is your social worker in that horse?

We noted earlier that fatherhood involved not just generation but acknowledgment as well—the father’s recognition of himself in the son. In the Trinity, the Father’s act of self-knowledge, of self-recognition, is the generation of the Son—the Logos, the knowledge of the Father. The procession of the Holy Spirit differs from that of the Son, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son by an act known as spiration: “active on the part of the Father and the Son, and passive on the part of the Holy Spirit” (p. 79). As the procession of the second person was an act of knowledge, so that of the third person is an act of will, an act of love between the Father and the Son. The Father and the Son look at each other and seeing that each is perfect, they love each other completely, putting themselves so wholly into that love that that love constitutes a separate person—the Holy Spirit. We should note that the processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit represent a kind of narcissistic doubling in which God makes himself, first, the sole object of his own knowledge, and then the sole object of his own love. Further, the generative relationship of the Son to the Father—filiation—is a passive relationship, and the climax of that sacrifice, whose denouement is the Crucifixion, is Jesus’ active willing of his own passivity in the hands of the Father: “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39). The climax of the sacrifice is the total submission of the Son’s will to the Father’s will, so that the Son’s will becomes one with, is wed to, that of the Father. In this connection, we should also note that in some heterodox Christian traditions a feminine element is reintroduced into the masculine triad, thus reproducing the Oedipal triangle. Sometimes it is the Son who is feminized, as with the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, who, discussing the “motherhood of God” in The Revela- tions of Divine Love, speaks of “Mother Jesus.”21 Sometimes it is the Holy Spirit, as with certain early Christian sects for whom the Paraclete was a feminine principle (Rosolato, p. 87). Yeats refers to these traditions of a feminine element in the Trinity in his series of poems called “Supernatural Songs.” One need only add that there is an obvious movement from the Son’s passivity in relation to the Father and their generation of a third person between them to a concept of the second person as feminine. Indeed, the imagery of the climactic moment when Jesus accepts his Father’s will suggests the feminization of the Son. Referring to his approaching death, Jesus does not say, “Let this sword pass from me,” but “Let this chalice pass from me.” The image of the cup, with its feminine connotations, accords with that death in which, by an active willing of his own passivity, Jesus will have his hands and feet pierced by nails and his side pierced by a lance. Indeed, one could view that death as a liebestod, a sexual act that, because Jesus is both the priest and the victim, is incestuous.