A Relational Model of the Trinity

Introduction¹

A relationality‑first view of the Trinity, which we will call the “Relational‑Fullness” model, presents God’s very being as fundamentally relational, a dynamic and eternal act of self‑giving love. Rather than conceiving of the divine essence as a static and solitary substance, this approach holds that to be God is to be in relation. God exists as an interpersonal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and relationship is not an added attribute but is constitutive of the divine essence itself. This resonates with both Eastern and Western Christian thought. Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas describes God as “Being‑as‑Communion,” stressing that God’s existence is inherently communal, not monadic.¹ Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) likewise observes that in God “person means relation”; the three divine Persons are their relations of origin, and “relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but is the person itself.”² In other words, the Father, Son, and Spirit are eternal relationships of love. A proponent of this model writes that to be, for God, is fundamentally to be in relation, a continual act of self‑giving love.³ In this view, the unity of God is not featureless simplicity but the active unity of perfect loving communion. Relationship is regarded as identical with the divine essence, echoing St Thomas Aquinas’s teaching that the Trinitarian relations are the divine essence itself.⁴

This relational ontology does not abolish the classical divine attributes of unity, simplicity, or immutability; rather, it illumines their deepest meaning. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught that there is “one absolutely simple essence … Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; three persons indeed, but one absolutely simple substance or nature.”⁵ The Relational‑Fullness model affirms God’s utter simplicity and oneness, yet understands this simplicity dynamically, not as inert solitude but as the perfectly undivided unity of an eternal triune exchange of love. In this view, God is “one pure act of being,” an act of subsistent love in which all that is in God is God’s self‑giving love.⁶ Even divine immutability and perfection appear in a new light, not as static aloofness but as the fullness of an eternal life of giving and receiving. God needs nothing for fulfillment, and, as the First Vatican Council declares, the one true God “of His own goodness and almighty power, not for increasing His own beatitude, nor for attaining His perfection, but in order to manifest His perfection through the benefits which He bestows on creatures,” freely created the world.⁷ Self‑giving love, therefore, is no mere quality God happens to have; it is the very heartbeat of God’s being from all eternity.

Building on these foundations, the Relational‑Fullness model offers a unifying principle that can illuminate every area of Christian doctrine. It invites us to view God’s inner life, creation, salvation, Christian life, and worship through the lens of God’s agapic relationality. First, we will consider the inner Triune communion, showing how God’s oneness and threeness coinhere in a relational ontology. Second, we will examine how classical attributes such as simplicity, unity, immutability, goodness, and freedom are re‑interpreted in light of God’s triune self‑giving love. Third, we will explore the external works of God, creation, incarnation, and salvation, seeing creation as a free overflow of divine love and the incarnation as the definitive extension of that fullness to humanity. Finally, we will reflect on the practical and spiritual implications of this model and conclude with its ultimate affirmation that God is Love, the truth from which all reality originates and toward which it is ordered. Throughout, the focus remains on the content of the theological vision rather than on any single author, and each insight is grounded in the broader Christian tradition.

I. Triune Communion as the Divine Being¹

At the heart of the Relational‑Fullness model is the claim that God’s very being is triune communion. The doctrine of the Trinity states that there are three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each fully God, sharing one and the same divine essence. The perennial challenge is to explain how God is one and three without dividing the Godhead or collapsing the distinctions of Persons. The relational model takes the interpersonal life of the Trinity as the starting point and interpretive key for understanding the divine essence. It asserts that God’s unity and simplicity are themselves triune: the only real distinctions in God’s simple being are the Father, Son, and Spirit in their mutual relations of love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses this by saying, “God himself is an eternal exchange of love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC 221).¹ Moreover, “in God everything is one, where there is no opposition of relation” (CCC 255). In other words, the three Persons are distinct only by their relations of origin, Fatherhood, Sonship, and Holy Spirit proceeding, and these relational distinctions do not undermine divine unity; they are the unity. Each Person is the one God, wholly possessing the same divine essence, but each in a unique relational mode: the Father as unbegotten source, the Son as begotten of the Father, and the Spirit as proceeding from the Father (and, in western theology, from the Son). These relational identities are the only distinctions in God; they are subsistent relations, each a Person who is the one simple God in a distinct manner of origin.² Trinitarian faith thus redefined personhood: God is not an individual substance that happens to relate, God is relationship; relation is the person.³

Building on Ratzinger’s insight (for our purposes here), Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas highlights how the fourth‑century shift from ousia to hypostasis recast the notion of person:

“The combination of the notion of ekstasis with that of hypostasis in the idea of the person reveals that personhood is directly related to ontology; it is not a quality added, as it were, to beings, something that beings ‘have’ or ‘have not,’ but it is constitutive of what can be ultimately called a ‘being.’ … That which makes a particular personal being be itself-and thus be at all-is, in the final analysis, communion, freedom, and love … the notion of person is to be found only in God and that human personhood is never satisfied with itself until it becomes in this respect an imago Dei.”⁴

Being, in its most basic sense, is not isolated substance but relational hypostasis; communion is constitutive of identity, beginning with God and extending to every creature made in God’s image.

Because these relations are internal to the Godhead, they do not compromise divine oneness or simplicity. The Father, Son, and Spirit coinhere in perfect unity. The Greek Fathers called this perichoresis, mutual indwelling, whereby each Person is wholly in the others without merging into a single Person. The Council of Florence (1439) affirmed that, because of the single divine nature, each of the Persons is wholly in the others.⁵ One may picture this as an eternal embrace of love: Father, Son, and Spirit eternally give the fullness of divine life to one another and live in one another. There is no tritheism, because the three Persons are one reality of love, and no modalism, because the distinctions are real relations, not mere roles.

A cornerstone of the model is treating the Trinitarian relations as metaphysical primaries in God. Nothing in God is derived from something more basic; the relationships themselves are ultimate. The Father, Son, and Spirit are self‑standing relational modes of the one divine essence: each Person is not a part of God but is God in full, each from a distinct relational standpoint.³ Relation is primitive within God, so it neither divides the substance nor collapses real distinctions. In this way, the puzzle of how “three” and “one” coincide is resolved: God’s oneness is the unity of triune relationship. As one summary states, relationality does not divide God but constitutes divine unity.³ Each divine Person fully possesses the one divine essence and is distinguished only by a unique relational mode of self‑donation.³ The Trinity, therefore, is not an appendage to God’s nature; it is God’s very nature.

II. Divine Attributes in Light of Triune Love¹

Seeing God as an eternal communion of self‑giving love sheds fresh light on the classical divine attributes. Qualities such as unity, goodness, immutability, omnipotence, and freedom all appear in a profoundly relational key. God’s unity is not the indivisibility of a geometric point, but the living oneness of the threefold love shared among Father, Son, and Spirit. The simplicity of God, the teaching that God is not composed of parts, is the simplicity of a living unity, the dynamic unity of a triune communion of love. Everything in God is one because the three Persons perfectly interpenetrate one another in an eternal relationship without rivalry or separation. There is therefore no tension between divine unity and the Trinity; the Trinity is the interior cohesion of love. As Gregory of Nazianzus famously puts it, “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.”² Thus the model preserves all that classical theism affirms about God’s oneness, simplicity, and transcendence, while showing that the one simplicity is filled with inexhaustible life and love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar makes the same point with characteristic force: “Divine being is pure, absolute self‑surrender; it is never a static possession but the eternal act in which Father, Son and Spirit hand themselves over to one another without reserve.”³ Attributes that seem static in abstract metaphysics, such as simplicity, immutability, or aseity, turn out to be the never‑ending overflow of triune love. Because each hypostasis possesses the one divine freedom wholly, each is that freedom by giving it away; God remains changeless because God’s very identity is the ceaseless actuality of reciprocal self‑donation. In that light every other perfection, starting with goodness itself, unfolds as an aspect of the same act of love.

Goodness and love likewise come into sharper focus. The First Letter of John says, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), and the model takes that claim in its fullest sense. The Father eternally pours out the divine life in begetting the Son; the Son eternally receives and returns that gift; the Spirit eternally proceeds as their consubstantial love. The communion of Persons is therefore the absolute Good, and, as the Scholastic axiom has it, bonum est diffusivum sui: the good diffuses itself. When we say God is all‑good and all‑loving, we acknowledge an eternal act of inward love and an outward movement to share that love in creation and grace. Every moral perfection in God, whether holiness, justice, or mercy, is an aspect of that one love.

Divine immutability also receives a dynamic interpretation. God’s changelessness is not the immobility of a static thing; it is the constancy of perfect act. The inner life of the Trinity is often likened to an eternal movement of love. This motion never began and never ends; it is not a passage from potency to act but an always fully actual act of love. Some writers even say “God is eternal movement.” In a qualified sense the model affirms this: God’s very being is an eternal movement of love, a changeless change that never develops because it is already complete. Immobility, therefore, is not lifelessness but the steady fidelity of Father, Son, and Spirit to their mutual love.

The model also reconciles divine freedom with what is necessary in God. The Father’s generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are necessary, for they belong to God’s essence, yet they are also free because they are identical with God’s own freedom.⁴ The Father eternally and freely is Father; nothing external constrains Him to beget. The Son’s return of love and the Spirit’s procession are the free unfolding of who God is. Hence God’s freedom is not arbitrary choice but the boundless liberty of perfect love. In Augustine’s well‑known analogy, the Trinity is Lover, Beloved, and Love; love is not merely something God does, it is what God is. Freedom and love coincide.

In sum, the Relational‑Fullness model treats relation as fundamentally real within God. Relation is, so to speak, substance, because the divine substance exists in relational form. The perennial one‑and‑three tension is resolved: God’s simplicity is the unity of threefold relationality, not the simplicity of a solitary essence. Each Person is the one God and is distinct only by a unique relational identity: Giver, Receiver, or Shared Love. Recognising self‑donative relationality as intrinsic to the simple divine essence becomes a master key for theology. The same pattern of love will illuminate creation, history, and redemption.

III. Creation and the Outpouring of Divine Love¹

If God’s inner life is perfect self‑giving love, how does this relate to the existence of the world? Classic theology distinguishes God’s internal processions—the Father begetting the Son and spirating the Spirit—from God’s external works such as creation and redemption. The internal processions are necessary and eternal; the act of creating is contingent and freely willed.² Following Aquinas, the Relational‑Fullness model insists that God created neither to complete Himself nor to gain a perfection He lacked. Before creation, speaking logically rather than temporally, God already enjoyed infinite beatitude in the triune communion of love. After creating, God remains the same infinitely perfect being: He knows and loves Himself and His creation in one single, eternal act, with no addition to His essence. Aquinas says that creation adds nothing intrinsic to God; it is a gratuitous gift of being to creatures.³

Because God is already an eternal exchange of love, creation can only be understood as pure gift. God does not create to have something to relate to; His relational fullness is so abundant that it overflows. As one writer puts it, God requires no creation to actualise relational potential; creation is a free overflow of divine love rather than a remedy for deficiency.⁴ Vatican I expresses the same point doctrinally: the Creator “in His goodness and almighty power, not for increasing His own beatitude … but in order to manifest His perfection through the benefits He bestows on creatures,” made all things.⁵

Creation is therefore the first gift of God’s love to the other. All things are brought forth from nothing by the Word through the Spirit, freely and in love. God does not increase His own glory or being by creating; He enables others to participate in His goodness. The Catechism summarises the motive: God creates “for no other reason than His love and goodness.”⁶ Every creature, declared good in Genesis, reflects in a finite mode the goodness of its Creator. Because the model keeps the Creator–creature distinction clear, it avoids pantheism: the world is not God’s substance, yet it is lovingly sustained by God’s relational being. Lateran IV states the principle: “Between Creator and creature no similarity can be so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen.”⁷

The sixth‑century mystic Pseudo‑Dionysius captures the logic of overflow: “For it belongs to the Good to do good, and to extend itself unsparingly, so far as may be, to everything that has being.”⁸ The Relational‑Fullness model simply makes explicit what this line implies: creation is the first outward surge of an inexhaustible goodness.

Seen in this light, all history flows from God’s inner life of love. The same self‑giving that constitutes God ad intra drives the economy of salvation. Creation is the first gift; the Incarnation is the unsurpassable gift. “The entire drama of salvation history unfolds as the self‑gift of God’s love.”⁹ The eternal Son through whom all things were made “became flesh and dwelt among us.”¹⁰ The Father sends the Son in the Spirit so that humanity may share the communion of the Trinity: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.”¹¹

Does God change or suffer in the Incarnation? Classic Christology answers no: in Himself God remains immutable, yet the Son, in the humanity He assumes, can suffer and die. The cross reveals in time the eternal self‑sacrificial love that God is. God does not cease to be impassible; rather, divine love proves strong enough to embrace even death and overcome it. The missions of Son and Spirit make the Trinity visible without altering it.

Salvation is participation in the triune fullness. The Son becomes human “so that humans might become partakers of the divine nature.”¹² Through the Spirit we are adopted as children and enabled to relate to the Father with the Son’s own intimacy. The Catechism affirms that God “has destined us to share in that exchange” of triune love.¹³ Holiness is therefore not aloof purity; it is “the burning fire of love that sacrifices for the beloved.”¹⁴ Eternal life is communal: it is the joyous perichoresis of the saints within God’s own life. Creation reaches its goal when creatures freely receive God’s love and return themselves fully to Him; then the circle of gift and gratitude is complete.¹⁵

Everything God does externally expresses what God is internally. The God who creates, redeems, and perfects is none other than Father, Son, and Spirit. “All traditional divine attributes, all of salvation history, and every aspect of creation find their coherence in one thing: God giving God.”¹⁵ When the gift is fully received, God will be “all in all.”¹⁶

Conclusion – God Is Love, and All in God Is God¹

The Relational‑Fullness model ends in a simple but far‑reaching claim: God is love (1 Jn 4:8). Everything in Christian faith begins with and returns to that truth. By defining God’s essence as relational, self‑donating love, the model supplies a single principle that sheds light on every doctrine. The Trinity is no abstract puzzle; it is the living heart of reality, the eternal communion of love that is both source and goal of all that exists. Even divine simplicity is recast. Rather than a dry assertion, it becomes a description of perfect unity in love, the dynamic unity of a triune communion of love. Simplicity means the three Persons are so deeply one in mutual indwelling that nothing divides God. Immutability means God is the constant and unfailing love that always gives itself. Transcendence remains intact even while God fills all things with that love.² The incarnation and the whole story of salvation are the outward extension of this triune love. Grace, sacraments, prayer, and liturgy become the means by which we enter the divine exchange, and eschatology is simply the communion of love brought to completion when we share fully in the joy of our Master.

This approach weds intellectual clarity to spiritual depth. On one side it brings coherence: Trinity, creation, incarnation, grace, and every other teaching converge around relational love. On the other it preserves awe. The model honours classical metaphysics and biblical revelation together. It answers the supposed gap between the God of the philosophers, the simple Absolute, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the personal God who saves. They are one and the same. The God who is pure act is the God who so loved the world that He gave His only Son. There are not two gods, one of reason and one of faith; the one God is triune love revealed in Christ. As one expositor writes, the one God, the Alpha and Omega, is an eternal act of love who gives Himself without reserve, and all things arise from and reach fulfilment in that love.³ Origin and end are both in love: creation is God’s free gift of being, and the final goal of creation is sharing in God’s own life of self‑giving love.

The vision carries practical weight. If ultimate reality is self‑giving relational love, then a truthful life is a life of charity, generosity, and communion. We are called not only to analyse divine things but to meet God and be changed by that encounter. This vision invites us not merely to study God but to meet Him and be drawn into relationship.⁴ Christian morality is therefore not rule‑keeping for its own sake; it is living according to the structure of reality by making a sincere gift of self to God and to neighbour. Selfish isolation contradicts the grain of existence. In an age of alienation, this theology offers a remedy: we are made for communion. Human dignity is relational; we truly find ourselves only when we give ourselves in love (cf. Lk 17:33; Gaudium et Spes 24).

The model also guards humility before mystery. Reason can go only so far; God’s inner life surpasses knowledge (Eph 3:19). Terms such as relational self‑givenness are pointers toward the living God who invites us into communion. We remain worshippers before the infinite love that exceeds comprehension. Such is the God we worship: all in God is God, and God is love.⁵ Everything in God is simply God Himself, and that God is eternal triune love, an eternal exchange of love into which we are invited. At the core of every doctrine beats the relational heartbeat of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God who out of sheer goodness created us, redeemed us, and draws us into His own life. Here lies the ground of reality and the centre of the Gospel: God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in that person (1 Jn 4:16).

Endnotes/Footnotes for section: Introduction
1 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 15–16.
2 Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 444; Introduction to Christianity, 131–132.
3 Robert Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude.” https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/divine-simplicity-and-relational-plenitude/
4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.28, a.2.
5 Fourth Lateran Council, Canon 1.
6 Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” Introduction.
7 First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, chap. 1.

Endnotes/Footnotes for section: Triune Communion
1 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§221, 255.
2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.28, a.2.
3 Robert Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude.” https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/divine-simplicity-and-relational-plenitude/
4 John D. Zizioulas, The Meaning of Being Human, 53–55.
5 Council of Florence, Decree Laetentur Caeli.

Endnotes/Footnotes for section:  Divine Attributes in Light of Triune Love
1 Section numbers restart; these notes belong to section II.
2 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40 §41, in Nicene and Post‑Nicene Fathers, ser. 2, vol. 7.
3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo‑Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. II, 268.
4 Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 25: the divine processions are “necessary and freely given.”

Endnotes /Footnotes for section: Creation and the Outpouring of Divine Love
1 Section numbers restart; these notes belong to section III.
2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.32, a.1 ad 3.
3 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a.3; q.45, a.2.
4 Robert Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” sec. “Creation and Goodness.” https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/divine-simplicity-and-relational-plenitude/
5 First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, chap. 1.
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §293.
7 Fourth Lateran Council, Canon 1.
8 Pseudo‑Dionysius, On the Divine Names IV.1, trans. C. E. Rolt, 70.
9 Phrase in Dryer, “Relational Plenitude,” sec. “Salvation and Holiness.”
10 John 1:14.
11 John 3:16.
12 2 Peter 1:4.
13 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §221.
14 Dryer, “Relational Plenitude,” sec. “Salvation and Holiness.”
15 Dryer, “Relational Plenitude,” Conclusion.
16 1 Corinthians 15:28.

Endnotes/Footnotes for section: Conclusion
1 1 John 4:8.
2 Robert Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” sec. “Conclusion.” https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/divine-simplicity-and-relational-plenitude/
3 Dryer, “Relational Plenitude,” Conclusion.
4 Dryer, “Relational Plenitude,” Conclusion.
5 Dryer, “Relational Plenitude,” final line.

The Above Summarized and Synthesized for Expressing a Systematic Theology in Brief (copy and paste this next section in Speechify and listen and enjoy)

The Christian confession that God is Love means, before anything else, that God simply is relationship. When we speak of the divine essence we are not pointing to a lonely core hidden behind Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we are naming the very communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each Person is the whole of the one God precisely in the act of being for the others.

  • The Father is Father only in begetting the Son.
  • The Son is Son only in receiving everything and returning everything to the Father.
  • The Spirit is the personal Love that proceeds from Father and Son and eternally unites them.

Classical theologians called these distinctions subsistent relations, because in God relation is not an added feature: it is the very mode in which the one life of God exists. When the Fourth Lateran Council spoke of “one absolutely simple essence” it was not picturing abstract oneness. It was pointing to an indivisible life whose simplicity is the undivided unity of eternal self‑giving Love. God’s immutability, so often imagined as frozen stillness, is nothing of the sort; it is the total constancy of that ceaseless giving and receiving that never had a beginning and will never run down.

A brief word on Self and Person in God

In ordinary speech the word self suggests an independent psychological unit: a center that owns its thoughts, memories and choices. If we import that notion into Trinitarian theology we stumble into contradiction, because three such “selves” would indeed be three gods. Classical doctrine therefore avoids saying that Father, Son and Spirit are three selves. Instead, it says they are three Persons, where person means an irreplaceable relational mode of the one divine reality. “Person,” as Joseph Ratzinger put it, is relation in pure act. The Father is not an individual who happens to relate; He is Fatherhood‑toward‑the‑Son. Likewise, the Son is Sonship‑from‑the‑Father, and the Spirit is Spirated‑Love‑between‑the‑Two. The divine “I” is therefore singular in being yet triune in relational standpoint. Speaking loosely we may call each divine Person a Self only if we remember that the term is being stretched far beyond its creaturely meaning: in God, Selfhood and Relation coincide without remainder.

Once the relational heart is in place every classical attribute is transfigured

  • Divine unity is the perfect oneness of that threefold communion.
  • Divine goodness is the pure overflow of love within God.
  • Divine freedom is not detached arbitrariness; it is the sheer liberty of the Father’s continual self‑donation, the Son’s continual thanksgiving, the Spirit’s continual union.
  • Even divine simplicity takes on color: nothing in God exists outside that single act of love. To say God is simple being is to say that God is a single eternal event of self‑gift.

From triune fullness to created relationality

God did not create because something was lacking; the infinite communion of the Trinity was already complete. Creation is therefore pure generosity, an invitation issued by Love to what is not God so it might share being and delight. Genesis hints at this with its refrain “and God saw that it was good.” The New Testament goes further by identifying the Word through whom all things were made with the Son and the Breath hovering over the waters with the Spirit. Creatures exist in permanent dependence on their Creator, and in a complex web of relations with one another; God called a cosmos into being, not isolated monads. Paul’s sermon in Athens captures both truths at once: “In him we live and move and have our being.” Being itself is participation, and always already a gift.

What, then, is a human self?

Because existence itself is relational, a human person is not reducible to a bare integer or solitary node. A person is a relational being whose identity emerges through participation:

  • Vertical participation – the continuous reception of existence from God.
  • Horizontal participation – the network of loves, memories and responsibilities that bind one to parents, friends, enemies, culture, earth and cosmos.
  • Interior participation – the dialogue of conscience with Truth and Goodness, which is another name for God’s quiet address.

Modern biology illustrates the point paradoxically: every cell in the body is replaced several times across a lifetime, yet the person remains the same person. Material components come and go, but the pattern of relations, spiritual, psychological, social, somatic, holds the identity steady. “I” signifies not a Platonic atom but a living history of received, and given relations gathered into one conscious narrative.

One could say: a self is a concrete center of openness, summoned to give and to receive, whose very stability is a dance of ever‑new relations.

Why strict “identity theory” is inadequate

So called, “Classical identity theory” (invented in the modern era), and appropriate in either logic or analytic metaphysics, tends to formalize reality into idealized atoms related by external predicates. Two principles—reflexivity (everything is identical to itself) and indiscernibility (things with all properties in common are one thing)—work wonderfully for mathematics but falter in the presence of dynamic, living beings. They miss at least three facts:

  1. Emergent continuity: the living person persists while every molecule changes.
  2. Internal constitution by relation: one’s “properties” are often the relationships themselves (child‑of, friend‑of, citizen‑of, believer‑in).
  3. Participatory depth: rational subjects not only have properties; they actively appropriate, interpret and give them away.

Reducing a person to property‑bearing substrata loses this richness. It also misreads the Trinity, because Father, Son and Spirit do not fall under a higher law of identity; they are the very reality within which any creaturely logic of identity is possible. In short, relational ontology supplies the context that a flat identity theory overlooks.

Revelation in history: creation, covenant, Christ

God calls Abraham, forms Israel, makes covenants and finally sends the Son and the Spirit. The sending of the Son is decisive because here Creator–creation relationship becomes personal and embodied. The Word assumes our nature not simply to rescue us from outside but to unite human existence to divine life from within. On Calvary the Son offers the act of filial obedience Adam failed to give; rising, he opens human destiny to resurrection. Salvation is nothing less than participation in the Son’s own relation to the Father through the Spirit. “The Son of God became human so that humans might become partakers of the divine nature,” the Fathers loved to say.

Sacramental life: concrete encounters with relational grace

Because the mystery is relational through and through, its fruits come by relational means. Sacraments are living encounters with the risen Christ.

  • Baptism inserts us into the filial relation;
  • Confirmation strengthens that bond;
  • Reconciliation heals it when damaged;
  • Anointing seals it in illness and dying;
  • Matrimony and Holy Orders configure spouses and ministers to distinct forms of self‑gift;
  • Eucharist gathers all into the supreme act of communion.

Under humble signs of bread and wine the same Body once offered on the Cross is made present so that those who receive it may be drawn ever deeper into the unity of the one Bread. By nourishing many selves it de‑isolates them, forging a single Body.

The Church: historical continuation of triune communion

Ecclesiology, seen from this angle, is simply the continuation in history of the relational fullness that is God. The Church is the people made one with the unity of Father, Son and Spirit. Her structures safeguard that unity; her invisible soul is the Holy Spirit who binds many into one Body. Authority serves communion, doctrine guards truth for communion, discipline protects charity, and the communion of saints stretches beyond death so the whole family of God supports one another.

Moral life: the rhythm of gift and reception

To love God with all the heart and neighbor as self is not an optional add‑on; it is the concrete form of being created for communion. Virtue is the stable capacity to give and receive love rightly; sin is any act that wounds love. Freedom is power to choose the good love dictates, not license to ignore relationship. Social doctrine insists on solidarity and the common good because dignity is relational. Sexual ethics, economic justice, respect for life and care for creation flow from the same conviction: persons and world are gifts meant to be welcomed and shared, never hoarded or exploited.

A final horizon: eternal communion

Eschatology describes the definitive state of relations.

  • Heaven is the beatific vision, a face‑to‑face knowing and loving of God that gathers all the blessed into a single act of praise and yet leaves each wholly personal.
  • Hell is the tragic self‑exclusion of a freedom that refuses communion.
  • Purgatory is mercy finishing the work of love in those still imperfectly attached to self.
  • At the resurrection our bodies, too, will be drawn into the circle of communion, and creation itself will be renewed so that God may be all in all. The wedding feast of the Lamb—the city where God dwells with humanity—is Scripture’s image for that final joy.

The unifying thread

In every phase, eternal life within God, creation, covenant, Christ, Church, moral struggle and final glory, the same principle shines: reality is relational. All that exists comes from the gift of the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit; all that is comes into being so that it may return through the Son, in the Spirit, to the Father. The Christian story is therefore the story of self‑donative being. And self in this story never means an isolated atom. It means a living center of openness whose very identity is forged in the rhythm of receiving and giving. To receive that story and to live it is to discover that true identity is found, not in grasping, but in the sincere gift of self to God and neighbor. Or—in the Apostle’s simplest words—God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

-Fin

Key Quotes (Appendix)

  1. “God is love.” – 1 John 4:8
  2. “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.” – St Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40, §41
  3. “The soul cannot live without love … and, by love, I created her.” – St Catherine of Siena, Dialogue of Divine Providence, ch. 88
  4. “[God is] a fire ever burning and never consumed.” – St Catherine of Siena, Prayers 12
  5. “[The Trinity] lives and shines … each one God, if contemplated separately … the three God, if contemplated collectively, because their activity and nature are the same.” – St Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31, §14
  6. “Unity is worshipped in Trinity and Trinity in unity.” – St Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 23, §11
  7. “It then follows that everything, because it exists, is good. And it also follows that whatever falls from goodness ceases to exist.” – Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book IV, prose 2
  8. “[T]he supreme God is to the highest degree filled with supreme and perfect goodness … true happiness is to be found in the supreme God.” – Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book III, prose 10
  9. “Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil … is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good.” – St Augustine, Confessions VII.12.18
  10. “In him we live and move and have our being.” – Acts 17:28
  11. “Between Creator and creature no similarity can be so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.” – Fourth Lateran Council (1215), De fide catholica, ch. 1
  12. “Man … cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” – Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes §24
  13. “Creaturely being is a suspended middle between God and nothingness.” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 210
  14. “Between Creator and creature every likeness is always outdistanced by an ever‑greater unlikeness (maior dissimilitudo).” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 117
  15. “The analogy of being is no bridge constructed from below to above; it is the very oscillation that both separates and relates Creator and creature.” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 68
  16. “All metaphysical (and other) theories have something in common: they all contain primitives.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta‑metaphysics, p. 42
  17. “Metaphysical theories are equivalent if they do the same job in the same way.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta‑metaphysics, p. 42
  18. “Primitive problem‑solvers are the pillars that sustain the structures of our theories.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta‑metaphysics, p. 22
  19. “A problem‑solver is a primitive that is there to solve a problem.” – Jiří Benovsky, “Primitives,” in Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, p. 22
  20. “The more the reduction reduces (itself), the more it extends givenness – so much reduction, so much givenness.” – Jean‑Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, pp. 203–204
  21. “It is therefore necessary to admit the fact of givenness as the ultimate authority.” – Jean‑Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, p. 7
  22. “There are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness … that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded, saturated!” – Jean‑Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, p. 22
  23. “If the given gives itself as a call … what is shown always stays behind and late in comparison with what gives itself.” – Jean‑Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, p. 10
  24. “Religion attains its highest figure only when it becomes established by and as a revelation.” – Jean‑Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 22
  25. “Revelation presents itself in a horizon only by saturating it.” – Jean‑Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 37

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Prima Pars (Part I), Questions 27–28. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd rev. ed., 1920. Accessed May 28 2025. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1028.htm. (Original work composed 1265–1274).

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Original Latin work c. 397–400.)

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by W. V. Cooper. London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1902. Accessed May 28 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Accessed May 28 2025. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM.

Catherine of Siena. The Dialogue of Divine Providence. Translated by Algar Thorold. London: Kegan Paul, 1907.

Catherine of Siena. The Prayers of Catherine of Siena. Translated by Suzanne Noffke. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1983.

Dryer, Robert. “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude: The Self‑Donative Vision of God.” RobertDryer.com. Accessed May 28 2025. https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/divine-simplicity-and-relational-plenitude/.

Fourth Lateran Council (1215). “Confession of Faith” (Firmiter credimus), Canon 1. In Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner, vol. 1, 230–231. London: Sheed & Ward / Georgetown University Press, 1990. Accessed May 28 2025. https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm.

Gaudium et Spes. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Second Vatican Council, 1965). In The Sixteen Documents of Vatican II, edited by Marian Schäffer, 513–601. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1967. Accessed May 28 2025. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 23 (On the Holy Spirit). In Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: Select Orations, translated by Martha Vinson. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003.

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 31 (The Fifth Theological Oration, on the Holy Spirit). In Nicene and Post‑Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 318–325. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1894. Accessed May 2025. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310231.htm.

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 40 (On Holy Baptism). In Nicene and Post‑Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7, 362–384. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1894. Accessed May 28 2025. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310240.htm.

Marion, Jean‑Luc. Givenness and Hermeneutics. Translated by Jean‑Pierre Lafouge. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2012.

Marion, Jean‑Luc. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

Marion, Jean‑Luc. The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner et al. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Przywara, Erich. Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Translated by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.

Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology.” Communio: International Catholic Review 17, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 439–454.

Ratzinger, Joseph. Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986.

Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). 7 December 1965. In Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, edited by Austin Flannery, 903–1001. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1975.

Vatican I Council. Dei Filius (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith). 24 April 1870. In Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, edited by Norman P. Tanner, 804–809. London: Sheed & Ward, 1990. English translation accessed May 28 2025. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/i-vatican-council/documents/vat-i_const_1870-04-24_dei-filius_en.html.

Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.

Ž (comp.). Holy Scripture and Patristic Sayings. Sources include 1 John 4:8; Acts 17:28 (Revised Standard Version); St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue and Prayers; St. Augustine, Confessions; St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Fourth Lateran Council, Canon 1; Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes §24.

Footnotes

  1. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 15–16.
  2. Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17, no. 3 (1990): 439–447, at 444; see also Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 131–132.
  3. Robert Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” https://robertdryer.com/defending-divine-simplicity/divine-simplicity-and-relational-plenitude/.
  4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.28, a.2.
  5. Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 1, “On the Catholic Faith,” English trans. at https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm.
  6. Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” Introduction.
  7. First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, chap. 1, 1870, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/i-vatican-council/documents/vat-i_const_1870-04-24_dei-filius_en.html.
  8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§221, 255, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM.
  9. Council of Florence, Decree Laetentur Caeli (1439).
  10. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40, §41, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310240.htm.
  11. Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 25.
  12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.32, a.1 ad 3.
  13. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a.3; q.45, a.2.
  14. Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” “Creation and Goodness.”
  15. Fourth Lateran Council (1215), De fide catholica, ch. 1.
  16. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, §24, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
  17. Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” “Salvation and Holiness.”
  18. Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” Conclusion.
  19. Dryer, “Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude,” concluding affirmation.
  20. Anicius M. S. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Book IV, prose 2.
  21. Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, 210, 117, 68.
  22. Jiří Benovsky, Meta‑metaphysics, 3–4, 21–22.
  23. Jiří Benovsky, “Primitives,” in Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, 387–394.
  24. Jean‑Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 203–204.
  25. Jean‑Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, 2, 7, 10.
  26. Jean‑Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, 21–23, 37.