God’s Selfie: a sermon on Rublev’s icon of the Trinity

Icons. Nowadays “icons” are mega-celebrities of one sort or another: pop idols, movie stars, royalty: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana – they are modern icons par excellence. In his brilliant reflection on contemporary culture, Lost Icons, Rowan Williams situates this “iconography” “in the complex realm of public presentation … [and] the marketing of personalities.” It is a travesty, he observes, of the “traditional icon of the Eastern [Orthodox] Christian world,” which “is never meant to be a reproduction of the world you see around you.” Rather, “the point of the icon is to give us a window into an alien frame of reference that is at the same time the structure that will make definitive sense of the world we inhabit.” And many Western Christians have also discovered that, prayerfully contemplated, these exquisite, evocative paintings of holy figures may awaken our spiritual senses and grace us with glimpses of God.

Here is one of the most famous of all icons. It was painted in the late 14th century by Andrei Rublev, a monk at the monastery of Zagorsk, near Moscow. It’s called “The Hospitality of Abraham”, narratively based as it is on the story in Genesis 18 about the three mysterious figures entertained by Abraham and Sarah who announce to them the birth of Isaac. But what do you suppose this icon is really all about? Here is a hint: its more common name is – “The Trinity.” But I reckon you could call it “God’s Selfie.”

But let’s take a step back and first ask how on earth – how on earth – can you picture the Trinity? Well, you can have a go at the Son – at least he becomes incarnate in the man Jesus. But what about the Father and the Holy Spirit? Perhaps an old man with a beard for the Father, and a dove for the Spirit? That’s been the tradition in Western art, the best of it quite sublime. But a dove lacks the “personhood” of the Holy Spirit, and while such imagery might tell us something about God’s work in creation and redemption – God as God reveals Godself to us (what theologians call the “economic” Trinity) – it tells us virtually nothing about God as God is in Godself (what theologian call the “imminent” or “eternal” Trinity).

Any other possibilities? Well, there is the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation known as typology, which re-reads the story of Israel in the light of the story of Jesus, hearing echoes of the former in the latter. It sees connections and explores correspondences between persons, events, and themes in the Old Testament and persons, events, and themes in the New Testament: sees the Old Testament prefiguring the New Testament and the New Testament reconfiguring the Old Testament. For example: in Romans 5 Paul writes of Adam as “a figure of the one who is to come”, namely Christ, the Second Adam; and in 1 Peter 3 the author sees the floodwaters in Noah’s day as anticipating Christian baptism in his own day.

Now: back to this strange tale in Genesis 18 about Abraham, Sarah, and the three mysterious visitors. Rublev is by no means the first Christian to have taken this story as a foreshadowing of the Trinity. It is certainly a strange story, full of suggestive ambiguity. Are there really three visitors, or only one? The text jumps between both possibilities. And who are these travellers? Are they human, angelic, divine? Certainly they bring the promise of the miraculous birth of a child. You can see how the story resonates with trinitarian themes. Perhaps, then, you can understand why it became the basis of attempts by Eastern Orthodox Christians to create a compelling visual aid to help us understand and worship God as Trinity.

So Rublev focuses our attention on these three persons imaged as angels – you can tell they are angels because they’ve got wings! (Abraham and Sarah don’t appear in the picture, although the tree rising over the left wing of the central angel reminds us of the oak of Mamre, where they entertained their visitors.) The angels are linked together by their common blue garments – blue, the colour of the sky, the heavens, and therefore symbolic of eternity. (The building above the angel on the left probably represents the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem.) And the whole scene is suffused with regal gold.

The angel on the right, introducing us to the Godhead, represents the Holy Spirit. His blue robe is covered by a green cloak – green, the colour of life, because the Holy Spirit (in the words of the Nicene Creed) is “the Lord, the Giver of Life”, including the earthly life of the Son through the Virgin Birth. The angel in the middle represents the Son. His blue cloak overlays a dark red robe – red, the colour of earth, the colour of blood, symbolising, respectively, the incarnation and the crucifixion. And the angel on the left represents the Father, his blue robe covered with a translucent cloak, symbolising the eternal divine glory.

What else? Observe that a circle can be traced around the angels, emphasising their divine unity and perfection. Note that each angel has a halo, symbolising their co-equality, and that each has a staff, representing their co-authority. And observe that they are sitting around a table, not round but rectangular, representing the world of time and space. But more, the table is clearly a Communion table – there is a chalice on it. And the angel of the Son is pointing to it with two fingers on his right hand, reflecting his two natures, human and divine, and yet, at the same time – such is Rublev’s artistry – also pointing beyond the table to the Spirit on his left, the Spirit sent by the Father through the Son. And in the chalice, though it is almost impossible to make out, there is a lamb: Behold the Lamb of God! – slain on the cross, but also slain before the foundations of the world.

Now look closely again at the three figures. They are certainly three distinct figures. But look at the way they are sitting, angled towards each other. And look at the way they are gazing – the Spirit on the right at the Father across the table, the Son in the middle at the Father to his right, the Father on the left at the Spirit across the Table – or is it at the Son to his left? The ambiguity is no doubt intended. But look too at the family resemblance – they could almost be triplets – no old man, young man, and a bird! – which suggests not only their equality but also their indivisibility. They seem to be giving themselves to each other, absorbed in each other, living in and for each other – one-in-three, three-in-one, the perfect expression of love. And the Son is central – why? Because he is the key that opens the door to the reality of God as Trinity, as it was by reflecting on his person and work that the early church came to understand and express that God is Trinity.

It has been observed that “this image of God does not always square with our understanding of personal relationships, whether with God or with each other. Often we do not link together the person on the one hand and the relationship on the other, because in modern western societies when we say ‘personal’ we usually mean ‘individual’ without any necessary sense of mutuality, interdependency, and inseparability. The Holy Trinity is not personal in our western sense at all. The personal nature of God, God’s very being, is relatedness, is Father, Son, and Spirit in the unity of communion. And so, in turn, for us to have a personal relationship with God is not a matter of two separate individuals, creature and creator, becoming ‘pals’. It is much deeper than that. It is a matter of being caught up into the very life of God, which is always personal but never individualistic. The Trinity reminds us that Christianity is not about having a one-to-one relationship with an isolated God, nor is it about having a private relationship with God to the exclusion of others. No, from start to finish Christianity is about participating in the trinitarian life of God, and it’s about participating in the community of the church, its human reflection” (from James White, The Forgotten Trinity, much adapted).

One last look at Rublev’s astonishing icon. I’ve left something out. I’ve missed what’s missing. Can you see how the scene, reversing the perspective we’re used to in Western art, seems to beckon towards us? Observe the empty space at the front of the table: the perfect circle is also an open circle. Could it be that Rublev is inviting us, the observers, to stop being observers and step into the frame, to approach the table, to share in the holy communion of Father, Son, and Spirit? For is that not the meaning and purpose of worship, of being church, of being Christian – to be drawn into, to indwell, the very life and being of God, as we lift up our hearts to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit? Yes, it is so. It is certainly so.

Finally this. Observe – none of the figures is speaking, they sit in silent, prayerful contemplation. So let us, like them, be quiet for a moment – in silent, prayerful contemplation …

Letter to the Virgin of Vladimir

Dear Lady,

All my life I have felt the lack of a sister. I grew up among boys, the second of three brothers, and whenever I look out at the world I see it through a brother's eyes. The world for me is masculine, a fraternal environment, a whole grand universe teeming with brothers.

It might have been different if I had ever had a sister. I might have known something then of the sororal side of things, the side that never shows itself to me. Imagine it, if even once in my life I had looked into another human face and said, My sister. 

St Francis must have grown up with brothers and sisters, for when he looked up at the sky he saw the hot sun burning like a brother, and the white moon gleaming like a sister.

But it is not so with me. I do not know what sisters are, and no matter where I look it is always brothers that I see. There are even women among my friends whom I have loved as brothers – whatever that means.

Which is why you mystify me, Lady. For there is nothing brotherly in you. In you I see creation, the whole perplexing mystery of things, looking back at me with the sad eyes of a woman.

Why are you always so sad, Lady? What is it your eyes see? If you told me, would I understand? Or would your language be lost on me? Would everything you tried to say be changed in my ears (the ears of a man among brothers)? Would your clearest, most careful explanations all sound like speaking in tongues to me? Is that why you have kept so resolutely silent all these years?

But though you only look and never say a word, I know you also listen. You listened so well that the vast unbounded Word was nurtured in your womb, as if you were the one place in the universe where God could really find a hearing. Even now in your sad eyes there is something like the purest listening, listening as an absolute quality, Listening-as-such.

So I light the candle to you: I watch you in the flickering dark: I let your ever wakeful eyes watch me: I strain to find a place with you in the cavern of your silence.

Sometimes (so intent, so palpable, is your listening) I almost have the courage to address you, to speak into the silence and tell you something only you would hear. In those moments if I could I would open my mouth and say to you, My sister. And right then (so I believe) the whole creation would turn its face to me and I would see all things – wind, stones, stars, sea – looking back with a sister's face, listening with a sister's eyes, and speaking with a sister's voice.

Until that day, Lady, pray for me, and for all my brothers –
&c.

The icon of theophany: one lingering glance

1

Then suddenly, like an axe laid violently at the roots, a voice splits the silence of eternity and some holy thing plummets straight down towards the one who stands alone amid the flowing waters, 

2 

whose life is as purposive as running rivers, shunning the heights and seeking out the lowest place, rushing down so far and so fast that our hands can hardly reach him, not without leaning dangerously near the edge, just as startled strangers once stooped to touch him in the cradle and afterwards to feel his cold unyielding body in the ground, 

3

all his flesh exposed to those cleansing Jordan waters as he stands in silence, as low as any river's end, so that the baptist has to bend his frail starved body like a bow to discharge the quick sharp blessing, reaching down to touch the head of him whose sandals none is worthy to undo, as though this one had need of human blessing or approval when he himself is the silent benediction resting on all creatures, or as though he could win glory from any of the sons of men when he is the holy brightness pulsating at the hidden heart of things, the still point about which all the worlds revolve, 

4

so that even the holy angels, bright in heaven's raiment and terrible beneath their wings of fire, lean hungrily towards his gentle silence, zealous for the devastating undreamt-of majesty of his unexceptional and still unwounded flesh, poised beside him like runners before the race and clutching their robes as towels, having waited longingly through all ages for one chance to pay him menial honour, as though the highest hope of dreadful cherubim and seraphim were to wipe cold bathwater from human flesh (for eternity's immortal monsters covet meekness, lowliness, and anonymous service just as the mortal children of Cain crave power, fame, and recognition), 

5

this fleshly being who transcends us only by standing infinitely lower than us, almost inaccessible in the extremity of his poverty and abnegation,

6

and who might remain forever hidden from a world that worships power had not the tremendous voice like thunder announced his rank as first-born of creation, and the birdlike lightning energies cascaded down upon him without measure, cleansing him whose touch makes all things clean, 

7

while the baptist's mad wild eye looks on in terror and the angels turn their faces meekly down, folding their burning wings and bending with shimmering towels to dry his body in preparation for his second baptism, that funereal pyre in which the dove will descend as cataracts of flame,

8

and what has fallen to earth will leap again heavenwards like tongues of fire.

The icon of the Holy Cross: 15 glances

1.

The icon portrays revelation: the crucifixion of the human Jesus as the appearance of the eternal God. The divine being is eternally cruciform, even as it is eternally radiant.

2.

The crucifixion of Christ is the secret of eternity, the true and only glory that shines forever from the abyss of nothingness.

3.

At the centre of Christian devotion is not a revealed doctrine, a religious ideal, or even a right way of life, but an embodied human person. Christianity began not with beliefs about Jesus, but with people who had known Jesus. They were affected by Jesus as we are affected by a powerful friendship, not as we are affected by reading a powerful book or encountering a new idea. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled…" (1 John 1:1). The heartbeat of Christian faith is embodied encounter.

4.

The crucifixion is depicted here as realistically as is possible within the bounds of iconographic form. The human Jesus stretches out his arms across a rough-hewn wooden beam. His body is bent, his feet twisted, his hands pierced, his head turned down in sorrow.

5. 

Around this earthly historical cross shines an eternal heavenly cross. This budded cross is clean and perfect and unbloodied; its form is untouched by the harsh lines and distorted perspectives of the small internal cross. Its form is light itself, the light of eternity. Everything contingent, historical, earthly is suspended amid this timeless light, absorbed into the serene balance of perfect form. The budded cross is the true essential form, the Platonic reality, that projects the earthly crucifixion like a black shadow on to the wall of the cave of time.

6. 

The eternal cross is a theodicy. Death and hell are safely circumscribed within its shining frame.

7.

At the top of the icon, the glorious divine face of Christ peers through the curtains, high above the earthly historical cross of Jesus. Unlike the face of the crucified one, this Christ-face looks straight ahead, reminding us that its own impassive glory is the ultimate truth of the crucifixion. On either side, the saints gather reassuringly, springing like flowers from the barren wood of the cross. The saints model for us our own proper response to the spectacle of the crucified one. We are to respond with adoring humility and reverent submission. The presence of the saints makes the cross safe, familiar, and accessible. There is, the icon assures us, a proper human posture that corresponds to the event of the cross. The cross stands not merely over and against us but alongside us, in uninterrupted continuity with our religious piety.

8. 

Is not history – the history of Jesus – completely fixed and immobilised in this representation? Is it not suspended in eternity like a beautiful figure inside a glass ball?

9. 

Are we not left with the impression that the icon is wholly right in what it shows, yet somehow also wholly wrong? Its sole aim is to set forth Christ as the truth of eternity, the truth that shines forever, the truth of God. But by the very act of showing this, the icon allows the impassive majesty of eternal truth to eclipse the brute fact of the cross of history. 

10.

When I was a little boy, I lived in a vast sprawling mansion beside the sea on a tropical island in North Queensland. When I was grown up, I went back one day to the island and saw my childhood home: a little dilapidated fibro beach shack with a tin roof and cracked concrete floors, scarcely bigger than a backyard shed. All my life, the real earthly house had been eclipsed by the fantasy house which my memory had built for me as, year after year, I silently venerated my childhood. The fantasy house was beautiful: but it was fantasy.

11.

As though we cannot venerate Christ without immediately turning him into an idol, an eternal idea instead of an embodied person. As though religious piety produces an immediate and inevitable transformation of the cross into a smooth, perfectly balanced object, something easily grasped and held in the hand, an instrument not of judgment but of consolation.

12. 

Theological truth and spiritual fantasy are thus bound together in the icon, as closely related as wheat and tares or light and day. 

13.

You can see why Karl Barth so loved Grünewald's great and terrible painting of the crucifixion. In Grünewald, one finds a complete repudiation of Christian Platonism: a theology of the cross stripped bare of all theology of glory. Yet Grünewald's Protestant aesthetic has its own perils. Without something like a Platonic anchoring, are we not right on the brink of a steep descent into theological nihilism? In beholding the earthly historical cross devoid of all religious mediation, do we not find ourselves at the very doorstep of hell?

14. 

Or is that, perhaps, where we are meant to find ourselves when we behold the cross?

15. 

The truth of the icon – a truth that Grünewald all but obliterates – is that there is, for us, no means of access to Christ accept through religious veneration. Our only contact with Christ is through worship in the company of the living tradition of the saints – even if our worship immediately becomes indistinguishable from idolatry. We cannot have Christ without religion: that is the truth that the icon teaches. But – this is what the icon forgets – we can speak of "true religion" only as we speak of a "justified sinner" (Karl Barth).

The Virgin of Vladimir: seven glances

1. 

Behold the handmaid of the Lord! 

2. 

There are paintings you can look at for a time, until at last you have finished with them. The Virgin of Vladimir is not that kind of picture. You could look at it all your life, and you'd still only be getting started – or rather, you'd be getting even further away from sounding out its mystery. To look at an icon is to "fast with your eyes" (St Dorotheus). 

3.

Though the face of the Virgin at first absorbs all our attention, the small insistent face of the child is, in fact, older and wiser and more – how else to put it? – more eternal. This small face constitutes the real centre of the icon and the real source of its radiance. Reflecting his light, the Virgin shimmers. Her infinitely sad, infinitely strong face is pulled towards the commanding gravity of this centre.

Yet observe the child's face, turned upwards and pressed so eagerly against the face of the mother. Look at his expression. Is it not something strangely close to – worship? Indeed, if I met someone who did not know what it meant to worship, I could hardly do better than to point to this picture, to this child's face, and to say: "It looks like that."

On the one hand, there is a real religious danger here: the danger of allowing Christ's mother to become an independent centre of religious devotion. But on the other hand, there is something profoundly true and correct in the representation of this child's "worship" of his mother. For no other word comes close to evoking the extent of Christ's devotion to humanity. To speak of Christ's "love" is too hackneyed and half-hearted. When we talk of love, we tend to think of delirious teenagers locked in the obsessiveness of romance, or of a man seducing a woman into his bed, or maybe of an old married couple, contented and at peace. But we would perhaps be closer to the truth if we imagined Christ's devotion to humanity as analogous to the piercing clarity and conviction with which the fundamentalist offers his life to god before going out into the busy street and detonating himself.

I do not mean that Christ is devoted to God in this way, but to us. His single-minded preoccupation with humanity is a kind of madness, a lucid intoxication. To unworthy humanity he ascribes all imaginable worth. As though he valued us – literally, worshipped us – above all other things, even his own life, even the life of God. 

4.

The disturbing political and ideological role of the Virgin of Vladimir in Russian history is completely bound up with what is so pure and so instructive in it: namely, its veneration of the bond between this Child and his Mother. Look at the mother's invincibly tender clasping of her son, and you will understand the Russian people's invincible conviction of an absolute and unbreakable bond to the sacred motherland. For the Vladimir icon is a representation not only of Christ and the Theotokos but also of a transcendent bond between the Russian people and their Mother Russia. 

It is this that makes it possible to comprehend the otherwise quite bewildering way that "Russia" routinely appears in Orthodox theological writing not only as a legitimate contextual issue but as a proper doctrinal topic in its own right. The iconographer was, of course, reflecting this preexisting habit of mind, this tendency to elevate Russian belonging to a transcendent status; but it must still be said that the Vladimir icon – the most venerated image in all of Russia – has burned that conviction on to the Russian imagination for nearly a thousand years. You need only look at the icon to understand why nationalistic sentiment is so closely bound up with the hidden core of Russian religious life; why the history of modern Russian thought is essentially the story of the Slavophiles; and why, for a non-Slavic person, a complete and thoroughgoing conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church proves all but impossible.

5.

The theological intuition underlying the whole tradition of Russian iconography is that there are, really and essentially, only two human faces: the face of Christ, and the face of his Mother. All other human persons have their own peculiar distinctiveness, their own particular faces, to the extent that they participate in these forms. For the Orthodox, it is not Adam and Eve who are the prototypes of humanity, but the New Adam and the New Eve – so that the fundamental human relationship is not that of man and woman (Karl Barth) or husband and wife (John Paul II), but of mother and child. The single form of Virgin and Child is the prototype of every human form: "The divine image in humankind is disclosed and realised … as the image of two: of Christ and of his Mother" (Sergius Bulgakov). 

6.

The truth of this came home to me as I was writing these quiet reflections the other night. My wife and children were away for the weekend, so I had gone out alone to a jazz bar, to hear some music and try a bit of writing. It was approaching midnight, and I was drinking my beer and scratching away with my fountain pen in a crumpled notebook, with a postcard-sized copy of the Vladimir icon propped up on the table in front of me. A pretty girl came over and wanted to know what I was writing. "Are you a music reviewer," she asked. But I had to admit that I was writing about a twelfth-century religious painting. She asked about the picture, and listened to my explanation with keen interest. Then she leaned close to me – quite close – and began to seduce me. I was flattered, but also saddened as I looked into the sad eyes of the Virgin of Vladimir. As though the human body could become an instrument of promiscuity – something freely offered to a stranger in a bar – only by a careless defacement of Her face, Her holy form. "Her face is beautiful," said the girl in the bar as she peered through the haze at the icon on the table, casually brushing my arm. "Like a sculpture." 

When she said that, I loved her and saw that her own face, too, was lovely as a work of art. And so I blessed her with my eyes and walked out in the rain and went home, alone, thinking of how the lines of the girl's face had seemed – just for a second, beneath the smoke and shadows and dim lights – like a lovely, sad quotation of the holy face of the Virgin, radiant though fallen.

7.

"There is only one face in the whole world that is absolutely beautiful: the face of Christ" (Dostoevsky).

An Easter icon

A guest-post by Ann Chapin (click the image to enlarge)

An icon for Pentecost

My friend Ann Chapin, who often contributes to our discussions here at F&T, kindly sent me some photos of her huge and wonderfully vivid icons. Here is her Pentecost tryptych, entitled “The Descent of the Holy Spirit” (each of the three murals is about ten feet tall):

Icons, theology and literature

The new issue of the excellent journal Literature and Theology is specially devoted to the topic of icons in relation to theology and literature.

Essential ikons for theologians

Chris Tessone has a great interest in iconography, and I asked him to come up with a list of essential ikons. So here Chris offers his list of the top 10 (primarily Eastern Orthodox) ikons. For a more detailed version of this list, see the full post at Even the Devils Believe.

1. Christ Pantokrator—this stern Christ is a major archetypal ikon. There are many famous Christs Pantokrator, but this small one held by the monks of Mt Athos is one of my favourites.

2. A fascinating contemporary ikon is that of St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane from the website of St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco.

3. I myself am not fond of highly ornamented ikons. However, among such representations, the Theotokos Nikopoios is one of the most ornamented, with gold and precious stones.

4. The Theotokos Hodegetria, also located on Athos, is a striking representation of the Virgin and the child Jesus.

5. The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow is a treasure trove of incredible ikons and should not be missed. One of the most famous is the 12th-century Spas Nerukotvornyj, or "Salvation Made Without Hands," originally from the Cathedral of the Assumption inside the Moscow Kremlin.

6. Iconography is not a dead art, so I would be remiss if I didn't offer one or two contemporary ikons in the traditional style: one of my favourite ikons of the Theotokos is this one by Italian iconographer Maria Mirea.

7. This St. Nikolas ikon is an example of contemporary Slovak iconography—it is from the Byzantine Catholic Church of Bratislava.

8. Now for a trio of great Russian ikons. First, Christ the Redeemer of Andrei Rublev: tt is a breathtaking image, which immediately comes to mind when I think of the word "ikon."

9. The Bogomater Vladimirskaja (Mother of God of Vladimir) is certainly one of the greatest ikons held in Russia, and many Bogomater ikons are based on it.

10. Also held in Moscow's Tretiakov Gallery, the Trinity ikon of Andrei Rublev, considered by many to be the greatest Russian ikon in history, or even the greatest work of art in history. I had the great fortune of seeing it up close and personal in the Tretiakov—it is an experience one does not forget.