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5. Love Theology of the Immanent Trinity
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5 Love Theology of the Immanent Trinity The previous chapter provided the point of access (via eminentiae) to human understanding of the immanent Trinity through the economic Trinity. This chapter now unfolds the immanent triune relations as a love theology, which von Speyr has elaborated from within her Trinitarian mysticism. A short overview of the development of the love theology of the Trinity begins the first section. The next section penetrates deeply into von Speyr’s love theology of the immanent Trinity by examining each divine Person’s love for the others. Since perfect love can be found only in its eternal expression, von Speyr’s love theology coincides with her understanding of eternal time. The final section summarizes her love theology through her commentary on John 1:2. Three words can be used to articulate the central revelation of Christianity: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). The divine essence itself is love. The Trinity is love. If the divine essence is love, then it would seem to be that each divine Person, inasmuch as that Person is wholly the divine essence, must also be love. If each divine Person is love, then their relations to each other are of this love: the Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; the Father and the Son love the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit loves the Father and the Son. I. The Development of the Love Theology of the Trinity The love theology of the Trinity developed out of the deeper meaning of 1 John 4:8 for the Trinitarian relations. A brief overview of this tradition will be helpful in situating von Speyr’s own love theology of the Trinity.1 1. The love theology of the Trinity has also been called the mutual love model or bestowal model. 103 A. ST. AUGUSTINE One of the principal developers of the love theology of the Trinity for Western Christianity was Augustine. The Cappadocians—namely, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, and Basil the Great—each in his own way, have a beautifully developed love theology of the Trinity. But as an example of patristic models of the Trinity as mutual love, Augustine is a good example among the many possibilities. In his work On the Trinity (De Trinitate), Augustine writes that the divine substance itself is love “and that love itself is substance, whether in the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, and yet that the Holy Spirit is specially called love.”2 This is an important summary of the early Western church development of the love theology of the Trinity. Augustine makes the step from “God is love” to “love is God.” For him, love itself is the divine substance. Inasmuch as each divine Person shares in that divine substance, each Person is love itself. The divine essence is love, and love is the divine essence. Each Person is love because each Person is nothing but the divine essence.3 In the essential sense, each divine Person is love. In the notional sense, Augustine believes that the Holy Spirit is specially called love. In a special way, if the Holy Spirit is the love of the Trinity, this Person can also be understood as the Spirit of both the Father and the Son, and therefore the Spirit is the mutual love by which the Father and the Son mutually love each other.4 The Western tradition has taken much from Augustine’s insight that the Holy Spirit is the mutual love with which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. Such an understanding of the Holy Spirit does not do away with the Holy Spirit as jointly spirated by the Father and the Son. Rather, it reinterprets spiration in terms of love as self-giving and person-constituting. Thus, the Father loves the Son by begetting him; the Son loves the Father by letting himself be begotten; and in their mutual exchange of love, the Father and the Son love the Holy Spirit by mutual spiration. B. RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR After Augustine, the next main contributor to the development of the love theology of the Trinity who functions as a representative of medieval Western Christian thought on the Trinity would be Richard of St. Victor. In his De Trinitate, Richard writes about how love is not only given and received but also 2. Augustine, The Trinity, XV.29. 3. The Father is the divine essence; the Son is the divine essence; the...