Hegel on Trinity

From an article by Anselm Min.

“The three Persons are thus mutually internal in the unity and totality of the divine process, of which the Father is the originating principle, the Son the pluralizing, and the Spirit the reintegrating and unifying principle, and from which none could be separately considered. The distinction of Persons is thoroughly relative to the self-unifying totality of this divine process of which they are moments. This, however, must not be understood in modalistic fashion, in which the three Persons are merely manifestations of and thus subordinate to a more primordial divine nature or divine ground . . . .

“The divine ‘nature’ is not something that exists apart from the divine Persons and that somehow exercises control over them. It is an internal principle of the Persons in their concrete existence and as such not to be reified into an autonomous entity in its own right. The divine nature is precisely the nature of the Father and identical with him, by which he, not the nature, differentiates him-self from himself, returns to himself from that differentiation, and thus exists concretely as one God.”

And on the incarnation: “Creation is a function of God’s self-differentiation ad extra by virtue of his self-differentiation ad intra. The separation of the finite Other from the infinite is itself posited by God’s separation of himself from himself. By the same token the human need for reconciliation with God is simply the finite side of God’s need for reconciliation with himself through the mediation of the finite, a mediation not imposed on God from without but posited by God himself. The need for the Incarnation is first and foremost a necessity inherent in the immanent Trinity and only secondarily a human need. Hegel’s doctrine of creation and the Incarnation, in this sense, is thoroughly trinitarian.”