Hegel’s Trinitarian Logic

In his Hegels Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection , Dale Schlitt lays out Hegel’s effort to derive Trinitarian theology conceptually, rather than from revelation and redemptive history. In part, this is an argument about the structure of logic.

For Hegel, the traiadic structure of the “inner Trinitarian God” or “inclusive Subject” was also the “structure of absolute Spirit, although not as yet its realization. The Subject needed an other to come to itself as Spirit. For Hegel, the final reconciliation of Subject and object, religiously speaking, of God and world, was to be attained by the mediation of both Subject and object in true philosophical thought, in the movement of absolute Spirit.”

This affects all areas of his philosophy. The Science of Right is “a study of logically reformulated Trinitarian divine subjectivity.” Since history is the self-realization of consciousness, of Geist , it has the same structure. Logic itself has this same structure: “each of the Concept’s non-temporal moments or thought determinations is the momentary whole or totality of the Concept. Inthe logic of being and of essence each moment is implicitly totality, because its other is contained within it in an as yet unposited manner.” Each moment “which develops into its other is the posited totality or whole ( das Ganze ) since each explicitly contains for Hegel the determination of its other within it. Each is concrete totality.” Logic is thus a “physically transposed” and “adequately formulated Trinitarian movement of divine” self-expression.