The Beauty of the Trinity

Trinity Sunday is a special one in the Church calendar. On this day we marvel at, and worship, the three and one God: Father, Son and Spirit.

I wonder if you’ve ever had an experience with a piece of art—a painting, a book, a play—and felt you had a transcendent experience? I bet you have, and Trinity Sunday explains why. In viewing beauty, as with experiencing love, the connoisseur is coming in contact with something that lacks a beginning and an end. Art makes us worship—not the object, of course, but the reality that lies beyond the object: the Triune God of the universe.

You see, beauty, especially beauty seen in the arts, is the result of tension of one kind or another. Obviously, the kind of tension that typically comes to mind is that between good and bad, right and wrong: Aslan and the White Witch. Christianity gives a full-throated voice to this tension. While the world was created good, it is fallen—which is to say it’s both broken and rebellious—but Christ has come to restore and redeem creation. In other words, Christ has come to resolve this tension. At least the three Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) agree on this point: Evil is not eternal. It has a beginning and an end. This tension will be resolved. But the Christian faith has a unique claim on beauty specifically, and it’s based on the Trinity.

Before the fall, indeed before Creation, God lived in perfect love, peace, joy and relationship. The Father, the Son and the Spirit were one, yet three. Were God only one—were he a mono-personal being—there would be no tension in eternity past, let alone in the perfect world to come. God is not such a being. While we can affirm the “oneness” of God’s essence, we can also affirm the various personalities of the Trinity. This tension between Father, Son and Spirit is irresolvable. It is the governing reality of the cosmos. Of course, this reality is why we can say that love is eternal. There has always been “love,” a “lover” and a “beloved.”

This is also why Christians can say beauty is eternal. Before the creation of the world, God was not stagnant. He was in a complex and textured relationship with his Trinitarian self. Beauty is eternal because tension is eternal, and tension is eternal because of the interior life of God. When we look at a truly beautiful painting, we appreciate the tension not only between right and wrong, but also between colors, shades, fabrics, etc. These tensions—those that exist apart from sin—allude to the complexity found in the Godhead. All the beauty you see today is inviting you to attend to the heart of reality, the eternal beauty behind all beauty: the Trinity.