the Trinity and the Incarnation- Hegel and Classical Approaches

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The Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical Approaches Author(s): Anselm K. Min Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), pp. 173-193Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202586Accessed: 01-08-2015 14:05 UTC

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The Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical Approaches* Anselm K. Min I Belmont Abbey College

The dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation are central to Christian faith, yet few today, with the possible exception of Thomists, seem happy with the classical orthodox formulations. I am not about to offer a reformulation. Instead, I propose to review one old reformulation, Hegel's interpretation of the Trinity, to which many contemporary reformulations consciously hark back, for example, those of Barth, Rahner, Juingel, Pannenberg, and Moltmann. I do this in the context of the issues raised but not resolved by the classic formulations. In the first section I examine the concepts of creation and Incarnation against the Hegelian background and ask what they imply about the nature of God. My basic assumption is that the economic Trinity is the only access to the immanent Trinity and that creation and Incarnation must be considered in their inner relation and unity, as Protestant theology has long insisted and recent Catholic theology is beginning to recognize. In the second section I go on to discuss the inadequacies of the classical formulations in meeting the philosophical requirements of creation and Incarnation, chiefly the notions of "person," "nature," "simplicity," and "relation." In the third and last section I present Hegel's alternative based on the philosophy of "spirit" that consciously sublates (Aufheben) the traditional philosophies of "substance." The basic question I want to press throughout is, What do creation and Incarnation presuppose about the nature of God as the a priori condition of their possibility? What must God be like in himself if he can and does reveal himself for us as Creator and Redeemer?

* I would like to thank Peter Hodgson and Eugene TeSelle of Vanderbilt Divinity School for the many helpful conversations on the subject of this article. ? 1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/86/6602-0004$01.00

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The Journal of Religion THE IDEA OF CREATION AND INCARNATION

Before we go on to answer this question, let us first be clear about what is meant by creation and Incarnation. Consider first the idea of creation. Thomism provides a good starting point. Creation does not add more being (esse) to the being of God; it only allows more and different beings (entia) to be. Non plus entis sed plura entia. There are two things to note. One is that God is the only source of being (esse) there is, even after creation, and the other is that created entities are neverthe- less distinct from their Creator. To deny the first would be to deny God's infinity and posit radical pluralism, and to deny the second would be to fall into pantheism. Creation means multiplication of beings in their otherness both among themselves and to God without diminishing or increasing God's own esse, the only source of the being of the finite in all their multiplicity.

First, God is the only source of the being of all beings. There are not many gods or many different sources of being, as there is no matter existing prior to or outside God out of which God creates. God alone creates, and he does so out of his own being. The source of the multiplicity of the finite is God himself. God creates out of his own being, but this does not mean creatures ever exist outside God. Nothing can exist or continue to exist apart from or outside God. Finite beings depend on God for the totality of their esse, which belongs to God and which is theirs only by a grant from him. The relation between the unity of being and the multiplicity of beings, between the infinite source of being and the finite derivatives from that source is not external but internal. Creation cannot be conceived on the model of a transitive activity, where the maker is and remains external to both the material out of which he makes and the product that he makes and that, once made, continues to exist independently of the maker. The Creator creates finite beings out of his own being and remains present to them in a way that is more intimate than their presence to themselves and more radical than the presence of one finite being to another. The relation between Creator and creature is a transcendental, not an empirical, relation and remains the "ontological" basis for all finite "ontic" (Heidegger) relations in the world.

If God is the only source of the being of all beings in both their unity and diversity, if this diversity is not something added from outside God, then creation is correctly understood, as Hegel insisted, only as the internal multiplication and diversification of God's own being or his self-differentiation and self-pluralization. God separates himself from himself and posits an Other as Other, but this Other does not fall outside God but is maintained as Other because God does not -and cannot -

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The Trinity and the Incarnation remain simply separated from himself as Other but preserves his identity with himself in this Other.' In creating, God does not need any external, preexisting material, but this does not mean that creatures come out of nothing. Rather, God creates them out of his own being- "the nothingness [das Nichts] of the world itself, out of which the world has been created, is the Absolute itself'22-whlch, ot course, should not be conceived in crude material fashion. That is, God creates by positing a distinction within himself. As an Other posited by God from within himself as his self-expression, the finite bears not only an ontological bond but also similarity with the Creator.

All discussion of creation must preserve this ontological unity of being between Creator and creature, a unity from which all diversity is derived from within and to which, therefore, it is ontologically second- ary and relative. Hegel sees a violation of this ontological unity in deism and the conventional conceptions of God as the infinitely removed "beyond" of the finite. Whether motivated by the desire to preserve the infinity of God or to maintain the distinction and autonomy of the finite from the infinite, these conceptions stress the difference between infinite and finite, that the infinite is not finite and vice versa. They place the finite on one side and the infinite on the other, each against the other as two independent things. For Hegel, the underlying assumption is false; it results from reifying both the finite and the infinite as static, ready-made things by separating them from the very process that makes each what it is. The being of the finite lies precisely in the process of coming to be in ontological dependence on and self- transcendence toward the infinite, its Other. It is finite, not by itself but through the relation of dependence on God, a relation that constitutes the finite as finite. The finite is finite only as a unity of itself and its infinite Other. To posit the finite apart from this sustaining, constitutive relation to the infinite would be to fail to recognize the finite as finite and implicity to infinitize it by granting aseity to what is by admission finite.

It is likewise false to separate the infinite from the finite, for opposite reasons. To separate the infinite from the finite, even for the sake of preserving the transcendence of the infinite, is in fact implicitly to infinitize the finite and also in the same process to reduce the infinite itself to a finite being by placing the infinite simply alongside (neben) the finite in a mutually external relationship and implicitly regarding the

I See G. W. F. Hegel, Begriff der Religion, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966), p. 147. Hereafter abbreviated as BR.

2 Hegel, Die Religionen der geistigen Individualitat, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966), p. 85.

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The Journal of Religion infinite and the finite as two powers over against each other at the same ontological level. Such an infinite is a bad (schlechte) infinite because it is limited by the finite. If God is truly infinite, unlimited, unconditioned, it is not enough that he be not finite, in-finite; true infinity also requires that there be nothing that somehow remains external to the creative causality of God, limiting and conditioning him from outside. The true infinite is not only not finite but also has the power to posit the finite in its totality by granting it an internal relation to the infinite, that is, by positing it as Other within himself. The true infinite is a unity of itself, the infinite, and its Other, the finite.3

Second, it is within this internal ontological unity of finite and infinite that the distinction between them must and can emerge. This distinction can only be relative; any absolute distinction or autonomy would mean infinitizing the finite and spell ontological dualism. Hegel's Absolute has often been accused of "devouring" the finite, but this accu- sation, I think, is a misunderstanding. It is important in this regard to recall the transcendental character of the relation between finite and infinite. The internal unity of finite and infinite is transcendental, not empirical as in the case of the unity of one finite being and another. In the latter case one being is never totally dependent on another; no finite being is the source of being of another in its totality. By the same token no finite being is totally free and autonomous vis-a-vis another; finite freedom is always more or less externally limited by the brute facticity of other persons, events, and situations beyond one's control, as it is also dependent for its actualization as "concrete" freedom on the coop- eration of others external to oneself. In fact, it is the very definition of finitude, for Hegel, that a finite being is limited by contingency, externality, and brute necessity that it cannot wholly sublate.4 A finite being cannot be totally internally related to or immanent in an Other without either destroying the Other as Other or being itself destroyed by the Other.

In contrast, it is the prerogative of the infinite to be able to posit the finite as Other, be present to it in its totality, and still preserve it as Other than itself. As Rahner put it, the radical dependence of the finite on God and their autonomy from him are directly proportionate to each other, whereas in finite, empirical relations the proportion is

3 On the concept of the "true" infinite and the relation between finite and infinite in general, see my article, "Hegel's Absolute: Transcendent or Immanent?" Journal of Religion, 56, no. 1 (1976): 68-76.

4 See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969, 1971), 1:75, 2:409-10.

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The Trinity and the Incarnation inverse.5 For Hegel, God is infinitely free because, as the positing source of all reality, God is not subject to any unsublated otherness. And it is because God is free that he can also grant autonomy and freedom to his creatures: "It is only the Absolute Idea which determines itself and which, in determining itself, is secure in itself as absolutely free in itself. Thus, in determining itself it releases what is determined in such a way that the latter exists as something independent, an independent object. What is free is present only for the free. It is the absolute freedom of the Idea that in its determination, in its judgment [Urteil], it releases the Other as something free and independent. This Other, released as something independent, is the world in general."6

Next, what is meant by the Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus of Nazareth? For the orthodox view, God becomes a human being in such a way that Christ is truly divine (vere Deus) and truly human (vere homo). God not only becomes a human being but also subjects himself to pas- sion and death on the cross. Whatever he does as a human being he does as God. The history of this man is also the history of God himself. Yet, when God becomes a human being and dies on the cross, he does not cease to be God. God becomes something other than himself yet does not cease to be himself, God. If a God who becomes a human being is difficult enough to grasp, a God who simply ceases to be God in becoming human would be an absurdity. Moreover, God not only dies and rises from the dead but also remains present in the spirit of humanity, guiding human history and reconciling humanity with himself. He is truly immanent in history yet without losing his divine transcendence. He is immanent in his Other, but this immanence in this Other does not destroy his enduring identity with himself.

The dogma of the Incarnation, like that of the Trinity, is subtle to the extreme, and a correct understanding of it requires distinguishing it from many apparently similar notions with which it has been confused, as witness the history of early heresies. It affirms true divinity ("consubstantial with the Father") and true humanity ("consubstantial with us") in the unity of the one divine person, the Logos. As such, the Incarna- tion is, in Dorner's phrase, "the most eloquent expression" of the relation between God and the world.7 The presence of God in Jesus is not identical with either God's presence in the world generally, as in

5 See Karl Rahner, A Rahner Reader, ed. G. A. McCool (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 157.

6 Hegel, Die absolute Religion, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966), p. 94 (my translation). Hereafter abbreviated as AR.

7 See Claude Welch, ed. and trans., God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology: G. Thomasius, I. A. Dorner, A. E. Biederman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 208.

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The Journal of Religion creation, or the universal presence of the Holy Spirit in the believers. Nor is it to be confused, as David Strauss would have it, with a universal incarnation of God in every human being in which God is simply, without distinction, identified with the human in pantheistic fashion, in which the Logos becomes Homo generalis, a Platonic universal, turning the individuality of humans into a mere appearance. The humanity assumed by the Logos did not exist prior to the union with the divine, and it was real humanity, not a mere external garment, that the Logos put on, which would turn the Incarnation into a mere theophany in human form. If the Logos did not cease to be divine through the Incarnation, neither did he merely appear to be human. The divine did not replace the human, as the human did not replace the divine. The union of the human and the divine in the one divine person of the Logos is a union that preserves the distinction of the two natures, which must be acknowledged "without confusion or change," "without division or separation" (Chalcedon). The Incarna- tion, to put it in Hegelian language, is the paradigm case of unity in difference.

A CRITIQUE OF THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

The question to ask now is, What do creation and the Incarnation, thus understood, presuppose about the nature of God and his relation to the world as conditions of their possibility? Are the concepts and categories of the post-Nicene Fathers (Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil) and those of classical theism (Aquinas) adequate to this task? Is the God of classical theism capable of creating the world and becoming incarnate in one of his creatures?

As is well known, the classical orthodox formulation of the trinitarian dogma grew out of the christological problem, the ontological status of the Logos through whom the world was created and who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The basic underlying logic was something like this. The divine nature is immutable, impassible, and eternal, but creation and Incarnation imply a relation to the finite, mutable, and temporal. The divine nature in its unoriginate, eternal being, therefore, cannot be the source of such a relation without impairing its immutability. Nor, however, could a merely finite being be such a source. The source could only be something that is divine yet not simply identical with the divine nature as such. The solution: the divine nature subsists in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and it is the Son, the Logos, through whom the world was made and who became flesh, not the Father, the unoriginate origin of both the Son and the Holy Spirit.

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The Trinity and the Incarnation

This solution, however, was not without serious difficulties. In order to preserve the unity and simplicity of the Godhead ("one" God), it had to place the Persons, the subsistent "relations" of origination and otherness, outside the divine nature, while in order to preserve the full divinity of the Persons, it had to identify the Person of the Father and through him the other Persons with the Godhead because, after all, it is the originating activity of the Father precisely in his divine nature that constitutes the Son as Son and the Spirit as Spirit. To the extent that the unity of the divine nature was stressed along with the diversity of Per- sons while also conceiving the relation between the unity and the diversity as mutually "external" or "outside," the classical formulation already contained an unresolved tension between the much-dreaded pagan polytheism on the one hand and a monotheism of the divine nature of which the Persons would be Sabellian "modes."8

The same ambiguity in the conceptualization of the relation between unity and multiplicity, between self-identity and relation to an Other, was carried over into the christological affirmation of the unity of the divine Person in two natures. It affirmed both the true humanity and the true divinity of the Logos yet also exempted the divinity from any real participation in the humanity for fear of endangering divine immutability. The Logos truly became flesh, but he did not suffer and die on the cross; only his humanity did. The human and the divine were united yet also remained mutually external. All the changes and sufferings took place on the human side of the gulf separating the human and the divine. For all its denials, classical christology could not overcome the Docetist implication that the humanity was no more than an "external garment" put on by the Logos without really affecting him.9

The same basic dilemma between unity of nature and diversity of relations, between identity and otherness, is also found in the medieval Thomistic synthesis, which, despite its restatement of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, contained the same ambiguity, especially in conceptualizing the relation between God and the world, between the immutable divine substance and its relation to the Other, the world of change and multiplicity. Creatures are "really" related to God, but God is not likewise really related to the world. Recently, under the prodding of process thought, some Thomists have tried to bring God and creatures together more closely by exploiting the distinction between "nature" and "person" or between "real" and "intentional" being in God. According to William J. Hill,

8 In these criticisms of classical trinitarianism, see Leslie Dewart, The Future of Belief (New York: Herder & Herder, 1966), pp. 144-48; Paul Tillich, History of Christian Thought (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), pp. 77-79. 9 See Rahner, p. 149.

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The Journal of Religion if God really relates to a world of creatures, and if those creatures creatively introduce genuine novelty into the world (as they do), and if they truly suffer (as they do), then this cannot remain alien to God's experience. Thus in some sense, without jettisoning the divine immutability (which would dedivinize God), God responds knowingly and lovingly to such suffering. One suggestion may be made here as an alternative to the dipolar nature introduced into God by process thought. The suggestion is to acknowledge as irreducible the distinction between nature and person (or, in a trinitarian context, Persons) in God. It might then be possible to maintain that in His nature God is eternally the infinite act of being and as such is incapable of any enrichment or impoverishment of His being; here the divine being is considered in its absoluteness and remains immutable. In His personhood, however, we are dealing with God's being in its freely-chosen self-relating to others, in that intersubjective disposing of the self that is self-enactment and self-positing. Here we are concerned not with what God is in His being as transcendent to world, but with who He chooses to be vis-a-vis a world which He creates and redeems in love. 10

The basic distinction between "nature" and "person," between the absolute, immutable being in itself and the multiple relations to Others, by which the early Fathers tried to safeguard both the unity of God and the threeness of Persons in the immanent Trinity, is here applied to God's economic relations to the world as well.

Using the same conceptual categories, W. Norris Clarke likewise argues that God remains unrelated to the world in his "absolute" being in himself (ens naturale) but that he is really related to, that is, affected by, the world in his "relational" being for us (ens intentionale), a position that he considers an advance over Saint Thomas, for whom God was not really related to the world even in his intentional being. Thus, for Clarke, "in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do," and "his consciousness is contingently and qualitatively different because of what we do." He immediately goes on, however, to add that "all this difference remains... on the level of God's relational consciousness and therefore does not involve increase or decrease in the Infinite Plenitude of God's intrinsic inner being and perfection.""

How is this so? The mystery lies in the peculiar character of "relation" itself. "Relation is unique among all the categories in that the addition of relations to a being does not necessarily add to or subtract anything from its absolute real being and perfection. It relates the subject to its term but does not necessarily change or modify it internally in

10 William J. Hill, "The Historicity of God," Theological Studies 45 (1984): 332-33. 11 W. Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God. A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston- Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1979), p. 92.

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any non-relative way."12Just as, for the Greek fathers, the act of gener- ation and the relation of origination posited by it does not involve any change in the human nature of either the Father or the Son -both are human, or divine in the case of the divine Persons, apart from such relations-so, for Clarke, "when the Father gives His entire identical nature (what He is) to the Son in love, and both together to the Holy Spirit, the two are relationally distinguished as Giver and Receiver, but what they possess as their intrinsic perfection of being is the identical simple and infinite plenitude of absolute perfection that is the divine nature."13 The relations among the Persons of the Trinity are real, subsistent relations, whereas God's relation to the world is real regarding his intentional being but only "rational," not "real," regarding his intrinsic being; but in either case relation remains external to the divine nature and does not affect its simplicity and immutability.

The basic question, of course, is whether relation is merely "external" to nature, whether it is possible to posit an "irreducible" (Hill) distinction between "nature" and "person." Does relation really "add nothing to and subtract nothing from" nature (Clarke)? According to this view, nature is fully and completely constituted as nature apart from all relations. To use a favorite classical analogy, a father remains a human being apart from his activity of generating a son and the relation of fatherhood posited by that act, just as the son retains his human essence apart from his sonship and relation of dependence on the father. To be a father and to be a human being are different, because, if not, only a father would be human. This is so because, as Gregory of Nyssa argued, "cause" and "nature" cannot be "defined" in the same way. 14 This, I think, gives a clue to the abstract character of nature and its external relation to relation in the classical approach. From a "definitional" point of view, the concept of "father" is indeed different from that of "human being." Does it follow from this, however, either that the son can exist as a human being apart from his relation of dependence on the father, or that "father" and "human being" can exist separately? Furthermore, could a merely conceptual father ever give birth to a son? In what sense does a merely conceptual son originate from a merely conceptual father? Plainly, we must go beyond the merely conceptual level; after all, we are not talking about a merely conceptual but a real Trinity or about a merely conceptual but a real Creator of the world.

12 Ibid., p. 101. 13 Ibid. 14 Gregory of Nyssa, Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, trans. William Moore

and Henry Austin Wilson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1983), p. 336 ("On Not Three Gods").

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The Journal of Religion From the viewpoint of concrete existence, "cause" and "nature,"

"father" and "human being," and "relation" and "nature" in general are not so easily separable or separately intelligible. The activity of causa- tion and the causal relation to an Other posited by that act can only come from nature as the intrinsic principle of activity and only express something of that nature itself. An act is not its own source; it is always the act of a subject with a determinate nature and reflects the deter- minacy of its source. The Father generates a divine Son, not a human son, only because his activity comes from and expresses the infinite power of his divine nature. Conceptually distinct, the Father and his divine nature are not separately intelligible. Activity and relation are intelligible only in their inner relation to nature from which they originate and that they concretely actualize.

Nor is nature intelligible apart from relations. I may indeed exist as a human being apart from some relations, for example, particular citi- zenship, profession, location, friendship, and so on, but what follows from this is simply that some relations are peripheral to my existence as a human being, not that relations as such or all relations are merely external and accidental to my concrete human existence. Apart from all relations, and thus taken as an "abstraction," nature simply does not and cannot exist, not even as potentiality, because real potentiality already implies actualization of that potentiality and thus relations in which it is actualized. From the concrete point of view, my being a "son" is not extrinsic but intrinsic to my "nature" as a human being because my relation of dependence on my "father" is both an expression and an actualization of my human nature as a finite, dependent being. Apart from relations that actualize and manifest it, nature becomes an unintelligible abstraction. In short, activity and relation are intelligible only as the self-activation and self-pluralization of nature, as nature is itself intelligible only as a process of manifesting and actualizing itself through activity and relation. The relation between the two is mutually internal and constitutive.

The consequence of separating nature and relation is no less serious in the case of God's creative and Incarnate relation to the world than in the case of the immanent Trinity. If, as Hill says, God's relation to the world is a matter of "God's being in its freely chosen self-relating to others," and yet this "self-relating" is "irreducibly" different from his nature as infinite, immutable, absolute being, then, at least two unsavory conclusions follow. One is that in that case either we end up with two Gods, or the difference cannot be "irreducible." By definition, creation is God relating himself to an Other, but if this self-relating God is irreducibly different from God in his absolute nature, have we not posited a radical dualism between God for us and God in himself?

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On the supposition of an irreducible difference, do we not also have to posit such a difference between the economic and the immanent Trinity with all its consequences for salvation as understood by Chris- tian faith?

If, on the other hand, the difference could not be irreducible, if there is an inner unity between God relating himself to the world and God in his absolute being, how are we to conceive this inner unity except as God, precisely in his nature, relating himself to the world? After all, it is only because God is a God of certain "nature," that is, the infinite act of being, that he can create at all and even become incarnate. But this is precisely what constitutes a scandal to Thomism; such a view seems to introduce a contradiction into God's own being between his simplicity and immutability on the one hand and an inner relation to composite and mutable creatures on the other. And this leads to the second con- clusion: either creation and Incarnation are impossible because the unity of God in himself and God for us seems to pose such a contradiction, or the relation between nature and relation-and along with it simplicity and immutability-must be reconceptualized so as to make room for creation and Incarnation, to which I now turn.

HEGEL ON THE TRINITY AND THE INCARNATION

Creation and Incarnation, for Hegel, are relations to the finite posited by God's own activity of internal self-differentiation. As such, activity, relation, and otherness are the very process in which God manifests and actualizes his very essence. If God is to create and become incarnate without ceasing to be himself, then, there must be in God's essence itself an aspect whereby he is the unoriginate origin of all being, an aspect whereby he can posit out of his own being something other than himself, and an aspect whereby he can sublate this otherness and maintain his identity with himself, in short, an originating, a pluralizing, and a reintegrating principle. Without the first, there would be no God. Without the second, there would be no possibility of creation and Incarnation; the Father would have to change himself into a creature and perish as God. Without the third, the Logos in the otherness of the finite would remain separated from the Godhead, and God would be literally divided from himself. It is as the divine principle of self-other- ing that the Logos alone can be both the creative and the Incarnate Logos, a point on which Dorner and Rahner agree with Hegel.15

15 See Hegel, AR (see n. 6 above), p. 94; on Dorner, see Welch, p. 216, and Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 86.

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The Journal of Religion The possibility of creation and Incarnation presupposes in God

himself this plurality, not simplicity, of principles consonant with his more primordial unity and expressive of that unity. It also presupposes an immutability compatible with entering into a world of change and still preserving identity in that world, a living, active, dynamic identity capable of positing and conquering otherness, something more than the metaphysical immutability of the classical conception. What is required is a shift from a philosophy of "substance," which stresses simple self-identity, self-sufficiency, and essential immutability of being and allows activity, relation, and otherness only as something external to itself, to a philosophy of "spirit," which regards active mediation by otherness as internal to the constitution of self-identity in its concrete unity.16

For Hegel, God is truly God only as Spirit, and as such essentially trinitarian. In an act of primordial judgment of separation (Ur-teil) the Father distinguishes himself from himself and posits an Other, the Son. Posited by the Father as his Other, the Son is distinct from the Father, but as his Other or his self-expression the Son shares the totality of the divine being. The Son "unites the two qualities of being the totality in itself and of being posited as other."7 The infinity of the Father lies precisely in this power not only to remain Father as a self-identical substance but also to posit an Other of himself without ceasing to be himself. The Father is both himself, that is, Father in his distinct self- identity and related and present to the Son in his distinct Otherness to the Father, where this relation is not external to the divine essence of the Father but is itself something posited by the Father in his divine nature. In this sense the identity of the Father is not the simple identity of a substance with itself but an identity mediated to itself by Otherness or a unity of identity and disidentity. The same is true of the Son, whose identity is likewise internally mediated by his relation to the Father. In and through the Son the Father returns to himself as a concrete, dynamic, mediated identity, which is the Holy Spirit. The Father does not merely posit an Other but also has the power to sublate the Otherness of the Son, that is, to preserve that Other as Other and at the same time transcend that Other as something posited by himself, whereby he mediates himself to himself. The Other is not a brute datum separating the Father from himself but a medium thoroughly open and transparent to the self-mediating action of the Father. This,

16 For Hegel's critique of "substance," see BR (n. 1 above), pp. 188-97, and Phdinomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 19 ff. ("Vorrede"). 17 Hegel, AR, p. 91.

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of course, is an eternal process in the Godhead, and it is the totality of this process of movement that constitutes the spirituality of God.18

How, then, does this compare with classical trinitarianism? Both Hegel and the classical view agree that the Father is the unoriginate source or ground of the Godhead and that the Persons are essentially relational, but whereas the classical doctrine places such relations outside the divine essence, generating the tension between the monotheism of divine nature and tritheism of Persons, Hegel identifies the Father with the Godhead as such and regards the Persons or subsistent relations as internal to the Godhead of the Father, who therefore con- tains the immanent Trinity within himself. The distinction of Persons is at least as real in Hegel as in the classical view, but Hegel would dis- agree that each Person is fully God as much as the other, not because he denies the divinity of the Persons but because such a statement would imply the possibility of separate existence of the Persons and of tritheism.

What is at stake here is the question of ontological priority within the eternal process itself: which is ontologically prior, the unity of the divine nature or the distinction of Persons? One could not absolutize the distinction without falling into tritheism, nor could one absolutize the unity of the divine nature in its immediate self-identity without making impossible the origination of the Son and the Holy Spirit as well as creation and Incarnation. Nor yet could one deny the ontological primacy of unity over plurality without positing radical pluralism; unity and plurality are not ontologically equal. Hegel's way, therefore, is to give ontological priority to the Father, not simply as one of three Persons but precisely as the unoriginate ground of the divine nature in its unity while also positing the power of self-pluralization within the one Godhead of the Father as the origin of both the Son and the Spirit.

It is therefore not so much each of the Persons as the totality of the divine process that manifests the "fullness" of divinity. Each Person, without ceasing to be distinct, is itself a "moment" or aspect of the self- pluralizing and self-unifying process, in which no Person, not even the Father, could be taken in isolation, where, therefore, it would be mis- placed to ask whether each Person is fully God as much as the other. The Father alone, for Hegel, would be an abstraction; he exists concretely only as Father of the Son and origin of the Spirit. The Father is concretely divine precisely as part of the whole process that he origi- nates and in which he becomes actual and concrete, as the Son exists concretely as Son only as the Other of the Father, and as the Spirit exists concretely only as the process in which the Father sublates the

18 See ibid., pp. 70, 72, 139.

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The Journal of Religion Otherness of the Son and returns to himself. The divine process is an eternal circle where the beginning enters into the middle and end points as their internal presupposition and becomes concrete only as a "result" of such mediation, just as the result could not be separated and reified from the beginning and the process of which it is a result and into which it enters as their internal presupposition.

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 himself from himself, returns to himself from that differentiation, and thus exists concretely as one God.

It is this vitality of the immanent Trinity with its inner multiplicity and finality that makes possible God's economic self-revelation in terms of creation and the Incarnation. In this regard it is important to try to see the inner unity of these two key events of salvation. For Hegel, creation and the Incarnation are not simply two successive events occurr- ing one after the other in time, connected at best by the subsequent necessity of making up for the "fall" of man at the beginning, as reli- gious consciousness tends to "represent" (Vorstellen) the relationship, as though the Incarnation were merely an "afterthought" for God. On the contrary, if the Incarnation means the union of the human and the divine, and if it is to be more than a brute, inexplicable mystery, then, human nature must be understood as something that was created from the first with the capacity and inner need to enter into union with the divine. Were created human nature simply other, alien, and opposed to the divine, the Incarnation would not mean genuine unity but mere juxtaposition of two heterogeneous elements. Unless human nature were created with an inner teleological relation to the divine, the Incar- nation would mean only an external imposition of the divine on the human, which on its part would not need the divine and for which, therefore, the Incarnation would have no redemptive, reconciling sig- nificance. The Incarnation as a redemptive event presupposes an

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inner, teleological relation between the human and the divine, between creation and redemption: the creation of finite spirits with an inner need for the divine makes the Incarnation humanly meaningful, just as redemption is the teleological fulfillment of creation.

This human need for the divine, for Hegel, is not a passing accident in human life; it is an "existential" (Heidegger, Rahner) built into the relational structure of man as the self-conscious but finite unity of finite and infinite (with God as the infinite unity of finite and infinite). As Hegel defines the essence of God in relational terms, so he locates the essence of man in the dialectic of his relation to the infinite. Man's transcendence to God is the very basis of all his relations to the finite and as such constitutive of his essence or Wesen, not an external or contingent addition to it. It is this capacity and drive for transcendence that makes possible human freedom, human dignity, ethical and reli- gious life, as well as self-conscious subjectivity and rational thought. This orientation to the infinite, however, only defines "man's essence" or "concept," which as such is not a present reality but a task and a goal yet to be achieved. In his finite "existence" and "reality" man seeks the infinite not in the truly infinite but in what is "natural" and finite. Infinite in "form" but finite in "content," the human spirit seeks its infinity, its certainty of itself, in absolutizing and universalizing its "natural" desires in all their particularity and contingency.19

As a finite unity of finite and infinite, then, the human spirit necessarily experiences a contradiction, an estrangement between its essence and existence, its concept and reality, an estrangement that is also qualified as "guilt." Insofar as the human spirit has not yet transcended its condition of naturality with its immanent determinisms while at the same time becoming conscious of its own (formal) infinity as a self, there is a necessary tension between its natural particularity and its spiritual universality, a tendency to absolutize that particularity into particularism and assert such particularism over against the universal, hence, a propensity to evil. At the same time it still remains an act of its will and freedom to actualize this tendency into particular acts of guilt. As far as the human condition is concerned, then, it is necessarily evil or infected with

"original sin" even while particular human acts may remain free. This evil, guilty, or sinful condition-or "existential" of finite existence in its estrangement from the true infinite-reaches its self-conscious climax in the "infinite sorrow" of the Jewish experience of alienation from God and the "infinite misery" of the Roman experience of alienation from the world, which drives the human spirit into its own depth with its experience of "total" and "universal" estrangement. Along

19 See ibid., pp. 97, 105.

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The Journal of Religion with this experience, however, is also posited the need and demand to overcome that estrangement.20

Could humans, then, overcome this estrangement and achieve reconciliation with the infinite on their own resources? Hegel's answer is that they could not. The finite spirit, of course, tries to do so, but as long as it remains its own activity alone, it remains merely subjective and formal, with no guarantee that it is also objectively efficacious. Subjective possibility, if it is to be a "real" possibility, presupposes objective possibility. Just as my particular act of knowing presupposes its intrinsic, objective possibility based on the general intelligibility of being, and just as my eating an apple presupposes the objective homo- geneity of myself and the apple that I propose to make part of myself by eating,21 so my Setzung of the reconciliation of finite and infinite depends on the Vorraussetzung that "precisely what is posited is also something implicit" ("eben das Gesetzte auch an sich ist").22 Only if the antithesis of finite and infinite is not absolute but sublatable "in itself," can the subject also try to sublate it explicitly "for itself." That is, only on condition that, despite the real antithesis of finite and infinite, a basic unity between them, more primordial than their antithesis, does persist and triumph over than antithesis, is it possible for the finite spirit to do its part in the reconciliation.

Should someone object why, if reconciliation is already actual "in and for itself," the finite subject still needs to make it explicit, two things may be pointed out. One is that the objective "already" of divine reconciliation, which must be understood as a "process," not as an accomplished fact of the past, does not make the subjective "not yet" of human reconciliation an illusion or the need for subjective human appropriation of divine reconciliation unnecessary, any more than the general, real intelligibility of being renders the reality of subjective ignorance a fiction or subjective appropriation of that intelligibility use- less. This, of course, raises the issue--which is the second point-of how God's activity of reconciling himself with the finite depends on yet also "overreaches" the self-reconciliation of the finite with the divine. This is the general issue of the relation between human freedom and divine initiative, nature and grace, which as such is not peculiar to Hegel but common to all theism that accepts God's ontological sover- eignty as the source of all being. I cannot pursue this question here. If the finite spirit cannot bring about the reconciliation of itself and its infinite Other on its own, then this infinite Other must bring about this reconciliation and show that it is reconciling itself with the finite

20 See ibid., pp. 104-21. 21 See ibid., pp. 159-60. 22 Ibid., p. 136.

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spirit precisely in the way that the finite in its actual existential condition can know itself as being reconciled with the infinite. The intrinsic identity of human and divine, the ontological basis of reconciliation, must show itself as actual through God's own activity of reconciliation and this to humans where they are. That is, the redemption of the human requires the Incarnation of the divine.

For Hegel, this Incarnation is possible only as the Incarnation in an historical individual for two reasons: the nature of God as Spirit and the nature of humans as spirits in history. What is at stake here is the concrete demonstration of the identity of God himself and humanity. In all preceding, that is, pre-Christian religions, God makes himself known to humanity in a number of ways, but all these ways stop short of revealing God himself, God as Spirit. Natural objects (natural religion), human artifacts (Greek religion), the transcendent God (Judaism), and God as "fate" (Roman religion): these reveal God only as an abstraction or only as a will remote and external to the human spirit. They reveal God only through finite intermediaries and fail to reveal God himself, God as a self, subject, or spirit with his own universal infinity. What is required is that God identify himself with the human not abstractly but concretely, not through intermediaries but through himself; that is, God must identify himself precisely as a self- conscious subject with humanity.

Humanity, on the other hand, is spirit in the world, not a pure spirit, but a natural, embodied spirit with a natural, sensible consciousness. (If Hegel also insists that this sensible consciousness must be sublated, we must also remember that this sublation preserves the reality of sensible consciousness and does not eliminate it, which would result in the disembodiment of the human into purely angelic existence, obvi- ously not what Hegel could mean, for whom the Spirit does not shun sensibility "in monkish fashion.") The reconciling identification of God and humanity must occurfor humans precisely in their natural consciousness, the "normal" and enduring form of human consciousness in its concrete historical existence. God as a self-conscious subject must appear to man's natural consciousness; that is, God must incarnate himself as an empirical historical individual.

The logic of reconciliation requires God's self-manifestation in a form that combines sensibility and self-consciousness, which can be found only in a particular, sensible individual. Individuality, for Hegel, is "the principle of actuality." The ultimate subject of existence, still more of self-conscious spiritual existence, is the individual, and in this ontological sense even God, the Absolute Spirit, is an individual, although a "concretely universal" individual. Ultimately, for all its relation to an Other, being means unity, identity with itself, inner undi-

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The Journal of Religion videdness, and thus distinction from the Other. Human individuals are not only individual in this ontological sense but also sensible individuals constituted by materiality that is essentially external and exclu- sive. God's self-manifestation in a form that is both sensible and self- conscious, therefore, can only be in one individual. The idea that God could have become incarnate in many individuals or in the human species as a whole either reduces the divine to an abstraction without subjectivity or turns the human into an accidental mask of the divine in the manner of Indian myths and Docetism.23

It is important to note here -against Barthian objections-that for Hegel, this human need for God's redemptive Incarnation is not a necessity external to and imposed on God. As mentioned earlier, 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 Incar- nation, in this sense, is thoroughly trinitarian.

Although Hegel rules out the possibility of a purely historical proof -in the positivistic sense--that Jesus of Nazareth was precisely that historical individual in whom the divine was united with the human, it is also true that for him Jesus was that individual. As "God in human form"24 or "the concrete God,"25 Jesus is not "the mere organ of revelation but is himself the content of revelation,"26 the ontological congeni- ality of human and divine. The history of Jesus is the history of God himself, and he alone is "utterly adequate to the Idea" ("schlechthin der Idee geniss").27 In his death on the cross, "God himself is dead,"28 and in subjecting himself to death, "the uttermost pinnacle of finitude,"29 God experiences the sting of otherness at its most radical and proves his own humanity and his love for humanity.

But just as, in the immanent Trinity, the Father does not remain separated from the Son but overcomes or sublates the separation,

23 On the necessity of Incarnation in one individual, see ibid., pp. 133-34, 137-42. 24 Ibid., p. 163. 25 Ibid., p. 148. 26 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1971), sec. 383 (addition). 27 Hegel, AR, p. 185. 28 Ibid., p. 165. 29 Ibid., p. 161.

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reconciling himself with the Son in the Spirit, so God does not remain dead in Jesus but has the power to sublate the otherness of death, that is, God has the power of Resurrection. No longer limited to the physical boundaries of a particular historical individual, God himself rises as the Holy Spirit from the particularity of finitude in a negation of negation and becomes a universal spiritual presence in the depth of human history, where he reconciles humanity with himself. For Hegel, otherness, negation, finitude - which is a moment of divine nature itself-is not the final word; reconciliation is. It is precisely the infinite power of God to subject himself to finitude and to overcome and triumph over that finitude and achieve reconciliation between himself and his Other. 30 In this sense Hegel's theology of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which he calls "the whole of history,"31 is essentially a "theology of Resurrection."32 Insofar as such resurrection and reconciliation is rooted in the inner trinitarian nature of God himself, it is also, one could say, a "theology of hope," a hope that God himself guarantees in the ultimate triumph over death and negation. The infinity of God in Hegel is not that of a God untouched by evil and finitude but that of a God who suffers yet overcomes them.

One question still remains to be discussed. How does Hegel distinguish between God's presence in Jesus of Nazareth in whom he is incarnate and his presence in the creatures in general in which he is not? Hegel does not, as far as I know, provide an explicit answer to this particular question that has preoccupied so much theology from Chal- cedon to contemporary theologians such as Rahner, Cobb, Hick, and others. What is clear is his rejection of the "substantialist" approach so characteristic of classical christology. It is possible, however, to attempt a Hegelian, if not Hegel's, answer to the question on the basis of the preceding discussion.

It is helpful here, I think, to distinguish three, not two, modes of God's presence in the creature. The first is God's presence in nature or the totality of nonhuman creatures. Here God is present as the source of their being, but not as Spirit. For Hegel, the Spirit can exist as Spirit only for another spirit. It is only in and for the human spirit that God can be present as Spirit, which is the second mode of God's presence, that is, the presence of the Holy Spirit in the interiority of the human spirit. There are two characteristics to this mode. One is that it is essentially a spiritual, not physical, presence, and the other is that it is still

30 See ibid., pp. 140, 163, 166. 31 Ibid., p. 163. 32 Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), p. 282.

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The Journal of Religion infected by the more or less estranged otherness of the human and the divine; that is, while the divine Spirit is reconciling itself with the human, the response of the human remains to varying degrees that of the guilty, alienated creature.

The third mode of God's presence is that in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus remains thoroughly human, not in Docetic appearance-the finite Other of God -as is every other creature, yet God so unites and identifies himself with Jesus as his own Other that God is himself involved in this Other. The intimacy of this self-identification of God with Jesus is characterized, first of all, by the fact that God is present to him not only in the interiority of his spirit as in the second mode but in the totality of his concrete historical existence. His pain, his death is God's pain, God's death. Second, it is a union of the human and the divine in which otherness does remain but without the estrangement so characteristic of the relation between God and other human beings. Jesus is the divinely posited exemplar of the reconciliation of the human and the divine "utterly adequate to the Idea." In this sense one might say that the relation between God and Jesus is the finite analogue - and repetition - of the unestranged, sublated otherness between the Father and the Son in the immanent Trinity. Third, Jesus is not an external "organ" of revelation like prophets and other finite intermediaries and signs but "the content" of revelation, that is, God himself reconciled with his human Other. By virtue of his "true" infinity, God does not remain merely infinite but, without losing his infinity, finitizes himself in the human otherness of Jesus so that the history of Jesus is God's own history, so that in the death of Jesus "God himself is dead."

* * *

Speculation on the Trinity and the Incarnation is inherently risky. No "labor of the concept" seems more strenuous and more confusing than speculation on these metaphysical ultimates. One often does not know what one is talking about, and there are so many ways one can go wrong. I have attempted only to throw some light on the issues involved by reviewing Hegel in the context of the classical formulations, in the belief that a more adequate understanding of these central Christian dogmas lies in the Hegelian rather than in the classical metaphysical approaches. Many issues still require elaboration or further elaboration, such as the "contingency" versus "necessity" of creation and Incarnation and the transcendence of the immanent over the economic Trinity, on which Hegel himself seems either obscure or at least

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difficult to comprehend.33 If anything is indicated, however, by the many contemporary attempts to reformulate the two dogmas, such as those of Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, and Pannenberg, in whom Hegel's Denkform is still quite wirklich, it is that his potential to illuminate deserves further exploration.

33 I dealt with some of these issues in an article (n. 3 above) and in "Hegel's Retention of Mystery as a Theological Category," Clio 12, no. 4 (1983): 333-53.

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Article Contentsp. 173p. 174p. 175p. 176p. 177p. 178p. 179p. 180p. 181p. 182p. 183p. 184p. 185p. 186p. 187p. 188p. 189p. 190p. 191p. 192p. 193

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 2, Apr., 1986Front MatterTruth or Meaning: Ricoeur versus Frei on Biblical Narrative [pp. 117 - 140]Cultural Hermeneutics: The Concept of Imagination in the Phenomenological Approaches of Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade [pp. 141 - 156]The Parable of the Loaves [pp. 157 - 172]The Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical Approaches [pp. 173 - 193]Review ArticlesSoloveitchik's Halakhic Platonism [pp. 194 - 198]Alfred North Whitehead: A Biography [pp. 199 - 202]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 203 - 204]untitled [pp. 205 - 206]untitled [p. 206]untitled [p. 207]untitled [pp. 208 - 209]untitled [pp. 209 - 210]untitled [pp. 210 - 212]untitled [pp. 212 - 213]untitled [pp. 213 - 214]untitled [pp. 214 - 215]untitled [pp. 215 - 216]untitled [pp. 216 - 217]untitled [pp. 217 - 218]untitled [pp. 219 - 220]untitled [pp. 220 - 221]untitled [pp. 221 - 222]untitled [pp. 222 - 223]untitled [pp. 223 - 224]untitled [pp. 224 - 225]untitled [pp. 225 - 226]untitled [pp. 226 - 227]

Book Notesuntitled [p. 228]untitled [p. 228]untitled [p. 229]untitled [p. 229]untitled [pp. 229 - 230]untitled [p. 230]untitled [pp. 230 - 231]untitled [p. 231]untitled [pp. 231 - 232]untitled [p. 232]untitled [pp. 232 - 233]

The Editors' Bookshelf: Art, Literature, and Religion [pp. 234 - 236]Back Matter

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