Old Testament Trinity, c. 1420s
(Wood Tempera, 142 x 114)
BY Andrei Roublev
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The point of departure for “Gomorrah” was Andrei Roublev’s 13th Century Russian icon, the Old Testament Trinity. In the painting, the three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre are seated in a semi-circle around a table that bears a sacrament. In the background are bare indications of a tree (the terebinth or oak of Mamre) and a human dwelling (not a tent but a columned house, its window and door opening out into the bright sunlight from an interior that houses darkness). Roublev’s Trinity can be inexpressibly comforting. As the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky writes: “amid the restless conditions of his time, amid the strife and internal dissension, universal savagery and Tartar raids, amid the deep peacelessness that ravaged Russia, an infinite, imperturbable peace… was revealed to Roublev’s sight,” the “inexpressible graciousness of the mutually inclined figures.” And yet for all this radiance, this incontestable grace, it is still possible to be shocked by an unwilled memory the icon does not picture — like a prefiguration of the savagery in Roublev’s day and every day, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for which the miracle at Mamre was the prelude.

The name “Gomorrah” means “hidden” or “submerged,” and of Gomorrah’s history almost everything is submerged. Of Sodom we know a little, of Gomorrah almost nothing. Abraham is justly celebrated because he bargained with God for the survival of Sodom: if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city would not be destroyed. Was Gomorrah included in the negotiation? By any reckoning, God did not keep his bargain. When two of the three angels arrived in Sodom and were attacked by a mob, they responded by destroying both Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Lot and his daughters were saved. Lot’s wife was lost because she looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. The just were never numbered. The angels never visited Gomorrah.

Later “Gomorrah” became a name for other catastrophes — in World War II, the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg was code-named “Operation Gomorrah” — but in Genesis, Gomorrah is never more than an afterthought. How to hold the eternity at Mamre and the destruction of Gomorrah in a single thought? I wrote “Gomorrah” because I was unable to hold eternity and the destruction in one thought, and because paradoxically this inability conferred a surprising freedom. I no longer knew what to think. For me, “Gomorrah” has become a name for this freedom that compels me not to know what to think.