Agapeic Trinity

Hegel’s erotic Trinity seeks the other out of need and lack, an indeterminacy that the other determines. What, however, if we think of the Triune love as arising from plentitude rather than lack? One immediate result is that the other is affirmed: “is this not what agapeic love does: releases the other as other and for the sake of its otherness as other?”

He expands on the love of fullness, plenitude, surplus, in paragraphs that deserve to be quoted at length:

“Beyond the self-communication from initially lacking indeterminacy, through determinacy, to self-recognition and self-determination, we would have to speak rather of communication from fullness to fullness to fullness . The excessive good of the gift of the first, given to the second out of a fullness not diminished by being given and the recipient, the second, as itself surplus fullness of good, not less, not more than the first; and the third the fullness recognized as spirit, itself overgoodness, or surplus. We have infinitely communicative good from overfullness to overfullness to overfullness: from pluperfection to pluperfection to pluperfection: not from ‘imperfection’ to perfection. And if we have an agapeic community, it is a symmetrical gape in that there is mutual recognition, but with respect to surplus good: communicative good as infinite, hence beyond any determinable whole. This agapeic community would be, in a sense, a divine philia in respect of symmetrical giving and receiving of the full, of the hyperfull. But with respect to finite being, the asymmetry of surplus good is not at all to be surpassed. This superplus good would be the God beyond the whole.

“In the terms of Father, Son and Spirit, what would it look like? It would not look like Hegel’s trinity. Father as origin and surplus good is overdetermined; Son as expression of the surplus good is also overdetermined; Spirit as communal intermediation, or the love of this secret life of the surplus good, is also overdetermined. No holistic logic of self-completing self-determination will do justice to this excessive communication from full to full to full: from overfull to overfull to overfull. This agapeic God is overwhole. The overfull is in the origin, hence there is no lacking indefinitely needing determinacy, and mediating its self-determination. Too much of transcendence in the origin is communicated to the second, itself expressing goodness more than determinate, hence inexhaustible. And this living surplus good is broadcast and affirmed in the third, itself overdeterminate, and hence too as creative power that possibilizes determinate, finite being in the most radical sense: giving it to be in a radical coming to be that is not at all a becoming or a self-becoming. What comes to be in finitude is itself always other than, in excess of, all determination and self-determination.”

Exhilarating. But a few questions: Does this violate my earlier Athanasian claim that the Father is determined by Son and vice-versa? Desmond uses overdetermination as a counter to Hegelian indeterminacy (and admits it’s all hyperbolic anyway). But does over-determination suggest that there is some excess to the Father beyond His determination as Father of the Son and co-origin of the Spirit? Does the Father have a life beyond the life He has in the Son and Spirit? If that is what Desmond is suggesting, then he is going beyond Trinitarian orthodoxy, which has insisted that Father is top-to-bottom Father of the Son and the origin of the Spirit, and that the Son is bottom-to-top Son of the Father (and not, for example, also a father in his own right). If overdetermined is just another way of saying overfull, hyperfull, then there is no problem.