Ask a Catholic priest which Sunday is the most daunting one to preach on, then there’s a good chance he’ll say Trinity Sunday. There are two obvious dangers when it comes to preaching on Trinity Sunday. The first is for the preacher to deliver a perfectly orthodox sermon, but one that uses so much abstruse theological terminology that only a trained theologian could hope to follow it. The second danger is that the preacher tries too hard to deliver a simple and engaging sermon, and in the process inadvertently commits some major heresy.
In his book <em>The Radiance of Being</em>, the Catholic author and publisher Stratford Caldecott observed that: “Year after year, Christian preachers get up in the pulpit and try to deliver a sermon on Trinity Sunday. Sometimes it is a lamentable failure. Occasionally it seems they are embarrassed about the wonderful doctrine of the Trinity. They certainly seem to struggle to put into words how one God can be three persons. Perhaps they feel a bit like quantum physicists, trying to explain to laymen how light can be a particle at the same time as being a wave.”
Caldecott went on to describe one of the major reasons why both priests and lay people find it so hard to engage in Trinitarian theology: nominalism. Nominalism is a philosophical theory that posits that only individual things exist. For example, according to nominalism, there is no such thing as human nature, since if human nature existed it would be common to many things (ie to all human beings) rather than something that existed as an individual. To say we belong to the species “rational animal” is to say nothing at all – as the 11th-century monk Roscelin of Compiègne put it, such sayings are just flatus vocis (politely translated as wind of the voice).
From the 14th century onwards, nominalism became increasingly popular. According to the Franciscan friar and nominalist William of Ockham, in explaining any phenomena, nothing is to be gained by positing the existence of entities such as “humanity”, so according to Ockham’s famous razor, such entities should be discarded.
Nominalists of course recognise that we can categorise things. For example, we can distinguish human beings from dogs, but we don’t need to posit the existence of entities such as humanity or caninity to do so. It’s just a brute fact that we can make such distinctions.
But if reality consists entirely of individuals so that there are no common natures to study, what else is there left to investigate? The nominalist replies: “We can count and measure things!” Nominalism has thus played an important role in the development of modern science with its heavy reliance on mathematics and mechanistic explanations.
But despite the success of nominalism, it has come at a great price. For example, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, there are three divine persons and only one God. But once one embraces nominalism, it’s hard not to see the doctrine of the Trinity as a kind of mathematical riddle, and one that has very little bearing on how we see reality.
But rather than see the Trinity as a riddle to be solved, we would do well to reject the nominalist principles that make it seem like a riddle in the first place. Once we do this, we can begin to see Trinitarian theology as a revelation of the depth and beauty that is at the heart of reality.
Caldecott thus wrote: “The world must be given back its sacramental quality, its dimension of mystery, which was too hastily stripped from it by the successors of nominalism. All identities – from that of numbers in mathematics to corporeal objects such as apples and pears, and above all human persons – are fundamentally identities-in-relation, existing as gifts one to another, and ultimately as gifts from one divine Person to another. Such a reorientation would spell the final demise of mechanism as the paradigm of cosmic order: the end of seeking to understand a thing by breaking it into parts and reassembling these in a purely extrinsic order.”
Caldecott died in 2014, but these words are a wonderful testament to his Catholic vision. If only every Catholic priest and layman was as excited about Trinitarian theology as Caldecott was. Many of us preachers approach Trinity Sunday with a certain amount of dread, as though it is on us to solve the riddle of the Trinity. But Caldecott offered us another approach: “The Trinity makes sense of human life as a whole. It is the key that opens every lock, an insight that reveals the centre of the universe. It is the most beautiful, elegant, and simple doctrine in the world – a true theory of everything.”
<strong><strong>This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click</strong> <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1">h</a></mark><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">ere</mark></a>.</strong>
