Crest in honour of the Holy Trinity hangs in St. John's Chapel (attached to St. Michael's Cathedral).
Fides autem catholica haec est: ut unum Deum in Trinitate, et Trinitatem in unitate veneremur. Neque confundentes personas, neque substantiam seperantes…Ita Deus Pater, Deus Filius, Deus [et] Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres dii, sed unus est Deus. – The Athanasian Creed
Want to see the mystery of the Holy Trinity a bit more clearly? Stand on the shoulders of Saints Augustine and Boethius.
Incidentally, that's the Borromean Link. It's a braid link with three strands such that deleting any one strand unlinks the other two.
ReplyDeleteThere are braid links with this property (linked, but unlinked relative to any one strand) for any number of strands, and even for a fixed number of strands they can be arbitrarily complicated; the simplest (and somewhat uninteresting) is just two rings simply linked. The Borromean Link is the simplest case actually having two unlinked strands.
I like thinking about math in the service of Art and especially Catechesis. This is a nifty example!
Ummm, Belfry. That. is. awesome. I just found my way to: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~spmr02/rings/trinity.html
ReplyDeletewhich suggests that the association between rings and the Holy Trinity in iconography can be traced to St. Augustine's De Trinitate 9.5.7.
Make that 9.4.7.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_III/Doctrinal_Treatises_of_St._Augustin/On_the_Holy_Trinity/Book_IX/Chapter_4