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Theology - Trinity: Vestiges of Perichoresis

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Hegel’s “sublation” seems to be a conceptual vestige of perichoresis.

Sublation requires the Trinity: If all is one, nothing other can be absorbed within being destroyed. If we have sheer differentiation, all is utterly other.

Hegel is right: Sublation happens. Aquinas does absorb Aristotle, so that Aristotle is still recognizably there even though he’s been sublated into a new system. Marx does the same to Hegel. Shall we say too that the New Testament does the same to the Old.

Sublation is simply the indwelling of the other within the same, the old within the new. But the indwelling goes the other way as well, since once the old is absorbed into the new, the new cannot be understood without the old.

Hegel’s aspiration was to arrive at a point where thought itself was Christian. Seems that he made some progress toward that end.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 7:46 am

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Theology - Trinity: Vestiges of Perichoresis

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