Analogy

“… we must be acutely conscious of the analogical interval within those words — such as ‘person’ — that we apply to both God and creatures, and always recall that the moral and ontological categories in which human personality is properly described are appropriate only to the finite and composite.  The relationality of human persons, however essential it may be, remains a multiple reality, which must be described now in social terms, now in psychological, now in metaphysical; it is infinitely remote from that perfect indwelling, reciprocal ‘containment,’ transparency, recurrence, and absolute ‘giving way’ that is the meaning of the word perichoresis or circumincession (adopted by Trinitarian theology long after Gregory or Augustine, and yet so perfectly suited to the theology of both).  For, if we forget this interval, we not only risk lapsing into either a collectivistic or a solipsistic reduction of human relationality — exclusively outward or inward — but we are likely to adopt either a tritheistic or a unitarian idiom when speaking of God.  Our being is synthetic and bounded; just as (again to borrow later theological vocabulary) the dynamic inseparability but incommensurability in us of essence and existence is an ineffably distant analogy of the dynamic identity of essence and existence in God, the constant pendulation between inner and outer that constitutes our identities is an ineffably distant analogy of that boundless bright diaphaneity of coinherence, in which the exteriority of relations and interiority of identity in God are one, each person wholly reflecting and containing and indwelling each of the others.  Because for us personality is synthetic, composite, successive, and finite, we are related always in some sense ‘over against,’ in a fragmentary way, and to be with others always involves for us a kind of death, the limit of our being.  In God, though, given the simplicity of his essence, there is an absolute coincidence of relation and unity.  For God, the ‘inwardness’ of the other is each  person’s own inwardness, the ‘outwardness’ of the other is each person’s outwardness and manifestation.”

David Bentley Hart