Life in the Spirit
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Life in the Spirit

Trinitarian Grammar and Pneumatic Community in Hegel and Augustine

Douglas Finn

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Life in the Spirit

Trinitarian Grammar and Pneumatic Community in Hegel and Augustine

Douglas Finn

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Since the nineteenth century, many philosophical and theological commentators have sought to trace lines of continuity between the Trinitarian thought of Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Many contemporary Christian theologians have also criticized Augustine's Trinitarian theology generally and his doctrine of the Holy Spirit more specifically through this historical lens. At the same time, Hegelian Trinitarian conceptual dynamics have come to exert a strong influence over contemporary Trinitarian theology.

In Life in the Spirit, Douglas Finn seeks to redress several imbalances with respect to Augustine, imbalances that have one of their hermeneutic causes in a Hegelian-influenced theological tradition. Finn argues that common readings of Augustine focus too much on his De Trinitate, books 8–15, betraying a modern—and to some extent Hegelian—prejudice against considering sermons and biblical commentaries serious theological work. This broadening of Augustinian texts allows Finn to critique readings of Augustine that, on the one hand, narrow his Trinitarian theology to the so-called psychological analogy and thus chart him on a path to Descartes and Hegel, or, on the other hand, suggest he sacrifices a theology of the Trinitarian persons on the altar of divine substance. Augustine's Trinitarian theology on Finn's reading is one fully engaged with God's work in history.

With this renewed understanding of Augustine's Trinitarianism, Finn allows Augustine to interrogate Hegel with his concerns rather than only the other way around. In this ambitious study, Finn shows that Hegel's rendition of Christianity systematically obviates whole swaths of Christian prayer and practice. He does this nonpolemically, carefully, and with meticulous attention to the texts of both great thinkers.

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PART I

WORD AND SPIRIT

Following the Gospel of John, both Hegel and Augustine develop theologies of Christ as the divine Logos, or Word of God. Both, moreover, exposit their theology of the Word by employing an image of the spoken word. However, variance in the extent to which each thinks the image is applicable across the broader narrative of the Logos results in very different christological paradigms, paradigms which I label Hegel’s logic of Christ, on the one hand, and Augustine’s rhetoric of Christ, on the other. These paradigms entail different understandings of the relationship between God and the world and between Christ and the Holy Spirit as each Trinitarian person reveals the character of divine love in the world. They bear upon how each thinker conceives of God’s speaking and acting in the world and the way in which human beings are called to respond to God’s Word, to model themselves individually and communally upon Christ through the inspiration of the Spirit.
By logic I mean that Hegel’s Logos speculation links the two basic meanings of the Greek word—reason and speech—in an attempt to discover and explain the meaning of the whole of reality. Hegel employs the image of the transient oral word—spoken only to fade away instantly—to illustrate the mediating and mediated character of the incarnate Word of God, that is, to show on the cross the reality of the opposition between God and the world but also how that opposition has been definitively overcome. Indeed, to show just how seriously God takes the world, Hegel applies the image of oral speech not only to God’s operations ad extra, but to the inner Trinitarian sphere as well. In this way there is structural continuity and rational transparency between the divine essence and God’s work in the world. On Hegel’s account, these dynamics of orality are developmental and oriented upward; hence God’s action in history is not merely consistent with his divine essence, but in fact defines who he is as God, the God who is love.
Both historically in Hegel’s development and systematically in his philosophy, however, the dynamism of his Logos speculation moves beyond love in a way that possibly vitiates the seriousness with which he had tried to infuse it. In his historical development, Hegel gradually supplants an early, yet formative concept of love with that of reason.1 By the time he arrives at his mature system, he has come to view love as limited by its residual sensuousness and inability to explain the connections between its ostensibly contradictory moments. Systematically too, then, Hegel’s dynamic logic strives to sublate the representational form of the Christian religion and advance toward a conceptual mode of expression commensurate to its truth content. Religion, accordingly, gives way to absolute knowledge or philosophy, where form and content, subject and object, God and the world are united in self-­conscious freedom. Trinitarianly speaking, the objective Logos of Christ, including the creation and salvation of the world, knows itself as but a passing moment in the rational process or history of divine becoming, of the triune God as absolute Logos, that is, as absolute Spirit.
These features of Hegel’s Christology—namely, its teleologically philosophical and pneumatological inflection—affect the manner in which we can compare it to Augustine’s understanding of Christ. The latter I label a rhetorical Christology, inasmuch as Augustine also uses oral linguistic imagery, but only for the incarnation. Thus, in contrast to Hegel, there is in Augustine’s use of Logos imagery a distinction between the eternal, inner-­Trinitarian Word and the incarnate Word spoken in the world. Whereas Hegel seeks to bridge that gap by integrating the dynamism of the spoken word into an all-­encompassing concept of reason, Augustine’s use of the rhetorical motif is intended to underscore the difference between God and the world, not their rational identity. Augustine frames the incarnation of the eternal Word in terms of fittingness—God speaks fittingly to the problem of sin and death that humans have caused. In this way God’s incarnate Word is for Augustine a Word of freedom and love.
Thus, Part I attempts to illustrate this difference between Hegel’s logical and Augustine’s rhetorical christological paradigms by tracing how they play out across the span of Christ’s life and death. The use of such a method, however, brings with it a difficulty that must be explained on material and formal levels. There is a material disparity between the two thinkers’ treatments of the historical events in Jesus’ life. Hegel, in spite of his attempt to take history seriously through his dynamic logic of becoming, is driven by that same logic, where the historical Christ is concerned, to focus primarily, if not exclusively, upon the definitive moment of negativity within the history of God—Christ’s crucifixion—and, moreover, to find in that negativity a dynamism that necessarily moves beyond Christ to the spiritual community. Contrariwise, Augustine, who has been accused of a Platonizing devaluation of humanity’s historical existence because of his distinction between divine eternity and the flux of temporality—epitomized in his theology by the restricted utility of oral linguistic imagery—devotes more attention to various events of Christ’s life beyond just his death and resurrection. Augustine’s Christology, in terms of form, then, is much more biblically based than Hegel’s. In Hegelian terminology, Augustine remains on the level of religious representation.
Nevertheless, this incongruity proves important for our comparison because it allows us to discern already on the christological plane (1) differences between the two thinkers at the more fundamental level of Trinitarian theology, in particular where the relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit is concerned, and (2) some of the practical effects these differences in Trinitarian theology have on the life of the Christian individually and in the church. On the one hand, Hegel’s focus on Christ’s death leads also to the displacement of Christ by the community. There results less of a sense of Christ as the way for the Christian life, because his individual person has been sublated in the eschatological advent of Spirit and surpassed by believers who appropriate his death and resurrection into their lives. In Augustine, on the other hand, we find a greater emphasis upon the Christian’s need to conform him-­ or herself to Christ within his ecclesial body—a process for which the various events of Christ’s life remain definitive in both an exemplary and transformative way. The result, in Augustine’s case, is a very different relationship between Christ and the Spirit in the journey of the Christian toward an eschatological end not yet realized.

Chapter 1

THE LOGIC OF CHRIST

Hegel’s Christology

LOGOS OF THE FATHER: THE IMMANENT TRINITY

“Immanent Trinity” is not a term Hegel uses. Its hermeneutic utility with regard to Hegel arises not from the traditional contrast drawn between it and the economic Trinity—God’s triune operation outward in the temporal world as opposed to the immanent triune relations of the eternal divine nature—but rather from Hegel’s principled rejection of the immanent-economic divide and his philosophical reformulation of the relationship between God and the world. As with any part of Hegel’s mature philosophical system, talk of the “immanent Trinity” is intelligible only in relation to the whole. Cyril O’Regan, accordingly, contrasts the “immanent Trinity” in Hegel with the “inclusive Trinity”—inclusive insofar as Hegel includes along with the logical inner-Trinitarian foundation the outward acts of creation, redemption, sanctification, and eschatological fulfillment in a single all-encompassing narrative of divine becoming.1
With this dynamic theology of growth or development, Hegel strives to conceive of God as at once rational and personal. Toward that end, Hegel understands personality as a result, the fruit of obedience to the Delphic injunction gn
symbol
qi s∊autón
(Know yourself), and, as such, as the end of an agonic and developmental process.2 As in the Bildungsromane of the late eighteenth century, Hegel conceives of personality as self-conscious subjectivity realized through the struggle with alienation, difference, and death. It is no wonder, then, that Hegel cannot make any sense of the orthodox Trinitarian conception of three persons, or hypostases, in one divine nature. To his mind, there is no escaping tritheism in such a formulation. In the various natural relations applied to it, such as the Father’s begetting of the Son, it is the product of sensuously informed picture thinking (Vorstellung). For discursive understanding (Verstand), which operates according to the principle of noncontradiction, there is no way of conceiving three discrete personalities as one personal God. Additionally, Hegel finds problematic the static nature according to which such personalities are conceptualized. A personality in its immediacy, one that does not go beyond itself toward an other, can never come to know itself, can never attain the full personality of subjectivity; in sum, such immediate personhood remains self-centered and even evil.3
To avert such pitfalls, Hegel argues that it is better to consider the Father, Son, and Spirit as moments in the development of the divine to full self-conscious personality. In more philosophical terms, reason (Vernunft), as the highest mode of thought, reconciles the contradictions of Verstand in the self-actualizing process of the absolute concept (Begriff). No longer are Father, Son, and Spirit static personalities placed arbitrarily alongside each other in the eternal godhead. They are, rather, moments whose connection to each other and to the whole can be explained according to the necessary logic of the absolute concept that develops itself out of itself. As absolute and operative according to the logic that it itself is, the divine concept is not merely an aggregate of parts. The whole is contained to varying degrees of explicitness in each of its moments along an ultimately upward developmental trajectory. Accordingly, the moment of the Father, the abstract idea of God, immediate divine subjectivity considered apart from the world, is the most undeveloped and nonetheless contains within it the implicit Trinitarian logic according to which the concept will realize itself. In other words, Hegel situates the entire immanent sphere within the first moment of the “inclusive Trinity,” that of the Father.4
This shift of the entire immanent Trinity to the moment of the Father, however, does not signal a loss of christological relevance, albeit for a Christology of a very different sort than that of traditional orthodoxy.5 The “logic of the Father,” as it were, sets forth the structural paradigm of Hegel’s entire system. The immanent positing and sublating of the second “moment” within the moment of the Father are the dialectical signposts according to which Hegel makes rational sense of the second (inclusive Trinitarian) moment of the Son. Consequently, we must look to the logic of the Father if we are to discern the logic of Christ. Already there, at the level of the immanent divine, Hegel illustrates his Trinitarian logic with the image of the spoken word.
In the abstract medium of immediate thought, the divine concept posits an other over against itself and then immediately sublates this distinction. This purely abstract dynamism takes the form of God’s speaking and hearing himself in solitude in the Phenomenology of Spirit:
Essence beholds only its own self in its being-for-self; in this externalization of itself it stays only with itself: the being-for-self that shuts itself out from essence is essence’s knowledge of its own self. It is the word which, when uttered, leaves behind, externalized and emptied, him who uttered it, but which is as immediately heard, and only this hearing of its own self is the existence of the Word. Thus the distinctions made are immediately resolved as soon as they are made, and are made as soon as they are resolved, and what is true and actual is precisely this immanent circular movement.6
Integrating the logic of the spoken word into the immanent divine has a number of important consequences. The logic not only of the immanent divine concept, but also of Hegel’s entire system, takes on an intrinsic structure of kenotic dynamism, of self-emptying and pleromatic return.7 Because the immanent utterance of the Logos entails the (abstract) emptying into an other and the immediate sublation of that distinction, the two subsequent moments of the Son and Spirit are anticipated in the moment of the Father. The second moment is marked by the transience of an audible word:
The logical Idea is the Idea itself in its pure essence, the Idea enclosed in simple identity within its Notion prior to its immediate reflection [Scheinen] in a form-determinateness. Hence logic exhibits the self-movement of the absolute Idea only as the original word, which is an outwardizing or utterance [Äusserung], but an utterance that in being has immediately vanished again as something outer [Äusseres]; the Idea is, therefore, only in this self-determination of apprehending itself; it is in pure thought, in which difference is not yet otherness.8
Against the suspicion that such transitoriness threatens the existence of the Son, Daniel Cook points out that, for Hegel, the divine Logos exists precisely in its expression and immediate evaporation.9 This point is valid to the extent that spoken language is taken as paradigmatic for the generation of the eternal Logos. But we ought to look closely at the above quotation from PS: “It is the word which, when uttered, leaves behind . . . him who uttered it, but which is as immediately heard, and only this hearing of its own self is the existence of the Word.”10 The existence of the Logos as a fleeting expression of the divine idea necessarily ...

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