The Liturgical and Iconographic Witness

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not primarily something the Orthodox Church teaches; it is something she does. This file sets out where the dogma actually lives — in the baptismal form, the doxologies, the anaphora, the Trisagion, the feast of Pentecost — and then states the rule of Trinitarian iconography: that the Church may depict only what has been seen, which is why there is one received image of the Three and why the Father is not painted.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Russian practice noted where it differs)

Lex Orandi

St. Basil’s argument for the divinity of the Holy Spirit was, in the end, an argument from the doxology: the Church glorifies the Spirit with the Father and the Son, has always done so, and would be an idolater if the Spirit were a creature (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 10–15, 27.66; trans. NPNF II/8). The Creed of 381 settled the question in the same terms — “worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son” — rather than by defining an essence.

This is the Orthodox order of things. The rule of prayer establishes the rule of belief, and the definitions are the Church saying under pressure what her worship had already committed her to (see Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi). A reader who wants to know what the Orthodox Church holds about the Trinity should attend a Liturgy before opening a manual.

The Baptismal Form

The dogma enters a Christian’s life at the font. The Orthodox form is in the passive: “The servant of God N. is baptized in the name of the Father — Amen; and of the Son — Amen; and of the Holy Spirit — Amen,” with a full immersion at each name. The grammar is deliberate: the priest does not say “I baptize,” because the baptizer is Christ.

Three immersions in one threefold name, three affirmations, one act. Chrismation follows immediately with the words “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” From that moment, everything the Christian does liturgically is Trinitarian in form.

The Doxologies

The Lesser Doxology. “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.” It punctuates every service in the Byzantine rite, closing psalms, litanies, and hymn-sequences. Its form is the outcome of the fourth-century quarrel described in Section 06.

The Greater Doxology, sung at the end of Matins, and the “Glory to Thee who hast shown us the light” that introduces it.

The Trisagion. “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us,” sung three times with the Lesser Doxology. It is read by the Church as addressed to the Trinity — Holy God the Father, Holy Mighty the Son, Holy Immortal the Spirit — and its source is the Sanctus of Isaiah 6:3. Its liturgical origin is given in a tradition that the hymn was revealed at Constantinople in the mid-fifth century during an earthquake, when a boy was caught up and heard the angels singing it. That account is pinned here to its attestation — it is reported in the Byzantine chronicles and in the Synaxarion and is not independently documented — and it is worth knowing precisely because a Christological addition to this hymn, “who wast crucified for us,” became one of the markers of the non-Chalcedonian party and a matter of imperial dispute in the sixth century (see Chalcedon and the Non-Chalcedonians).

The Divine Liturgy

The Liturgy is Trinitarian in its architecture and not merely in its formulas.

It opens with “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” — the only rite in which the Liturgy begins by naming the Trinity rather than by a petition.

The Creed is confessed by the whole assembly before the anaphora, introduced by the deacon’s “Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess” — love first, then confession, and the two presented as one act. The Creed entered the Byzantine Liturgy in the early sixth century.

The anaphora is addressed to the Father. This is the structural fact that most clearly displays the Orthodox doctrine of the monarchy: the eucharistic prayer, in both the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and that of St. Basil, is offered to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The Anaphora of St. Basil opens by naming the Father and moves through a long recital of the Son’s economy; its length and theological density are the reason it is served on the Sundays of Lent and the great feasts (see The Eucharistic Prayer).

The epiclesis asks the Father to send down the Holy Spirit upon the assembly and upon the gifts. That the consecration is asked of the Father and effected by the Spirit — rather than accomplished by the priest’s recitation of the words of institution — is the sharpest liturgical expression of the difference between the Orthodox and the Latin accounts of sacramental causality (see The Epiclesis and the Consecration).

The apostolic blessing of 2 Corinthians 13:13 — “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all” — introduces the anaphora, in the words St. Paul wrote in the 50s.

Pentecost

The Orthodox Church has no separate Sunday of the Holy Trinity. She has Pentecost, and Pentecost is the feast of the Trinity: the day the Spirit was sent, and therefore the day the Trinity was fully revealed. In Russian usage the feast is simply called Троица, “Trinity.” The Latin West, having placed Trinity Sunday on the octave of Pentecost from the fourteenth century, made a doctrine into a separate commemoration; the East kept doctrine and event together.

The Kneeling Vespers served on the evening of Pentecost — the first kneeling since Pascha — carries three long prayers of St. Basil addressed in turn to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, including the Church’s prayer for the departed. It is the fullest Trinitarian prayer in the year (see The Twelve Great Feasts).

Beyond the great feast, the Sunday Midnight Office of the Octoechos consists of triadic canons (triadika), and the Octoechos supplies Trinitarian hymns for each of the eight tones — a weekly, year-round confession in verse.

The Rule of Trinitarian Iconography

The Church’s iconographic practice follows a single rule, and everything else follows from it: the Church depicts what has been seen. The Incarnation is what makes the icon possible, since what was invisible became visible and circumscribable in the flesh (see The Image of God and the Incarnation).

The consequences for the Trinity are exact.

The Son is depicted, because he became man. Every icon of Christ is an icon of a divine hypostasis, and this is the whole burden of the seventh-century and eighth-century argument.

The Holy Spirit is depicted only under the forms in which he manifested himself — as the dove at the Theophany, as tongues of fire at Pentecost — and never in himself, because he did not become incarnate.

The Father is not depicted. He has never been seen; “no man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). The Great Council of Moscow (1666–1667) ruled explicitly against images of God the Father, the “Lord of Sabaoth” as an old man, on precisely this ground. The ruling is clear and it has been widely disregarded in practice: images of the Father as an ancient of days, and the composite “New Testament Trinity” or Otechestvo (“Paternity”) type showing an old man with Christ and a dove, are common in Russian and Greek churches from the seventeenth century onward. Orthodox theologians who have written on the icon — Ouspensky above all — regard these as a Western importation and a doctrinal error, and the Council of 1666–67 is the canonical authority against them. Their persistence is reported here as a fact about practice, not as a licence (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 2 vols., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992, on the Moscow council and the Western influence).

The Trinity is depicted only through Genesis 18. The received image of the Holy Trinity is the Hospitality of Abraham — three winged travellers at table under the oak of Mamre — and its licitness rests on the fact that it depicts an appearance, not the divine nature. Nothing in the image asserts which figure is which; the composition asserts only that three came, and were one Lord.

Rublev

The supreme instance is the icon by St. Andrei Rublev, painted for the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra in honour of St. Sergius of Radonezh. [Disputed: the date. Two datings are current in the scholarly literature: c. 1411, associating the icon with the first wooden church over St. Sergius' tomb, and c. 1425–1427, associating it with the stone Trinity Cathedral built under Abbot Nikon. Neither is documented by a contemporary source, and the literature remains divided.]

Rublev’s composition strips the scene of everything narrative — Abraham and Sarah are gone, the meal is reduced to a single chalice on the table — and arranges the three figures in a circle of inclination, each turned toward the others, with the table’s near side left open. The icon has been the object of an immense interpretative literature, much of it assigning each angel to a specific hypostasis; the assignments proposed are mutually inconsistent, and the icon itself does not label them. That silence is theologically correct: the three are of one nature and are not distinguished by appearance.

The Stoglav Council of 1551 in Moscow, legislating on iconography, directed painters to paint the Holy Trinity as Andrei Rublev and the ancient painters had done (Stoglav, ch. 41). The instruction is the clearest official statement in the Russian tradition that this image, and not the composite types, is the icon of the Trinity.

What the Section Establishes

That the Trinitarian dogma is not a specialist topic within Orthodox theology but the shape of Orthodox life. It is confessed at every baptism, sung at every service, presupposed by the structure of every eucharistic prayer, kept as the greatest of the movable feasts after Pascha, and guarded in the Church’s iconography by a rule about what may be shown. The definitions of Nicaea and Constantinople exist to keep this intact, and they are read correctly only by someone who knows what they are keeping.

References

Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 10–15, 27. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Council of Constantinople I (381). Creed. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great; The Kneeling Prayers of Pentecost. In the received service books.
Stoglav Council (Moscow, 1551), ch. 41.
Great Council of Moscow (1666–1667), acts on iconography.
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel with Elizabeth Meyendorff. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992.
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.