Hegel Heretic

Who else but Cyril O’Regan to write the essay on Hegel’s Trinitarian theology in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford Handbooks in Religion) ? As with Schleiermacher, Ja’s and Nein’s are both in order(pp. 257-9).

On the plus side (sort of): “Hegel makes the symbol or ‘representation’ ( Vorstellung ) of the Trinity central once against for Protestant theology by regarding it as nothing less than the symbol of symbols.” But this plus is soon negated: “Thought rightly, the symbol of the Trinity is not a dogmatic abstraction; rather it is the perfect symbol for a dynamic, self-differentiating divine who necessarily becomes in and through history.” On the plus side, philosophically “the symbol corrects for various forms of monism”; and theologically “it legitimates Christianity over other religions which are unable to synthesize unity and plurality, stasis and becoming. More specifically, it validates Christianity over other monotheistic faiths, and in doing do determines them to be unphilosophical, that is, not capable of being assimilated by and justified within a self-authenticating conceptual network.” Yet, on the negative side, “Hegel makes it plain that he has no time for a tri-personal divine, which he deems to reduce to tritheism.”

Despite his regular insistence that he was a faithful Lutheran, Hegel is in the end a Trinitarian heretic, and O’Regan lists five crucial departures from Lutheran orthodoxy:

1) Hegel insists “that the Trinity is not a mystery.”

2) Though Hegel has a “facsimile” of the immanent Trinity in that he “admits a triadically shaped divine as the non-temporal ground of the economy,” his immanent Trinity is not that of Augustine or Aquinas or Lutheran orthodoxy: He rejects “any tri-personal view of the Trinity” and “the eternally differentiated dynamic divine is considered neither to be self-subsistent nor fully real.”

3) For Hegel, “creation, as the ‘other’ to the divine, is at the same time a divine self-othering.” As it must be, since he doesn’t really affirm an immanent self-othering in God. (But then, without an immanent self-othering, how does God self-other himself in creation without alienation from himself? How can such a God create without creation being the death of God?)

4) Hegel can’t help ending up a Gnostic in the sense that Rowan Williams uses the term (an identity of creation and fall): “The purpose of the self-othering in the world of nature and finite spirit is to supply something like a theodicy in which the ultimate justification of evil and horrendous suffering in the world is that this is the only way – the ‘logical’ way – in which the divine becomes all that it can be.”

5) Rather than grounding economy in ontology, Hegel goes in the opposite direction: “It is the economy – the work of the divine in the world and history – that retrospectively gives authentic reality to the immanent sphere of the divine that it would not otherwise enjoy. The immanent Trinitarian sphere requires the economy in order to be real or actual ( wirklich ). As a result, “The relation between the immanent Trinity and the economy is . . . erotic in the strict metaphysical sense of being government by a movement that overcomes lack.” The immanent Trinity becomes “something like the first moment of a process of divine self-development from the less to the more real.”