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01.  Andrei Rublev: Encircling Peace Amidst Strife

One cannot think of Andrei Rublev, the Orthodox monk who at the turn of the fifteenth century produced this icon near Muscovy, the precursor to modern-day Moscow, without also thinking of his spiritual abba and mentor Sergius of Radonezh. Their stories are as entwined as that of a boy and his father. 

With this in mind, a particular event from Sergius’s childhood is worth recounting. Sergius was a good and earnest student, yet he struggled to read, says his hagiography. But one momentous day a starets, a spiritual elder, visited him and gave him holy bread. From this day on Sergius could read. Christians soon adopted the belief that this visitor was, in fact, an angel. It is not difficult to see possible linkages between this event in Sergius’s life and the icon Rublev created decades later. Notice the Trinity is presented as three angels (the text that informs this image, Genesis 18:2, refers only to “three men”), offering us holy bread. 

The rulers of Muscovy at the time, known as the Golden Horde, were the political descendants of Genghis Kahn, against whose cruelty Hitler’s, for example, pales. Mongol invasions may have been responsible for over forty million deaths. While we do not know how stressful day-to-day experience was for Sergius, he lived under occupation his entire life and certainly would have known about and even seen the cruelty of the Mongolian Empire. 

Eventually the noise and strife were too much for this ascetic, and Sergius retreated with his brother, Stefan, into the dark forests of Makovets Hill, about forty miles north of present-day Moscow, to build a hermitage with his own hands and a church dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Word spread quickly of this compelling holy man of the woods, and before long he was joined by fellow monastics. They too longed for the peace of his sylvan setting, to say nothing of the wisdom and guidance they believed Sergius could give them. At last he relented to be their hegumen, or father superior, and so began Holy Trinity Monastery, now known as The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in Russia. 

To this holy dwelling came the artistically inclined monastic Andrei Rublev. Of specific details about Andrei’s life, little is known. He was likely born in the 1360s and likely died in approximately 1430. He is the most famous Russian painter of medieval icons, and even in his lifetime his work was worth its weight in gold. His contemporaries describe him as unusually focused and deeply thoughtful. 

It was in the midst of the civil strife and onerous military occupation alluded to above that Rublev created this ineffable, radiant image of harmony and unity. In many ways Rublev expressed the longings of his society at the same time he pulled aside the curtain of space and time to reveal the vast unity that is behind all reality—whether we sense it at any particular moment or not. 

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02.  Iconography: Building Windows to Heaven

The quickest route to grasping the meaning of icons is to recognize their most informing theological category, namely, the Incarnation. As surely as God poured God’s self into the material world on our behalf, say the Orthodox, the material world was lifted up and is no longer mere mortal stuff. It is to one degree or another suffused with the holy. Many an Orthodox would nod approvingly at Karl Rahner’s famous quote, “Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God.” The world we inhabit is drenched in grace. 

In this vein icons are not intended as representations of their subjects any more than Picasso’s abstract portraits are intended as realistic depictions of theirs. Whether the figures in icons bear any close resemblance to their historical referents is not the point. The point is the realities beyond and into which we, the gazers, are drawn by the icon. Icons are “windows to heaven,” beyond space and time. It may require some suspension of disbelief (particularly for Protestants), but, if for no other reason than to honor their intention, we must approach icons as containing something of God. They are sacred objects—not to be worshipped, of course (the Orthodox know the first commandment as well as anyone in Christendom)—but certainly venerated. 

And people are drawn to them, not least because of what is called inverse (or reverse) perspective. Whereas in many paintings the vanishing point can be seen toward the top and middle of a work, as, for example, in the distant horizon of a landscape, the vanishing point of most icons is in front of the icon, nearer to the observer than any particular location within the icon. This technique has the effect of pulling viewers in. As we look into icons, we know we are beginning to enter iconic meditation when we wonder whether we are separate from or somehow a part of the image.  

Another peculiarity of icons is those odd-looking faces—transfixed, it appears, and often very solemn. The reason for these expressions is that iconographers deliberately avoid the world of emotion to present a picture of the holy, the transformed, the sanctified. The faces do not look natural because they are not natural; they are otherworldly, heavenly. And when one considers the occasions within scripture when people did not initially recognize the post-resurrection Jesus (think of Mary at the open tomb or the Emmaus sojourn), one can begin to understand the iconographer’s intentions. 

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03.  The Holy Trinity: Cosmic Hospitality

God welcomes us. That, it seems, is a central message of Rublev’s icon. In a world wrought with hardship, where so often we toil for a place to call our own, God says, “Come to me . . . and I will give you rest” (see Matthew 11:28, NIVi). We are at home in the presence of God, and nowhere else. The truth of this statement, unfortunately, does not make it any easier to believe. 

Even if we manage to believe God welcomes us, it is something else entirely to believe the reverse. God is our guest? Let us remember, though, what inspires this icon: Abraham’s hospitality of the three strangers at his Bedouin tent in Genesis 18. Who is the host, and who is the guest? Is the meal on the table—the center of this composition—the Eucharistic feast from the Lamb himself, or is it food we in Abraham’s place have set out for God’s enjoyment (see Genesis 18:5–8)? Are the hands we see in a gesture of offering or receiving? Rublev seems to relish the ambiguity—ambiguity that only increases the back-and-forth relational glory assumed to flow between the Trinity and the Trinity’s beholders. 

The Oak of Mamre, also referenced in Genesis, can be seen in the background. Or is this the Tree of Life? Or does the tree symbolize all of creation, which is perhaps God’s most supreme gesture of hospitality? God made our place just as surely as God made us. (I sometimes like to think of creation as God’s way of setting out a welcome mat at his front door. “Enter,” God says.) We see this same message in the rectangular hole on the front face of the altar table. It represents openness to the world below, some think. Others think it an architect’s square, to go with the long staffs the angels hold, representing God’s yen for, indeed his execution of, order. 

Similarly, the edifice in the background, is it Abraham’s residence or a reference to Jesus’s “In my father’s house are many rooms” (John 14:2)? The stone cliff in the background could be a reference to the mountain where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son in obedience, or it could be another creation reference. 

Most believe the figures sit in creedal sequence from left to right: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Note the shimmering of the outer garment on the Father, its color indistinct, as if between worlds. The earth tone of the Son’s robe is striking in its darkness, by far the darkest area in the image. And note the similar tone of the meal. When we receive of this cup, we feed on “the body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” And the most prominent color among the Spirit’s garments is a beautiful, lively green to remind us, perhaps, that she is the Spirit of Life. All three wear blue, representing the common divinity between them.  

Finally, note the intimate dance between their eyes, which as you widen your view becomes a circular movement throughout the icon—a movement of harmonious love. Dr. Larry Crabb is fond of asking, rhetorically, “When Jesus was on his way to the cross, for what did he pray?” He did not pray, as we may have, for the whole awful mess to go away. He prayed “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21) As we gaze here, we behold a matchless and divine mystery of oneness, and somehow, impossibly, we are welcomed in.