Talk:Shield of the Trinity

First half of 19th century
William Hone included in his 1823 book Ancient Mysteries Described a 15th-or 16th-century woodcut incorporating a version of the Shield of the Trinity diagram (which was later reproduced in Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages book ) -- but mainly to mock at the three-faces-on-one-head depiction of the Trinity included at the top of the diagram (a type of Renaissance iconography which is now rejected by mainstream Christian groupings).

Also, Augustus Pugin (1812–1852) seems to have included a very pseudo-Medieval (and not very legible) version of the diagram in one of his books.

The general impression I get is still that the Shield of the Trinity diagram was very rarely actively used as a Christian symbol or teaching tool at that time... AnonMoos 09:14, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Use outside England and France
I haven't been able to come up with much usable information about any use of this diagram outside England and Northern France before the late 19th century. In the book "Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Meaning" by Ottfried Neubecker (1976), there's a photo of a redrawn version (by Otto Hupp) of an illustration from the now-lost late 15th-century (ca. 1490?) Wernigerode/Schaffhausen armorial (probably originating near Noerdlingen) which includes a whole heraldic achievement (with helm, mantling, crown, and crest with dove of the Holy Spirit) -- not just a shield -- presented as the arms of God. However, it's hard to conclude much from just that one item without any context... There's also an article Das "Scutum fidei christianae magistri Hieronymi Pragensis" in der Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen trinitarischen Diagramme by František Šmahel in a book "Die Bildwelt der Diagramme Joachims von Fiore: Zur Medialität religiös-politischer Programme im Mittelalter" (edited by Alexander Patschovsky, 2003), but I haven't been able to access it. AnonMoos 15:54, 22 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Wernigerode armorial now uploaded as File:Wernigeroder Wappenbuch 010.jpg... AnonMoos (talk) 02:02, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * P.S. Image based on Jerome of Prague's work now uploaded as File:Jerome-of-Prague Scutum-fidei-Christianae 15thc.png ... -- AnonMoos (talk) 17:58, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Sherborne missal
The British Library changed the URL, and now has a large pic of Easter Sunday instead of Trinity Sunday, which is much less relevant to this article. Not removing the link yet... AnonMoos (talk) 16:12, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

14th century
According to C. Boutell's work on monumental brasses, the 1383 memorial bronze of John of Campden (or John de Campden), warden of St. Cross, Winchester (who died in 1382) contains a small Shield of the Trinity and Arms of the Passion, one on each side of the effigy. This is the first solid source I've found on 14th-century usage (the whole ca. 1275-1395 period otherwise seems to be a kind of dry spell). A small reproduction is on p. 95 of the Rodney Dennys book. AnonMoos 23:27, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Attempts to use of the structure of the diagram for other purposes
There's information in the Michael Evans journal article and several other places about efforts to use the structure of the "Shield of the Trinity" diagram (i.e. three peripheral nodes and one central node, fully interconnected by six links) for other purposes, beginning as early as a "Shield of the soul" (Scutum anime) which is included in Matthew Paris' Chronica Majora manuscript of ca. 1250. There's also an image of a stained-glass window Shield of Mary available on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/506681385/. However, I'm unsure what if anything to say about such attempts, since none of them seems to me to be very succesful (since few subjects other than the Trinity can usefully be expressed with the particular peripheral-negative central-positive approach of the original diagram, while if all the links are used for positive meanings, then the diagram usually becomes merely a redundant way of expressing tautologies). Certainly none of the attempts has caught on... AnonMoos (talk) 13:49, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * See now image File:Sylva Philosophorum 06 Homo.png... -- AnonMoos (talk) 08:33, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Semi-useless link
A blurry and rather illegible ca. 1400 depiction of the coat of arms of the Priory of Black Canons (monastery of Christ Church) near Aldgate is claimed to be included in Harley MS 7026 f.11r (St. John Writing On The Island Of Patmos, In 'The Lovell Lectionary') at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/illmanus/harlmanucoll/s/011hrl000007026u00011v00.html (not sure they're showing the right page...). AnonMoos (talk) 16:04, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

PNG to SVG conversion
It's been a somewhat lengthy and erratic process, but now all the PNGs generated from a vector PostScript source which were in the 2005-2006 version of the article have been converted to SVG format, except one (the most complex one). AnonMoos (talk) 13:38, 10 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Done. AnonMoos (talk) 17:41, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Association with three-faces-on-one-head
In western continental Europe during the Renaissance there seems to have been some kind of conventional association between the diagram and a three-faces-on-one-head depiction of the Trinity -- see the Simon Vostre book ( http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta03.htm#page_19, http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/Ancient.html ), File:Trinity_by_Jeronimo_Cosida.jpg, etc. However, there's no logical or necessary connection between the two, and this 15th-17th centuries three-faces-on-one-head iconography is no longer really accepted in Catholicism in recent times (and was never really accepted by mainstream non-Catholic groups). In commons:File:Trinidad.jpg, the diagram was painted out and the three-faces-on-one-head depiction left in place, while a strict regard for orthodoxy would seem to demand the reverse! AnonMoos (talk) 16:37, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Another example in. "The Gran Poder and the Reconquest of La Paz" by David M. Guss, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11 (2): 294-328. (2006)  -- AnonMoos (talk) 16:58, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Scandinavia ca. 1800
There seems to have been a minor trend of using modified versions of the Shield of the Trinity diagram as decorations in some Scandinavian churches ca. 1800, as seen in images File:Jhwh landa.jpg and File:Kempele Church Paintings 2006 07 24 C.JPG. However, these Scandinavian church-painters don't seem to have really understood the main point of the overall central-positive vs. peripheral-negative structure of the original unmodified diagram... AnonMoos (talk) 17:46, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Greek
The original Greek phrase in Ephesians 6:16 is τον θυρεον της πιστεως (or nominative case ὁ θυρεος της πιστεως)... AnonMoos (talk) 00:32, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Denver photo
Good photo at http://extras.denverpost.com/media/photos/neighbors/4a9349e27ad5b4e69258da189ff37f83.jpg (for now), but there's not any real source information or way to link to a page that would give information on it, it seems... AnonMoos (talk) 16:27, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Two unknown pivotal individuals
The diagram first appears in a manuscript of ca. 1210, and then occurs in several other manuscripts for the next 50 years or so. It then seems to fall out of use for over a century (as far as the available surviving evidence indicates), before being revived to be used as part of physical church decorations (not just manuscript illustrations) during the 15th century and neighboring decades. The earliest solidly-dated use after the 13th century that I've come across is the 1383 memorial bronze of John of Campden (or John de Campden), warden of St. Cross, Winchester, described in a book by Charles Boutell. So it seems that there were two pivotal individuals -- the person who originally invented the diagram ca. 1200 (by combining the Petrus Alfonsi diagram with the Athanasian Creed), and the person ca. 1375 who plucked it out of old manuscripts and was influential in bringing into somewhat wider use -- but we don't know who either person was, and can't really even make a good guess. In the journal article, Michael Evans speculates about Matthew Paris, but he was likely too young in 1210 to be the original inventor... AnonMoos (talk) 23:29, 29 October 2011 (UTC)


 * According to https://piperline.hamline.edu/ brass rubbings database ( http://sites.hamline.edu/brass/pdfs/n_win-ste_c1382.pdf ), the John de Camp(e)den memorial in Winchester College Chapel may date from as late as 1426, with no solid indication that it's from 1382, so the 14th-century gap remains. AnonMoos (talk) 13:43, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Another 13th-century manuscript diagram (Grosseteste)
I only recently became aware that in a manuscript of Robert Grosseteste's Dicta 95 ("Ambo huius scuti fulget luce inaccessibili"), there's a Shield of the Trinity diagram, given a date of "before 1231". This diagram (in Durham Cathedral manuscript A.III.12, f. 14v) shows the "EST" and "NON EST" text written doubled (going in both directions) for each connecting link, and has "Divina Essentia" in the central node and "Filius Deus et Homo" (as far as I can read it) in the bottom node. A reproduction can be found in John Gage, "Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism" (1999), p. 125. Gage assumes that this means that Grosseteste invented the "Shield of the Trinity", but that seems far from clear-- there's no strong evidence that I can see that Grosseteste was directly responsible for the A.III.12 diagram (Dicta 95 doesn't seem to discuss it directly, to judge by the Bodley 798 (SC 2656), f. 74ra version), and the peculiarities of the node captions of the A.III.12 diagram (which depart from the wording of the Athanasian creed) do not appear to have influenced other versions of the diagram. It's doubtful whether the A.III.12 diagram precedes the Peter of Poitiers / Petrus Pictaviensis Cotton Faustina manuscript B. VII, f. 42v diagram anyway. AnonMoos (talk) 19:42, 7 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Also, according to a footnote in The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora by Suzanne Lewis (1987), the Shield of the Trinity is discussed in a 1230's commentary on Ephesians by Hugh of Saint-Cher ("Postilla super Epistolam Pauli ad Ephesios")... AnonMoos (talk) 21:01, 7 October 2012 (UTC)


 * P.S. A reproduction of the Grosseteste diagram is available on-line in the Google Books version of The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, p. 195 (though too small to read). AnonMoos (talk) 12:37, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Another name
File:Wernigeroder Wappenbuch 010.jpg has "Arma divinitatis" (converting from genitive to nominative case); however, including it in the article would be kind of primary source research... AnonMoos (talk) 16:22, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
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Removed cross template
The Shield of the Trinity is sometimes combined with a cross in various ways (see File:Trinidad-Anglican-Episcopal-Coat-of-Arms.svg, File:Shield-Trinity-Scutum-Fidei-earliest-and-latest-major-variants.svg,, File:Shield of the Trinity diagram - language-neutral concept.svg etc.), but it is not itself a cross, so I don't see a real need to have the large template on this article. AnonMoos (talk) 19:45, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Scutum Dei in 1992 Artificial Intelligence book illustrates IS-NOT-A links
An illustration of a version of the Shield of the Trinity, "proposed to be used by God", is copied in part from the Wernigerode Armorial, circa 1489, and appears in the introductory article "Semantic Networks" in: Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence, E. Y. Rodin, Co-Editor, Pergamon Press, London, 1992. It says the IS-NOT-A ("Non est") Scutum Dei link was "reintroduced" from the divine heraldry in the artificial intelligence work of Scott Fahlman, as a semantic network link in Fahlman's AI system called NETL. The same "Semantic Networks" article appeared in the maths journal Computers and Mathematics with Applications in 1992. (Scott Fahlman also happens to be the original inventor of the computer smiley face " :-) "  --- in early emails, long before emojis.)    72.182.43.183 (talk) 18:44, 2 November 2018 (UTC)


 * The Wernigerode Armorial illustration is File:Wernigeroder Wappenbuch 010.jpg, as discussed above on this page. It's hard for me to assess what relevance that article has to this Wikipedia article until I see it, and I can't promise when that will happen. AnonMoos (talk) 02:33, 9 November 2018 (UTC)