Everything went back to the definition of the Holy Trinity, practically the fate of all Eastern Christianity rested on this, indeed even Christianity itself rested upon the extraordinary concerns surrounding this fundamental question; as a rule, things don’t usually occur in this way, because as a rule the fundamental questions only crystallize later, only later is it usually clear what is being debated, why certain principles are being put forward, why the quarrels, the schisms, then the heaps of massacred bodies; the questions occur generally speaking later; but this was not the case of the Christian religion of love, as here the discussions had been taking place since the fourth century, and finally it was because of this that the theological schism, made official back in 1054, occurred, although there actually had been an Eastern and Western Church since the creation of the Eastern Roman Empire, there was Rome and Constantinople; and this Eastern Church, to speak of only that now, this Constantinople, was none too reassured, neither at the time, nor later on, when an ultimate decision was reached as to the nature of the Almighty, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and what there even was in this realm that surpassed the human, because they had to make up their minds — on every occasion, once and for all — six times; the problem was that human beings — that is the Fathers of the Church, the patriarchs, metropolitans, bishops, priests of the synod, in a word the local and universal synods, and so on, the great Saint Athanasios, Saint Gregory of Nazianos, Saint Basil the Great, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa — had to make a decision in a question that clearly surpassed not only their extraordinary talents but their human capacities, because when the time came to say what was the relation between the Lord, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, everything came into it: and there were the subtle and heretical distinctions of the most outrageous versions, heresies so subtle that it is not easy to comprehend the large quantity of blood, symbolic or real, that was periodically shed due to one or another miniscule detail of the so-called theological question, that was shed, therefore, because of the teaching of the Holy Trinity: for there were those who argued for the Lord alone, and there were those, too, who acknowledged the uniqueness and primacy of Christ alone, then there were those who argued for the precedence of the Lord and Christ together, but there were finally those who advised for the equal standing of all three, that is of the Lord, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and this school of thought was finally victorious, together with that peculiar formation which became the central tenet of Christian belief: the single essence of the Father but in three forms, so that there followed afterward, for those who can even understand it, the so-called filioque controversy, i.e., as to whether the Holy Spirit originated only from the Father, or from the Son, and this split the Christian faith into two once and for all, and there arose the Orthodox world of belief — this colossal mysterious Byzantine Empire — which remained for a thousand years even after the great collapse of the West, where there reigned a life subordinated simultaneously to the desire for pomp and sensual hunger, and additionally, with equal justification, a life subordinated to a theologically driven faith; and where the essential, earth-shattering
attack on the entire Orthodox congregation following the Seventh Ecumenical Council no longer threatened this fundamental tenet of faith, which of course did not at the same time mean that the question was resolved, the question was not resolved; every decision concerning the Lord, as well as that of the relation between Him and the incarnation as Christ and, respectively, between Him and the Holy Spirit, remained in an unapproachable obscurity, or looking at it from the viewpoint of the later materialist heretics, on the terrain of a fairly indefensible logical failure, where only deference to authority and faith itself was of assistance, that is, as for the most profound saints of the Church, from St. John Chrysostom of the Golden Mouth to St. Sergius of Radonezh, the question of the nature of the Trinity never was problematic, it was and remained a problem only for the others, that is for the world, for all those who were not capable — since they were not capable of what the saints were — of seeing the embodiment of the Creator, of seeing the mystery of the Trinity, of not questioning but experiencing, experiencing for themselves and perceiving the extraordinary concentration of the created and the non-created world, the godly atelier and the supremacy — stunning, miraculous, inexpressible in words — of the strength of creation; allowing the decisions to be rendered upon them, through them, through their saintly beings, by the Church, that is the Holy Synod, as to what the tenet of faith was that could no longer be cast into doubt concerning bodily manifestation, concerning the mystery of the Trinity and its depiction, because it could be depicted, they concluded after some debate — a debate that did not forego destructive resolve — yes, they concluded that it could be depicted, yes, Christ the Son, the Embodiment of the Lord, it could be represented — as the order of the Ecumenical Council of One Hundred Articles conceived it — if Abraham had seen them beneath the oak-tree at Mamre, which indeed he had, then they could be represented, namely if Abraham saw Him in the depiction of the three angels, as was repeated by thousands and tens of thousands, from Athens to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Radonezh, then nothing could be said against the idea of the holy icon-painter depicting the Trinity, strictly on the basis of the prescription of the Council; and in the practical sense, on the basis of the descriptions of the monks of Podliniy, according to them, only Abraham, the most ancient of ancients, once, under Elonei Mamre, that is under the oak of Mamre, saw the three winged youths, sat them down at a table, and feasted them; Sarah’s future was discussed, then after a similarly interesting dialogue between Abraham and the Lord during His celebrated appearance as the Three Angels on the topic of Sodom and Gomorrah, at the end of it, there was, briefly, a promise, that namely if He, the Lord, should find ten innocent people there, pure in soul, then He would show mercy to Sodom and Gomorrah, although inasmuch as later on he does destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, the conclusion can be reached that the Lord did not find even ten innocent people pure in soul in this Sodom and Gomorrah, but enough about that, let us return to the point where after this memorable dialogue, everyone went about their own business, the Lord in some form or another — contradictions arise in the relevant traditions as to what this form was — He went on toward Sodom and Gomorrah; Abraham could have reflected for a long time on what he saw and whom he saw, and what had been said to him under the oak, well then, after all this, from this renowned encounter of Our Father with Abraham, from this meeting’s sacred Ordinance preserved namely in Moses 1:18, the precept of the Synod was established as such, after a good few hundred variations — in consequence of which, the divine grace descended upon Andrey Rublev, and his gentle hand and his humble soul, through the agency of his continuous prayer, and from the inspiring strength of the Unnamable Himself at the commission of Abbot Nikon of Radonezh, in memory of St. Sergius, it bore the title of “The Holy Trinity” and came into being, and was preserved, the extraordinary news of which, like a kind of storm of beauty, swept across the whole of Russia, so that Dionisy’s imagination burst into flame a generation later when a copy of the Rublev perfection was commissioned on behalf of a church now unknown to us, and Dionisy set to work, he and no other, because, although it cannot be authenticated that the author of the copy in question could only have been Dionisy, at the same time, the thought that it could have been anyone else: say, one of his followers or someone from the artel of Dionisy, is inconceivable — it is inauthenticable and impossible — for this painting, which turned up later in the Tretyakov Gallery via a path equally unknown and which, thanks to the auspices of a traveling exhibition, arrived in Martigny, Cannes, and then Barcelona, some five hundred years later, was in its essence such a perfect copy of the perfect original, any painter less talented than Dionisy could not have been capable of it, either in that period or any other; after Rublev a magnificent artist such as Dionisy had simply not turned up for a long time, so that it was only he, and he alone, with nonetheless extraordinary help, namely that the
condition of the fulfillment of the commission was nothing else than Dionisy receiving assurance that he could inspect the Rublev original without being disturbed, so that Dionisy must have had to spend a very long time in the Church of the Trinity — in the monastery of St. Sergius in Radonezh — for he would need a very long time to draw near to the spirit of this master-work, the spirit of Rublev, and to draw near to the presence of that which the icon of the Trinity on the iconostasis, located in the first space to the right of the Royal Gate, reveals, inasmuch as not only was it necessary to take within a hair’s breadth the measure of the outline of the figures and all the items depicted in the icon, not only did he have to study the forms, the sketching, the placement, and understand the colors and the proportions, but he had to be able to pledge himself as well to the task, for he must have been aware, while in the midst of contemplating the icon, of the dangers inherent in the task: if word got out about someone, even about Dionisy himself — this celebrated icon-painter of the fifteenth century — that he was not worthy of the preparation of the copy of the Radonezh original, for surely Dionisy knew better than anyone else that if the soul did not feel what Rublev did in that time, then he himself would certainly end up in Hell, and the copy would come to nothing, because it would be just a lie, a deceit, a mystification, just an ineffectual and worthless piece of trash, which would then be placed in vain in the Sovereign Tier of the church’s iconostasis, in vain would it be placed there and worshipped, it would not help anyone and would only lull them into the delirium that they were being led somewhere.
He went to get the linden himself, and as a matter of fact, he really would have liked to complete the entire commission on his own, but the others in the artel — among them his son Feodosiy — were convinced that the master did not wish to work alone, for surely they could, just as they had been doing for years, help him out with this or that, finally — already this was somewhat typical of the era as a whole, and many such matters were similarly concluded out of a love of comfort — it was permitted, and so they allowed him to select for himself the linden wood best suited to the original Rublev; but already they did not allow him to squander his sacred gift on completing the planing, the joining, and the gluing of the icon board, or the formation of the two sponki, that is the two crossbars crafted from beech wood, whose function it was to hold the board together, as well as the hollowing out of the space for the two sponki, the so-called “sponki vrezniye vstrechniye,” they did not allow him to complete this work alone; there first came, accordingly, someone who sawed and planed and hollowed and fitted and glued and assembled the icon board and tautened the tightening bars, then someone came who completed the work pertaining to the sponki, then the polye was created to demarcate the border formed by the luzga — that is the border-area beveled inward — and the kovcheg — done by the one who was best at this — followed the direction of the luzga, already drawn; deepening the paintable surface, as it were framing it; because just as in the case of all other icons, the very first order of business was to ensure that the polye, the luzga, and the kovcheg were in good order, moreover in this particular case it was also mandatory for all three parts to correspond to a hair’s breadth to the original, that is to say the polye had to be in the same place and of the same extent, the luzga had to be beveled in the same way and at the same angle, and at last the kovcheg had to be as deep and as straight as related by the descriptions of the original in Radonezh, so that after this the priming-master of the artel could take up his work and with his assistants prepare for the canvas that would be glued onto the surface to be painted; the levkas — that is the diluted glutinous liquid — mixed with chalk dust, was applied, in this case, in exactly eight layers, to the icon board, and when finally the last layer of levkas had dried, and it had become as smooth and clean as it possibly could, then there came the znamenshchik, the composition master, who was one of the most important personages in the artel, and especially here in the artel of such a famous painter, for he was the one who, for instance, could now, upon the surface of the completely dried levkas, sketch in, following the outlines of the Radonezh drawing originating from the Master’s hand, with unerring assurance and fidelity, the three angels, infinitely gentle, with their enormous wings, gathered around the table; and behind them the outlines of the church, the tree, and the cliff, the table with the chalice and the platter filled up with veal; the entire artel stood behind his back with bated breath, as his instrument, the grafia, did not quiver even once in his hand; all of this, of course, from the assembly of the icon boards to the work of the znamenshchik proceeded self-evidently in such a way that it was not just the assistants and master of the artel who observed each other, but at each individual phase of the work the Master himself stood behind the backs of those who were working, and it remained so in the following phases up to the end, for this was not just any old work; the Master observed from behind to see if the paints, that is the lapis lazuli, the vermilion, and the rust and the malachite and the white, indeed, even the beaten egg-yolks corresponded exactly to that which had been chiseled into his memory as he stood immersed before the Radonezh original for all time; he stood there at the back, and he prayed, while first the lichnik and the dolichnik set to work, painting what was entrusted to them; the lichnik, in this case, exceptionally, just the arms and the legs instead of the face, the dolichnik, however the khitons and garments — and no matter, the Master governed every movement, practically guiding the hand of the lichnik and the dolichnik, so that it could be asserted with confidence that the Master himself had done everything from first to last, for it was evident that his assistants in the artel were obedient to his volition — namely, through the Master’s prayers, the volition of the Highest — until the famous copy reached the phase where there was no longer any intermediary assistance, where the Master could not entrust the task to another, where he himself had to take the brush, dip it into the paint-stained dish, and paint the faces, the mouths, the noses, and the eyes and, although according to the accustomed order of things as the last great phase of the painting, at this point, the appropriate master would have followed next in painting the outlines, he did not, as the Master insisted that he himself would lay down the outlines of the asisti and the dvizhki, but at that point he prayed much more intensely, he recited the Jesus prayer, for perhaps he was thinking that in this too he should trust in tradition, and one must believe that Andrej, at all times, but especially while working, had recited this Jesus prayer to himself, he could hardly do otherwise as he worked, not only that, he didn’t even stop praying, not taking his eyes off the icon for a second when he stepped aside for the assistants to put on the olifa, the transparent protective layer which, from this point on, had to protect all that had come into being so far, for it had come into being, said the people in the Master’s artel happily, their eyes sparkling, the copy of the Rublev icon is completed, here before us again is the Holy Trinity, and whoever was able to come from the neighboring monastery, they looked at the icon, and they couldn’t believe their eyes, because they were seeing the exact same thing, not a copy, and not an icon but the Holy Trinity in its own radiant beauty — the Master only stepped back from the workshop of the artel when the last layer of the olifa was being applied, and he stood before the completed icon, looking at it for a long time, then suddenly turned on his heel, and no one even saw him, in the time to follow, even cast the slightest of glances at the icon ever again; however, he had to have been there when the patron placed it in his own church, had to be there when the bishops consecrated it, had to stand there and listen as the bishops, after the opening prayer of the sanctification of the icon and the Sixty-Sixth Psalm, sang Our Lord, Our God, Who art praised and exalted in Thy Holy Trinity, hear our prayer, and send Thy blessing upon us, and may the icon be blessed and sanctified through the holy water, to venerate Thee, and bring salvation to Thy poor people — he heard this, he watched as the bishops consecrated the icon, he listened and he watched all of this, and
he crossed himself and he said Amin, then immediately after that, Gospodiy pomiluy, and Gospodiy pomiluy, and Gospodiy, Gospodiy, Gospodiy pomiluy, but he was troubled, and he did not reply when later people went to him to express their recognition and wonderment, he was silent that day and he was silent for weeks on end, and every day he went to confession, finally completely withdrawing from life, and from that point on whoever, whether from curiosity or ignorance, dared to speak in his presence of how splendidly he had painted Rublev’s Holy Trinity either risked having Dionisy gape at him in incomprehension, questioningly like someone who does not understand what is being talked about, or — and this was principally before his death, at the time when he painted the Blagoveshchenskaya in Moscow — the celebrated icon-painter of his age would suddenly turn pale, his face distorted, and with enraged eyes would scream inchoately at the top of his lungs at his understandably terror-stricken interlocutor — except if it was his son who was asking, for until the very last moment he always forgave him for everything.
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