Triradiant Grace, Triradiant Glory
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
Contemporary Ukrainian iconographer Ivanka Demchuk (b 1990) gives us her interpretation of Rublev’s classic The Holy Trinity. Interestingly, Demchuk seems to be applying to Rublev’s original icon the same heuristic that produced the original image. Rublev’s artistic idea — at the time, a striking novelty — was to depict the mystery of the three persons of the Holy Trinity under the guise of Abraham’s three mysterious angelic guests, described in Genesis 18. Under the genius of Rublev’s artistic-theological imagination, almost all of the details of the story dissolved in Rublev’s depiction, leaving only the enigmatic three figures, poised in a precise, unifying flow of attention, bathed in heavenly light, and touching — only with hints and suggestions — the material of earthly existence, and the original details of the narrative setting.
Demchuk has doubled down on this approach. Now, even more details have dissolved. Color itself is lost in a kind of surreal and heavenly overexposure. All that remains are the Persons, seated in heavenly repose: and their quiet contemplation of an Orb (representative of the World to be redeemed by their triunified action), and a rectangle (representative of the tomb beneath the earth, representative of the depths to which the divine superabundance of being would need to penetrate in order to affect its redemption.
Praise the Lord. Praise God in his holiness; praise him in the firmament of his power…let everything that has breath, praise the Lord.
—Psalm 150:1, 6
Trinity Sunday
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever.
Trisagion
The Trisagion (from the Greek meaning “Thrice Holy”) is the Trinitarian invocation frequently repeated in Eastern liturgies, deployed nearly every time the church gathers to pray. (It is also used in the Western tradition, though with not nearly the same frequency). In English, the text of the prayer runs as follows:
Holy God,
Holy and Mighty
Holy and Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.
Naturally, this famous prayer has received innumerable settings in chant, more elaborate sacred music, and contemporary adaptation — in many languages, naturally.
Like the artwork above, our featured video — Arvo Part’s Trisagion for string orchestra — applies the principles of the ethereal music of the thrice holy hymn to the music itself, creating an abstracted and atmospheric piece even more deep and delicate than the original. I can’t do better than summarizing Jeremy Grinshaw’s notes on the piece:
Arvo Pärt's Trisagion (1992) blurs the distinction between evocation and portrayal, expression and imitation. … composed in Pärt's distinctive "tintinnabula" style … the music …. take[s] on a devotional attitude. [He uses] a spare contrapuntal structure rich with religious symbolism. Moreover, the structure and phraseology of the work -- the contours that the lines follow -- are derived in a very real way from a religious text, even though the work is composed for strings only.
Unbeknownst to the uninformed listener, every stop and go in the music is dictated by the syllabic number and accentuation, phrasing, and punctuation of the text [of the Slavonic Trisagion]. To those listeners ignorant of the Slavonic language, this probably has an effect quite similar to that of listening to the Slavonic prayer itself: though words pass by without comprehension, one identifies the devotional feeling and the calm, deliberate declamation of prayer.
