In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.

–Finnegans Wake, III.1

The Holy Trinity crops up again and again in the Wake and in Joyce’s other works.

But what does this doctrine mean in Christianity, and in Catholicism specifically (the tradition in which Joyce was raised and educated)? And, more important, how does Joyce use it?

Read on for more!

Put simply, the Holy Trinity is the doctrine that there are Three Persons in the Christian God: the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. Each is individual and distinct from the other two. The Father is most definitely not the Son, who is most definitely not the Holy Spirit, who is most definitely neither of the other two. But each of them is fully God. “God” is the one nature they all share, and the union of their natures is called “consubstantiality.” Stephen Dedalus muses in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses about the consubstantiality of the Father and Son, as well as the “hypostatic union” in Christ, the idea that Christ, by means of the incarnation, is simultaneously fully God and fully Human.

That’s more or less the gist of it. I went to Catholic school my whole life, and that’s what I got out of it. As a current skeptic and nonbeliever, I’m probably not the person best placed to explain the ins and outs of the doctrine as it is understood by practicing Christians. I always think of a section from Bill Maher’s movie Religulous (a portmanteau of “religion” and “ridiculous”) in which he asks a believer how it could be that one god could be three persons, and his interlocutor compares it to water appearing in three different states (solid, liquid, and gas), which surprised Bill with such a neat explanation of a doctrine so seemingly illogical. [“You almost had me at ice cube,” he quipped later]. A more familiar image is the shamrock, famously used by St. Patrick in his conversion of the Irish. As a clover with three petals, the shamrock has three distinct parts, but they all share the same stem.

The Trinity has an extensive history in Christianity. As you might imagine, few of the many, many Christian sects can agree on all of the details of this idea (there are thousands of Christian denominations, all with different theologies). The word “trinity” never appears in the Bible, and the relationship between these “Persons” is never explicitly spelled out, so believers are left to interpret and re-interpret and argue until the Second Coming. Are all the members of the Trinity co-eternal with each other? Do some members of the Trinity create the others? Do some members “proceed” from the others? What’s the function of each one? How do their functions interact? How should prayers be directed to them?

One aspect of trinitarian theology that appears in “The Mookse and the Gripes” in I.6 is the Filioque controversy, and since it regards the Son and the Father, it’s worth mentioning here. “Filioque” is Latin for “And the Son,” and it was added to the Nicene Creed by the First Council of Constantinople in 381: that version of Creed declares that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

To my understanding, this was added to the Creed to refute Arianism, a heresy that held that the Son was created by God the Father and is therefore not co-eternal with him. This could lead to the interpretation that the Son is somehow an inferior being, a created being rather than a being who is one with the Creator himself. The Eastern Orthodox Church refused to accept the Filioque addition to the Creed, and, as the Wikipedia article on Filioque puts it, “From the view of the West, the Eastern rejection of the Filioque denied the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son and was thus a form of crypto-Arianism.” I presume the Eastern Church doesn’t see it this way.

From my perspective as a non-believer, all of this sounds like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s the big-endians and little-endians all over again.

What in blazes does any of this have to do with FInnegans Wake?

First, HCE is described as a trinity: as ALP’s Letter says, “There were three men in him” (I.5).

Those are the “three soldiers” that make him up: Shem, Shaun, and their combined form as the “Cad” (and/or their combined form as Tristan, the overthrower of HCE and the next HCE, as the son Oedipally overtakes the father and will one day be overthrown himself by his own son).

One of the voices in III.3 puts it this way:

—Three in one, one and three.
Shem and Shaun and the shame that sunders em.
Wisdom’s son, folly’s brother.

The three letters of H-C-E signify our common humanity with all other people (Here Comes Everybody), and also at one point are said to mean “human, erring, condonable,” which suggests that accepting our common humanity with everyone else means forgiving the foibles and even the more serious wrongdoings of others (and ourselves) because we ourselves all have the same tendencies to screw up and fall, transgress against others. As I said in an early post on this blog,

HCE is a clue and a key to an escape from our normal, limited ways of viewing the world. The little roomwhorled of our minds and egos – the tiny “room” of egotism and self-regard and self-worry that we are all trapped in, between our ears – can and should be opened to the worldroom beyond, a wider view of things.

[…]

“Here Comes Everybody […] human, erring, condonable.”

The Wake contains the key to breaking out of your roomwhorld and accessing the worldroom: the key has always been acceptance and love and forgiveness. The Fortunate Fall. Phoenix Culprit. Eleven thirty-two.

That’s what the Trinity (H-C-E) is actually about, in the highest sense. 

[Joyce later describes the shamrock – symbol of the Trinity – as a clee, suggesting both the German clee (clover) and the French cle (key)…cle clee, clue key, clover key. The keys to the kingdom: Here Comes Everybody]

Shem and his various forms tends to be associated with heresies (from the perspective of the Catholic Church) and apostacy, as well as the Druidry of the ancient Celts, and the Gripes in particular is connected to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Shaun is more often connected to Catholicism, especially in his guise of the Mookse, who assumes the names of Catholic popes.

Does this imply that the Eastern Church’s conception of the Trinity is the more “mystical” and more in line with Shem’s more artistic and (eventually) more humanistic outlook?

I’m reminded of a post I made about Ulysses and Stephen’s conception of the father and son in his Shakespeare Theory. The rough summary is that the father corresponds to the flux of the universe and the son corresponds to each person’s narrative about the self (the ego, the concept of the self as separate from the universe). I don’t explicitly link them to the Trinity in that post, but if I were to do so, perhaps the Holy Spirit corresponds to the process of creativity (which includes the unwitting artistry of each of us in constructive those narratives of self, the conscious attempt to free ourselves from the belief in essences in order to narrate our stories differently, and the conscious creation of formal art such as paintings, poems, novels, etc.).

Seen from that perspective, whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the son depends on exactly what we mean. I could see an argument that a Shem-type would see true imagination coming not from the ego/son but from the flux/father and from an embrace of that flux. Yet the notion that the flux, the ego, and the creativity all participate in the same nature would also be true from this view, or at least from a similar view.

Part of me feels like what I’ve been saying in the two paragraphs above is another version of wondering about angels dancing on pins. Perhaps Joyce’s point is just that the Catholic Church and its terms for its doctrines are associated by the dreamer of the Wake with waking consciousness while “othered” doctrines, such as Arianism, are associated with sleep consciousness and the mystical idea that all things are interconnected. The true meaning of the Trinity, the oneness of Humanity and acceptance of others’ wrongdoings, can’t be fully grasped by Shaun and his exoteric priesthood, even though their doctrine of consubstantiality ironically describes the Wake‘s view of Human oneness quite well.

In the end, Joyce isn’t so much commenting on actual religious belief so much as appropriating this terminology to discuss a deeper understanding of reality than simple supernaturalism.

At the end of the novel, St. Patrick confronts the Druid, where the former is like a Shaun-type being gathered into a new HCE/Tristan and the latter is like a Shem-type about to be defeated. Alternatively, we can see them as new versions of HCE and the Cad, or the Russian General and Buckley, except here (unlike in I.2 and II.3) HCE defeats the Cad figure, and the Russian General triumphs over Buckley.

St. Patrick appears to reiterate parts of HCE’s offense, and he seems to defecate and wipe himself with the shamrock (“wipenmeselps gnosegates a handcaughtscheaf of synthetic shammyrag to hims hers” [hims hers = “his arse”] The “shammyrag” could also be the sort of literature produced by Shem-like artists (since “Shem was a sham and a low sham,” I.7). It is also a towel (a chamois, like the name of that “sham wow” product that was popular about a decade or more ago).

The new HCE, this higher version of Shaun, has his own art, the art of waking consciousness and practical, everyday work that sees things, in the light of day, as separate:

saving to Balenoarch (he kneeleths), to Great Balenoarch (he kneeleths down) to Greatest Great Balenoarch (he kneeleths down quitesomely), the sound salse sympol in a weedwayedwold of the firethere the sun in his halo cast. Onmen.

“arcobaleno” is Italian for “rainbow” (“baleno” actually means a flash of lightning, which recalls the Thunderwords of the Fall). See my article about rainbows in Finnegans Wake.

The rainbow is the symbol of the sun or of waking consciousness, since the light splits into separate colors, just as waking consciousness divides the flux of the riverrunning world into separate objects. The three “Balenoarchs” seem to be members of the Trinity, the three sides of HCE, the three petals of the shamrock/shammyrag. They also seem to be a reference to Noah and his Ark, which preserves Humanity through the Flood/Fall and which sees the rainbow as a sign of Redemption/Waking.

In the waking world, the Trinity is simply a doctrine that believers accept: it’s a characteristic of a God outside of the self, from which humanity is cut off, just as every individual is cut off from the rest of the universe. The newly reconstituted HCE, who is the dreamer preparing to wake from the dream, doesn’t grasp the deeper sense of that Trinity, which the Druid articulates in a way that baffles St. Patrick (“Rumnant Patholic, stareotypopticus, no catch all that preachybook”).

It is Patrick who triumphs in the waking world, preaching a simple doctrine that is popular with the people. As the dreamer wakes, the people who have populated the dream — the little Finnegans who have “waked” over the course of the novel — will go back to sleep. The dreamer’s waking life is a kind of figurative sleep, a waking dream of being a stable Selfhood, a separate entity from everything else. Lost in the dream of everyday life, people embrace their little sectarian doctrines and think of God as some mysterious being that’s “out there” somewhere. But at night, the dreamer will descend again into dreams, a new Finnegans Wake will pour from his mind, and all the little Finnegans will be released once more into the fallen world of the dreamscape to wage their battles and hope for the redemption of the rising sun. In that fallen world, it is the artists who will see the deep interconnection of all things, the deeper meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.

And each of us, in the course of our lives, falls into the dream of ego/Selfhood and hopes to Rise into wiser understandings of the world.