Erotic Trinity

Desmond suggests that when Hegel defines God as love, he has in mind God as erotic love, and God specifically as needy erotic love: “For Hegel . . . the movement up and the movement down seem not to be two different movements, but two expressions of a singular movement of eternally circular motion. Hegel’s God is an erotic absolute in this sense: the origin in itself, if taken for itself alone, is a lacking condition of being, all but indistinguishable from nothing . . . . To be itself, the erotic origin must become itself, and it becomes itself concretely by its self-othering both in itself (determines itself immanently as the Son: the ‘immanent’ trinity), and into the world of finiteness (the ‘economic’ trinity).” This empty origin becomes the “fulfilled absolute of holistic immanence” only “by erotically overreaching the finitude of temporal immanence.”

Hegel needs a big dose of Nicene theology here, the Athanasian insight that the Father is only Father by having a Son.

One might retain Hegel’s claim that the Father is determined only in the other, but because this other is co-eternal and co-originary with the Father, there is no “need” satisfied by the Son. The Father is infinitely, eternally determined because He eternally has a Son.

This has significant ethical implications as well. Desmond notes that in Hegel’s erotic conception of love, “the form of love is peace with self through the other or, more generally, mediated self-return in one’s own other in which distinction, first posited, is sublated.” The distinction between S(ubject) and O(object) is re-encompassed by the subject: S(S-O), as otherness is integrated into the original subject. In this conception of erotic love, otherness exists only “for mediated purposes of its return to the other.” It’s all about me. (Whether we can conceive an eros that escapes this return to the self is another question.)

Plus, Desmond sees Hegel expressing a typically modern conception of freedom. The free subject is as empty and undetermined as Hegel’s “Father,” and comes to determination in time, in relation to a self-othered other that is sublated to the subject. Both for God and for man, this is absurd. The Father is not a nul, but is already determined in his relation to the Son. And human existence is also radically, always-already determined by inheritance, nurture, parents, siblings, God.