Where and with what can beginnings transpire? The so-called ‘question of beginning’ is paramount for Hegel, and appears in the Introductions of nearly all his major philosophical works. It remains a widely discussed point for readers of Hegel and indeed paves the path for Dale M. Schlitt's intervention in the second, revised edition of his Hegel's Trinitarian Claim.
This reissue of the original text from 1984 includes a new Preface — with a reply to commentators, Emilo Brito, Merold Westphal, and Jean-Pierre Labarrière — an updated bibliography, and a new Postscript. Following the thematic of Trinity, the book impressively treats the breadth of Hegel's work, spanning from the Science of Logic to the Realphilosophie presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Focusing on the logical structure of Hegel's argumentation, Schlitt's gives a deeply detailed and thoroughly articulated account of Hegel's approaches to Trinity, as well as of the expansive secondary resources on Hegel's Trinitarian thought.
Schlitt maintains that while Trinity expressed philosophically is arguably the axis of and model for Hegel's thought, his argument for it is untenable and leads to irresolvable contradictions, in light of the conditions delineated by the overall Hegelian system: ‘Hegel cannot establish his Trinitarian claim as he intended to, namely on the basis of an argumentation in the public realm from infinite to finite . . . [for] Hegel's argument always presupposes a prior movement from finite to infinite’ (xxiii). As Schlitt sees it, Hegel cannot begin with infinity and subsequently offer an analysis that presumes finitude. This Trinitarian argument, Schlitt claims, must rather progress from the finite to the infinite, from world to God. Defending his thesis over the span of six chapters, Schlitt endeavours an immanent critique of the logical, phenomenological, philosophy of religion, and philosophical formulations of Hegel's Trinitarian claim. While Schlitt finds each of these formulations wanting, he holds that ‘Hegel was right in claiming that to think God as Subject and as personal[,] one must think of God as Trinity’ (159, cf. x).
Chapter 1 demonstrates the speculative theology of the Science of Logic through an examination of the movement of pure thought and its culmination in the method of absolute Idea, which, he contends, is the true content of Trinity. Chapter 2 questions Hegel's success in establishing subjectivity's beginning, arguing through an analysis of the early instantiation of the logic of pure thought, being/nothing/becoming, that the development of human thought must necessarily be finite and determinate (160). Hegel's initial move, from pure being, is inaccessible to the finite human. In Chapter 3, Schlitt transitions to Hegel's Realphilosophie; an account of the syllogistic structure of the three Trinitarian moments in the Encyclopedia that sets the stage for his subsequent critique of the Phenomenology in Chapter 4. Here, Schlitt finds Hegel ineffectively accounting for the historical contingency of the incarnation, and claims, challenging Hegel, that it is impossible for human beings to sensuously intuit God immediately. Chapter 5 turns to the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion from 1827, raising the question of whether the syllogistic formulation of Trinity can support the role of community, as Hegel articulates it here. Schlitt finds that it cannot, on the basis of an incompatibility of community and pure thought. Chapter 6 works out a reconstructed alternative to Hegel's Trinitarian claim, and takes as its foundation a movement beginning from the finite to the infinite, or more specifically, from finitude to ‘triadically structured inclusive infinite’ (174). This develops into an account of what Schlitt calls ‘enriched Selfhood’, introduced originally in Chapter 5 (175). The chapter's thesis, that one must ‘begin always and only in and from finitude’, is developed more concretely in the added Postscript (181). Here, Schlitt mentions the most salient aspects of a ‘post-Hegelian philosophical theology’, which comprise the decisive concepts of his subsequent works: the infinite inclusive of finitude, envisioning finite and infinite Spirit as a movement of enriching experience, and a consideration of a human experience of God in the Christian context (188-191).
While the book remains a successful accomplishment in its own right, several points nevertheless lend themselves to further discussion. Evoking the ‘critically sympathetic’ approach that Schlitt advances in the Postscript, two minor points of clarification and one of more considerable intervention come to mind (184).
First, it is curious that while the text's central thesis recurs in nearly exact language throughout the book, its key terms — the public realm, thought, discourse — are assumed to be transparent. In contrast to the precision that Schlitt commands at each other juncture, he leaves these paramount concepts open to interpretation.
Second, though the book centerpieces a variety of moments in Hegel's philosophical corpus and approach to Trinity, and clear accounts of the movements in each are provided, the standpoint of the Logic is prevalent throughout. Such priority colours Schlitt's treatment of Hegel's Realphilosophie — and especially the Phenomenology, where reading and arguing from a phenomenological stance yields a different way of conceptualizing, and thus a distinct philosophical outcome. Had Schlitt allowed more room for a phenomenological approach in his own analysis, his rendering of Trinitarian thought in Chapters 3 and 4 could have been truer to the Phenomenology, conveying the experiential undercurrent of its tone, and his proposal to understand Spirit as a movement of enriching experience as discussed in Chapter 6 and in the Postscript could have emerged more directly from Hegel.
Third, and more substantially, given the centrality of the concepts of the finite and finitude in Schlitt's account, it is surprising that more attention is not allotted to the equal role that both the finite and the infinite play in dialectically overcoming their opposition. Set in terms of the relation between the human and the divine, at least one major consequence of this emerges. By Schlitt's account, the infinite enjoys a prior and a more robust role in Hegel's thought, and accordingly, he emphasizes the dialectical movement of infinite, divine self-realization, thus downplaying the essentiality of that which the finite human contributes to the elemental unity of the dialectic. Turning against what he takes to be Hegel's position, he appeals to the need ‘to postulate a triadically structured infinite becoming [which] lies finally not . . . as Hegel had thought in infinity's need to other itself in order to come to itself but in finitude's need to have its self-contradiction mediated or resolved’ (180). As I see it, this risks overvaluing one term in the dialectical relation, which chances replicating the precise limitation that he attributes to Hegel.
Although Schlitt does not pursue such, one possible inroad to addressing this concern could be found in Hegel's various and recurring arguments for the death of God in Faith and Knowledge, the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Rejecting the notion that the divine is either within the self or outside of the self — a view that mandates that God can only be known as an inner power, or as something unknowable to human comprehension (Hegel Reference Hegel1977: 55-56) Hegel advances a third way of thinking God — God is dead — and claims this on the grounds that, if existence entails death, as the transition from nature to spirit renders explicit (Encyclopedia), then for God to exist requires that God too must die. Schlitt broaches the thematic in Chapter 5, vis-à-vis ‘a two-part consideration first of the life and then of the mediating death of Christ’ and points out that ‘[f]initude and death have become a moment in the very life and nature of God’, but he does not pursue the implications of it further (129). Announcing God's death both as a historical event and a speculative philosophical proposition allows Hegel to claim a reconciliation of historical revelation with the absolute content of the Idea: ‘[T]his death is to this extent the highest love. [It is] precisely love [that is] the consciousness [of] the identity of the divine and the human, and this finitization is carried to its extreme, to death. [Thus here] we find an envisagement of the unity [of the divine and the human] at its absolute peak, the highest intuition of love’ (Hegel Reference Hegel2007: 125). Exploring this approach to reconciling the antinomies of the human and the divine and the finite and the infinite could bridge Schlitt's reading of Spiritual Community in Chapter 5 with that of ‘Hegel's brilliant resolution of the opposition between finite and infinite’ in Chapter 6 (170); lastly, it could facilitate Schlitt's concluding call in the Postscript for a developed rendering of ‘inclusive divine subjectivity’, a ‘phenomenological analysis of the experience of God’ in the temporality of Christianity, and illuminate the ‘mystery of love’ (190-2).
To conclude, in concurrence with one unnamed Hegel scholar to whom Schlitt refers in the Preface, ‘who after reading the book, said that he disagreed with [the] argument, but could not point out any passages from Hegel which [Schlitt] had misread or misinterpreted’, the quality and precision of Schlitt's rich presentation of Hegel's argument for Trinity remains undisputed.
