God and the Self in Hegel by Paolo Diego Bubbio

Author:Paolo Diego Bubbio [Bubbio, Paolo Diego]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781438465258
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Hegel’s Trinity

Hegel is adamant regarding his view of the centrality of the trinitarian doctrine within Christianity. In this context, the target of his polemical attacks was not only Schleiermacher, who had described the Trinity as an “appended proposition” to Christianity, but also those “pious theologians” (Rel I, 68/157n17) who regarded the Trinity as a mere historical product and traced its origins back to late Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism and, on this ground, dismissed it as a “decorative timbering.”28 Hegel is willing to concede that, as a human-developed historical product, the notion of the Trinity entered Christianity through external cultural influences, and especially through the Neoplatonic tradition. However, stopping at this claim would, in Hegel’s view, miss the point. Hegel thinks that religious representations can find their sublation (Aufhebung) in the conceptual language of philosophy. But, insofar as they are representations, they are inseparable from the cultural history that has produced them. Therefore, it is “immaterial where that doctrine came from,” Hegel claims, and he continues: “The question is solely whether it is true [wahr] in and for itself” (Rel I, 68/157n17). In this regard, one must remember that Hegel thinks that the traditional (Aristotelian) correspondence theory does not exhaust a comprehensive theory of truth; for Hegel, truth (Wahrheit) is, first and foremost, “the agreement of a content with itself [Übereinstimmung eines Inhalts mit sich selbst]” (E I, 8:86/62).29 Therefore, the question is whether the religious representation of the Trinity is consistent with the concept of God. To answer this question, Hegel’s dialectical method requires an “unpacking” of the notion. The dialectical method, rather than being simply “applied” to an inquiry, gives “form” to the subject matter; in other words, that “unpacking,” which clarifies the internal and external connections of a notion or representation, permits the “truth” of the Trinity to be discovered.

The standard Christian doctrine of the Trinity defines God as three divine persons, distinct but coexisting in unity: God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Hegel clarifies that, taken literally, this description of the Trinity is a “childlike” (kindlich; Rel I, 43/126 and Rel III, 127/194) and imaginative (bildlich; Rel III, 209/284) expression. Here, Hegel distances himself from the traditional doctrine of the Trinity and expresses a dislike for the emphasis on the representation of three “persons.” For Hegel, “we must be aware that all three are spirit” (Rel III, 128/195), an awareness that should help us to develop a more appropriate understanding of the Trinity as represented by a unity, that is, a unique “personhood,”30 which expresses itself in a range of relationships—those relationships traditionally expressed by the inadequate images of Father, Son, and Spirit.

To explore this range of relationships, it is useful to employ a distinction that is traditional in trinitarian theology but that is not explicitly mentioned by Hegel, yet it seems to be implied in his analysis: that between immanent and economic Trinity.31 The immanent Trinity is the pre-worldly Trinity, that is, the idea of God prior to the creation of the world—“the show of finitude,” Hegel remarks, “has not yet taken place” (Rel III, 16/77–78).

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