Perichoresis and the Vocational Christ


I. The Problem of Jesus' Humanity

There is a quiet heresy that runs through most popular Christianity, and it hides in plain sight. The average churchgoer — Catholic or Protestant — will affirm that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. They learned this in Sunday school or catechism. They can recite it on demand. But if you press them on what they actually imagine, something else emerges. They picture a God wearing a human suit. The humanity is there, technically, but it is overwhelmed, swallowed up by the divine nature the way a candle is swallowed by the sun. This is, in effect, the heresy of Eutyches — the absorption of the human into the divine — and it is the default operating theology of most exoteric Christianity.

Cynthia Bourgeault, drawing on the Wisdom tradition and the deep currents of patristic theology, names this tendency and offers an alternative. The alternative is not a novelty. It is, she argues, what the tradition actually said before it was flattened by fear and institutional convenience.

II. Monads and the Zero-Sum Game

Why does the exoteric imagination default to this Eutychean slide? Bourgeault would locate the problem in a particular metaphysics — what we might call the Leibnizian monad framework. In this picture, selves are sealed units. God is one substance, humanity is another, and they occupy separate compartments. When you try to fit two substances into one person, you get a zero-sum game. If Jesus is more divine, he must be less human. If he is truly human, the divinity must be diminished. The exotericist, wanting to honor God, instinctively sacrifices the humanity. The liberal humanist, wanting to honor the man, sacrifices the divinity.

Bourgeault insists that both moves rest on the same mistaken assumption: that divinity and humanity are competing substances. And she argues that the great councils of the early Church — Chalcedon in 451, and the later work of Maximus the Confessor — were trying to say exactly the opposite. "Without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." The two natures are not blended into a third thing, nor are they set side by side like mismatched bookends. They exist in a unity that the monadic framework simply cannot picture.

III. The Recovery of Chalcedon

The mesoteric or esoteric reading, in Bourgeault's sense, does not abandon Chalcedon. It recovers it. When the Chalcedonian formula says Jesus is fully human and fully divine, the deeper reading takes "fully human" with absolute seriousness. Jesus' humanity is not special by being less human. It is revelatory by being completely, unqualifiedly human — human without distortion, without the contraction of ego, without the self-protective closure that marks fallen existence.

This is what Maximus the Confessor meant when he spoke of Jesus' human will as perfectly aligned with the divine will — not overridden by it, not replaced by it, but freely and fully consonant with it. The human will remains genuinely human. It simply operates without the static of sin.

And here the mystery does not shrink. It relocates. The exoteric mystery is a logical puzzle: how can two incompatible substances coexist? That mystery is opaque. You are told to accept it and move on. The esoteric illumination shifts the mystery to something far more staggering: that humanity itself is built for this. That the capacity for divine union is woven into the structure of what it means to be a creature. Jesus does not demonstrate something alien to human nature. He demonstrates something about the nature of nature. The mystery deepens because now it implicates you.

IV. "God's Only Son"

But what then of the claim that Jesus is God's only begotten Son? Does this not set him apart absolutely, as the one unrepeatable exception?

Bourgeault would say you have to attend carefully to what kind of uniqueness is being claimed. The exoteric reading hears "only begotten" and makes it exclusive: Jesus is the sole anomaly in an otherwise God-separated creation. The Wisdom reading, rooted in the Prologue of John and the hymn of Colossians, hears something different. The "only begotten" points to the Logos — the eternal pattern of self-giving love that pours itself out in creation. Jesus is unique not as the sole container of something otherwise absent, but as the first full realization of a pattern that is everywhere latent. He is the firstborn, the prototype — not the exception.

Paul's language confirms this: "the firstborn of many brothers and sisters." A firstborn opens a way. The uniqueness is real, but it is the uniqueness of one who inaugurates, not one who forecloses.

V. Against the Charge of Liberal Humanism

At this point, the predictable objection arises: is this not simply saying Jesus was just a man? Is Bourgeault slipping into liberal humanism dressed up in mystical language?

She would push back hard. The liberal humanist move is a subtraction. You strip away divinity and keep a flattened, monadic humanity — Jesus as moral exemplar, inspiring teacher, nothing more. Bourgeault is doing the opposite. She is not subtracting divinity. She is redefining what humanity is. If humanity is already ontologically wired for theosis — for participation in the divine life — then saying Jesus was "fully human" is not a demotion. It is an elevation of the meaning of "human" itself.

The liberal humanist and the fundamentalist are mirror images. Both assume the same substance metaphysics in which God and humanity are separate compartments. One picks the God compartment, the other picks the human compartment. Neither questions the compartments. The esoteric move refuses the binary altogether. And in doing so, it recovers what Athanasius actually said in the fourth century: "God became man so that man might become God."

VI. Why the Hedging?

If the tradition itself contains this teaching, why do most Christians — Catholic and Protestant alike — hedge so relentlessly? Why the endless qualifications, the nervous insistence on Jesus' absolute metaphysical otherness?

Bourgeault would be sympathetic. The hedging is not stupidity. It is terror. Because if Jesus is the prototype and not the exception, then you are not off the hook. You cannot admire the incarnation from a safe distance, accept it as a doctrinal fact, and continue living as a sealed-off ego. The incarnation becomes a vocation. You are being called into the same kenotic self-emptying. And that is terrifying.

There are institutional reasons too. If the incarnation is a pattern you are invited into, the church's role shifts from gatekeeper of salvation to midwife of transformation. That is a massive loss of institutional power.

The mystics within both traditions — Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, the Philokalia fathers — did not hedge. They said it plainly. And they were often marginalized or condemned for it. The tradition keeps producing people who see it clearly and then keeps pulling back from what they saw.

VII. The Oriental Orthodox Intuition

Latin Christendom has been especially prone to this retreat, in part because of its passage through scholasticism. The filtering of theology through Aristotelian categories — substance, accident, essence — almost inevitably pushes toward the monadic framework, turning the incarnation into a metaphysical puzzle to be solved rather than a mystery to be entered.

The Oriental Orthodox churches — Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac — have preserved something different. Their theology remained embedded in liturgy and ascesis. It lived in the body — in the daily office, in fasting, in prostrations. When theology is practiced rather than merely theorized, the incarnation naturally stays vocational. You are doing it, not just analyzing it.

The miaphysite formula — "one united nature" — whatever its technical controversies with Chalcedon, preserves an intuition Bourgeault would respect deeply: that the divine and human in Christ are not two things awkwardly joined but one seamless reality. The Oriental Orthodox have always insisted they never meant Eutyches. They meant a unity so deep that separation is unthinkable. They kept the taste of it, even when the Latin West kept only the formula.

VIII. "Through Whom All Things Were Made"

The cosmic dimension of the incarnation opens when we turn to the great christological hymns: the Prologue of John, the hymn of Colossians, the Nicene Creed's "through whom all things were made." The exoteric reading applies this to the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, creating an immediate vertigo — a man born in Palestine predating creation. The exotericist either treats it as brute mystery or quietly sets it aside.

Bourgeault would say you must distinguish — without separating — Jesus from the Christ pattern. The Logos is the eternal self-outpouring of God into form. It is the principle by which anything exists at all. Creation is already an act of kenosis: God giving Godself away into manifestation. That movement is the Son, the second person of the Trinity. "Through whom all things were made" is not a biographical statement about Jesus. It is saying that the same kenotic love perfectly embodied in Jesus is the force that holds atoms together, that brings anything out of nothing into being. Creation itself is already christological.

Drawing on Teilhard de Chardin, Bourgeault sees the whole evolutionary sweep as the Logos unfolding, becoming conscious of itself. Jesus does not interrupt the process from outside. He reveals what the process was doing all along. The incarnation is not God parachuting into an alien world. It is the world finally becoming transparent to its own deepest nature — the moment creation recognizes its own source.

IX. The Logos as Person, Not Principle

Yet the Logos must not be dissolved into an impersonal cosmic force. This would be the Neoplatonic temptation, and Bourgeault resists it. The Logos is a distinct person within the Trinity — genuinely, irreducibly distinct.

But personhood here must be understood differently than the monadic individual self we habitually imagine. The Trinitarian persons are not three separate consciousnesses seated around a table. They are relational through and through. Each one exists only in the act of self-giving to the others. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds. There is no residue of isolated selfhood. The persons are the relationships.

The distinction, then, is real — but it is the distinction of a movement within a dance, not of one billiard ball from another. And this matters for the incarnation. When the Logos becomes flesh, it is not a generic divine energy taking on a body. It is the specific relational movement of self-outpouring — the Son, the one eternally turned toward the Father — that enters history as Jesus. That specificity is what makes Jesus more than a mystic who achieved God-consciousness. He embodies a particular relationship within the Trinity.

X. Perichoresis: The Making of Room

And here we arrive at the heart of it. The early Greek Fathers named the inner life of the Trinity perichoresis — a word whose etymology carries the whole theology. Peri: around. Choresis: to make room, to contain, to yield space. Each person of the Trinity exists by creating space for the other two. It is not a static structure. It is an active, ongoing making-room-for-the-other.

This is kenosis at its most fundamental. The primary divine act is not power, not assertion, not sovereignty. It is yielding. The Father makes room for the Son. The Son makes room for the Father. The Spirit is the very movement of that mutual yielding. The divine life is this choreography of spaciousness — and some scholars connect perichoresis to choreia, dance. The resonance, whether etymologically precise or not, is real. The Trinity is a dance where each partner's movement is defined by making room for the other's.

Now look at what happens to the incarnation. "Through whom all things were made" means the Logos brings creation into being by the same gesture: making space for something that is not God to exist. Creation is perichoresis extended outward. God yields, contracts, makes room — and the world appears in that opened space. The whole of creation, from the Big Bang to the cross, is one continuous act of making-room.

Jesus on the cross is perichoresis made visible in human flesh. The self-emptying that holds the Trinity together is the same self-emptying that holds the universe in being, is the same self-emptying that hangs on Golgotha.

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