Hegel, thinking as radical love, and God as condition for politics.

For Hegel, thinking is radical loving, and only trinitarian theology allows for the conditions of reality to BE thinkable, and politics to BE  possible (as an authentic politics was unimaginable without the doctrine of the Trinity, since the doctrine affirmed the impossibility of unmediated identity)  
Rowan Williams says,

"The religion that is properly related to itself, the religion that is transparent to itself, thinks itself - spells out the inseparability of thinking God and thinking the reconciled consciousness; it also, very importantly, explains why such a religion can only be a historically determined ('positive' or `revealed') faith. Consciousness is necessarily the recognition of self in the other, and so no individual or timeless subjectivity could be actual, could think itself, the world, or God. To think myself is to discover my identity in the alien givenness of the past, and to think history is to find it in my consciousness (thereby discovering that there is no such reality as a consciousness that is `privately' mine). Thus the supreme awareness of thinking, thinking reconciliation, God, must be a historical discovery or recognition.

Yet the recognition issues in something more than mere historical narrative- or rather it must dispossess itself of the positive so as to recover it as the content of thinking.

So we have been *led to begin to think what thinking is, and so we are able to say that the condition for thinkable reality is the fundamental `process, movement, life' of self-differentiation and self-recovery.` To speak of this condition `in itself', to speak of spirit beyond time, God before creation, is in one sense an impossibility, since it is apparently to try to think being without otherness; but in fact the structure of trinitarian doctrine enables us to avoid talking plain nonsense here, because it speaks of an eternal, irreducible being-in-the-other.

To try and think the condition for thinkable reality would be a contradiction if God were envisaged as an unmediated identity; but the Christian vision is of a God who is quintessentially and necessarily mediated in a divine selfhood that is simultaneously its own absolute other. And, Hegel concludes, the complete transparency of self in the other that is God's act of being (as `Father' and `Son') is what constitutes God as `Spirit', as living consciousness proceeding into the determinate otherness of the world.

`That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself, or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love.’

Hegel himself says,

“I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it. This is the simple, eternal idea.”

Williams continues, 

"Our thinking, then, is ultimately radical loving: ecstasy, being-outside-ourselves. ourselves. And it is manifest as such because of the way in which the specific Christian tradition instructs us to think God: prior to any contingent otherness in the world, beyond a supposed determinate otherness between `God' and `the world' (which, as we have seen, is not really thinkable) God as such, in se, is the positing and sublating of `ideal' otherness.

Theologically, the Spirit is what makes possible the extension or repetition of the Father-Son relation for persons within the created order.

Thought thinks itself, `abstractly', thinks the concrete other, its alien but inseparable and necessary partner, and thinks itself ultimately as the productive historical life that issues from living-in-the-other - as the life of the subject in community. And insofar as the community is truly thought, it is a life in which reconciliation and freedom are actual: it is `ethical' life, in which sacred and secular are indistinguishable.

What is more, thinking the life of the community in this sense is passing beyond the Enlightenment,which conceives only of an abstract and non-historical reconciliation. The Enlightenment becomes aware of the power of thought over against externality, heteronomy, tradition or authority, so that its ideal of freedom remains fundamentally negative. It also is incapable of thinking God except as a determinate other (which is, of course, not thinking God at all): its God will either become the abstract and unknown deity of Kantianism or - as a twentieth-century reader is bound to conclude - disappear entirely. 

Enlightenment thought leaves the gulf open between two possible destinies for the spirit: an `absolute' freedom that is in fact bondage because it is incapable of enactment in the concrete world, and a subjectivity without content, legislating for itself according to `private' sensibility.

Concrete freedom is the development of selfhood in the otherness of what is given - at every level; and the concluding message of the Philosophy of religion lectures is that concrete freedom is unimaginable, unrealisable, if thinking revolts against the triune God, against thought as self-love and self-recovery recovery in the other, against thought as ecstasis.

That politics is not thinkable apart from the trinitarian dogma as thought by Hegel. `Concrete freedom' is the condition in which human selves have understood stood that they have no unmediated identity, and so (of course) no legitimate interests that are purely private or individual: they recognise the identity of their interests with the `law' of the community (not necessarily the de facto law of a presently existing state).;' Thought as ecstasis dictates the dissolution of any conception of rights as competitive tive assertion or safeguards against the claims of an alien collectivity, though the perception of rights in such terms is the necessary step away from the tyranny of an illegitimate collective power, the force of a corporate political entity that has not yet been thought or understood. 

The concrete freedom that lies beyond the Enlightenment assertion of rights `against' authority is the action that follows on grasping that my welfare or fruition is attainable only in the welfare or fruition of all: I lose my conception of private right so as to negotiate with the otherness of other persons a good neither mine nor theirs. And to do this with understanding, not slipping back into the forms of primitive consciousness in which the otherness of the other is eroded, is the business of free political life - which is the life pointed to by the Christian Church, but conspicuously not realised in its history, since it has been historically ally guilty of reverting to pre-conscious patterns of power.”

*For Hegel, an authentic politics was unimaginable without the doctrine of the Trinity, since the doctrine affirmed the impossibility of unmediated identity.

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