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 Trinity, he faced a challenging task. How was he to depict in image that which cannot be comprehended by human imagination: that God is one in three persons?
The Russian painter and monk reached for the old icon motif: “The Hospitality,” representing three angels or divine messengers who, according to Genesis 18, visit Abraham and sit at the table with him and his wife Sarah under the oaks at Mamre and share a feast. Over a millennium earlier (before Rublev), Augustine and other theologians from the early Church interpreted this narrative from the Abrahamic cycle as a precursor to the Trinity in the Old Testament. In a long, arduous process of reflection at that time, they tried to find answers to the question of how faith in one God could be reconciled with the experience of the early Christians that not only the one whom Jesus calls “Abba – dear Father” belongs to God, but also the risen Jesus himself and likewise “ruach,” the Holy Spirit. Gisbert Greshake, who recently outlined the history of the faith in the Trinity from its beginnings to the present in a thick book of 560 pages, summarizes this effort: “After prolonged oscillation characterized by diverse, often contradictory, and therefore so conspicuous struggles for the purity and unity of concepts, many theological concepts and theories finally reached a result accepted by the entire Church in 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 liturgy).
The mentioned monk of the Eastern Church succeeded in weaving all the essential core ideas of this Trinitarian theology into the motif of “Hospitality” and expressing them masterfully. Thanks to his icon, it also becomes "more illustrative" and understandable to me what the language of theologians seeks to convey.
Icons want to be a window through which the contemplative can look into the reality intended by the image. The doctrine of the Church, which is represented by the icon, also cannot and does not want to be anything other than a "window" made of words and concepts into the mystery of God. Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity, as Joseph Ratzinger writes in his Introduction to Christianity, is always only “poor stammering and nothing more”; it is “a gesture that points to the unnameable; it is not a definition that categorizes anything into the compartments of human knowledge,” it has “the character of a suggestive language, in which the concept becomes merely an attempt and understanding merely an outstretching of the hand towards the incomprehensible.”1
Grateful for these “windows” – both the one represented by the icon and the window into it that is formed by the doctrine of the Church – I would like to look through both and I would like to try now to express and show in my own words, words and comparisons from our life, what I am able to see behind them...
God – they are three. This is the message that strikes anyone contemplating the icon immediately. By means of an illustrative image, it says what the language of theologians has captured in the fundamental statement about the Trinity: “One divine essence in three persons.” The great divine power that “upholds the world” is not some “impersonal force” or merely some “everything-containing energy,” as many people in our cultural circle believe today, nor is it some benevolent and merciful deity that exists in solitude (as most Christians practically hold – even if “unintentionally”). Behind the word “God” lies community. The name “God” is like a surname, like a name signifying a family or group to which three personal names belong. God is a community of three, each of whom can say “I,” each is a unique personality different from the others – just as three of us humans have completely our own identity. This holds true for both the “Father,” his “Son” Jesus Christ, and the “Holy Spirit,” who is thus also a person and not merely “the bond of love between the Father and the Son,” which is certainly fitting but also a very confusing term in our contemporary proclamation.
However: when we speak of a personal God, yes, of three persons in God, this is also a concept-shaped “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 sense that is naturally far broader and more perfect, and for us incomprehensible. Nevertheless, no other word would be more suitable or appropriate to point us in the right direction in which our thinking about God should proceed and where we are allowed to sense His reality. Could God, the creator of all that is, be smaller and less significant than what creation has produced as its highest form of being? And could He – could the three in God – be a lesser form of being than the one who as a human person and personality has brought God closer to us 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 thorny thought, which many people today share with him, thus: “I believed in God and in nature2 and in the victory of what is noble over what is despicable; but this was not enough for the pious souls, I also had to believe that three are said to be one and that one is three; this, however, contradicted my soul's sense of truth; it did not seem to me that it helped me in the least.” Whether this was of any real help to the poet we will leave aside for now. In any case, it is true that with “mathematical theology” we cannot advance further. A more fitting path is once again shown to us by the icon of the Russian monk and painter: not rational cleverness, but empathy gives us the direction we need to take in seeking a “solution.”
The first glance at the icon perceives three persons; a deeper vision, empathizing with the three, allows me to realize that and in what way “equals one” applies here: Andrei Rublev did not simply place these three divine figures side by side; between them exists a relationship, there is a silent, peaceful, deep accord, a conversation takes place, they are one in love...
This is precisely what the theologians – Church Fathers mean when they talk about God in three persons being one. Tertullian (died around 225) already in the early period of theological reflection on the Trinity formulated: “Tres unum sunt, non unus – three are one, not one.” This “one divine essence” that the Trinitarian doctrine of theological thinkers speaks about embodies the character traits of one who loves completely and totally. The First Epistle of John summarizes it in the sentence: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love – this is the turn from I to you, it means to devote oneself to one another, to perceive each other and to rejoice in one another, it conveys 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 one being of God in love more understandable. “Perichoresis” means to “dance around each other” and “to mutually penetrate” – again it is a concept-shaped window that aims not to define but to incite an empathy into the ongoing event in the “hearts” of the divine three: in God, each time two devote themselves so deeply and completely to one another that one “lovingly circles” around the other and “dances,” indeed, “penetrates” it and thus loves it from within, from this “heart” and with this “heart”... – so that one lives in the other without losing oneself and “melting away” into the other, indeed: only in the other do we find ourselves. In rare moments, moments of grace, something similar occurs in the relationship between two people – even if only for a moment; they most likely give us a glimpse of what happens in God's “perichoretic” love...
Richard of Saint 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 mid-12th century, introduced into Trinitarian theology the concept of the co-loving and co-loved third: “condilectus.” What this wants to express is that in God – they do not remain alone in their mutual love; they are one in dedicating themselves to the third. Understanding this again can be aided by our experience of love among us humans. “Love is not looking at each other, but looking together in one direction,” wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry long ago. To unite and to be mutually one in love with the third: with the same desire of the heart, with the common life task, all the more with a mutual child, with a dearly beloved friend, with the “same” God – this is the culmination of love already among us humans. Those who can “listen” to the quiet conversation of the three in Andrei Rublev's icon with this experience or at least longing in their hearts can sense something of the perfect love of the triune God...
Who is depicted here as the Father, who as the Son, who as the Holy Spirit? The interpretations of commentators on this matter diverge greatly, each time with good theological justification.3 No “authentic” explanation was left by the Orthodox monk, and it is not possible to identify the persons from their appearances. None can be said to be younger, none to be older; their faces are equally young. In God-Community, there is no earlier or later, nor any subservience of the younger to the older. When the confessions of faith of the councils in Nicaea and Constantinople say of Jesus that “he was begotten of the Father” and of the Holy Spirit that “he proceeds from the Father and the Son,” this does not mean a temporal sequence, nor any causal statement about the “origin” of the second and third divine person, nor any order among the three. Here too, we are dealing with “poor stammerings” of words and images that are meant to express no more and no less than that those whom we call “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” belong together most closely and deeply. These three in God experience in constant “youthful freshness” and in “equal” belonging a perfect adventure of indescribable love...
We Carmelite monks adorned the sanctuary of our monastery church in Birkenweder with a simple drawing depicting the Trinity according to the Russian monk. Guests occasionally ask us whether “the three” are to be men or women. In reality, it is not possible to tell, not even in the original. Andrei Rublev surely intended to say not only that God cannot be thought of as male or female but always only in the totality of the “characters” of both sexes. Rublev may also have intended to suggest to those who empathetically contemplate his icon that the love that unites the divine Trinity includes 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 something far beyond mere sober feelings of solidarity in a bowling club...
From the “oak at Mamre,” under which three divine messengers sat at the table with Abraham and Sarah, in the image of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev became 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 merely in their unique being of three; they do not remain “closed” in themselves. They are three mutually one in their gentle-passionate love and in their creative imagination and creativity, they pass their life onward – from themselves outward into the common creation.
In the middle of the table stands a bowl. Its shape resembles a chalice, reminding the contemplative of the mystery of the Eucharist, the celebration of God's love for His creation even to the point of shedding blood, as well as many gatherings at feasts that Jesus sought out and experienced with His disciples and with “tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 15:1 and more often). From the meal that Abraham and Sarah presented to God's messengers, it becomes the drink and food that God gives to people, from Abraham's hospitality to 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,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John (John 10:30). Leonardo Boff explains: “Jesus does not say: ‘I and the Father are one in number’” – otherwise, the evangelist would have had to use the Greek word “heis” – “but rather: ‘We are together’ (in Greek: hen).” Similarly explains Jürgen Moltmann: “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 Holy Spirit are one in love – only then does Goethe's arithmetic task work out.
And what would the poet gain from this? Really nothing? In any case, I have gained much from it. 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 vitality, full of attractive adventure... Since then, I no longer say only “You, God,” considering here the Father, there Jesus, occasionally also the Holy Spirit, but I have also gotten into the habit of praying – like Elizabeth of Dijon, a contemporary of St. Therese of Lisieux and a Carmelite like her, – “You, my three,” has entered into my life a breadth, an infinite breadth that takes my breath away...
(Reproduced with the kind permission of the author from the journal Karmel-Impulse,
Year 8, No. III/1998, pp. 16–21.
Translated by P. Gorazd, O.Carm.)
