Romancing the Trinity: A Mystical Approach to the Equality of the Spirit

An influential contemporary trend in pneumatology, pioneered by Thomas Weinandy and Sarah Coakley, uses resources from traditions of prayer to explain how the Spirit is equal to the Father and Son. Several thinkers who participate in what Coakley calls “incorporative” pneumatology draw on figures like John of the Cross to argue specifically that the Spirit’s activity in originating other divine persons is equal to that of the Father and Son. Despite the promising novelty of this approach, some have criticized these thinkers for attenuating trinitarian distinction without overcoming trinitarian inequalities. My paper contributes to incorporative pneumatology by supplying two new insights that I take from John of the Cross: his iterative theory of apophatic language and his nuptial framework for examining active trinitarian love. I argue that the combination of these two insights accounts for the equality of trinitarian activity in terms of nuptial love without jeopardizing trinitarian distinction.

I begin with an introduction to John of the Cross’s unique iterative approach to speech about the ineffable. Towards the end of the Spiritual Canticle John argues that apophatic realities like eschatological beatitude cannot be “understood by one word, nor at one time…,” nor fully expressed even through a sequence of words or concepts (Canticle, 38.7). But John does think that at least something meaningful can be said by a kind of iterative process, wherein the same ineffable subject is addressed multiple times in multiple ways. John’s explicit theory of apophatic iteration expresses an implicit instinct in trinitarian theology going back to Augustine and the Cappadocians. According to this practice, what Ghislain Lafont calls “reduplication,” the apophatic nature of the trinitarian mystery means that one must speak about the same trinitarian reality twice: once from the perspective of trinitarian distinction based on the processions of origin and once again on the basis of trinitarian unity rooted in the divine nature. John takes up this apophatic instinct and develops it in two directions. First, he expands its scope from a duplication to a more open-ended process of iteration. Second, he applies this more expansive iterative method to both trinitarian explications of divinizing union and to his systematic treatment of the Spirit in the Trinity itself.

John’s application of iteration to the Spirit in the Trinity finds its high point in his nuptial account of the Trinity in the Romances, an account that Rowan Williams and others have underscored for its originality in the Christian tradition. Significantly, John grounds the explanatory force of his nuptial trinitarian theology in the fact that it comes as the third logical moment in a series of iterations. In a first iteration, John takes up Thomas Aquinas’s theory of the Spirit’s procession in the Trinity, positing that the Spirit resides in the Father as the Father’s Love for the Son just as the imprint of love for the beloved resides in the lover. John then takes Thomas’s language of the “lover” and "beloved” and carries it forward into a new, nuptial framework rooted in his mystical experience and doctrine. However, this nuptial theory depends on a second iteration of theological claims: namely, that the three persons possess one divine essence, and that this essence is love itself. John then carries out his critical third iteration, wherein he combines the notion of the divine essence as love with Thomas’s language of the lover and beloved, but with a twist. Instead of the Father as lover and the Son as beloved, John proposes that because every trinitarian persons possesses the divine nature, each is both the lover and beloved of each other person. Thus, each possible pair of two persons represents two co-lovers in relation to their respective third. So, the Son and Spirit are co-lovers of the Father, the Spirit and Father are co-lovers of the Son, etc. In this way, John uses an iterative approach to layer together the processions of origin and the common possession of the divine essence in order to ground a nuptial pattern of trinitarian activity wherein all three persons love equally as co-lovers in a richly interlaced circulation of communal love.

John’s iterative method contributes to incorporative pneumatology by breaking it out of an overly restrictive focus on the processions of origin. The sharpest criticisms of the incorporative approach center on the confusions caused by claims that the Spirit participates in the origination the Son and for this reason shares equally in trinitarian activity. This move tends to run aground on the seemingly intractable superiority of the Father as the source of both Son and Spirit. The Spirit appears at best to originate the Son, but certainly does not originate two persons in the way the Father does. Furthermore, in tending to remove the linear order of the processions, the incorporative approached weakness the ability of the procession to account for trinitarian distinction. That is, whereas theories of the procession of the Spirit from the Father through or with the Son have usually served to explain how the persons are distinct in relation to the order of their origination, the claim that the Son and Spirit mutually originate each other seems to presume distinction rather than arguing for it. However, John’s iterative method frees the analysis of the processions to do the work of establishing trinitarian distinction without it needing to also explain the Sprit’s active equality. Instead, this work can be accomplished by a later iteration. The specific iteration in which John does take up the question of active equality arrives in his nuptial rendering of trinitarian life. According to this approach, each person loves each other person as a beloved and is united with each other person as a co-lover of their respective beloveds. John thereby focuses the processions on the task of explaining distinction while shifting the question of equal activity into the domain of the shared divine essence. John’s contributions thus succeed both in unequivocally portraying the active equality of each divine person in terms of nuptial love and in maintaining a robust account of trinitarian distinction.