Commontide
Every other Sunday of the Church's year hands the preacher something that happened. Trinity Sunday hands him a confession instead: one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Substance. There is no scene to set, no witnesses to call, no place on a map. Few days in the Western calendar keep a doctrine with no story of its own, and this is the oldest and chief of them.
The day had to be argued into existence. In the eleventh century a petition reached Rome asking for a feast of the Holy Trinity for the whole Church, and Pope Alexander II refused it. His reason was not that the doctrine was small but that it was everywhere: the Roman Church, he said, honoured the Holy Trinity daily by the Gloria Patri, and needed no separate day to do what it already did at every hour. He did not suppress the observance where it already existed. That is the argument the feast had to survive, and it was a good one.
It survived because parishes kept the day anyway. A bishop of Liège named Stephen is credited, early in the tenth century, with composing a full Office of the Holy Trinity; a century and a half later the Micrologus reports that in some places that Office was said on the Sunday after Pentecost, and in others on the Sunday before Advent, and in many places the Sunday after Pentecost remained a vacant one with no proper Office at all. The feast spread the slow way, parish by parish, with no one commanding it. In England it has a particular anchor: Thomas Becket was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the Sunday after Pentecost, 3 June 1162, and the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on him reports, in its own careful words, that "It seems to have been St. Thomas who obtained for England the privilege of keeping the feast of the Blessed Trinity on that Sunday, the anniversary of his consecration, and more than a century afterwards this custom was adopted by the papal Court, itself and eventually imposed on the whole world." No twelfth-century chronicle has been found to confirm it. What is beyond doubt is the consequence: for eight hundred years the English reckoned the rest of their year from this day, and half the calendar carries its name.
Rome came round at last. In the pontificate of John XXII, about 1334, the feast was ordered for the entire Western Church on the first Sunday after Pentecost; no bull for it has ever been identified. In 1911 Pius X raised its rank to the highest the Roman calendar then held.
What the day asked of ordinary people can be read in their own books. About 1390 an English parish priest, John Mirk, wrote a sermon for it that says plainly what it was for: "This fest was ordeynet for þre skylles: for þe trynyte furst fyndyng, for heretykes hegh confondyng, and for þe hegh Trynyte worschypyng." Then, having said so, he told his people to stop trying to work it out: "forto study how þis may be, hit is but a foly; for monnys wyt may neuer comprehend hit." He gave them water, ice and snow instead, and a ring without beginning or end, and the story of a child on the shore emptying the sea into a pit with a shell while a great master of divinity wrote his book on how God is three in one, until the master left off his study and thanked God for the warning. At St Botolph's in London the guildsmen of the Holy Trinity chose this day for their annual assembly precisely because Easter was too crowded, and kept a chaplain to say Mass at dawn so that working men could hear it before work.
The demands grew heavier before they lightened. The 1662 Prayer Book bound the Creed of St Athanasius to thirteen days, Trinity Sunday named last among them, so that once a year the laity stood and said aloud what the whole faith required of them. Fifteen years before that, the ordinance of 8 June 1647 had abolished the whole system of holy days, Trinity Sunday among them by a catch-all clause that never named it, and given English apprentices and servants the second Tuesday of every month instead. The Restoration gave the day back. In the nineteenth century the weight moved out of the pulpit and into what people could carry home: George Herbert's nine lines in three stanzas of three, ending "That I may runne, rise, rest with thee"; Reginald Heber's hymn written for this Sunday in a Shropshire parish and printed after his death under the heading TRINITY SUNDAY; Keble's poem for the day in a book that sold a hundred thousand copies in twenty-five years.
Across six centuries, the day's own teachers say something remarkably consistent, and it is not what a doctrinal feast might be expected to say. Mirk called the study of it a folly. Newman, preaching on this day, told his people to bow down in silent adoration and submit to it. What the feast asks is not that the mind master the mystery but that the heart consent to it, and the collect asks only for that: to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, to worship the Unity, to be kept steadfast in this faith and worship, and to be brought at last to see God in his one and eternal glory.
You will not understand this one. That is not a failure of preparation on your part; it is the shape of the day, and the men who taught it longest said so first. What Trinity Sunday asks of you is smaller and harder than comprehension: that you say the words with the rest of the church, and mean them, and let them stand over a life you are still learning to live. Herbert did not try to explain the doctrine; he asked to be enriched in heart, mouth and hands, with faith, with hope, with charity. That is the whole of what this day wants from anyone. Where in your own life are you refusing to obey until you first understand?
Everything known about this feast before the twentieth century reaches us through a narrow channel, and the honest place to begin is with the channel rather than the story. The pre-1911 chronology given below descends almost entirely from one article: Mershman's entry on Trinity Sunday in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912, which itself cites nineteenth-century liturgical scholarship (Nilles) that could not be traced. Modern accounts that appear to corroborate one another are for the most part reading that same page. The chronology should be held accordingly.
The Catholic Encyclopedia reports that in the early Church no special Office or day was assigned to the Holy Trinity, and that prayers and a Preface of the Trinity appear in the Sacramentary attributed to Gregory the Great (d. 604). That attribution is not text-critically secure: the surviving "Gregorian" recensions are eighth- and ninth-century Frankish copies whose fidelity to any sixth-century Roman original is disputed, a difficulty the encyclopedia does not address. Alcuin (d. 804) is associated by received tradition with the arrangement of the votive Mass of the Holy Trinity in this period; no primary document confirming it was located.
The first named composer of a full Office is Stephen, Bishop of Liège, to whom the Catholic Encyclopedia assigns an Office of the Holy Trinity, printing his dates as 903-20 (his episcopate is given elsewhere as 901-920). The attribution is contested: Barbara C. Raw's study of the Office of the Trinity in the Crowland Psalter (1999) questions it, and Kate Helsen's comparison of two Trinity Offices is the other study cited. The earliest witness to the observance as living custom is the Micrologus, of the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-1085), which calls the Sunday after Pentecost a vacant Sunday with no proper Office, but records that in some places the Office attributed to Stephen was recited, and in others it was said on the Sunday before Advent instead. No source retrieved gives a reason for that second placement. Between 1061 and 1073 Alexander II declined a petition for a universal feast; the encyclopedia is at pains to specify Alexander II "not III", correcting a common misattribution that still circulates.
For the English strand the witness is the same encyclopedia's article on Becket, which reports the 1162 consecration and the privilege that followed it, hedged in its own voice as "It seems to have been". No twelfth-century chronicle (FitzStephen, Herbert of Bosham, John of Salisbury) has been traced, and the encyclopedia's own Trinity Sunday article is silent on Becket. John Peckham, Franciscan, Canon of Lyons and later Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1292), composed a new Office that had circulated for decades before the universal mandate adopted it.
Two dates require care. The mandate for the whole Western Church came during the pontificate of John XXII (1316-1334), conventionally placed about 1334; the encyclopedia and its dependents give only the pontificate, and no bull or instrument has been identified. The flat date "1334" is widely printed and is his death year read out of a parenthesis. The rank elevation is by contrast the firmest date in the whole timeline: 24 July 1911, by Pius X, from double of the second class to primary of the first class.
In the West the day is kept in white, with its own Proper Preface, and in the classical Prayer Book with the Creed of St Athanasius said or sung at Morning Prayer in place of the Apostles' Creed. Its date sets Corpus Christi, which falls on the Thursday following, and it once closed a pre-modern season in which church weddings were barred from Rogation Sunday onward, a discipline that has since lapsed.
The Eastern calendars do not have this feast at all, and the name is the trap: in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic use "Trinity Sunday" is Pentecost itself, the Spirit's descent being held to complete the Trinity's self-disclosure, with the Feast of the Holy Spirit on the Monday following and All Saints on the Sunday after. Russian customs kept under that name, green vestments and churches strewn with cut grass and birch branches, belong to Pentecost and not to the Western feast a week later. The Armenian and Coptic patterns are structurally similar; East Syriac and Syro-Malabar use anchors the Trinity instead to Theophany on 6 January, where Father, Spirit and incarnate Son are manifest together.
Local keeping survives in scattered places. At Ashford-in-the-Water in Derbyshire the well-dressing festival is timed to Trinity Sunday and opens with a Blessing of the Wells. In Culhuacán in Mexico City the day occasions the neighbourhood's largest annual festival, eight days honouring El Señor del Calvario, hosted in turn by the barrios, with a street fair, nightly fireworks and tamales, buñuelos, cocoles and atoles. The fullest survival is Bolivian: the city of Trinidad in Beni was founded in June 1686 by the Jesuit Cipriano Barace under the invocation of the Holy Trinity, and its Chope Piesta, kept by the Cabildo Indígena de la Santísima Trinidad founded in 1701, runs from late May into early June, timed to the liturgical date and the corn harvest together, with the machetero and torito dances, the jocheo de toros and the palo encebado. Revived with municipal support in 1975, it was designated Cultural Patrimony of Bolivia by Law No. 2612 of 2003. In England the feast's oldest secular residue is the name of Trinity term, still borne by the law sittings and by the third terms of Oxford and of Trinity College Dublin.
Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), "Trinity Sunday" (Mershman) and "St. Thomas Becket": newadvent.org/cathen/15058a.htm and newadvent.org/cathen/14676a.htm. The first supplies the whole pre-1911 institution chronology quoted here, including the early-Church statement, the Micrologus and vacant-Sunday report, Alexander II's refusal and its "not III" corrective, and the 1911 elevation citing Acta Apostolicae Sedis III, 351; the second supplies the Becket sentence quoted in the Story, with its own hedge.
John Mirk, Festial, sermon 40, "De Festo Trinitatis", ed. Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society Extra Series 96 (1905), pp. 163-168; full text at archive.org/details/mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft. Source of the three purposes (p. 163) and of "forto study how þis may be, hit is but a foly" (p. 167), and of the water/ice/snow, ring and seashell teaching aids (pp. 166-168). Mirk does not name Augustine in the seashell story.
Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, 8 June 1647, in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, British History Online. Source of the abolition clause and of the second-Tuesday recreation provision.
The Book of Common Prayer 1662, Trinity Sunday propers, eskimo.com/~lhowell/bcp1662/communion/trinity.html; and the Athanasian Creed rubric as printed in the Baskerville 1762 edition, justus.anglican.org. The rubric names thirteen feasts, Trinity Sunday last.
The Book of Common Prayer 2019 (Anglican Church in North America), Collects of the Christian Year and Holy Eucharist: Proper Prefaces, bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net. Source of the collect quoted in the Story, of the Proper Preface phrase "in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Substance", and of the rubric authorising "after Pentecost" or "after Trinity".
George Herbert, "Trinitie Sunday," in The Temple (1633), Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Source of "That I may runne, rise, rest with thee."
John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons vi.24, "The Mystery of the Holy Trinity", newmanreader.org. Headed as preached on Trinity Sunday; source of the counsel to bow down in silent adoration and submit to it.
Guild return of the Fraternity of the Holy Trinity and SS. Fabian and Sebastian, St Botolph's (1389), London Record Society vol. 18, pp. 79-81, British History Online. Source of the choice of Trinity Sunday because Easter was too crowded, and of the dawn Mass for labourers.
Reginald Heber, Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (London, 1827), pp. 77-78, archive.org; with hymnologyarchive.com for the manuscript history. The hymn stands under the heading TRINITY SUNDAY; the holograph (British Library Add MS 25704) dates c. 1820-21, and the reported 1826 Banbury printing cannot be confirmed, that collection being lost.
Bolivian sources for the Chope Piesta: the Spanish Wikipedia article "Chope Piesta Santísima Trinidad", the municipal site trinidad.gob.bo, and Bolivian Senate material at web.senado.gob.bo, which together supply the 1686 foundation, the 1701 Cabildo, the 1975 revival and Law No. 2612 of 2003.
In England the feast was never separately instituted. It was inherited continuously from Sarum use into the Prayer Book tradition, and no Anglican act of institution exists to be cited. What distinguishes English practice is the numbering: Sarum, and every Prayer Book descended from it through 1928, counted the rest of the year as Sundays after Trinity rather than after Pentecost, so that the two systems run offset and their appointed Gospels and Epistles land on different Sundays. The Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, 8 June 1647, ended the observance in law, naming the Nativity, Easter and Whitsuntide and then "all other Festival dayes, commonly called Holy-dayes"; Trinity Sunday falls under the catch-all only and is not named. It was restored with the 1662 book.
Two later changes reshaped the day without abolishing it. Paul VI's Mysterii Paschalis of 14 February 1969 retained Trinity Sunday as a Solemnity but abolished the octave of Pentecost that had surrounded it and replaced "Time after Pentecost" with Ordinary Time, so that the feast now stands alone where it once closed a week of celebration. In the Anglican line, the 1979 American book named the following season after Pentecost, while the Book of Common Prayer 2019 authorises both: all subsequent Sundays have numbered propers "and may be designated as 'after Pentecost' or 'after Trinity.'"
A warning worth preserving in the record: the claim, found online, that the feast was instituted in 828 by Gregory IX is impossible, Gregory IX having reigned from 1227 to 1241. It contradicts every better-attested source and should not be reintroduced.
Genesis 1:1–2:3Psalm 1502 Corinthians 13:5–14Matthew 28:16–20
Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.