The Rublev Trinity // Iconographic Tradition and the Individual Talent

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By Daniel A. Siedell

“There exists the icon of the Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefore God exists.” This remarkable statement by Fr. Pavel Florensky, Russian Orthodox priest, mathematician, art historian and martyr, is not the kind of apologetic strategy that Christians in the West are used to. To say that our tastes run toward the intellectual is an understatement. Whether we prefer the elegant Aristotelian cathedrals of the Scholastics or the sturdy Foundationalist bunkers of the Biola School, Christian apologetics in the West is a rational sport. To our western ears, Florensky's argument sounds woolly, mystical, or patently irrational. This is so not simply because we have inherited a very different tradition of apologetics, we also, perhaps more importantly, have inherited a very different tradition of art.

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