Catechesis · Inquirer
The Life of the Trinity is Love
Catechesis · Inquirer
The Life of the Trinity is Love
If God is love (1 Jn 4.8), then love must be eternal in God. Love requires another. Before creation, before time, God existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an eternal communi…
Question
Why is God communion?
If God is love (1 Jn 4.8), then love must be eternal in God. Love requires another. Before creation, before time, God existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an eternal communion of giving and receiving. The doctrine of the Trinity is what the confession of divine love requires.
Man was made in the image of a God who is love and communion. The human longing to be known, to be loved, to give oneself to another, is the image of God reaching toward its archetype.
The teaching
Perichoresis — the mutual indwelling of the Persons
The Greek word *perichoresis* describes the way the three Persons of the Trinity live in one another. Each Person is wholly within the others. The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father (John 17:21). The Spirit dwells in both and proceeds from the Father. They are three, yet so completely given to one another that there is one life, one will, one love, one God.
Creation flows from this life. God does not create because He is lonely or incomplete. He creates as an act of love — freely extending the communion of Trinitarian life outward to include beings who are not God by nature, so that they might participate in His life by grace. The whole universe is a gift that flows from the love that God is.
The very movement of divine love is not a fall into the other — it is the eternal ecstasy of the Trinity, in which each Person goes out of Himself toward the others, and in going out, finds Himself more fully.
This is the mystery of love in God and in us: when you give yourself completely, you do not lose yourself — you find yourself. The Father gives Himself wholly to the Son and is wholly Father. The Son gives Himself wholly to the Father and is wholly Son. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and is wholly Spirit. Love in God does not diminish. It is the structure of divine being.
Vladimir Lossky
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church · 1944
Holy Scripture
"I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word, that they may all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us."
John 17:20–21
"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God."
1 John 4:7