‘The Golden Thread of Freedom’: Impulses for Considerations on the Relations between the Trinitarian Ontology and Social Reality in the Work of D. C. Schindler

Abstract

The article presents the founding elements of the social and political thought of American philosopher and theologian David C. Schindler. The main aim of the article is to examine possible relations between Schindler’s work and the philosophical concept of ‘Trinitarian ontology’. It focuses on Schindler’s approach towards liberalism and analyses his critique of the modern conception of freedom. It suggests that the main pillars of his idea of the social order might be found in the notion of reality as the symbolical order, the conception of human beings as fundamentally relational, and the renewal of the traditional notion of freedom as rootedness in goodness. It concludes with the suggestion that the proper understanding of social reality requires certain ‘social ontology’, the metaphysical interpretation of social life as a part of a broad cosmological order which symbolically manifest the beauty of the source of being. And it is the social ontology based on the notion of freedom and relationality which analogically reflects the main principles of Trinitarian ontology.