divinities and, more by implication, divine household provides Panikkar with the occasion to meditate on the human household within the context of cosmotheandric spirituality. He turns to the World and, more specifically, the earth as our human home. He makes a bold statement. ‘Only if the Godhead, the natural World, and Man are seen to belong intrinsically together in a trinitarian reality will our attitude to the earth cease to be domineering, and become one of real partnering, a partnership with something we ourselves

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are – allowing for all distinctions necessary to prevent confusion’. In speaking of the wisdom of the earth, Panikkar stresses in various ways the interpenetration of Man, World, and Divine. Among them, for example, he speaks of material things as members of our shared reality. We are in all those things with which we relate. For example, rivers, water, air, mountains, streets, the people we live with. In turn, the divine dimension ‘pervades the human and the cosmic and yet is not reducible to either’. The third topic is political involvement (355-59). Panikkar calls the political situation ‘the immediate field of this [proposed] transformation’ (355). Today we are stuck with a situation in which neither king nor constitution garners the support needed to avoid the law of the most powerful. And the idea of an omnipotent God who wills all no longer suffices to ground political life. Panikkar goes on to describe various well-known dilemmas which arise if we stress religion over politics or vice versa. For example, theocracy takes over or religion is reduced to a private affair. In response, he offers an advaitic understanding of religion and politics. Neither one has exclusive reign, though both are characteristic of human life. Religion does not deal exclusively with a Supreme Being and politics with worldly affairs. He then comments on the present situation. For example, he holds that the time is ripe for a consideration of radical change. Today we are more aware of unacceptable situations and have gained some freedom to react against them. And religion’s promise of an afterlife is no longer either good or bad opiate. Indeed, we have learned from the past. But technology has acerbated the situation to the point where we cannot assure human fulfillment without radical transition from ‘historical to transhistorical Man’. Panikkar brings his remarks on political involvement to a close with two brief remarks. First, the vision of the nation-state must be corrected by ‘the complete vision of Man and the universe’ (359). Second, he calls on his background in chemistry to recall the role of a catalyst in chemical changes. He does not, at this point, explicitly identify such a catalyst. But we would be well justified to suppose that it is the cosmotheandric insight with its advaitic stress on a widened vision of Man. That vision includes considering Man as relating to reality through the senses and reason. But it goes beyond these two in its view of who Man is. Panikkar’s overall emphasis on attitude and action, on doing, comes across here, perhaps surprisingly, as a form of engaged advaita. Personalism Panikkar has meditated on silence and on logos as approaches to God which are characteristic of cosmotheandric spirituality. He now treats of a third such approach, personalism (359-67). Recognizing that this aspect of cosmotheandric spirituality is both humane and important, he considers it from two angles.

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First, he introduces the Hindu notion of Iṣṭadevatā. Then he presents a fuller understanding of contemplation. Iṣṭadevatā Spirituality. Panikkar’s meditative presentation on Iṣṭadevatā (35964) opens with a reminder of some of the widely varied symbols with which people around the world express personal relationships with the Divine. The cosmotheandric insight recognizes the poetic strain in Man and will not allow every expression to be reduced to a metaphysical formula. Śiva, Viṣṇu, Durgā, Jesus Christ, Father, God, Allah, Yahweh, Justice, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, to name only a few, are not dead symbols – and every living symbol transcends every crude hypostatization. The symbol is only a symbol of the Mystery that manifests itself precisely in the symbol itself. (360)

Panikkar rejects what he considers the simplistic juxtaposition of personalistic monotheism over against the supposed merely impersonal character of the Divine in most religions originating in Asia. He, in turn, also sees an excessive stress on ‘person’ in certain religions and cultures. The juxtaposition of personalist and impersonal seems to be rooted in the presupposition that one culture’s expression of the Divine is true, and those of the others are erroneous. He argues that such an unsatisfactory comparison reflects a certain cultural imperialism, one culture’s insights serving as criteria in evaluating those of another culture. He thinks that intrareligious dialogue and intercultural studies may well help in overcoming this imperialism (360). Panikkar then suggests, rather, that we see the impersonal characterization of the divine Mystery as stressing divine transcendence and the personal one as representing ‘our relationship with this divine Mystery’ (361). With this distinction in mind, Panikkar proceeds to interpret Iṣṭadevatā in a way that will help appreciate the concern with the personal in both monotheistic and other religious traditions. The notion of Iṣṭadevatā does not simply imply that someone chooses a way of representing and making present the divine Mystery. Rather, such a representation is more traditionally presented to someone by a spiritual advisor. Its choice is not merely individualistic. In a sense, ‘it is the Divine, if at all, who chooses you’. This choosing occurs in a more communal and widely cultural and historical context. Such a choice does not imply that one representation is superior to the other, though, from the point of view of one or more aspects, one may be superior. Allah, as God, is superior to Jesus of Nazareth, who is equally Man. The symbol, as iconic representation of the divine Mystery, stands on ‘an existential and personal plane’ (362). We need such a symbol lest we be left ‘cold and our minds blank’ in our relationship with the divine Mystery. Panikkar calls his interpretation of Iṣṭadevatā spirituality daring. His ‘point is to stress the multiple manifestations of the divine

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dimension. (…) [T]he iṣṭadevatā (…) is in a certain way that real divine symbol with whom we may have a personal relationship’ (364). Contemplation. Panikkar brings his reflection on personalism and this chapter 7 on the divine dimension to a close by proposing a more inclusive understanding of contemplation (364-67). Essential as the symbolic connection between Man and the Divine is, contemplation is a further element found in all religions. In cosmotheandric spirituality, this most human activity finds it fullest meaning. There, an ‘invisible aspect of the divine dimension (…) becomes manifest to the third eye of mystical contemplation’. But now contemplation is no longer reduced to some form of isolated or esoteric mystical experience. It is not just a form of prayer. Rather, it unites what he calls praxis and theōria, ‘action and knowledge, immediate involvement and effective non-attachment’. At this point, Panikkar recalls his advaitic insight. In contemplation, we ‘contemplate the seer’. But we do not simply see the seer. ‘We become the seer – not by seeing it, but by seeing with the seer, by sharing that vision’. Such, more fully understood contemplation, ‘underscores (…) the transformation of the cosmos, the engagement of Man in the overall dynamism of the universe, and thereby rounds out the very idea of personal perfection’. In chapter 7, ‘The Divine Dimension’, Panikkar has chosen to meditate on three constitutive characteristics of cosmotheandric spirituality: silence; logos; personalism. Earlier on, he had asked whether the ‘threefold aspect of the theos as emptiness, freedom, and infinitude corresponds to the trinitarian paradigm of Father or Source, Son or Logos, and Spirit or Love’ (318). Here, in chapter 7, we have been dealing with attitudes or approaches toward the divine Mystery which Panikkar has highlighted in his presentation of cosmotheandric spirituality. True, then, they are characteristics of Man’s relation with the Divine. But Man is also a microcosm, even a macrotheos. Man is trinitarian. Perhaps we could, then, ask a similar question concerning the possible correspondence between Father, Son, and Spirit, on the one hand, and silence, logos, and personalism as contemplation, on the other. Silence, logos, and contemplation as Panikkar understands them would seem, if we pushed the point, to be trinitarian, interindependent ways in which, for Panikkar, Man experiences the divine Mystery. * *   * Chapter 8, ‘The Emerging Mythos’, is the last full chapter in Panikkar’s The Rhythm of Being. In effect, what we have seen so far is just that emerging mythos, the cosmotheandric mythos. As Panikkar summarizes his efforts, ‘The cosmotheandric mythos, which is slowly being formed, retells on another level the

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majority of myths humanity has held regarding the meaning of the universe’ (376). Much of the chapter is dedicated to a fuller critique of the scientific mythos, or basic faith-stance, providing a horizon within which specific scientific beliefs become truly tenable. He sees the scientific mythos as one rooted in the quantifiable and the mathematic. While recognizing its value, he rejects its exclusive focus on these two (for example, 383-88). He objects to its effort to consider reality without including Man. Then, Man is merely an observer (389). He warns against the emphasis in the scientific mythos on a single principle of thinking which leads to monotheism (388-89).28 In response, he argues in favor of a mythos which is rooted in a wider understanding of Man, including various levels of consciousness (369-70). He calls it kosmology. It is a new story with its ‘dramatis personae – kosmos, anthrōpos, theos’ (375). This chapter 8 is replete with indications that Panikkar wishes to promote this cosmotheandric trinitarian mythos. By way of example, he says ‘I am not at all advocating “going back” to primitivism or to an idyllic society, which has never existed. (…) [T]he alternative is either a radical change in mind and heart (they go together) or a catastrophe of cosmic proportions’ (397). Panikkar is proposing that we embrace what he calls the radical, unbroken Trinity of the World, the Human, and the Divine. They are interrelated and interdependent, distinguished but not separated. The rhythm of being is indeed the rhythm of becoming of the perichōrētic interrelating of these three. We can do no better than repeat his own summary of his efforts to explain his intuition and the resultant insight which he encourages others to experience and embrace. A new mythos may be emerging. Signs are everywhere. I have already given many names to fragments of this dawning: cosmotheandric insight, sacred secularity,[29] kosmology, ontonomy,[30] radical trinity, interindependence, radical relativity, and so on. I may also use a consecrated name: advaita, which is the equivalent of the radical Trinity. Everything is related to everything but without monistic identity or dualistic separation. I have tried to spell it out throughout these pages. (404) 28

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In contrast, Panikkar describes his kosmology in trinitarian terms. ‘A trinitarian kosmology is no longer monotheistic. The Trinity is not three substances. That would be tritheism. The trinity is pure relation, and we are also incorporated in this relationship, as the Christian Incarnation affirms’. Rhythm, 393. Panikkar mentions ‘sacred secularity’ briefly several times in Rhythm and refers to his book, El mundanal silencio (Madrid: Martinez Roca, 1999). In his introduction, Panikkar describes what he means by this neologism (ontonomy): ‘If Being is rhythmic, each entity will enjoy a real freedom according to its nature in relation to the Whole. The way to relate to one another is similar to a rhythmic dance in which I spontaneously create my role in the dance listening to the overall music (which I may also contribute to making). The order is an ontonomous order in which every being (on) discovers its proper nomos within the Whole: ontonomy’. Rhythm, 53.

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Cosmotheandric Testimonials In the previous chapter, we identified five instances or examples of experience of the Trinity to which Panikkar offered testimonial. These instances of experience took the form of intrareligious dialogue within Panikkar himself and within others as well. In a wider sense, they also occurred more communally within many religious traditions, within the accumulated experience of humankind, and within reality as such. Now, by 2010, he points to a nascent interest in the experience of intrareligious dialogue (360). He is happy to see that interest growing over the years since the publication of his 1973 book, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind. He made this remark within the context of his concern for interreligious and intercultural appreciation. But I would suggest that it can also be read as referring, at least implicitly, to all five of these forms of intrareligious dialogue. Panikkar continues to testify to intrareligious dialogue, especially that involving Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, as experience of the Trinity. But, by 2010, he has in The Rhythm of Being explicitly and formally expanded Trinity to refer to all of reality. He now speaks of the radical and unbroken Trinity of the Cosmos or the World, of Man or the Human, and of the Divine Mystery. Each of these, and all of them together, are the radical Trinity. It is now this Trinity to which he gives testimony. ‘There is a perichōrēsis between the three. The Divine contains, and is everything, but so are Man and the World as well. Each is the Whole, and not just in a particular mode. The three are not merely modalities of the real’ (403). To understand better what Panikkar has proposed in his testimonials to experience of the Trinity so understood, we should again consider briefly his transformation of Trinity, his complex understanding of experience, and the various testimonials he offers. All the while realizing that ultimately even these three cannot be separated. Trinity Panikkar’s widening of Trinity to refer to all of reality as interrelated carries us far beyond more traditional references to vestiges of the Trinity to be found here and there throughout reality. Based on his reading of advaita,31 Panikkar has 31

Bielawski briefly discusses Panikkar’s reading of advaita in comparison with that of Panikkar’s friend, Henri Le Saux/Abhisiktānanda (1910–1973), a French monk who spent much of his life in India. Bielawski explains that Le Saux interprets advaita closer to the way in which Śaṅkara (perhaps 788–820 CE) presented it, namely, that all dualism in any form disappears in the purest and highest level of brahman. In contrast, regarding Panikkar’s reading, Bielawski writes ‘L’advaita di Panikkar è un’interpretazione originale e per certi aspetti nuova: “advaita” non significa eliminazione di due poli (il dualismo), ma uno stato in cui essi con-vivono

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now brought the Kosmos or World, Anthrōpos or Man, and Theos or the Divine together as three wholes. They constitute the radical and unbroken Trinity and are three dimensions of trinitarian reality. Each of them manifests all three of these dimensions. Yet each of them is characterized in its own way and, at the same time, finds its true reality in its relations with the other two. No World without Human and Divine, no Human without World and Divine, no Divine without World and Human. This, then, is the radically expanded Trinity to which Panikkar refers when he speaks of experience of the Trinity. Experience Panikkar refers to experience of the Trinity as the cosmotheandric experience, which he in turn calls the cosmotheandric intuition.32 This intuition is, then, a form of human awareness. And by cosmotheandric insight he means his interpretation of that awareness (55). We might also call that insight his cosmotheandric vision, especially if we think in terms of his hope for the future. Evidently, in all this Panikkar is working with a complex understanding of experience. For example, he refers to experience from his own point of view and that of others (even all of humankind).33 That is, from the perspective of those who experience, indeed contemplate, the three dimensions of reality. Here, that experience takes the form of a direct awareness of emptiness, an emptiness which in turn grounds freedom and infinity. It likewise refers to a direct and immediate participation in the adualist experience as such, in brahman. As well, it becomes the experience of a personal relationship which he and others have with a concrete symbol of the Divine. Panikkar further develops his interpretation of the cosmotheandric intuition when he meditates on three approaches to God. The first approach consists in

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armonicamente, si compenetrano e fecondano reciprocamente, cioè non scompaiono, ma si armonizzano’/‘Panikkar’s advaita is an original and in some ways new interpretation: advaita does not mean elimination of two poles (dualism), but a state in which they harmoniously live together, they mutually interpenetrate and fertilize one another, that is, they do not disappear but harmonize [with one another]’. Panikkar: un uomo e il suo pensiero, 223-24, quotation on 224 (my translation). Panikkar would insist that he eliminates any dualism. Though we might still have the impression that his reading of advaita may in some ways be closer to that of Rāmānuja (perhaps 1077–1157 CE) than that of Śaṅkara. See Shyam Ranganathan, ‘Rāmānuja (c. 1017–c. 1137 [traditional dating])’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed May 2, 2019, https://www.iep.utm.edu/ramanuja/#H1. ‘I have called this experience the cosmotheandric or the theoanthropcosmic intuition’. This experience is one of ‘the three (the “divine”, the “human [sic], and the “material”) go[ing] together with neither confusion nor separation’. Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 183. ‘The cosmotheandric vision is the most obvious human experience’. Rhythm, 267.

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the experience of several forms of silence before the Divine as Sacred Mystery, ultimately before the unbroken Trinity. His person, and his presence in silence as witnessed to by others, says something about the Trinity. In line with his interpretation of silence, they present experience of the Trinity as an experience of the whole person, body, mind, and will.34 In a second approach, he and others who experience the Divine do so when they speak appropriately, when they worship in thanksgiving, pray, truly listen, and act in engaged advaita. The third approach is personalist. It involves the experience of being in a personal relationship with a mediator between the Divine, the Human, and the World. It takes the form as well of contemplation as an experience of ‘immediate involvement and effective non-attachment’ (366). This complex series of references to himself and others who experience the Divine in these ways includes, and perhaps from various points of view paradoxically prioritizes, the experience of pure brahmanic experiencing. In this experiencing, the ego is no longer of concern. For Panikkar, experience refers as well to the result of these more human, awareness-rooted intuitional experiences. Such is the case when he speaks of the cosmotheandric insight. It results from Panikkar’s and others’ multiform experience of the Divine, indeed of the Trinity including the World and Man. But, as resultant insight, it seems to take on a life of its own. It is true that the insight finds expression in human consciousness. But that expression is giving voice to all of reality in that reality’s trinitarian being. Panikkar has, in effect, spoken of and affirmed experience of the Trinity at individual and communal levels. He has as well offered that cosmotheandric insight at the level of reality itself. He brings together succinctly much of what he says in affirming various instances of his affirmation of experience of the Trinity. He does this when he writes that ‘the experience of the radical Trinity is to know oneself enveloped in a cosmotheandric perichoresis’.35 And, ‘We can be aware that the Whole embraces us’ (212).

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Kapila Vatsyayan witnesses to Panikkar’s own experience of silence and that of others who joined him in meditation. Preface to Raimundo Panikkar: A Pilgrim across Worlds, ed. Kapila Vatsyayan & Côme Carpentier de Gourdon (New Delhi: Niyogi, 2016), 9. I would add that I was privileged in 1983 to meet with Panikkar in his home in Santa Barbara. Without wanting to overstate it, immediately on meeting him I felt I was in the presence of a person of great spiritual depth. We then had dinner at another professor’s house along with several other professors, all from the University of California Santa Barbara. We spent the evening together. I recalled this meeting again many years later when I read Panikkar’s reference to the human person as a mystery of great depth. In a way, when we speak of experience in relation to Panikkar and his thought, we must consider not only his more immediate lived experience taken with his interpretation of it but also his person as such. Quoted from the official Panikkar website, italics in the original.

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Testimonials In his 1973 publication, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Mankind, Panikkar offered testimonials to experience of an enlarged Trinity. He does so as well now in 2010. He refers especially to his own lived experience, intrareligious and now cosmotheandric. He has meditated on this lived experience and worked at interpreting it over many years. His reflection has been contemplative regarding the trinitarian dimensions of reality and meditative concerning the cosmotheandric spirituality such contemplation engenders. His reflection, shared with others in various ways, has found public expression in his 1989 Gifford Lectures. And, finally, in his 2010 book, The Rhythm of Being. In each of these, namely, reflection, lectures, and writing, Panikkar has affirmed experience of the enlarged Trinity. His often forceful, and in a wide sense philosophical, reflection, lectures, and writing are enriched by luxuriant references to various linguistic, religious, and cultural expressions. These various forms of expression encourage further reflection and invite others who read them to share in the experience to which Panikkar refers. Of great import, in all of this we need to see his person, life, and writings in conjunction with one another. The inner unity of these three makes up his ultimate personal cosmotheandric testimonial to experience of the radical Trinity.36 Beyond reference to these various forms in which Panikkar gives testimonial to personal and communal experience of the Trinity, we might go a major step further. We might well say that, from a Panikkarian perspective, reality itself gives testimony to its trinitarian character. It does this in and through human consciousness. Reality itself, then, becomes the fullest testimonial to experience of the Trinity. The rhythm of its being is its becoming as perichōrētic interrelationship of three distinct but not separate dimensions of reality: the World, the Human, and the Divine. We close our review of these various forms of testimonial to the cosmotheandric experience of the Trinity appropriately with Panikkar himself, who speaks of music, the rhythm of being, and Trinity.

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See Maciej Bielawski’s important but more widely phrased insight into understanding Panikkar, ‘Understanding Panikkar and Making Him Understood: A Threefold Hermeneutic Structure – Graphe, Bios, Autos’, in: Raimundo Panikkar: A Pilgrim across Worlds, ed. Kapila Vatsyayan & Côme Carpentier de Gourdon (New Delhi: Niyogi, 2016), 67-72. Though Panikkar’s writing is a re-enactment, so to speak, of Panikkar’s own experience, Panikkar seems to be expanding upon his own personal experience to a more generalized level when he writes in the introduction to Rhythm: ‘The holistic attempt to approach Reality as such cannot follow the individualistic method. (…) Our attempt requires also the pneuma, the spirit, love, not as a second fiddle playing to the echoes of reason, but as a loving knowledge, reflectens ardor, symbolized in the trinitarian experience: the Logos inseparable from the Pneuma (Spirit) and “coming” from the selfsame Source’ (17).

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If Being is rhythmic, each entity will enjoy a real freedom according to its nature in relation to the Whole. The way to relate to one another is similar to a rhythmic dance in which I spontaneously create my role in the dance listening to the overall music (which I may also contribute to making). The order is an ontonomous order in which every being (on) discovers its proper nomos within the Whole: ontonomy. (53) We all participate in Rhythm, because Rhythm is another name for Being and Being is Trinity. (38)

CHAPTER 12 LEONARDO BOFF Trinitarian Societies

From Raimon Panikkar in India we turn now to Brazil. Leonardo Boff (1938–) is one of the best-known founders of Latin American liberation theology. In 1970, he completed doctoral studies in philosophy and theology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Bavaria, Germany.1 He served for 22 years as professor of Systematic and Ecumenical Theology in the Franciscan Theological Institute, Petrópolis, Brazil. In 1993, he was named professor of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Over the years, Boff has regularly published works written from the perspective of his deep concern for the poor and marginalized who suffer in unjust societal situations. He has authored more than 60 books in such areas as theology, spirituality, philosophy, anthropology, ecology, and mysticism. He was awarded the alternative Nobel prize ‘Right to Livelihood Award’ in Stockholm in recognition of his concern for the poor and their rights. Boff is perhaps the first liberation theologian to write at length on Trinity.2 True to his life-long interests, he writes on Trinity from the point of view of his 1

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Boff’s 1970 doctoral dissertation was published as Die Kirche als Sakrament im Horizont der Welterfahrung: Versuch einer Legitimation und einer strukturfunktionalistischen Grundlegung der Kirche im Anschluss an das II. Vatikanische Konzil (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1972). The dissertation shows ‘in what measure the Church can be a sign of the Sacred and the Divine in the secular world and in the process of liberation of the oppressed’. Boff’s web page, accessed February 25, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20071214193954/http://www. leonardoboff.com:80/site-eng/lboff.htm. Boff’s web page provides considerable information concerning his life and interests as well as a bibliography of his writings and of studies of his thought. Stephanie Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik? Das Verhältnis von Gotteslehre und Sozialkritik in den trinitätstheologischen Entwürfen von Jürgen Moltmann und Leonardo Boff (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 60. Boff himself refers to an earlier, shorter study on ‘the Trinity in the light of the Latin American and socialist reality of Cuba’ by Sergio Arce Martínez, ‘El desafío del Dios trinitario de la Iglesia’, in: idem, La teología como desafío (Cárdenas, Matanzas, Cuba: Consejo Ecuménico de Cuba, 1980), 45-54. See Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 243n2.

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concern for the poor and oppressed in Latin America. Yet, at the same time he speaks to the worldwide Christian community. We will consider more directly three of his writings to discover the various forms which his testimonials to experience of the Trinity may take. The first of these writings is an early study carried out for the Confederación Latinoamericana de Religiosos (the Latin-American Confederation of Religious), entitled La experiencia de Dios (The Experience of God).3 The second is his key work on Trinity. It was originally published as A Trindade, a Sociedade e a Libertação (The Trinity, Society, and Liberation), a title reflecting his intention to consider the Trinity in relation to individual, group, and societal liberation. In later editions, this volume bears the shortened title A Trindade e a Sociedade, translated as Trinity and Society.4 The third is a shorter, more easily accessible work, Holy Trinity, Perfect Community,5 in which Boff writes succinctly of Trinity, community, and liberation. We will at times refer to this book, especially when he expresses the gist of his thought more directly in it.6 As theological reflections, these three studies, but especially Trinity and Society, will challenge us to be sensitive to exactly what the author is proposing. Reviewing such reflections requires a certain attention to ways in which the author proceeds, leads to specific conclusions, and announces concrete results. 3

4

5

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Leonardo Boff, La experiencia de Dios (Bogotá: Secretariado General de la CLAR, 1975), abbreviated Experiencia. Leonardo Boff, A Trindade, a Sociedade e a Libertação (Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil: Vozes, 1986); ———, A Trinidade e a Sociedade, 3rd ed. (Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil: Vozes, 1987). The English translation of this third Portuguese edition, Trinity and Society (see n. 2 above), will generally be referred to by page in the text of this chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, italics in quotations from this English translation are in the translated text. Leonardo Boff, Santíssima Trindade é a melhor comunidade (Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil: Vozes, 1988)/Holy Trinity, Perfect Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000). We will generally examine Boff’s writings on experience of the Trinity in line with the general approach often taken in spirituality studies to writings giving expression to spiritual experiences. At least initially, that approach usually involves making a prolonged effort to understand, describe, and appreciate such experiences. A more traditional theological approach often moves more quickly to critical evaluation of them. Such evaluation is regularly based on references to one or more of the following: Scripture; Tradition; development of dogma; reasoned argument; and, more recently, various forms of experience. For summaries, including more theologically oriented and critically evaluative studies of Boff’s trinitarian thought, see, by way of example: Ted Peters, GOD as Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 110-14, 217-18; Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik?, here and there but esp. 124-29, 151-64; Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004), 118-31, 252-54; VeliMatti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 276-91; Risto Saarinen, ‘The Trinity, Creation, and Christian Anthropology’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. Gilles Emery & Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 422-23.

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More specifically, in our case we will approach Boff’s reflections from the point of view of our interest in identifying and describing them as testimonials to experience of the Trinity. Already now I suggest that we will find in Boff a particularly direct and explicit example of one who himself provides such testimonials while, importantly, pointing out various other testimonials. We will see that he focuses at length, and in appreciative fashion, on several forms of liberating experiences of the Trinity, encouraging his readers to take part in them.7 The Earlier Boff on Experience of the Trinity In the earliest of these three studies, La experiencia de Dios, Boff begins with wide-ranging analyses of somewhat more general questions concerning experience – especially experience of God in today’s world. Over several chapters, he discusses, succinctly and with great insight, various ways in which we experience God. For example, he looks at God in relation to our more technically oriented world, to social oppression in Latin America, and to our own personal human development. Two chapters are of special, present interest. The first is a brief chapter 3, in which he presents his overall, philosophically informed view of experience. The second is chapter 8, where he reflects at some length on the Christian experience of God. Experience In chapter 3,8 Boff proposes to work with a notion of experience permitting him to consider the experience of God as taking place within human history. Indeed, for him experience is not simply theoretical. Rather, it is a knowing which comes from contact with something or someone given, so to speak, in an experience. He calls this given an intractable reality. We learn by coming to terms with this reality, which often forces us to revise previous ideas and ways of acting. When a person accumulates many such experiences, we speak of that person as experienced. Experience-based knowledge is verifiable, concrete, and vital. It is more than merely the subjective knowing of an object. Still, a person’s social conditioning 7

8

Boff often speaks of experience of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The context in which such reference is made should help see whether he is referring to such experience more generally considered or even to more specific, concrete experiences of the three divine Persons in connection with human and societal liberation. In this chapter, we will generally work with experience in both the singular and the plural, depending on what a specific context would seem to call for. Boff, Experiencia, 22-25.

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and overall outlook have already formed ways of feeling and thinking which condition that person’s experiences. In effect and more generally stated, ‘experience is the way in which we interiorize reality, the way we situate ourselves in the world and the world in us’.9 He then calls experience a horizon. It is a perspective according to which we look on others, our life situations, our society. He provides an example of such perspectival experience. That is, he sees a tendency in Latin America to look at pedagogy, theology, social and political systems, even sacraments ‘under the optic of liberation or oppression’. Liberation is itself, in turn, ‘a horizon, an optic, an experience’ which helps us see things as liberating or oppressing.10 Here, in these few pages, Boff is pushing beyond a merely subjective view of experience. For him, already in this early study experience seems to be understood as a relationship between the one experiencing and that which is experienced. It is a relationship resulting in oppression or liberation. Christian Experience of God In chapter 8, Boff reflects at length on what he identifies as, more properly, the Christian experience of God.11 He divides the chapter into two sections. The first he entitles ‘Jesus of Nazareth’s Experience of God’.12 The second, ‘The Revelation of the Most Holy Trinity in the Experience of Jesus Christ’.13 Jesus of Nazareth’s Experience of God. Boff opens this first section of chapter 8 with a reminder of an important point he had already mentioned in more general fashion in chapter 2. He says that God emerges (emerger), so to speak, from within the world and human history. He then asks how Jesus emerges from within a world where his God would be the God experienced by the Jewish people. In response, he stresses that Jesus appears in this world to reveal a God of love and forgiveness. For Boff, this revelation of a loving and forgiving God occurs in Jesus’ own experience of God. Indeed, Jesus’ experience differs in many ways from that based in more legalistic interpretations found in various Hebrew Bible texts.14 9

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11 12 13 14

‘Experiencia es el modo como nosotros interiorizamos la realidad, como nos situamos en el mundo y el mundo en nosotros’. Ibid., 24 (translation of quotations from this study published in Spanish are my own). ‘bajo la óptica de la liberación o de la opresión’; ‘un horizonte, una óptica, una experiencia’. Ibid., 24-25. Ibid., 54-75, with this remark on 54. ‘La experiencia de Dios, de Jesús de Nazaret’. Ibid., 55-68. ‘La Revelación de la Santisima Trinidad en la experiencia de Jesucristo’. Ibid., 68-75. Ibid., 55-56.

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Boff describes the world in which Jesus lived as one oppressed from without and from within. From without, in that the Jewish people had lived for centuries under various forms of domination by several empires coming one after the other. And Jesus’ home territory of Galilee was a poor, agricultural land in which Jesus worked with his hands in carpentry and construction. Boff notes, in recalling Matt. 20:1-15, that dayworkers were at the mercy of wealthier landowners. As well, all were subject to heavy taxation by King Herod. Within this context of oppression, Boff refers to various liberation movements. Among them he names the Zealots, who worked to provoke imminent divine intervention in favor of the oppressed. But, for Boff, worse than such external and socioeconomic oppression was the often-legalistic interpretation of the law. For the law was supposed to help people on their way to God. Instead, so interpreted, it brought about a form of slavery in the name of God (Matt. 23:24 and Luke 11:46). The law had in effect replaced God.15 It is from within this context of oppression that Jesus appears (surgir). From the beginning, he presents himself as liberator of captives, the poor, the blind, and the oppressed (Luke 4:18). For Boff, Jesus experiences God, more widely, as liberator of creation and, more specifically, as the one who works through him to free from demonic possession. ‘But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you’ (Luke 11:20 NRSV). ‘Kingdom of God’ is the key phrase giving expression to what Jesus experienced in his encounter with ‘God as total liberation’.16 Jesus experiences God not only as liberator but as Father of infinite goodness. God is present to those in need. Boff reflects at some length on Jesus’ experience of God as Father, Abba. God his Father is ‘for him [Jesus] a proximate experiential evidence and, at the same time, greatly beyond this world’.17 Jesus’ preaching and actions reflect Jesus’ experience of God as his Father. When Jesus announces the beatitudes, he radicalizes the demands of the law. Yet, according to the Gospels he also relaxes, and even does away with, some rigoristic interpretations of it. He is accused of eating and drinking with sinners (Luke 7:34). He welcomes all: the sick, tax collectors, lepers (Luke 15:2; Matt. 9:10-11; Mark 1:41).18 His Father is at work in all things and Jesus sees himself united in that work (John 5:17).19

15 16 17

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Ibid., 56-58. ‘Dios como total liberación’. Ibid., 59. ‘para El una evidencia experiencial próxima y al mismo tiempo más allá de este mundo’. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 60-63. Ibid., 58-64.

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This same God the Father reveals, as Father, God’s relationship with us. When we recognize that others are God’s hymn (hymno de Dios) and see them as our brothers and sisters, we are in effect experiencing the reality of God as our Father. This understanding of God, considered always in some way in relation to creation and humankind, is a special characteristic of Jesus’ own immediate experience of God. Loving God always involves loving our neighbor as well (Mark 12:31 and 33; Matt. 22:36 and 39). Boff insists that ‘God wants to be served in others more than in himself’.20 In speaking of Jesus’ experience of God, Boff uses a favorite word of his, emerger, to which we have previously referred. He says that ‘God emerges for Jesus exactly from within life and in relation to others’.21 He reminds us of the identity between love of God and love of neighbor, even of enemies (1 John 4:19 and 21). Jesus shows that his trust in the goodness and ultimate power of God who loves all continues even in moments of desolation. Examples of such moments are Jesus’ experiences in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. For Boff, Jesus has come in the name of God to announce total liberation from oppression through his life, death, and resurrection. And even liberation from such desolation as Jesus himself experienced. Boff concludes that Jesus’ overall experience of God is a revelation of God both as total mystery and as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.22 The Revelation of the Most Holy Trinity in the Experience of Jesus Christ. Boff opens this second section of chapter 8 with several initial remarks. As he will throughout this section, he stresses the importance of faith in the mystery of the Trinity as the mystery has been expressed in later conciliar statements. Then he immediately returns to his main interest. He insists that the revelation of the mystery of the Trinity occurs ‘in Jesus’ concrete journey, word, activity, and passion’.23 The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit reveal themselves in the life of Jesus. They do this for our salvation. In so doing, they are revealing themselves to and for each of us. After these initial remarks, Boff divides the rest of this second section of chapter 8 into two subsections. He moves to his main consideration in the first subsection, entitled ‘How the Most Holy Trinity Reveals Itself in the Life of Christ’.24 He begins with reference to Jesus who prays to God as Abba, his Father. Boff had earlier cited Gal. 4:6 and Rom. 8:15 to recall that, already early 20 21

22 23 24

‘Dios quiere ser servido en los otros más que en sí mismo’. Ibid., 65. ‘Dios para Jesús emerge exactamente dentro de la vida y en relaciόn con los otros’. Ibid., 65 and see 64-66. Ibid., 66-68. ‘en el camino concreto, en la palabra, en la actividad y en la pasiόn de Jesucristo’. Ibid., 68. ‘Cόmo en la Vida de Cristo se reveló la Santisima Trinidad’. Ibid., 69-73.

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on, Christians had expressed their faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now he focuses more on the Father and the Son themselves, stressing that Jesus senses he is different from the Father. At the same time, he feels himself sent by the Father as liberator. Salvation is conditional on adhesion to him (Luke 12:8, 10, the latter verse with reference to the Spirit). To paraphrase Boff closely, Jesus does not just act in place of God but makes God himself visible. Jesus and the Father are one (John 10:30). Intimacy and difference characterize the relationship of the Son to the Father and, we might add in going beyond Boff here, of the Father to the Son. The Father reveals the Son who takes on divine attitudes. The Son acts with divine authority, with the power of God. For Boff, the actions of Jesus also reveal that the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son. The Gospels present Christ as a charismatic, one filled with the Holy Spirit for his mission as liberator (Mark 1:9, 11). The Spirit leads Jesus into the desert (Mark 1:12), enables him to cast out demons (Matt. 12:28), is a power which goes forth from him (Mark 5:30, Luke 8:46). The Holy Spirit works in Jesus, is the Spirit of Jesus, and at the same time works independently. Identity and difference are especially evident in the mutual relationship between Son and Spirit. Boff continues, saying that over the first centuries Christians reflected on the experience of Jesus living, having died, and risen. He speaks of ‘the experience of faith [which] contemplated the Father, saw the Son, and delighted in the Holy Spirit’.25 And he notes, importantly, ‘The experience of the faith did not start off from the unicity of God. It experienced diversity in God; a lived experience of God as family: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It worshiped the three as God’.26 Later theological formulations of one God in three persons were explanations of this historico-salvific salvation experienced and subsequently further understood by Christian communities. Boff insists that, for early Christians, it was not first a question of divine unity but, rather, of the three who were experienced. This second section of chapter 8 closes with a second, brief subsection entitled ‘The Experience of the Most Holy Trinity in Our Experience’.27 Here Boff 25 26

27

‘La experiencia de la fe, contempló al Padre, vio al Hijo y saboreó al Espíritu Santo’. Ibid., 71. ‘La experiencia de la fe no partió de la unicidad de Dios. Experimentó la diversidad en Dios. Vivió a Dios como familia: Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo. Veneró a los tres como Dios’. Ibid., 71. On consultation, Prof. Renata Furst suggested this English translation. I am most grateful to her and saw that, though not as literal as one I had worked on, it captures better the character, as I understand it, of the preterite indicative in Spanish indicating, in some way, a completed action in the past while also allowing for and bringing into play the more dynamic ‘journey’ meaning of partir. Her translation reflects something of the dynamic of Boff’s thought. ‘La experiencia de la Santisima Trinidad en nuestra experiencia’. Ibid., 73-75.

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calls upon Karl Rahner as Boff reflects on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. His reflection itself has a distinctly Rahnerian ring to it, with remarks reminiscent as well of Thomas Aquinas on Trinity. Boff describes the Father in terms of mystery, the Son in terms of intellect and truth, and the Holy Spirit in terms of will and love. He says that considering the Father, Son, and Spirit in this way sheds further light on the human person. For the human person is also basic mystery out of which flow knowing and willing. Of special note, Boff ends the chapter by affirming that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each communicate themselves to creation and to humans in line with who they are, namely, as Father, Son, and Spirit. Such divine self-communication ‘constitutes the unity of the mystery of God and also the unity of the mystery of the [human] person’.28 In effect, Boff is describing the Christian experience of God and, more specifically, of the Trinity in terms of Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God. He moves freely from Jesus’ experience of God to Christians’ experience of the Trinity. We find this move exemplified, for example, in his practice of quoting from the Gospels and then citing Gal. 4:6 and Rom. 8:15. In these two verses, Boff sees references to early Christians, their communities, and their experience of God. Such moves from Jesus to Christians, both earlier and more recent, would seem to be justified by Boff’s working within an overall framework of faith. Faith links Christians to Jesus as his disciples.29 Speaking of faith, it is striking that Boff seems at least several times to identify explicitly Christian faith and Christian experience of the Trinity. Faith and experience of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seemingly become interchangeable. For Boff, faith itself takes on various meanings. Sometimes it refers in his writing to an individual’s or a community’s stance before, and trust in, God. At other times it refers to the cumulative experience of the Christian community as well as to the overall result of such cumulative experience. This at least apparent identification of faith and experience of God brings to light what he here states less explicitly. When he speaks of experience of the Trinity, he is referring to, and working with, multiple forms of that experience. The experience to which he refers can be personal and individual, communal, cumulative, and liberating. Experience can also be more than one, or even be all of them taken together. When considered in its positive result, experience can for Boff itself be a form of liberation. 28

29

‘constituye la unidad del Misterio de Dios y también la unidad del misterio de la persona’. Ibid., 75. Concerning Boff’s moves from Jesus to Christians, see also, for example, Boff’s remarks on members of religious congregations. If their experience of the triune God is authentic, they give witness to that experience in their prayer and work. Ibid., 77, and see 76-83, with further remarks on experience of God on 84-87.

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Boff sees experience as resulting in oppression or liberation. More specifically, he stresses Jesus’ role as liberator, with that role emerging from within a wider context of oppression. Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God as total liberation. Regarding Christians’ experience of the Trinity, Boff insists that what early Christians experienced was the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom they then recognize and identify as one God. He notes that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each relates to creation and to humans in line with who they are. Later on, Boff will greatly develop these and several of his other insights and intuitions concerning experience of the Trinity. This he will do particularly in his book, Trinity and Society, published about 10 years after La experiencia de Dios. There he will reflect at greater length on the Trinity and especially on the Trinity in relation to societal and personal liberation.

The Trinity, Societies, and Liberation Boff opens his major study on the Trinity and liberation, Trinity and Society, by harkening back to his earlier study on Christian experience of God. We see this recall in the following statement from the introduction to Trinity and Society: The Christian doctrine of the Trinity has gone through this process [of encountering the divine Mystery]. In the first place came the original experience [experiência-fonte]: the first disciples lived with Jesus, saw how he prayed, how he spoke of God, how he preached, how he treated people, particularly the poor, how he faced up to conflict, how he suffered and died and rose again; they also saw what happened in the community that believed in him, especially after Pentecost. With joy in their prayers and simplicity in their preaching, they proclaimed the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (…) [T]hey called each of these God. (1)

For Boff, Christians experience the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who, in their mutual relations, together form one communion of divine Persons. He goes on, throughout the book, to argue that this one divine communion constitutes a utopian paradigm challenging various human societies to overcome oppression. The three divine Persons, equally and together, form a loving community which, in turn, challenges societies to structure themselves, as far as possible, in like manner. Societies which succeed in doing so find themselves transformed into more humanly enriching ones. Their members are thus progressively freed from oppressive structures. Boff encapsulates this quickly stated summary of several aspects of his thought on the Trinity, society, and liberation in the following programmatic quote from the end of his introduction: For those who have faith, the trinitarian communion [comunhão trinitario] between the divine Three, the union between them in love and vital interpenetration, can

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serve as a source of inspiration, as a utopian goal that generates models of successively diminishing [destructive?] differences. This is one of the reasons why I am taking the concept of perichoresis as the structural axis of these thoughts. It speaks to the oppressed in their quest and struggle for integral liberation. The community [comunidade] of Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes the prototype of the human community dreamed of by those who wish to improve society [sociedade] and build it in such a way as to make it into the image and likeness of the Trinity. (6-7)30

Boff goes on in Trinity and Society to argue his theological position, with its accompanying social and political considerations, in six identifiable steps. In the first of these steps, he in chapter 1 develops several more general theological and societal considerations already touched on in the introduction. Of special interest, he speaks further of the Trinity ‘as a model for any just, egalitarian (while respecting differences) social organization’ (11). Of note, he says that ‘a society structured on these lines [for example, egalitarian lines] could be the sacrament of the Trinity’ (13). In the second step, namely, chapters 2 through 4, he spells out what he means by the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity with which he is working. In these three chapters, he reviews, respectively, biblical sources of the doctrine of the Trinity, early efforts to understand the Trinity, and subsequent dogmatic statements on the Trinity. These chapters provide an easily accessible overview of traditional trinitarian thought. In the third step, in chapters 5 and 6, he reflects more constructively on various forms of trinitarian symbolism and contemporary challenges to formulating an appropriate understanding of the Trinity. Among these challenges, he refers, for example, to the ‘feminine dimension of the whole mystery of the Trinity and of each of the divine Persons’ (122). He will return to this theme of the Trinity’s feminine dimension regularly enough throughout the rest of the book. In the fourth step, chapter 7, Boff fills out his understanding of the perichoretic union of the three divine Persons and that union’s role in encouraging liberation through the establishment of ever-more-just societies. The fifth step consists in four chapters. In chapter 8, he first speaks briefly of the glory due to each of the three divine Persons before dedicating chapters 9 through 11 respectively to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He brings the book to a close in a sixth step with four more brief chapters. Here he prolongs his theological reflection on the Trinity. He argues, in chapter 12, for the importance of a continuing interest in the Trinity in itself, the immanent Trinity, if it is to 30

Grenz draws attention to this quote. Rediscovering the Trinity, 121. In the Glossary in Trinity and Society, 241, Boff describes perichoresis as the ‘Greek term meaning literally that one Person contains the other two (static sense) or that each Person interpenetrates the others, and so reciprocally (active sense). The derived adjective ‘perichoretic’ defines the type of communion obtaining between the divine Persons’.

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serve as utopian model. Then, in chapter 13, he reflects further on the Trinity for us, the economic Trinity. What he treats in chapter 14 is captured in the chapter’s title, ‘Forever and Ever: The Trinity in Creation and Creation in the Trinity’ (227). In the final chapter 15, he summarizes important points he has made throughout his development of trinitarian doctrine. We will look more especially at Boff’s fourth and fifth steps. In the fourth step, Boff treats of the Trinity in relation to human societies. In the fifth step, he describes each of the three divine Persons and their roles in the liberation of creation and of humankind. We should again note he has consistently insisted that what we experience is the three divine Persons and their concomitant perichoretic unity. We will, then, in a way reverse his order of presentation. We will first look at aspects of what he says in step five, where he dedicates chapter 9 to the Father, chapter 10 to the Son, and chapter 11 to the Holy Spirit. Then, we will return to his step four in chapter 7, where he reflects on the communion of the three divine Persons and that communion’s liberating role in relation to human societies. Already now we can recall that Boff will see this trinitarian communion of mutual relations as model, paradigm, and utopian goal which, when considered in faith, incites the creation of more just societies.31 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Boff has decided to work with what he calls the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity. For him, orthodox doctrine refers to the ongoing effort to understand something which has occurred, and which can be expressed at least partially in words. That something is the various ways in which Christians have, from Christianity’s beginning down through the ages, experienced God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It will be helpful to keep this idea of further understanding arising out of and following upon experience in mind as we examine certain aspects of his own effort to express what Christians understand when they speak of their experience of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.32

31

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Hartmann’s presentation of much of Boff’s thought on the Trinity, society, and liberation follows this approach. That is, she first presents the three divine Persons, then their unity followed by their and their unity’s liberating relationship especially to human communities but also, in a sense, to all of creation. Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 68. See, for example, Boff, Trinity and Society, 1-2, quoted partially above. This quote should now be complemented by what follows that quotation: ‘Later, Christians began to think about this experience [of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit] and to translate this proclamation into a formula. This gave rise to the classical expression of the doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three Persons or one nature and three hypostases’ (1-2).

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Father. In line with long Christian traditions and their ordering of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Boff first reflects theologically on the overall Christian experience of the Father (164-77).33 The title of chapter 9 in Boff’s longer text, Trinity and Society, is ‘Glory Be to the Father: Origin and Goal of All Liberation’ (164). With this title, Boff stresses the Father’s liberating roles. The corresponding chapter in the shorter text Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, published two years later, is chapter 7. It bears the title ‘The Person of the Father: Mystery of Tenderness’.34 As this title makes explicit, in the shorter text he highlights the way in which the Father carries out his liberating roles, namely, with great tenderness. In this shorter text presentation, Boff gathers his thought on the Father into five topics rather than the seven to be found in the longer text. We will work with the longer text but follow the shorter text’s way of organizing the presentation in five topics.35 The first of these five brings together what Boff treats in the longer text as the first three topics. This first and more inclusive topic is, then, the Father as mystery. As we turn to this first topic, we should recall that Boff had touched on aspects of the Christian experience of the Father in his earlier study, La Experiencia de Dios. Here, in Trinity and Society, he includes many of them in what is now his more developed treatment of the Christian experience of the Father.36 But, in comparison with his earlier study, here he reflects at greater length on the Father as liberator. Liberator under the banner of absolute mystery. As mystery, the Father provides the basis for universal sister- and brotherhood and for both the maternal and the paternal. He is ultimate origin within the Trinity itself and liberator in relation to creation. In his discussion of this first topic, Boff says the Father is the one who always was (165-67). For Boff, the Father is beginning more as the Father who eternally begets the Son than as the Father who is creator. For the Father begets even within the Trinity itself. Boff then moves quickly to stress the role of the Son. The Son reveals the Father to us. Through the Son we know of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Boff refers to Jesus’ intimate experience of God as Abba and cites various relevant New Testament texts. In so referring to the Son here, 33

34 35

36

See the helpful summary in Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 69-72, where on 72 she briefly compares the way Boff presents the Father in Trinity and Society with what he says in Holy Trinity, Perfect Community. Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 68-78. Working with this fivefold presentation will help us focus on aspects of special importance as we review Boff’s longer-text presentation. In the shorter text, Boff writes straightforwardly, ‘When Christian faith proclaims that God is Father of the eternal Son together with the Holy Spirit, it intends to express that in him we experience the absolute mystery from which everything comes and toward which everything is going’. Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 72.

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he in effect reminds us that we cannot describe the various roles of the Father without reference to those of the Son. In principle though not greatly developed here, the same could be said regarding reference to those of the Holy Spirit as well.37 Again, Boff refers to various New Testament texts, citing them to link Jesus’ preaching and healing with Jesus’ experience of the loving mercy and tenderness of the Father. ‘His [Jesus’] acts were always to set people free of what oppressed them, and those actions sprang from his meeting with the Father’. For Boff, Jesus proclaims the coming of the kingdom of the Father, giving rise to the kingdom, as Boff says, in history and in human society. ‘Jesus, in his tender relationship with the Father, revealed the Father also in creation, in the birds of the air that neither sow nor reap, but are fed by his Father in heaven (Matt. 6:26)’ (167). Boff’s second topic consists in the assertion that the Father of Jesus is, as well, our Father (167-70). Jesus is eternally begotten, and we are adopted daughters and sons. Yet, for Boff our adoption is real. The Father has intended our creation already in and with the begetting of the Son. We are, he says, ontologically daughters and sons of the Father in and through Jesus. In Jesus we are a ‘universal brother- and sisterhood’ (168). Along with Jesus the only begotten Son we are, with Jesus, adoptive members of a universal communion or fellowship in which ‘the Father is never without the Son and these sons and daughters’ (169). This communion assures that we do not understand the Father as, in titles Boff truly dislikes, absolute Lord, supreme Judge and solitary Father (170). This topic of God’s fatherhood leads into Boff’s third topic, ‘The Maternal Father and Paternal Mother’ (170-71). He recalls Hebrew Testament texts referring to the tenderness, comfort, and love of a mother. For example, ‘Like a son comforted by his mother will I comfort you (Isa. 66:13)’. Boff observes that begetting can be attributed either to father or to mother. True eternal fatherhood requires the various characteristics often linked with each of them. ‘Jesus’ Father is a Father only through being also a Mother, uniting the strength of paternal love with the tenderness of maternal love’ (171). Only then do we appropriately consider God the Father as the true origin and goal liberating us from all oppression and slavery. Boff returns to the question of the Father’s unoriginated origin when he, in the fourth topic, further considers the identity of the Father. This time, within the Trinity itself (171-74). He reminds us that what we might know of the inner life of the Trinity we know through Jesus. He also recalls various theological developments concerning our understanding, at least to some extent, of the inner trinitarian dynamic of love and mutual sharing. Among them, he embraces the Western theological position that the Father with the Son breathes forth the 37

Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 69.

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Holy Spirit. ‘The Father, therefore, is determined by two original relationships, with the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (172). While continuing to stress the Father’s unoriginated origin, he seems to temper that stress. He does this when he repeats his key trinitarian insight that Christians in faith experience the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. ‘All [three divine Persons are] equally original and originating realities, [so] unity emerges as the expression of the eternal communion and essential interpenetration of life and love between the three divine Persons’ (173).38 Boff continues with the fifth and final topic, namely, that this eternal divine communion of love is open, ultimately including creation (174-77). Here he speaks unconventionally of creation as the mission of the Father. He reiterates that the Father remains mystery even though, through creation, we can infer something about the Father. Creation is the work of the whole Trinity but starts from, to use his phrase, the fecundity of the Father. It is eternally present within the Trinity since, as he has mentioned, the Father intends creation with the begetting of the Son. There are many imponderables, such as the production of human life, the meaning of life in history, even the origins of the world. They point in their own ways to the loving tenderness of the Father. But the Father is not only the origin and goal of all that is. The Father is as well origin and goal of all liberation from oppression. Boff quotes Isaiah 63:16: ‘You, Yahweh, yourself are our Father; Our Redeemer is your ancient name’. The Father sent his Son so that people might ‘shake off their fetters and take their proper task in hand’. The Father ‘appears as protector and defender of the “least”, of those who are completely unprotected’ (177). The overall theme, then, running through Boff’s theological understanding of the maternal Father and paternal Mother is one of mystery discovered through Jesus. Mystery lovingly and tenderly leading to liberation from oppression. Son. Boff continues his theological reflection on the three divine Persons as he turns to the Son. He treats of the Son in the longer text Trinity and Society’s chapter 10, ‘Glory Be to the Son: Mediator of Integral Liberation’ (178-88).39 The parallel chapter 8 in Boff’s shorter text Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion bears the title ‘The Person of the Son: Mystery of Communication and Principle of Liberation’.40 ‘Glory Be’ in the title of the longer text’s chapter 10 stresses the equality of the Son with the Father. In the title of the shorter text’s chapter 8, ‘Communication’ seems to spell out more explicitly what the longer text’s 38

39 40

As has been mentioned above, in Trinity and Society Boff at times seems to equate faith and experience (for example, Trinity and Society, 83, 95, 112). At other times, he seems to say that experience leads to faith (for example, 43). Summary in Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 72-76. Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 78-85.

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mention of Mediator implies. At the same time, the shorter text’s reference to ‘Principle’ stresses the point that the distinct role of the Son in creation and liberation has been foreseen from eternity. In the shorter text, Boff has brought together the first two sections of the longer text concerning the topic of Jesus as Son. He then adds a section treating of the topic of the Son in relation to the Holy Spirit.41 As we did regarding the Father, we will here generally focus on the longer text’s chapter 10, but follow the thematic organization found in chapter 8 of the shorter text. The result is that we will review Boff’s presentation of the Son in terms of five topics: Jesus as Son; the Son and the Holy Spirit; the feminine dimension of the Son; the Son within the Trinity; and, the mission of the Son. We will see how Boff understands that to which the Christian experience of the Son leads. Boff has already treated, at some length, of Jesus as the Son in his earlier work La experiencia de Dios as well as here and there in earlier chapters in Trinity and Society. Now, in Trinity and Society’s chapter 10, he again briefly considers the ways in which Jesus, in Boff’s terms, showed himself the Son and behaved as the Son (179-82). In a remark leading into his presentation of this first topic, namely, Jesus as Son, Boff says that he sees in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed a double reference to Jesus. Jesus is distinct from and yet consubstantial with the Father. Boff insightfully notes that ‘consubstantial’ underscores the ‘interdependence of Father and Son’. One is not without the other. He then asks the question which guides his reflections on Jesus as Son. ‘How did Jesus, in his humanity, show his relationship of Son to the Father, and how did he show us that we too are sons and daughters in the Son?’ (179). According to Boff, Jesus did not, in his human life on earth, claim to be the Messiah or the eternal Son of the Father. Rather, he freely acted with liberating power and spoke in the name of God. He recalls the intimacy with which Jesus prayed to God as Abba. Jesus felt God was his Father. Boff goes on to say that Jesus ‘behaved in the manner of a son and in this revealed the Son’ (180). He regularly withdraws in prayer and acts on behalf of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is understood here as God’s acting in the world to free creation from what disfigures it. In his acts, Jesus effects what God does in the world, namely, encouraging justice and the respect of human rights. In divine liberty, Jesus ate with sinners, healed the sick, freed from demonic possession and, above all, freed from slavery to sin. All this in the name of his Father. As the Son, he remained obedient even to death on the cross. He mediates and executes the Father’s plan. 41

Boff does not devote a section in the shorter text to the topic of the Son within the Trinity itself but does so in the longer text. The shorter text includes abbreviated versions of the parts of the longer text on the feminine dimension of Jesus the Son and on his mission. On this second point, see Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 76.

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Boff brings his reflection on this first topic concerning the Son to a close with a brief remark on the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit. The Father sends the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are always together, into the world. The Holy Spirit ‘creates the humanity taken on by the Son’. Jesus acts ‘in the power of the Spirit[,] (…) reveals the Father, transforms deformed reality. It is in the joy of the Spirit that Jesus invokes his “Abba” (cf Luke 10:21)’ (182). In what Boff develops as a second topic in the shorter text, he to some extent expands on his brief, longer-text remarks concerning the relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He adds that the relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one of mutually interpenetrating life, giving, and love. Then, as incarnate, Jesus ‘confers a character of son and daughter on all creatures, primarily human beings’. In Jesus’ resurrection, ‘we are sons and daughters in the Son and all brothers and sisters in the power of that same Spirit’.42 With the risen Lord we are all, in a sense, in the Trinity. For Boff, the Father was both maternal and paternal. Now, in the longer text he, in a third topic, dwells briefly on the ‘Feminine Dimension of Jesus the Son’, as this section’s title reads (182-83). In the shorter text, the title is ‘The Male and Female of the Son and Our Brother’, thus giving male and female more of an equal standing. At the same time, with Son and Brother he brings out again that Jesus himself is male.43 As Boff says in the longer text, he can speak of the feminine dimension because Jesus showed himself to be a free and, as he writes, integrated person. He demonstrated an ongoing openness to women and permitted himself to be anointed by a public sinner (Luke 7:36-50). Women such as Martha and Mary took an active part in his life and mission. Boff ends this brief, third-topic reflection by asserting that ‘this feminine dimension belongs to the humanity of Jesus, hypostatically taken on by the eternal Son. Femininity thereby strikes roots into the heart of the mystery of God. Though Jesus was a man and not a woman, the feminine dimension in him is equally divinized, revealing the maternal face of God’ (183). In both the shorter and longer texts, Boff notes what he identifies as feminine characteristics of Jesus’ liberating role. These characteristics include caring for those who are suffering or hungry and longing to gather ‘the children of Jerusalem as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings (…) (Luke 13:34)’ (183). He closes the shorter text, insisting that women are called ‘to find in each person of the Blessed Trinity a prototype for their efforts at growth and betterment’.44 In the longer text, Boff next carefully extends his reflection to a fourth topic in a section of the chapter with the title ‘The Only-Begotten Son Who Is in the 42 43 44

Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 81. Ibid., 81-83. Ibid., 83.

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Father’s Bosom’ (183-85). Here he acknowledges the ages-long trinitarian expression of the Son as begotten by and from the Father. But he hurries to clarify that this form of procession from the Father is not to be understood in terms of causality. For the Son is begotten without beginning. He prefers to speak of processions within the Trinity as forms of the divine Persons’ mutual selfrevelation to one another. And concerning the Son, he calls upon the notion of the Son as the Word of the Father. The Son expresses all that the Father is while remaining distinct from the Father. He is not the Father. But, equally, as the full expression of the Father, the Son is the image of the Father (Col. 1:15). The Son is the presence of the prototypical Father, both in the Trinity and, as Boff will note, in creation. While not source and origin which the Father is, the Son eternally receives the Holy Spirit with his begetting and revelation of all that the Father is except fatherhood. We can, then, suggest that the Son is born of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Boff goes on to say that the Son reflects both the Paternal Mother and the Maternal Father. Indeed, all creation itself, through the Son, reflects the divine paternal and maternal. God is beyond the sexes as such. But, since ‘everything is a sacrament of the Son, everything contains and reveals this deep feminine dimension as well as his masculine dimension. (…) [M]asculine and feminine created perfections (…) find their ultimate rationale and infinite exemplar in the eternal masculinity and femininity of the Son’ (185). Boff continues, widening his reflection on the liberating role of the Son. He does this in his presentation of a fifth and final topic. Here he shifts from considering the Son within the Trinity to the Son in relation to creation. He treats of this topic in the longer text in the last section of the chapter entitled, ‘The Mission of the Son: The Universe Reflects Back on the Word’ (185-88). In the shorter text, he stresses more the liberating mission of the Son when he introduces this final topic as ‘The Mission of the Son: Liberate and Make All Sons and Daughters’.45 The Son is Word and image not only within the Trinity but in creation as well. As Word and image, the Son is the perfect revelation of the Father. The most complete form of this revelation takes place in his incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth. Boff argues that the incarnation is not just an emergency effort to revive what had been lost in creation. He roots his argument in the notion that all of creation was already present, at least in intention, in the Father’s begetting of the Son. With creation through the Son, all that is created becomes image and likeness of both the Father and the Son. And, with the incarnation, all created beings become in some way sons and daughters in the Son. They are, then, all oriented outward in self-revelation and self-gift. The Son’s mission is to lead all of creation, and especially humans, to reflect the Word. In so doing, humans transform creation ‘into the glory of the Father’ (187). In his 45

Ibid., 83-85.

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incarnation, Jesus accomplished this transformation in the humblest of ways. He suffers within the world and liberates from within it. ‘The lordship of the incarnate, crucified and risen Word consists in this immense process of liberation from the sin that hides the glory of the Father’. All creation becomes ‘of the Trinity’ (188). In the shorter text, Boff ends his reflection on this fifth topic with a direct statement rich in spiritual implications concerning experience of the Trinity. ‘That event [the incarnation] signals the beginning of our blessed end: we are now within the Blessed Trinity’.46 Holy Spirit. In the longer text Trinity and Society, Boff’s chapter 11, ‘Glory Be to the Holy Spirit: Driving Force of Integral Liberation’ (189-212),47 is itself longer than the previous chapters on the Father and the Son in this text. Boff gives the shorter text’s parallel chapter 9 the title ‘The Person of the Holy Spirit: Mystery of Love, and In-breaking of the New’.48 He does not include reference to liberation in the title. But he brings out the Spirit’s dynamic role in liberation when he entitles the chapter’s first section, ‘Who is the Holy Spirit? The Driving Force of Full Liberation’. In the longer text’s chapter 11, he treats of four topics, each in one of the chapter’s four sections.49 We will work directly with this chapter and these four topics as he richly develops them successively in the four sections of this chapter 11. The topics are: first, the ways in which the Spirit carries out the Spirit’s mission; second, the Holy Spirit’s feminine dimension; third, the Holy Spirit within the Trinity; and, fourth, the Holy Spirit’s mission of transformation and new creation. Boff opens the chapter with several preliminary remarks concerning the traditional and doctrinal affirmations of the Holy Spirit as Lord, as proceeding from the Father, and as being of the same nature as the Father and the Son. He leads into the rest of the chapter by recalling his basic procedure. He indicates that ‘starting from our basic thesis – the complete perichoresis between the three divine Persons – we shall try to bring out the qualities proper to the Person of the Holy Spirit’ (191). He will first show ‘the action of the Holy Spirit in history’. This is, then, the topic he develops at some length in the first section entitled ‘The Influence of the Holy Spirit on Processes of Change’ (191-96). Here in this reflection on the first topic, Boff reviews the works of the Holy Spirit. He starts out more generally with reference to the Spirit’s ways of acting 46

47 48 49

Ibid., 85. For Boff’s more developed presentation of Jesus of Nazareth as liberator, though not in an explicitly trinitarian context, see Boff’s Jesus Cristo Libertador: Ensaio de Cristologia Crítica para o nosso Tempo (Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil: Vozes, 1972)/Jesus Christ Liberator: A Critical Christology for Our Time (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978). For summary and commentary, see Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 76-92. Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 86-97. By comparison, in the shorter text Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion’s chapter 9, he restructures this material into six topics in six sections.

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in the Hebrew Bible. For much of the Hebrew Bible, the Spirit is ‘an original, divine power acting on creation, moving in living things and influencing human beings, especially the prophets’ (191). The Spirit works as well in charismatic political leaders such as the Judges. And then in Israel’s kings who were to rule, protect the poor, and assure justice. Spirit-inspired Prophets arose to rebuke royal injustices. Slowly the Spirit came to be identified with the Suffering Servant. The Spirit would empower the coming Messiah. In the New Testament, Jesus launched his program of liberation by citing Isaiah. ‘The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners’ (Isaiah 61:1 NRSV). By the time between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Spirit had become the presence of God freeing the oppressed and ‘renewing the face of the earth’. (192) Boff goes on, in discussing this first topic, to gather the works of the Holy Spirit under four themes. First, the Spirit is the ‘power of the new and of a renewal in all things’ (192). The Spirit was present in creation and brought about the incarnation as new creation. Jesus preaches and heals in the power of the Spirit. He continues his liberating mission from his baptism to his death on the cross and the Spirit’s raising him from the dead. Pentecost is itself the work of the Spirit. The Spirit frees from obsession with the past and orients humankind and all of creation to the future. The second theme concerns the announcement of the Spirit in the New Testament as the ‘memory of Jesus’. Boff cites several references in John’s Gospel to the Spirit who will teach all concerning Jesus (for example, John 14:26). The Spirit establishes us as sons and daughters of the Father who sent his Son among us (Rom. 8:29). Among many other things the Spirit does, the Spirit assures a continuity between Jesus in the flesh and us in history (193). The third theme of which Boff speaks is the Spirit’s third mission, namely, ‘to liberate from the oppressions brought into being by our sinful state’. The Spirit sets the poor free from oppression by the rich and powerful, encouraging them to find new and creative ways to build a more just world. To use Boff’s phrases, the Spirit opens horizons, breaks bonds, keeps alive hope, and frees from the ‘legalism of the old Judaic regime’ (194). The fourth and final theme is one in which Boff announces that ‘the Spirit is the principle that creates differences and communion’ (194). He sees the community of Jesus’ disciples resting on two columns. The first is that of Christ and his incarnation. It stands for continuity and permanence. The second is that of the Spirit, which represents the ‘emergence of newness, which brings discontinuity’. The two work together, with the Spirit leading to Christ. Boff then reminds us of Paul’s teaching on charisms in 1 Cor. 12:7-11. In concrete phrasing, he describes the gifts of the Spirit which can be put to the service of the community even in smaller local churches. ‘Someone who can organize prayer, lead

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the celebration, instruct children, prepare engaged couples for marriage, teach the brothers and sisters their rights, articulate a Christian presence in the process of liberation in society, consolidate union among all’ (195). True charismatic gifts of the Spirit do not divide. Rather, they enrich the community. For Boff, then, with his theological reflections carried out over the course of his discussion of these four themes, we recognize that the Spirit is an ‘active agent, a divine Person’. The Spirit is sent into our hearts leading us to the Father, the Advocate who gives witness to Jesus. The Spirit is on the same level with Father and Son (196). Boff has so far described various works of the Holy Spirit which Christians experience as being brought about in their lives. He does this primarily by referring to experiences to which early Christians have given witness in the New Testament. He now turns to his second topic, ‘The Feminine Dimension of the Holy Spirit’ (196-98). Here Boff again picks up on New Testament texts and several theological traditions which speak of the Holy Spirit in what are often identified as feminine and maternal terms. These texts and traditions usually link the Spirit with life. The Spirit consoles and teaches, assuring we are not left orphans. The Hebrew Bible sees the Spirit hovering over the waters and being the source of wisdom. The Spirit brings about new creation in the Incarnation and Jesus’ rebirth in the resurrection. Boff recalls the famous phrase of St. Jerome, the great biblical translator. ‘The Spirit is feminine in Hebrew, neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin’. Boff again reminds us that God is beyond sex. What we are concerned with here are human values ‘in their masculine and feminine embodiments’ (198). Masculinity and femininity find their origin and prototypes in the Trinity. Of practical note, however, Boff does not here refer to the Spirit’s possibly masculine traits. The third topic, ‘The Holy Spirit Co-eternal with the Father and the Son’ (198-207), concerns the Spirit and the Spirit’s origin within the Trinity. Boff reviews, at some length, the almost 1,500-year-long discussion concerning the origin of the Holy Spirit. The East, generally considered, insisted that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, as the early, commonly accepted Nicene Creed says. The West, again generally considered, developed a further theological and doctrinal position. It states that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle. This position finds expression in the Western addition to the Nicene Creed. The addition was made without seeking approval from the East. The added phrase, ‘and the Son’ now proclaims that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). Given this profound disagreement between East and West, Boff reviews biblical references to the procession of the Spirit. He then discusses various aspects of the question as to whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son. He follows with a summary of efforts to bridge the gap between the Eastern and Western

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positions and includes his own suggestions.50 Of more immediate interest, though, are several further remarks he makes concerning the Spirit’s role within the Trinity and in relation to creation. He reiterates that our starting point for reflection on the Spirit is, in both cases, the Spirit’s equality and simultaneity with the Father and the Son. Within the Trinity, Boff interprets unbornness, begetting, and procession in terms of ‘mutual recognition and mutual revelation in which each of the three Persons participates simultaneously’ (206). The varied relationships among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all forms of self-revelation and self-gift to one another. Concerning the Spirit’s relation to creation, he stresses the Spirit’s generativity, as exemplified in the Incarnation. Within the Trinity, the Spirit engenders the Father’s joy in the Son. This engendering within the Trinity continues in the Spirit’s mission to create loving communion in the world. Boff ends his reflection on this third topic by at least implying the immediacy with which we experience the Spirit in our lives. ‘Through the Spirit is the way from the intra-trinitarian life, and through the Spirit is the return to the trinitarian life, to the glory of the three divine Persons, now in communion with other created beings who have been caught up in a communion without end’ (207, emphasis added). Boff prolongs his reflection on the mission of the Holy Spirit in the fourth and final topic in chapter 11, ‘The Mission of the Holy Spirit: Transformation and New Creation’ (207-12). Among the many remarks he makes here, we will focus on those touching more directly on the Spirit’s role in liberating from oppression. We will then close by briefly noting his exploratory theological hypothesis regarding the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Mary. Transformation and new creation – this is what Boff sees the Spirit doing. For the Spirit is ‘expansion and union, diversity and communion – in a word, the love that reveals others and is revealed in others’ (207). The Spirit works through action by empowering humans. Thus, the Spirit’s action is hidden within that of humans. The Spirit is present in history, making things new. The Spirit leads the poor to become aware of their oppression and to take an active role in overcoming it. The Spirit works as well within charismatic leaders, whether in politics, science, art, or the like. Where the Spirit acts, there is inventiveness, tenderness, utopian hope for a better future. The Spirit acts in the Church, the Christian community, bringing about diversity of charisms within 50

Boff calls on several Eastern thinkers and Moltmann in the West to express what seems to be his own suggested solution, namely, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each must be considered in their origins as involving the other two. A sort of trinitarian balance. The Son is begotten of the Father through the Spirit and the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. The Son and the Spirit, in turn, witness to their origin from the Father. Trinity and Society, 204-6.

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unity of loving communion and service. The Church is the ‘sacrament of Christ and also that of the Holy Spirit’ (209). Of special note, the Spirit acts in the Eucharist, leading to such communion and service. Boff ends his reflection on the Holy Spirit as transformation and new creation with a suggestion concerning a new theological hypothesis. In addition to the Son becoming incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, he proposes a second, parallel identification. He ‘would say that the Holy Spirit, coming down on Mary, “pneumatized” her, taking on human form in her, in the same manner as the Son who, in a personal and unmistakable manner’ (210-11) did in Jesus. He then sees the Son’s incarnation as consecrating the masculine and the Spirit’s pneumatization doing the same for the feminine. Boff has consistently insisted that what Christians experience is the three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who form a communion arising out of their mutual, loving relations. His insistence led us to look at what he says about each of the three divine Persons as liberators. While writing on the last of the four topics with and through which he presents the Holy Spirit, Boff helpfully includes a sketch of what he sees as an underlying characteristic of each of the three divine Persons. ‘The Father always represents the nature of mystery and inaccessible – but at the same time protective – depth. The Son, in his mission, signifies the Trinity taking root in human history, since our nature has been totally taken up into the Trinity. The Spirit acts universally in all men and women, not in just one of them, as the Son does in Jesus’ (207-8). We turn now to Boff’s view of the trinitarian communion of loving interrelationships and that communion’s liberating role in overcoming inequality and oppression in human societies. Trinitarian Communion and Human Liberation Boff treats of trinitarian communion and its relationship with human liberation at various points throughout his longer text, Trinity and Spirit,51 as well as at various points in his shorter text, Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion. He treats of these two themes and their relationship in more sustained fashion in Trinity and Spirit’s chapter 7, ‘The Communion of the Trinity as Basis for Social and Integral Liberation’.52 We will focus on this chapter 7, which he develops in four sections. In the first two sections, he speaks more generally of the Trinity, giving a dynamic reading of the Trinity. In the first of these two sections (124-28), Boff describes God as eternal living. He speaks of life as ‘a mystery of spontaneity, 51

52

For a brief review of Boff’s reference to trinitarian communion here and there in Trinity and Society, see Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 93-96. And see parallel texts in Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 47-67.

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an inexhaustible and varied process of development from within, manifesting itself in outward relationships’ (125). This dynamic occurs spontaneously and eternally, that is, not temporally, within the Trinity. It characterizes, as well, the Trinity’s relationship with creation. In the second section (128-34), he looks in a general way at the communion brought about by the interrelationships among the three divine Persons. When we say that God is communion, we mean God is ‘three Persons and a single communion and a single trinitarian community’ (133). Trinitarian Communion. The heart of Boff’s theological understanding of trinitarian communion is to be found in Trinity and Society, chapter 7, third section, ‘Perichoresis, Communion and Interpenetration of the Three Divine Persons’ (134-48).53 He calls upon the Greek word perichoresis, used in theology ‘to express this interpenetration of one Person by the others’ (135). He expands this dynamic meaning of perichoresis to include both the interaction among the three divine Persons and to describe the type of unity, indeed communion, which this interaction constitutes. Perichoresis can also have a more static meaning, namely, that of each of the divine Persons as being in the other. But Boff prefers the more dynamic meaning. The divine Persons ‘interpenetrate one another and this process of communing forms their very nature’ (136). And, ‘perichoresis-communion is used in order to express the union in the Trinity, keeping the Christian experience of God as always being Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ (137). This unity of Persons is a multi-relational union of love and selfgiving of each of the Persons to one another. Of importance here, Boff says that according to the scriptures the ‘Persons emerge as three Subjects who engage in mutual dialogue, love one another and are intimately related’ (138).54 Each is for, with, and in the other two. This form, which the unity of the three divine Persons in the Trinity takes, is for Boff revealed in scripture and brought forth in professions of faith. He notes that difference is difficult to live with but is still the starting point to be embraced. As well, the three are ‘irreducible one to another’. Each has a role to play in human liberation. The Father is ‘ultimate mystery, both final refuge and source of everything’. He sends the Son and the Spirit into the world. The Son liberates by proclaiming the Kingdom of life and freedom. The Spirit is divine 53 54

On this third part, see Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 96-102. Boff uses the language of ‘person’ and ‘other’ in his shorter text, as if the three divine Persons in some sense experience one another in a relationship of self and other. See also, for example, ‘This is something we have already considered, perichoresis, one Person being in the others and each Person permeating and being permeated by the other two’. Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 57.

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power working in the Son and leading us to him in whom we see, as he puts it, the face of the Father. The three ‘exist in eternal communion’, differences in an ultimate harmony of love. And, there is an order among them (140). The Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Holy Spirit is the love uniting the two. In this order, the three are co-eternal and eternally interrelated. It is not a question of one causing the other so that the other might seem less equal in divinity than the other. They are co-eternal, eternally interrelated, and equal. We see again that Boff particularly likes the language of revelation to describe the mutual relations among the three. Each one reveals oneself to oneself and to the others. They participate in loving dialogue, giving themselves totally to the other two. Here Boff formulates more fully his basic thesis concerning experience of the Trinity. Christians experience ‘the three divine Persons [who] are simultaneous in origin and co-exist eternally in communion and interpenetration. Each is distinct from the others in personal characteristics and in the communion established by that Person in everlasting relationship with the others, each revealing that Person’s self to itself and the self of the other to them’ (142).55 They are one God who is loving communion. While each Person is distinct, their interrelationships are always triadic. As we have seen in reviewing his remarks on each of the three divine Persons, Boff presents each one in relation to the other two. He then further clarifies that their communion is not a result coming after the interaction which the three Persons are. Rather, it is ‘simultaneous with them, originates with them’ (146).56 Communion is the interaction among them. Finally, in his description of perichoretic, trinitarian communion, Boff insists that such communion is open and inclusive. Son and Spirit act on behalf of all of creation, of all people, and all of history. ‘This trinitarian unity is integrating and inclusive; its end is the full glorification of all creation in the triune God, healing what is sick, freeing what is captive, forgiving what offends divine communion’ (148). Human Liberation. We have reviewed Boff’s argument that what we in faith experience is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their liberating roles regarding creation. We have as well just considered Boff’s effort to explain the trinitarian communion of love which the three divine Persons, in their selfrevelation and gift to one another, constitute. We now take up what is Boff’s most characteristic and insightful proposal. In the fourth section of Trinity and 55

56

Boff states this equality directly in his shorter text, ‘Form all eternity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit coexist ever together. No one comes first and no one later, no one is superior or inferior. They are equally eternal, infinite, and merciful; they make up eternal community’. Ibid., 53. Stated straightforwardly, ‘Wherever one Person is, the other two are always there as well’. Ibid., 60.

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Society’s chapter 7, he sketches out the relationship between, on the one hand, trinitarian communion and, on the other, the overcoming of human oppression. The title of this fourth section of chapter 7 is ‘Trinitarian Communion as Critic of and Inspiration for Human Society’ (148-54).57 As we earlier noted, Boff had already said in the introduction to Trinity and Society: For those who have faith, the trinitarian communion between the divine Three, the union between them in love and vital interpenetration, can serve as a source of inspiration, as a utopian goal that generates models of successively diminishing [destructive] differences. (…) It [the concept of perichoresis] speaks to the oppressed in their quest and struggle for integral liberation [libertação integral]. The community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes the prototype of the human community dreamed of by those who wish to improve society and build it in such a way as to make it into the image and likeness of the Trinity. (6-7)58

Now, he elaborates further on this proposition when he says that awareness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as distinct within the Trinity, ‘produces a critical attitude to personhood, community, society and the church’ (148). This awareness leads us to critique modern ideas of isolated individualism. That the three divine Persons are distinct and yet united in openness to one another provides a corrective to such individualism. And the openness of the Trinity to creation invites us, individually and as communities, to work toward more participatory relationships with other people and other communities. Boff then takes up the question of oppression within societies. From the point of view of trinitarian communion, he criticizes both capitalism and socialism. In capitalism, he sees the building up of great disparity between the ways the wealthy live and the ways in which those who are less fortunate must struggle for the basic needs of life. In capitalist societies, large portions of the population are marginalized. Differences among persons seem to be considered pathological. Such societies ‘are not (except through negation) a vehicle for people in general and Christians in particular to experience the Trinity in history’. In contrast, in trinitarian communion ‘mutual acceptance of differences is the vehicle for the plural unity of the three divine Persons’ (150). 57

58

For a fuller summary and commentary on Boff’s trinitarian communion-based societal critique, see Hartmann, Trinitätslehre als Sozialkritik, 103-11. The importance of this quotation, stressing here integral liberation, repeats what was quoted in our text at n. 30 above. Boff sees a close connection between the Trinity and human societies. ‘Human society is a pointer on the road to the mystery of the Trinity, while the mystery of the Trinity, as we know it from revelation, is a pointer toward social life and its archetype. Human society holds a vestigium Trinitatis since the Trinity is “the divine society”’. Trinity and Society, 119.

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In socialist regimes, societies are organized on a good principle, namely, communion and involvement in production. But such societies tend to subordinate individuals and to dictate, from on high, solutions to problems. They do not encourage creative involvement from the base and the enriching human experience such involvement provides. Against a homogenizing whole, whether capitalist or socialist in nature, trinitarian communion serves as an inspiration to liberating activity. It is not so much a source of criticism of specific social forms as an overall permanent utopia.59 In loving self-gift to one another, the three fully distinct divine Persons invite societies to strive for greater equality and sharing. At the same time, they invite them to respect the distinct value and importance of each of their members. Trinitarian communion stresses participation and equality in a world where many are oppressed. Such participation and equality ‘mirror the very mystery of trinitarian communion in human history’ (152). Boff brings his reflection in chapter 7 of Trinity and Society on the liberating role of the Trinity to a close with several remarks on the Church. In almost poetic form, he remarks that ‘the solar mystery of perichoretic communion in the Trinity sheds light on the lunar mystery of the church’ (153). For him the basic definition of the Church is that of a community in communion with the three divine Persons and in which members are in communion with one another. The Spirit fills the members of the ecclesial community with various gifts enabling them to make important contributions to the local and universal Church. With their varied gifts, distinct members of the Church community are called to serve one another. In so doing, they reflect, as far as possible, the loving relationships among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.60 Testimonials to Liberating Experience of the Trinity We have examined selected texts from two of Boff’s works with further reference to a third. They are, essentially, theological reflections on the Christian 59

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Boff provides helpful expression of what he means by trinitarian communion as utopian goal in his shorter text. ‘The presence of trinitarian communion in history makes it possible for the barriers that turn difference into inequality and discrimination to be overcome; thus in the mystery of the Son (second Person of the Trinity), there is neither Jew nor pagan, men nor women – all are one (Gal 3:28). Economically, all goods are shared (Acts 4:32-35), and socially all are “of one heart and one soul” (Acts 4:32). Such things are of a utopian nature: they are ideals toward which we are headed. They unleash energies so that we may reach ever greater levels of participation and communion, and at the same time we relativize and critique every conquest attained, keeping it open for further improvements’. Holy Trinity: Perfect Communion, 63-64. As Boff remarks in the shorter text, ‘There arises a [Christian] community with diversities that are respected and valued as expression of the wealth of community of the Trinity itself’. Ibid., 66.

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experience of God. More precisely, for the most part they are reflections on Christian experiences of the Trinity. And, again more specifically, reflections on the Christian experience of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit considered from the perspective of a deep concern for liberation from poverty and oppression. These remarks just made concerning Boff’s testimonials to experience of the Trinity remain general. To flesh them out, we need to return briefly to what Boff means by experience of the Trinity. At the same time, we will note that he encourages his readers to participate, or continue to participate, in such liberating trinitarian experiences. In spirituality studies, at this point we would often tend to continue to proceed in a somewhat more descriptive fashion. But, in the present case we are examining Boff’s theological reflections. As theological, such reflections are by their nature exploratory and constructive. They invite those who read them to make further comment, draw attention to what may have been stated more implicitly, and suggest further implications of what has been said. We ourselves can, then, now feel authorized to proceed in modestly more exploratory fashion as we identify Boff’s testimonials to experience of the Trinity. Experiences to Which Boff Gives Witness Boff writes of experience, more generally considered, in his earlier study, La experiencia de Dios. He observes that it occurs within human history, provides contact with an intractable reality, and challenges previous ideas and practices. Due to an accumulation of experiences, persons become experienced. They situate themselves in a wider context in and through their myriad experiences. Their experiences become perspectival. They are conditioned by various factors. Boff himself considers such experiences from the point of view of their being conditioned by concern for liberation of the oppressed. Experiences result in something. Given Boff’s concern, he focuses on their resulting, regrettably, in further oppression or, happily, in at least some degree of liberation from it. Boff describes Christian experiences of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in ways which we can quickly say exemplify these more general characteristics of experience as such. The concrete experiences he refers to are personal, shared, or communal or, ultimately, both. For, in so describing them, he is in effect showing that, again in line with such general characteristics, the intractable reality of what is encountered is unique. That intractable reality is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in their communion. Boff’s more general understanding of experience has, then, in various ways proven helpful. It provides context and initial insight. But we need to qualify what we have just said about this general understanding of experience. Experience of the three divine Persons in their loving communion cannot merely be subsumed under such a general understanding. Boff would himself acknowledge

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that experience of the three divine Persons sets the standard by which we can judge a more general understanding of experience. That standard is whether, and to what extent, a more general understanding of experience is applicable to, and helpful in, understanding what it means to experience the three divine Persons in their uniqueness. Who for Boff, then, are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? They are three distinct subjects interpenetrating one another in a communion of mutual love. It is almost as if, in saying this, he is suggesting that we experience the three divine Persons who themselves experience one another in a spontaneous, simultaneous, and non-temporal way. And what, then, are the experiences we have of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to which Boff witnesses affirmatively? In response to this question, he refers to Jesus’ own experience of a loving Father and a powerful divine Spirit. Jesus’ experience is twofold. It leads Jesus to free those oppressed in various ways. Boff then cites scriptural and especially New Testament texts. These latter texts themselves give witness to ways in which early Christians say they have, after Jesus’ resurrection, now experienced three divine Persons. He goes on to accept post-scriptural developments in trinitarian thought, which result in what he calls the orthodox understanding of the Trinity. Beyond these references, he speaks as well of Christian experience, and indeed concrete experiences, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, occurring over the centuries. In these references to such experiences, Boff constantly brings together experience and reflection on them. It is as if he sees theological reflection as a prolongation, in reflexive thought, of various experiences of God. He seems, in a way, to be supposing that faith-based reflection on experience of the three divine Persons is itself also a way of experiencing them. This time, experience occurs at the level of, and in a way appropriate to, such reflexive thought. His own theological reflection would as well, then, be a form of prolongation of experience of the Trinity. Whether of his own personal experience, or that of the community with which he identifies, or both. In his theological writing, he may well be reflecting both more directly on his own experience of the three divine Persons as well as, or at least, in more mediated fashion on the personal and communal experience others have had and continue to have.61 There is an aspect of Boff’s reflection on individual, shared, and communal Christian experience of the three divine Persons which deserves further explicit 61

On the idea that faith-based theological reflection might be considered a prolongation of personal and/or communal experience of God, see Dale M. Schlitt, Theology and the Experience of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), esp. 1-70 and 237-79. Of at least tangential interest, Boff speaks of the move from doxology to theology. Trinity and Society, 155. Doxology, or praise of God, may well serve as a bridge between personal and communal experience of God, on the one hand, and more systematic theological reflection on that experience, on the other.

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attention. At various times in Trinity and Society, he mentions that we are taken up into and find ourselves within the Trinity. He does this, for example, when he speaks of the incarnation. The second divine Person takes on human nature in all ways but sin. Creation, including especially humankind, is thus brought into the trinitarian communion of the three divine Persons. Boff seems to be working with a spatial image when he makes this proposal. He uses prepositions such as ‘into’, ‘in’, and ‘within’ to describe the relationship between creation and the Trinity. The use of these prepositions leads us to think of the image of creation and humankind in the Trinity as spatial in nature. An example of his use of one of these prepositions: ‘The Trinity in creation seeks to insert creation in the Trinity’ (230).62 These prepositions suggest proximity to, immediacy of, and, consequently, mutual relationships between the Trinity and creation. Boff’s spatially expressed image reinforces the idea that we experience Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And Boff seems, at least by implication, to be saying that the Trinity embraces creation. The three divine Persons experience creation, including us.63 To use a temporal form of reference complementary to the spatial form of reference, of trinitarian eternity, we will see that liberation, in its final and definitive form, is not only a transition from oppression to liberation but total liberation from all forms of oppression. Societies themselves will finally be liberated from all oppression. All will rejoice equally within the Trinity. Boff wraps up his remarks on the Trinity and creation with a couple lyrical phrases regarding this final ‘now’. ‘In trinitized creation, we shall leap and sing, praise and love the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we shall be loved by them, praised by them, invited to dance and sing, sing and dance, dance and love forever and ever, amen’ (231).

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And see the whole of chapter 14, ‘Forever and Ever: The Trinity in Creation and Creation in the Trinity’ in Trinity and Society, 227-31. In Trinity and Society, Boff does not speak explicitly of this sense of being within the Trinity as a form of panentheism. John W. Cooper so remarks in Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers, from Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 280. But, if we understand panentheism in a general way as the affirmation that all is ‘in God’ while retaining its distinctive character, then at least the reality itself to which panentheism refers seems to be present in his thought. To back up this observation, Cooper draws attention to the last part of chapter 13 in Trinity and Society, ‘Creation as the Body of the Trinity’ (23031). He notes that Boff refers explicitly and approvingly to panentheism in his later book, Ecology & Liberation: A New Paradigm (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995), 50-51. Boff entitles a brief part of the book ‘Christian Pan-en-theism: Everything in God, God in Everything’. And see 43-51, with explicit reference to the Trinity on 51, accompanied by a helpful reiteration of the liberating roles of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in terms of ages. He presents them not as consecutive chronological periods of time but as dimensions of the ever-present activity of all three of the divine Persons in any given situation.

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Testimonial Encouragement to Trinitarian Liberation As Boff continues his theological reflection on experience of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he refers more specifically to what we might call communal experiences. As communal experiences, they include and involve, as well as finding their basis in, personal experiences shared among members of the community. He speaks of civil societies, Christian communities, and the Church as a whole. He sees them as communities within which we can, as communities and personally, experience what we in faith recognize as the liberating presence of the three divine Persons in trinitarian communion. For Boff, such experiences occur especially when communities develop more egalitarian, loving structures and relationships through the intervention of the poor and the marginalized. Regrettably, communities can as well serve as occasions for what we could call negative experiences of the Trinity. They do this when the poor and the marginalized are oppressed in them.64 This is the case when communities are or become structured in such a way that the poor and marginalized are held down. They are not treated fundamentally equally with others in the community. They do not flourish, and their potential human contributions are neither appreciated nor accepted. I would suggest, then, that Boff is affirming the experience of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in their trinitarian communion when oppression is overcome in each of these individual, societal, and ecclesial cases. At the same time, he is encouraging the poor and oppressed, indeed all of us, to partake in liberating movements to correct oppressive situations. With his theological reflection, he likewise encourages his readers themselves to experience the liberating presence of the three divine Persons in their own personal, but especially in their communal, lives. He presents the Trinity to his initial readers and to later ones, including us, as their and our utopian goal. For Boff, the Trinity, as egalitarian tri-personal divine communion, inspires us to work in concrete historical contexts in favor of more just and enriching forms of personal, societal, and ecclesial living. In arguing along this line, Boff is encouraging us in faith already now to experience something of the life of the Trinity itself. He is also, in effect, saying that at some point, beyond history, we will experience individual and communal life in the Trinity in such a way that all oppression will have been overcome. For now, he invites us, his readers, to live individually and in community as best we can in our present condition within, and in line with, the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 64

See, for example: the second section of chapter 1 in Boff, Trinity and Society, 13-16, to which he gives the title ‘Disintegrated Understanding of the Three Divine Persons’; the fifth section of chapter 1 in Boff, Holy Trinity, Perfect Community, 9-10, entitled ‘A Disintegrated Experience of the Blessed Trinity’. And see Boff, Trinity and Society, 150.

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Boff has provided testimonials to experience of the Trinity in three forms. The first of these is his prolonged theological reflection with which he seems to be offering his own personal trinitarian testimonial. At the same time, and most importantly, he draws attention to oppressive situations. He argues that such situations call out to us to transform our communities whenever we find that they are or become oppressive. The second form of testimonial finds expression in the action of the poor and the marginalized whom Boff encourages to work individually and in organized groups toward greater justice in their communities. He is in effect suggesting that, in their striving toward trinitarian equality, the poor and the marginalized themselves become testimonials to experience of the Trinity, testimonials in the form of doing. The third form of testimonial to which Boff points is given when societal and ecclesial communities develop ever more just and humanly enriching ways for people to live together. Such communities become societal and ecclesial testimonials, again in the form of something done, to experience of the Trinity, namely, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in their loving communion. They can be sacraments of the Trinity. Boff has indeed concretized his more general understanding of experience, giving it as well a practical and engaging thrust. We can bring our review of Boff and his theological reflection to a close in no better way than by returning to remarks with which he began his book, Trinity and Society. There, at the end of the introduction, he includes three paragraphs not found in the English translation. Given what we have found Boff to be saying as we reviewed his thought on trinitarian liberation from oppression, we should read these paragraphs as being an invitation addressed to us in our personal, societal, and ecclesial lives. The first of them is of special interest. It reads as follows. Attentive reader, if in studying these pages you find increasing within you a sensation of Mystery, thank the Father because unfathomable and loving mystery [as such] is revealed in him. If in your mind you encounter great light, attribute it to the Son because he is the light of light, intelligence, and wisdom. If you feel yourself drawn to communion with the three divine Persons and all those beings in which they dwell and to further participation [leading] to commitment in favor of integral liberation, attribute this to the Holy Spirit because it is in the Holy Spirit that we recognize love, life, and communion.65 65

‘Atento leitor, se ao estudares estas páginas crescer em ti o sentiment do Mistério, agradece-o ao Pai porque nele se revela o misterio abyssal e amoroso. Se tua mente encontrar mais luz, atribui-a ao Filho porque Ele é Luz da Luz, a Inteligência e a Sabedoria. Se te sentires atraido à comunhão com as três divinas Pessoas e com todos os seres que elas habitam, e para que haja mais paticipação te empenhares na libertação integral, tribute-o ao Espirito Santo porque nele reconhecemos o amor, a vida e a comunhão’. Boff, A Trinidade e a Sociedade, 19-20 (my translation in consultation with Bro. Patrick McGee, OMI, longtime resident in Brazil.).

CHAPTER 13 CHARLES NYAMITI An Ancestral Trinitology

With Charles Nyamiti (1931–2020), we find ourselves in East Africa. He was born of a Roman Catholic family ‘in Ndala close to Tabora in Tanzania, in a region known as Unyamwezi, the land of the Nyamwezi. His cultural background is thus that of the Nyamwezi’.1 After seminary studies, he was ordained priest for the Tabora Archdiocese in 1962. He completed doctoral studies in theology at the University of Louvain (Leuven) in 1969, while studying music there as well. The title of his doctoral thesis was ‘Christian and Tribal Initiation Rituals: A Comparative Study of Maasai, Kikuyu and Bemba Rites in View of Liturgical Adaptation’. He then moved to Vienna, where he continued to study music and earned a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Vienna in 1975. His thesis focused on a specific ethnic group’s practice of ancestor cult. It was entitled ‘Ahnenkult bei den ostafrikanischen Kikuyu [Ancestor Cult of the EastAfrican Kikuyu]’.2 Nyamiti is one of the founders of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, where he taught since the early 1980s. He is known as one of sub-Saharan Africa’s leading Christian theologians, indeed one of the most prolific theologians in that region of the world. Gifted linguist, he continued his early interest in the African reality and notion of ancestorship throughout his long career in teaching, research, and writing. Known now as himself ‘an ancestor of African theology’, he has identified several characteristics of the reality and notion of ‘ancestor’ reasonably common to various sub-Saharan cultures. This common 1

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Mika Vähäkangas, In Search of Foundations for African Catholicism: Charles Nyamiti’s Theological Methodology (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 2n3. Biographical and other background information is drawn from this study (1-7), and from Patrick N. Wachege, ‘Charles Nyamiti: Vibrant Pioneer of Inculturated African Theology’, in: African Theology [in the 21st Century]: The Contribution of the Pioneers, vol. 2 (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2006), 149-62, esp. 149-52. The chapter on Nyamiti is available online without indication of pages, but see especially the first three pages, accessed August 10, 2018, https://profiles.uonbi.ac.ke/patrickwachege/files/african_ theology.pdf. Vähäkangas, In Search of Foundations, 289.

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understanding serves as a basic perspective from which he goes on to restate many Christian theological insights in a thoroughly inculturated way. In his decades-long process of restating such insights, ancestor becomes a paradigm in line with which he eventually interprets all of reality.3 Over time, he offers to Christian communities in sub-Saharan Africa and to the worldwide Christian community his own theological insights deeply rooted in African cultures. More specifically regarding the Trinity, Nyamiti has made an impressive contribution to systematic trinitarian theology. That theological contribution will prove, in its own way, to be an important testimonial to experience of the Trinity. But, before so identifying his work, we need to see ways in which he envisions the Trinity in ancestral terms. Toward an African Ancestral Trinitology Nyamiti frequently describes his trinitarian theology as an African ancestral trinitology.4 We will explore his understanding of Trinity by examining the 3

4

According to Vähäkangas, ‘Paradigm in the sense that ancestorship does not only represent a cultural phenomenon but a whole host of cultural values’. In Search of Foundations, 217n282 and see 216. Vähäkangas refers to ‘ancestor’ in Nyamiti’s thought in various ways, such as central category in relation to African thinking (176), genuine [hidden] revelation (192), ‘the central factor connecting his theology and African tradition’ (212), and ‘ancestor [as] the dominant point of departure for Nyamiti’s theological elaboration’ (214). In his study, Vähäkangas often and at great length discusses African ancestorship in general and Nyamiti’s use of it. He underscores the great importance that Nyamiti’s own ethnic group places on ancestral veneration (214). Already now it might be of interest to note Vähäkangas’s judgment, without evaluating its justification, concerning Nyamiti’s ancestral trinitology. ‘What is radically new to the traditional African pattern is that Nyamiti brings the Trinity into the core of his concept of ancestrality. This necessarily transforms the nature of ancestorship to fit the Trinity’ (226). In this transformation, as we shall see, Nyamiti has as well significantly enriched, even modified, Western trinitarian theology, especially as expressed by Thomas Aquinas. For instance, Aquinas insisted that created reality has a real relation of dependence on God, but that God has only a relation of reason with created reality. Nyamiti, for his part, insists that in his ancestral reading of the Trinity humans have a specific relationship with each of the three divine Persons. There is one common action, but each Person works according to that Person’s unique personal property. Charles Nyamiti, Studies in African Christian Theology, vol. 1, Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind: Methodological and Trinitarian Foundations (Nairobi: Catholic University of Eastern Africa Publications, 2005), 122. He does not speak of the relations between the three divine Persons, on one hand, and humans, on the other, as relations of reason. Nor are they relations based merely on appropriation. As Nyamiti describes it in his Glossary, ‘appropriation = attribution to a single divine Person of characteristics or activities which are common to the three Persons of the Trinity’ (176). See, for example: Charles Nyamiti, ‘The Trinity from an African Ancestral Perspective’, in: African Christian Studies 12 (1996) no. 4, 38; ———, ‘The Trinity as Source and Soul of

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overall, more synthesizing development of his systematic theology of the Trinity. He presents this extensive overview in the first volume of his collected, and often somewhat reworked, studies. This volume is entitled Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind: Methodological and Trinitarian Foundations.5 Indeed, Nyamiti has reflected on and written about the Trinity in many of his studies leading up to this volume. He did so already in several of his 15 early, initially unpublished writings. Some of them on the Trinity have subsequently been published, often with revisions and additions.6 Among these published studies, several form a series of progressively more developed theological essays on the Trinity. In effect, they are iterations, in whole or part, of previously published texts.7 By way of example, Nyamiti speaks relatively briefly of the Trinity in his 1977 monograph, African Tradition and the Christian God.8 Ten years later he picks up on language and insights mentioned there. He continues to build on them in a more focused, 1987 working paper, ‘Ancestral Kinship in

5

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7 8

African Family Ecclesiology’, in: African Christian Studies 15 (1999) no. 1, 91; ———, Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, 4. Three important studies on Nyamiti’s African ancestral trinitology: a review and critique especially from a Lutheran perspective, Mika Vähäkangas, ‘Trinitarian Processions as Ancestral Relationships in Charles Nyamiti’s Theology: A European Lutheran Critique’, in: Swedish Missiological Themes 86 (1998), 251-63; more generally and from a methodological point of view, the previously mentioned study, Vähäkangas, In Search of Foundations; Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), where he remarks on the African context (349-57) and on Nyamiti (358-69) with critical reflections (365-69). For several works more widely concerned with Nyamiti’s theology, see Vähäkangas, In Search of Foundations, 14. Page references to this volume, Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, will usually be given directly in the text as well as in notes in which the reference to it will be clear from the context. When page numbers to short sections (equivalent of 3 pages or less) of a given chapter are given in the text, indications of the exact page on which a quotation from that short section is found or a more general reference to where a point is made in that short section will not be further indicated. Italics in quotations from this volume of Nyamiti’s are in the original. In citations from, and references directly to, Nyamiti’s thought, capitalization of words such as ‘Ancestor’ (God the Father), ‘Descendant’ (God the Son), as well as ‘Gift’ and ‘Oblation’ (God the Holy Spirit) will follow Nyamiti’s practice. Nyamiti usually capitalizes them when they refer to divine ancestorship but not when they refer to human ancestorship. On these unpublished texts and on Nyamiti’s writings in general, see Vähäkangas, In Search of Foundations, 3-7, with accompanying initial remarks on areas of development in Nyamiti’s thought. I have not had access to unpublished texts in their unpublished form. For Vähäkangas’s list of them as well as of Nyamiti’s published studies until 1996, see 289-92. See also a select listing of Nyamiti’s writings, some unpublished and some published, in Wachege, ‘Charles Nyamiti’,160-62. Vähäkangas offers brief remarks in this regard in In Search of Foundations, 7. Charles Nyamiti, African Tradition and the Christian God (Eldoret, Kenya: Gaba, 1977), esp. 48-52, 62-65.

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the Trinity: An African Theology on the Trinity’,9 prepared for a meeting at the Gregorian University in Rome. Nyamiti then integrates most of this paper into his longer, 1996 article on the Trinity, ‘The Trinity from an African Ancestral Perspective’.10 Another ten or so years later, he includes the text of this 1996 article in his again considerably longer 2005 presentation on the Trinity in Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind: Methodological and Trinitarian Foundations.11 This 2005 volume is divided into two parts. The first part (3-61) is made up of the book’s first two chapters, one on basic elements in African theology and the other on Nyamiti’s theological methodology. The second part (65-173) consists in the third chapter, ‘Ancestral Kinship in the Trinity’. Nyamiti divides this chapter into four sections. In the first section, he briefly presents the understanding of African ancestral cult with which he is working. In the second, he reflects constructively on trinitarian relationships from an ancestral perspective and, in the third, he remarks on several practical consequences of the Trinity considered from this perspective. In the fourth, he brings in further, somewhat wider-ranging and concluding reflections.12 One of Nyamiti’s main concerns in this book is to lay out clearly his overall way of doing systematic theology with a special, longer-term interest in Christ’s ancestral status (vii-viii, 147). But, given his theological approach, he finds that he must first situate his reading of Christ as ancestor within the wider context of an ancestral trinitology (65). He goes so far as to identify African ancestral trinitology as this volume’s main subject-matter (9). We will occasionally refer to the first, more methodological part of the book. But our primary concern will remain with the second part. There he makes available much of his previous thought on Trinity while further developing it. In the first section (65-70) of chapter 3, Nyamiti acknowledges differences among various ethnic groups, which have somewhat different communal 9

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Charles Nyamiti, ‘Ancestral Kinship in the Trinity: An African Theology on the Trinity’, in: Inculturation: Effective Inculturation and Ethnic Identity, Working Papers on Living Faith and Cultures, ed. Arij A. Roest Crollius (Rome: Centre ‘Cultures and Religions’, Pontifical Gregorian University, 1987), 29-48. Nyamiti, ‘The Trinity from an African Ancestral Perspective’, 38-74, with remarks on 38 concerning his incorporating into this article much of his then previous writing on the Trinity. In Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, Nyamiti refers as well to other studies of his on the Trinity. If not already cited elsewhere here in the notes, those other studies which seem more directly relevant to an understanding of his trinitarian thought will be indicated when we treat of points in his various studies where he refers to them. See Nyamiti, Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, vii. He treats the material on pages 42-46 of his 1996 African Christian Studies article (see, nn. 4 and 10 above) separately from the rest of the text of the article. These pages 42-46 are developed somewhat differently in Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, where he transfers them to the beginning of the volume (9-16). We will work with this fourth section more in the last part of our present chapter.

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understandings of what being an ancestor means. He argues, though, that there are several elements common to many of these traditional African understandings of ancestorship. There are other elements which are not as common but are genuinely African and express African cultural values. As such, Nyamiti argues, they can be generalized and included in a richer Black African understanding of what it means to be an ancestor.13 By way of example, he says that some African communities do not consider the Creator as an ancestor. Others do not seem to require that ancestors be mediators between humans and the divine. Nyamiti acknowledges these and other examples of variations in the understanding of ancestorship among ethnic communities. But, for him it is important to arrive at an understanding of ancestorship basically common to sub-Saharan Black Africans. Before we see what Nyamiti identifies as basic characteristics of that common understanding of ancestorship, we need to note two preliminary remarks on his part. First, ancestral cult is closely related to the African sense of vital force. African cultures consider ‘strengthening of vital force (…) one of the basic motivations of ancestral cult’ (66).14 Second, Africans find themselves in a relationship of both fear and fascination with their ancestors. This belief in such

13

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Earlier on in his 2005 study, Nyamiti reflects at some length (9-16) on a problem which arises when he attempts to work out an African ancestral trinitology. The problem represents a specific case of the wider question of how to approach African studies. Does one restrict oneself to studies related to a specific ethnic community since there are differences among them in their social organization and cultural outlooks? Or can one generalize and work with an understanding, in this case concerning ancestorship, which is both basically common to various ethnic communities and respectful of variations in their organization and outlooks? Nyamiti himself had done studies on specific ethnic communities. So, he is familiar with the social and cultural values of several of them. He himself has heard of and lived such values significant in his own ethnic community. He insists on the importance of such studies. Yet, at the same time, he says that, as compared with more socio-cultural studies, one is justified in thinking at a more universal level, especially regarding theological studies. For theology is by its nature universalizing. If a specific value or attitude found in several ethnic communities is truly African, then other ethnic communities should be able to call upon it to enrich their own theological reflection (15-16). A fuller quotation: ‘In black Africa, ancestral veneration is intimately linked with the traditional worldview. In this worldview, life understood as sacred power (vital force), is a central element. The ideal of African culture is coexistence and strengthening of vital force in the human community and the world at large. This ideal is one of the basic motivations of ancestral cult’ (65-66). For an insightful discussion of vital force, as developed by Fr. Placide Tempels and then critiqued, see Stephen O. Okafor, ‘“Bantu Philosophy”: Placide Tempels Revisited’, in: Journal of Religion in Africa 13 (1982) no. 2, 83-100, accessed September 2, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1581204. Nyamiti carefully cites Tempels as one who draws attention to some elements from various African cultures which may be considered ‘authentic African values, and as values they transcend all ethnic limits’ (15).

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experience, as Nyamiti puts it, helps understand Africans’ ambivalent behavior in that relationship (67-68). With Nyamiti’s two observations in mind, we can now look more directly at how he describes his common understanding of African ancestorship. That understanding, paraphrasing Nyamiti, includes five characteristics. They are kinship, superhuman or sacred status of the ancestor, mediation, exemplarity of behavior in community, and right or title to regular sacred communication with earthly kin. These five characteristics are so important for Nyamiti as he develops his own Christian ancestral trinitology that we should quote his summary of them in full. a) Kinship between the ancestor or ancestress and his or her earthly kin. In most cases the ancestor is also the source of life of his terrestrial relatives. b) Superhuman or sacred status of the ancestor, acquired usually (but not invariably) through death. Such status includes superhuman vital force and other spiritual qualities obtained through special nearness to the Supreme Being. c) Mediation. The ancestor is frequently, although not always, believed to be the mediator between his earthly kin and the Supreme Being. d) Exemplarity of behavior in community. Hence, in many cases, no one can enjoy ancestral status without having led a morally good life, according to African moral standards. e) The ancestor enjoys right or title to regular sacred communication with his earthly kin through prayers and ritual donations (oblations). This communication is a sign of love, thanksgiving, confidence and homage to the ancestor from his earthly relatives. The ancestor is expected to respond benevolently to such prayers and rituals by bestowing bodily and spiritual goods to his kin as a sign of his love, gratitude, faithfulness and respect towards them. (68-69)

Nyamiti will consider relationships between humans and the members of the divine ancestral Trinity in terms of these five characteristics. But first he dedicates a considerable amount of time to his interpretation of relationships among the three divine Persons within the Trinity as themselves ancestral relations. Trinitarian Ancestral Relationship We turn now to the second section of chapter 3 (70-95). Here Nyamiti proceeds in three steps. He affirms the ancestral identity of the Trinity, reflects further on that identity, and then considers the filioque controversy from an African ancestral perspective. At the beginning of the first step, he briefly notes several aspects of his overall methodological approach in developing an ancestral trinitology (70). These remarks provide the occasion for us to expand slightly on the way in which he proceeds as he reflects on the Trinity from an ancestral perspective.

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We will expand on his initial methodological comments in this first step by recalling several of his methodological remarks found earlier in this volume. There he points out that he constructs his systematic theology of the Trinity in four somewhat parallel moves. First, he critically accepts the Bible and Christian Church tradition (16-18).15 Particularly concerning the Trinity, he refers especially but not exclusively to Western Christian Church tradition. More specifically, but again not exclusively, he dialogues with Augustinian-Thomistic trinitarian theology (116). In effect, he is working with the results of centuries of communal and individual Christian experience of God and efforts to express and interpret that experience. Second, he appeals to African social, cultural, and religious sources and again, in our case, to understandings of ancestorship. He will speak of various African themes (25) and cultural values (26), which he critically purifies and employs to restate and further develop theological insights (18-22). These insights regard the nature of relations among the three divine Persons as well as between them and creation, especially between them and humans both in community and considered individually. They concern, as well, relations among humans viewed in the light of the Trinity as exemplary ancestral reality. In effect, he is working with the resulting expressions (themes) and interpretations (values) of many generations of African ancestral experience.16 Third, in describing the three divine Persons and consequently the Trinity as such in ancestral terms, he applies these expressions and interpretations to the divine Persons in analogical ways. That is, he acknowledges similarities between the meanings of these terms in relation to the three divine Persons and in relation to humans. But he stresses even more differences in the ways these terms are used in the two cases (70). Fourth, Nyamiti offers insights resulting from 15

16

The page references in this paragraph are to specific examples of the ways in which Nyamiti proceeds. They are representative of what he says, in these regards, here and there in Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind. Note, for example, the way Nyamiti speaks of his approach to the filioque question (on Nyamiti on this question, see further below in the present chapter) in Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, 92. He says that when he refers to African ancestral values and insights he is not proceeding simply based on human experience. But, the important point for us is that, in so refusing to reduce his procedure regarding his ancestral understanding of the Trinity, he is at the same time acknowledging the origins of various African ancestral values and insights in human experience. ‘I do not mean to deduce the presence of active spiration in the divine Ancestor and Descendant from the mere fact that similar activity is found in African ancestors and descendants mutually communicating through oblations and other donations. This kind of reasoning would (…) imply that the life of the Trinity can be known from human experience apart from supernatural revelation’ (92). And see again Nyamiti’s specific reference to African experience of the sense of fear and trembling before ancestors (67-68). Note also Nyamiti’s appeal to human experience in working in an analogical way to speak of the Trinity (32).

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his ancestral reading of the Trinity both to African Christian communities and to the worldwide Christian community. These insights can enrich various communities’ overall understanding of the Trinity. They can as well encourage more deeply Christian ways of living within community and in relation to the wider world characterized by such a great variety of cultures (for example, 81, 89-95). Establishing the Trinitarian Ancestral Relationship With this just-mentioned fourfold method of reflecting on the Trinity from an African ancestral perspective in mind, we are now ready to return directly to Nyamiti’s three-step presentation of trinitarian ancestral relationships. In this first step (70-73), he justifies his speaking of the Trinity in ancestral terms by recalling the five elements,17 as mentioned here above, common to ancestorship. He applies them in various ways to the three divine Persons in their relationships with one another within the trinitarian family.18 Nyamiti identifies the divine Father-Son relationship as the obvious parallel to ancestral kinship. As parent, the Father is the Ancestor and, then, the Son is the Descendent. As an example of his insistence that any ancestral elements apply to the Divine analogically, he speaks of the God the Father as being both Father and Mother, as Ancestor and Ancestress.19 ‘God the Father is also (analogically speaking) the Mother of the Logos in the immanent Trinity’. The first Person of the Trinity is both Father and Mother. Human ancestors gain superhuman sacred status through death. In this new status, they gain ‘superhuman 17

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By way of recall, to use Nyamiti’s own words, ‘Kin relationship’, ‘Superhuman sacred status’, ‘Mediation’, ‘Exemplarity’, and ‘[T]itle to regular sacred communication’ (70-71). On Nyamiti on the ancestral Trinity as family, a notion he often treats more indirectly, see ‘Trinity as Source and Soul of African Family Ecclesiology’, 34-92. See also Charles Nyamiti, Studies in African Christian Theology, vol. 3, Some Contemporary Models of African Ecclesiology: A Critical Assessment in the Light of Biblical and Church Teaching (Nairobi: Catholic University of Eastern Africa Press, 2007), 84-110. Among many points of interest made here, Nyamiti says that ‘the Church is not only spreading God’s kingdom in the cosmic world, but is also participating in Christ’s pneumatic gradual process of “trinifying” the universe and of the “enworlding” of the Trinity until the Parousia, when God will be all in all’ (105, italics in the original). He refers to Anthony Kelly, The Trinity of Love: A Theology of the Christian God (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989), 97. At this point (70, 162n7), Nyamiti refers to two of his studies, ‘The African Sense of God’s Motherhood in the Light of Christian Faith’, in: African Ecclesiastical (Ecclesial) Review 23 (October 1981) no. 5, 269-74, and ‘The Trinitarian Foundation of the Church’s Teaching on Christian Marriage and Sexual Ethics’, in: African Christian Studies 1 (December 1985) no. 2, 70-92, with specific reference to 78, 90n17. While strongly affirming the Fatherhood and Motherhood of the first divine Person in the Trinity, Nyamiti tends to refer to that Person simply as Ancestor. We will follow his practice, though it is important to recall his strong affirmation of divine Fatherhood and Motherhood.

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forces and sacred relationship to (…) [their] living kin’. Parallel, but eminently superior to this ancestral sacred status, is the Father’s sanctity. The Father is holy by virtue of his divinity and not by death. The Son enjoys this same level of holiness due to his numerical identity with the Father. This same holiness grounds the ‘infinitely sacred and mystical relationship’ of Father and Son to each other. As to mediation, the Father is not a mediator. But mediation is not essential to all understandings of ancestorship. Nyamiti then sees the Father as exemplar of his Son, who is the Father’s ‘perfect image in being and activity’. Nyamiti treats of the Holy Spirit at relatively greater length than he did the Father and the Son.20 He speaks of the Spirit in ancestral terms when he refers to ancestors’ ‘title to regular sacred communication’. African ancestors have the right to receive prayers and ritual offerings or oblations from their descendants. In turn, ancestors are expected to provide their descendants with various benefits in gratitude for prayers and oblations. Nyamiti sees a similar, though more profound, form of communication taking place between the Father and the Son. That communication is the loving relationship between the two, who give of themselves totally to one another. The Spirit, who is this loving relationship, is, then, loving self-gift of each to the other. Nyamiti goes on to ask if the Spirit is not only gift but ancestral Oblation between the Father and the Son. The Father and Son give themselves to one another not only through their goodness but also through their sanctity or holiness. For Nyamiti, this self-giving fulfills the definition of ritual Offer or Oblation. It is ‘an expression of homage or respect (…) or of a desire to please’. So, both love and ‘homage or respect to the infinite holiness of the divinity in each of the two Persons’ are motivations in the giving of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, the spontaneity on the part of the Father in his goodness, namely, in begetting and gifting with the Spirit, serves as reason for the Son’s communicating the Spirit to the Father. This communication of the Spirit is an expression of gratitude on the part of the Son. Again, then, the Father’s offer of the Spirit to the Son is an ‘expression of reward and thanksgiving to his Son’. Nyamiti calls this move on the part of the Father a pneumatic donation. He justifies his speaking of the Trinity in terms of ancestorship and of the Spirit in terms of oblation with a brief closing remark. ‘The Father and the Son communicate the Holy Spirit to each other as ancestral Gift and Oblation in token of their mutual love, homage and gratitude’.

20

We will need to follow Nyamiti’s own wording even more closely here as he faces the challenging question of the ancestral character of the Holy Spirit.

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Further Theological Reflections Nyamiti continues his constructive reflection on trinitarian ancestral relationships in a second step, entitled simply ‘Further Theological Reflections’ (73-89), in his three-step presentation of trinitarian ancestral relationship. In these reflections, he usually notes various, more traditional trinitarian theological positions, especially those arising in the Augustinian-Thomistic traditions of trinitarian thought. At the same time, he often describes differences between human ancestral relations and those within the Trinity. In this way, he again underscores the analogical nature of speaking of the Trinity in ancestral terms. Then he generally points to richer and more complete insights which arise when one interprets intra-trinitarian relations from an ancestral perspective. We will pay special attention, as Nyamiti does, to contributions he sees his ancestral interpretations making to ongoing, worldwide Christian theological reflection on the Trinity. He often, and respectfully, presents his insights as complementary to those in previously developed trinitarian thought. Nyamiti carries out eight further theological reflections. In the first (73-74), he proposes several conclusions to be drawn from his previous description of the Trinity in ancestral terms. He concludes that ‘God the Father is, analogically speaking, the Ancestor and Ancestress of his Son, and this latter is his true Descendant’. He notes that to be an ancestral reality a sacred relationship must be a ‘kinrelationship involving consanguineous or vital (i.e. of life) bond of some sort between the related parties’. He adds that Ancestor and Descendant make a ritual offering to each other by ‘raising their mind to each other in a loving devotional fashion’. This ritual communication is, as he has mentioned, the Holy Spirit. Christ, in turn, is both our Ancestor and our Brother. Being both is not antithetical, given our calling as brother and sister through grace, of which Christ is the source. Following upon these, mainly summary and concluding remarks, Nyamiti continues with seven more reflections. In the second reflection (74-75), he returns to the question of the Father as Ancestor and the Son as Descendant. He says that considering them in this way means more than merely speaking of them as Father and Son. Working from an ancestral perspective necessarily brings in the notion and reality of sacredness, that is, sanctity and holiness. When we consider Father and Son as Ancestor and Descendant, we acknowledge they are holy because they are divine, with the Father as Progenitor and holy Person. Speaking of Father and Son does not as such necessarily give expression to the characteristic of holiness. Holiness complements generation. In the third reflection (75-77), Nyamiti looks at the ways in which considering Father and Son as Ancestor and Descendant provide further grounding of the Father’s role as exemplar in relation to the Son. He says that more

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traditional trinitarian theology sees the Father’s role rooted in the divine nature which Father and Son share. Begetting, as intellectual generation, produces likeness and identity of being. But Nyamiti wants to enrich the understanding of the Father’s exemplarity vis-à-vis the Son. He analyses the rootage of ancestral exemplarity in both the Ancestor and the Descendant. In African cultures, ancestors are exemplars because they model ‘conduct or way of living in community’. In turn, descendants honor and follow the example of their ancestors. They act out of ‘filial love or piety, respect or homage of (…) [their] ancestors’ superhuman sacred status, [and] fear of evil consequences’ if they are not respectful. For descendants the intrinsic goodness of ancestors is of secondary importance from the point of view of motivation. What counts more for descendants is devotion to their ancestors in the light of their ancestors’ superhuman sacred status. What also counts for descendants is fear of evil consequences if they would not express appropriate devotion to their ancestors. Nyamiti cleanses this ancestral notion of exemplarity by briefly noting the need to correct the notion of fear. Once cleansed, these motivations characteristic of human descendants in their relationships with ancestors shed light, analogically, on the Son’s relationship to the Father. Nyamiti acknowledges that the basis for the Son’s following the example of the Father is rooted, secondarily, in the shared divine nature. But he focuses on the Son’s ‘will and activity (life)’ as the primary basis for such following. The Son’s conformity to the Father is anchored in the Son’s reflecting perfectly the Father’s will and activity. ‘The traditional approach to the Father’s and Son’s consubstantiality is ontological and intellectualistic, whereas the African approach is vitalistic and voluntaristic’. For Nyamiti, these two approaches are complementary. He brings this reflection to a close with the observation that traditional trinitarian theology explains divine freedom as the spontaneity of the Son’s response to the Father’s ontological goodness in begetting the Son. But, from an ancestral perspective, divine freedom finds expression especially in the fact that ‘the spontaneity of the Logos [is] (…) primarily (…) the manifestation of his love, fidelity and homage to his divine Ancestor’. Nyamiti’s fourth reflection (77-80) is a prolongation of his remarks on the Holy Spirit previously made from an ancestral perspective. The Holy Spirit is the Father’s and Son’s mutual self-gift, oblation, love, homage, and gratitude. This ritual communication is ‘in God (…) inseparable from the idea of the Holy Spirit’. The ancestral relationships in God are ‘sacred, ritual, eucharistic and pneumatic’. Nyamiti speaks of a ‘sort of ritual or ceremony in the immanent Trinity’. The Holy Spirit is, then, not only love but also ‘divine Homage and Doxology in Person’. In turn, the Spirit enables us to render homage and eucharistic doxology to God. Nyamiti brings this consideration to a close when he recalls the traditional idea that the mutual interpenetration among Father, Son, and Spirit is called in Greek perichoresis. From the perspective of ancestral ritual

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communication, the Spirit assures infinite interpenetration of the three divine Persons. In the Trinity, we find a form of ritual communication so profound that such sacred communication between human ancestor and descendant becomes but a poor image of that which constitutes the Trinity. In the fifth reflection, Nyamiti addresses further the relationship in the Trinity between the Father and Son, on one hand, and the Holy Spirit, on the other (80-81). Given that ‘divine Ancestorship and Descendancy are essentially pneumatic categories’, the Spirit is involved in the relationship between Father and Son. The second procession, namely, that of the Spirit is an essential ingredient in this first procession.21 This is not to say the Spirit arises directly and solely from the Father without a ritual connection, or the Spirit would, then, be a mere finite descendant. Rather, the Spirit is brought forth by the joint will of the Ancestor and the divine Descendant. Such pneumatic ancestral terms and all they imply go ‘beyond the more traditional terminology of “Father”, “Son” and “generation”’. In the sixth reflection (81-84), Nyamiti stresses the understanding of the Holy Spirit as Gift and, from an ancestral perspective, Oblation – even within the Trinity. He appeals to M. J. Scheeben’s reading of Augustine’s understanding of the Holy Spirit as Gift arising out of love between Father and Son.22 Nyamiti notes especially Scheeben’s idea of the freedom of spontaneity to justify his reference to the Spirit as Gift and Oblation within the Trinity itself. Scheeben recognizes that Gift or Oblation presupposes freedom in some way. With Scheeban, Nyamiti argues that the Spirit proceeds necessarily by nature and spontaneously, that is, freely, by love. We are justified in speaking analogically of the Spirit as ‘Person-Gift in the inner life of God’. The seventh and penultimate reflection (84-87) concerns the question of an ancestral Oblation or ritual Offer as a ritual ceremony within the Trinity. Here, Nyamiti argues that three elements constitute a ritual. The first of them is ‘one or usually a number of “gesta” performed according to a predetermined form of procedure’. He finds in the Trinity several acts or processions, namely, begetting, spirating, and mutual self-donation of Father and Son in the Spirit. This third 21

22

In his longer study on ‘naming’, considered from an African perspective as a way of gaining further theological insight into the Trinity, Nyamiti writes succinctly concerning the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father’s generation of the Son, ‘In the Trinity the Logos is begotten (named) as Son of God in fullness simply because the Father’s begetting (naming) activity comprises spiration as its inner and complementary moment’. ‘The Naming Ceremony in the Trinity’, in: African Christian Studies, part 2, 4 (November 1988) no. 3, 75 (italics in the original and see also n. 24 below). Nyamiti refers to Matthias Joseph Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity (London: [Herder?], 1970), 106ff. He also cites David Coffey, ‘The Holy Spirit as the Mutual Love of the Father and the Son’, in: Theological Studies 51 (1990), 193-229.

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act is ‘utterance, love, sacred homage (doxology) and gratitude’. There is an order among these acts. The Father is logically prior self-knowing. This act is followed by the begetting of the Son and the Spirit’s arising as the fruit of the Father’s and the Son’s self-donation in, as he says, mutual ancestral love, respect, and thanksgiving. The second element is the ‘religious dimension (form of divine service) to whose performance symbolic meanings are attached’. Here Nyamiti is speaking of each of the three Persons as being engaged in these sacred ritual acts. These acts involve symbols. The Son is the revelation of the Father. The Spirit is the ‘expression of the mutual love, homage and gratitude of the Father and his Son’. The third element is ‘regularity of procedure established by tradition’. In the Trinity, the procedure is not established by human tradition but by ‘the intrinsic demands of the divine being’. This true ritual ceremony, occurring within the Trinity, is the three divine Persons’ Eucharist. Father and Son give themselves mutually in gratitude and the Spirit is the personal symbol of this self-giving. In the final reflection in this series of eight, Nyamiti prolongs his application of the African ancestral notion of sacredness, sanctity, and holiness to the Trinity (87-89). Here he first presents the African sense of the sacredness of ancestral relationships. He observes that there is already a certain basic sense of sacredness to relationships, for example, between a parent and child though such a relationship is not yet ancestral. A human person becomes an ancestor in a kin-relationship at death. But simply being a parent does not, even after death, justify describing the relationship as a sacred ancestral relationship. There must be something more, and that something is ‘special proximity to the Supreme Being’. Nyamiti examines anew ancestral trinitarian relations to describe further such special proximity. He identifies and illustrates a trinitarian parallel to the understanding of human ancestral relationships. This parallel he finds in ‘the ancestral holiness of the divine Descendant’ considered in the context of the absolute proximity of Ancestor, Descendent, and Oblation. This absolute proximity is pneumatic perichoresis. It is the absolute oneness and holiness of the three divine Persons. The Father is source of all holiness, with whom the Son is in ‘mutual communication in their ancestral Oblation (the divine Spirit)’. Human ancestors in turn share in this holiness of the divine Descendant through their sacred relationship with him. For they participate in Christ’s Ancestorship as Christ’s spiritual descendants. There is a sacred kin-relationship within the Trinity and, in dependence on it, a sacred kin-relationship between ancestor and descendants. Ancestral Trinitology and the Filioque Controversy Nyamiti rounds out his constructive theological reflection on trinitarian ancestral relationship with a third step (89-95). Here he suggests ways in which an

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ancestral trinitology could contribute at least to clarifying, if not resolving, the centuries-long Filioque controversy. He opens by summarizing several aspects of the controversy. Generally stated, the Eastern Church insists that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. The Western Church has developed a theology in which the Spirit proceeds as a single spiration from the Father and the Son. For Nyamiti, then, in the West both Father and Son are active sources of the Spirit, with the Father as primary source. In the Eastern or Orthodox position, only the Father is active principle or source of the spiration of the Spirit. True, one might also speak of the Spirit proceeding from the Father through the Son. But, in this case the Father would be active principle and the Son passive principle or source (89-90). Nyamiti recalls that, in his African ancestral trinitology, Ancestor and Descendant are both active in giving rise to the ritual communication between them. This communication is the Oblation which is the Holy Spirit (92). Along with what he has now presented concerning ancestral trinitology, he continues to presuppose revelation and established, but especially Western, trinitarian positions as he reviews the filioque question. In effect, here he moves through several more concrete steps to argue, in a more sympathetic way, the overall Western trinitarian approach. Though he does not necessarily proceed in the following order when presenting his argument, I would suggest that logically speaking he proceeds in four steps. First, he describes human ancestral understandings of the relationships between ancestor and descendant. For example, both ancestor and descendant are active in ritual communication (92).23 Second, he purifies these understandings of aspects which would not apply to the Trinity as infinite. Nyamiti brings in the following example. In human ancestor and descendant relations, the forms of these communications differ, depending on whether one looks at them from the perspective of the ancestor or of the descendant. In the Trinity, though, there is only one form of ritual communication which is the Holy Spirit as the self-gift of Father and Son to one another (92-93). Third, he stresses anew the active role that both Father and Son, as 23

In speaking of Nyamiti’s overall way of proceeding, Vähäkangas writes that ‘Nyamiti begins his theological work from below, analyzing the common elements of African understandings of ancestorship’. ‘Trinitarian Processions as Ancestral Relationships’, 252. It is true, as I am indicating, that logically speaking Nyamiti proceeds from an analysis of the African ancestral reality. But he does this within the context of biblical writings and Christian trinitarian traditions. He presupposes these writings and traditions and, as such, they serve as his basic systematic theological starting point. For his part, Vähäkangas qualifies his initial remark concerning the African cultural understanding of ancestorship as starting point from below when he later writes, ‘Thus, even if the starting-point in considering ancestral relations in God is from below, the actual focus is strongly theology from above viewing God rather as He is in Himself than as He is experienced by human beings’ (253). See also n. 16 above.

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Ancestor and Descendant, play in the spiration of the Spirit (92). Fourth, after moving from human ancestral relations to analogically understood trinitarian relations, he returns to an enlightened understanding of such human relations considered in view of the trinitarian ones. He now sees them as created replicas of what we could call the originary trinitarian relations. In this way, he further grounds his previous move from human ancestral relations to divine ones. Human relations exist as dependent images of the divine ones, for humans are created in the image of God. To illustrate the similarity between human ancestral relations and divine ones, Nyamiti refers to African naming practices (93-94).24 In human ancestral relations, the ancestor’s existence is often seen as dependent on the descendant’s continuing the ritual relationship between them on the ‘affectional, personal and dialogal planes’. Indeed, Africans often give a child their name to encourage their being remembered. Thus, they help insure their survival as an ancestor after their death. Nyamiti then draws several parallels with this naming practice at the level of the Trinity. God the Father ‘names (…) his Son and Descendant in order ultimately to live in him’. This naming process culminates in the reciprocal pneumatic communication between the two, which is the Holy Spirit. Through this naming, divine Ancestor and divine Descendant live in one another. They do this through the Spirit who is ancestral Oblation. ‘The divine Ancestor and Descendant would cease to exist as such if their ritual ancestral encounter in the Spirit were to be abolished’ (94). In this way, the divine ancestral encounter stands in parallel with the need for ritual contact if the human ancestor and descendant relationship is to continue. Nyamiti brings his reflection on the filioque question to a hope-filled close. He suggests that considering the question from an African ancestral perspective will enrich our understanding of the relationship between the procession of the Son and that of the Spirit. Finally, he is sensitive to the need of the Western Churches to learn further from the Eastern Churches regarding the procession of the Holy Spirit. Some Practical Consequences Nyamiti has been reflecting in a more constructive, systematic way on the ancestral character of the Trinity as such. He considers in more practical fashion several consequences he sees flowing from this insight. As he notes toward the 24

Nyamiti references (Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, 94, 166n43) his longer study, ‘The Naming Ceremony in the Trinity’, in: African Christian Studies, part 1, 4 (March 1988) no. 1, 41-73; part 2, 4 (November 1988) no. 3, 55-83. These texts form a lengthy theological and spiritual reflection on naming in the immanent and economic Trinity by means of analogical reference to African naming ceremonies with their culturally embedded characteristics.

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end of his study, he is to some extent now shifting attention from the immanent Trinity to the economic Trinity.25 Though he does not say so explicitly, the first of his five sets of more practical considerations (95-102) lays the foundation for what he will develop in the following four. Here, in this first of these five sets, he opens by recalling what he describes as his more metaphysical definition of ancestorship.26 It is ‘a sacred kin-relationship which establishes a right or title to regular communication with one’s own kin through prayer and ritual offering (oblation)’ (95). Considering ancestorship in relation to the Trinity has permitted him to purify the African notion of ancestor. Then, in its ancestral character the Trinity becomes the highest Exemplar of what it means to be an ancestor. He refers to the famous theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, for whom, as John J. O’Donnell writes, ‘Being is the Trinitarian love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. Hence, the prime analogue in human experience for the illumination of Being will not be the subject’s presence to self, but the presence of the Thou to the I’ (96).27 In response to von Balthasar’s emphasis on love, Nyamiti complements this understanding of being as love with his own preferred identification of being as found exemplified in ancestral trinitology. For Nyamiti, identifying ‘being’ in ancestral terms brings in a more communal and relational outlook on being while remaining, with von Balthasar, focused as well on individuals. ‘The African will situate the human prime analogue of human experience for the illumination of being primarily in the presence of the “We to the You” (in the plural) in sacred doxological and eucharistic relationship’ (97). In speaking of ‘being’ in ancestral terms, Nyamiti slowly moves to include reference not only specifically to the Trinity but to the whole cosmos as well. He comes to speak of the ancestral nature of being as such. For, if the Supreme Being is ancestral, then so is all being which participates in that Being.28 All created beings come into being in dependence on the Descendancy of the Logos and share in that Descendancy. They are in kin-relationship with the all-holy Ancestor, the Father. Theirs is a sacred relationship with all the qualities of such a relationship. Among many possible conclusions, created beings and especially humans become exemplars of sacred kin-relationships in 25

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‘[My] theological elaboration begins from the immanent to the economic Trinity’ (151). ‘Although the starting point for trinitological elaboration in this book is the immanent Trinity, the economic form of this mystery is not overlooked’ (153). For Nyamiti, ‘metaphysical definition’ would seem to refer to an understanding of ancestorship which can be obtained by philosophical reflection on what Africans experience and mean by ancestorship. John J. O’Donnell, Hans Urs von Balthasar (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1992), 6-7. Later in Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, Nyamiti writes that ‘according to African ancestral metaphysics, each created reality is a particular manifestation of God’s ancestral mode of being’ (142).

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themselves and to one another. For they all have the same sacred CreatorAncestor. The divine Ancestor glorifies created beings, as he indeed glorifies the Logos, by giving them being and bestowing the Spirit upon them. ‘By virtue of the cosmotheandric “organic” unity and relationship of all beings in the universe, each created reality needs the others for its proper and meaningful existence needed, and intended by the Creator, for such glorification’.29 Nyamiti suggests an ancestral ontology of ‘“kinship” (relationality), sacredness, exemplarity, doxological “ritual” and mediation (…) as essential characteristics of being’ (98). In such an ontology, all created reality is secular in some ways but sacred when considered in relation to God. It is oriented toward participation in ‘the ancestral pneumatic ceremony of thanksgiving and doxology in God himself’ (100). There is a cosmotheandric perichoresis.30 The world and the holy God are in one another. Nyamiti picks up on Rahner’s experiential language when he cites Rahner and provides his own revision of what Rahner says. He quotes Rahner, modifying the quotation in a way which results in a slightly more experiential language. Nyamiti’s additions are indicated in italics and words Nyamiti has removed are struck out. [Rahner writes, with the African ancestral metaphysician’s modifications indicated,] ‘Man experiences his creatureliness and encounters God’s infinite holiness in it, not so much and also in nature, in its stolid and unfeeling finiteness, and finally also in himself and in the world only as known by him and as freely administered in the unlimited openness of his own spirit’.[31] (…) [Nyamiti continues,] For indeed, even ‘in its stolid and unfeeling finiteness’ the world of nature is a revealer and glorifier of God’s infinite holiness – precisely because, as a ‘stolid and unfeeling’ finite being, it is a creature of God, and thereby participates in his sacredness. (100)

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Nyamiti defines ‘cosmotheandric’ as ‘belonging to the worlds of nature, spirits and human beings’ (176). Nyamiti mentions that he will reflect further on the ‘cosmotheandric dimension of the Trinity’, and possible implications for understanding reality, in a later volume of his series, of which the one we are reviewing is the first. In this regard, see Jesus Christ, the Ancestor of Humankind, 102. Also, Nyamiti briefly remarks on the Trinity and cosmotheandric reality from the perspective of the African family in Some Contemporary Models of African Ecclesiology, 96 with 103-7, 132-33, 143, 216; with more extended remarks in his article, ‘Trinity as Source and Soul of African Family Ecclesiology’, 73-77. Nyamiti cites Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 80-81. This may not be the edition to which Nyamiti refers, but the pagination indicated here corresponds to that which Nyamiti indicates.

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Nyamiti avoids a potential African interpretation of humans’ relationship with nature as one of simple awe and respect. While appreciating such awe and respect, he recognizes as well that humans are called to develop the world around them for the greater glory of God and for human welfare. At the end of this first set of consequences, Nyamiti draws from an ancestral reading of the Trinity to stress participation and experience.32 He says that creation takes part in the trinitarian mystery which God is. And heavenly life ‘includes (…) the living and joyful experience of the sacred kin relationship with the divine Ancestors (= the Father and the Logos) and their heavenly descendants (= the saints and angels) through pneumatic (and, therefore, loving) eucharistic and doxological celebration’ (102). When, in this first set of considerations, Nyamiti describes being as ancestral he is, as previously mentioned, paving the way for his more focused reflections in the next four. In the second set (102-8), he points to the numerical oneness and holiness of the Descendant with the Ancestor, God the Father, a oneness based on their absolute proximity to one another. This proximity is rooted in their mutual self-giving which is Oblation, the Holy Spirit. It is the source of the Descendant’s and the Ancestor’s role as models of being and conduct. He cites the perfect union, in holiness, of the Descendant with the Ancestor as reason why human descendants are in a sacred relationship with the DescendantAncestor-Brother. Thus, ‘our ideal of Christian life should be his [Christ’s] ancestral holiness in the immanent Trinity’ (103). But this high ideal does not seem for Nyamiti to be confirmed by much general human experience. Even in his own experience, he has come across many people who claim that most Christians are not called to full perfection as modeled by Christ in his relationship with his Father. He then returns to his point that all Christians are indeed called to such holiness. He recalls that the Descendant’s ‘oneness in being and holiness’ (104) is pneumatic, assured by the mutual self-giving of Ancestor and Descendant. But this oneness in holiness cannot be reflected in those who act while in serious sin. They may be able to act in faith and hope. Still, they lack the sanctifying grace needed to make their acts truly conform to those of the Descendant, their Ancestor and Brother. Again, Nyamiti appeals to common enough experience to point out that sometimes people say it is enough to engage in various humanitarian activities. But

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In an important remark, Nyamiti says concerning participation that ‘it seems to me (…) that the differences between the Thomistic and African ways of understanding participation are chiefly due to the fact that the African conception is derived mainly from experience, whereas the Thomist’s is more the result of philosophical reflection’. African Tradition and the Christian God, 60 (italics in the original).

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he notes that, good as these activities may be, they do not finally find their source in Christ as ‘animating principle or vital source of such conduct’ (105).33 Nyamiti slowly ends this second set of considerations of consequences of understanding the Trinity in ancestral terms. He makes a widely applicable remark. ‘As a model of Christian life the trinitarian oneness of being and holiness between the divine Descendant and his Ancestor should be related to all sectors of communal life in the Church and in civil societies’ (105). In conjunction with this remark, he insists on the importance of serious dialogue not only with other Christian denominations but also with other religions. He adopts what he calls an inclusivist view of the goal of such dialogue with various religions. Ultimately, he foresees one Church having room for, and being enriched by, all that is truly good in various Christian denominations and other religions. In his third set of considerations (108-11), Nyamiti sees the ‘ancestral pneumatic communication between the divine Ancestor and Descendant in the Trinity (…) as an exemplar or model of Christian matrimony and family life’. The love, respect, gratitude, and intimacy characteristic of the relationship between Ancestor and Descendant find a reflection in the truly communal life of husband and wife. Nyamiti does indeed acknowledge the importance of such communal life. But he chooses to attend more specifically to the relationship between parents and offspring. These characteristics of love, respect, gratitude, and intimacy are reflected especially in truly nourishing and respectful relationships between them. The parents’ begetting of children exemplifies, we might say although Nyamiti does not use the term ‘exemplifies’, in its own way the relationship between Ancestor and Descendant, Father and Son. As well, the relationship between parents and children shares, ideally, in the loving and respectful ancestral relationship between the two. He concludes that such a relationship excludes attitudes and comportment inimical to the offspring. Among them, he lists abortion and depriving children of education. A truly loving and respectful relationship between parent and child comes to completion when the child reciprocates in a loving, respectful, and grateful way. Nyamiti closes this third set of considerations by referring again to the question of the relationship between husband and wife. In closely paraphrasing Nyamiti, we can say he understands that the relationship of parents to one another and to their children offers a further way of appreciating the biblical idea that 33

Nyamiti refers (105, 166n53) to his article, ‘Some Moral Implications of African Ancestral Christology’, in: African Christian Studies 8 (September 1992) no. 3, 36-51. He remarks briefly on the relationship between evil and the Trinity in ‘The Problem of Evil in African Traditional Cultures and Today’s African Inculturation and Liberation Theologies’, in: African Christian Studies 11 (March 1995) no. 1, 48-50.

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man and woman together are created in God’s image. They are complementary partners.34 Nyamiti continues with a shorter fourth set of considerations (111-12). Here he prolongs his reflection on the holiness of the relationship between Ancestor and Descendant which is rooted in ‘divine sanctity and the Holy Spirit’. He fears that, if we do not see the role of the Holy Spirit as intrinsic to the relationship between Father and Son, we will be open to the danger of forgetting the importance of prayer and ritual ceremonies. For example, acting in liberation movements and being concerned about human development are important. But without prayer and ceremony, such movements will not fully reflect and express the love and respect and gratitude between Ancestor and Descendant. Nyamiti proposes a spirituality which is based on both the Ancestor-Descendant relationship, including the Father-Son relationship, and ‘God’s holiness and the ancestral pneumatic ceremony in the Trinity’. Nyamiti’s fifth and final set of considerations (112-15) concerning practical consequences of conceiving the Trinity in ancestral terms rounds out his remarks, in the present volume, on these consequences. After recalling the ancestral character of the Father and the Son, he stresses that Christ is our Ancestor, our elder Brother and unsurpassable Model.35 He is our Brother-Ancestor. ‘We are his true brother-sister-descendants’. The Father’s Ancestorship reaches to us through that of the Son who is incarnate in our world. ‘Through the Son, the Father’s immanent Ancestorship has become economic’. The Father’s Ancestorship and that of his Son also need to be seen in relation to that of the saints and African saintly ancestors if we wish to understand properly their relationship to us. Nyamiti continues, insisting that ‘Christian life is life of divine descendancy’. It is to be characterized by all that such descendancy implies. Serious sin is the mortal enemy of faithful descendancy. It renders all we do less than fully descendant-appropriate. He refers as well to filial fear of God’s ‘ancestral anger (prominent in African ancestral beliefs)’ aroused by human refusal to render ancestral homage. Nyamiti sees this point, properly considered, as correcting a perhaps one-sided emphasis on divine love without reference to divine truth and justice. Given African ancestral tradition’s communal character, that tradition in turn calls for respect for ‘the authentic tradition of the Church’. Finally, divine ancestry exists in relation to all. It then includes not only the 34

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Nyamiti refers (110, 166n60) to his article, ‘Trinitarian Foundation of the Church’s Teaching on Christian Marriage and Sexual Ethics’, 70-92. Toward the end of the presently reviewed volume, he confirms that his focus in it is primarily on ancestral kinship as exemplified in the nuclear family and not as found in the more extended family. This latter approach would be another direction one could take in developing a Christian ancestral theology (145). Nyamiti refers (112, 167n65) to his book, Christ as Our Ancestor: Christology from an African Perspective (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo, 1985).

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‘new indefinitely extended Family (the Church)’ but all peoples and persons. It opposes all discrimination and oppression. In an analogical parallel to the African sense of the importance of progeny, Christians are called to attract new descendants, new members of the Church. Thus, ancestral trinitology provides new insight into, and impetus for, the Christian missionary spirit. Ancestral Trinitological Testimonials We have accompanied Nyamiti as he explores the possible advantages of developing an African ancestral trinitology. In the process, he adds new and daring insights to Christian thought on the Trinity. We find that, in what we have studied, he focuses especially on the immanent Trinity along with important reference to the economic Trinity.36 In his explorations, restated summarily, Nyamiti envisions a Trinity of Ancestor, Descendant, and Oblation. He presents these three in specifically identifiable relationships with one another and with creation, but particularly with humans in community and as individuals. Ancestor and Father, Descendant and Son and Brother, Oblation and Holy Spirit each relate to us in line with who they are. And we relate to them as well in their respective roles as Ancestor/Father, Descendant/Son/Brother, and Oblation/Holy Spirit. We have seen, at greater length, the way he envisions the immanent Trinity with, as mentioned, lesser reference to the economic Trinity. Nyamiti’s envisioning of the three divine Persons of the Trinity in ancestral terms has been, for Nyamiti, a theological and spiritual adventure of great personal and wider ecclesial interest. With his writings, he invites us in various ways to join in what we might call his fascinating adventure, an adventure becoming a truly spiritual experience. Mentioning experience provides us with the occasion to explore somewhat further Nyamiti’s understanding of the Trinity. In so much of what Nyamiti has written over the years, ‘experience’ as such does not appear as a prominent word. As far as I can see, this is the case not only in the further developed reflection on the Trinity which we have now read but in much of his other writing as well. In a somewhat similar vein, already in 1998 Vähäkangas sensed 36

In what we have seen, Nyamiti regularly refers to several other studies. In them, he gives more extended attention to economic aspects of the three divine Persons in their relations to us and the rest of creation. He underscores the importance of these studies, which develop at greater length what he says in the volume to which we are presently referring more directly. Nyamiti considers these further studies as indispensable to a fuller understanding of his African ancestral trinitology (146). Regrettably it has not been possible to refer to these further studies in detail, given the more limited nature of the present study. But, on reading some of these further writings, I believe they buttress the present reading of his ancestral trinitology.

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something of this absence of reference to experience. He wrote that ‘even if the starting-point in considering ancestral relations in God is from below, the actual focus is strongly theology from above viewing God rather as He is in Himself than as He is experienced by human beings’.37 It is true that Nyamiti works out his ancestral trinitology with ongoing, more general reference to the Bible and to various Christian trinitarian traditions. But towards the end of his 2005 book, a good part of which we have reviewed, he begins to refer more explicitly to experience. This would seem to be due, in part at least, to his reading of and interaction with, among others, the thought of Karl Rahner. For example, Nyamiti himself refers to experience understood as the accumulated experience of Christians. Many of them seem, over time, not to have fully grasped the universal call to holiness as exemplified by Christ. They have often settled for a less demanding understanding of the calling they have received. His own personal experience of this situation exemplifies another sense in which he uses experience. Again, we can illustrate his occasional use of the word as referring to what we might call regular human experience, that which humans have. In a more negative mention of experience, he argues against appealing to and proceeding from merely human experience of God, here Trinity, without prior reference to revelation (67-68). Nyamiti’s relatively sparse explicit reference to experience requires that we be prudent in the ways in which we conclude that Nyamiti affirms experience of the Trinity and encourages others to be open to it. With this caveat in mind, I would like to take a second look, so to speak, at certain aspects of what he is doing as he works out his ancestral trinitology. We begin, first, by noting that he is working from revelation as expressed in the Bible and in various trinitarian traditions. In so doing, he is at least implicitly presupposing that such revelation is available to those who have written the Bible and contributed to such traditions, thereby transmitting that revelation to us. At least those who have given rise to the New Testament and early trinitarian positions would themselves somehow have come to experience God in their lives. And they did so in ways which then led them to want to give threefold expression to that experience. I would suggest that revelation of the Trinity occurred in and through such human experiences. And the earlier, written reflections on that revelational experience are as well, in faith and in their own ways, forms of experience of the Trinity appropriate to a more reflective level. Early Christians experienced, in various ways, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They expressed this experience in New Testament formulations and later 37

Vähäkangas, ‘Trinitarian Processions as Ancestral Relationships’, 253. However, in the note immediately above, general reference is made to various studies in which Nyamiti does consider the three divine Persons in relation to humans and to creation.

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in conciliar declarations.38 Through his biblical and trinitarian-traditional references, Nyamiti is building on the cumulative experience of early Christians. They experienced the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as present to and within them. And they, in turn, gave varied expression to that experience, thus prolonging it in more reflective and communal forms. I would think, then, that in his constructive theological reflection Nyamiti is following a centuries-long theological approach. In line with this approach, he sees theology as fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). We may fairly and respectfully rephrase his approach as, at least implicitly and in mediated fashion, experientia Trinitatis quaerens intellectum (experience of the Trinity seeking understanding). Nyamiti’s reference to the revelation of the Trinity sets the context within which he reflects further on the Trinity from an African ancestral perspective. Given this context, we are now better positioned to continue to examine further possible roles experience, as notion but especially as reality, might play in his theological reflection on the Trinity. More specifically, we can now think about the possible forms of experience of the Trinity to which he might be more directly referring in that reflection. We can bring forward several of these possible forms of experience by focusing on two meta-characteristics of Nyamiti’s understanding of African ancestorship. First, for Nyamiti ancestorship is a relatively concrete notion and reality. Second, it involves at its core the notion and reality of relationality. He writes that most of his descriptions, in the present study we are working with, of ancestors and descendants have rested on a more conceptual or even ontological level (130, 131, 138, 143). Yet, as we have seen, even then he speaks relatively concretely of ancestors and descendants, parents and children, duties of them to one another. This he does especially when he refers to specific African cultural values. As we have seen, he identifies a common African understanding of ancestorship as including five elements. Those elements are, again, kinship, sacred status, mediation, exemplarity, and sacred ritual communication. Following on his more conceptual, and yet surprisingly concrete, approach toward African ancestorship, he takes up the notion and reality, of ‘symbol’ (esp. 138-45). He treats of ‘ancestor’ as a symbol (138, 144), with all that such a treatment can imply at a concrete level. He sees this more concrete way of speaking as being complementary to his previous, more conceptual approach. Indeed, the more conceptual approach arises out of the symbolic one, giving symbol, we might say, a certain priority. Concept arises out of symbol (139, 143). In this concrete, symbolic approach, he refers primarily but not exclusively to divine Ancestor and Descendant. 38

We might note, for example, Paul of Tarsus and Basil of Caesarea in their testimonials to experience of the Trinity presented in the present study.

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We can get a sense of how concretely he speaks of Ancestor and Descendant as symbols by citing several verbs he uses to describe their symbol-based impact on us. For example, symbolic awareness (138) of divine Ancestor and Descendant incites us to devotion. It lures us to Christ, the Mediator. It ‘transforms us interiorly to spiritual descendants of God’. It arouses in us charity towards all. And it prompts us to transform unjust social structures to make them conform better with ‘the pneumatic and perichoretic model of our divine Ancestors in the Trinity’ (139). As divine symbol, ‘ancestor’ opens us to mysteries. Accepting that Christian revelation as presupposition is a context for Nyamiti’s further theological reflection, we can as well appreciate the significance Nyamiti finds in certain African sensitivities. For example, his theological reading of some African beliefs in a certain plurality in God is of special interest. He suggests that those who hold such beliefs have perceived ‘though faintly, as “in a dark mirror” – some aspects of the Trinity (…) albeit without knowing it’ (140).39 In effect, Nyamiti is regularly stressing the fundamentally concrete character of African ancestorship as such. This concrete character has come through loud and clear in his use of dynamic verbs to describe the impact of divine Ancestors on us. And, of great importance, he speaks of our ‘symbolic awareness of the divine Persons’ (138) and their relationships with us. Concreteness of the notion of ancestor, the ancestral impact on the part of the three divine Persons of the Trinity, the awareness of the ancestral roles of the three divine Persons on the part of human descendants – all these lead to our consideration of the second meta-characteristic of Nyamiti’s understanding of ancestorship. That metacharacteristic is relationality. We remarked above that Nyamiti insists on the specific character of distinct relationships among Ancestor, Descendant, and Oblation as well as between each of them and humans. He says that the distinct relationships between each of the three divine Ancestors and humans are not merely relations identified through a theological process he refers to as ‘appropriation’. Rather, these relationships are real both on the part of the divine Ancestors and of humans. They are real, described in analogical terms drawn from the common African understanding of ancestorship. Each Person of the Trinity relates to humans according to that Person’s unique property (122). In these relationships, humans relate to each of the Persons of the Trinity out of a ‘symbolic awareness of the divine Persons’ (again, 138). Concreteness of the notion, symbol, and reality of ancestor, the dynamic interrelatedness of divine Persons and humans in community and individually, and symbolic awareness on the part of humans. Together, these lead to the conclusion that Nyamiti is, in effect, referring in an affirmative way to various 39

Nyamiti writes, ‘In my opinion, it would not at all be farfetched to conceive such plurality of divinities as a kind of vague adumbration of the Trinity in Shona traditional religion’ (139).

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forms of experience of the Trinity. At the human level, he speaks of African cultural values, which arise out of communal and individual experience of ancestorship over centuries.40 More specifically regarding experience of the Trinity, he explicitly mentions the vague adumbration of the Trinity he finds in certain ethnic traditions. Even more particularly, he explicitly talks of mutual relations between divine Ancestors and humans. He presents them in such a way that we can reasonably suggest he is speaking of divine Ancestors and humans in their experience of one another through sacred communication, properly understood. In another study, he clearly affirms that this differentiated relationship will continue for humans into eternity. ‘The beatific vision of the elect is the immediate result of the flowering of their grace of justification which – as already noted – establishes trinitarian relationships that cannot be adequately expressed in terms of appropriation’.41 In these various instances, Nyamiti witnesses to culturally identified and embedded experiences of ancestors and descendants. In certain of these instances, he sees such experiences as vague adumbrations of the Trinity. Of more direct interest for us, he speaks of humans aware of and being impacted by the divine Ancestor, the divine Descendant, and the divine Oblation or Holy Spirit. In speaking of awareness and impact, he is, then, referring, at least obliquely, to communal and individual experiences of the Trinity. We can extend somewhat our reading of Nyamiti as speaking positively of experience of the Trinity by considering ‘of the Trinity’ to be a subjective genitive in two senses. First, if the relationships between the three divine Persons and humans in the beatific vision remain real, then the three divine Persons experience, it would seem, their human descendants in eternity. Second, Nyamiti describes the three divine Persons as perichoretically interrelating and interrelated Ancestor, Descendant, and Oblation. I suggest that this ancestral interpretation of perichoresis permits us to speak, from Nyamiti’s ancestral perspective, of the immanent Trinity itself in terms of experience. Doing this would seem to be fair and faithful to what Nyamiti has written. We can go so far as to speak of the three divine Persons as experiencing one another in and as ancestral, relational acts of self-giving in love, homage, and gratitude. In this case, Nyamiti

40

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Nyamiti discusses, at some length, various aspects of the African world view and then considers them in relation to Christ and the Trinity. His reference, for example, to the African understanding of participation in the world, as well as various other remarks, would provide further avenues of insight into his at least implicit reference to the varied human experience of reality in sub-Saharan Africa. See ‘The Incarnation Viewed from the African Understanding of Persons’, part 1, in: African Christian Studies 6 (March 1990) no. 1, 3-27; part 2, 6 (June 1990) no. 2, 23-76. Nyamiti, ‘Trinity as Source and Soul of African Family Ecclesiology’, 51. This is one of Nyamiti’s further studies on Trinity which is particularly rich in trinitarian insights.

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would be speaking of the immanent Trinity as a multiform movement of enriching experience.42 Finally, Nyamiti often suggests that insights gained through his ancestral interpretation of the three divine Persons should be of interest not only to Christians in Africa but also around the world. He feels the same about insights he has garnered from other considerations. These include his descriptions of the specific forms of relationships existing between the three divine Persons and humans, including all created beings. Reflection on the divine Persons gives rise as well to further insights which come from a consideration of appropriate relations among humans and their relations to the rest of created reality. He is clearly hopeful that these varied insights will enrichen various spiritual and theological understandings of the Trinity, those both of his more general readers and of specialized theologians (123). Truly, he writes with deep conviction as he describes the enhanced understanding of the Trinity to which his ancestral interpretation leads. Toward the end of the volume with which we are working more directly, Jesus Christ: the Ancestor of Humankind (116-30), Nyamiti brings together in synthesizing fashion many of his trinitarian insights. Globally speaking, he sees his interpretations of the three divine Persons and the relations between them and the created world as complementary to more traditional forms of trinitarian thought. This is especially the case concerning Augustinian-Thomistic trinitarian thought (116). He feels that much of what he writes is already implied in such thought as well as in various biblical and early trinitarian traditions. Among many points to which he draws attention, Nyamiti first lists one concerning the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is ‘eucharistic and doxological ritual Offer or sacred Oblation’ which Father and Son donate to one another. This reading of the personal character of the Holy Spirit underlies much of what he will say next. He then underscores the importance of the ancestral rootage of the relationship 42

Of note, Nyamiti discusses the generative role of the Father within the Trinity. He works in analogy with the intimacy of relationship between a man and a woman which leads to conception. During this discussion, he speaks of experience both in relation to the Father and to a married couple. Here we have two uses of experience, one referring to the Father’s selfexperience, so to speak, within the Trinity and the other in relation to human relationships. ‘Experiential character [of the divine act of generation]. This consists in that the Father’s procreative knowledge involves immediate or direct experience of the one who is known (in this case, the Father Himself) – an experience infinitely more direct than in the married couple, since the knower, the known and the knowing intellect are absolutely one unique and simple reality’. Nyamiti, ‘Trinitarian Foundation of the Church’s Teaching on Christian Marriage and Sexual Ethics’, 77 (italics in the original). Nyamiti refers in various ways to experience on 74-76, 85. I have come upon two brief references by Nyamiti to God’s reign considered in the Old Testament as ‘experience of salvation’. ‘An African Theology of the Kingdom of God’, in: African Christian Studies 13 (December 1997) no. 4, 8 and 10.

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between Father and Son, Ancestor and Descendant, in their holiness giving rise to the Spirit as doxological eucharist (117). Such emphasis on holiness and its role in the Trinity is not as evident in classical trinitarian thought as it is in his ancestral trinitology. Indeed, in this latter the Holy Spirit is directly involved in the procession or begetting of the Son by the Father. That involvement leads, in turn, to Nyamiti’s description of divine perichoresis in terms of pneumatic ritual communication (118). Nyamiti stresses the importance of his ancestral vitalistic and voluntaristic approach to the relationship between the Father’s exemplarity and the Son’s spontaneous conformity to the will of his Father. In this way, Nyamiti’s approach contributes to a deeper understanding of the consubstantiality of Father and Son. Consubstantiality is now understood in ancestral terms such as love, fidelity, ritual homage and thanksgiving. It differs from Western ontological and intellectualistic approaches. Here, as elsewhere, Nyamiti finds that his ancestral trinitology adds depth and, I would add warmth, to various traditional trinitarian themes. We can simply mention several further instances of such enrichment. Among them, he celebrates the Eucharistic ritual action within the Trinity itself. And, the Spirit is Gift and Oblation within the Trinity and effectively ‘the condition of the possibility of both divine processions and even of the existence of the Trinity itself’ (119). At least partly in consequence thereof, Ancestor/Ancestress, Descendant, and Oblation take on ‘a new African ancestral conception of divine relations and Persons’ (120). Divine perichoresis gains in meaning as an eternal immanent ceremony of gratitude within God (121). Divine activities in relation to creation become more significant as prolongations of these inner actions within the Trinity. For instance, bringing the Holy Spirit into the procession of the Son from the Father helps ground the affirmation of the necessity of the mission of the Spirit in relation to that of the Son (121-22, 124-25). More widely, from the perspective of ancestral trinitology ‘the ancestral, doxological and eucharistic ceremony in God is the dynamic origin of and central or intimate element in, the whole of creation and salvation history’ (123). The divine missions make possible creatures’ sharing in God’s inner life. So, ‘human and spiritual beings, as well as the entire cosmic world, are sacred’ (127). Nyamiti then reflects briefly on the earthly Eucharist, the Mass, as ‘sacramental reactualisation of the ancestral eucharistic ritual in the immanent Trinity’ (128).43 43

At this point, Nyamiti refers (128, 171n91) to two of his articles. In the first, ‘The Mass as Divine Ancestral Encounter between the Living and the Dead’, in: African Christian Studies 1 (August 1985) no. 1, 28-48, he writes more forcefully, ‘The Mass possesses its sacrificial, propitiatory and sacramental dimension, (absent from the Trinity) not because it is not one with the eternal Eucharist in the Trinity, but because it is that very same trinitarian Eucharist communicated to

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Over the course of his long academic career, Nyamiti has written many times of African ancestral trinitology. He happily identifies important contributions it makes to a fuller understanding of the Trinity. He writes, ‘a sincere endeavor has been made to deepen our understanding of the Christian mysteries and their practical relevance beyond what has been achieved in Western traditional and contemporary theologies’ (159). At the same time, he invites remarks and input from other theologians regarding his trinitology. He looks forward to such theological dialogue (159-60). In the meantime, I would suggest that his various writings on the immanent and economic Trinity have become, in themselves, ancestral trinitological testimonials to experience of the Trinity. They are testimonials expressed in the form of a universalizing theological reflection carried out from an ancestral perspective. He reflects on the three divine Persons of the Trinity and on the relations between them and created reality. Of great importance, in these writings Nyamiti encourages his readers to take up his insights and, based on them, to live their calling to Christian holiness. He hopes they themselves will develop a trinitarian spirituality along the lines of his African ancestral trinitology. We end with his exhortation to this effect. When one takes the Ancestor-Descendant relationship as Model of Christian spirituality, one has to include, as Exemplar, not only the Father-Son relationship (implied in the Ancestor-Descendant relationship), but also God’s holiness and the ancestral pneumatic ceremony in the Trinity as Models of such spirituality. Of necessity, one’s own behavior will include all that is good in the spirituality based on the Father-Son relationship, and will also be characterized by a life of prayer and ritual activity (particularly Mass attendance) – accompanied by the grace of the Holy Spirit (i.e. sanctifying grace) – as central elements of one’s own Christian conduct. (111-12)

sinful men through the God-man’ (42, italics in the original). The second article is ‘The Eucharist as Mystical Affinal Encounter in God’s Family: The Church’, part 2, in: African Christian Studies 18 (June 2002) no. 2, 5-55.

CHAPTER 14 JOHN POLKINGHORNE A Science-Religion Dialogue

We head north from Nairobi in Kenya to Cambridge in England. It is there, in Cambridge, that John Polkinghorne (1930–2021) has spent most of his professional life and where he wrote his autobiography, From Physicist to Priest.1 In choosing this title, he encapsulates major moments and overall directions of his impressive academic and ministerial career. He completed doctoral studies in theoretical physics at Cambridge University in 1955. He and his wife Ruth travelled to the United States on a post-doctoral Harkness Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. Upon returning to Great Britain, he accepted a lectureship in theoretical physics in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1958, it was back to Cambridge as a lecturer, and then professor of mathematical physics. Over the next 25 years, he made major contributions in the field of theoretical particle physics. In 1977, he decided to study for ordination in the Church of England and was ordained priest in 1982.2 As he explained much later, I have spent half my life working in theoretical elementary particle physics, concerned with using mathematics to understand the behavior of the smallest bits of matter. In 1979, I resigned my chair in Cambridge to take up a very different vocation, as I began to train for the priesthood in the Church of England. (…) I (…) felt that after 25 years I had done my little bit for science and it was time 1

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John Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007). Chapters cover various stages in his life and work, with touching references to personal experiences. Biographical remarks here on Polkinghorne and his career draw upon this autobiography as well as the following: J. J. O’Connor & E. F. Robertson, ‘John Charlton Polkinghorne, Born: 16 October 1930 in Weston-super-Mare, England’, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, with special attention to Polkinghorne’s contributions in mathematical quantum physics and Polkinghorne’s publications in these areas of physics, accessed February 3, 2019, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Polkinghorne.html; ‘Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS’, the Star Course, accessed February 5, 2019, http://www.starcourse.org/jcp/books.html. On personal experiences leading up to his decision to enter the ordained ministry, see Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest, 73-80.

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to do something different. (…) I have been a Christian believer as long as I can remember. (…) After a few years of service in parish life, I returned to the academic world of Cambridge because by then I had come to the conclusion that thinking and writing about how science and religion relate to each other was central to the fulfilment of my new vocation.3

Polkinghorne went on to establish an outstanding international reputation as a specialist on the question of relations between science and religion. He has lectured widely and published 30 or more books in this area.4 Two of his many lectureships are of special interest to us. First, the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in the 1993–1994 session, published as Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker.5 Second, his Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in March 2003, published as Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality.6 His post-ordination 3

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Polkinghorne, in an interview in conjunction with his being awarded the 2002 Templeton Price for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. ‘A Chronicle: 2002 Templeton Prize Laureate Rev. Dr. John C. Polkinghorne’, 4, accessed February 3, 2019, www.templetonprize.org/pdfs/Templeton_Prize_Chronicle_2002.pdf. Several partial bibliographies of Polkinghorne’s writings, listing for the most part books on science and religion: Thomas Jay Oord, ‘Books by J. C. Polkinghorne’, in: John Polkinghorne, The Polkinghorne Reader: Science, Faith and the Search for Meaning, ed. Thomas Jay Oord (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2010), 233-34; ‘A Selected Bibliography of Works on the Science-Theology Dialogue’, in: God and the Scientist: Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne, ed. Fraser Watts & Christopher C. Knight (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 275-80, with helpful listing of journal articles and chapters in books; ‘Titles by Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS’, the Star Course, accessed February 5, 2019, http://www.starcourse.org/ jcp/books.html; ‘John Polkinghorne’, Wikipedia, accessed February 4, 2019, https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne, with a more up-to-date but still partial bibliography. For an important collection of excerpts from Polkinghorne’s books selected mostly by Polkinghorne himself, see Polkinghorne Reader, with editor’s remarks on 4-5. For discussions of various aspects of Polkinghorne’s thought, though not focusing on Trinity, see Watts & Knight (Eds.), God and the Scientist. For a brief, critically concerned but also highly appreciative evaluation of basic aspects of Polkinghorne’s thought, see Christopher C. Knight, ‘John Polkinghorne’, in: The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. J. B. Stump & Alan G. Padgett (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 622-31. For studies related to themes arising in Polkinghorne’s thought on Trinity, see John Polkinghorne (Ed.), The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). For a thorough study and analysis of Polkinghorne’s basic notion of consonance along with discussion of various other themes in Polkinghorne’s work, but not treating of Polkinghorne’s work after 2002 and not referring to Trinity, see Johannes Maria Steinke, John Polkinghorne: Konsonanz von Naturwissenschaft und Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). John Polkinghorne, Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker, The Gifford Lectures for 1993-4 (London: SPCK, 1994). John Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). This book as well as many others by Polkinghorne have been published simultaneously by Yale in the United States and SPCK in Great Britain.

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career includes many important appointments. Among them: Fellow, Dean and Chaplain, Trinity Hall, Cambridge; Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he served as its President from 1989 to 1996; Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral from 1994 to 2005; chairman of various Church of England and governmental committees and commissions concerned especially with social, medical, and ethical questions. In 2002, he became the Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion.7 In the same year, he received the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.8 Science and Theology Polkinghorne has pursued his interest in science and religion by focusing more specifically on relationships between science and theology. This focus finds expression already in his early volume One World with its subtitle The Interaction of Science and Theology, first published in 1986.9 One similarity justifying this attention to and consideration of science and theology together comes to the fore time and again throughout his writings. Both, each in its own way, work from experience to theory or interpretation of that experience.10 Science may move from hypothesis through experimentation or directly from discovery in experimentation. It proceeds to a concluding, interpretative, and explanatory generalization about or theory of physical reality or an aspect of it based on the results of experimentation. As to theology, he admires Anselm’s understanding of theology as fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’), which he importantly restates, saying ‘theology is the reflection on religious experience’.11 Science, whose understanding is based in experiments, and theology, which is based in religious experience, both require experience and subsequent, further 7

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On the International Society for Science and Religion, see its website under that name, accessed February 5, 2019, https://www.issr.org.uk. See, n. 3 above. John C. Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (London: SPCK, 1986). It is striking to read, in One World, his early thoughts on the similarities between science and theology (36-42), many of which reappear in various ways in his later thought. At this early point in his writings on science and religion, he speaks of a kinship between them (36). In reference to science, Polkinghorne speaks both of ‘experience’ and ‘interpreted experience’. It seems that in this way he is acknowledging a role some form of conceptually expressed elements play in the moment of experience as experimentation. Whether he speaks of experience or interpreted experience, he maintains that further interpretation follows upon each of them. Polkinghorne, One World, 28. For further remarks on such reformulating of fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’) more specifically as experientia Dei quaerens intellectum (‘experience of God seeking understanding’), see Dale M. Schlitt, Theology and the Experience of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), throughout, but esp. 1-3, 16-17.

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interpretation of that experience. In both science and theology, experience and interpretation together constitute what science and theology are. Polkinghorne helpfully reflects on his own theological writing, calling both science and theology bottom-up thinking.12 From early on, Polkinghorne focuses his thought further when he refers to theology not only in a more general way but also, more specifically, in the form it takes as trinitarian thought.13 His 1991 study, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology, is prescient in referring to trinitarian thought as well as to other aspects of what he will further develop in greater detail. Regarding Trinity, in this 1991 study he writes that ‘the doctrines of a tripersonal God and of God’s making Godself known in human terms, have about them those elements of surprise and intellectual profundity which are characteristic of the best scientific theory. Our investigation of the physical world has stretched our minds and enlarged our notions of the conceivable. It would be surprising indeed if the encounter with God did not do the same’.14 Polkinghorne returns with a vengeance to this point in later publications. In his overall approach to the study of various questions, he repeatedly treats of specific topics in what he calls spiral fashion. That is, he returns to a previously considered topic, now reflected on in a further, more advanced consideration which ‘seeks at each turn to move closer to the heart of the matter’.15 This spiral approach finds exemplification in the ways in which he returns in two of his later writings to the question of relationships between science and trinitarian theology. He himself identifies these two studies as ones in which he takes a particularly direct ‘trinitarian approach to issues of science and religion’.16 They are his 2004 work, Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality17 and his 2005 volume, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and

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Polkinghorne, chapter 15 ‘Theological Writing’, in: From Physicist to Priest, 131-56, with explicit reference to ‘bottom-up thinking’ on 143-45. See also, for example, the subtitle of Polkinghorne’s Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker. For a well-documented background to Polkinghorne’s reflection on trinitarian thought in relation to science, see K. Helmut Reich, ‘The Doctrine of the Trinity as a Model for Structuring the Relations between Science and Theology’, in: Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 30 (1995), 383-405. John Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991), 98. Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest, 136 and see 150. Ibid., 155. Polkinghorne summarizes his thought on science and the Trinity, providing a helpful introduction to the subject matter in his book Science and the Trinity in his article, ‘Physics and Metaphysics in a Trinitarian Perspective’, in: Theology and Science 1 (2003), 33-49.

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Religion.18 We will focus on selections from Science and the Trinity and complement what he says there with further insights from Exploring Reality. This approach will provide the basis for an appreciation of the similarities and interaction he sees between science and trinitarian theology as a form of testimonial to experience of the Trinity. Scientific and Trinitarian Perspectives on Reality Polkinghorne delivered his Warfield Lectures with the title ‘Trinitarian Perspectives’ at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003.19 He published them, as mentioned, a year later as Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. The volume’s aim is ‘to make a contribution to the science and religion dialogue in which it is largely [trinitarian] theological concerns that are allowed to shape the argument and to set the agenda’ (xiii). The volume proceeds in seven chapters. Chapter 1 reviews four approaches to dialogue between science and theology. They are deistic, theistic, revisionary, and developmental (xiv). He sees in the movement from one to the other of them an increasing interest in theology. He himself identifies with and embraces the fourth or developmental approach (28). In it, the interaction between science and theology proceeds as a ‘continuously unfolding exploration’ in the form of bottom-up thinking in search of understanding (xiv, 26). Chapter 2 considers Scripture’s evidential, spiritual, and contextual roles (xiv-xv). Spiritual, in that we prayerfully let Scripture judge us as we seek guidance, and contextual in that the testimony of Scripture requires respect for its integrity, character, and development. But, of special present importance is its evidential nature as witness to the Church’s

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John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Polkinghorne continues, in more detail, his reflections on parallels between quantum physics and theology in Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), with specific reference on 99-104 to the importance of early Christian experience for the development of trinitarian theology. Among themes Polkinghorne further develops in this book, one concerns relationships between experience and interpretation. More recently, he has published a brief, tightly structured and helpful presentation of his argument concerning science as leading to a view of reality consonant with trinitarian theology. John Polkinghorne, ‘The Trinity and Scientific Reality’, in: The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, 523-32. Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, ix, hereafter, except later in our present chapter’s section entitled ‘Further Exploring Reality’, generally referenced by page in the text. Italics in quotations are in the original. If a short section of the equivalent of about three pages or less from this volume is referenced in our text by page numbers, individual pages will not be further referenced in the immediately ensuing presentation of the section in question.

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experiences and encounters with God (37).20 These encounters with God, Christ, and the Spirit ‘led the Church to a Trinitarian conclusion’ (39). Chapters 3 and 4, to which we will return shortly in greater detail, treat respectively of a theology of nature and the nature of God. At various points in these two chapters, Polkinghorne identifies parallels in the form of what he calls ‘consonances’ between science and Trinity (more specifically, trinitarian theology). He discusses the roles of each of them in relation to the other as well as the overarching function of trinitarian theology.21

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Polkinghorne quotes approvingly Arthur R. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine and Human, enlarged ed. (London: SCM, 1993), 94 where he writes, ‘The faith of the Christian church derives from its experience, the principal resource and source for which are the archetypal and seminal experiences and encounters with God recorded in its scriptures’. In his 1993–1994 Gifford Lectures as published, Polkinghorne had written the following in which he links together ‘experience’ and ‘encounter’. ‘Whatever might be the speculative elaboration of aspects of trinitarian discourse, it had its origin in the Church’s struggle to come to terms with its threefold experience of divine encounter’. Science and Christian Belief, 154. What Polkinghorne means by ‘consonance’ should become clearer as we refer to various consonantal aspects of physics and theology. Steinke provides a thorough study of Polkinghorne’s notion of consonance between physics and theology, namely, similarities of various aspects between the two. In his closing remarks, he provides a good summary of Polkinghorne’s thought up until about 2002. After that date, Polkinghorne remains true to his previously expressed thought on consonance while expanding on it. Steinke lauds Polkinghorne’s contributions to the study of possible relationships between science and theology including the idea of a consonantal relationship between them. But he also critiques Polkinghorne’s lack of detailed analysis and philosophical precision and sharpness at various points. John Polkinghorn: Konsonanz, 119-23. Pat Bennett, in turn, examines various sides to Polkinghorne’s notion of consonance between science and theology. His intention, in doing this, is to point the way to further fruitful exploration and expansion of Polkinghorne’s notion. ‘Subtle and Supple: John Polkinghorne’s Engagement with Reality’, in: God and the Scientist: Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 175-96, esp. 189-96. Willem B. Drees discusses problematic aspects of the notion of consonance between science and theology. Without going into various positions which he takes and the specific ways in which he uses the notion, we can note his phrase ‘constructive consonance’. ‘“Religion and Science” without Symmetry, Plausibility, and Harmony’, in: Theology and Science 1 (2003), 113-28, esp. 118-21. Though I have not seen Polkinghorne use the phrase ‘constructive consonance’, I would suggest that it gives expression to what he means by consonance when he sees it involving possible enhancements of or even modifications to science and theology suggested in the light of various consonances. In a sense, Polkinghorne seems to acknowledge this, at least regarding the possible influence of physics on trinitarian theology, when he writes, ‘I have sought to show how Trinitarian metaphysics can be built consonantly on the foundations provided by insights drawn from physics and cultures’. ‘Physics and Metaphysics in a Trinitarian Perspective’, 47. It might be helpful to recall that ‘consonant’ and ‘consonance’ have their root in the Latin consonare, meaning or at least implying ‘to sound with, to harmonize, to agree with’, and so forth.

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Chapter 5 grounds its various considerations in the interpreted experience of Christians who participate in ‘the Trinitarian worship of the Church’ (xvi). The role of such experience in theology is, in important ways, similar to the grounding role of interpreted experience in science. Polkinghorne recalls his own experience of participation in the celebration of the Eucharist (118-20), where ‘thanksgiving for creation, remembrance of the cross and anticipation of the final vindication of the Lordship of Christ, together with the invocation of the Spirit, combine in the Trinitarian worship of the Church’ (xvi). Such sacramental (135), indeed Eucharistic (138), experience bears a trinitarian character (140), exemplifying the Trinity’s ongoing activity in the Christian community (122). Chapter 6 provides reflections on the eschatological themes of life after death, considering together continuity and discontinuity between creation old and new (xvii, 152-66). Eschatological hope is grounded in trinitarian belief and provides it with ultimate credibility. Of note, Polkinghorne recalls that, on the one hand, science poses questions to theology and sets some constraints on theology’s possible responses. On the other, theology’s duty is to remind science of the inherent limitations of its approach to reality and of resources not available to it (145-46). Chapter 7 bears an appropriately Kierkegaardian-like title ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript: In Defence of Particularity’. In this chapter, Polkinghorne explains his decision to carry out his reflection from the point of view of Christian trinitarian theology (xvii, 171). He acknowledges the religiously plural world in which we live but stresses the need to respect ever-particular, individual and communal experience, in his case Christian experience (173-74). After this brief review of the various chapters making up Science and the Trinity, we now turn at greater length to chapters 3 and 4. In them, Polkinghorne spells out most explicitly his approach to the dialogue between science and trinitarian theology.22 A Theology of Nature Chapter 3, ‘The Universe in a Trinitarian Perspective: A Theology of Nature’ (60-87), proceeds in two overall steps.23 In the first step, Polkinghorne clarifies several terms, and states more generally what he is going to do. In the second, he presents ‘seven scientifically disclosed features of our universe’ (62). It is usually toward the end of each presentation that he identifies a certain consonance or harmony and agreement between aspects of the feature of physical reality 22 23

For succinct summaries of chapters 3 and 4, see Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, xv-xvi. The technical character of much of what Polkinghorne discusses in chapter 3 will require we remain close to his text in our presentation.

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presented, on the one hand, and aspects of trinitarian theology, on the other. This consonance forms a basis for a consideration of trinitarian theology’s serving as a fuller, contextualizing understanding of various scientifically disclosed features of the universe. This is the order in which Polkinghorne repeatedly lays out his argument. Following this order enables him to give expression to the overall role of trinitarian theology in relation to science by what he says, but not only in that way. Rather, this order also permits him to structure what he presents in a way which itself reflects what he is arguing. For he then brings his remarks on physical reality to a certain completion by referring to the Trinity. In the first step (60-62), Polkinghorne writes, ‘In this chapter I want to travel from physics to metaphysics’. For him, physics refers to natures of things as revealed especially by the natural sciences. He understands metaphysics as a comprehensive, overarching account of reality arising out of various forms of study. Among these, he is thinking here especially of philosophy and theology. To paraphrase closely Polkinghorne’s explanation of the relationship between physics and metaphysics, we can say that he sees the former as constraining the latter. It does this in a way similar to the way in which a building’s foundation constrains what is built on it without determining in detail that which is built. Importantly for him, ‘[t]he connection between the scientific concepts of physics and the philosophical or theological concepts of metaphysics, is that of an alogical association, based upon a perceived consonance’. As well, he sees physics providing avenues for further metaphysical reflection. In what he calls an overaudacious claim, he boldly proposes that trinitarian theology is an attractive candidate for the ‘Theory of Everything’. Polkinghorne says that in this chapter he will be pointing to what might previously have been called vestiges of the Trinity. We need his exact phrasing here: ‘There are aspects of our scientific understanding of the universe that become more deeply intelligible to us if they are viewed in a Trinitarian perspective’. Though he respects natural theology, he describes his own project here as a theology of nature. He wants to go beyond a merely deistic view to something much richer. He wishes to work with a trinitarian perspective to provide a fuller context within which various scientific insights can be accommodated while gaining in depth of understanding. In the chapter’s second step (62-87), Polkinghorne examines what he briefly referred to as scientifically disclosed features of our universe. He identifies seven such features. Discussion of the first two could serve in a more natural theology reflection, though Polkinghorne brings in trinitarian considerations regarding them as well. The further five find their more natural context, as he says, within an explicitly trinitarian theology of nature (62). Of these seven features, the first is the profoundly intelligible character of the universe (62-65). Science finds that our world is deeply transparent to reason.

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We discover this when we spontaneously push beyond knowledge needed for survival. We even come to speak of the universe in terms of quarks and gluons.24 There is something more at play here than a merely pragmatic need for knowing. Beyond this need, for example, we use mathematics which provides privileged insight into the intelligibility of the universe. The more mathematically beautiful the reading of the physical universe, the more plausible that reading turns out to be. This surprisingly fulfilling access to the universe pushes beyond what would be expected simply in considering scientific experimentation. That ‘beyond’ is something calling for metaphysical input in order better to understand that access. For Polkinghorne, this profound congruence of reason and the world’s rational structure are both brought about by the rational willing of God. Polkinghorne then provides a more trinitarian reading of the relationship between reason and rational structure. ‘The rational beauty of the universe is seen to be part of the Father’s gift of the imago Dei to humankind, and the beautiful rational order of the universe is the imprint of the divine Logos. (…) [I]t is the Holy Spirit (…) who is at work in the truth-seeking community of scientists’. Polkinghorne concludes this consideration of the universe’s deep intelligibility with the suggestion that the scientific ‘community’s repeated experiences of wonder at the disclosed order of the universe are, in fact, tacit acts of the worship of its Creator’. The second feature Polkinghorne selects for consideration is what he calls the universe’s fruitful history (65-73). Here he makes a quick, fourteen-billion year move from the simplicity of the Big Bang to the extraordinary complexity of self-conscious human beings. As he puts it well, ‘That initial ball of energy has become the home of saints and mathematicians’ (66). Perhaps cosmic history involves more than science can explain. Polkinghorne continues, stressing that, when we speak of chance and necessity as characteristics of the universe’s history, we are not referring to any simply random chance. Natural selection has had its results, which even theology has often come to accept. It acknowledges that God grants creation an appropriate creaturely independence in its selfconstruction. Trinitarian theology itself sees the world not as a fixed grand performance but ‘the unfolding of a grand improvisation in which the Creator and creatures both participate’ (67-68). Polkinghorne then takes up the notion of the anthropic principle, namely, that the universe has evolved in such a way as to result in carbon-based, selfconscious humans. Among various considerations, he stresses the need for the 24

Here and elsewhere Polkinghorne calls upon his early work in theoretical and mathematical physics. For a helpful introduction, see his Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), where he describes quarks and gluons as ‘current candidates for the basic constituents of nuclear matter’ (97).

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sun to have provided a long period of relatively constant light and warming for life to develop on a planet. He further notes the fact that the stars had to function, in specific ways, in creating the chemical building blocks of life. This specific nature of the universe and its development leads him to mention the commonly proposed but unproven Grand Unified Theory concerning the ‘fundamental physical character of the universe’ (69-70). Scientists often seem uncomfortable accepting such a specific universe. In response, he suggests that various domains of the universe may have evolved in somewhat different ways, with the part we know being characterized by its specificity leading to selfconscious humans. He no longer sees the need to argue in favor of an unlimited variety of specific universes to maintain an overall homogenized or non-specific view of reality as such. But he thinks such metaphysical speculation is not logically convincing. William of Occam, with his logical razor, would not be impressed with such a complex and speculative solution (72). Polkinghorne thinks it is more helpful to acknowledge a Creator’s fine-tuning of creation for its fruitful history. He brings this discussion of the universe’s fruitful history to a close with a brief reflection on the profound question of evil. He admits that the evolving character of a fruitful cosmic history cannot explain evil. But it can show that creation which leads to such a history is essentially, even from a scientific point of view, an integrated package deal (72). Good and evil are an inevitable part of such a universe. To come to some understanding of this reality of good and evil, he appeals to the incarnation and a trinitarian understanding of the cross. God is ‘creation’s partner in its pain’ (73). As mentioned, after these first two science-disclosed features of the universe, Polkinghorne ties the next five features more directly with various aspects of trinitarian theology. The first of these five, the third overall feature he points to, is that of a relational universe (73-75). He identifies three discoveries by Einstein which lead to the understanding of physical reality’s ‘deep-seated interconnectivity present in the fabric of the physical world’. The first of these three discoveries is that judgements of simultaneity and of the elapse of time are relative to the observer’s motion. The second is that ‘space, time and matter are closely interconnected in a kind of integrated package’. The third says that two quantum entities which interact continue to be related even at a distance. Experiments confirm this third insight even though Einstein himself considered the idea spooky. Polkinghorne observes that science is methodologically reductionist but seems to be heading in a relational and holistic direction. Perhaps, he suggests, metaphysical thinking can consider the possibility that not only electrons are entangled but persons as well are interrelated to a greater degree than previously thought. At this point, Polkinghorne recalls the theological notion of the Body of Christ as a ‘web of relationality’. He finds various scientific moves toward a relational and holistic view of reality ‘deeply congenial to Trinitarian ways of

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thought’. Though such moves do not prove the existence of the Trinity, they are consonant with the idea of perichoretic relations among the three divine Persons of the Trinity. He then concludes that reality is relational. The fourth of these seven features is that of the universe as a veiled reality (76-78). Again, Polkinghorne appeals to quantum theory, this time to its discovery of physical reality’s rather, as he says, cloudy subatomic level. Science has not yet found a satisfactory overall interpretation of this situation. Reality, then, is idiosyncratically veiled. He makes two further comments. First, quantum entities such as electrons are correctly identified as real. It is just that we must remain with the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle and take them as they are. As with science, so theology must work in a similar way regarding the Trinity. It must base itself on ‘the Christian testimony that God is most fully to be known in meeting with the One God whose triune reality is Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. He considers this an insight no more counterintuitive than that of quantum theory. In both cases, the reality encountered forces such insights on us. In the second comment, Polkinghorne says that quarks and gluons may themselves never be observable. But, the deep intelligibility of the physical world provides a basis for what he calls ontological belief. In the analogy with theology, belief in the unseen God stands on its fruitfulness in leading to understanding of spiritual experience as recorded in the gospels and found in the Church’s ‘continuing worshipful and sacramental experience’. In discussing the fifth feature, Polkinghorne describes the universe as an open process (78-82). In contradistinction to the previously held, more mechanistic view of physical reality, science today embraces a world of unpredictabilities at the atomic level as well as at the level of larger systems. These latter bear the ‘ill-chosen name of “chaotic”’. They involve ‘interplay between order and disorder’, such that further activity is ‘unpredictable but not totally haphazard’. Polkinghorne stresses that limits like these are intrinsic to physical reality. In this vein, he opts for a critical realist position, namely, that what we know is a guide to that which is real. He coins the phrase, ‘Epistemology models Ontology’. Otherwise, he remarks, why bother with science? For Polkinghorne, such unpredictabilities indicate ‘an actual ontological openness to the future’. Causes bringing about change are more than the usually considered simple exchanges of energy. Causality must take into consideration the system’s behavior as a whole, a sort of top-down approach to causality. The focus then is on ‘energy flows’ as ‘pattern and information’. He continues, considering two implications of such an open universe for a trinitarian theology of nature. First, the created world is a world of becoming. God knows this world in its ‘becomingness’, which implies a ‘divine dipolarity with respect to time’. The eternal and the temporal are complementary. Second, for science novelty occurs where order and openness are such that they avoid both rigid stagnation

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and lack of persistence in being. Polkinghorne sees here a resonance on the part of a trinitarian theology of nature with the interplay of order and openness within physical reality. This order reflects the interplay or activities of Word (order) and Spirit (openness). ‘There is a Trinitarian rhythm of sustainingredeeming-sanctifying. (…) The insight of creativity at the edge of chaos could be seen as a pale reflection of this pattern’. Polkinghorne notes that, in his discussion of the third feature of the universe, namely, as relative, he had brought that feature together with the relationality of the immanent Trinity. Here he is aligning scientifically observed processes of creation with economic trinitarian activity in the world. Sixth, for Polkinghorne the universe is information-generating (82-85). Here he draws attention to facts gathered since the introduction of the computer. Science has come to appreciate more clearly the behavior of complex systems. They exhibit ‘propensities for the spontaneous generation of patterns of largescale order’. By way of example, he cites the experiment in which a net of 10,000 bulbs light randomly, but not so forever. Soon the bulbs light in several repeated patterns, ‘the spontaneous generation of an altogether astonishing degree of order’. Polkinghorne predicts that patterns, so generated, and information specifying the patterns will eventually be considered an element fundamental in physical reality along with matter and energy. He calls this causal process active information. At this point, he quickly moves to say this insight can also be applied to acts of divine providence in which ‘God may be seen as interacting with creation by the input of information within its open history’. In such a case, it will not be possible easily to distinguish what nature, humans, and divine providence do. As the physical world exhibits a certain cloudiness of predictability, God remains a hidden deity. Polkinghorne sees this insight as especially compatible with the Christian understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is usually considered discrete and hidden in its guidance of history. God does not overrule what humans do. But then we come to the ‘ageold theological problem of grace and free will, now written cosmically large’. Seventh, and finally, Polkinghorne speaks of the universe’s eventual futility (85-87). He reminds us of the well-known options for the universe. The initial explosive force birthing the universe wars, perhaps along with dark matter, against the force of gravity. The universe may expand, in dissipation, to what Polkinghorne calls a whimper. Or, it may collapse back into its fiery beginning. Ultimately, either option leads to eventual futility. Such options do not support the hope of a lasting fulfillment within the physical cosmos itself. But, is such eventual futility compatible with the Christian ideal of creation by a loving Creator? Polkinghorne interestingly says that such difficulties do not create significantly more challenges than do questions about human life after death. He proposes that hope regarding both a universe of eventual futility and life after

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death lies in the eternal faithfulness of God. In response to the question of such futility, he cites various New Testament texts on the cosmic Christ. He also calls upon the belief in the empty tomb to indicate a future not only for Christ but for creation itself.25 If we wish to hold out hope with intellectual integrity, we must look at the universe from the overarching perspective provided by trinitarian theology, to which he turns in chapter 4. A ‘Thick’ Trinitarian Theology Chapter 4, ‘Theological Thickness’, begins the with several initial remarks (8893) to facilitate the transition from his reflections in chapter 3 to the present chapter. He is, in effect, moving from experience and interpreted experience in science and theology to a fuller and more inclusive, satisfying overall theory as further interpretation of initial experiences. More specifically, he is making this move from what he early on had referred to as religious experience26 to the further development of aspects of what he calls a thick, and not merely, Deist theology. He moves to a truly trinitarian theology. In these initial remarks, Polkinghorne describes the early stages of discourse in theoretical physics as phenomenological. Here, for example, physicists reflect on a question or problem, carry out several experiments, and propose early but incomplete insights related to this question or problem and related experiments. In parallel fashion, he suggests that his previous work in the present volume concerning scripture (chapter 2) and a theology of nature (chapter 3) can be considered a relatively early, phenomenological stage of theological reflection. He is describing what theologians identify as first theological reflection when they refer to early Christian experience of God, its expression in the New Testament, and early liturgical and sacramental celebration of the experience of God. Physicists continue beyond the phenomenological to construct a theory better integrating the original data in a more comprehensive theory. So too, theologians continue to develop a more systematic understanding of early trinitarian experience and initial reflection on it. Whether in physics or now in theology, this further reflection prolongs initial experience and early interpretation with a fuller reading of that experience. The fuller reading of these two forms of experience, scientific and religious, goes deeper into various aspects of them and, at times, corrects earlier intuitions. In both physics and theology, but especially in trinitarian theology, the task is difficult. Physicists have to do with a physical world but theologians with the infinite reality of God (90). 25

26

In chapter 6 of Science and the Trinity, Polkinghorne will discuss various points related to this question of Christ’s resurrection in relation to the future of creation. Polkinghorne, One World, 28.

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Polkinghorne then concentrates his attention primarily on developing aspects of the thick trinitarian theology which was worked out laboriously ‘to integrate Jewish, apostolic and ecclesial experience of God into a single account’ (90). He acknowledges his own lesser strengths in several more technical areas of trinitarian thought. He humbly says that ‘in theology we have to do the best we can’ (92). He himself suggests a relatively modest approach to understanding the Trinity, recognizing the importance of distinguishing what arises from interpreted experience and what may be ‘at some degree of hypothetical remove from such experience’ (93). After these initial remarks, Polkinghorne moves on to five topics arising especially from quantum physics, topics which he judges ‘particularly relevant to a Trinitarian engagement with science and religion’ (93). The first topic concerns God in relation to creatures (93-99). It is a brief reflection on divine transcendence and immanence. Polkinghorne reviews several approaches toward this question. He notes, for example, that scientists are easily enamored of pantheism, given the awe they feel before the ‘deep rational order and fruitful history of the universe’ (93). But for him the Christian God is not so immanent as to be identified with the universe. God is the reason for hope stretching beyond human and cosmic death. Human worship itself reinforces this sense of the divine beyond the universe. It is an encounter or experience whose numinous element combines with a deep sense of God within. He finds that, in another approach, classical Western theism has excessively stressed God as other. He says that, in a third approach, scientist-theologians often appeal to a panentheistic relationship between God and the universe. In this approach, the universe is included within God. Polkinghorne objects to ambiguities in this panentheistic way of imaging God’s transcendence and immanence. He himself proposes a fourth approach. He refers to process theology’s envisioning of God as one who only persuades finite causes. There are aspects of this approach, especially its overall proposal of a dipolar God, which he finds helpful. But he seems to lament the fact that process theology itself does not provide a place for direct divine power. Polkinghorne then criticizes the more philosophically formulated panentheistic attitude that anything outside God would limit God, who would consequently not be infinite. In contrast to this point of view, and at least implicitly in response to several of those he has previously cited, he proposes a kenotic understanding of God in relationship to the universe. God limits Godself by entering the world in such a way as to ‘“make way” for the existence of the created other’ (97), thus showing God’s love for the world. In further critique of panentheism, Polkinghorne holds that it is a form of Neo-Platonism with the world seen as a mere emanation within a divine inclusivity. Ultimately, for him panentheism is indeed too inclusive. He says that, in

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considering the relationship between God and created reality, it is enough to embrace a view rooted in the thought of various Eastern theologians who distinguish between God and God’s divine energies. He sees these divine energies as ‘immanently active divine operations ad extra’ (98). For Polkinghorne, this resulting divine and creaturely interaction maintains a balance. God remains God and creation has the space within which to be itself. He has continued throughout this discussion, somewhat surprisingly, to refer to God not in explicitly trinitarian terms but more generally. In this line, he concludes, ‘The Creator’s self-limitation should be understood to extend even to God’s condescending to act as a providential cause among causes’ (99). The second topic, trinitarian thinking (99-103), focuses on ways in which early trinitarian thinking developed. He acknowledges that such thinking arises out of earliest Christian experience. It combines respect for the oneness of God with addressing Jesus as the Lord. He sees this way of proceeding as a move from such experience of salvation to further interpretative reflection on it. Polkinghorne notes that science proceeds in a similar way when it develops fuller theories ever-more-adequate to the results of scientific experimentation. Scientists can appreciate trinitarian theology’s development as a move from experience to further reflection on it. At this point, Polkinghorne recalls that earliest Christian reflection tended toward a subordinationist view of the role of the risen Lord. This remark opens the way for him to identify two further elements supporting further reflection on experience both in the realm of science and, in some parallel thereto, in trinitarian theology. In both science and theology, this further reflection consists in an interpretation of data (101). He then considers the first of these two elements which help advance such reflection. In scientific theory, he too briefly calls that element an ‘overplus of interpretative success’ (102) which goes beyond initial considerations. He finds such a theological overplus in trinitarian theology. As the image of a loving and open exchange among divine Persons, it is considerably more illuminating than a simply monotheistic view of God. He describes a second element or form of support as collateral. In science, it involves calling upon other areas of study outside the area of immediate concern in support of further reflection on experience. Regarding science’s collateral support for trinitarian theology, he cites science’s affirmation of the relational character of the universe. That character is ‘certainly congenial to a Trinitarian way of thinking’ (103). Given our concern for testimonials to experience of the Trinity, we should now, at the end of our review of his second topic, cite what Polkinghorne had written earlier on in his discussion of it. ‘It is important to me that Trinitarian thinking arose primarily as a response to the insistent complexity of human encounter with the reality of God experienced within the growing life of the Church’ (99-100).

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In the third topic, God and time (104-10), Polkinghorne again refers more generally to God rather than specifically to the Trinity. He notes that geology, biology, and now physics have concluded ‘it is impossible today to think about created reality without acknowledging its evolutionary character and its radical temporality’ (104). Theology, in turn, stresses that God’s knowledge is true and comprehensive. But he immediately says we must understand God’s knowledge as knowledge of what things are. And, more concretely, God knows them in their temporal succession. In contradistinction to the traditional notion that God knows all in one eternal gaze, Polkinghorne, in a general way, embraces process theology’s dipolar understanding of God as atemporal in one pole and temporal in another. He sees divine temporal dipolarity as a ‘mutual complementarity between the unchangingly steadfast and the providentially responsive’ (105). It is, then, not only scientists and theologians who often feel comfortable with such divine temporal dipolarity. For the Bible itself leads to an understanding of God as both steadfast and engaged in temporal processes. Polkinghorne sees several consequences of such a more dipolar understanding of God in relation to time. Time begins with creation, but God does not. Rather, with creation God in self-kenosis freely limits Godself to knowing events as they occur. For example, God relates differently to the universe in its first moments and now in its complexity ‘when the universe is the home of saints and sinners’ (107). God’s immutability rests in God’s steadfastly relating appropriately to creation at every moment. God does not know contingent future events in their futurity but can ‘bring about determinate ends through contingent paths’ (108). God engages with the world in its suffering. The final point Polkinghorne takes up in this discussion of God and time is the question of which form of time God relates to. Quantum physics shows that there are varieties of time, dependent on various factors such as the movement of observers as well as where they are located. But God simply knows every event ‘as and when it happens’ (110). In the fourth topic, divine complexity (110-13), Polkinghorne returns to a more explicitly trinitarian form of reference to God. Here he takes up the classical theological notion of divine simplicity, a notion important in the first part of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. He underscores that, in this way of understanding God, God is not merely just but is justice itself. However, trinitarian thinking requires a sense of a certain complexity in God. Polkinghorne has, in effect, drawn attention to the tension in Aquinas’s thought between the approach in the first questions treated in the Summa and Aquinas’s slightly later treatment on the Trinity. In the former, Aquinas stresses more substance and efficient causality whereas, in the latter, he works more with relationality. For Polkinghorne, the eternity-temporality polarity in God reinforces the notion of divine complexity. He brings this fourth reflection to a close by citing the complexity of a human person. By way of example, he recalls that Augustine makes

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of memory, intellect, and will human analogies available in speaking of the Trinity. Polkinghorne says that it should, then, not be surprising to find a complexity-within-unity in God as triune. In the fifth and final topic, incarnational thinking (113-16), Polkinghorne rounds out his discussions of the first four topics with brief remarks on the central role of incarnational thinking in trinitarian theology. He cites Jürgen Moltmann, who is perhaps his favorite trinitarian theologian. Moltmann links the Father’s suffering with that of the Son. He writes, ‘The form of the crucified Christ is the Trinity’.27 Polkinghorne continues his reflection with a remark which quickly catches the reader’s attention. With a certain tentativeness, he asks if one could responsibly say, from a theological perspective, that it was the ‘temporal pole of the Second Person that became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, while the eternal pole continued its timeless participation in the divine essence and governance’. He argues that such an interpretation of the incarnation finds its justification in two points. First, it is appropriate that the Second Person’s temporal pole participate in time-conditioned creation. Second, this participation is enough to meet the patristic requirement that what is not assumed is not saved, namely, that in this case time, humanness, and physical creation are so assumed. After death, we will share in the resurrection’s new-creation time. But we will not share in the ‘ineffable life of the eternal divine pole’. In effect, Polkinghorne expands his notion of temporal pole to apply to all three divine Persons, suggesting that they are all involved in the historical event of the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity.28 Polkinghorne brings this chapter 4 on theological thickness to a close with renewed reference to a certain parallel or, as he says, consonance between quantum mechanics and trinitarian theology. To give a satisfactory insight into physical reality, ‘one needed the “thick” theory of quantum mechanics, with its much greater complexity and the counterintuitive character of its thought [than that of earlier theories]. (…) [I]n theology also it is only a thick account that 27

28

Polkinghorne refers to Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981), 246. But it seems the reference should rather be to Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993 edition), 246. In 1989, Polkinghorne had explicitly affirmed the eternal and temporal poles of each of the three divine Persons. ‘Each of the divine Persons is to be conceived as possessing his eternal and his temporal pole. It will be the temporal pole of the Son which is involved in the kenotic focusing of the infinite upon the finite, in the historical episode of the incarnation. The temporal poles of the Father and the Spirit would continue God’s rule over the general process of the world and his immanent working within it, without any suspension of divine providence in the early years of the first century’. Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World (London: SPCK, 1989), 87 (italics in the original).

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proves even partially adequate to the explanation of the inexhaustible riches of the Triune God’ (116-17). Polkinghorne has identified a certain consonance in the form of parallels between a quantum reading of physical reality and a trinitarian theology. In so doing, he is considering the quantum reading from the wider perspective of trinitarian theology. Given such consonance and perspective, we can appreciate Polkinghorne’s claim that trinitarian theology becomes an attractive candidate for the theory of everything (again, 60-61).29 Exploring Reality Further As we have noted, in his 1991 book, Reason and Reality, Polkinghorne had observed that ‘elements of surprise and intellectual profundity’ characterize both science and trinitarian theology.30 Then, in 2004, he expanded his reflections on science and trinitarian theology in his masterful study, Science and the Trinity. In this volume, he considered the two from the specific perspective of trinitarian theology’s serving as a context within which science’s insights, and especially those of quantum theory, could take on deeper meaning. A year later, in 2005, he continued his spiral approach to reflection on relationships between science and trinitarian theology with the publication of Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (x with xi and 169).31 In this intertwining, however, Polkinghorne tends to speak less of Trinity. In most of the chapters, he refers simply to God. Often, he seems to work only more implicitly with trinitarian theology. It is as if he is presuming what he has written the year before in Science and the Trinity. Topics treated in it regularly come up again in Exploring Reality, but now developed at greater length. Among them, for example, he again discusses topics such as critical realism, causality, and the nature of time. Chapter 5, ‘Divine Reality: The Trinity’, is an exception to this tendency to refer more to God than to Trinity. But before turning directly to this chapter, it will be helpful to call attention to the striking way in which Polkinghorne 29

30 31

Polkinghorne repeats this position in stronger fashion three years later, in 2007. ‘I believe that ultimately the cousinly relationships that we have investigated in this book find their most profound understanding in terms of that true Theory of Everything which is trinitarian theology’. Quantum Physics and Theology, 110. Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality, 98. Pages in parentheses in the present chapter’s section, ‘Exploring Reality Further’, refer to Polkinghorne’s volume, Exploring Reality. Italics in quotations are in the original. If a short section equivalent to about three pages or less from this volume is referenced by page numbers in our text, individual pages will not be further referenced in the immediately ensuing presentation of the section in question.

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regularly refers, throughout the volume, to experience. He speaks of experience in relation to both science and trinitarian theology. His stress on experience is perhaps due, in part at least, to his earlier specialization in science and particularly in physics. In a related point, from the beginning of this volume Exploring Reality he emphasizes the multi-dimensional character of reality. On one hand, it is this character which he will in effect be exploring. On the other, he sees varied forms of human experience as being correlative to reality’s multi-dimensionality. We indeed relate in many ways with reality. Thus, he understands experience in various ways. At times, when speaking of it he can be referring to an interior, mental, and emotional process and, at other times, to experience as encounter with others and ‘otherness’. And, again, to the result of either such process or encounter. When he speaks of experience, he can as well be making more general reference to what occurs in a specific domain of endeavor, or often implicitly all these forms of experience together. Among such varied forms of experience, he writes of it as macroscopic (26), encounters with the sacred (44), mental and spiritual (47), the experience of yesterday (52), mathematical (55), experiences of the resurrection (83), the threefold skein of experience (of the Trinity) (100), experience of time (115), human and divine experience of temporality (118-19), sacramental (172).32 Within the gamut of these and other forms of experience, science treats of experiencing reality at one important level, that of physical reality. But science is not by itself capable of accounting for the fuller range of human experience beyond its consideration of encounters with the more impersonal side to physical reality as such. Polkinghorne wishes to consider, equally, the dimension of the personal, which he says, in summary form, leads him through the reality of Jesus of Nazareth on to a trinitarian understanding of the divine nature (x-xi). Now, in chapter 5 on the divine nature as Trinity, it is again the notion of experience and especially its importance in relation to trinitarian theology which catch our attention. Here Polkinghorne complements and further reinforces what he had written the year before when he considered experience of the Trinity as leading to further interpretation of it. This interpretation came to be expressed in the form of a more fully developed trinitarian theology. He himself confirms his intention with this chapter 5 when he describes what he will be doing in it. ‘Emphasis is laid on the manner in which trinitarian thinking arose 32

Steinke provides an extensive discussion of Polkinghorne on experience and religious experience, underscoring negative or at least weak aspects of the ways in which he sees Polkinghorne as understanding and working with these two notions. John Polkinghorne: Konsonanz, 86-101. In a judgment which goes beyond Polkinghorne’s thought on experience and religious experience, Steinke sees Polkinghorne as one who paints with a wide brush, we might say, with details remaining unexplained (101). It may, though, be easier to accept working with a more fluid way of referring to experience in the English-speaking world, where such reference is frequent.

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as a response to Christian experience, both that recorded in scripture and that continued in the worshipping life of the Church’ (xiv). As well, Polkinghorne acknowledges a currently renewed interest in trinitarian theology, an interest he reflects in his own writing. He sees this renewed interest fostered, in part at least, by a focus on relationality, a focus supported by modern science and its discoveries (xiv). The chapter opens with initial remarks concerning the provisional nature of formulations of overall theories in physics (90-93). At present, for example, physicists must be content with the fact that they do not have an overarching theory concerning the ultimate nature of the physical universe. As in the past, here Polkinghorne continues to call scientists’ moves toward a universal theory bottom-up thinking. He describes the move as one from interpreted experience to theoretical understanding. Recalling such bottom-up thinking permits him to mention that he also considers theology’s approach to be bottom-up (93-96). In working with this approach, both science and theology are seeking the truth. The search involves judgment made, and discernment carried out over, the course of the move from experience to theory. But, as the quantum world leads to still unanswered questions, so theological concern for the infinite God will never arrive at complete understanding. Throughout the rest of the chapter, Polkinghorne continues to spell out further the rootage of trinitarian theology in the early and ongoing experience of the Christian community.33 At the same time, he intertwines various aspects of that theology with elements of quantum theory. He is in effect continuing to identify consonances between the two. Regarding trinitarian theology, he forcefully argues that it developed particularly from two sources. From earliest Christian experiences as recorded in the New Testament and from Christian liturgical celebration carried on in ancient times and continued throughout subsequent history. In relation to New Testament witnessing, he again cites approvingly Moltmann, who speaks of it in terms of the cross as a trinitarian event in which the Father suffers the loss of the Son. He recognizes that there is a danger here of reducing the cross to a binary event unless one attributes to the Spirit a participation which is typical of the Spirit, a somewhat more hidden activity (96-101). Polkinghorne brings much of his thought on experience of the Trinity together in the following quote. 33

Already in his early study, The Way the World Is: The Christian Perspective of a Scientist (London: Triangle, SPCK, 1983), 95-101, Polkinghorne had brought forth several ideas on trinitarian thought that he develops at much greater length over the following years. Among these ideas, his insistence that trinitarian theology arose not from metaphysical speculation but from reflection on early Christian experience of God: God our Father; the Lord Jesus Christ; the mysterious but real presence of the Spirit who urges us to prayer. Of further note, already in the preface to this early work, he discusses similarities between science and theology (ix-xi).

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Christian experience testifies to the knowledge of God as the Creator of the world (one might say, the Father ‘above us’), as God made known to us in human terms in Jesus Christ (the Son ‘alongside us’) and as God at work in our hearts and lives (the Spirit ‘within us’). This threefold skein of experience certainly forms part of the motivation for trinitarian belief.

He then warns of the danger of reading this experience in a merely monistic mode. Such a reading is unacceptable because ‘relational experience requires a degree of differentiation’ (100). In speaking of liturgical celebration, Polkinghorne refers to it as liturgical experience, especially when he speaks of baptism and eucharist. From early on, baptism is trinitarian in nature, as illustrated in the baptism of Jesus (Mark 1:911). The eucharist is celebrated according to the structure of thanksgiving to the Father, recalling the death and resurrection of Christ, and the calling down of the Spirit upon worshippers and gifts (102). As mentioned, at various points throughout this chapter Polkinghorne has been bringing together elements of quantum theory and aspects of trinitarian theology. He intertwines, as he says, quantum theory and trinitarian theology. In so doing, he has continued gently to relate them to one another. Ultimately each, and consequently science and religion more generally in their own ways, gives expression to the relational character of reality. He seems subtly to be reinforcing the reader’s own sense, so to speak, of possible consonances not only between physics and trinitarian theology but also between physical reality and the Trinity. But, more specifically now concerning quantum theory and trinitarian theology, Polkinghorne provides examples of ways in which their intertwining expresses the relational character of reality. Theologians have had to struggle to understand the unity and diversity which they try to express in trinitarian thought. So too, physicists have had to struggle with light functioning both as particle and as wave. Nature presents the doubled characteristic of light, and Christian encounter with the divine could only be fully expressed in a triadic way (103-4). Another example of intertwining is the clear emphasis on relationality, which over the centuries came to be a significant, perhaps the most significant, aspect of trinitarian thought. This attribution of ontological density to relationality finds support in science’s exploring ever more deeply the relational character of physical reality.34 In a sort of back-and-forth between science and 34

In a 2010 writing, Polkinghorne seems to take a step further concerning science’s increasing stress on relationality as being something more than just consonant with trinitarian relationality. He writes, ‘The physicist can see science’s parallel [to Christian thought on the Trinity] discovery in its own domain that “Reality Is Relational”, as being a faint but distinct echo of the triune character of the Creator of the universe’. ‘The Demise of Democritus’, in: Trinity

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religion, he says that twentieth-century science brought us quantum theory and relativity theory (104-7). Theologians had developed what appear to be their own arid and abstract concepts such as filiation, spiration, begetting and procession. Quantum theory, in turn, has led to abstract mathematical theories (108-9). Polkinghorne has spelled out these and other similarities between science and religion as forms of consonance between quantum theory and trinitarian theology. Finally, he affirms that ‘the trinitarian path is the one to follow. Not all is exhaustively understood but, as with quantum theory and so with trinitarian theology, we know enough to be assured we are moving in the right direction’ (112). Science-Religion Dialogue as Testimonial As both theoretical physicist and Christian committed to long-term serious theological reflection, Polkinghorne is eminently qualified to explore possibilities of dialogue between science and religion. He has framed his exploration of that dialogue as one between physics and theology, more specifically, between quantum physics and trinitarian theology. In this dialogue, trinitarian theology serves as an overarching perspective. From this perspective, he considers consonances between the two and, indeed, looks upon the universe itself (87).35 It would be hard to think of areas of theoretical reflection wider in scope and implication than quantum physics and trinitrian theology. Quantum physics proposes a revolutionary understanding of physical reality. Trinitarian theology opens the way to a complex insight into divine, infinite reality in relation to that which is finite. Polkinghorne bases his, in a sense comparative, study of quantum theory and trinitarian theology on consonances between them. That is, he identifies similarities resonating between them, especially the fact that both emphasize relationality. Reality itself is relational.36 Of immediate present interest, both scientists and theologians adopt a bottom-up approach. They begin from experiences, often he says interpreted experiences. They then proceed to develop theories as interpretations of experiences appropriate to their respective realms of reflection.37 In taking a further, final look at these scientific and religious forms

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and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 12-13. Here page references in the text refer again to Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity. Polkinghorne believes that science, in its quest for reality’s intelligibility, is ultimately theological. For him, creation’s rationality is rooted in humans being images of the Creator. Science and the Trinity, 180. See, n. 34 above. Christiana Z. Peppard briefly describes the ‘scientific method as we now know it (…) as “observe, test, measure, formulate hypothesis, repeat”’. ‘The Fourth Era of the Catholic

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of experience, we will focus on experiences which Polkinghorne more explicitly relates to the notion and reality of God as triune. Regarding experiences in the scientific realm, he speaks of those arising in relation to and out of scientific experiments as well as initial reflection on them. For example, he describes one instance of human experience which quickly catches our attention. He notes the repeated sense of wonder scientists experience before the rational order and intelligibility of the universe. He then considers this instance from a more theological perspective. He does not say the sense of wonder provides proof for the trinitarian structure of the divine. But, within the context of various references to the Trinity, he sees such experiences of wonder as ‘tacit acts of worship of the Creator’ (65). Regarding experiences in the religious realm, Polkinghorne speaks of many and varied forms of experience of the divine. More specifically, in relation to trinitarian theology he points to several ways in which he sees various Christian experiences as having led to, and then as well reinforced, the insight that God is triune. First, such experiences have influenced the formation of the New Testament, whose subsequent role is to provide ongoing witness to them. Second, the continuing Christian communal and individual experience of God as Trinity finds expression in the tradition of theological reflection on and interpretation of that experience. Third, distinguishable but not to be separated from this second, there is the Christian community’s and its members’ ongoing liturgical and sacrament experience. Polkinghorne roots, though not exclusively, his testimonial to experience of the Trinity in these three ways in which originary experiences give rise to further interpretation. We have examined Polkinghorne’s working with these three forms of testimonial to experience of the Trinity as found primarily in his 2004 study, Science and the Trinity. But the dialogue he carries out between science and religion began many years earlier. And, as noted, that dialogue has continued as further reflection and writing carried out in spiral fashion. He takes up earlier insights and develops them further, thus returning to them in new and fuller ways. In his earlier work, Science and Theology: An Introduction38 published in 1998, he makes a series of helpful remarks regarding Scripture and tradition but without

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Church’s Engagement with Science’, in: Sacred Cosmos: Faith & Science, 24th Annual Festival of Faiths, April 25-27, 2019, Louisville, KY, Kentucky Center for the Arts, 2019, 77-89, with quotation on 80. Dr. Thomas J. Singer, OMI, has kindly drawn my attention to this Festival collection of texts. Peppard’s article originally appeared as ‘Pope Francis and the Fourth Era of the Catholic Church’s Engagement with Science’, in: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71 (2015) no. 5, 31-39, with quotation on 33 (this printed version contains bibliographical reference information), accessed August 16, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/ 0096340215599776. John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 1998).

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explicitly mentioning the Trinity at this point in the book.39 He says that ‘the continuing deposit of the record of transpersonal encounters with God is to be found in Scripture and tradition’.40 Concerning Scripture, in his critical realist perspective he refers to the New Testament’s witness to ‘actual experience of the risen Christ’.41 In this way, the New Testament’s recounting of such experiences continues to resonate in subsequent Christian experiences occurring throughout history. Then, in Science and the Trinity (33-59), he further develops this insight concerning appearances of the risen Christ and treats more extensively of the role of Scripture in witnessing to encounters with God. It bears repeating that for him the New Testament provides ‘raw materials of encounter with the reality of God, Christ and the Spirit that eventually led the Church to a Trinitarian conclusion’ (39). Again, in his 1998 work Science and Theology, Polkinghorne comments on tradition in relation to various forms of religious experience. Over the course of his comments, he gives some idea of what he means when he speaks of religious experience as encounter with the mystery of God.42 He considers religious experience under five rubrics. As mystical, it is an intense experience of unity with God. As numinous, it is an experience tremendous and overwhelming. In prayer and worship, it gives expression to a more ‘lower-key experience of awareness of the divine presence’. As a form of desolation, it involves a ‘feeling of divine absence’.43 These forms of highly personal religious experience rest in the background. They continue to influence him as, through the ensuing years, he speaks of religious experience and, in more specific fashion, of experience of the Trinity. We move on to the long fifth chapter in his 2004 book Science and the Trinity. In it, Polkinghorne focuses on liturgical and sacramental experience of the Trinity. He describes at length that lower-key experience to which he had briefly referred in 1998, describing especially the celebration of baptism and the Eucharist. For him, both are in their own way occasions for communal and individual experience of the Trinity. Participation itself in the celebration of these two sacraments can serve as a form of experience of the Trinity. Such is the case especially concerning the Eucharist, which is communal and trinitarian in character (140-41). Yet, he admits that participation in the Eucharist can also be ambiguous (128). Polkinghorne has gone to great lengths to identify experiences of the Trinity through reference to various testimonials to them. For the most part, he points 39 40 41 42 43

Polkinghorne does write of the Trinity briefly in Science and Theology, 112-14. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 100-2. Ibid., 101.

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to more directly communal and individual experiences witnessed to in Scripture or in various ways throughout the history of the Christian community. But he also speaks of vicarious experiences of the Trinity, ones engendered generally when those who hear or read of such experiences accept them as personally meaningful (119). In carrying on his dialogue between science and religion, he writes in approving witness to these direct as well as more vicarious forms of experience of the Trinity. We would be remiss, though, if we did not also note what Polkinghorne says regarding his personal experience of the Trinity. In his 1995 book, Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue, he speaks of his religious experience in a more general way. ‘My own experience of encounter [with God] through worship, with a Reality standing over against me in mercy and in judgment, however faint and fitful those encounters are, is undeniable experience for me’.44 In 2004, he refers in Science and the Trinity to his own ‘rather humdrum kind of spirituality’ in the form of experience in prayer, worship and service. He reaffirms the importance of his experience of participation in the Eucharist (119), whose structure, again, is trinitarian.45 Over many years, then, Polkinghorne has written of varied dimensions of reality and the corresponding, overall multi-leveled human experience of it. Among human experience’s many levels, many forms we might say, he works especially with the physicist’s experience of physical reality and the Christian experience of the triune God. He aligns various aspects of physical reality with consonant aspects expressed in trinitarian theology and vice versa, permitting him to address directly both scientists and theologians. In so addressing them, he is judicious in judgment. Importantly, at the same time his direct and straightforward, calm style makes what he writes available to a wider readership.46 His identification of compatibilities between quantum physics and trinitarian theology offers to all, for their consideration, an impressive, ultimately trinitarian vision of the fullness of reality. His passion for truth in both science and religion undergirds the dialogue he has set up between them. His dialogue contributes to the further development of both quantum theory and trinitarian theology. In so carrying out that dialogue, and with its results, Polkinghorne offers a contemporary testimonial to experience of the Trinity.

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John Polkinghorne, Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), 8. Concerning his experience as a physicist and as a priest, Polkinghorne adds: ‘I find a satisfying degree of consonance between my scientific knowledge and the insights of my Christian belief, a harmony between my scientific knowledge and my experience as an Anglican priest’. ‘Physics and Metaphysics in a Trinitarian Perspective’, 48. On his writing style, see Polkinghorne’s own remarks. From Physicist to Priest, 135-37.

CHAPTER 15 WILLIAM PAUL YOUNG The Shack, Novel

From quantum theory and trinitarian theology in England to fictional writing in North America. William Paul Young (1955–), author of the novel The Shack, ‘was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was New Guinea’.1 At age 6, he went off to boarding school after having learned the local Dani tribal language and become what he called a white Dani. Somewhat later, the family returned to Canada, where his father served as pastor in Western Canada. Altogether, he says he attended 13 schools before heading to Bible College. He covered costs at the College by ‘working as a radio disc jockey, lifeguard and even [doing] a stint in the oil fields of northern Alberta’. After earning an undergraduate degree in Religion from Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon, he married Kim Warren and served on staff at a suburban church while at seminary. Over the next years, he owned several businesses, worked in anything from insurance to construction, and produced various commercial texts. Of special interest, he wrote ‘songs, poetry, short stories or newsletters; never for public consumption but for friends and family’.2 Young originally wrote The Shack, his novel about healing, reconciliation, and redemption, for his six children at the request of his wife. She wanted him to explain something of his own experience and what he had gone through over the years. There is, then, much that is in one way or another autobiographical in the novel. Young himself had felt deeply that he needed all three, healing, reconciliation, and redemption. He suffered sexual abuse both within the tribal context in which he spent his earliest years and again at boarding school. In later 1

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William Paul Young with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity (Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007), back cover. The Shack will often be referenced overall by chapter. Specific page references will be indicated in parentheses within our text itself. Italics in quotations are in the original text. ‘Wm. P. Young—About’, website accessed October 24, 2018, http://wmpaulyoung.com/ wm-paul-young-about.

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years, he admits having been unfaithful to his wife at one point in their marriage. He says it took years to heal the damage he suffered and the hurt he had caused his wife. His was a profound, multi-year healing process. Following it, he wrote The Shack, which became for many weeks a New York Times best seller. He hoped it would also be made into a movie, as was subsequently the case. We will first focus on the novel and, in the next chapter, turn to the movie, considering each from the perspective of our interest in testimonials to experience of the Trinity.3 The Novel The Shack has sold over 20 million copies since its publication in 2007. Its author Young has been described as a public theologian.4 He probably would 3

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For further information on Young’s life, suffering, sense of guilt, and search for redemption, see Motoko Rich, ‘Christian Novel Is Surprise Best Seller’, review of The Shack by William Paul Young with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings, in: The New York Times, accessed October 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/books/24shack.html. A version of this review appears in print in the New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2008, New York edition. The review is based in part on an interview with Young, who has given several other interviews concerning the novel itself and its relation to his own experience. See, for example: Melissa Binder, ‘“The Shack” Author Talks about Abuse, Adultery and Atonement (Q&A)’, in: The Oregonian/OregonLive.com, posted May 14, 2015, accessed October 24, 2018, https://www.oregonlive.com/faith/2015/05/the_shack_author_qa.html; and, at greater length, Carmen LaBerge, ‘Online Exclusive: Extended Interview with Wm Paul Young, Author of The Shack’, March 3, 2017, The Reconnect, accessed October 24, 2018, https://reconnectwithcarmen.com/online-exclusive-extended-interview-wm-paul-young-author-shack. Christopher Douglas’s extended study and analysis of The Shack as a retelling of the Hebrew Bible Book of Job, a retelling most probably unintended by Young, came to my attention after completing this text. Douglas sees in the book a theodicy in line overall with remnants of an early form of polytheism in ancient Israel, with Young’s Trinity appealing to three divine persons better to handle possible divine responsibility in relation to evil. ‘This Is The Shack That Job Built: Theodicy and Polytheism in William Paul Young’s Evangelical Bestseller’, in: Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88 (2020), 505-42, where on 534 Douglas writes, ‘My claim (…) is that Young inadvertently rediscovered the latent residual polytheism of the Bible for the simple reason that it is an easier way to try to solve problems of theodicy that his novel takes up’. Andries G. van Aarde, ‘God, the Christ and the Spirit in William P. Young’s Bestseller The Shack Seen from a Pauline and Johannine Perspective’, in: HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 65, Art. #305 (2009) no. 1, 418, DOI: 10.4102/v65i1.305, accessed October 25, 2018, https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/305/636. Van Aarde refers to his own further study concerning what he means by public theology, namely, theology performed in the agora: Andries G. van Aarde, ‘What Is “Theology” in “Public Theology” and What Is “Public” about “Public Theology”?’, in: HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 64 (2008) no. 3,

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be happy with that title, though he did not intend to write a systematic theology. Rather, he wanted to discuss the question of the human predicament and the triune God in a way attractive and easily accessible to a wide range of readers. He wrote what has been described as a Christian book. And Christian it is in its subject matter. But, as he notes, some, especially from his own evangelical ranks, have questioned its doctrinal orthodoxy. He points to others who have argued in favor of its overall coherence with Christian biblical and later theological traditions.5 Young has created a fictional world of suffering and its overcoming through loving relationships, especially relationships with God.6 Already now it will be helpful to provide a brief preliminary summary of the novel’s story.7 The central character in this fictional world is Mackenzie Allen Phillips. His wife Nan and close friends call him Mack (10). He has suffered greatly in life – a difficult relationship with his father, a Labor Day weekend trip gone terribly wrong. His wife is a nurse who is scheduled to follow a continuing education class over the upcoming weekend. Mack, in turn, takes his three youngest children, who are still living at home, on a camping trip. They are Josh, who is the oldest, Kate and Missy, the youngest. During the trip, little Missy is kidnapped and brutally murdered. Some years later, Mack finds a note in the mailbox. It is an invitation to return to the shack where the little girl had been taken. He drives off to the shack, where he meets three persons. He and we the readers, with his help, recognize them as the three divine persons of the Trinity. Over the weekend, he develops a relationship of trust with each one of them individually and with all three together. They in turn affirm their ongoing, loving relationships with him. Through these relationships, he comes to healing, reconciliation, and redemption. In effect, he comes to see his own and many of the world’s problems from a redeeming divine perspective. That of love.

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1213-34, accessed October 26, 2018, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext& pid=S0259-94222008000300005. William Paul Young, foreword to C. Baxter Kruger, The Shack Revisited: There is More Going on Here Than You Ever Dared to Dream (New York: Faith Words, 2012), ix-xiii. Prof. David Perrin kindly drew my attention to Kruger’s book, which is an appreciative and expansive theological reflection focused especially on the Trinity as presented in The Shack. See also, in a similar vein: Roger E. Olson, Finding God in the Shack: Seeking Truth in a Story of Evil and Redemption (Downers Grove, IL: IVP InterVarsity, 2009); Randal Rauser, Finding God in the Shack (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2009). Young, foreword to Kruger, Shack Revisited, xi. For a more extensive overview of and study guide to The Shack, see William Paul Young & Brad Robison, The Shack: Study Guide, Healing for Your Journey through Loss, Trauma, and Pain (Newbury Park, CA: Windblown, 2016). Many summaries of the overall storyline are available on the Internet.

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Now we turn to the novel itself as a work of narrative fiction. In line with its fictional character, we will first present the novel under three headings: Story and Narrators; Plot and Participants; Timelines. Under these headings, we will focus on the novel itself as a text which Young has created by imaginative use of language.8 More tightly phrased, the text is a language-based imaginative construction. We will then, in the final part of our reflection, consider the novel as a testimonial. There, but especially in that part’s last subsection entitled ‘Entering Mack’s Fictional World’, we will approach the text more from the perspective of those who read it.9 Story and Narrators As we have just indicated in a briefest of summaries, The Shack tells Mack’s story. There are three levels in its narration. As the author, Young is the underlying, creator-narrator. Then, internal to the story, there is Mack’s friend, Willie. He retells Mack’s story from within the overall text. In a foreword, he explains that Mack has recounted to him all that he had experienced. Mack himself, then, becomes at least indirectly the narrator of his own story as retold by and through Willie over the course of 18 chapters. These chapters are perhaps best seen as episodes in the overall, developing narration of Mack’s story. Willie comes back to speak in his own right again in an ‘After Words’. There he updates us, the readers, on several more recent events in Mack’s life and in his own. For instance, Mack attends the trial of the one accused of killing his young daughter and wishes to meet with the accused, when permission will be granted. We are, in effect, reading Mack’s story as embedded within Willie’s retelling of it. Willie’s retelling in turn provides a sort of chronological context to Mack’s story. That story, and Willie’s wider framing of it, together make up the text Young has written. 8

9

In fiction writing, such imaginative use of language can call upon the rich variety of human linguistic forms of expression and multileveled, contextualized meanings of words and phrases. Regarding our use of language, the chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University Robert P. Crease has critiqued a flat scientific literalism. He reminds us that humans speak, and we should add write, ‘allusively, evocatively, breezily, playfully, impressionistically, satirically, provocatively, imperatively or even wickedly’. ‘Thus Faked Zarathustra’, opinion article, in: The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2018, A13. Prof. Renata Furst has kindly drawn my attention to the following two studies which have proven most helpful in understanding fiction and its worlds. My at times somewhat idiosyncratic ways of referring to fiction and its worlds do not capture the more complex, profound, and nuanced presentation of this subject matter in these studies: Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Shlomith RimmonKenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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Willie’s framework involves reference to events and persons. But it is especially Mack’s own story itself which consists in an interweaving of events and main characters.10 The story is an interweaving with an overall purpose. Stated succinctly, its purpose is to tell us of Mack’s healing, reconciliation, and redemption. Without going into many details at this point, we can note an example of such interweaving. Crucial to the overall storyline is the episode in chapter 1. There Mack finds a cryptic note in his mailbox (18). Mackenzie, It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together. – Papa

Of all places to avoid, it was this shack where Mack’s young daughter died. Already before her disappearance and death, but especially afterwards, Mack has been suffering from ‘The Great Sadness’. He feels himself alienated from God. Totally unexpected, he now gets this note signed ‘Papa’, which was his wife Nan’s ‘favorite name for God’ (24).11 Mack, his wife, and God are all introduced and brought together in the story through the simple event of finding a note in the mailbox. Over the following 17 chapters, Mack will report on various things that happen to him and how they all lead finally to healing, reconciliation, and redemption. The story aims to bring us, the readers, to share in Mack’s experience of these three. In turning now to the plot in The Shack, we will select and focus on further events and those main characters who participate in them. In this narrative fictional writing, the events themselves have at least quasi-causal relations with one another. They move the story forward from one event to another toward the just-mentioned goal of healing, reconciliation, and redemption. 10

11

Main characters, that is, especially from our perspective of interest in testimonials to experience of the Trinity. Regarding the novel The Shack, linking story here with purpose reflects something of Young’s description of his story as a parable. See LaBerge, ‘Online Exclusive: Extended Interview’, where Young adds, ‘But it has very deep layers beneath [the story as parable]’. In both novels and movies, descriptions of what we mean by story and plot as well as relationships between them seem to differ somewhat in various literary studies. Here I am working with more general notions of the two. See, for example in these regards, brief remarks on story and plot by Brian McFarlane, ‘A Note on Terminology’, in: Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 19-20, 23. A literary allusion to Gospel descriptions of Jesus’ own way of addressing God as abba and father, as confirmed by Jesus’ addressing Papa as abba later in the story (123, 147).

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Plot and Participants The overall plotline or series of events in Mack’s story develops in three successive stages, each with its own internal dynamic. The first stage moves in chapters 1 to 4 from Mack’s discovery of the note through reveries concerning terrible past events to a moment just before Mack decides to accept Papa’s invitation and returns to the shack. The second develops from chapters 5 through 17, from Mack’s decision to return to the shack on through his encounters with three persons. In the third stage, consisting of chapter 18, Mack finds himself again with his family, this time in the hospital after an accident. His life, outlook, and especially family relations radically change for the better. He has come to appreciate and, in a deeper way, understand his various relationships and their importance. We will highlight several events in each of these three stages, events which will help us enter progressively more fully into Mack’s world. As we enter, we bring with us much of what we are and what we believe or do not believe. In either case, a review these events and the main characters participating in them will bring forward several aspects of what we will ultimately come to identify as Young’s testimonial to experience of the Trinity. In the first stage of plot development, Mack has, as mentioned, found a note in the mailbox. After receiving it, he recalls his earlier decision to take his three youngest children for a family weekend of camping in the woods. In his reveries, two events of special importance followed this decision and his having carried it out. In chapter 3, Josh and Kate are in a boat out on the lake close to their campsite and those of other acquaintances. Suddenly Kate, waving her paddle, loses her balance and tips the canoe. Mack swims out to help her and Josh. She is okay, but Josh is entangled in canoe webbing. Mack finally frees him. Following this accident on the lake, and Mack’s having previously received the note from Papa in chapter 1, another event brings this first stage of the plotline to a truly tragic close. In chapter 4, Mack has returned to the shore where he looks for little Missy. He and others realize she is missing. The search for her stretches from hours to a day and more. Finally, search parties lead Mack and those with him to a hidden valley. There they find ‘a run-down little shack near the edge of a pristine lake barely half a mile across’ (63). Mack and the others with him fear she is dead. They then come upon her bloody dress. It seems she has been the victim of a serial killer of little girls (61, 65). This tragic event has terrible personal consequences. Kate turns inward, seeming to think it was her fault that her Dad was not on shore to protect Missy. Josh, somewhat older, holds up better. Though Nan assures Mack that she does not hold him responsible, he sinks further into the great sadness. At the end of chapter 4, Mack returns from his reveries to the present and wonders if, somehow, perhaps the note did come from God (68).

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The second and by far longest stage in the developing plot takes us to the heart of Mack’s weekend encounter with God. In this stage’s opening chapter 5, Mack, and we with him, find ourselves three and a half years after the tragic family weekend – in the dead of winter. Mack drives back to the shack. On entering it, he sees the faded bloodstain on the floor where Missy’s dress had been found. Emotionally exhausted, he falls asleep and seemingly shortly thereafter awakens. On his leaving the shack, the weather changes to spring, flowers and all. It is now a beautiful log cabin from which voices flow. This first event leads to a second one. Mack meets three persons for the first time. They introduce themselves. The first is a ‘large black woman’, the second is a ‘small, distinctively Asian woman’, and the third appears to be a ‘Middle Eastern laborer’ (86). Mack asks if there are more. ‘“No, Mackenzie”. The black woman chuckled. “We is all that you get, and believe me, we’re more than enough”’ (87). The black woman says her name is Elousia, but he can call her Papa. The Middle Easterner is Jewish. His name is Jesus. The small Asian woman is Sarayu. She is, among many things, keeper of the gardens. Mack suspects they may be ‘a Trinity sort of thing’ and asks, ‘Which one of you is God? “I am”, said all three in unison’ (89). Singular and plural self-expressions merge in their response to Mack. This initial encounter opens onto further meetings in which Mack moves back and forth from being with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu together to spending time with each of them individually. Over the course of these individual meetings, he develops a specific relationship with each of the three. In chapter 6, he enters in lengthy dialogue with Papa, who is preparing supper. Papa seems to know everything about him, and to care deeply for him. Mack struggles with the idea that Papa loves Missy a great deal, given Missy’s cruel death. Papa reminds Mack that her own son had also died a terrible death and that she suffered with him. She stresses the continuing relationship between her and her son, a relationship which made it possible for him to express her love to all. For her, this weekend is about relationship and love. In turn, Mack notes that he feels safe in being here with her. In chapter 7, Mack and the three share a dinner prepared by Papa. During preparation, meal, and clean-up, Mack sees further into the loving and respectful relationships among the three. He wonders about his own relationships with others. After the meal and clean-up, Jesus invites Mack to go ‘out to the dock and look at the stars’ (110). Over the course of the evening, the two develop a reasonably warm, trusting, and friendly mutual relationship in which Jesus is supportive of Mack. Mack, in turn, feels comfortable with Jesus, more so than with the other two. For instance, Mack dares to mention to Jesus that he expected him to be more handsome. Jesus takes the remark graciously. Toward the end of their discussion, Mack confides in Jesus, saying how lost he feels.

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Jesus simply takes his hand and says he is with him. At the end of this exchange, Jesus ‘put his arm around Mack’s shoulder and together they walked back toward the cabin’ (116). Chapter 8 finds Mack and the three at breakfast. During their discussion, he suggests that they do not relate in the way he would have envisioned. Jesus picks up on this remark and addresses Papa as Abba. They and Sarayu gently lead Mack to see their relationships among themselves not as a chain of command from Father to Son and Spirit, but as a circle of relationship. Earlier discussions had touched on human freedom. Now the three reiterate their respect for human freedom made possible by, and expressed in, their self-limitation in relating with creation. They relate through love both among themselves and with creation. At the end of chapter 8, Sarayu brings the breakfast discussion to a close, inviting Mack to help her in the garden. In chapter 9, we find ourselves with the two of them in the garden. There Mack describes Sarayu as ethereal, unpredictable, one who moves as the wind and can change from translucent to darker colors and back again. Earlier, Jesus had said her name meant ‘wind’ (112), a way of describing the personified presence of the Holy Spirit active in the world. Sarayu addresses Mack as Mackenzie, as did Papa, whereas Jesus addresses him more intimately as Mack. When Mack describes her garden as a mess, beautiful but a mess, Sarayu is happy. She tells him that, when the garden is seen from high above, it is a fractal. So viewed, what Mack sees as a riotous mess is a repeated, orderly pattern. They go on to collect flowers and clear a space for new planting. While collecting and clearing, they discuss the nature of good and evil. For Sarayu’s garden is, in a way, the Garden of Eden (136). Sarayu helps Mack understand that good and evil are not something we can determine on our own, autonomously. Rather, good and evil can ultimately only be determined in a trusting, loving relationship. She reminds Mack that Jesus decided what was good not on his own but in loving obedience to his father. Mack had brought up Missy’s case, saying she had a right to be protected. Sarayu replies that being loved is what protects her. Enigmatic as this explanation remains here, Mack finds himself comfortable and at home in this beautiful mess of a garden. Sarayu reveals to him that this garden is his soul. It is him, messy yet a ‘perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive – a living fractal’ (140). Over the following chapters, in a series of conversations with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, Mack finds his relationship with each of them deepening. In the process, he appreciates and understands better Papa’s parental love, Jesus’ friendship, and Sarayu’s mysterious, creative, loving presence. In so doing, he sees that the secret to overcoming his great sadness lies in relinquishing autonomy and independence by embracing loving relationships.

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In chapter 10, Jesus invites Mack to take a walk with him. A walk on the water to the other side of the lake near the shack. Mack and Jesus continue in friendly banter as they cross on the surface of the water. As they reach the other shore, they turn to more serious topics. They pick up again on the theme of human freedom, with the inevitably related question of good and evil. Jesus reinforces what Papa had earlier said. Humans try to resolve problems in an independent way. They try to use power, rather than believe in God and model their relations after the loving ways in which Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu relate with one another and with humankind. The three have given the earth to humans and respect their freedom as they relate to it and to one another. Mack comes to see that love does not force its will on others. Jesus confirms Mack’s insight. ‘That’s the beauty you see in my relationship with Abba and Sarayu. We are indeed submitted to one another and have always been so and always will be. (…) Submission is (…) all about relationships of love and respect. (…) [We] are submitted to you in the same way’ (147). Somewhat later in the conversation, Mack responds, ‘I’d love to experience that, with you and with Nan’. And Jesus says, ‘That’s why we’re here’ (151). Once on the other side of the lake, now in chapter 11, Jesus sends Mack off to a well-camouflaged and mysterious inner space. Once within it, he meets a beautiful Hispanic-looking woman, Sophia, whom Jesus would later describe as a ‘personification of Papa’s wisdom. (…) [P]art of the mystery surrounding Sarayu’ (173). Mack enters a long exchange with her, during which she leads him to begin to see things from God’s perspective. She reminds Mack of his own love for his children, a unique love for each of them. She then says he is to judge, indeed judge God and humankind. More specifically, he is to judge parents who mistreat their children and, then, God as Father in relation to Missy and the rest of God’s children. But how could Mack dare to judge them? Though parents may have done wrong things, Mack asks that, in his own case, he be judged instead of his children. The beautiful lady reminds him this is just what Jesus did. She then encourages Mack to see that Papa also suffered with Jesus for Missy and for all. She asks Mack to let go of his independent judgment and trust in Papa’s love. At that point, Mack sees Missy and his other children in a vision. Missy smiles lovingly at him before returning to be with Jesus and with the other children. The beautiful woman assures Mack that Missy’s love for him is beyond any forgiveness for which he might think he should ask. Chapter 12 finds Mack heading back to meet Jesus again, his great sadness now lifted. Indeed, Jesus had assured Mack that he and Sarayu were with Missy in her tragic situation. Jesus and Mack return across the lake, again this time walking on the water, with Jesus encouraging Mack to live loved. At this point, still on the water, Jesus explains to Mack what he, Papa, and Sarayu wish for Mack and for themselves.

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‘What you’re doing, Mack – learning to live loved. It’s not an easy concept for humans. You have a hard time sharing anything’. He [Jesus] chuckled and continued, ‘So, yes, what we desire is for you to “re-turn” to us, and then we come and make our home inside you, and then we share. The friendship is real, not merely imagined. We’re meant to experience this life, your life, together, in a dialogue, sharing the journey. You get to share in our wisdom and learn to love with our love, and we get (…) to hear you grumble and gripe and complain, and (…)’ Mack laughed. (177)

When they reach the dock, Jesus and Mack continue talking. Jesus reminds him that the church, the lady he loves, is a matter of relationships with God and others. Marriage as well is a relationship, and so is human freedom. It’s all about relationships. Though neither Mack nor Jesus says it explicitly at the end of this chapter 12, so is the Trinity. In chapter 13, Mack joins Papa for coffee and pastries. Now he feels at ease with calling her Papa. In turn, Papa reinforces her expression of loving forgiveness to Mack who had misjudged her. She then mentions some of his difficulties, such as lying about the note (he never told Nan about it) and being terribly hurt by his father. All Papa wants to do is grow together with Mack in their relationship, as she wishes to do with the whole world. We are with Mack and Sarayu again in chapters 14 and 15. Mack takes a canoe out on the lake, himself alone and serene enough to sing again ‘K-K-KKatie (…) beautiful Katie, You’re the only one that I adore’ (197). How would he break through to her, closed off as she seems to be? Then Sarayu is suddenly present with him in the boat. They speak of her ongoing presence in everyone’s life. After returning to shore, Mack goes to the cabin again and finds Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu at dinner. He admires their carefree and casual conversation. He and Sarayu discuss what could only be described as the contrast between law and faith now understood, respectively, as artificial autonomy rejected in favor of relationship. Faith wins out as a form of loving relationship with all three. Papa interrupts, saying she wants to have some fun, and turns the discussion over to Sarayu again. Sarayu asks Mack to shut his eyes so that they may be healed for a while. Then we find ourselves in chapter 15 where Mack has opened his eyes. The universe is aglow. All is brilliant, white, and yet multi-colored. Sarayu appears to be enrobed in jewels of every sparkling sort. She and Mack find themselves among many children, all again in glorious light, as are the adults and the rest of creation. Mack, in turn, ‘had never felt this well, this whole’ (213). Yet there is one man among the adults who is somber of color, seemingly unsure of himself. Sarayu tells Mack that this man is his father. Overcome with emotion, Mack goes to his father in love and forgiveness. His father then shines, clothed in bright color. They embrace. Jesus joins in, the children dancing around and

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with him. Mack sees reality from Papa’s, Jesus’, and Sarayu’s perspective. But then all is back to what it was. And he is a little sad. Jesus takes his hand and assures him that ‘everything was as it should be’ (219). The last two chapters of this second stage in the plotline bring us again to a moment of deep sadness, but now one to be followed by peace and serenity. In chapter 16, Papa wakes Mack on this third day, the last of the weekend at the shack. To Mack’s surprise, Papa is now a man, ‘dignified, older, wiry (…) [with] silver hair pulled back into a ponytail’ (220). Papa feels that Mack needs a father at this delicate moment. Papa, Jesus, Sarayu, and Mack take off on a sad trail, Mack carrying a gift of flowers and herbs which Sarayu gives him. The flowers and herbs are those they had cut yesterday. Papa, in turn, takes several tools with him. At this point, Mack summarizes in his mind much of what has gone on. As they hiked, Mack thought about the multitude of things he had experienced during the previous two days. The conversations with each of the three, alone and then together, the time with Sophia, the devotion he had been part of, looking at the night sky with Jesus, the walk across the lake. And then last night’s celebration topped it off, including the reconciliation with his father – so much healing with so little spoken. (223)

Mack then speaks up, this time to Papa. He admits he does not understand all that is involved in the terrible question of evil, but he strongly affirms, ‘Papa, I do trust you’ (224). Papa says there is one more thing necessary before a final, sad discovery. He asks Mack to forgive Missy’s killer but does not ask him to forget the terrible thing the killer did, nor to ignore his own anger. Rather, simply to say aloud, ‘I forgive you’. After much hesitation, Mack finally comes to say it three times. With this burden assuaged, Papa tells Mack that they must now bring Missy home. They have been following a trail marked by red arcs seemingly left by the killer. The trail leads to a small cave so marked, where they remove the rocks closing its entrance. Within, they find the little body of Missy. They place it on a sheet amid Sarayu’s flowers and herbs. Mack himself carries his daughter’s body back to the shack. Chapter 17 finds them back at the shack, where Jesus brings Mack to his workshop. He has been working on a wooden box these last days. Now Mack sees that it is to be a coffin for little Missy. Jesus has carved images on the sides of the little coffin, images which Missy herself had suggested. Once Missy’s body is laid in the coffin, they carry it into Sarayu’s garden. They continue to the place where Mack and Sarayu had previously made a clearing among the trees and flowers. This time there is a hole in the center of the clearing, in which they bury Missy’s body in Sarayu’s garden, which is now equally Papa’s and Jesus’, and Mack’s. They all return to the shack now, slightly after noon, to find freshly baked bread and some wine on a table. Papa tells Mack he has one last decision

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to make. He may remain with them and Missy. Or he can return to be with his family and friends, where his presence will make a great difference for the better in their lives. When he hears that Missy is patient and is ready to wait, he decides to return to the family. He will be reunited with Missy later. In the meantime, the three, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, will be with him. Sarayu has a final gift for Mack. She tells him that Kate blames herself for Missy’s death. She had raised her paddle in the canoe, leading to the events that followed. Knowing this, Mack will now be able to help free Kate from her sense of guilt. Papa, Jesus, Sarayu, and Mack then enjoy the bread and wine together. The weekend is over. Mack packs his things and comes back to the living room. Except for a cup of hot coffee waiting for him, the room is empty. He falls into a comforting sleep. On awakening, the shack has returned to its earlier, cold and dilapidated condition. As Mack says through Willie’s retelling, ‘He was back in the real world. Then he smiled to himself. It was more likely he was back in the unreal world’ (239). He gets in Willie’s Jeep, comes to an intersection, and enters when the light is green. Another driver comes through a red light. The Jeep is destroyed. Mack, gravely injured, is taken by air to the hospital. The second stage of the developing plotline comes to an end. In it, Mack has gone from his home to the shack and, over the course of his weekend experience, from great sadness to trust in Papa, friendship with Jesus, and great appreciation of Sarayu. Now, at the opening of chapter 18, we, in the third and final stage of the plotline, find Mack seemingly unconscious in the hospital. Then, momentarily more conscious, he hears his son speak. Josh confirms that his father had squeezed his finger. After slowly coming out of his coma, Mack is told by his family that he was unconscious for almost four days following an accident. Willie, his friend, visits Mack and asks about the note from Papa. This jars his memory, helping him pull together memories of the weekend at the shack. He shares with Willie the fact that Papa is fond of him, which sends Willie out of the room in great emotion. Nan talks with Mack, who tells her what he has experienced over the weekend. She at first surmises that it is the drugs causing Mack to think this way. He and Nan then talk with Kate, tellingly calling her Katie and saying Missy’s death was not her fault. Kate finally admits she thought her waving the paddle had pulled her dad away from Missy, leading to Missy’s death. She says she thought her mom and dad blamed her. She rushes out of Mack’s room, with Nan following to talk with her. Some hours later, Mack awakes from a restful sleep to find Kate asleep next to him on the bed, reconciled. And Nan whispers to Mack that she believes him. Once out of the hospital, Mack decides to contact the officer Tommy Dalton, who was the first to handle the case of Missy’s murder. Dalton had become Mack’s friend over the course of the search for the killer. He accompanies Mack

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and Nan as Mack leads them along the trail he had followed with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. As the four of them had, over the weekend, discovered the place where Missy’s body was hidden, now he, Nan, and the officer discover it for themselves. During the weekend discovery, Papa had left in place at the entrance to the cave a rock marked by the killer with a red arc. It is this marked rock which now draws the attention of Mack and those with him to the small cave in which Missy’s body lies. Various clues found here and there eventually lead to the killer’s arrest. Timelines The plotline in The Shack is based on a series of events recounted one after another. It is a work of fiction in which events need not follow one another chronologically. In the actual world, though, time seems to be a stubborn movement from a past, which one remembers, to a present, of which one is momentarily aware, toward a future up ahead.12 The plotline does not necessarily follow this way in which time is perceived. Rather, the order is more one of quasicausality. That is, one event simply leads to another. The sequence of events takes the form of an essentially singular, though not necessarily past-presentfuture, movement. The plot thickens, so to speak, from one event to the next. As well, in a fictional narrative text the timelines within the overall plotline are a different story. The nature of fictional narrative as language-based creative construct makes possible the carefully handled, imaginatively varied juxtaposing of past, present, and future events or even two simultaneously present events involving the same characters. Indeed, such juxtaposition enriches the narrative presentation, providing greater depth. This is the case in The Shack, where the timelines are indeed multiple and related to one another in various ways. The text itself of The Shack is written in the form of an overall, ongoing, and inclusive present timeline. That is, Mack’s friend Willie is presently retelling the whole story as Mack has recounted it to him. Willie sets the stage with a foreword in his own words and brings the text to a close with his ‘After Words’. In the foreword, he tells us who Mack is and confirms that all he will recount in 12

In our actual, everyday lives, we perceive the movement of time as past → present → future. In language-created realities, the movement of time is more flexible. Even in a text based on, and reflectively interpreting, historical events the ordering often reflects that flexibility. Fictional writing allows for even more flexibility, to the point of establishing parallel possible timelines within the fictional world created by imaginative use of language. We see this, for example, in Mack’s experience at the cabin over the weekend and Mack’s family’s experience of him as being in a coma over that weekend. The important thing is to create a certain sense of plausibility in each case.

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the body of the text is written as Mack has described it to him. In the ‘After Words’, Willie updates us on things happening since Mack’s return to, and reconciliation with, his family. Willie retells Mack’s story within this first and most inclusive timeline. Though Mack’s story is a recounting of past events, its internal timeline (chapters 1 to 18) within Willie’s overall retelling is that of an ongoing historical present, what can also be called a narrative present.13 Willie retells Mack’s story itself in the past tense, but quotations are in the present and the story is framed by Willie’s use of the present tense in the foreword and ‘After Words’. As we have seen, shortly after the opening of this historical-present timeline Mack finds Papa’s note in his mailbox. Reading it leads him to recall past events, especially those relating more directly to his great sadness. These past events revolve mainly around the tragic loss of his youngest daughter, Missy. As an imaginatively constructed recalling, this timeline (chapters 2 to 4, specifically pages 27-67) takes on various forms of temporal status, depending on the perspective from which it is considered. It is past to Mack but present in its recounting to Willie (it is new for him). Through him, it is again present in his retelling to us who are reading the chapters in which these and related events are retold. We, then, find ourselves in a series of past events within a timeline presented to us, in effect, as present. We return from Mack’s recounting of what happened in the past to Willie’s historical present (now chapters 5 to 17, specifically pages 67-240). At the beginning of this long retelling by Willie, Mack is preparing to return to the shack. On arriving at the shack, he first finds it in disarray. But then he sees it and its surroundings as transformed. This historical-present timeline continues as he meets Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu together and individually. Ongoing 13

I am using ‘historical present’ here to refer to past events retold in the present tense, the past tense, or both (as is the case in The Shack), but with a vividness and dynamically expressed development by which the author intends to enhance the reader’s sense of being present to, identifying with, and participating in what is taking place. In my own selective presentation of what Willie retells throughout the text, I attempt to capture something of the vivid actuality of his retelling, and our sense of immediacy in reading it, by describing in the present tense what is going on in the story. Willie’s past tense becomes, in effect, a form of present time for the reader. My use of historical present in describing Willie’s retelling of Mack’s experiences differs somewhat from the more usual meaning of the term, though I adhere in my presentation itself, at least in principle, to that more usual meaning: ‘In English grammar, the historical present is the use of a verb phrase in the present tense to refer to an event that took place in the past. In narratives, the historical present may be used to create an effect of immediacy. Also called the historic present, dramatic present, and narrative present’. Richard Nordquist, ‘Historical Present (Verb Tense): Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms’ (italics in the original), ThoughtCo., accessed November 13, 2018, https://www.thoughtco.com/historicalpresent-verb-tense-1690928.

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encounters with them and others seem at times not necessarily to be following an internally consistent sequential chronology. But, as Mack through Willie notes, this may, for example, at times just be a manifestation of Sarayu’s fluid relationship with time (174). This ongoing historical-present timeline closes for Mack, for Willie, and for us, the readers, as Mack suffers a serious accident. A new and seemingly parallel historical-present timeline comes into effect (chapter 18, pages 241-48). In this short recounting, Mack finds himself in the hospital. From the initial perspective of his family, he has simply been in a coma. Unconscious for almost four days after a serious accident. The prior timeline recounting his weekend meeting with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu and this timeline in which he recuperates from an accident seem at first to form two parallel timelines. But they are, to some extent at least, reconciled in an interesting way. They seem to merge as Willie brings Mack’s recounting of Mack’s story to a close. First, Nan comes to believe what Mack has told her about his weekend experiences (247). Then, several weeks later, Mack and Nan decide to return to the shack. Willie drives them back to the area where Missy tragically died and where they now join Officer Tommy Dalton, newly appointed deputy sheriff. As we have previously noted, he is the one who had initially handled the case of Missy’s disappearance and murder. During that investigation, he and Mack had become friends. The four head off on a trail leading away from the shack. On it, certain empirically verifiable signs, small red arcs, lead them to the small cave where Missy’s body lies. Papa had left one of the red arcs clearly visible as a sign indicating to them where the cave is (248). The Novel as Testimonial A Fictional World Before returning with Jesus across the lake and back to the shack, Mack himself raises a fundamental question about all that he is in the process of experiencing over the weekend. He asks Jesus, ‘Is any of this real?’ Jesus replies, ‘Far more real than you can imagine. (…) Would all this be any less “real” if it were inside a dream? (…) Let me assure you, all of this is very much real, far more real than life as you’ve known it’ (174). This brief exchange concerning what is truly real leads us to consider the status of a fictional world as such and, more specifically, of Mack’s fictional world. First, a fictional world is a language-constructed world parallel to the actual one we know and in which we live. It has its own coherence and integrity, its own ontological density, so to speak, as a fictional reality.14 As 14

A side remark. Electronically generated ‘virtual reality’ seems to be gaining its own, at least quasiontological, status parallel to those of fictional reality and of the reality of the actual world.

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a fictional reality, we expect it to have its own internal consistency and credibility. It needs to make sense. But such a world is likewise often hybrid. On the one hand, it is an imaginative construction. On the other, it incorporates references to our actual world, as is the case with The Shack. For example, Young makes repeated reference to actual geographical locations. Oregon, where the story takes place; the Columbia River Gorge by which Mack and his three children drive on the way to the campsite; Interstates 205 and 84 in Oregon; the town of Joseph near the Wallowa Lake campsite where Mack and the children are camping. In The Shack, these references to actual places reinforce an overall sense of the story’s realism and make it easier for the reader to enter Mack’s fictional world. There are, as well, other ways in which Young enhances the story’s verisimilitude or way of imitating life. For example, he makes the story seem more real by providing concrete descriptions of things, events, and persons. We might recall, for example, that the bread Mack and the three shared was recently baked. And the way Willie fills in various details of Mack’s life is striking. Right from the beginning, in the foreword, he describes Mack as being born ‘in the Midwest, a farm boy’ (9), son of a drunken father who repeatedly abused his mother. Mack is now ‘about to turn fifty-six, and he is a rather unremarkable, slightly overweight, balding, short white guy’ (11-12). Young writes, again concretely, that Willie has always thought highly of his friend Mack. But, after Mack’s weekend experience, Willie says that ‘Mack has changed; he is now even more different and special than he used to be. In all the time I have known him he has been a rather gentle and kind soul, but since his stay in the hospital three years ago, he has been (…) well, even nicer’ (13). As to concretely described events and persons, we need simply recall the various carefully described events of which Young has written and which lead to rich and fuller relationships among the four main characters who participate in them. Experience of the Trinity The notions of relationship and especially loving relationship are key to understanding what is going on in Mack’s fictional world. These relationships are both forms of interaction among the characters in the story and the results of such interactions. They are both processes and results. When Young speaks of such relationships, he variously uses three words we have brought together several times, namely, healing, reconciliation, and redemption. They both characterize what goes on in the process of developing these relationships and capture well that to which he sees them leading. In effect, healing, reconciliation, and redemption describe various forms of such interaction, especially among those who are, for us, the principal characters in the story. For example, they

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characterize the processes Mack goes through when he relates to Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. And they give expression to the results of that process. Mack is healed within, reconciled with others, redeemed by God. Then too, we should consider these relationships between Mack and the three persons from the perspective of these persons. From the beginning of each of these relationships between them and Mack, the three persons bring about healing, reconciliation, and redemption precisely through their relating with him. And again, healing, reconciliation, and redemption as process and result find their basis in the way in which Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu relate, indeed interact, among themselves, namely, the way they are. They are, simply stated, loving relationships. Finally, healing, reconciliation, and redemption express the process Mack and members of his family go through as well as what comes to result from that process when he enters into deepened loving relationships with them after his weekend at the shack. Mack has come to appreciate and participate in these various forms of loving relationships as they develop through events occurring over the course of his weekend at the shack. As we have seen, he refers to these various events during the course of his search for Missy’s body. He ‘thought about the multitude of things he had experienced during the previous two days’ (223). I would suggest that, with his reference to experience, Young is offering a way to unpack further what he means with the words ‘loving relationships’. We can make more explicit what they mean by considering them from the perspective of Mack’s saying he experienced several dynamics which give rise to, and build up, the various forms of loving relationship we have mentioned. In looking at these loving relationships as experiences, we easily enough recognize a consistent pattern running through them. Put in general terms, we can discern, especially clearly in Mack’s experiences, a certain structured movement. Mack’s experiences are movements developing from an initial relating of Mack and whoever or whatever is experienced on through a further process of interaction to an enriched resultant relationship between them. Stated more succinctly, Mack’s experiences are structured movements of becoming, namely, relation → process → result. It will be helpful briefly to illustrate this process in each of the various forms of Mack’s experience first from Mack’s perspective. We should, though, immediately admit that in Mack’s world these various forms overlap more than can be indicated here. There is then Mack’s experience of Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, individually as well as together. Mack initially becomes aware of a specific relation to Papa when he reads Papa’s note to ‘Mackenzie’. This initial awareness of an at least potential relationship is renewed and deepened when Papa comes to the door of the shack to greet Mack. Over the course of various encounters and discussions, he comes to trust Papa and finally to love her, resulting in the

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loving relationship between them. She is the unconditionally loving divine parent who helps him heal and be reconciled with others. This unconditional parental love is Papa’s generous gift to Mack, who, in response, grows from hesitation concerning Papa to trust of, and then love for, her. On entering the shack for this first meeting with Papa, Mack sees a small Asian woman, Sarayu, emerge from behind Papa. His relationship with Sarayu will mature through time spent together in her garden, on a boat, during the hunt for Missy’s body, and then at the burial. As a result of her continuing presence, Mack comes to appreciate her as the one who enlightens him, identifies his suffering father, and offers him precious gifts. Among them, she offers Mack her view of a fragrance-filled creation, inviting him to share her view of it. And she suggests a way for him to reconcile with his daughter Kate. Again, at his first meeting with Papa, Mack meets Jesus, who is Middle Eastern in appearance. Jesus immediately befriends Mack, laughs with him, and assures him of his constant love. As expressions of this love, he offers his support for Mack through gestures such as touching his shoulder and grasping his hand. Mack in turn dares at one point to tell Jesus that he is not as handsome as Mack had expected him to be. Jesus laughs good naturedly. Their deep and loving relationship is confirmed when Jesus gives Mack the little wooden coffin he has been preparing for Missy’s burial. Jesus’ overall gift is a deeply personal and supportive friendship which Mack finds greatly consoling. In addition to these one-on-one experiences leading to loving relationships between Mack and each of the three, he spends time with all three of them together. Already the first evening, in an initial, longer encounter he shares a meal with them. At various times over the weekend, they again invite him to join them for a meal. Mack learns to appreciate the casual and loving ways in which Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu enjoy one another’s company. They have welcomed him and brought him into their conversations. He learns that they are not hierarchically related. They are simply their loving relationships which he is experiencing first-hand through their shared meals and conversation. Their common gift to Mack is a share in their life lived lovingly. There is a second perspective from which we can consider these loving relationships developing between Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu each, on the one hand, and Mack, on the other. For, as real relationships, they are bidirectional. Each of the three have offered Mack specific gifts. For his part, Mack learns to see Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu not only from his own point of view as grateful receiver of such generous gifts. He comes to share in their own perspectives on him as well. It is as if he experiences Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu individually and collectively experiencing him. At various points over the weekend, the three explain that they limit themselves in order to respect human freedom. They allow Mack to choose to live in loving relationships or to refuse to do so. More personally,

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they want to live with him through all that he does as they lead him to healing, reconciliation, and redemption. As we have seen, Jesus confirms this intention when he says, ‘So, yes, what we desire is for you to “re-turn” to us, and then we come and make our home inside you, and then we share. The friendship is real, not merely imagined. We’re meant to experience this life, your life, together, in a dialogue, sharing the journey’ (177). It is, then, true that Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu limit themselves in order to share with Mack his life and what he does. But in so limiting themselves, their collective and individual relationships with him remain, from their perspective, permanently loving and supportive ones. The fact that the three remain ever loving enables the effect of their relationships with Mack to grow in him and, so it would seem, in them. These relationships so far referred to are themselves characterized by a movement from an initial relation between those involved to further interaction which results in deepened loving relationships. Mack has come to experience, and consequently to admire, a third form of loving relationships. In this third form, they are the ways in which Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu relate to one another, which relating constitutes what they are. They are divine relations, loving from all eternity. In Mack’s story, they do not develop in the ways in which human relations or self-limiting divine ones do. Still, the interactions among Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu would seem in some way to be eternally developing, perhaps non-temporal forms of mutual divine experience. As Mack sees it, this divine experience takes the form of a permanent, loving conversation.15 The fourth and last form of loving relationships to which we have referred are those between Mack and his family. They are based in and arise out of the healing, reconciling, and redeeming relationships which have developed between Mack, on the one hand, and Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, on the other. These relationships between Mack and the three are, in turn, based in and arise out of the divine relationships among Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. In effect, the relationships between Mack and his family give concrete expression to Mack’s richly varied weekend experiences with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu – with the Trinity. Mack has, then, experienced the three divine persons in three more direct ways: as he relates to them individually and together; as they accompany him on his journey; and as they relate among themselves. His threefold, more direct experience of the Trinity finds its prolongation and further realization in renewed family relationships. For Mack, experience of the Trinity consists in his experience of these various forms of loving relationships. These relationships are both processes and results of these processes. Ultimately, then, freely participating in 15

Perhaps we are not pushing the point too far to say that for both Rublev and Young/Mack the Trinity is a divine conversation three-form within and in relation to humankind, even to all of creation.

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these loving relationships and experiencing the Trinity become interchangeable terms and realities. Such participation in, and experience of, divine unconditional love, friendship, and ethereal urging toward life, indeed newness of life, offer redemption, a redemption expressing itself in healing and reconciliation. All three, namely, redemption, healing, and reconciliation take place through and as experience of the Trinity. Entering Mack’s Fictional World Based in the power of the written word, fiction writing has a potential and power all its own to provide enjoyment, to influence people, and to enrich their lives. Ernest Hemingway, for example, expresses this well in his own unique, highly monosyllabic style. ‘All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was’.16 This quote from Hemingway sets the tone for our remarks now concerning The Shack’s potentially transformative impact on us, its readers. In writing and publishing The Shack, Young has invited us, the readers, to join Mack in his fictional world. Truly joining Mack in that world means ‘throwing ourselves whole-heartedly into the reading’.17 At least for a while, we lose ourselves in it as we join him in what becomes for us our own present tense 16

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Ernest Hemingway, ‘Old Newsman Writes, A Letter from Cuba’, in: Esquire Classics: The Official Esquire Archive, December 1, 1934, 26, accessed November 21, 2018, https://classic. esquire.com/article/1934/12/1/old-newsman-writes. Quoting Hemingway, apparently when he was in Madrid in 1954, Aaron Edward Hotchner provides a slightly different phrasing. ‘All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people, and the weather’. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (New York: Random, 1966), 132. Hemingway makes this remark with reference to his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Citing him here is not meant to indicate a judgment on the literary quality of The Shack as such, but simply to recall the impact a work of fiction can have on its readers. Hannah Frankman also quotes this second form of Hemingway’s words in her article, ‘The Importance of Reading Fiction’, The Mission Podcasts, accessed July 10, 2019, https:// medium.com/the-mission/the-importance-of-reading-fiction-7f57546a229b. In the article, Frankman makes a succinct but strong argument for the overall importance of reading fiction and such reading’s transformative effect. Walter J. Ong provides many important insights into complexities surrounding such ‘throwing ourselves whole-heartedly into the reading’, when he discusses aspects of writers’ fictionalizing of their readers and the requirements this sets on the readers who then fictionalize themselves in taking on various roles required by the writer and the text. ‘The Writer’s Audience Is Always

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and timeline. We are with Mack in his development from the great sadness to loving relationships with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu which result in healing within himself. We rejoice in his subsequent reconciliation with others – little Missy, his wife Nan, his son Josh, and his daughter Katie. Throughout this development on Mack’s part, we identify with Mack and what he experiences. We share in his varied emotions, sympathize with him in his suffering, and sense that what we are feeling is something profoundly real for us as well. The healing love of Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu can become real, at least for a while, through our sharing in what Mack feels and comes to appreciate. In any case, such love and sharing are something we cannot easily avoid at least considering further. In effect, then, entering Mack’s world, as would be the case in entering any fictional world, involves an experiential relationship with it, with what occurs within it, and with the characters within it. We spontaneously feel comfortable with fictional work, whether in writing or in other forms. We truly relate to it as a context in which we become sad or happy, perhaps terrified or consoled, in the light of what occurs. In that context, we feel sorry for, or joyful with, terrified or consoled concerning various persons as their characters develop in changing situations. A fictional world, whether it be that of Mack or any other, has a reality all its own, a reality which is simply different from that of the actual world. Indeed, a fictional world which is intelligibly constructed and coherent within itself is not fictitious in the negative sense of being false. Entering it can at times even have greater effect on us than does what we experience in our actual world. Perhaps Hemingway was pointing out something similar when he wrote, ‘You will feel that all that [which you had read] happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you’. Returning more specifically to Young and his intention in creating Mack’s fictional world, we should now note that his wife had asked him to write something for his children about what he had gone through. We might well imagine that his own experience is reflected in some way in those of Mack. But, based on the text of the novel itself, we cannot say whether and in which ways Young’s own experiences involved explicit reference to the Trinity. What we can be sure of is that with The Shack Young wanted to encourage his readers to come to healing and reconciliation through some form or other of personal experience of trinitrian divine love. This point finds support, for example, when the book ends with a page explaining ‘The Missy Project’. This project reflects the author’s own enthusiasm for spreading the word about God’s healing and reconciling love. The page reads in part, ‘Give the book to friends, even strangers, as a gift.

a Fiction’, in: PMLA, Journal of the Modern Language Association of America 90 (1975), 9-21.

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They not only get a compelling, page-turning thrill ride, but also a magnificent glimpse into the nature of God that is not often presented in our culture’.18 Several years after publication of The Shack, Young himself offered an explicit invitation to revisit Mack’s world. ‘I, along with myriad others, invite you to revisit the world of The Shack, a world where Papa’s affection is unending, Jesus’ faith in you is as “strong as cabbage”, (…) and the Spirit’s hope is wider than the cosmos; a world where you matter and Papa is especially fond of you!’19 Indeed, with The Shack Young offers a unique testimonial to experience of the Trinity. In it, he gives witness to such experience by creating an at least potentially powerful fictional world. In it, an unconventionally20 imaged Trinity plays the central, profoundly loving and reconciling role in Mack’s personal and interpersonal transformation. Young hopes his writing will transform lives of those who read it.

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For further, more general information on the novel (and movie), see the Web site, theshackbook.com, accessed November 19, 2018, http://theshackbook.com/#home. Young, foreword to Kruger, Shack Revisited, xiii. Of note, Young, with Robison, writes: ‘This guide is meant to help you experience the presence of the triune God, not in some cathedral or stronghold of your own making, but in “the shack” of your deepest pain’. Shack: Study Guide, 5. The term was used by Prof. David Perrin in personal communication. We would do well to recall in Kruger’s book, Shack Revisited, two more direct statements: ‘Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son, and Spirit set their love upon us and planned for us to share and know and experience the trinitarian life itself’ (63); ‘The Holy Spirit discloses Jesus to us so that we can know and experience Jesus’ own relationship with his Father, and be free to live in the Father’s embrace with Jesus’ (64).

CHAPTER 16 STUART HAZELDINE The Shack, Movie

From novel to movie: Mack’s world in motion. Stuart Hazeldine (1971–) is director of the movie The Shack, which opened in 2017.1 It is 132 minutes long and is based on the novel of the same name, which is its major source. The Australian of Avatar-fame, Sam Worthington, interprets the role of Mack. Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer images Papa as an African American woman. The Israeli actor Avraham Aviv Alush re-presents Jesus. And the Japanese Sumire Matsubara visualizes Sarayu’s ethereal presence. Credits: Screenwriters John Fusco, Andrew Lanham, and Destin Cretton; Director of photography Declan Quinn; Editor William Steinkamp; and, Composer Aaron Zigman.2 From Novel to Movie Over the past half-century and more, scholars specializing in study of the adaptation of novels to movies have stressed the process’s creative character. Such adaptation involves the transition from one medium of expression to another. It is a transition conditioned in large part by the differing strengths and limitations of these two media. Specifically concerning the transition from The Shack as novel to The Shack as movie, it will be helpful already now to draw attention to two points. First, given differences between the two media, it seems best to recognize the distinct testimonial character of the movie as compared with that

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The Shack, directed by Stuart Hazeldine (Lionsgate/Summit, 2017), DVD (Lionsgate, 2017). The DVD includes a series of ‘Special Features’, providing insight into various aspects of the movie. On filming locations, see ‘Where Was the Shack Filmed?’, Filming Locations by Atlas of Wonders.com, accessed November 23, 2018, https://www.atlasofwonders.com/2017/02/theshack-filming-locations.html.

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of the novel. Second, the director of the film is responsible for the adaptation.3 We will consider him to be the one who offers this unique cinematic testimonial to experience of the Trinity.4 As director, he works in collaboration with others who contribute creatively to making the movie and especially with the author of the book.5 From the point of view of our interest in testimonials to experience of the Trinity, we can say that the movie The Shack generally follows the story as

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Several reviews of the adaptation from various perspectives: positive (religious perspective), Edward McNulty, ‘The Shack (2017)’, Visual Parables, accessed November 23, 2018, https:// www.readthespirit.com/visual-parables/the-shack-2017; negative (religious perspective), Michael Youssef, ‘Six Major Problems with The Shack’, Leading the Way, accessed November 24, 2018, https://www.ltw.org/read/articles/2017/03/six-major-problems-with-the-shack; negative (humanist perspective), Mark Dunbar, ‘Film Review: The Shack Bad Humor, Bad Theology, Bad Religious Metaphors’, TheHumanist.com, accessed November 23, 2018, https://thehumanist.com/arts_entertainment/film/film-review-shack; (socio-politically contextualizing perspective), Tyler Huckabee, ‘‘The Shack’ Once Sold Millions of Books. But the Film Doesn’t Fit the Trump Era’, washingtonpost.com, accessed November 24, 2018, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/03/03/the-shack-once-sold-millions-ofbooks-but-the-film-doesnt-fit-the-trump-era/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.73904944bd6e; negative (cinematic perspective), ‘“The Shack” Fumbles a Worthy Message: Movie Review’, in: New York Daily News, March 2, 2017, accessed November 24, 2018, https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/shack-fumbles-worthy-message-movie-review-article-1.2985927; series of mixed or negative reviews (cinematic perspective), ‘The Shack 2017’, Metacritic, accessed November 24, 2018, https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-shack; positive (cinematic perspective), Kevin Russell, ‘“The Shack” Impresses Audiences with Its Powerful Plot and Talented Actors’, Mira Costa High School’s La Vista, accessed December 10, 2018, https://www.lavistamchs.com/?p=35258; positive (cinematic and religious perspectives), Sr. Rose Pacatte, ‘“The Shack”: Finding God in the Dark’, National Catholic Reporter, accessed July 13, 2019, https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/shack-finding-god-dark. Brian McFarlane suggests that the director should often be considered the chief author of a film which is based on a previously published novel. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 202. And George Bluestone writes, ‘In the fullest sense of the word, the filmist becomes not a translator for an established author, but a new author in his own right’. Novels into Film (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 62. See ‘“I’m Not Afraid of Controversy”: Exclusive Interview with The Shack Director Stuart Hazeldine’, by Martin Saunders, Christian Today, May 26, 2017, accessed December 3, 2018, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/im-not-afraid-of-controversy-exclusive-interview-with-the-shack-director-stuart-hazeldine/109510.htm. Hazeldine notes, for example, that in the movie he needed to shorten the novel’s extensive conversations and he worked to enhance the role of Jesus in response to criticism that Jesus’ role was diminished in the novel. See pertinent discussion and comments from many involved in making the movie The Shack, ‘Something Bigger Than Ourselves: The Making of The Shack’, on The Shack, DVD (Lionsgate, 2017).

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developed in the novel.6 Most of the novel’s main events and their sequence find their place in the movie. Those whom we consider the main characters and their varied relationships are the same as well. The movie is generally faithful in letter, but especially in spirit, to the novel. Both share a common body of narrative events and character interaction. Still, novel and movie express things differently. More specifically, most adaptations of novels to movies require that the overall story told in the novel be compressed when presented in the movie. A movie is usually subject to generally accepted time-constraints. In the movie The Shack, this compression takes two more evident forms particularly relevant to our present concerns. The first of these two forms is the shortening, or even dropping, of longer discussions. Such abridging is to be expected in movies which, like The Shack, are based on novels with lengthy conversations encouraging the reader to reflect on complex psychological and religious questions. Movies in general, and The Shack in particular, stress movement, usually doing this within a two- or three-hour time frame.7 Indeed, in its form as a movie The Shack is essentially a series of dynamically presented, interactive encounters among the main characters. The novel certainly includes such encounters, though often complementing and extending them with the just-mentioned longer conversations. The second of these forms of compression occurs by way of selection. For example, the movie leaves out the novel’s ending to Mack’s story, where Mack, Nan, and Officer Tommy Dalton return to the shack. In that ending, the three follow the marked trail and discover Missy’s body. The fact that they find it in the cave which Papa had located over the weekend reinforces the overall sense of reality surrounding Mack’s weekend experience. Omitting this scene in the movie allows for a smoother closing to the version of Mack’s story as presented in the movie. But it does not bolster the sense of the story’s at least implied reality, namely, the story’s seemingly having taken place in an, or even our, actual world. In the movie, there remains, then, the question as to whether what Mack experienced over the weekend happened in a dream. Yet, even in this case of a revised ending in the movie, what happened to Mack would have its own form of reality. Beyond such questions, this omission of the novel’s ending emphasizes more strongly the principle which Willie, Mack’s friend, enunciates at the end of the movie. That is, for him the reality of what Mack experienced 6

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On the novel, see the previous chapter. For remarks on various forms of a movie’s fidelity to the novel of which such a movie is an adaptation, see McFarlane, Novel to Film, 8-11. Bluestone reminds us that, when moving pictures came along, we took ‘sheer delight in the fact that images move’. Novels into Film, 6 (italics in the original), and see 52, 58-60, and on 50 a comparison of duration in novel and movie. Regarding movement, Bluestone cites Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures’, in: Transition 26 (1937), 121. We might well add that at some deep level moving images continue to enchant us today.

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over the weekend is confirmed more directly by appealing to the reconciliation resulting from the experience. We might call this a sort of biblical pragmatism, namely, judging a tree by its fruit. We should also note that, in addition to omissions, the director adds a few scenes. For example, he enhances Jesus’ role in the movie beyond what it was in the novel.8 Ultimately, and more generally speaking, through this process of adaptation the resulting movies which are based on novels usually turn out to be autonomous, though related, artistic creations.9 In collaboration with others, the directors decide what to keep, omit, or even add. Making a movie by adapting a story from a novel involves a transition from language-constructed images to visually presented ones reinforced by sound.10 A movie’s basis in the visual sets the general parameters within which a movie can tell a story and helps identify varied means available for such recounting. 8

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On the role of the director in general and that of Stuart Hazeldine in particular, see, n. 4 above. ‘The filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based’. Bluestone, Novels into Film, 64. See McFarlane, Novel to Film, for example, 4, where he speaks of mental image in relation to a novel and visual image in relation to film. He later spells out this distinction somewhat more explicitly, referring to signs and signifiers. He writes, ‘The novel draws on a wholly verbal sign system, the film variously, and sometimes simultaneously, on visual, aural, and verbal signifiers. (…) [T]he verbal sign (…) works conceptually, whereas the cinematic sign (…) works directly, sensuously, perceptually’ (26-27, italics in the original). Later he speaks of an audiovisual image (194) in which ‘the visual almost invariably dominates the perceptions of its viewer, taking precedence over the aural’ (202). For McFarlane, the distinction between mental image and visual image describes the basic difference between novel and film. But there are also forms of influence between the two. For instance, at a more general level the two art forms influence one another. And more specifically, a film which is an adaptation of a novel is influenced by the latter. As well, the more determinate view established in the film can precondition the subsequent reading of the novel. For a helpful introduction to important aspects of the process of adaptation from novel to film, see McFarlane, Novel to Film, vii-viii, 3-37, 194-202. The rest of McFarlane’s book is dedicated to a detailed study and analysis of transitions from novel to film as exemplified in five case studies of such transitions. I will occasionally borrow remarks and phrasing McFarlane makes regarding these case studies and will apply them to scenes from The Shack. Bluestone’s classic study, originally published in 1957, offers a wealth of important, original insights into adaptation. Novels into Film, v-x, 1-64, 215-19, with the rest of the book examining in detail the adaptation of six novels as films. Already in 1957, Bluestone had identified many of the distinctions between novel as linguistic medium and film as essentially visual (vi). He wrote of the ‘percept of the visual image [film] and the concept of the mental image [novel]’ (1). I will be drawing more directly on McFarlane than Bluestone since McFarlane’s presentation is more easily accessible for our purposes. Still, Bluestone’s study offers a more detailed overall analysis of differences between novel and film. For a discussion of many adaptations of novels into films, though not of The Shack, see John C. Tibbetts & James M. Welsh, The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2005).

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The novel’s language-based mental images leave much to the reflective imagination of the reader, indeed stoking it. The movie’s audio-reinforced visual images address more directly and immediately the viewer through the senses of sight and hearing. The movie provides perceptual concreteness.11 ‘Perceptual concreteness’ plus other phrases such as ‘directly experienced film narrative’, and ‘perceptual immediacy’ capture well the experience of those of us who view The Shack.12 We are immediately present to what goes on in the movie. Equally, it is immediately present to us. The movie’s tense is a perceptual present.13 If we go with the flow, so to speak, in watching the movie, we let go and trust ourselves to the movie’s overall movement and varied pacing. The effect of being taken up into the movie is especially striking when we view it on the big screen. There, it more easily fills the span of our vision. So visually absorbed, we long, with Mack, for reconciliation and then rejoice in its occurrence through, and resulting from, loving relationships. It is as if Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu appear to us as they do to Mack. They are present to and with Mack, to and with us as well. They fully reveal themselves to Mack and us at the shack and in the garden. They become our loving parent, close friend, and supportive ethereal presence. All this in perceptually concrete and immediate ways. The result is a directly experienced narrative expressed in perspectively presented visual images. The images are paired with the sounds of what is going on in the various scenes and accompanied by background music. Such a narrative includes strategically placed interpersonal encounters and focused conversations. We will select, and focus on, five such encounters and conversations: 1) Mack’s and Papa’s first longer discussion in the cabin; 2) farther along in the movie, Mack’s and Jesus’ crossing to the other side of the lake; 3) Mack’s and Sarayu’s first 11

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Bluestone also distinguishes the novel as more time-oriented and the movie as more spatial in its way of presenting a story. He writes, ‘Both novel and film are time arts, but whereas the formative principle in the novel is time, the formative principle in the film is space. Where the novel takes its space for granted and forms its narrative in a complex of time values, the film takes its time for granted and forms its narrative in arrangements of space’. Novels into Film, 61. McFarlane phrases the relationship of novel to time and film to space slightly differently in his subtitle, ‘The novel’s linearity and the film’s spatiality’. Novel to Film, 27. Though Bluestone as well speaks of the novel’s linearity or movement from word to word when he refers to language as ‘a forward-moving linear form of expression’. Novels into Film, 49. Phrases taken from McFarlane, Novel to Film, 8, 19. Bluestone, Novels into Film, 57. Specifically regarding the novel and movie Great Expectations, McFarlane remarks: ‘In the interrelation of past and present, the novel is effortlessly able to draw comparisons between the young Pip and his older narrating self, so that, though the whole narrative is given in the past tense, one has no trouble in distinguishing the “present” of the novel’s discourse (itself a sort of immediate past) and the “past” of its story. In the film when everything is happening (as opposed to having happened), such comparisons must be made by other means’. Novel to Film, 129 (italics in the original).

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longer discussion; 4) and 5) two scenes toward the end of the movie in which Sarayu plays a prominent role. The first and second examples, namely, encounters 1 and 2, will help us appreciate the relationships respectively between Mack and Papa and between Mack and Jesus. The third example, including encounters 3, 4, and 5, will permit us to note the mutual relationship between Mack and the three while focusing on that between Mack and Sarayu. Several Visualized Experiences Mack and Papa Before turning directly to the encounter between Mack and Papa, we should note two scenes from about 45 minutes into the movie. They parallel the last part of the novel’s chapter 5. In the first of these two scenes, the movie’s director Stuart Hazeldine replaces the novel’s seemingly magical transformation of the dilapidated shack and its winter setting to a delightful cabin surrounded by flowers and lush green forest. Instead, in the movie the director has Mack meet a man whom he will shortly find to be Jesus. Mack follows him on a trail back to the cabin. Along the way, trail and cabin change in a more ‘mystical’ way, to use the director’s word.14 The director notes that this specific revision places greater stress on the role of Jesus as the way to the Father. The second scene follows the first. It shows Mack arriving at the cabin where he meets Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu for the first time. At this point, careful camera work permits us at times to see them as if through Mack’s eyes. As the director observes, we feel ‘like we’re meeting the Trinity as well as Mack [is]’. The overall scene of Mack’s first longer meeting in the cabin with Papa parallels the novel’s chapter 6 and lasts about six minutes. During this first meeting of Mack with Papa on Friday afternoon, she tells him she loves him so much. He, in turn, seems hesitant and confused, to say the least. A few moments later, she invites him to join her in the kitchen where she is preparing supper. As he enters, we see her in a full screen shot focused especially on her face, pleasantly round with a slight smile. This is a strikingly attractive view of Papa, especially when seen on the big screen. Papa is listening to reggae music through earphones. We too hear the music as we see her moving shoulders, and then body, rhythmically to it while kneading bread dough. As Papa removes the earphones, the reggae music fades out. Sounds typically characteristic of preparing a meal 14

References here and hereafter to the director’s comments on the film and the making of it are taken from ‘Audio Commentary with Director Stuart Hazeldine’, ‘Special Features’, The Shack DVD (Lionsgate, 2017).

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follow. They are accompanied by quiet, supportive, and we might say comforting music in the background. The music will gently rise, bringing us along emotionally as the scene moves forward with Mack, who is sad, and Papa, who is lovingly sympathetic to him in his sadness. She invites Mack to help her knead the dough, flours his hands, and shows him how to do it. At this point, there is a hint of a smile on his face. What is most telling in the scene’s overall sequence of shots is the ways in which the camera films them. At first, Mack leans on a counter with his back toward her. Then, the camera shows them in slightly longer-range shots, still distant from one another. As they converse, it moves in on them in several stages. While kneading the dough, they both face the table on which they are working it. Soon the camera comes in again closer for a series of facial close-ups. The shots alternate between Mack and Papa. We see continuing hesitation, confusion, and hurt on Mack’s face. He still seems distant. Papa, in turn, is variously happy and sad, but always warm and sympathetic from the beginning on through these many shots. Mack looks at her, again with a hint of a smile. But, by the end of the scene, he still stares at her coolly before going out onto the porch. And this, even though she has said how especially fond she is of him. At this point, there is hardly any hint that Mack will come to trust and love Papa. But, for now, the movement between Mack and Papa expresses, in a directly visible way, the relationship between them at an early stage in its development. We have followed Mack and Papa from his initially talking with his back to her and her glancing over at him to their slowly coming to look more closely and intensely at one another. Face-to-face. We come to share their perspectives as we see Papa through Mack’s eyes and Mack through Papa’s.15 The director says this is one of his favorite scenes in the movie. Over the course of the scene’s development, Mack shows himself to be a hurting human who now can ask a ‘loving’ God the ‘why’ questions. Mack says to Papa, petulantly, that she is the almighty God. But then asks where she was when Missy needed him. Where was she when he needed her? Mack even quotes scripture when he recalls Jesus’ words, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Papa’s face becomes sad, even to the shedding of a tear. She tells Mack that she was always with her son, and with Mack and Missy. She shows Mack her wrist marked with a scar from the piercing of a nail. She suffered with her son and suffers with them. ‘We were always there together. (…) I never left either him 15

For a positive, reflective discussion on the image of God as a black woman, see Katie Mettler, ‘Why God Is a Curvy, Black Woman in “The Shack” and Some Christian Critics Say It’s “Heresy”’, Morning Mix, accessed November 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/morning-mix/wp/2016/12/21/why-god-is-a-curvy-black-woman-in-the-shack-and-somechristian-critics-say-its-heresy/?utm_term=.20438557493a.

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or you’, she says. Mack leaves the kitchen for the porch, where Papa will join him again to continue their conversation. Mack and Jesus Friday night, Mack spends some time with Jesus on the dock below an allencompassing, overwhelmingly star-filled sky. Two men talking honestly to one another. Jesus speaks of loving relationships, which is all the three of them wish of Mack. We see a certain initial level of comfort in Mack’s face and a gentle, loving concern in that of Jesus. The next morning, in a scene parallel to the novel’s chapter 10, Jesus invites Mack to take the little rowboat out on the lake. The director has modified this scene considerably. In the novel, the two talk a bit on the shore and then Jesus invites Mack to join him in walking across the lake. While doing so, they discuss at some length questions of human freedom, love, and respect. Love and respect as lived by Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu among themselves. But in the movie the scene takes on a different coloring. Here, in a wide-angle view, we see Mack in the boat strikingly alone, out some distance on the lake. In a series of subsequent close-ups, we discover how the director has linked the scene more intensely with the overall story than had been done in the novel. In the movie, Mack, while in the boat, has a panic attack leading to two momentary visions. In the first, he hears the call, ‘Daddy’, looks around and over the side of the boat. He sees a little girl in a red dress under the water, surely Missy. Mack puts his hand down into the water to reach her. It comes out covered with a black liquid. In the second vision, he briefly looks upon Josh whom he is trying to revive, all this accompanied by slightly eerie music reinforcing the dramatic character of the scene. The director has linked anew earlier tragic events with Mack’s ongoing experience over the weekend. He also brings them together now with Mack’s meeting Jesus. As the scene continues, the boat fills with black water and breaks apart. Jesus appears on the screen for a moment and asks Mack to look at him, just keep looking at him. Mack hesitates, the boat begins to sink. Finally, the camera zooms in so close that we see only Mack’s eyes focusing on Jesus. Mack then looks back at the boat and it is whole, dry, and stable. Jesus walks on the water, across the length of the screen, up to Mack and invites him to join with him in walking the rest of the way across the lake. After a moment of consternation, Mack stands up in the boat, grabbing Jesus’ arm. Jesus helps him maintain his balance as he steps out of the boat onto the water. We see them from behind as they walk together toward the other shore, then as if they are walking toward us who await them on shore. While walking, Jesus, in familiar and friendly fashion, tells Mack that he wants one day to catch the biggest of the fish they spot swimming beneath them. Jesus chuckles. They

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arrive on shore, Mack looks back for a moment, laughs heartily, and Jesus simply smiles. The supportive background music has itself become more lighthearted, and the slight sound of waves reaching shore seems to echo Mack’s and Jesus’ own lighthearted feeling. Mack tells Jesus that he is not the religious type Mack would have expected. Jesus, in turn, says that does not interest him. ‘I want friends’ – he wants people to know how much he loves them. Mack and Jesus then enter the woods, stopping in front of a stairway leading up a hillside with a path which then continues farther on. Jesus invites Mack to take this path. Mack hesitates. Jesus says, ‘Trust me’. Mack looks at Jesus with the slightest smile and heads up the hillside to a cave where he will meet Sophia, as she called herself in the novel. Here she identifies herself as ‘Wisdom’. Throughout the scene, we have followed Jesus in movements and gestures toward Mack. And, in turn, Mack as he comes to trust in and depend on Jesus. We have listened to shared laughter, subtle background music, and, at shore, restful sounds of nature. Careful camera work and editing, creative visual effects, and carefully chosen dialogue contribute to the dynamic pacing of this scene. The director has used these elements to vividly enact the growing relationship between Jesus and Mack. We find ourselves accompanying them as they slowly become friends. Mack and Sarayu To exemplify the movement to an ultimately loving relationship between Mack and Sarayu, we need first to go back to Saturday morning. Mack and Papa are talking and having breakfast together on the cabin porch. Suddenly, Mack says that nothing can justify what happened to Missy. In anger, he abruptly abandons his breakfast and leaves the porch. He heads into the woods, looking for his truck with the intention of leaving. On the way, he meets Sarayu, who says ‘just to be clear, we’re not justifying anything; we just want to share it’. In the ensuing scene, parallel to the novel’s chapter 9, she asks Mack if he would help her in her garden which is nearby in the woods. Mack hesitates, but then follows her off to the garden. As she leads him there, she shimmers in the sunlight. The garden is everywhere overwhelmingly luxuriant in bright flowers. Mack says it looks wild, indeed, a mess. Sarayu turns and smiles at him, happily agreeing. We then see her lovely face framed by delicate pink flowers. She says the flowers are truly beautiful. We, however, cannot help but apply the same description to her as we see her smiling amid these delicate flowers. Shortly on, Sarayu invites Mack to take a garden tool and help her prepare some ground. She starts cutting away and digging up some flowers which Mack finds gorgeous. But, as asked, he starts digging anyway. He is about to pull up a root when Sarayu stops him. It is deadly, she says. Why, he asks, would something poisonous be in such a beautiful garden? She takes this occasion to widen the

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discussion. She says he presumes it is bad. And true, alone the sap of the root can kill. Combined with nectar from lilies of the valley, though, it becomes something with great healing qualities. She then asks Mack how he judges good and evil. He responds that good is what is helpful for himself and those he loves. Evil is what does them harm. Sarayu asks if he ever changes his mind about what is good and evil. He does, at times. As the soft background music slowly wells up, she again expands the discussion further, this time by noting many billions of people deciding good and evil on such bases. They do so on their own and alone. Then, what is good for one comes up against what is evil for another. And this is not what was intended from the beginning. Sarayu simply observes that deciding good and evil must be done together and not on one’s own. Here she has set things up for later exchanges with Papa, Jesus, and herself about the need for humans to do things together among themselves and with Papa, Jesus, and her. She is hinting at the need of discerning and acting within loving relationships instead of doing so with a false and destructive sense of autonomy. The scene comes to an end with a return to the question of the messiness of the garden. Sarayu stands up, looks down at Mack still kneeling on the ground, and says, ‘This garden is you’. It is as if she is saying that she who takes care of the garden is taking care of him. He looks away for a moment, then back to where Sarayu was standing, but finds she has disappeared. In the novel, Sarayu speaks of fractals to say that this mess, which the garden and Mack are, have from God’s point of view a beautifully structured recurrent form. In the movie, this same insight is expressed in a non-verbal cinematic equivalent. The camera pulls back slightly, does a close-up on Mack’s face, and then zooms upward. The scene ends with a view from above, a view of Mack kneeling next to the hole they have dug in the space they have just cleared. In this last shot, we see the garden’s beautiful form and then, by implication, the way God sees the beauty of Mack and his life. To continue reviewing the developing relationship between Mack and Sarayu, we fast-forward to two scenes of events taking place toward the end of the weekend. In each of them, Mack is with all three, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. But, of special interest, Sarayu takes on a prominent role in the interactions and exchanges occurring in these two scenes. The first of them, parallel to the novel’s chapter 15, begins after a conversation between Mack and Papa. In the conversation, we have observed Mack growing in trust of, and appreciation for, Papa. Mack, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu then take a walk through an open area to the crest of a hill, from which they can see a wide valley spreading out before them. Sarayu asks Mack if he would like to see what the three of them see. Mack looks at Papa, waits a moment, and gently smiles ‘yes’ as he closes his eyes. Sarayu looks at Mack, touches his eyes with her thumbs, and delicately rubs them from the nose outward, as if preparing to deepen his perspective. Suddenly, the amber

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sun of late afternoon shifts, with the darkening scene becoming one of luminous color. As Mack opens his eyes, a multitude of people appear at some distance from him and the other three. They stand in an informal row in front of a darkly green woods, shining in greens, rose, purple, yellow, and white. Mack himself stands in awe before the beauty which Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu see whenever they look at the world. The background music rises in a slow, piano pace as Mack notices that one man stands out in dull brown. Sarayu says to Mack that the man who has now stepped forward is focused on him. Mack realizes it is his Father. By this point in the weekend, Mack can forgive and embrace him. The two come together, Mack slowly and hesitatingly at first. ‘Dad’. ‘Mack’. They express their sorrow and embrace, with the background music reaching full crescendo. At that moment, both shine in full flourish. Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu look on in obvious pleasure at this moment of reconciliation mediated by Sarayu’s touching of Mack’s eyes. The second of these two scenes parallels much of what occurs in the novel’s chapter 17, the last of the novel’s chapters recounting Mack’s weekend at the cabin. Prior to this scene, Papa has appeared to Mack in the form of a Native American man, interpreted by Graham Green. Papa feels that Mack needs a father at this point. Now, then, in the second scene Papa and Mack have found little Missy’s body, which Mack carries back to Jesus’ workshop. There Jesus and Sarayu receive him and, in touching gestures, share with him in his sorrow. They open the doors to Jesus’ workshop, where we see the wooden coffin Jesus made for Missy. Jesus lovingly lays her body in the coffin. Before they close the coffin, Sarayu places flowers in it, flowers she and Mack had gathered the day before. As the director notes, much of the scene will be accompanied by the touchingly beautiful song, ‘I’ll Think about You’, performed by We Are Messengers. This vocal accompaniment helps move the scene along and provides an emotional thread running continuously through it. The ongoing music reinforces the scene’s overall impact, thus bringing us ever more intimately into the scene and the action it portrays. With this music in the background, Sarayu leads Jesus and Mack, who carry the coffin, through the woods to her garden. There they meet Papa, who now reappears as an African American woman. They stand in the clearing Mack and Sarayu had made the day before and place the coffin in the hole she and Mack had dug there. Papa scatters flowers on the coffin, then Jesus and Mack cover it with dirt. Sarayu brings out a crystal vial containing tears she had collected from Mack’s face at a particularly sad moment during their first meeting in the cabin on Friday afternoon. She sprinkles the tears over the earth covering the coffin. Immediately, delicate little crocuses sprout forth and blossom. Mack and Papa hold hands, with Jesus and Sarayu on either side of them. Together, they watch as a thin green plant sprouts from the soil, grows

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into a sapling, and bursts into a large tree in full leaf, beautiful to behold. Sarayu has brought forth new life in the garden and in Mack. Vocal music continues as the camera shifts to a view from above. It shows the well-designed garden with this large tree growing where Missy had been buried. Mack, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu stand together before the tree, amidst such beauty. * *   * The movie comes to an end in three steps. First, Mack wakes up to find himself in the again dilapidated cabin in full winter. He leaves the cabin and drives out to a crossroad where he has a terrible accident. Second, at the hospital we see that redemption expresses itself in healing and reconciliation among the members of the family. Third, different from the novel, the movie ends with Mack and his family again enjoying themselves together, tenderly, at a campsite in full summer. The Movie as Testimonial Recently, John Semley submitted a text entitled ‘A Testament to Testimonial Cinema’ to the Toronto Globe and Mail, where it was published on September 12, 2017.16 He writes of a ‘phenomenon that I’ve noticed throughout my Toronto International Film Festival 2017 filmgoing: images of people speaking at, or even just looking directly into, the audience. These are movies as testimonials’. Among various examples, he refers to Violeta Ayala’s documentary Cocaine Prison. In it, the prisoners, many young, use video cameras to document and relate their own everyday lives in prison, ‘often directly addressing each other’s viewfinders, and the audience in turn’. Semley describes another film, one from Ben Russell. In it, Russell films workers in Serbian and Surinamese mining communities. Different as the workers are, he simply captures their everyday lives. In various interludes in the film, the workers say nothing. They simply stare directly into the camera as they go about work and play. ‘These, too’, Semley writes, ‘are testimonies. (…) They’re solemn and silent, yet their simple message that THIS IS A PERSON resounds loud and clear’. He sums up his reading of these and similar testimonials and their effects. ‘These cinematic testimonials are arresting precisely because they make head-on, directaddress testimonials feel totally engaging. They’re intimate, sometimes invasive, 16

John Semley, ‘A Testament to Testimonial Cinema’, special to the Globe and Mail, September 12, 2017, accessed December 31, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/tiff2017-a-testament-to-testimonial-cinema/article36242189.

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and even a little uncomfortable. And they accomplish what we can only hope from movies: shake us out of our boredom and passivity, and make stale images and modes feel somehow new again’. We can draw upon much of what Semley says as we suggest that The Shack is, as a movie, a cinematic testimonial to experience of the Trinity. True, Semley is speaking of actual persons who give witness in word to, or simply with a direct look at, viewers. He invites viewers to experience, with those in the films, the difficult lives they are living. He sees testimonial films as having a direct and positive effect on those who view them. In the movie The Shack, we find a somewhat more complex situation. Those who address the audience are fictional characters. For example, Tim McGraw plays Willie, Mack’s friend. He addresses those of us who view the film directly at the beginning and again at the end. The characters speak to us more indirectly in that we see and hear what Mack does in the presence of, and says to, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu – and vice versa. But we feel that these interactions involve us directly in the film’s presenttense happenings. The Shack is a visual presentation of a fictional world. Yet, in its own way it too consists in ‘direct-address testimonials [which] feel totally engaging’. The Shack is, to apply Semley’s words, ‘intimate, sometimes invasive, and even a little uncomfortable. (…) [It] shake[s] us out of our boredom and passivity, and make[s] stale images and modes feel somehow new again’. Such is, indeed, the power of film. Both the world of The Shack as novel and the world of The Shack as movie are fictional realities. The two worlds they present are hybrid fictional worlds in that they contain specific geographical and other references to the actual world. And they are each a world parallel to the actual world. Each of them has its own internal coherence and consistency. Each is, in its own way, credible within its genre. They both serve as testimonials to experience of the Trinity in the sense in which we have been using the term ‘testimonial’. That is, each of them, in its own distinct way, refers to and affirms Mack’s experience of the Trinity. But, more directly here, as novel and film they make that experience present to those reading the novel and seeing the film. In so doing, each one is an invitation to participate in that experience while reading the novel or viewing the movie, and afterwards. Given the clear difference between the two media of novel and movie, it is, then, perhaps ironic that we find ourselves here describing in language various ways in which the movie gives expression, through perceptually available dynamic images, to a series of events and the interactions of characters occurring within it. But our return to a language-based approach more characteristic of a novel is the only means we have here at our disposal to point to the movie as its own unique form of testimonial. Those who have seen the movie and found themselves seriously entering its world will more easily appreciate what we are

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getting at. Those who have not seen the movie are here being asked, through imagination, for the moment to form mental images of dynamically moving, sound-enhanced visual ones. In either case, as with the novel, here we bring with us all that we are and believe or do not believe. Our words necessarily fail to capture the full perceptual richness of the movie’s many images gathered into various scenes. When watching the movie, we see and hear what is going on. This understanding of perception through the senses of sight and hearing needs, however, to be complemented by a further, and more inner directed, analogously understood perception as well. That perception is our way of experiencing within us various emotions arising as we participate in the movie and its action through sight and hearing. Many of us who see the movie feel within us, experience, moments of sadness as we share with Mack in what he is going through that is tragic and difficult for him. We also share in his healing as he overcomes his years-long great sadness. We experience a certain catharsis even in our own lives, happy with him as he reconciles with his father, comes to peace in burying his little Missy, and renews loving relationships with his family and friends. We have here only described a few of the many events in which, through a twofold perceptual immediacy of seeing and hearing, we come inwardly to share in Mack’s experience of the Trinity. But hopefully these events provide some idea of the potential such a unique medium as film can have in serving as a testimonial to experience of the Trinity. Our few examples of the interaction among the main characters in these events help us to appreciate the tangible ways in which relationships develop over the course of the movie. They are mutually involving relationships freely entered, for example, between Mack, on the one hand, and Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu together, on the other. More especially, they are loving relationships between Mack and each of the three. Mack experiences Papa (the Father) as unconditionally loving parent. He experiences Jesus (the Son) as friend. He experiences Sarayu (the Spirit) as ethereal presence lovingly bringing forth new life. In turn, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu experience Mack respectively as son, friend, and, so to speak, fertile soil. And, as we have noted, he experiences them as well in their loving interaction with one another. So far, we have considered movies from the perspective that they are made up of camera shots presenting moving images, with moving used here in a general way to refer to pacing and to all that is involved in such dynamic imaging. In line with our understanding of testimonial, there is a further sense of moving in relation to movies. In a free play with words, we can say that they are made with the intention of moving us the viewers in a twofold way. The first way is by involving us in the movie itself. With specific reference to The Shack, it offers us who see it the opportunity to enter with Mack into an imagined but meaningful relationship with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu while viewing the movie. We

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will do well to recall the director’s comment on the first scene’s careful camera work which permits us to see Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu through Mack’s eyes. Perhaps even as they see us. We feel, as the director Stuart Hazeldine says, ‘like we’re meeting the Trinity as well as Mack [is]’. In collaboration with others, he offers the movie The Shack as a testimonial which itself becomes the vehicle of a possible experience of the Trinity. Finally, stated now in the briefest of fashions, there is a second way in which a movie can move us, namely, by continuing to have an impact on us after we have seen it. With the movie The Shack, Hazeldine encourages us to linger, long after we have viewed it, in thought and reflection over what we have seen, heard, and felt.17

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For an insightful and wide-ranging, more general study of film from theological and spirituality perspectives, see Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).

CONCLUSION DISCIPLESHIP

After reflecting on Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God, we turned to 15 testimonials to experience of the Trinity, considering them in chronological order based on the approximate dates when they were offered. Our study of these testimonials progressed in three stages. A first stage, with two early testimonials, one by Paul and the other by Basil. A second stage, with five medieval and early modern testimonials from Suger, Julian of Norwich, Rublev, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Charles Wesley. A third stage, with eight more recent testimonials from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, namely, one overall testimonial from the Azusa Street Revival, two by Panikkar, one each by Boff, Nyamiti, Polkinghorn, Young, and Hazeldine. This chronological ordering of our review in three stages reflects, in a general way, the growth and development of the worldwide Christian community. The early testimonials arise within the Middle East. They help clarify patterns and parameters for subsequent testimonials and the experience of the Trinity to which they give witness. Those of the medieval and early modern period come, for the most part, from Europe. They are examples of classic references, in various senses of the word ‘classic’, to experience of the Trinity offered through diverse mediums of human expression. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century testimonials come from North America, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. They reflect a tendency toward wider understandings of the Trinity. These understandings arise out of increasingly varied ways in which experience of the Trinity is said to occur in larger segments of the worldwide Christian community and beyond. Each of these 15 testimonials would merit further examination from the perspectives of their varied religious, historical, social, cultural, and political contexts. While keeping such contexts in mind, here we will continue to focus more on the testimonials themselves. We will do this especially by highlighting selected aspects of the experiences of the Trinity to which they offer affirming witness and, consequently, encourage. At times, we will refer as well to aspects more directly

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related to the testimonials themselves.1 First, though, we return to Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God. Jesus’ Spirituality Jesus lived out of his experience of God and based what he did on it. He prayed to God as Abba. He preached and healed in the power of the Spirit. His life was one of both intimate relationship with God in prayer and relationship with the Spirit of God empowering him in mission. As Abba, God was for Jesus both an authoritative and protective, caring and tender presence. God was fully committed to Jesus’ ultimate well-being. Jesus, in turn, was committed to doing the will of God throughout his life and, ultimately, to its end. He lived in emotionally profound, existential relationship with God and invited his disciples to share in that relationship in their own ways. As to the Spirit of God, he sensed the Spirit’s empowering presence within him. From the Spirit, he drew strength of conviction concerning his mission and assurance that God was at work in his ministry and service. In the Spirit, Jesus freed those possessed, healed the sick, proclaimed God’s reign already now through his actions and in fullness at the end of time. His activities and invitation to his disciples to pray to God as their Abba were expressions of his own experience of God. More forcefully stated, they were a prolongation of that experience, assuring that it extended to and affected all aspects of his life and ministry. After his resurrection, early Christians came to recognize that his sonship included oneness, in a strong sense of the word, with God. And they came to see that, in his Spirit-rooted empowerment, he did what God did. We easily recognize a certain structure to, and movement constituting, Jesus’ experience of God, an experience which for Jesus was all-encompassing. As to structure, his experience involves a dual relationship with God. Abba and the Spirit of God are for him ‘others’ to whom he relates and who relate with him. They are, it has been said, an otherly given. He relates to Abba in an intimate, trusting way and to the Spirit as one who empowers him. In these relationships, he experiences them as relating to him in loving and empowering ways. As to 1

It would perhaps require another extended study to compare adequately the various testimonials, the experiences to which they witness, and the ways in which they encourage experience of the Trinity. One might as well, from a more imaginative and constructive perspective, at some point want to explore the possibility of an historically and geographically sensitive phenomenological reading of the series of testimonials and the experiences to which they give affirming witness. Perhaps even beginning with Jesus’ experience of God and ending with a foreseen, final fullness of sharing in the life of the Trinity and its implications both for those who share in that life as well as for the Trinity itself.

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movement, his experience began with initial relationships, namely, between Jesus and Abba, on one hand, and Jesus and the Spirit of God, on the other. Here we must be circumspect. But we can well imagine that, as these relationships developed through ongoing interaction, Jesus continued to grow in wisdom, age, and grace over the course of his active ministry. These relationships led him to turn to others in loving service of preaching and healing. We sense as well that in this movement Abba was with Jesus in his growth and the Spirit was with him in his service. These mutually enriching relationships resulted in a sense of purpose and feeling of wholeness on his part. This resultant wholeness showed itself at various moments in his life and especially in the lives of others to whom he preached and whom he freed from various illnesses. For Jesus himself, this wholeness came to full fruition in his resurrection. His experience of God was one of movement from his initial relationships with Abba and the Spirit, through interaction with them, to wholeness within himself and in his relationships with them. In serving others, he bought wholeness to them in their lives when they accepted him. Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God was ultimately enriching, indeed transforming, both for himself and others. We can take our reflection on Jesus’ experience of God a step further. There are aspects of it which permit us to speak of that overall experience as Jesus’ spirituality. To identify some of these aspects, it will be helpful to draw upon Sandra M. Schneiders’ descriptive definition of what spirituality, and in the present case more precisely a spirituality, is. In that definition, Schneiders brings together several components making up what she calls a general definition of spiritualities. An initial caveat. When referring to a more general definition of spirituality, it is not our intention to subordinate Jesus and his unique experience to such a descriptive definition. His experience, as with all experiences, is ultimately beyond such subordination. Indeed, we need to respect the uniqueness of his experience. Each concrete experience, as well as experience accumulated over time, remains unique.2 With this said, we can well profit from Schneiders’ identifying and bringing to our attention several components constitutive of a spirituality.3 In her brief descriptive definition, Schneiders writes that ‘spirituality as lived experience can be defined as conscious involvement in the project of life integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives’.4 Here 2

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It could be argued that Jesus’ experience itself, once examined from the perspective of a descriptive definition, ultimately confirms the value of that definition rather than vice versa. I am grateful to Prof. Schneiders for her important insights but am myself responsible for their use here. Sandra M. Schneiders, ‘Christian Spirituality: Definition, Methods and Types’, in: The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (Louisville, KN: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 1. See also her further remarks in ‘Approaches to the Study of

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Schneiders identifies three fundamental components of spirituality. They are lived experience, project of life integration,5 and self-transcendence toward an ultimate value. Without necessarily attributing to her what we are doing, we can read her definition of a spirituality as referring to an individual’s personal experience, to experience shared by a couple or friends or a group, or to that of a wider religious or social community and its traditions.6 Thus, a spirituality can be considered primarily individual, shared, or communal, though the forms often overlap. In our reflection on Jesus of Nazareth, we saw that his experience of God was lived personal experience, in the deepest sense of the words, occurring within his overall Jewish context. Worth repeating, it was a doubled religious experience of profound intimacy with Abba and empowerment through the Spirit’s active presence in him as he preached and healed. Intimacy with Abba defined Jesus as the Son, and the presence of the Spirit assured results of his actions no human alone could have hoped for. His project of life integration consisted in consciously and freely living in full faithfulness to Abba’s will, announcing the coming of the reign of God through his Spirit-empowered preaching and healing. It included inviting his disciples to join him in both his faithfulness to Abba and his proclamation of the reign of God. What Jesus valued as ultimate found expression in a threefold way: commitment to Abba; proclamation and healing in the Spirit; encouraging commitment as well as proclamation and healing in his disciples. In effect, these three, namely, commitment, action, and encouragement, become one for Jesus in his all-encompassing, integrated spiritual life. His was a way of life, a spirituality freeing both for himself and for others.7

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Christian Spirituality’, in: The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), esp. 15-19, 29-31. Schneiders speaks of ‘conscious involvement in the project of life integration’. The understanding of experience we are working with here includes within it, to some degree at least, the notion of conscious involvement. The three forms of experience, based on the nature of the one or ones experiencing, require adaptation and consideration appropriate to each of the three forms. I have taken the phrase ‘Jesus’ spirituality’ from the book written by Albert Nolan, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), esp. xiii-xv, xvii-xx, 47-88. Dr. Sylvester A. J. David, now auxiliary bishop of Cape Town, South Africa, brought this book to my attention when he cited it in ‘A Retrospective and a Prospective Reading of Jn 1:118, Using the Method of Biblical Rhetorical Analysis’, Ph.D. diss., University of KwaZuluNatal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 2012, 282. Three statements by Nolan are particularly relevant, given our present interests. First, ‘The experience of God as his abba was the source of Jesus’ wisdom, his clarity, his confidence, and his radical freedom. Without this it is impossible to understand why and how he did the things he did’ (71). Second, ‘The starting point of Jesus’ spirituality, the experience of God as abba, included the awareness that God was a loving Father to all human beings’ (79). Third, ‘Jesus’ experience of oneness [with others and with all of creation] was rooted in his experience of God as his abba’ (169). Italics in the original texts.

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Discipleship Spiritualities Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God is the founding experience which gives rise to the various experiences of the Trinity witnessed to by the testimonials we have reviewed. Though we have not considered all possible testimonials to such experiences, it is, I would suggest, reasonable to go further and say that Jesus’ experience lies at the root of Christian experiences of the Trinity.8 In any case, the testimonials we have examined, and especially the experiences to which they witness, are not fully understandable without some reference to Jesus’ experience of God. That experience is indeed foundational, setting a pattern for, and providing certain flexible parameters to, Christian experiences of the Trinity. Testimonials and Experiences Jesus’ experience and various New Testament expressions of it provide the core terminology Christians use to express their experiences and their understandings of them to themselves, to one another, and to others beyond the Christian community. Specifically, the testimonials we have reviewed have spoken, in a wide sense of this word, in terms of Abba/Father, Son, and Spirit. The testimonials themselves reflect the overall structure of Jesus’ experience when they describe, or even offer the opportunity for, various experiences. At the same time, the testimonials are, in effect, saying that these names give expression to the experiences to which they have referred in affirming fashion. That is, Abba/Father, Son, and Spirit identify what we might call, stated in more general formulation, those others whom communal, shared, and individual selves experience in their relationships with each of them. Indeed humans, and through them all of creation as we presently know it, experience the Three. Furthermore, those who use these terms to name the ones whose presence they experience at least imply, in so doing, that the relationships between them and those they experience are mutual. We might even dare to say that, in these relationships, the Three experience those who are experiencing them in their creational context. Perhaps we could go so far as to say that there is ultimately but one overall, multi-faceted experience of the Trinity, with the genitive here being both objective and subjective. The Trinity is experienced and experiences. But we return now specifically to Christians’ experience of the Trinity. The movement which occurs in, and indeed constitutes, the varied forms of this experience reflects the overall dynamic characterizing Jesus of Nazareth’s own experience. Jesus’ experience, and Christians’ experience dependent on that of 8

Raimon Panikkar presents a special case. To make this statement more directly regarding him, with his widened understanding of Trinity, would require further nuance.

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Jesus, are in their varying ways enriching movements of self and other in interactional relationship. They lead to a feeling, on the part of Jesus and those whose experience is dependent on his, of wholeness within and of oneness with others. The descriptions of experiences of the Trinity provided by the testimonials we have reviewed need not be further summarized here. They stand on their own. We can, though, at this point, bring forward several more striking aspects and characteristics of these experiences. In doing this, we will do well right away to profit from some generally stated insights concerning experience of the Trinity identified by Anne Hunt in The Trinity: Insights from the Mystics.9 She studies eight mystics who have written about the Trinity, doing this in good part based on their own trinitarian experiences.10 It is encouraging to see that several of the insights she gathers are strikingly consonant with what we have found in our review of testimonials and experiences. An example is the point widely shared among mystics that the Holy Spirit plays an important and specific role in bringing about experience of the Trinity and assuring entry into the Trinity’s divine life.11 Furthermore, she notes the variety of experiences and of perspectives on them as well as the varied linguistic expressions and images used to tell of them. The experiences are intensely personal, sometimes expressed through the beauty of poetry or painting, and often less concerned for technical theological considerations. The experiences as recounted encourage entering more deeply into the mystery of the Trinity. They generally involve a lively sense of the presence of the three divine Persons, within whose relationships those experiencing the Trinity are invited to live.12 Further Aspects and Characteristics We are now well positioned to reinforce, even complement, Hunt’s various insights. In so doing, we will at times speak of aspects and characteristics of communal, shared, and individual experiences witnessed to. At other times, we will discuss such points in relation not only to the experiences themselves but 9

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Anne Hunt, The Trinity: Insights from the Mystics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010). Hunt helpfully gathers insights gained from her study at the end of each chapter and in the conclusion. Of note, she rightly reminds us of difficulties around the notion of experience (xiv), but carefully works with it in referring to mystics’ encounters with the Trinity. The eight mystics Hunt studies are: William of St. Thierry (ca. 1080–1148); Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179); Bonaventure (ca. 1217–1274); Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328); Julian of Norwich (1342/3–ca. 1416); Teresa of Avila (1515–1582); John of the Cross (1542–1591); Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906). Hunt, Trinity: Insights, for example, 20, 45, 93, 143, 166. Ibid., 46, 165, 182-85.

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also to the testimonials presenting them. Some aspects and characteristics are obvious, and we will not refer to them at length here. For example, the simple fact of divine threeness and oneness with which those who experience the Trinity seem spontaneously comfortable. Certain among the various aspects and characteristics to which we will refer may only be present implicitly in some of the experiences and in the testimonials witnessing to them. Often, though, specific testimonial presentations will not only mention explicitly, but even stress, one or more of them. Highlighting some of these points or elements more prominent in specific testimonials will help us identify reasons for having selected them. It will underscore the importance of including them here and undergird decisions taken to have done so. Naming such points will also draw attention to them even when they are less explicitly referred to, but are nevertheless often present, in other testimonials. It can alert us to subtle similarities among experiences to which various testimonials witness. Given the rich variety of possible testimonials down through the ages and the experiences to which they refer, we might be tempted even at this late point to draw attention to aspects and characteristics of testimonials and experiences not included in our study. But, in line with our generally modest aim of appreciating the wide range of testimonials available over many centuries, I suggest we remain with the following points relating more directly to the ones we have reviewed. Roles of the Spirit. Reference to the Holy Spirit is evidently an essential element in each testimonial we have examined and, indeed, in any recounting of experience of the Trinity. But, Paul of Tarsus, Basil of Caesarea, Marie de l’Incarnation, and the Azusa Street Revival stand out for the specific roles they attribute to the Holy Spirit in relation to such experience. For Paul, we need simply recall that he appeals to his and the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit of God’s Son crying Abba. This experience serves as anchor for his argument that he and the Galatians are now heirs and, as God’s children, free. Basil identifies the special role of the Spirit as point of departure for communal and individual experience of the three Persons of the Trinity when he distinguishes two directions in the dynamic movement which is God. He confirms that movement from the perspective of human knowledge, we would say experience, of the Trinity as one from the Spirit through the Son to the Father. From the perspective of divine glory, he describes the movement as one from the Father through the Son to the Spirit. Marie de l’Incarnation’s life is one of growth in the Spirit. The Spirit is at the base of all the impressions left in her soul by the Trinity, leads her to mission in Canada, urges her to speak to her Father and to her Spouse. The Spirit moves her to act as the spouse of the Word and even to address the Spirit as well. During the Azusa Street Revival, Pastor Seymour and the many

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testimonials offered there provide a powerful witness to experience of the Trinity through the experience of the Spirit. These testimonials, others summarized in the Revival’s newspaper, and indeed the Revival itself witness to the action of the Spirit manifested in, and continuing subsequently to arise out of, baptism in the Spirit. Paul, Basil, Marie de l’Incarnation, and the Azusa Street Revival underscore what so many others who offer testimonials have said in various ways, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more implicitly. The Spirit is at the origin of such experience of the Trinity, initiating and then sustaining it.13 Freedom. Among the 15 testimonials we have reviewed, those of Paul of Tarsus, Basil of Caesarea, Raimon Panikkar, and Leonardo Boff give special prominence to the notion and reality of freedom in relation to experience of the Trinity seen thereby as transformative. They do this within specific contexts. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul is gravely concerned about those who would, in his view, shackle Christians with now unnecessary Jewish legal requirements. He tells the Galatians they are heirs and children, a fact witnessed to by, indeed due to, the freeing presence of the Spirit within their hearts. Basil finds himself in the middle of a serious dispute concerning the divine status of the Holy Spirit. In the course of his argument in favor of equal status and honor for the Spirit along with the Father and the Son, he modifies the Neo-Platonic schema of vertical, deterministic emanation and return. Instead, he places the Spirit on a horizontal level with Father and Son in the divine realm. With this adjustment, he recontextualizes various forms of experience of Father, Son, and especially Spirit by creating a space between divine and human in which the two act freely in relation to one another. Panikkar, in his later proposal of overall cosmotheandric trinification, works within the context of his concern to establish trinitarian relationships among the three, namely, the Kosmos, the Human, and the Divine. There he finds elements of freedom in the Kosmos. He speaks of human freedom from the slavery of the ego. He treats of freedom in relation to the Divine as spontaneity, a freedom beyond the mere freedom of choice. He then attributes such spontaneity to the Kosmos and the Human as well. For him, freedom is a characteristic of all reality, a characteristic he has experienced in meditative ways. He refers to the will’s acting beyond desire, at the level of being, as rhythmic becoming. Finally, Boff focuses on freedom as characteristic of the experience 13

Both the earlier and especially the later Raimon Panikkar could well be included here in remarks concerning the role of the Spirit when he interprets the experience of the Spirit in advaitic terms, with the then non-relational and immediate experience of the Spirit as for him the goal of trinitarian experience. Perhaps it is as such goal that we could speak of the Spirit as being the grounding origin of the ultimately advaitic experience of the Trinity. In this context, it is good to recall that, in Panikkar’s view, this experience includes as second ‘moment’ a personal relationship with ‘Christ’.

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of the Trinity considered in relation to liberation from oppression in society. For him, the process of human efforts to establish egalitarian human societies, and especially the results of these efforts, reflect the divine trinitarian society in its egalitarian reality. In so doing, they together become a form of experience of the Trinity lived as the freeing of societies and their members. Engagement. In effect, all the testimonials we have reviewed reveal some form of transforming engagement arising out of the various types of experience of the Trinity to which they give witness. To name only a few, we should first cite Marie de l’Incarnation. Hers is an example of personal engagement within a social and historical context. She sails off to Quebec in the New World. Her mission of prayer, education, and religious as well as social community formation flows from her visionary experiences of the Trinity and other visionary experiences. They lead her to see her mission as a way of participating in the extension of her Lord’s kingdom around the world. Her life flows back and forth from contemplation to mission back to contemplation and forward again to mission, all ultimately integrated in her mission to Canada. Boff, in turn, stands as an example of societal-level liberating engagement. As noted briefly above, he commits himself in his writing to encouraging liberation from oppressive societal situations through the formation of egalitarian societies patterned after that of the three divine Persons in the Trinity. In his testimonial writing, he does not mention so much his own personal experiences as he does those of persons suffering in unjust societies. His witness to experience of the Trinity has a forward look to it. He focuses on emerging situations within the stream of history. That is, he moves from negative experiences of the Trinity, in the sense of societies in which people are oppressed and exploited, to current and future positive experiences in the form of societies becoming fairer and more egalitarian. Charles Nyamiti, for his part, commits himself to theological engagement. He offers insights into the Trinity from an African ancestral perspective. He concretizes, and makes more attractive to people in sub-Saharan Africa, an understanding of the roles the three divine Persons play in their lives. He wishes to share such insights with others around the world. His insights present a warm and inviting view of the Trinity connected with human communal and personal life. The Azusa Street Revival, and those involved with it by providing witness to experience of the Trinity through experience of the Spirit, show a markedly evangelizing engagement both in their home countries and abroad. The Revival and various witnesses encourage a deeply emotional experience with the hope of thereby transforming lives. Somewhat in contrast, Polkinghorne combines his quantum physics acumen with deep commitment to trinitarian experience and reflection on it to engage, in dialogue, the contemporary world so committed to science. He works to enrich both that world and the Christian community

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with a deeper understanding of themselves and their relations with one another. Raimon Panikkar, in his early testimonial but especially in his later one, commits to sharing with others what he has himself experienced of the Trinity understood in a widened sense. He offers what he has himself experienced, namely, intrareligious dialogue and cosmotheandric insight, to enrich human understanding of and appreciation for the deeper rhythms of reality. In their greatly varied ways, each of these several testimonials becomes a project for transformation flowing from and in line with the diverse instances and forms of experience of the Trinity to which they refer. The engagement flows freely from that experience, though often with a sense of urgency even becoming one of necessity. Intimacy and Immediacy. Several testimonials stress the related points of intimacy and immediacy. Regarding intimacy, Marie de l’Incarnation comes to mind as a particularly striking example. As an approximately seven-year-old child, in a visionary experience she encounters Jesus, the most beautiful of human children. Later in life, she says she was absorbed in the three divine Persons. She speaks of them as my Father, my Spouse, and the Holy Spirit who fashions impressions in her soul. It would be hard to think of a more emotionally telling example of experiential intimacy than her speaking to the Son as her spouse and so acting in relation to him, which she does when she writes of her second visionary experience of the Trinity. As to immediacy, throughout our review of testimonials we have regularly come upon a pervasive sense of immediacy in the form of direct relationships on the part of those who speak of their own experience of the three divine Persons. Furthermore, this sense of relational immediacy comes to the fore in a special way in the two testimonials ‘The Shack as novel’ and ‘The Shack as movie’. Here the testimonials themselves create a certain sense of immediacy between those of us who read or see the testimonial and the three divine Persons. When reading the novel, we develop such a feeling through sharing in the ongoing dialogues between Mack and Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. The sense of immediacy deepens in relationships in which we participate when we enter into Mack’s world through an exercise of imagination. We come into direct contact with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. As to the movie, this sense of relational immediacy is established in striking fashion. Papa looks directly into the camera as she speaks with Mack. In effect, she is looking directly at us, the viewers, who in turn are immediately present to her. This immediacy is most powerfully experienced when our range of vision is filled by Papa’s image on a large screen. So many components of the film reinforce such directness and immediacy of relationship with each of the three divine Persons. Among them, camera angle capturing movement and drawing viewers into the movement itself, color and scenery so appealing to the eye, music touching the soul so deeply.

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Beyond these examples of intimacy and immediacy, there is a sense of intimacy and immediacy which may not always be evident in testimonials to experience of the Trinity which witness, for example, to such experience in its accumulated communal form. Even in these cases, though, there lingers just below the surface a feeling of intimate and immediate relationship on the part of the community and its members with each of the three divine Persons. More generally, intimacy in and immediacy of relationship find added expression in testimonials to experience of the Trinity which stress a special feeling of living, moving, and having one’s being within the Trinity. Beauty. Here we are speaking directly of beauty as characteristic of testimonials themselves offered in various artistic domains, using mediums appropriate to them. The testimonials to experience of the Trinity which come more spontaneously to mind are, in this case, the following: in architecture, Abbot Suger’s Saint-Denis chapel; in painting, Rublev’s icon; in music, Charles Wesley’s Trinity hymns; and, in film, Stuart Hazeldine’s movie, The Shack. The Saint-Denis chapel welcomes those coming to it with the harmonious beauty of its manyfaceted, triply structured façade and carving representing the Trinity. It rejoices in its threefold interior structure whose dynamic lines draw attention forward and upward. Indeed, overall setting and harmony invite those who approach it to enter this trinitarian space, ultimately to enter spiritually into the Trinity itself. Rublev’s icon, restrained and yet elegant, delights the eye of those who come upon it. The dynamic setting of the three angels, delicate coloring, and an open place at the table invite those who gaze upon it to join the serene conversation of the three divine Persons. Charles Wesley’s hundreds of Trinity hymns and accompanying, often lilting, melodies encourage communities, families, and individuals to join in the song. Joining in song leads them to an evergreater awareness of their own experience, in varied forms, of the Trinity. Words, melodies, and rhythms work to entrance them into the saving presence of the Trinity. In directing the movie, The Shack, Stuart Hazeldine works with gorgeous scenery, brilliant color, often subtle background music, dynamic camera shots and angles capturing important moves as well as powerful close-ups of Mack, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. All these together facilitate an emotionally engaging entry into Mack’s world. These several testimonials address those who view them in a holistic way, beauty addressing mind and heart and soul. Characterized by such beauty, they aim to reflect the beauty of experiencing the Trinity. And the beauty of the Trinity itself.14

14

Of note, as we have seen, already early on Basil had written of the Spirit who leads through the Son to the beauty of the Father.

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Motherhood and the Feminine. Leonardo Boff and Charles Nyamiti refer explicitly to one of the divine Persons as Mother or as feminine, with the latter open to implying motherhood. Boff speaks of the maternal Father and paternal Mother. For him, fatherhood is not complete without motherhood. Both beget offspring. Jesus’ Father cannot be understood without bringing together the strength of paternal love and the tenderness of maternal love. Jesus’ Father is the source of both the maternal and the paternal, of sisterhood and brotherhood – mystery lovingly and tenderly leading to liberation. Nyamiti, in turn, writes of the Father as ancestor and ancestress. When we understand ancestor analogically, God the Father is Mother of the Logos within the Trinity. In The Shack, novel, William Paul Young invites the reader to imagine God the Father, Papa, as a ‘large black woman’ and the Holy Spirit as a ‘small, distinctively Asian woman’. Stuart Hazeldine and Julian of Norwich introduce strikingly feminine ways of envisioning, respectively, two or three of the divine Persons. In The Shack movie, Hazeldine creatively casts Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer as Papa (the Father) and the Japanese Sumire Matsubara as Sarayu’s ethereal presence (the Holy Spirit). But it is Julian who plumbs the depths of insight into the Trinity as Mother. She explains her sense of the Trinity as Mother from within the perspective of her concern for familial themes of home and hearth. In the Long Text, she follows her telling and further reading of the parable of the lord and the servant with a description of Jesus as Mother. In concrete terms, she explains that Jesus loves us as a mother. A mother naturally loves her child and her child the mother. Julian expands this appreciation to the whole Trinity. For her, there are three ways of contemplating divine motherhood. The motherhood of God in creation (the Father), the motherhood of grace in the incarnation (the Son), and the motherhood of God at work (the Holy Spirit). Especially for Julian, the Trinity is a Mother who embraces us. Joy. Several testimonials speak of joy in relation to experience of the Trinity. Sometimes experiencing the three divine Persons is described as a joyful event. At other times, the testimonial itself becomes a joyful one as, for example, in the singing of trinitarian hymns. Again, a testimonial may identify joy as the most important characteristic of the Trinity itself. Of the many testimonials we have reviewed, it is those of Julian of Norwich in her Short and Long texts which focus most explicitly on the joyful character of various aspects of experience of the Trinity. In her experiences, Julian moves with Jesus from a sense of sadness at his suffering to a sense of joy at her being with the Trinity. Of special significance, she describes the three divine Persons themselves in terms of joy. The Father is joy, the Son is bliss, and the Holy Spirit is endless delight. Yet all are equally joy. Joy, bliss, and endless delight characterize, respectively, the three

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divine Persons in their loving relations both among themselves and with her and all of creation. Julian reflects on what she considers to be the fundamental characteristic of her experience and, indeed, that of the three divine Persons themselves. She describes the Trinity in emotional and affective terms, elevating emotion and affection to what we might call the divine level itself. Without wishing to attribute to Julian an intentional turn to a more metaphysical mode of reflecting, we can say that she has proposed what seems to be a reading of reality ultimately as emotional, in a deep sense of the word. Ultimately, all will be transformed, for all will be joyful and all will be well. Trinification. Raimon Panikkar and John Polkinghorne have each, in quite differing contexts, grasped something seemingly more implicit in many of the testimonials we have reviewed. Panikkar, in a multi-religious, advaitic meditative context, and Polkinghorne, in a quantum-physics embracing scientific context, conclude that all of reality is ultimately trinitarian in form. I suggest that we find an at least implicit affirmation of such a form in other testimonials. It is difficult to deny some form of trinitarian structure and movement to all of reality if one attributes a trinitarian structure and dynamic movement to the source of reality. For Panikkar, this insight becomes clear in his later testimonial to the rhythm of being. There, he speaks repeatedly of the trinitarian, perichoretic character of each of the three dimensions of reality, namely, the Kosmos, the Human, and the Divine. Of special import, he describes the relationships among them as trinitarian and perichoretic. For his part, Polkinghorne highly respects the experiential perspective of the world of science and, specifically, quantum physics. He deeply appreciates the relational character of the universe, especially as quantum physics reveals it. Without adopting a panentheistic view of the universe as existing within God, he at length views consonances between the quantum world view and that of trinitarian theology. He claims, in what he calls an overly audacious way, that trinitarian theology may well serve as the theory of everything. Several years later, he goes so far as to say that the ‘cousinly relationships’ between science and trinitarian theology justify the claim that trinitarian theology is that theory of everything. Panikkar and Polkinghorne, each in his own way and within his own context, in effect propose that experience of the Trinity leads to the view that all of reality is best understood in trinitarian terms. Prolongation.15 We come now to consider what may be the most complex aspect of the question of testimonials and the experiences to which they refer 15

Seeing testimonials as ‘prolongations’ of experiences of the Trinity to which the testimonials refer stands here, to some extent, against the background of Dewey’s three types of experience,

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and which they encourage. It is an aspect already mentioned in our introduction and then noted here and there throughout our study, namely, the relationship or relationships between testimonial and experience. Testimonials we have reviewed usually refer, at least indirectly, to several forms of experience of the Trinity. But they often give greater prominence to one form over others. I suggest, then, that we divide our consideration of various types of relationships between testimonial and experience into two groups, based on the form or forms of experience more prominently witnessed to. The first group includes testimonials offered by individuals who speak directly of their own experience of the Trinity. The second, testimonials which may or may not imply such personal experience, but which refer more to experience of the Trinity in forms other than the strictly personal and indeed individual. Admittedly, this distinction between reference to one’s own experience and to other forms of experience is somewhat subjective. It depends, to some extent, on one’s perception of a testimonial’s emphasis on a specific form or forms of experience to which it refers. Still, the distinction between testimonials offering explicit witness to one’s own personal experience and testimonials witnessing more directly to other forms of experience will prove helpful as we continue to bring together what we have seen in our study. The first group of testimonials, then, gathers ones offered by those who write about their own experiences. In Paul of Tarsus, we find someone who wrote about his experience, one he shared with others. As he says in Gal. 4:6, he recognizes the Spirit of God’s Son acting in him and in the Galatians, leading him and them to cry out Abba. In writing of what was probably an ecstatic experience, he is further reflecting on it and its implications. In effect, he is bringing the experience further into the realm of reflexive thought in a way appropriate namely, primary or gross experience, reflective experience, and consummatory experience. On Dewey’s types of experience, see, n. 28 to chapter 5 above. There, reference to Dewey on experience reflects his seeming tendency to refer more to individual experience. But when he refers to ‘experience’ he is surely leaving open the application of his thought to communal experience as well. It is in this vein that his notion of reflective experience and consummatory experience being prolongations (this is my word interpreting what Dewey says) of gross experience lends itself to a wider reading of experience such that, for example, it can apply as well to later testimonial or reflexive activity as prolongation of the experience to which the testimonial offers witness. For present purposes, though, here it seems better to remain with something more general like ‘prolongation’ since we are referring to somewhat complex forms of relationships between testimonials and experiences. One might, at least in certain contexts, speak as well of ‘continuation’ of the experience to which reference is made. But, among various considerations, ‘prolongation’ seems to express better the importance of that experience. As well, ‘prolongation’ seems, even due to the way it is written and pronounced, to imply a dynamic movement toward the future. One can almost sense that dynamic thrust forward as one pronounces or hears the word.

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to that realm. He is doing it for himself but, in the context of his letter to the Galatians, most importantly for those to whom he is writing. Raimon Panikkar, in turn, writes of intrareligious dialogue and the cosmotheandric insight. In each case, he claims that he has lived an experience of Trinity, with Trinity here understood widely to apply to all of reality. He makes this claim especially through his experience which he calls the cosmotheandric insight. In that insight, reality itself is an experience of the Trinity as perichoretic relationship of Kosmos, Human, and Divine. That experience, namely, his own and at the same time what reality is, finds its ultimate rootage in his understanding of reality from his advaitic perspective, in which experience is pure experiencing. Given this ultimate a-distinguishing of personal and universal, we can include him here as one speaking of ‘personal’ experience. Indeed, his written testimonials to intrareligious dialogue and to cosmotheandric insight are the result of long years of meditative experience. Both Paul and Panikkar express their experience in writing, thus prolonging their experience in the world of conceptual communication. Julian of Norwich and Marie de l’Incarnation provide the most easily recognizable examples of a direct relationship between testimonial and experience. Julian and Marie are aware of and appreciate the long Christian tradition of belief in, we should say here experience of, God as Trinity. But they speak at length of what we usually mean when we think of experience, namely, their personal, visionary experiences of the Trinity. Julian wrote twice of her experiences, probably first in her Short Text and later in her Long Text. Each text, but especially the second, is the result of a long process. In this process, the Short Text becomes a moment in the extended process leading to the Long Text. The course of this two-step process, as delimited by the Texts, begins with her initial visionary experiences, on which she then reflected meditatively and prayerfully for several years. Perhaps she had further visionary experiences. In any case, she brought her experiences together with a certain knowledge of Christian tradition and her experience of home life. She gives her experiences of the Trinity further expression in her written texts. These texts, but especially the Long Text, integrate her initial visions with what flowed from them. For her part, Marie explicitly experienced the Trinity three times. Other visions accompanied them, including ones directing her to missionary work in Quebec. At the request of her spiritual directors and her son, she wrote several times of her personal and intimate trinitarian experiences. Her three-timed visionary experience of the Trinity developed early on in her life. The subsequent process of her writing and rewriting continued over many years. In that process, she gained further insight concerning her experiences of the Trinity, insight which arose out of any further visions as well as ongoing contemplation and action reinforcing one another. As was the case with Julian, this process was

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for Marie one of spiritual integration. In Marie’s case, that integration ultimately came about through her work with settlers in Quebec and especially with indigenous inhabitants. Her writings, but even her whole life, became prolongations of her experience of the Trinity. The second group of testimonials is made up of those which do not give such prominence to direct, personal experience on the part of those offering the testimonials. They may, though, briefly mention or at least imply such experience. In this group, the relationship between testimonial and experience is generally less direct, more attenuated we could say, than it is in the first group. These testimonials refer, in various ways, to experience as punctual or ongoing, personal (though again not usually that of the ones offering testimonials) and communal, accumulated over time, or several and even all of these. In his argument in favor of the equal honor of the Spirit with that of the Father and the Son, Basil of Caesarea focuses on the Spirit’s role in the process and experience of sanctification. He includes himself in this process, but stresses that role’s being played throughout the various realms of created reality, including those of angels and of humans. In effect he is, with his ongoing argument in favor of the divinity of the Spirit, appealing to, confirming, and giving expression to what he reads as the communal, individual, and cumulative experience of the Trinity among Christians since the death and resurrection of the Lord. I would suggest that, with his argumentation, he is consolidating, clarifying, indeed prolonging in thought, that early, multiform experience. As mentioned in our earlier remarks concerning beauty as a characteristic of testimonials to experience of the Trinity, Abbot Suger, Andrei Rublev, and Charles Wesley turn, respectively, to architecture, painting, and music to celebrate and encourage experience of the Trinity. They are concerned with the past but, at this point, we can say especially with the present and the future. Abbot Suger celebrates the Trinity by launching the reconstruction of the Saint-Denis chapel as a trinitarian space. He fosters experience of the Trinity by inviting those who come to the chapel to stand in rapture before its beauty and to feel themselves embraced by Father, Son, and Spirit as they enter it. Andrei Rublev captures something of the spiritual beauty of the Trinity in his iconic representation of the three divine Persons dynamically positioned in conversation around a table. He himself prayed his icon into existence, a process which took on the form of a trinitarian experience on his part. He responded to a request by his abbot to paint an icon in honor of the previous abbot. But his deeper concern was, I would suggest, to make present the Trinity in such a way as to solidify trinitarian traditions in the Russia of his day. More so, he hoped to give those who gaze upon it a feeling of themselves participating in trinitarian serenity despite a world seemingly in turmoil. Charles Wesley composed hundreds of hymns to the Trinity, some even on horseback. His personal conversion

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experience seems to have flowered in loving, musical composition over several decades. His varied rhythms, rhyming, and melody provided occasions for those who sang his hymns, together and individually, to embrace and enter into Jesus’ saving gift which then permits them to glorify the Father. His main purpose was, in line with his brother John’s attitude, to help Christians recognize that they all experienced the Trinity in their lives. Suger, Rublev, and Charles Wesley provide architectural, pictorial, and musical prolongations of centuries of accumulated experience of the Trinity and reflection on that experience. Prolongation in the present and into the future. The Azusa Street Revival stands out as unique in relation to the rest of the testimonials in this second group. Reading in early Azusa Street documents reveals many individual recountings of personal experiences of the Spirit, usually offered in an ultimately trinitarian context. In this sense, the Revival, with stress on those who took part in it, could be placed within the first group. But there is an often less recognized and yet strong communal side to the Revival and even to these individual experiences. These latter usually involve a characteristically common move from conversion to sanctification to Baptism in the Spirit. Pastor Seymour, who led the Revival movement during most of its existence, was strongly trinitarian in his overall spiritual orientation. His inspiring presence and leadership assured a certain background continuity to various experiences occurring throughout the Revival. At the Revival, he often presided over immediate preparation for baptism in the Spirit, which commonly took place within a communal context. That process usually consisted in the offering of testimonials, prayer sessions with sermons encouraging witness to an experience of the Spirit, and an altar call. Personal witnessing to these experiences bore strikingly common characteristics such as a sense of empowerment, having deeply emotional reactions, even ways of phrasing used to express these reactions. At Azusa, these experiences often led to enthusiastic missionary activity as well as outreach to the marginalized both in the United States and around the world. The result of such experiences was, impressively, the founding of Pentecostal communities and other communities, charismatic in character, around the world. In origin, characteristics, and results, Pentecostal experiences, though happening to individuals, truly bear many traits in common. To recognize the communal character of the Revival as testimonial, the title chosen for our chapter concerning it began with ‘The Azusa Street Revival’. After these words, there followed ‘Pentecost Testimonials’ in recognition of individual experiences and their recounting, which latter was in effect an effort to share these experiences with others. More widely speaking, the Azusa Street Revival saw itself as, in a special use of the word, a prolongation of the Pentecost experience from about 1,900 years earlier, with the Spirit making that experience available again in the twentieth century and beyond.

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Leonardo Boff, Charles Nyamiti, and John Polkinghorne write in diverse theological modes as they present testimonials to experience of the Trinity. In a sociologically sensitive theological vein, Boff argues that the Trinity forms an exemplary egalitarian society inciting humans in society to move their societies in more egalitarian directions. Within this theological context, societies which so move become occasions of liberation. As such, they serve as testimonials to experience of the Trinity. Testimonial and experience come together, ultimately becoming the same thing. Nyamiti proceeds against a background of various, but especially Western, trinitarian theological traditions. But he works concretely from an inculturation perspective as he envisions Father, Son, and Spirit respectively as Ancestor, Descendent, and Oblation. In so doing, he intends to encourage sub-Saharan African Christians, and others ready to learn from them, to experience the Trinity in new and, so to speak, warmly human ways without detriment to the transcendence of the three divine Persons. With his writings, he is in effect prolonging, in a new theological direction, experiences of the Trinity, both those occurring in African contexts and those finding expression through various Christian trinitarian theological traditions. Polkinghorne carries out his theological reflection on the Trinity in a dialogical approach. He explores consonances he finds between aspects of reality reflected in quantum physics and aspects of the Trinity as these latter are made available in trinitarian theology. In his exploration, he finds that both quantum physics and trinitarian theology proceed from experience to reflection on that experience and further expression of it. He proceeds in his dialogue from an overall trinitarian perspective, arguing that the science-religion dialogue ultimately leads to a trinitarian vision of reality. The dialogue itself becomes a testimonial to this vision and the experience it reflects. With his dialogue, he prolongs that experience as mediated now through scientific and theological reflection. In their diverse theological approaches, Boff, Nyamiti, and Polkinghorne have followed the ages-old tradition of seeing theology as fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), but now reformulated as experientia Trinitatis quaerens intellectum (experience of the Trinity seeking understanding).16 William Paul Young’s novel The Shack and Stuart Hazeldine’s movie of the same name make available, in popular media, many aspects of experience of the Trinity as various theological traditions have expressed them. The novel invites readers to imagine their way into Mack’s fictional world and, once there, share in the relationships between Mack and Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu as well as among these latter three. The movie, in turn, makes Mack’s world visually real. Movement, scenery, music, seeing Mack and Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu so directly, 16

With Boff, ‘understanding’ would need to be understood in a more pragmatic and activist sense.

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all these bring viewers emotionally into the story and its healing resolution. As testimonials, the novel and movie, each in its own way, make available the healing, reconciling, and redeeming effects of loving trinitarian relationships. In these two cases of novel and movie, and in other cases as well, encouragement itself becomes prolongation of the ages-long transformative experience of the Trinity into the present and the future. Trinitarian Spiritualities The way of proceeding here in the conclusion parallels that followed over the course of our study. In both cases, we began with reference to Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God, calling it founding and foundational in the light of what would follow. We considered Jesus’ lived experience of God as such. We then spoke of it in a second sense. This second use, coherent with the first, referred to all that followed from that experience for Jesus in his earthly life and beyond it. Lived Experience. Both in our study and now in the conclusion, we then reviewed and reflected on 15 testimonials to experience of the Trinity. In these reflections, we picked up again on this doubled use of ‘lived experience’. First, the experience of the Trinity to which various testimonials give more explicit witness has itself taken many forms. Such experience was sometimes more individual and personal, at other times, more shared and communal, even accumulated over longer periods of time and, ultimately, as variously expressed over two millennia. We found that experience of the Trinity could as well be lived vicariously or even in a less self-aware way. Second, experience of the Trinity in a wider sense, namely, to include what follows from the specific forms of such experience to which more immediate testimonial witness had been given. We considered testimonials as varied forms of prolongation of the experience of the Trinity as understood in the first sense. Then, in this second sense, ‘lived experience’ covered both experience in the first sense and the diverse ways in which experiences of the Trinity have come to further expression in and through the various testimonials and their development. We have, in effect, been working gratefully, but perhaps we should also say in our own way, with one of the three components Schneiders sees as constituting a spirituality, namely, lived experience. Schneiders speaks of two further components, namely, self-transcendence toward an ultimate value and a project of life integration. In her description of Christian spirituality, she further specifies these two. ‘The horizon of ultimate value is the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ and communicated through his Holy Spirit, and the project of self-transcendence is the living of the paschal

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mystery within the context of the church community’.17 Along with her stress on lived experience, this further, twofold insight will help us appreciate various multiform experiences of the Trinity, along with the testimonials to them, as trinitarian spiritualities. They are spiritualities having much in common while remaining existentially distinct and, in this sense, unique. Ultimate Value. Hunt’s insights, noted above concerning experience of the Trinity, reinforce the sense that Trinity is experienced as ultimate value. Hunt speaks of a lively sense of the presence of the three divine Persons, of entry into the Trinity’s divine life, and of living within the Trinity. Our identification of various characteristics of experience of the Trinity strengthens this understanding of life with and in the Trinity as ultimate value. We have spoken of these characteristics and now need only list them in staccato form: roles of the Spirit, freedom, engagement, intimacy and immediacy, beauty, motherhood and the feminine, joy, trinification, prolongation. Project of Life Integration. The various testimonials to experience of the Trinity we have reviewed bring with them indications of ways in which that experience leads to enriched relationships with the three divine Persons and a sense of communal, shared, and personal well-being on the part of those who have experienced the Trinity in their lives and in their histories. We have as well seen that such transformative experience results in self-transcendence taking a form of dynamic engagement in projects beyond that of merely isolated self-enrichment. In these regards, we need simply think of the varied engagements on the part of those with whom we are by now often on an almost first-name basis. Engagements easily recalled by so naming them: Paul, Basil, Suger, Julian, Rublev, Marie, Charles Wesley, Azusa and Pastor Seymour, Raimon, Leonardo, Nyamiti, Polkinghorne, Young, and Hazeldine. Paradoxically, life-integrating enrichment occurs through self-gift to the Trinity, to others, and to creation. We have considered Jesus’ lived experience of God, understood widely enough, as constituting Jesus’ spirituality. We are now well positioned to make a somewhat parallel remark concerning the testimonials and experiences we have reviewed. The testimonials witness to lived experience of the Trinity as ultimate value leading to life-integration through self-transcendence. Considering these elements, so brought together, opens the way to underscoring an even more inclusive understanding of the notion and reality of experience of the Trinity. Testimonial, lived experience, ultimate value, and integrating project, taken

17

Schneiders, ‘Christian Spirituality’, 1. See also Schneiders, ‘Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality’, 17.

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together, justify seeing the various testimonials and the experiences to which they give witness as constituting existentially distinct, but content-wise similar, trinitarian spiritualities. To use a musical reference, we might say that each testimonial and the experience to which it gives witness is a significant melodic variation on a theme which, when it is considered along with others, produces, over the course of time and around the world, a trinitarian symphony. Discipleship During his lifetime Jesus of Nazareth invited his disciples to pray as he did, encouraging them to address God as Abba. As we have noted, his invitation was an important element in his spirituality. With it, he in effect confirmed them in their discipleship. He indicated the way in which they were to live, namely, in line with what he said and did.18 They were to share, in a dependent way, in his intimate relationship with God. Then his early post-resurrection disciples as well shared in that relationship. Their sharing in it led them, in the Spirit, to proclaim the reign of God in their lives and the lives of those around them, in their communities, and in all of creation. They had quickly come to express their belief in him as risen Lord and truly the Son of God, the one in whom the reign of God manifested itself so fully. Jesus’ disciples and those who followed immediately after them grew in appreciation of such a rich, multiform presence of God in their lives. This appreciation and the personal and communal engagement it engendered moved them, and Christians after them, to relate to God as Father, Son, and Spirit. For almost two thousand years now, disciples of Jesus have continued to share, to varying degrees and in various ways, in this threefold awareness and consequent engagement. We find examples of this sharing in the testimonials we have reviewed and the experiences to which they give witness. This is surely the case as well with myriad other testimonials to experiences of the Trinity. Such testimonials themselves make Jesus’ invitation to discipleship available anew to those who attend to them or will do so in the future. They urge them to become ever more aware of, or even for the first time simply aware of, and then to celebrate a calling to share joyfully in the trinitarian love of the three divine Persons. In so inviting them to participate in transformative experience of the Trinity, these testimonials encourage them to develop trinitarian spiritualities, indeed discipleship spiritualities, ultimately rooted in Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God. I would suggest, then, that we consider these testimonials

18

Regarding the remarks in this paragraph, Panikkar would probably prefer to speak of ‘Christic discipleship’.

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and related experiences to be post-resurrection prolongations, in space and time, of Jesus’ experience of God. That we as well consider all disciple-dependent communal, shared, and individual experiences of the Trinity down through the ages as such prolongations. These various prolongations ultimately come to expression in, and as, the lives of Spirit-empowered disciples of Jesus crying out, in word and deed, Abba.

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INDEX

Abraham (husband of Sarah), 141,142, 145, 152, 155 Adam, 198 (in Julian of Norwich’s parable, 126-30, 133, 136) Adriazola, Maria-Paul del Rosario, 160, 168-70, 173, 178 Aghiorghoussis, Maximos, 82 Alexander, Estrelda, 212, 230 Allchin, A. M., 189 Alush, Avraham Aviv, 399 Amaladass, Anand, 260 Amphilochius of Iconium, 66, 78 Anselm of Canterbury, 353 Arce Martínez, Sergio, 291 Arthur, William, 213 Augustine of Hippo (Aurelius Augustinus), 105, 108, 122, 136, 266, 334, 366 Ayala, Violeta, 410 Baker, Denise Nowakowski, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 124, 130, 133 Baker, Frank, 187, 188, 191, 193, 195 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 338 Barratt, Alexandra, 119, 129 Barron, Robert, 91, 101, 108 Bartels, Laura A., 196 Bartleman, Frank, 216, 230 Basil of Caesarea, 1, 55, 65-83, 149, 345, 415, 421, 422, 425, 430, 434 Bates, Matthew W., 23 Bauckham, Richard, 19, 35 Beckerlegge, Oliver A., 195, 203 Benedicta, SLG, Sister, 112 Bennett, Pat, 356

Benton, John F., 88 Betz, Hans Dieter, 43, 47, 50 Bielawski, Maciej, 238, 260, 286, 289 Binder, Melissa, 378 Bluestone, George, 400-403 Blum, Pamela Z., 94, 98 Bobrinskoy, Boris, 142, 143, 145 Bocken, Inigo, 90 Boff, Leonardo, 2, 7, 237, 262, 291-321, 416, 422, 423, 426, 432 Böhler, Peter, 185 Bonaventure (Giovanni di Fidanza), 420 Bora, Katie von, 56 Boris, Anne Cliff, 132 Boyd, Gregory A., 226 Bramwell, William, 203 Bray, John, 185 Brown, Raymond E., 44, 47 Bruneau, Marie-Florine, 158, 166, 179 Brush, Kathryn, 88, 105 Bruzelius, Caroline Astrid, 101, 103 Bryant, Barry E., 182, 190 Buisson, Paul, 161 Bullen, Donald A., 181 Bunge, Gabriel, 137-39, 141-49 Burgess, Stanley M., 215 Burnim, Mellonee, 189 Burrows, Mark S., 11 Butler, Anthea, 211 Butts, Thomas, 192 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 132 Calvin, John, 63 Campbell, Ted A., 181, 187 Carey, Brycchan, 184

470

INDEX

Carpentier de Gourdon, Côme, 260, 269, 288, 289 Carr, Benjamin, 200 Casey, Edward S., 90 Cashwell, Gaston Barnabas, 232 Caspers, Charles, 92, 93 Castle, Tony, 137, 138, 142, 147, 149 Caviness, Madeline Harrison, 103 Certeau, Michel de, 90, 92, 93 Chandler, Russell, 218 Church, Donna, IX Clark, William W., 89, 103 Cobb, John B., Jr., 22, 25 Coffey, David, 334 Colledge, Edmund, 112-14, 118, 122-26, 129 Collins, Mary, 189 Cooper, John W., 319 Cousins, Ewert H., 237 Cox, Harvey G., 210 Cox, Raymond L., 211 Coxe, A. Cleveland, 71 Crease, Robert P., 380 Cretton, Destin, 399 Crosby, Sumner McKnight, 87-89, 94, 97-100, 103, 104 Cummings, Brad, 377, 378 Cutler, Ann, 203 Dale, James, 195, 203 Dalferth, Ingolf U., 23 Dalton, Tommy (in The Shack, novel and movie), 388, 391, 401 Dampf, Andrew, 5 D’Angelo, Mary Rose, 23 Daniil (Chorny, Monk), 139, 151, 152, 155 David, King, 118 David, Sylvester A. J., 23, 418 Davis, Stephen T., 51 Day, Keri, 211 Dayton, Donald W., 208-14 De Botton, Alain, 90 De la Haye, (Jean?), S.J., 163

Denis, Saint (Dionysius, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Pseudo-Dionysius), 87, 88, 100, 105-7, 176 Dewey, Joanna, 18 Dewey, John, 121, 122, 427, 428 Dieter, Melvin E., 209 Dinh, Ha, XI, 31 Dillenberger, John, 56 Donaldson, James, 71 Dostoieffsky, Fyodor, 155 Douglas, Christopher, 378 Draper, Peter, 88, 105 Drees, Willem B., 356 Dreyer, Elizabeth A., 11, 119 Dudley-Smith, Timothy, 182 Dunbar, Mark, 400 Dunn, James D. G., 18-32, 34, 36, 38, 44, 45, 49, 50 Dunn, Mary, 157-60, 162, 165, 175, 176 Durham, William H., 226-28, 231 Eckhart, Meister, 420 Eigo, Francis A., 261 Einstein, Albert, 360 Elizabeth of the Trinity, 420 Emery, Gilles, 49, 292 Escobar, Melody V., XI, 111, 122, 133 Espinosa, Gastón, 216 Eustace, Saint, 97 Evans, Florrie, 215 Evdokimov, Paul, 117, 138, 139, 143, 145-48, 151 Farina, John, 165 Feagins, John, 200 Feagins, Raquel, XI, 111, 200 Fee, Gordon D., 51, 64 Femiano, S., 62 Fernie, Eric C., 88 Ferrell, Sister, 229 Fischer, Johannes, 23 Fittipaldi, Silvio E., 261 Fitzmyer, Joseph A., 47 Fleming, John, 108

INDEX

Forrest, Benjamin K., 181 Fox, Charles R., Jr., 216, 217, 227, 231 Francis, Pope, 373 Frankman, Hannah, 396 Furst, Renata, 297, 380 Fusco, John, 399 Füssel, Marian, 92 Gaborit-Chopin, Danielle, 103 Garcia, Maria, IX Garcia, Misty, 111 Gelpi, Donald L., 4 Gerson, Paula Lieber, 87, 98-100, 103 Ghilardi, Marcello, 236 Glasscoe, Marion, 119, 121 Godbey, W. B., 213 Goldberger, Paul, 5 Green, Graham, 409 Gregory of Nazianzus, 78 Gregory of Nyssa, 78, 80, 81 Gregory Palamas, 116 Gregory the Great, Pope, 81 Grenz, Stanley J., 292, 300 Grigoriĭ (Krug), inok (Gregory Krug), 143 Grimes, William, 236 Grodecki, Louis, 103 Großhans, Hans-Peter, 23 Guardini, Romano, 33 Guénet, François, 101 Guyart, Florent, 160 Guyart, Marie (Marie de l’Incarnation), 157, 158, 168, 173, 174 Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte (Madame), 158 Habermas, Gary R., 19, 36 Hahn, August, 79, 80 Hahn, Georg Ludwig, 79, 80 Hall, Gerard, 260 Hansen, Walter A., 56, 57 Happel, Harald, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100-104, 106, 107, 109 Harmon, Nolan B., 202 Harrolf, Douglas, 219, 220, 230

471

Hartmann, Stephanie, 291, 292, 301-5, 308, 312, 313, 315 Havukainen, Tuomas, 18 Hayward, John, 215 Hazeldine, Stuart, 2, 399, 400, 402, 404, 413, 415, 425, 426, 434 Hegel, Georg W. F., 276 Helmer, Christine, 61 Hemingway, Ernest, 396, 397 Hengel, Martin, 22, 23 Herod, King, 295 Hide, Kerrie, 119, 135 Higgins, J. August, XI, 11, 67, 83, 207 Hildebrand, Stephen M., 66, 67, 73, 78, 80, 82 Hildebrandt, Franz, 195, 203 Hildegard of Bingen, 420 Hill, Wesley, 45, 47, 52-55 Hills, A. M., 212 Holder, Arthur, 11, 418 Holland, William, 185 Holloway, Julia Bolton, 113, 117 Holmén, Tom, 18, 28, 36 Honour, Hugh, 108 Hotchner, Aaron Edward, 396 Huckabee, Tyler, 400 Hughes, Lindsey, 138 Hugh of St. Victor, 103 Hugues, Archbishop of Rouen, 97 Hulbert, Alistair, 260 Hunt, Anne, 37, 38, 117, 119, 122, 132, 420 Hunt, Priscilla, 142-45, 154, 434 Hunter, Harold D., 211, 216, 226, 227 Hurtado, Larry W., 18, 37, 38 Hutchins, Julia W., 217, 218 Hutchison, John A., 252 Jackson, Blomfield, 65, 68, 75 Jamet, Albert, 159, 168 Jantzen, Grace M., 12, 111, 112, 119, 124, 135, 136 Jenkins, Jacqueline, 113 Jeremias, Joachim, 24, 25

472

INDEX

Jerome, Saint, 310 Jesus (in The Shack, novel and movie), 381, 383-91, 393-95, 397, 398, 400, 402-13 Jesus of Nazareth, IX, 1-3, 8, 9, 13, 17-39, 43-45, 47, 48, 50-55, 58, 62, 63, 66, 70, 72, 73, 79, 102, 105, 106, 108, 112, 115-17, 119, 123-25, 128-32, 136, 137, 141, 146, 160, 162-64, 178, 179, 185, 193-95, 201, 202, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 219-22, 224-26, 229, 231, 233, 237, 242, 243, 247, 249, 250, 283, 294-99, 302-10, 312, 318, 324-26, 329, 337-39, 348, 365, 367, 369-71, 415-20, 424-26, 431-36 Job (Hebrew Bible), 378 John of the Cross, 420 John Paul II, Pope, 36, 37, 157 Johnston, Robert K., 413 John the Baptist, 22, 30, 31, 39 Jones, E. A., 114 Jones, John N., 106 Jones of Nayland, William, 196, 201 Julian of Norwich, 2, 12, 13, 111-36, 137, 166, 416, 420, 426, 427, 429. 434 Jüngel, Ebehard, 23 Kagan, David, 6 Kagarise, Robbie, 214 Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti, 237, 292, 325 Kelly, Anthony, 330 Kendall, Daniel, 51 Kieckhefer, Richard, 91, 102 Kimbrough, S T, Jr., 184, 186, 198, 200 Kiner, Aline, 101 Kioko, Jacinta, XI Knapp, Martin Wells, 212 Knight, Christopher C., 352 Knighten, Cliff, IX, XI Komulainan, Jyri, 262 Kruger, C. Baxter, 379, 398 Krumenacker, Yves, 165 Kyuhyung Cho, 215

LaBerge, Carmen, 378, 381 Lake, John G., 218 Lamm, Julia A., 166 Lampe, John, 200 Lampert, Mark A., 181 Lanham, Andrew, 399 Lanzetta, Beverly J., 262 LaPointe, Jess, 214, 219 Lauer, Josh, 96 Law, William, 185 Leatherman, Sister Lucy M., 230, 231 Lecoy de la Marche, A., 100 Leech, Kenneth, 112 Le Goff, Jacques, 125 Le Saux, Henri/Abhisiktānanda, 238, 286 Levering, Matthew, 49, 292 Liardon, Roberts, 212, 214, 224, 230 Litjens, Wendy, IX Llewelyn, Robert, 124, 130 Lopez, Donald S., 248 Louis VII, King of France, 88 Louth, Andrew, 137 Lovett, Leonard, 211 Luibheid, Colm, 106 Luther, Martin, 55-63, 185 Macchia, Frank D., 230 MacPherson, Camilia Gangasingh, 23537, 242, 247, 249, 250, 260 Macrina, Saint, 65 Maddox, Randy L., 181 Maes, Allen, IX Mahan, Asa, 214 Mahoney, Irene, 157-65, 168, 176 Maleparampil, Joseph, 43, 45-48, 50 Mali, Anya, 165 Manasseh, Bishop of Meaux, 97 Marie de l’Incarnation (Marie/Mary of the Incarnation), 1, 157-80, 187, 415, 421-24, 429, 430, 434 Martha, Mary (and Lazarus), 33, 306 Martin, Claude (husband of Marie de l’Incarnation), 160

INDEX

Martin, Claude (son of Marie de l’Incarnation), 157, 159, 160, 167, 168, 170, 175 Martin, Larry E., 214, 216-18, 223, 229 Mary (mother of Jesus), 79, 127, 163, 164, 230, 311, 312 Mary Magdalene, 118, 200 Matsubara, Sumire, 399, 426 McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 119, 133, 134 McCasland, Vernon S., 24 McClymond, Michael, 214 McConnell, Timothy P., 74 McEntire, Sandra J., 112 McFarlane, Brian, 381, 400-403 McGee, Patrick, 321 McGinn, Bernard, 12, 105, 111, 112 McGraw, Tim, 411 McIntosh, Alastair, 259, 260 McLaughlin, Michael, 261 McNulty, Edward, 400 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 209, 211 Meier, John P., 28, 31 Menon, Sangeetha, 245, 246 Menzies, William W., 209 Mettler, Katie, 405 Michel, Robert, 157-64, 177, 179 Michelet, Jeanne, 160 Molinari, Paul, 115, 132 Moltmann, Jürgen, 291, 311, 367, 370 Moore, Peter, 121 Moore, Sebastian, 38 Murphy, Roland E., 47 Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome, 33, 34 Musgrave (Mrs.), 185 Mwangala, Raymond, XI Myland, D. Wesley, 209 Nannu K., 237, 242, 247, 249 Nelson, Douglas J., 218 Neumann, Peter D., 4, 207, 210, 211, 230 Newport, Kenneth G. C., 181, 187 Nikon of Radonezh, 139, 151 Noë, Alva, 5

473

Nolan, Albert, 418 Noonan, Peggy, 6 Nordquist, Richard, 390 Nouwen, Henri J. M., 142, 146, 148, 150, 153, 154 Nuth, Joan, 119, 132 Nyamiti, Charles, 2, 323-50, 415, 423, 426, 432, 434 O’Collins, Gerald, 51 O’Connor, J. J., 352 O’Donnell, John J., 38, 338 Okafor, Stephen O., 327 Olson, Roger E., 379 Ong, Walter J., 396 Oord, Thomas Jay, 352 Oort, Johannes van, 80, 81 Origen, 70, 71 Oury, Guy-Marie, 157, 158-60, 162-64, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174, 176 Outler, Albert C., 181, 199, 202 Owen, John, 63 Ozman, Agnes, 214 Pacatte, Rose, 400 Padgett, Alan G., 352 Panikkar, Raimon/Raimundo, 1, 188, 235-57, 259-89, 291, 415, 419, 422, 424, 427, 429, 435 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 25, 55 Panofsky, Erwin, 88, 89, 92, 97, 108, 401 Panofsky-Soergel, Gerda, 88 Papa/Elousia (in The Shack, novel and movie), 381-91, 393-95, 397-99, 401, 403-13, 424-26, 432 Parham, Charles Fox, 214, 217, 224 Parham, Sarah E., 214 Paul of Tarsus, 1, 17, 20, 30, 34, 35, 37, 43-57, 59, 60, 62-64, 65, 70, 73, 88, 108, 118, 137, 185, 309, 345, 415, 421, 422, 428, 429, 434 Peacocke, Arthur R., 356 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 56, 57, 59 Peppard, Christiana Z., 372, 373

474

INDEX

Percival, Henry R., 78 Peter, Apostle, 118, 208, 224, 233 Peter, Bishop of Senlis, 97 Peters, Ted, 292 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 89 Pham, Duong, XI Phillips, Josh (in The Shack, novel and movie), 379, 382, 388, 397, 406 Phillips, Kate/Katie (in The Shack, novel and movie), 379, 382, 386, 388, 394, 397 Phillips, Mackenzie Allen/Mack (in The Shack, novel and movie), 379-98, 399, 401, 403-13, 424, 425, 432 Phillips, Missy (in The Shack, novel and movie), 379, 382, 383, 385, 387, 388, 390, 391, 397, 405-7, 409, 410, 412 Phillips, Nan (in The Shack, novel and movie), 379, 381, 382, 385, 386, 388, 389, 391, 397, 401 Podgorski, Frank, 262 Poirel, Dominique, 92 Pokorny, Petr, 18 Polkinghorne, John C., 2, 351-75, 423, 427, 432, 434 Polkinghorne, Ruth, 351 Power, David, 189 Prabhu, Joseph, 235-37, 257, 261, 262, 276 Prenter, Regin, 60 Pruche, Benoît, 65-67, 69, 77 Pugin, A. Welby, 102 Pulikottil, Paulson, 216 Quantrille, Wilma J., 182, 183, 186, 187, 192, 196, 198, 204 Quasten, Johannes, 66, 75, 80 Quinn, Declan, 399 Radde-Gallwitz, Andrew, 78 Raguin, Virginia Chieffo, 88, 105 Rahner, Karl, 63, 298, 339, 344 Ramabai Sarasvati, Mary/Pandita, 215 Rāmānuja, 287

Ranganathan, Shyam, 287 Rattenbury, J. Ernest, 186-89, 195, 196 Rausch, Clyde, 139, 142, 151 Rauser, Randal, 379 Reed, David A., 224-26 Reich, K. Helmut, 354 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 36 Renaudin, Paul, 166 Renty, Gaston-Jean-Baptiste, baron de, 181, 182 Rich, Motoko, 378 Richard of Saint Victor, 278 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 380 Robeck, Cecil M., Jr., 207, 208, 211, 212, 214-18, 221-28, 231 Roberts, Alexander, 71 Roberts, Evan, 214, 215 Robertson, E. F., 351 Robertson, Elizabeth, 133, 134 Robinson, Benjamin, 214 Robinson, James M., 28 Robison, Brad, 379, 398 Robson, Roy, 143 Rodriguez, Carmen, IX Roest Crollius, Arij A., 326 Rolf, Veronica Mary, 111, 112, 124, 125, 132, 135 Romanus, Saint, 97 Ronen, Ruth, 380 Rosa, Adolph, 228, 229, 231 Rossum, Joost van, 67 Rousseau, Philip, 66, 68, 74 Rowe, Christopher Kavin, 47, 49, 52 Rublev, Andrei, 1, 137-55, 157, 158, 395, 415, 425, 430, 431, 434 Rudolph, Conrad, 103 Russell, Ben, 410 Russell, Kevin, 400 Ryhal, Bruce, IX Saarinen, Risto, 292 Sagne, Jean-Claude, 168, 169, 178-80 Sanders, E. P., 17, 29 Sanders, Fred, 181, 182, 199, 203

INDEX

Sarah (wife of Abraham), 141, 142, 145, 152, 155 Sarayu (in The Shack, novel and movie), 383-91, 393-95, 397, 399, 403, 404, 406-13, 424-26, 432 Sauer, Joseph, 96 Saunders, Martin, 400 Schaff, Philip, 65, 68, 75, 78, 106 Scheeben, Matthias Joseph, 334 Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von, 270 Schlager, Neil, 96 Schlitt, Dale M., XI, 4, 55, 63, 122, 144, 202, 276, 318, 353 Schneiders, Sandra M., 11, 417, 418, 433, 434 Schner, George P., 4 Seasoltz, R. Kevin, 93, 94, 101 Semley, John, 410, 411 Sergii of Radonezh, Abbot (Sergius Radonezhsky), 138, 139, 151, 155 Severance, Diane, 184 Seymour, Jennie Evans Moore (Mrs.), 223, 224 Seymour, William J., 1, 214, 216-27, 229-33, 421, 431, 434 Sheldrake, Philip, 90-94, 101, 105, 108, 111-15, 117-20, 122, 124, 125, 13033, 136, 164, 165, 417 Siebert, Matthew Kent, 13 Silvas, Anna M., 65 Simson, Otto von, 88, 89, 102 Singer, Thomas J., 373 Sinnen, Rudolf von, 237, 242, 247, 249, 250, 262 Snyder, Howard A., 198, 200 Sophia/Wisdom (in The Shack, novel and movie), 385, 387, 407 Spelmans, Ingemar, IX Spencer, Octavia, 399, 426 Stalcup, Erik K. R., 181 Starkey, Lykurgus (?) M., Jr., 202 Steinkamp, William, 399 Steinke, Johannes Maria, 352, 356, 369 Stewart, Robert B., 19, 36

475

Strezova, Anita, 138, 139, 142-46 Stump, J. B., 352 Suger, Abbot, IX, 1, 87-89, 92, 94, 96-101, 103-9, 111, 137, 415, 425, 430, 431, 434 Sutherland, Annie, 114 Synan, Vinson, 209, 212, 214, 216, 217, 224 Tanner, Norman P., 105 Tempels, Placide, 327 Teresa of Avila, 420 Theodosius, Emperor, 78 Thomas Aquinas, 298, 324, 366 Thomas of India, 118 Thompson, Marianne Meye, 20 Thompson, Miriam, 158 Tibbetts, John C., 402 Tilley, Terrence W., 18 Torrey, Reuben Archer, 213 Tsurikov, Vladimir, 143 Turner (Mrs.), 185 Turner, Denys, 122, 124, 129, 130, 134 Tyson, John R., 181-86, 194-96, 201, 203, 264 Vähäkangas, Mika, 323-25, 336, 343, 344 Van Aarde, Andries G., 378 Vatsyayan, Kapila, 260, 269, 288, 289 Vickers, Jason E., 181, 187, 192 Waaijman, Kees, 11, 13 Wace, Henry, 65, 68, 75, 78 Wachege, Patrick N., 323, 325 Wainwright, Geoffrey, 186, 197, 199, 203 Walsh, James, 112-14 Warren, Kim, 377 Watson, Nicholas, 112, 113, 118, 119, 122-26, 129 Watts, Fraser, 352 Welsh, James M., 402 Wesley, Charles, 1, 181-204, 207, 209, 210, 415, 425, 430, 431, 434

476

INDEX

Wesley, John, 181-84, 186, 189, 190, 195, 199, 201-3, 207, 209, 210 Whaley, Vernon M., 181 Whaling, Frank, 183 Whishaw, Frederick, 155 William of Occam, 360 William of St. Thierry, 420 Williams, Rowan, 142, 149 Willie (in The Shack, novel and movie), 380, 388-92, 401, 411 Wilson, Christopher, 101, 103, 107 Windeatt, Barry, 134 Wixom, William D., 103

Worthington, Sam, 399 Wright, N. T., 21 Wright, Wendy M., 164, 166 Yong, Amos, 4, 208 Young, Carlton R., 187 Young, William Paul, 2, 377-82, 392-98, 415, 426, 432, 434 Youssef, Michael, 400 Zas Friz de Col, Rossano, 11 Zigman, Aaron, 399 Zubiri, Xavier, 239