God surprising God

Stratford Caldecott explains the logic of self-giving within the Triune life ( The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity , 110-111): “it is the Father, not the Essence, who gives, but the Father is the Essence, or not -other than the Essence, and what is given also is the (same) Essence. The Father is the source of the Son and the Spirit, but he also receives, since the love he gives is reciprocated, and if it were not perfectly reciprocated it would not have been perfectly given. The Son receives the Father’s love and, as the perfect image (self-knowledge) of the Father, freely gives all that he has received, namely the one and undivided divine Essence, in love to the one from whom he receives it. We might say, with Augustine, that the second Person is so perfect an image of the Father that he gives of himself just as the Father does. Finally the Holy Spirit is also the Essence, one and the same Essence eternally already given and received.”

But this is not a game of catch, where something is being passed back and forth. That, he suggests, would be “an image of sterility.” Rather:

“The gift is distinct from the giver through being given. It is a total given-awayness that renders the giver (and the receiver) fruitful beyond their own subjectivity because it bears them both within itself, transformed by their communion in one another. This is the archetype of the way a child bears within himself the nature and image of the two parents, making him an (endlessly surprising) gift to each. Purely by virtue of the relationship to Father and Son, the gift which unites them becomes a third Person. Without ever being other than one and the same God, the Holy Spirit is the bond or medium of exchange between Father and Son-completing the Trinitarian process in a “kiss” signifying their mutual delight and their eternal superabundant or ‘ecstatic’ fruition.”

In a footnote on the parenthetical comment about surprise, he explains: “The necessary separation of gift from giver in order to be given corresponds in the logic of the Trinity to the Spirit’s ‘otherness’ as Person from the Father and the Son-that is, to his being ‘another Person.’ The ‘superabundance’ of true gift is rooted in the ever-greater infinity of God’s Essence and the otherness within the Essence of the three Persons. This is why Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr can dare to talk of gratitude and even ‘surprise’ in God-God surprising himself.”