Thought from Trinity Sunday: Contemplation of the Holy Trinity

For the twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner, the beatific vision is ‘God’s perfect self-communication’, ‘the perfect and ultimately the only absolute fulfilment of the spiritual creature’ (Rahner (ed.), Encyclopedia of Theology, 79). Where on this earth can we begin to feel something of this ‘absolute fulfilment of the spiritual creature’? For more than ten years off and on, I have been contemplating the icon of the Holy Trinity painted by St Andrei Rublev (1370-c.1430), and now I have found expression of my contemplation in the words of Gabriel Bunge’s profound meditation on the subject. ‘The meaning and end of Christian life [is] ... communion with the All-Holy Trinity in and through the Holy Spirit’, he writes. ‘What is experienced when this icon is contemplated is ‘my being, my salvation, as the subject of conversation between the Father, Son, and Spirit’  (Bunge, The Rublev Trinity, trans. Andrew Louth: 2007, 111).

The Rublev icon, or the Old Testament Trinity as it is often called, depicts the hospitality of Abraham to three strangers who turn out to be angels (Genesis 18:2–5). Yet the icon is also a depiction of the Trinity as God’s love towards the world, preeminently so according to a decision of the Russian Orthodox church at a synod in 1551: it’s a vision of unanimity and universal love. The spiritual beauty and timelessness of the scene is an image conceived of by a Christian to whom the Christian understanding of the Trinity has been revealed. The story may be from Genesis 18; but the vision is essentially one from the New Testament, not the Old.

Life in the Trinity–St. Sergius monastery emphasized ‘fraternity, calm, love (toward) God and spiritual self-improvement’. The work was painted in about 1410 for the abbot of the Trinity Monastery, Nikon of Radonezh, a disciple of St. Sergius. Russian icon painters before Rublev subscribed to the view that Abraham was visited by God (in Christ’s image) and two angels. Hence, Christ was represented in icons of the Trinity as the middle angel and was symbolically set apart either by a halo with a cross, by a considerable enlargement of his figure, by widely spread wings or by a scroll in His hand. In Rublev’s icon for the first time all the angels are equally important.


The icon is more than theology in paint. It is prayer in paint. This achievement was only possible because of Rublev’s ascetical discipline. Bunge notes that Rublev and his friend and ‘fellow faster’ Daniil, himself an accomplished icon painter, would sit for hours simply contemplating an icon of the Holy Trinity in St. Sergii’s Trinity Monastery. It was this devotion that nourished his soul and prepared Rublev for his greatest aesthetic achievement (Bunge, p. 109). The texts on Trinity talk about the love which fills the Trinity: ‘Trinity is love’, ‘the Son loves His Father, the Father loves His Son’, ‘the Love of the Heavenly Father is Given to the World through His Son’, and so on. Rublev’s Trinity is not only a representation of the three hypostases of God, the triune God, and the symbol of the Eucharist, but it is also an all-encompassing symbol of unity and an image of divine love. ‘There exists the icon of the Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefore God exists’ (Bunge, p. 107). This remarkable statement by Fr. Pavel Florensky, Russian Orthodox priest, mathematician, art historian and martyr, is not the kind of comment that Christians in the West are used to, but it reveals the intensity of feeling that the icon draws out of those who have contemplated its beauty for a long period of time.


For Henri Nouwen, Rublev’s trinity is ‘a holy place to enter and stay within. As we place ourselves in front of the icon in prayer, we come to experience a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table. The movement from the Father [on the left] toward the Son [in the centre] and the movement of both Son and Spirit [on the right] toward the Father become a movement in which the one who prays is lifted up and held secure... Rublev’s icon gives us a glimpse of the house of perfect love.’


Contemplation of Rublev’s Holy Trinity can help fill the relative scarcity of peaceful images on which to meditate in our stressful lives. We need images that bring us peace; images that encircle us with love (we can be more than just witnesses, we can be participants, drawn into the circle of love); images that inspire our prayers and lift us up above the maelstrom and stress of life rather than bring us down to the ordinariness of institutional or personal conflict. If not quite the ‘absolute fulfilment of the spiritual creature’, as Karl Rahner envisaged the beatific vision, it is not far short of it. Thanks be to God.

Update: Rublev by Rowan Williams

One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.

I said, Here is the blood of all our people,
these are their bruises, blue and purple,
gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.

These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust I shall make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birth.

For ever, I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beechmast, never let you forth.

To the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.