The Beauty of the Trinity

What role does beauty play in theological discourse? How does beauty stack up against unity, goodness, and truth? Can something so serious as God-talk be grounded in something so innocuous as beauty? How can we understand the triune God as beautiful? In The Beauty of the Trinity: A Reading of the Summa Halensis, Justin Coyle plumbs the depths of an oft-neglected medieval Franciscan work of beauty referenced in the work’s subtitle to explore some answers to these important questions. Without succumbing to historical clichés or imposing narrow modern stereotypes about beauty, this book reflects on Halensis own “peculiar theology of beauty.” Because of this, Coyle is able to move the conversation about Halensis out of the realm of historical curiosity and into the realm of constructive theology: to conceive of “the relation between the beauty God is and its traces upon creatures” (1). Thinking along the lines of the book’s subject matter, the question of what beauty is interrelates to where and how beauty does its work throughout the text. According to Coyle, beauty is in the divine because it is located within (the “where”) the sacred order of the divine persons and it is relational because of this (the “how”) and can be traced in the trinitarian vestiges of beauty throughout creation. In other words, beauty throughout the Summa Halensis is trinitarian beauty.

To understand beauty as trinitarian, readers need to have a grasp of the notion of transcendentals that governs God-talk in scholastic medieval theology—the One, the True, and the Good. Transcendentals are important because they determine being. When one tries to figure out what something is, they do so by determining how it is simple, good, and true. That is the proverbial measuring stick for understanding something’s being. The debated scholastic question is whether beauty is a part of the transcendentals. If so, how? In its peculiar fashion, the Summa Halensis does not see beauty as a fourth transcendental among the other three; rather, it “identifies beauty with the very taxis of the trinitarian persons” (35). Halensis argues that beauty is the structuring principle of the One, the True, and the Good: “order itself is beautiful” (52). Beauty, which is itself trinitarian, recasts the transcendentals, or in Coyle’s terms “transfigures” them by a “trinitarian motive.” In this sense, the transfiguration is driven by a commitment to trinitarian faith as opposed to being conceptualized using a purely philosophical “disinterested metaphysics.”

What is peculiar about Halensis’ ontology is its ordering of the transcendentals trinitarianly through the notion of beauty. This reflects a Balthasarian move of aesthetic theology, according to which the beholden form reflects eternal depths. As Balthasar illumines, “The appearance of the form, as revelation of the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself to these depths.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Ignatius Press, 2009). The depths of being that is determined by the One, the True, and the Good are not only shown in the form of beauty but are structured by it. Like trinitarian relations, so also with beauty. Coyle writes, “beauty is the ordered interpenetration of the transcendentals” (51). When one is reflecting on the beauty of something that is, they are reflecting on its truth and its goodness as it relates to its unity.

Coyle organizes his book into three parts. The first part lays out  Halensis’ ordering of the transcendentals through trinitarian beauty as laid out above. Parts 2 and 3 concern the Trinity’s beauty ad intra (the operations of God’s triune life “internally”) and ad extra (the operations of God’s triune life “externally”), respectively. First, the Trinity’s beauty ad intra. Beauty for the Summa Halensis names not an attribute of God, like the three transcendentals, but rather names an order, and thus names “the very structure of God” (4). Because the relations of the trinitarian persons are understood within Godself as a relation of origins and processions, Halensis’ trinitarian theology focuses on the “taxis or order” of these trinitarian relations. Coyle writes, “If a God robbed of persons describes a God without order, and if, according to Alexander, the ‘sacred order of persons’ just names divine beauty, then a God who is not three divine persons is a God without beauty. It is a God who is not Beauty itself” (70). The very fact that the trinitarian persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are related to one another by origins shows that the Trinity has an order, and that in this order the Trinity is beauty.

Part 3 moves to the Trinity’s beauty ad extra: how does creation bear traces of trinitarian order and beauty? For this he turns to the classic theological themes of creation, humanity, sin, and salvation.  Most fundamentally, trinitarian beauty orders creational beauty trinitarianly: “A creature is beautiful because it reflects the order of its trinitarian creator” (75). The remainder of the book offers a trinitarian recapitulation of salvation history: sin is antitrinitarian because it disorders the soul and grace is trinitarian union because it reorders the soul and makes it beautiful— “an icon of the trinity” (130).

Coyle’s account of Halensis’ trinitarian theology of beauty according to its own lexical meaning and logic provides constructive value for trinitarian theology today. His argument is simple but profound: “that beauty has something to do with the trinity” (133). In reading Halensis, Coyle shows us that God is not only good, true, and one, but that God is beautiful. And in this, the very structure of the Trinity, and thus, the very structure of being is beautiful because it is trinitarian. The Summa Halensis provides an exciting way to ground theology, ontology, and epistemology that is steadfast to trinitarian faith while also providing joy and pleasure in its beauty. As Ralph Waldo Emerson states, “beauty is its own excuse for being” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems, J.M. Dent, 1914).

Elvir Ciceklic is a PhD student in practical theology at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

Elvir Ciceklic

Date Of Review:

April 26, 2024