IN THE COMMUNION OF ONE LOVE

See the Trinity – said Saint Augustine – and you see love. A love that has revealed itself throughout history (first reading), which wants to reach the ends of the world (Gospel), to finally dwell in the heart of every man (second reading). The Father’s love is a pilgrim love in that it seeks a human partner. History thus becomes the place of a possible encounter where the believing gaze captures his actions. In Jesus of Nazareth, who faith recognizes as the Son of God, love instead has the traits of solidarity. A solidarity that has opened access to Trinitarian life for all humanity. With the Spirit, love becomes maternal. Diadochus of Photike wrote that the Spirit “behaves like a mother who teaches her child to call “dad” and repeats this name with the child until it leads him to the habit of calling even sleep “dad”. Looking at the Trinity we learn to recognize that everything flows from the Father as pure gratuitousness (cf. Jas 1,17), that everything is welcomed and returned by the Son in a gesture of infinite gratitude, that the Spirit is the eternal breathing between the Lover and the Beloved. Love like this has been poured into our hearts (cf. Rom 5.5), so that we can say the love of God structures the human person on the model of Trinitarian relationships. Every man or woman is therefore called to free and total self-giving, to communion in difference and to a capacity for openness towards others without prejudice. Let us look for a moment at the famous fresco by Masaccio, the Trinitas in cruce that we find in Santa Maria Novella (Fi). It must be remembered that for Masaccio painting is much more than a representation of reality: painting is thought that the image represents plastically and visibly with line and colour. He was a philosopher of morality, not of science, like Paolo Uccello, who had an obsession with perspective, and much less a metaphysician like Piero della Francesca. The composition presents a double movement: ascending (from the skeleton to the eternal Father) and descending (from God, to the crucified Christ, to the bystanders). With the first movement a sort of path towards salvation is traced. From the reflection on the vanitas of existence (see the funeral warning: «I was already what you are and what I am you have yet to be»), through the passage of death (skeleton), in a spirit of faith (the two praying sideways, on their knees and with hands joined), and with the intercession of the saints (Mary and John, the beloved Disciple), the human spirit reaches Trinitarian peace. This ascending movement is possible because God descended towards man in Jesus. Here then is the second movement that starts from the Father, in the Spirit (dove) to reach man through Christ. Masaccio reminds us of an important theological reality: the Trinity is a dogma. Dogma is born from revelation and revelation always takes on a certain, defined and true space. This space is the perspective one of Brunelleschi’s architecture. Masaccio’s genius reaches its peak here because he iconographically translates one of the greatest Christian truths: the cross is the historical place of the Trinitarian manifestation.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey