"This is Hegel’s reading of the actual significance and deep meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity. (Similar accounts are found throughout his work, notably in the Science of Logic.) He thinks that the doctrine of the Trinity is really talking about the structure of spirit, that is, of social substance, and that the community and the norms that are implicit in the communal doings is what God the Father in the Trinity is the image of. The substance is social substance. That is the medium in which the norms inhere. In the model, that is the language. And those norms, “passing over into being for another, becoming a self, a mortal, perishable, self”—in the image, the interfusion of humanity and divinity in God the Son—is the actual speakers, who are bound and constituted as self-conscious individuals by those norms, and the actual utterances of those speakers. And the relations between them—the way in which speakers and their utterances are what they are only by virtue of the linguistic norms that govern them, and the norms are only actualized by being applied to actual utterances by speakers and audiences—that is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. So we have the universals or norms, their perishable incarnation raised above mere particularity, which is also the actualization of those norms, and the relation between them in individuality. The lesson Hegel draws is that the being of these spirits “lies in thinking the unity they constitute,” that is, in understanding his recognitive account of normativity and individuality. It is a measure of the way he works that Hegel goes back and forth cheerfully between the logical vocabulary, the theological vocabulary, and the linguistic-cum-normative vocabulary for talking about these things. The religious language is a sensous allegory for the most fundamental metaphysical idea Hegel has."