Agree with Juliano. My first listen was while going about my daily tasks. A second listen in the stillness at home after Friday evening Mass (lingering over the visual image) was just the thing! And I SO love that the post is framed as initiation and meditation. Listening, I began to think: we hear so much about becoming a welcoming church. (Like it’s never been done.) And into what are we to be welcomed? I don’t want or need a church made in my image, or of this moment only, I could invent that—or a committee could—and it will age out pretty quickly. Rublev’s sacred artistry, as this meditation shows, provides an apostolic and enduring model of welcome: patiently initiating the faithful into the inexhaustible mysteries in all their richness and beauty. The Trinity beckons! Hearing this meditation I feel welcomed into something greater than myself, without shadow, an unfading hope. Sign me up for the church of the ages!
Thank you for this beautiful expose. For what my two cents are worth though, the single greatest insight I ever discovered on the Blessed Trinity is the almost unknown tradition in the Church that the Holy Spirit is actually feminine. In the ancient Aramaic and Hebrew which Christ actually spoke, She definitely is. The vast majority of Catholics stopped believing such because of historical "male supremacy" (as some would call it), coupled with the ancient feminine forms of said languages being translated into the Greek neuter forms, and thence into the Latin masculine forms. No poetry was ever more lost in translation!
The Augustinian(?) ideal of the Trinity was that of a Lover, a Beloved, and the Love which defines and binds them as one; and, nothing in all of creation bears greater witness to this than the marital unity of a man and woman, who were explicitly made to the image of God's plurality of Persons in the ancient language of Genesis (I actually wrote a book on this, though it currently needs a publisher). A man is the Lover, made to the image of God the Son. A woman is the Beloved, made to the image of the Holy Spirit, and God the Father is Himself the Pure Act of Love (marital unity) which both defines and perfects the former two in their very existence.
It's pretty self-evident as well that neither a man nor a woman is representative of a complete human nature by themselves: it is only in the unity of marriage wherein a complete human nature can be said to be present. Such is why marriage was always the first and final point of attack of Satan against the image of God in man, as well as the only sacrament even called a sacrament in Sacred Scripture (let alone a "great" sacrament). It is also why St. Paul in 1 Cor. 7 was divinely inpsired to qualify the supremacy of virginity over marriage as being fundamentally due to scandal and "propter instantem necessitatem." Honestly, the greatest barrier mankind has ever had against understanding the Trinity is his own disparagement of marriage in Genesis 3 against the Divine Will: "The WOMAN, that YOU GAVE ME to be my companion, gave me of the Tree."
The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, and He is adored together with the Father and the Son.
Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek may have feminine or neuter terminology to explain Who Is the Holy Spirit, but the Church addresses the Holy Spirit as "He".
Excerpts from Kneeling Vespers:
The Holy Spirit always was and always will be,* for He is with the Father and the Son, One of the Trinity.* He is both Life and Life-giving;* He is Light, and by nature, the Giver of Light;* He is All-Holy and the Source of Holiness.* Through Him we know the Father* and glorify the Son* understanding that the Holy Trinity is a single Power,* Three of equal rank and equally to be worshipped.
Praise the Lord, all the nations;* proclaim His glory, all you people.
The Holy Spirit is Light and Life,* a living fountain of all spiritual reality;* He is the Essence of Wisdom, the Spirit of Knowledge;* He is Goodness and Understanding, the Leader of Righteousness.* He cleanses us from sin;* He is divine and makes us so;* He is Fire proceeding from Fire;* His word is action and the distribution of gifts.* Through Him God’s witnesses, prophets and Apostles were crowned.* Oh, the marvel of this truth! Oh, the marvel of this sight!* Tongues of fire bringing about the distribution of gifts!
Margaret, I did not say the Holy Spirit is not the Third Person of the Trinity. Truth is not limited to our ability to express it in vernacular language, which is why the official stance of the Rome is to simply defer to the vernacular default, as is the case with the current Aramiac traditions in the Church even to today.
You could make the argument that the ideas above are bordering on heterodoxy, but certainly not heresy. All the titles and actions of the Holy Spirit you relate above are compatible with Her being Feminine, and the argument that male and fermale were created according to the the image of the Son and Holy Spirit respectively still stands on it's own merits, regardless of historical perception. The thing is is that the arguments I make above come straight from the natural law and common sense, whereas your argument is to simply insist even louder on the letter of the law which I have already countered. Furthermore, knowing that the Son and Holy Spirit are male and female actually makes the Blessed Trinity substantially more relatable to our knowledge, and thus from an a priori standpoint, increases our ability to know, love, and serve Them, which is the Surpreme rule of Faith of the Church. I already explained why the Church uses the masculine to describe the Holy Spirit. Perhaps you could demonstrate how from an "a priori" standpoint it is impossible that the Holy Spirit is Feminine by nature? The argument of authority does not exist in the vacuum that you are supposing.
It's honestly just a matter of historical semantics. Holy Mother Church has always understood there to be an extremely deep unity between Our Lady and Holy Ghost, and since marital unity is presumably the greatest unity that can exist between multiple persons, and granting the Latin Tradition on the matter, the Church simply used the idea of marriage to testify to their unity.
Interestingly, and to the best of my knowledge, St. Maximillian Kolbe didn't actually like the idea of marriage between Mary and the Holy Ghost (though he used it), because he didn't believe it was enough to explain how deep their unity actually is. Even assuming a spousal relationship, Mary shouldn't have been able to say at La Salette, "I have given man six days to work, but I have kept the seventh day for myself," nor should the "Ave Maria" grammatically and literally treat Mary and Jesus as equals. St. Maximillian rather said that Mary was the "quasi-incarnate" of the Holy Spirit, and that even as she is the created Immaculate Conception, the Holy Ghost is the Uncreated Immaculate Conception.
It honestly begs the question of whether or not the Holy Ghost and Mary could actually be the same Person, especially since the Church has never formally condemned the notion, and Mary checks off on everything the Church already laid down with regard to the nature of a hypostatic union in condemning the Arians, Monothelites, etc. who denied the hypostatic realities of Christ Himself. Basically, If the Holy Ghost was incarnate, She would look, speak, and act just like Mary.
"It honestly begs the question of whether or not the Holy Ghost and Mary could actually be the same Person, especially since the Church has never formally condemned the notion..."
FALSE. That is blasphemy.
The Holy Spirit is True God. He is Eternal, Omnipotent, Good etc. He is NOT a creature. That is Pneumatomachianism.
Even though She is the masterpiece of God, Our Lady is still a creature. She is the holiest and highest of all creatures.
Read True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort.
We took a pilgrimage to Lourdes over Eastertide, and while in France we also venerated the relics of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. I was so happy to see this icon placed just beyond her reliquary in a niche on the wall.
Agree with Juliano. My first listen was while going about my daily tasks. A second listen in the stillness at home after Friday evening Mass (lingering over the visual image) was just the thing! And I SO love that the post is framed as initiation and meditation. Listening, I began to think: we hear so much about becoming a welcoming church. (Like it’s never been done.) And into what are we to be welcomed? I don’t want or need a church made in my image, or of this moment only, I could invent that—or a committee could—and it will age out pretty quickly. Rublev’s sacred artistry, as this meditation shows, provides an apostolic and enduring model of welcome: patiently initiating the faithful into the inexhaustible mysteries in all their richness and beauty. The Trinity beckons! Hearing this meditation I feel welcomed into something greater than myself, without shadow, an unfading hope. Sign me up for the church of the ages!
DEO GRATIAS
A blessed Feast of the Holy Trinity to you!
Dr. Peter, you outdid yourself with this beautiful teaching
Thank you for this beautiful expose. For what my two cents are worth though, the single greatest insight I ever discovered on the Blessed Trinity is the almost unknown tradition in the Church that the Holy Spirit is actually feminine. In the ancient Aramaic and Hebrew which Christ actually spoke, She definitely is. The vast majority of Catholics stopped believing such because of historical "male supremacy" (as some would call it), coupled with the ancient feminine forms of said languages being translated into the Greek neuter forms, and thence into the Latin masculine forms. No poetry was ever more lost in translation!
The Augustinian(?) ideal of the Trinity was that of a Lover, a Beloved, and the Love which defines and binds them as one; and, nothing in all of creation bears greater witness to this than the marital unity of a man and woman, who were explicitly made to the image of God's plurality of Persons in the ancient language of Genesis (I actually wrote a book on this, though it currently needs a publisher). A man is the Lover, made to the image of God the Son. A woman is the Beloved, made to the image of the Holy Spirit, and God the Father is Himself the Pure Act of Love (marital unity) which both defines and perfects the former two in their very existence.
It's pretty self-evident as well that neither a man nor a woman is representative of a complete human nature by themselves: it is only in the unity of marriage wherein a complete human nature can be said to be present. Such is why marriage was always the first and final point of attack of Satan against the image of God in man, as well as the only sacrament even called a sacrament in Sacred Scripture (let alone a "great" sacrament). It is also why St. Paul in 1 Cor. 7 was divinely inpsired to qualify the supremacy of virginity over marriage as being fundamentally due to scandal and "propter instantem necessitatem." Honestly, the greatest barrier mankind has ever had against understanding the Trinity is his own disparagement of marriage in Genesis 3 against the Divine Will: "The WOMAN, that YOU GAVE ME to be my companion, gave me of the Tree."
... again, for what my two cents are worth ;)
The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, and He is adored together with the Father and the Son.
Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek may have feminine or neuter terminology to explain Who Is the Holy Spirit, but the Church addresses the Holy Spirit as "He".
Excerpts from Kneeling Vespers:
The Holy Spirit always was and always will be,* for He is with the Father and the Son, One of the Trinity.* He is both Life and Life-giving;* He is Light, and by nature, the Giver of Light;* He is All-Holy and the Source of Holiness.* Through Him we know the Father* and glorify the Son* understanding that the Holy Trinity is a single Power,* Three of equal rank and equally to be worshipped.
Praise the Lord, all the nations;* proclaim His glory, all you people.
The Holy Spirit is Light and Life,* a living fountain of all spiritual reality;* He is the Essence of Wisdom, the Spirit of Knowledge;* He is Goodness and Understanding, the Leader of Righteousness.* He cleanses us from sin;* He is divine and makes us so;* He is Fire proceeding from Fire;* His word is action and the distribution of gifts.* Through Him God’s witnesses, prophets and Apostles were crowned.* Oh, the marvel of this truth! Oh, the marvel of this sight!* Tongues of fire bringing about the distribution of gifts!
Thank you, Margaret, for chiming in here with the orthodox Catholic teaching.
Margaret, I did not say the Holy Spirit is not the Third Person of the Trinity. Truth is not limited to our ability to express it in vernacular language, which is why the official stance of the Rome is to simply defer to the vernacular default, as is the case with the current Aramiac traditions in the Church even to today.
You could make the argument that the ideas above are bordering on heterodoxy, but certainly not heresy. All the titles and actions of the Holy Spirit you relate above are compatible with Her being Feminine, and the argument that male and fermale were created according to the the image of the Son and Holy Spirit respectively still stands on it's own merits, regardless of historical perception. The thing is is that the arguments I make above come straight from the natural law and common sense, whereas your argument is to simply insist even louder on the letter of the law which I have already countered. Furthermore, knowing that the Son and Holy Spirit are male and female actually makes the Blessed Trinity substantially more relatable to our knowledge, and thus from an a priori standpoint, increases our ability to know, love, and serve Them, which is the Surpreme rule of Faith of the Church. I already explained why the Church uses the masculine to describe the Holy Spirit. Perhaps you could demonstrate how from an "a priori" standpoint it is impossible that the Holy Spirit is Feminine by nature? The argument of authority does not exist in the vacuum that you are supposing.
Interesting perspective but how do you reconcile that with the Church addressing the Holy Spirit as the spouse of the Holy Theotokos?
It's honestly just a matter of historical semantics. Holy Mother Church has always understood there to be an extremely deep unity between Our Lady and Holy Ghost, and since marital unity is presumably the greatest unity that can exist between multiple persons, and granting the Latin Tradition on the matter, the Church simply used the idea of marriage to testify to their unity.
Interestingly, and to the best of my knowledge, St. Maximillian Kolbe didn't actually like the idea of marriage between Mary and the Holy Ghost (though he used it), because he didn't believe it was enough to explain how deep their unity actually is. Even assuming a spousal relationship, Mary shouldn't have been able to say at La Salette, "I have given man six days to work, but I have kept the seventh day for myself," nor should the "Ave Maria" grammatically and literally treat Mary and Jesus as equals. St. Maximillian rather said that Mary was the "quasi-incarnate" of the Holy Spirit, and that even as she is the created Immaculate Conception, the Holy Ghost is the Uncreated Immaculate Conception.
It honestly begs the question of whether or not the Holy Ghost and Mary could actually be the same Person, especially since the Church has never formally condemned the notion, and Mary checks off on everything the Church already laid down with regard to the nature of a hypostatic union in condemning the Arians, Monothelites, etc. who denied the hypostatic realities of Christ Himself. Basically, If the Holy Ghost was incarnate, She would look, speak, and act just like Mary.
It's an interesting study and topic for debate.
"It honestly begs the question of whether or not the Holy Ghost and Mary could actually be the same Person, especially since the Church has never formally condemned the notion..."
FALSE. That is blasphemy.
The Holy Spirit is True God. He is Eternal, Omnipotent, Good etc. He is NOT a creature. That is Pneumatomachianism.
Even though She is the masterpiece of God, Our Lady is still a creature. She is the holiest and highest of all creatures.
Read True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort.
"FALSE. That is blasphemy."
Prove it, my friend. Don't just shout it.
My favorite book growing up :). Have you read Cardinal Newman's "Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine"?
Deo Gratias! What an edifying teaching and beautifully rich meditation!
Thank you Dr. K, that was quite an amazing analysis of the Reblev Trinity Icon artwork. -Blessed Trinity Sunday!
It's even better with a second listen.
Wonderful, Dr K. Love this.
We took a pilgrimage to Lourdes over Eastertide, and while in France we also venerated the relics of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. I was so happy to see this icon placed just beyond her reliquary in a niche on the wall.
All Holy Trinity, have mercy on us! ☦️⛪📿🕯️🔔🇷🇺
Amazing, Peter. Thank you.