P. Reinhard Körner OCD
When the Russian Orthodox monk Andrei Rublev (born around 1360, died around 1430) was commissioned by his superior to paint the icon of the Triune God at the Trinity Monastery in Zagorsk near Moscow, he faced a daunting challenge. How was he to represent visually that which cannot be grasped by human imagination: that God is one in three persons?
The Russian painter and monk resorted to an ancient icon motif: “Hospitality,” depicting three angels, or God’s messengers, who according to Genesis 18 visit Abraham and sit with him and his wife Sarah under the oaks of Mamre at a table, enjoying a feast. Already a whole millennium before Rublev, Augustine and other theologians among the Church Fathers interpreted this narrative from the Abrahamic cycle as a foreshadowing of the Trinity in the Old Testament. In a long, laborious process of reflection, they sought to answer the question of how the faith in one God can be reconciled with the experience of the first Christians that not only the one whom Jesus calls “Abba – dear Father” belongs to God, but also the resurrected Jesus himself and, just as importantly, the “ruach,” the Holy Spirit. Gisbert Greshake, who recently described the history of faith in the Trinity from its beginnings to the present day in a substantial 560-page book, summarizes this effort as follows: “After a prolonged oscillation characterized by a variety of diverse, often contradictory, and therefore conspicuous struggles for the purity and unity of concepts, many theological concepts and theories ultimately achieved a result accepted by the entire Church in the form of the formulation: God is one in his being, three in persons.” The councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) summarized this still valid result in the Creed (see the Mass ritual).
The aforementioned monk of the Eastern Church managed to weave all the essential foundational ideas of this Trinitarian theology into the motif of “Hospitality” and express them masterfully. Thanks to his icon, it also becomes “more illustrative” and understandable to me what the language of theologians is trying to convey.
Icons are intended to be windows through which the contemplative can glimpse the reality meant by the image. The doctrine of the Church, which is represented by the icon, cannot and does not want to be anything other than a “window” made of words and concepts leading into the mystery of God. Thus, the teaching on the Trinity, as Joseph Ratzinger writes in his Introduction to Christianity, is always merely “pitiful stammering and nothing more”; it is “a gesture that points to the unnameable; it is not a definition that classifies a thing into the compartments of human knowledge,” it has “the character of indicative speech, in which the concept becomes merely an attempt and understanding merely an outstretching of the hand toward the incomprehensible.”1
Grateful for these “windows” – both the one represented by the icon and the one integrated into it by the doctrine of the Church – I would like to look through both and now attempt to express in my own words, using images and analogies from our lives, what I can see behind them...
God – they are three. This is the message that strikes the eye of the one contemplating the icon immediately. By means of a vivid image, it expresses what the theological language has conveyed as the fundamental teaching about the Trinity: “One divine essence in three persons.” The great divine power that “upholds the world” is not some “impersonal force” or mere “energy encompassing all,” as many people believe today in our cultural sphere, nor is it an albeit benevolent and merciful deity standing alone (as has been the practical belief – even if “unwittingly” – of most Christians). Behind the word “God” lies community. The name “God” is like a surname, like a name designating a family or a group to which three proper names belong. God is a community of three, each of whom can say “I,” each is unique, with a personality different from the others – just as three of us humans each have a completely own identity. This applies to both the “Father,” to his “Son” Jesus Christ, and to the “Holy Spirit,” who is thus also a person and not merely “the bond of love between the Father and the Son,” which is indeed quite suitable but also a very confusing term in our current proclamation.
However: when we speak of a personal God, yes, of three persons in God, it is still about a conceptually formed “window” that points to a reality far greater than what we know as a person or personality in the human realm. The three in God are “persons” in a far more comprehensive and perfect, for us unattainable sense. Nonetheless, no other word would be more appropriate to direct our thoughts about God and where we are allowed to sense His reality. Can God, the originator of all that is, be smaller and less significant than what the creation has produced as its highest form of being? And can He – can the three in God – be the least form of being than the one who, as a human person and personality, has brought us closer to God and represented Him? God, they are three, who are at least what we call a person...
But how can it be true that 3 = 1? How can three persons be one divine essence (“una substantia”)? Johann Wolfgang Goethe sharpened this troublesome thought, which many people share with him even today, in this way: “I believed in God and in nature2 and in the victory of what is noble over what is evil; but it was not enough for pious souls, I also had to believe that three are said to be one and that one is said to be three; this contradicted my soul's sense of truth; nor did it seem to me that it was of the least help.” Whether this was of any actual help to the poet, we will leave aside for the time being. In any case, the truth is that with “mathematical theology,” we will get no further. A more suitable path is once again shown to us by the icon of the Russian monk and painter: not rational ingenuity, but empathy directs us in the search for a “solution.”
The first glance at the icon perceives three persons; a deeper vision, empathizing with those three, gives me to know that and how that “equals one” applies here: Andrei Rublev did not simply place the divine three beside each other; there is a relationship between them, there is a silent, peaceful, deep agreement, a conversation is taking place, they are one in love...
Nothing else is meant by theologians – Church Fathers – when they speak of God in three persons as being one. Tertullian (died around 225) already coined the formulation in the early days of theological reflection on the Trinity: “Tres unum sunt, non unus – three are one, not one.” The “one divine essence” referred to in Trinitarian teaching of theological thinkers has in Jesus' proclamation and example of life the character traits of one who loves absolutely and entirely. The First Letter of John summarizes this in the statement: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love – this is the turn from I to you, it means devoting oneself to one another, perceiving each other, and delighting in one another, it is the deepest “being in relationship,” communication, and “communio” (= being together as one).
Since the 7th century, theologians have used the Greek word perichoresis to make this unified being of God in love more comprehensible. “Perichoresis” means to “dance around one another” and “to penetrate one another” – again it is a window made of concept that is meant to incite to empathy rather than to define, to provoke contemplation of the occurrences in the “hearts” of the divine three: in God, every time two devote themselves so deeply and entirely to one another that one lovingly “circles” around the other, “dancing” him and “penetrating” him, and from this “heart” and with this “heart” loves him... - in such a way that one lives in the other without losing oneself and “dissolving” into the other, yes: only in the other does one recognize oneself. In rare moments, moments of grace, something similar happens in the relationship between two people – if only for a moment; the most likely give a hint of what is taking place in God's “perichoretic” love...
Richard of St. Victor (died 1173), who created perhaps the most original and important work on the Trinity between Augustine (died 430) and Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) around the middle of the 12th century, introduced into Trinitarian theology the concept of the co-loving-co-loved third: “condilectus.” In God – this is what it wants to express – two do not remain alone in their mutual love; they are one in the fact of devoting themselves to the third. The experience of love between us humans can again help us understand this. “Love is not looking at each other, but looking together in the same direction,” wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry long ago. To unite and be together in love with the third: with the same desire of the heart, with the common life task, all the more with a common child, a mutually beloved friend, with the “same” God – that is the completion of love already among us humans. Whoever, with this experience or at least the desire in their heart, can “listen” to the silent conversation of the three in Andrei Rublev's icon can sense something of the perfect love of the Triune God...
Who is depicted as the Father, who as the Son, who as the Holy Spirit? The interpretations of commentators vary greatly on this matter, always with good theological reasoning.3 There is no “authentic” explanation left by the Orthodox monk, and it is impossible to identify the persons from their appearance. Nothing can be said about any of them being younger, nor can any be said to be older; their faces are equally young. In God-Community, there is no earlier or later, nor any subordination of the younger to the older. When the creeds of the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople state about Jesus that “he was begotten of the Father,” and about the Holy Spirit that “he proceeds from the Father and the Son,” this does not imply any temporal succession or any causal statement about the “origin” of the second and third divine person, nor any order among those three. Here too it is about “pitiful stammering” words and images that are meant to express nothing more and nothing less than that those whom we call “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” belong most intimately and deeply together. These three in God experience in continuous “youthful freshness” and in “equal” belonging the perfect adventure of indescribable love...
The altar of our monastery church in Birkenweder has been adorned by us Carmelites with a simple drawing representing the Trinity according to the Russian monk. Occasionally, guests ask us whether “the three” are to be men or women. In reality, it cannot be discerned, not even in the original. Andrei Rublev surely wanted to convey that one cannot think of God as being either male or female, but only ever in the totality of “characteristics” of both genders. Rublev likely also wanted to indicate to those who empathetically contemplate his icon that the love uniting the divine Trinity encompasses all the tenderness and inner passion that a man and a woman feel towards each other. What perichoretically unites the “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” is nothing other than the sober feeling of belonging to a bowling club...
From “the oak in Mamre,” under which three divine messengers sat with Abraham and Sarah at the table, in the image of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev has become the tree of life – a symbol that all life and everything that is has its origin in this divine community of love. These three do not remain in their one being of three; they do not remain “closed” in on themselves. They are three mutually one in their tender-passionate love and in their creative imagination and creativity, they pass their life on outward – from themselves into the common creation.
In the middle of the table stands a bowl. In its shape resembling a chalice, it reminds the contemplative of the mystery of the Eucharist, the feast of God's love towards His creation even to the point of shedding blood, and also of many communities at the feast that Jesus sought and experienced with his disciples and with “tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 15:1 and more often). From the meal that Abraham and Sarah offered to the divine messengers, it becomes the drink and food that God gives to people, from Abraham's hospitality the hospitality of the divine three, who are united in bringing “the whole world” (Matthew 28:19) to their table...
“I and the Father are one,” says Jesus in the Gospel of John (John 10:30). Leonardo Boff explains this: “Jesus does not say: ‘I and the Father are one in number’” – otherwise, the evangelist would have to use the Greek word “heis” – “but: ‘We are together’ (in Greek: hen).” Similarly, Jürgen Moltmann explains: “They (i.e. the three divine persons) are not ‘one’, but ‘one’, i.e. united, which is expressed in the plural ‘we’ and ‘us’.” God is and remains one God because the Father, Son, and Spirit are one in love – only then does Goethe's arithmetic task succeed.
And what would the poet get from this? Really nothing? In any case, I have gained much from this. My God, in whom I believe, to whom I pray, and with whom I try to live my life, is now a community full of impulsive liveliness, filled with attractive adventurousness... Since I do not just say “You, God,” with the thought of the Father, then Jesus, and occasionally also the Holy Spirit, but I have also begun to pray – like Elizabeth of Dijon, a contemporary of St. Therese of Lisieux and a Carmelite like her – “You, my three,” my life has opened up to a breadth, an infinite width that takes my breath away...
(Reprinted with kind permission of the author from the magazine Karmel-Impulse,
Year 8, No. III/1998, pp. 16–21.
Translated by P. Gorazd, O.Carm.)
