Scutum Fidei - Variations

Variations

Some variations of the Shield of the Trinity diagram are shown in the image below:

A shield-shaped version of the diagram placed on a red shield (heraldic "gules") was attributed as the arms of God (and of the Trinity) by heralds in 15th-century England and France. The "banner of the Trinity" which Jean Le Fevre, Seigneur of St. Remy, and Jehan de Wavrin attest that Henry V of England displayed at Agincourt would have been the same (but with the emblem on a red flag instead of a red shield). This coat of arms was given the following heraldic blazon in "On Sacred Heraldry" by E.L. Blackburne (attached as Appendix II to Emblems of the Saints, By which they are Distinguished in Works of Art by F. C. Husenbeth, edited by Augustus Jessopp, 3rd.ed. 1882):

Gules, an orle and pall Argent, conjoined and surmounted of four plates, occupying the dexter and sinister chief and the base and fess points respectively; the first inscribed "Pater", the second "Filius", and the third "Spiritus Sanctus", the centre "Deus"; the connecting portions of the orle between them having the words "non est", and those of the pall "est".

The diagram on a blue shield (heraldic "azure") was the coat of arms of the Priory of Black Canons (monastery of Christ Church) near Aldgate in the City of London (see also the 15th-century coat of arms attributed to St. Michael the Archangel and the modern coat of arms of the Anglican diocese of Trinidad shown below). Two of the 13th-century manuscripts have the diagram on a green shield (heraldic "vert"), which is also found in the coat of arms of Trinity Parish, Jersey shown below. Green is the color of Trinity Sunday or the Trinity liturgical season in some traditions.

Other variant forms of the diagram have the lettering on nodes and links with a yellow background color (instead of white), since "or" (i.e. gold/yellow) is the other heraldic "metal" color. So the arms attributed to St. Faith in late medieval England consist of a diagram with lettering on yellow, placed on a red or blue shield, while the parish of the Forest, Guernsey uses a diagram with lettering on white or yellow nodes and links, placed on a green shield.

In the Middle Ages, the shield-shaped version of the diagram was sometimes imagined as a protective shield wielded by the Archangel Michael, or by an ordinary soul, in the spiritual warfare against dark forces described in Ephesians chapter 6 (as in the c. 1260 allegorical illustrations in manuscripts of Peraldus' Summa Vitiorum and the De Quincy Apocalypse).

A symmetrical rounded form of the diagram with one vertex up and two down was apparently popularized in the modern period by the Audsleys' Handbook of Christian Symbolism; this rounded form also occurs with one vertex down and two up. The outer node captions can be reduced to simple initials ("P", "F", and "SS"). On the coat of arms of Trinity Parish, Jersey shown below, all four node captions are reduced to single initials, and in some late medieval English church decorations (such as the bench end at Holy Trinity church, Blythburgh, Suffolk and the font at St John the Baptist church, Butley, Suffolk) the four connected circles are intended as a symbol of the Trinity even when all text is omitted.

Obviously, many further slight artistic variations can occur in the relative sizes of nodes and links, their exact placement, in lettering styles, in further decorative elaboration, etc. Occasionally one or more of the outer nodes is drawn as a non-circular shape to fit within a space allotted.

Also, the diagram can be color-coded in order to bring out the interrelationships between its elements more clearly; in the version included above, the positive or asserting parts of the diagram are shown in black, while the negative or denying parts of the diagram are in red. This is similar to the version of the Shield of the Trinity present in a 15th-century stained glass window in St. Peter and St. Paul church, Fressingfield, Suffolk, England (where only the positive or asserting parts of the diagram are shown — see link below).

Finally, a version of the diagram with translated English-language captions is shown in the illustration above. (For simplicity, the definite article could also be left out of the English translations of the outer node captions, as in the next illustration below.) In the Middle Ages, Latin was the liturgical language and main language of scholarship of Western Europe, so that Latin captions were then most often used (but at least one old rendition of the diagram in another language is attested in the c. 1260 Anglo-Norman French allegorical illustration in the De Quincy Apocalypse).