The Trinity and the Arts: Toward a Christian Poetics

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to explore the question of a Christian poetics, and to see what, if anything, the doctrine of the Trinity has to do with it. Our conclusion is that the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being accidental to Christian poiesis, is fundamental to any account of it—if indeed all phenomena are analogues of the eternal phenomenality of the Son vis‐à‐vis the Father, and if all that is made is made through the Son by the power of the Creator Spirit. To this end, however, it is argued that Christian poetics implies a particular kind of metaphysics as well, namely, an analogical metaphysics, which is able to do justice to the interplay of essence and existence in creatures, which is cognate with the aesthetic interplay of form and novelty. The result of these explorations is not only a proposed standard, comprising four theses, for Christian art, but also an ecumenical proposal for how to think about the Trinity (and the Filioque) anew—not by dispensing with Augustine's psychological analogy, but by supplementing it with an artistic analogy, specifically, with the help of the patristic trope of the Son as the Ars Patris in whom the Father eternally delights. The final result is a clearer picture of the role of the Holy Spirit, in God and in creation, and of the spiritual‐poetic vocation of the imago Dei.