154 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
Where in this world, then, or in the world to come, does
the web of those associations that make us who we are reach
an end? Nowhere, I believe. Our personhood, to take the mat-
ter still further, must surely consist not only in the immediate
love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward
those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar, or even in the
abstract; for the most essential law of charity, of love when it
is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all im-
mediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled, and
to continue to be active. And all of those in whom each of
us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are
themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless
others, on and on, without limit. We belong, of necessity, to
an indissoluble coinherence of souls. In the end, a person can-
not begin or continue to be a person at all except in and by
way of all other persons. Gregory certainly understood this.
Human beings are not, in the metaphysical sense, "substan -
tial relations" or pure acts of perichoresis-reciprocally "con-
taining" one another- as the Persons of the Trinity are said to
be; we are not metaphysically simple in that way. According
to Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), in fact, only the Trinitarian
God is "personal" in the full sense, because in the simplicity
of his coinherent life of love he comprises every modality of
personal being: he is at once "I," "we," "thou," "you," but en-
tirely as the one God. We are not that. And this means that we
require others in order to possess all the necessary and consti-
tutive modalities of true personal existence for ourselves. So, if
not subsistent relations, we are nonetheless, so long as we are
anything at all, subsistences of relationality; each of us is an
entire history of attachments and affinities, and none of those
attachments and affinities is merely accidental to some more
essential self. Yes, the psychological self within us-the small,