The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

The Pattern of Hegel's Trinity: The Legacy of Christian Immanence in German Thought

chap ter 5  The Pattern of Hegel’s Trinity The Legacy of Christian Immanence in German Thought 162 So they loved as love in twain Had the essence but in one, Two distinct, division none: Number there in love was slain . . . Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded. —Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. It is established that the two distinguished moments are the same, that this distinction is sublated insofar as it is precisely what posits itself as no distinction at all; hence the one remains present to itself in the other. —Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3:276. Dispersed throughout Gadamer’s writings are testimonies to the importance of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity for hermeneutics. Trinity is linked in Gadamer’s mind with Plato’s effort to solve “the great dialectical puzzle of the one and the many.”1 In his 1977 essay “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” Gadamer connects Hegel’s claim that philosophy ’s task “comprehends and gathers up into itself the totality of truth as it has been unfolded in its historical development” to the truth of the trinitarian doctrine, and Gadamer then adds: “I personally believe that this doctrine has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding” (5). Gadamer cites the prodigious mystery of the Trinity as the major impediment to a reconciliation between revelation and reason in the time of the Enlightenment, a barrier that only Hegel would overcome.2 And of course in Gadamer’s section on the verbum interius in Truth and Method the mystery of the Trinity is brought into the closest proximity with the nature of human linguisticality.3 What is the claim of this doctrine on hermeneutic philosophy? The mystery at the heart of Christian teaching is an enigma that sustained the identity of the Christian church, and it was based on a logical contradiction , the presence at one and the same time of identity in difference:“Father and Son and Holy Spirit in the inseparable equality of one substance present a divine unity; and therefore there are not three gods but one God; although indeed the Father has begotten the Son, and therefore he who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and therefore he who is the Son is not the Father.”4 This is true both in terms of the internal relation of the persons of the Trinity and also in terms of the worldly incarnation of God in the Word.5 With the extension of the trinitarian enigma into the economy of history, the utterance of the Father is expressed through the life of the church, and the belongingrelation between identity and difference becomes the texture of worldly history.The reciprocity of transcendent and immanent reality at the heart of this “double” Trinity expresses the complex ontological role of the word as the crossing point between the mundane and the eternal, a theme that theology shares with philosophy.6 Between Gadamer and dogmatic Christianity, however, lies Hegel, who brought philosophy and the doctrine of the Trinity into the closest proximity. Hegel himself “more than once described his thought as the translation of the content of classical Christianity into the form of the speculative concept.”7 No effort to come to grips with Hegel can safely avoid his encounter with Trinity, since, as Samuel Powell notes, “the philosophical deciphering of the doctrine is, Hegel believed, the key to solving every philosophical perplexity” (108). When Hegel describes the true in the Phenomenology as “the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal,” he is recapitulating a pattern of thought that developed out of centuries of struggle with the enigma The Pattern of Hegel’s Trinity 163 of the divine processions (10). This philosophy is an appropriation of the emanationist circuit of self-othering that theology described for its own purposes. History as the necessary expression of God’s love becomes for Hegel“Spirit emptied out into Time.”8 The profound trinitarian abuse of logic is reinforced and amplified in his dialectic, which is itself a...