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John of Damascus, a thoroughly good egg, used the word in the 8th century to explain the verse in the Gospel: ‘I am in the Father and the Father in me.’ Literally it meant ‘to rotate’, but it signified that the Holy Trinity’s mutual indwelling is compenetration without confusion. Lovely.
The real absurdity is more recent. I don’t know who dunnit, but people have misunderstood the word as meaning ‘dancing around’, as if the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were in a chorus line.
‘As the Greek fathers said, life is a perichoresis,’ writes Michael Keeling in The Mandate of Heaven (1995), ‘a dance of the universe led by Christ the Lord of Creation.’ I doubt that the Fathers had been listening to Sydney Carter or watching Michael Flatley. Catherine Mowry LaCugna in God For Us (1991) enthuses: ‘Each dancer expresses and at the same time fulfils him/herself towards the other.’ She does enter the caveat that ‘the philological warrant for this is scant’. For ‘scant’, read ‘non-existent’.
‘Whether the Greek Fathers understood perichoresis in the Trinity as dancing,’ remarks Fergus Kerr drily in After Aquinas (2002), ‘depends on conflating an omega and an omicron.’ For the fact is that choreuo with an omicron in the middle means ‘dance a round dance or choral dance’, as the Bacchae might. Perichoreo with an omega means to ‘come in succession’. It is the omega meaning that the Fathers meant, not the dancy omicron one.
As my learned friend Harry Mount remarked here last week, the future of Greek is wine-dark. But it’s already corked. Happy Easter.
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