Georg W. F. Hegel
A Daring Claim
Hegel (1770–1831) acknowledged that Fichte followed in the tradition of Descartes and Kant when Fichte identified the I as an initial unity and, along with Kant, as the source of the categories of thought. He praised Fichte for taking the tremendous step of trying to show how the categories of thought arise in necessary fashion out of the initial I itself. But Hegel claimed that with the ever-recurrent presence of the non-I Fichte ended up in what Hegel called an absolute contradiction. The non-I should have been absolute and inclusive in its own right. So from Hegel’s perspective Fichte ended up merely with the infinite of infinite progression, in which limit constantly recurs without an enriched return to a renewed identity. Though in Fichte’s view thought was creative, Fichte was not able to reintegrate subjectivity and objectivity in a true concept of spirit as movement of inclusive subjectivity.1
Over the years Hegel worked out his mature, we could say, true concept of spirit. He presented that concept on the level of religion as a movement of inclusive trinitarian divine subjectivity. He first set forth his philosophical reading of Trinity in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.2 He then succinctly sketched out his readings of Trinity in the 1817, 1827, and 1830 editions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline.3 He filled in these readings at greater length in his 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831 lectures on the philosophy of religion.4
Hegel saw his true concept of spirit as bringing to explicit formulation the necessary movement of logical thought categories in, from the point of view of his system, the first sphere of logic. This sphere was, formally speaking, a movement of inclusive subjectivity whose realization then occurs in the second and third spheres, respectively, of nature and spirit. These second and third spheres are, in contradistinction to the first sphere of logic, the realphilosophical spheres.5 In his Encyclopedia sketches of this overall movement of spirit, his presentations of Trinity stand as penultimate or second-last moment. He identifies this moment as revealed religion and presents it just before his treatment of philosophy.
The Shape and End Result of Hegel’s Efforts
It will be helpful to take a first look at Hegel’s philosophically informed efforts to reconceptualize Trinity, namely, to develop a philosophy of absolute or inclusive divine subjectivity. We can do this by summarizing selected aspects of his presentation of Trinity in the 1830 Encyclopedia. With this wider systematic context in mind, we will then consider at greater length his presentation of Trinity in his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion.
Hegel’s Encyclopedia begins with logic, understood as movement of pure thought and, more precisely, with logic’s initial moment. This initial moment is the thought category of pure being, the being of pure thought. It ends in an enriching advance that, in the philosophy of absolute spirit, is equally enriched resultant return to what was the initial movement of logic. But now, at the end of this encyclopedic, self-developing movement of spirit, the logical concept has become the philosophical concept. Here form and content are truly and fully adequate. Hegel would say that concept and reality are united in the absolute idea. Indeed, as its title indicates, the Encyclopedia constitutes an outline of Hegel’s overall mature philosophical system. It does this, as we have intimated, not as a mere juxtaposition of philosophical sciences. Rather, it presents absolute spirit as idea developing from the immediacy of logic to the logical idea’s self-othering in nature and finite spirit. This development of spirit continues as enriching, advancing return through finite spirit in philosophic thought to the renewed and enriched immediacy, or identity, of the idea. This overall movement from logic to the realphilosophical spheres, culminating in philosophy, is a process of self-determination by absolute spirit. The movement of spirit occurs in logic as inclusive subjectivity, in nature as self-othering of the idea, and then in and through art, religion, and philosophy as absolute subjectivity.
Within this overall process Hegel places revealed religion, which he identifies with Christianity and especially Lutheran Christianity, as the penultimate sphere. In this sphere the content is true but the form is as yet burdened with pictorial representation. It is only the ultimate sphere, philosophy, which is characterized by conceptual clarity. He presents revealed religion schematically in the form of a syllogistically structured “immanent” and “economic,” so to speak, divine self-revelation. This divine self-revelation is the self-development of trinitarian divine subjectivity, the movement of spirit in the realm of revealed religion. He employs an explicitly religious or representational, but nevertheless always philosophically informed, language to lay out “immanent” and “economic” Trinity. He sees these as three syllogistically structured moments of universality (U, Allgemeinheit), particularity (P, Besonderheit), and individuality (I, Einzelheit).6 He again develops the last of these, individuality, as a movement of three self-mediating syllogisms. In the Encyclopedia this moment of individuality climaxes as the effective self-revelation of absolute spirit in and through finite spirit in community. It is the final moment of syllogistically structured divine trinitarian reconciliation. In the sphere of religious representation this reconciliation remains the movement of self-determining divine subjectivity. It has not yet been explicitly established as mediation of the absolute self or concept in the form of philosophical thought where the otherness indicated by reference to God will have been overcome.7
In his encyclopedic system as a whole, this final moment, namely, philosophical thought, is for Hegel the truth or perfect correspondence of subject and object, or better, of self and concept.8 It is this perfect correspondence or absolute spirit, this infinite or inclusive totality, only in so far as it is the end result inclusive of the whole process. As the final moment, philosophy is for Hegel the grounding return to the immediacy of logical thought. It is this enriched return which finally justifies seeing Hegel’s realphilosophical spheres themselves, and in particular his philosophical thought or concept, as his reconceptualization of Trinity. Moreover, it is this return that justifies recognizing his logic as the appropriate systematic logical reformulation of “immanent” Trinity, with “immanent” carefully nuanced so as not to insinuate an independently existent reality. This return on the part of philosophical thought explains why Hegel can use philosophically reinterpreted representational language to describe logic as the presentation of God as God is in the eternal divine essence before the creation of nature and finite spirit.9
When we look at his encyclopedic system, we see that from the perspective of his system in its speculative formulation Hegel appropriately treats of “immanent” Trinity twice. He does this first as movement of self-determining inclusive subjectivity in the form of pure thought or logic. He treats of “immanent” Trinity again as moment of universality in the realphilosophical sphere of the philosophy of religion. He likewise presents “economic” Trinity twice. He does this, first, in the realphilosophical sphere of the philosophy of religion as including “immanent” Trinity. Second, he again treats of “economic” Trinity in philosophical thought as grounding return, as enriched return that justifies the whole process. This return is both to the immediacy of “immanent” Trinity on the level of philosophy of religion and to the immediacy of logic on the level of spirit as a whole. The encyclopedic system is, in its totality, Hegel’s philosophically reinterpreted presentation of “economic” Trinity inclusive of “immanent” Trinity. Hegel rather humbly, though daringly as well, ends his 1827 and 1830 editions of the Encyclopedia with his famous quote from Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “For it is this, what God is” (τοῦτο γὰρ ὁ Θεός).10
In this overall sweep identified by Hegel as what God is, “immanent” Trinity is the initial moment structuring the overall dynamic of divine self-development as self-revelation. From the perspective of his system in its speculative presentation, this overall dynamic is a movement from initial identity to difference to enriched, grounding we could say, return as renewed, inclusive identity. It is a movement from initial infinite, to finitude, to inclusive or true infinite.11 In this way, logically reformulated as inclusive subject, religiously represented as absolute divine subjectivity, and philosophically reconceptualized as absolute spirit, Trinity is for Hegel the whole truth.
In order to flesh out Hegel’s briefer presentation in the 1830 Encyclopedia, we need now to focus on his lectures and, more specifically, his well-developed 1827 lectures. In these lectures Hegel clearly saw religion as the consciousness of the all-encompassing object or God, which has become the fully inclusive self-consciousness of absolute spirit. This inclusive self-consciousness is trinitarian divine self-positing subjectivity. It is, as was the case in the Encyclopedia, a movement in and through finite spirit from universality to particularity to individuality.12 In examining more closely what Hegel said about Trinity in his 1827 lectures, we will first look at what he said in his mature systematic reinterpretation of Trinity. We will then speak of how and why he argued so forcefully concerning the importance of thinking God as Trinity.
Over the course of his four series of lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel apportioned theological content somewhat differently in various presentations of the second and third moments in the movement of self-positing trinitarian divine subjectivity. Still the basic progression of this movement from first to second to third sphere or element is consistently describable in terms of moments of the concept as, respectively, universality, particularity, and individuality.
We are here proposing that Hegel sets up the dialectical movement in each of these three elements in such a way that it develops according to, and therefore manifests, a specific syllogistic structure. When we speak of syllogism here, we should mention that we mean Hegel’s particular interpretation of the syllogism and not merely the traditional understanding of syllogism as a form of three-termed movement of inference. Hegel gave to this traditional notion of syllogism a specific dialectical spin when he placed it as a thought determination or moment in the movement of pure thought. For him it was a movement of inclusive subjectivity. It was a self-mediating development of thought, progressing on the basis of a middle term that mediated between the two extremes, the syllogism’s major and minor premises.
It is especially in his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion that Hegel uses considerable terminology from his Science of Logic to describe the first element of the consummate religion. He refers to this element as the overall appearance of God. It is the divine idea or the realized unity of concept and reality, in the realm of thought as universality, the immediacy of the “in itself” (an sich).13 His use of logical terms, and especially of the three moments of the concept, is particularly appropriate with regard to this first element since it is the appearance of the divine idea in the realm of thought. This self-enclosed movement of, theologically speaking, “immanent” Trinity is for Hegel the concrete universal containing otherness within itself. It is, in its own way, the moment of initial identity. It contains this otherness within itself as moment of judgment or separation as negation, the begetting, so to speak, of itself as the Son, but it does this only as a sort of play. With otherness so understood here as moment of negation, Hegel sets up a dialectical moment at the very core of God’s being. He has built the formal structure of the crucifixion and death of Christ into the very movement of “immanent” Trinity. With otherness as moment of negation, he wants us to think together, dialectically, initial identity (God the Father) with the other (God the Son) of that initial identity in their momentary contradiction (positive and negative, universal and particular). As was just mentioned, for Hegel here in the first element of the consummate religion this otherness arises only as a sort of play. Still, the distinguishing is itself, as difference, momentarily the entire idea. In line with Hegelian dialectical thinking, when the contradiction of universal and its negation or its other is thought through they are seen to have become a new identity, traditionally referred to theologically as the Holy Spirit. For the other is the other of this initial identity, which it thus includes. This inner dynamic of otherness, or particularity, functions as mediating totality inclusive of the extremes of universality and of the resultant identity as individuality. In this way, it presents the triadic structure of inclusive and, here, absolute subjectivity. When thought through, this movement of subjectivity takes on the form of the logical thought determination that Hegel calls the categorical syllogism (U-P-I).14
The second element in the development of the consummate religion as movement of spirit is the appearance of the divine idea in the doubled movement of diremption and reconciliation.15 It is the sphere of particularity, difference, and objectivity. It appears as the movement of judgment in which the divine idea comes into existence “for itself” (für sich). In this element, characterized by contradiction, the divine idea others itself as an independent world in and out of which there arises finite spirit. Within this world finite spirit in turn distinguishes itself from nature and from its own nature. This distinguishing that goes on within finite spirit gives rise to the contradictory reality of finite spirit as both good and evil. It is one with its nature, namely, with what it should be, and yet is not what it should be. So, finite spirit is self-estrangement. The very establishment of this contradictory character of finite spirit is itself the indication of a need for reconciliation. According to Hegel, such reconciliation has to occur in an exclusive individuality. It has to take place in an individual divine-human self, in the mediating death of Christ. Hegel goes on to present reconciliation in the particularity of the community’s consciousness of an immediate existence spiritually interpreted as the risen Christ. As this historical appearance of the divine idea, the second element of the consummate religion is the moment of objectivity in the overall development of God as spirit. This historical appearance of the divine idea has taken place as a triadically structured movement. The movement occurs from God, as presupposed universality, to the particularity of the community’s spiritual consciousness of the risen Christ by means of mediating individuality, the doubled individuality of nature and finite spirit. Mediating individuality reaches its climactic depths in the death of Christ. For the philosophically informed religious consciousness, this triadic structure of the absolute subject reveals the form of what Hegel identifies as the hypothetical syllogism (U-I/I-P).16
In the third element of the consummate religion, namely, in spiritual community,17 the objective reconciliation achieved in Christ has become the subjective relationship of the individual subject to this objective reconciliation with the truth. The previous two elements of the consummate religion, and now this third element, are for Hegel the very progression of the idea of God and, indeed, of God as spirit.18 They are the absolute eternal idea “in itself” (an sich), “for itself” (für sich), and now “in and for itself” (an und für sich). These elements are the very life and activity of God consummated in the third element as the community or unity of the individual empirical subjects who are filled by the Spirit of God. These subjects are individuals who live in the Spirit of God and with whom the Spirit of God is dialectically identified. God existing in and as the community of finite subjects is the very realization of God as spirit, the Holy Spirit or reconciling return of the divine idea out of the self-othering of judgment. The third element of the consummate religion is the movement of inclusive, and now absolute, divine subjectivity.
This third element develops as the reconciliation of the individual believer with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ in three stages. These stages are: first, the origin of the community in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit; second, the realization or actualization of the community through faith, doctrine, church, and Eucharist; and, third, the realization of the spirituality of the community in universal actuality as philosophy. In the first stage, the community originates in the particularity of a shared religious consciousness. In the second stage, Hegel sees the various theologoumena there discussed as the reconciling active presence of the spirit. This presence of the spirit is the objectively presented universality of truth mediating the objective reconciliation, already obtained in Christ, to the individual subjects. In the third stage, he presents the movement from the shared conscious inner enjoyment of the presence of God, which was achieved in the second stage, to an adequate mediation in self-knowledge, in philosophical thought. The knowledge of being at peace with God has become knowledge of being at peace with oneself. Here in philosophical thought, knowledge or subjectivity is recognized as developing out of itself and as reconciling itself with itself. For Hegel this rationality is true freedom. Philosophy is the comprehending thought which, as essentially concrete, determines itself to its totality, the idea. It is absolute spirit, the very peace of God, true individuality.19 In this third element of the consummate religion, the mediation of particularity with inclusive individuality occurs by means of objective universality (P-U-I) as religious reconciliation in community. It is the realization of what Hegel calls the disjunctive syllogism20 and is, overall, the moment of individuality. It results, as dynamic movement of spirit, both in a grounding return to the immediacy or identity of “immanent” Trinity in the realphilosophical sphere of revealed religion and in the advance to philosophical thinking.
How Hegel Argued His Trinitarian Position
Hegel is always doing philosophy ultimately from the perspective of the concept. So his presentation of his realphilosophical trinitarian thought is itself already a response to the question of how he argued his trinitarian position. For Hegel, correct presentation is argumentation. Nevertheless, it is important to refer more directly to the 1812/1816 Science of Logic for two reasons.21The first is that for Hegel logic represents the appropriate reformulation of “immanent” Trinity as self-determining inclusive subjectivity. The second is the way in which he conceives of the systematic relationship between the realphilosophical spheres and the sphere of logic. This latter is the movement of pure thought as a series of self-positing thought determinations. For Hegel logic is discovered and “contained” in the spheres of nature and spirit since it is their inner formative principle. Specific logical thought determinations arise out of and are thereby revealed as such inner formative principles in the spheres of nature and spirit. These principles can then be examined in the clarity of their archetypal expression as moments in the dialectical movement of pure thought. So logic itself likewise is and “contains” the spheres of nature and spirit insofar as it is their archetype.22 Hegel’s construction of a dynamic logic, a post-Kantian replacement for traditional metaphysics, forms his strongest and most prolonged argumentation for his philosophical interpretation of Trinity. He reconceptualized Trinity by means of an ontological reinterpretation of “immanent” Trinity.
It will be helpful to recall that Hegel’s reconceptualization of the triune God is a process of sublation (Aufhebung) in which there has occurred a triply structured transition of negation, preservation, and development. The Trinity of religious representation retains for Hegel the characteristics of three independently represented subjects in an inadequately purified parental and filial relationship. This is true particularly for popular piety, but also for dogmatic theology.23 Hegel’s reconceptualization negates such a representation. It negates as well the continuing projection of reconciliation insofar as it is achieved in a divine subject over against the self. The true content of this religious reconciliation is preserved, according to Hegel,24 in the move to philosophical thought as the full mediation of subject and object, self and concept, in self-determining conceptual thought. As purification this transition not only negates but preserves in a truer form, and therefore develops, the true content expressed as Trinity. Nowhere can this sublation be more clearly seen than in Hegel’s proposal to translate what appears on the level of religious representation as divine freedom, namely, to create or not to create, into a logically necessary self-othering of the absolute idea in, and as, nature. Hegel calls this self-othering as logically necessitarian self-determination “free self-release” (“frey entläßt”).25
Hegel understood logic to be an immanent and consistent, internally self-justifying progression of thought determinations. Already in the philosophy of religion he had, in principle, elaborated creation and crucifixion within “immanent” Trinity by means of his understanding of difference as negation. Now in the dialectical movement of self-positing and self-determining logical thought he has integrated positivity by defining it as otherness characterized as negation. It is, then, the overcoming of this negation in the realization that the other is the other of the initial identity which constitutes the fundamental dynamic of self-determining pure thought. Logic presents the structure of inclusive subjectivity as self-relationality. The speculative dialectic of self-relationality is what underlies all of Hegel’s mature systematic thought, including his reconceptualization of trinitarian divine subjectivity.
For Hegel the logical thought determinations or categories are themselves nontemporal “momentary” totalities of the concept. There is no underlying subject or thinker. Each thought determination arises as a momentary totality within Hegel’s dialectically developing movement of inclusive subjectivity. Each is, in its own way, a form of becoming (werdend).26 To the extent, then, that the structure of “going over into” or self-donation is constitutive of all logical moments, Hegel’s speculative presentation of the movement of pure thought is as a whole the systematic reformulation of “immanent” Trinity. It is equally the archetypal structure of “economic” Trinity. Furthermore, to the extent that such “self-donation” is the dynamic structure of personhood, or better with reference to logic, of subjectivity, Hegel has managed to elaborate in a logical formulation what was for him represented in the consummate religion as a tri-personal God.27 Though he carries out this elaboration in the singular and speaks simply of person or subject,28 Hegel is, in regard to logic, not referring to an existent. He thinks, in a post-nominalist framework, of the concrete universal as the structure of subjectivity. In his so thinking we can see Hegel as one attempting to move beyond the dichotomy between what would today be termed monosubjectival and societal formulations of Trinity.
Systematic Concerns Motivating Hegel’s Reconceptualization
In order to get at some of the systematic religious and philosophical concerns motivating his endeavor, we can reformulate the question of why Hegel reconceptualized Trinity as follows: What did he see was at stake in his attempt to reconceptualize the trinitarian God from the perspective of the concept? We can indicate what is in play for Hegel by reviewing religious-representational formulations of his claim that God can be conceived adequately as person, subject, and spirit only if God is conceived as Trinity. We can then infer the underlying philosophical concerns which pushed him to reinterpret Trinity, and to do this in specific ways, from his resultant philosophical position as a whole.
In his manuscript for the 1821 philosophy of religion lectures on the consummate religion Hegel wrote, “God is spirit—that which we call the triune God.”29 God is spirit because God becomes the other and sublates this other.30 Hegel claims that God remains but an empty word if God is not grasped as triune.31 He is concerned to establish a concept of God which does not leave personhood behind.32 There is, then, a particular earnest with which he allows his concerns to surface as he makes this claim that only if God is known as what would today be termed “immanent” and “economic” Trinity can God be known as spirit. Only as Trinity can God be inclusive subjectivity becoming absolute spirit finally as philosophical concept. We can further spell out these concerns of Hegel’s by citing the consequences he draws from the successful, or unsuccessful, establishment of the trinitarian structure for which he so ardently argues. Here we should recall that for Hegel trinitarian divine self-othering and sublation of that otherness is not a simple movement of othering and return. It is, rather, one of progression which is both development and enriched return. It is in this trinitarian self-othering and sublation of that otherness that Hegel recognizes the principle and axis upon which history turns.33 World history is, for Hegel, a history of God.34 This trinitarian dialectic is equally the principle of freedom,35 the reason why God can be the source of community,36 the reason why God can be known37and the justifying content of Christianity’s distinctive truth claims38 as the religion of absolute subjectivity39 and freedom.40 Trinity, the content of the true religion, is divine self-revelation.41 According to Hegel, without a trinitarian structure to the divine there could be no true reconciliation in Christ.42 God would, as mentioned, be an empty name, one-sided and finite rather than inclusive and infinite.43 There could be no truth as mediation for there would be no possibility of a transition from religion, with its true content but representational form, to philosophy where form and content would be identical.
In religion, the overcoming of alienation in reconciliation is realized representationally in the trinitarian God as a movement of divine self-revelation and absolute subjectivity. That same content has for Hegel received its adequate form in philosophical thought. There it is expressed in its necessary movement, namely, as a self-mediation which is the identity of thought and reality, identity and difference or, from another perspective, self and concept.44 In this sense, Hegel’s famous claim in the preface to the Phenomenology that the true must be grasped not only as substance but also as subject45 becomes an appropriate philosophical reformulation of his trinitarian claim. It reiterates his concern not to conceive of God as less than inclusive subject.
Hegel’s particular formulation of the concept of inclusive subjectivity meant he had to insist that truth could be mediated only by a content which was seen to be the other of itself and yet, indeed, was ultimately not other than itself.46 Or again, religiously expressed, in the God-world relationship God must be seen as inclusive of the world. Hegel gave logical expression to this inclusive relationship in his elaboration of the true infinite as the mediation of infinite and finite, and thus as inclusive totality.47 What he had termed the “bad infinite” (das Schlecht-Unendliche) or merely an infinite progression, had to go over into the concept of the true infinite (wahrhaft Unendliches), in which the thinking of finitude would result in the transition to the infinite, and vice versa. For Hegel the true infinite is finally, in its speculative formulation, the process of mediation in which the infinite, having become finite, sublates itself as its own difference or finitude into its own self-affirmation. The true infinite is the posited negation of negation.48 It is identity inclusive of difference, the one inclusive of the many. To be anything less than inclusive would be to remain one-sided and finite.
In the context of the present discussion it is this concept of the true infinite as concrete universal, inclusive totality, or absolute spirit which provides the best access to the systematic religious and philosophical concerns lying behind Hegel’s reconceptualization of Trinity. The true infinite, as a movement from the positive to its negation to the negation of this negation, recalls again how Hegel integrated the positivity of religion, or even positivity in general, into a widened notion of reason. To the Enlightenment mind, positivity had designated a form of particularity which could not be deduced from universal reason. Hegel’s definition of difference or otherness as negation allowed him to integrate particularity, as the other of universality, into the overall movement of reason itself.
To recapitulate, Hegel’s dialectical and speculative reconceptualization of Trinity was his post-Kantian response to the problem of the one and the many or of the relationship between identity and difference.49 By means of this reconceptualization Hegel was able to give content to the term “God.” In his philosophy of religion, he traced the development of the concept of God through the various religions of the world. That development arrived ultimately, in Christianity, at an explicit understanding of the trinitarian God as absolute subjectivity and subject, with the spiritual community becoming the locus of spirit’s self-realization. He saw in the trinitarian divine self-othering and sublation of that otherness a movement of progression which is both development and enriched return, the principle and axis upon which not only the history of religions but history itself turns. World history is then for Hegel the history of God. Freedom was understood ultimately as logically necessary but truly self-determination. Knowledge of God, Christianity’s truth claim, and truth itself, were likewise grounded immediately in Hegel’s reconceptualization of Trinity as movement of self-determining divine subjectivity. In eliminating the need for a distinction in “immanent” Trinity between divine essence and divine person, Hegel continued the modern turn to the subject. He was able to avoid a Cartesian appeal to God to guarantee truth and certainty in knowledge by making of the trinitarian God the very structure of truth itself. Hegel claimed to recognize in Trinity in general, and in the “inner” or “immanent” Trinity in particular, a congruity with his fundamental, speculatively formulated dialectic of positive/negation/negation of negation. In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity he discovered the means to give religious expression to mediation in the self as concept. This, and especially this latter idea of the self as concept, was his philosophical response to alienation in his time. Hegel might well argue that in the future it would still be this philosophical response, in the form of the true infinite as inclusive totality, which, when appropriately adapted, would prove most fecund for a further reconceptualization of Trinity as the whole truth.