Julian's Audacious Reticence: Perichoresis and the Showings

While Watson never uses the term "perichoresis," he is articulating a version of it-albeit a limited and potentially misleading one, as his emphasis on the "godhead" and the "indistinguishable" nature of the divine persons implies. Moreover, Watson does not discuss the importance of this hermeneutic for Julian's readers interpretation of her text, although he comes close to acknowledging it. As he states, Julian's "account of her experience must potentially have the same relation to her readers as the experience itself has to her. For the slow, deliberative and prayerful reader, the written Rerelation of Love must be, or be meant to become, the showing."13 I would suggest that Watson overlooks the full importance of the readers experience because of his misjudgment of Julian's experience. That is, because for Watson (although not, I think, for Julian) the divine persons are "indistinguishably united," the very distinguishable difference between reader and writer can be conceived here in only limitedly perichoretic terms. It is precisely at this point that a subtler understanding of the Trinity is needed in order to perceive and delve into the readerly implications of Julians "Trinitarian hermeneutic."14

Understanding the relationship between the divine persons as perichoretic goes back at least to the Cappadocian fathers, although its revival has had a seemingly pervasive impact on contemporary Trinitarian theology.15 As Miroslav Volf explains, "Perichoresis refers to the reciprocal inferiority of the Trinitarian persons. In every divine person as a subject, the other persons also indwell; all mutually permeate one another, though in so doing they do not cease to he distinct persons."16 In contrast to Watsons insistence on "indistinguishableness," the idea of perichoresis thus "enables theology to preserve both [he one and the many in dynamic interrelations."17 Rather than an utter loss of distinctiveness, dynamic relationality provides exactly the analogy for the text-reader relationship needed to understand Julian's authorial and theological (particularly Christological) ideas and strategies.18 That relationality, it must be remembered, is in fact constituted by self-giving. Each divine person is who it is in and through the giving of itself to the other.19 Mark McIntosh claims that this "going out" of the divine persons involves creation as a whole: "In a sense we could say that the whole cosmos and its responsivity to God are embraced within the infinitely fecund giving of the Divine Persons to each other."20 If this is right, then surely it can be said to involve the responsmty of the reader to the mystical text. Here Rowan Williams's application of Paul Ricoeur is especially useful in understanding how this might be so:

In an important essay on the hermeneutics of the idea of revelation, [Ricoeur] has attempted to link the concept with a project for a "poetics," which will spell out the way in which a poetic text, by offering a frame of linguistic reference other than the normal descriptive/referential function of language, "restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects as opposed to a subject."21