Charlie Stewart
AP English Lit Cº
15 Nov 2016
The Trinity of Beloved
The Nicene Creed, a Catholic Christian statement of faith, states that the Holy Trinity can be explained by processions: “The Father generates the Son; the Son is generated by the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.” In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sethe’s family is the Holy Trinity: Sethe the Father, Denver the Son, and Beloved the Holy Ghost.
Sethe is the Father of the Trinity, with Beloved and Denver following from her as the Son and Holy Ghost follow from the Father. When Paul D is talking to Sethe about Sweet Home, Sethe talks about her decision to run away to 124: “I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that…But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between” (190). Sethe knows that she is…show more content… Not only is Denver deeply attached to and descended from Sethe, but she also is closely connected to Beloved as well, as demonstrated by her need to take care of Beloved when she comes out of the river: “Denver tended [Beloved], watched her sound sleep, listened to her breathing … So intent was her nursing, she forgot to eat or visit the emerald closet (64). The Nicene Creed states that the Holy Ghost “proceeds from the Father and the Son”. Denver proceeds from Sethe in the more obvious physical sense of birth, but she also proceeds from Beloved. Beloved became a part of her through her haunting of 124, which drives Denver’s need to care for her when she reappears. Denver’s connections to both Sethe and Beloved prove her role as the Holy Ghost of the Beloved Trinity.
In Beloved, the main characters form a classic Holy Trinity. With Sethe as the Father, Beloved as the Son, and Denver as the Holy Ghost, the Trinity is
