![]() (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. 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. 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. You can see how the story resonates with trinitarian themes. And who are these travellers? Are they human, angelic, divine? Certainly they bring the promise of the miraculous birth of a child. Are there really three visitors, or only one? The text jumps between both possibilities. It is certainly a strange story, full of suggestive ambiguity. Rublev is by no means the first Christian to have taken this story as a foreshadowing of the Trinity. Now: back to this strange tale in Genesis 18 about Abraham, Sarah, and the three mysterious visitors. 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. 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. 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).Īny 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. 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 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.”īut 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. ![]() 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. It was painted in the late 14th century by Andrei Rublev, a monk at the monastery of Zagorsk, near Moscow. Here is one of the most famous of all icons. In his brilliant reflection on contemporary culture, Lost Icons, Rowan Williams situates this “iconography” “in the complex realm of public presentation … the marketing of personalities.” It is a travesty, he observes, of the “traditional icon of the Eastern 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. 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |