More from Mark McIntosh’s Mystical Theology .

The Word, he notes, is the “expression of the Father’s ecstatic love which causes there to be an ‘other’ in God.”  That same love not only leads to the begetting of the Son, but “leads to the eternal filial response of the Son towards the Father.”  The Father is identified - McIntosh hints we might even say “constituted” - by “his eternal desire to pour out the divine life for the Other-in-God (the Son),” and likewise “the Son is identified as Word because he desires eternally to speak forth the Father’s giving life.”  The glory of this eternal giving life is found in the fact that God freely chooses to be God not only for Himself but for others: “God that is, in an eternally free act of love, chooses to mirror the divine ‘other’ (which takes place eternally within the divine life) by bringing into being a created other.”  The “eternal fecundity of the Source, the Abyss of God’s personal being” is found in its infinite capacity not only to beget “rich mutuality within itself” but also to bring into existence a world that has no existence at all.  The Father, in short, “chooses to speak himself, to utter the Word, by bringing into being and fellowship with Himself a universe.”

But this created other doesn’t stand over-against God, but is enveloped, as it were, by the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s for the Father.  The Father’s ecstatic love begets the Son, and through the Son creates a world; and as the world created by the Word, the world is caught up in the Word’s response of praise to the Father: “it is an expression of the Word’s ecstatic love for the giving Source to resound to the praise of the Source no only within the Abyss of divine love itself, but from within all the creatures, all that is ‘other’ than God.”  That does not cease simply because of the intervention of sin and death: The Father is still determined to express His love in this created other, and the Son is still determined that this created other will response to the Father with praise.  Thus, “the Word reflects the divine glory by speaking the promise of this reconciling and giving love in the very midst of that which is not only ‘other’ than God but also opposed and alienated from God.  The Word speaks God by being incarnate, by being made to be sin, by giving himself up to death.  never did the Father’s Word more perfectly resound with the infinity of the divine love than when it was made perfect in the obedience of that earthly mission, for there the Word speaks even in the final silence of the cross.”

Now, what of the Spirit here?  The “ecstatic love which ‘beguiles’ God out of heaven” is not an “automatic instinct of a Neoplatonic essence of goodness,” but rather a person, the Person of the Spirit.  And we can move that back a step too, into the eternal life of the Trinity: The ecstatic love that “beguiles” the Father to beget a Son is the Spirit.  McIntosh suggests that “the Father is the Father precisely because of his Spirit, his ecstatic love which identifies him as the One who is and who will be because this One eternally chooses to be for Another .”  And this means that the Spirit is the Person-constituting Person of the Godhead: “It is the Spirit as ekstasis who works within the divine Abyss the free decision to pour out divine life as ‘Other,’ as Word - and it is this very begetting which constitutes the Father as Father.  Again it is the same Spirit as ecstatic love who constitutes the Word as Word by filling him with the desire to respond to the Father, to celebrate the fruitfulness of the divine Source by giving voice to it in the creation of a universe and the re-creation of it in the covenant of divine fellowship.”

Augustine didn’t quite have it: The Spirit is not only a “bond” of Father and Son, but the love that marks the Father as Father and the Son as Son.