Chapter 1 is a slightly modified version of my article, “The Whole Truth: Hegel’s Reconceptualization of Trinity,” The Owl of Minerva, Biannual Journal of the Hegel Society of America 15 (1984): 169–82, included here with the kind permission of Ardis B, Collins, Editor-in-chief of The Owl of Minerva. A previous version of parts of chapters 2 through 8 appeared in my chapters, “German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy: The Nineteenth Century,” “German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy: The Twentieth Century,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, vol. 4, Religion, ed. Nicholas Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), respectively 48–68 and 69–90.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Mr. Andrew Kenyon, Acquisitions Editor, Philosophy, State University of New York Press, for his encouragement and for wise professional guidance through the process of review and publication. Sincere thanks to Ms. Maria M. Garcia, Director of the Oblate School of Theology’s Donald E. O’Shaunessy Library, for overall support and research help and to Ms. Carmen Rodriguez, Library General Services Manager, for so diligently hunting down and obtaining often hard-to-find items through interlibrary loan. A special word of thanks to Prof. Peter C. Hodgson for translation of one of Hegel’s remarks, particularly difficult to translate, in the margin of one of Hegel’s texts; to Prof. Renata Furst for discussion and insight concerning aspects of the notions of narrativity and plot; and to Prof. Dr. Martin Wendte for insightfully drawing attention again to Hegel’s and Schelling’s development of their thought on Trinity in relation with their thought on various religions of the world.