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The Traditional Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Katherin Rogers
Katherin Rogers
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
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Abstract

Traditionally God has been considered absolutely simple. Some contemporary philosophers argue that this means that God is His attributes and hence is mere quality, and that all the divine attributes name exactly the same quality, which is incoherent. However, the contemporary debate misunderstands the tradition. God is not quality, He is act. Analogies from human experience can minimize the initial implausibility. There are worrisome corollaries to this doctrine, the most troubling being that God's nature is somehow dependent on the choices of His free creatures. This conclusion, though radical, is not as shocking as it appears.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 165 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Recent critics include Richard LaCroix, ‘Augustine on the Simplicity of God’, The New Scholasticism, LI, 4 (1977)Google Scholar; Plantinga, , Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Morris, , ‘On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity’, in Anselmian Explorations (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Hughes, Christopher, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

2 Recent defenders include Mann, , ‘Divine Simplicity’, Religious Studies, XVIII (1982)Google Scholar, ‘Simplicity and Immutability in God’, International Philosophical Quarterly, XXIII (1983)Google Scholar, and ‘Simplicity and Properties: A Reply to Morris’, Religious Studies, XXII (1986)Google Scholar; Stump, and Kretzmann, , ‘Absolute Simplicity’, Faith and Philosophy, II (1985)Google Scholar; Leftow, Brian, ‘Is God an Abstract Object?’, Nous, XXIV, 4 (1990)Google Scholar; and Vallicella, William, ‘Divine Simplicity: A New Defense’, Faith and Philosophy, IX (1992)Google Scholar. Among the defenders, Stump and Kretzmann do offer the correct analysis of the traditional view of divine simplicity, but their article is devoted to reconciling this doctrine with the idea that God has free choice rather than to making the doctrine itself plausible.

Nicholas Wolterstorff suggests that the medieval position on divine simplicity makes sense within what he terms the medieval's ‘constituent ontology’. It would have seemed unproblematic in the middle ages to identify God with His nature because, ‘For a medieval,…an essence or nature was just as concrete as that of which it is the nature’. Corporeal beings are made of two constituents, a nature and some individuating matter which, according to Wolterstorff, the medieval thinker sees as really existing things which combine to produce an individual, Thus the medieval could easily identify an incorporeal God with His nature (‘Divine Simplicity’, Philosophical Perspectives, 5, Philosophy of Religion, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 531–52Google Scholar, see pp. 541–4).

Wolterstorff's analysis of the medieval position is questionable. It seems mistaken at the outset to speak of a medieval view when the question of the ontological status of natures was one of the most hotly argued issues of the middle ages. (The view which Wolterstorff attributes to ‘us twentieth century philosophers… to think of things as having essences, and to think of these essences as certain properties or sets of properties’ is the view which Abelard advanced as that of the moderni in the twelfth century.) The philosopher cited by Wolterstorff is Aquinas, but Aquinas, good Aristotelian that he is, adamantly denies that natures are concrete things the way particulars are. True, according to Aquinas, in the case of incorporeal individuals the individual is identified with its form, but this does not explain divine simplicity. The angels are incorporeal. For them there is no individuating matter, and so each angel is a species unto itself. But the angels are not simple the way God is. For example, their essence is not identical with their existence. Only God, the absolutely necessary being, is perfectly simple. Thus Wolterstorff's analysis does not seem to capture Aquinas' position on divine simplicity.

3 See Mann (1982), p. 454.

4 See respectively, Stump and Kretzmann (1985), pp. 376–8 and Leftow (1990), pp. 595–6.

5 Anselm, Monologion, XVI and XVII, Aquinas, ST Ia. 3, 4. See also, Leftow (1990), pp. 582–3.

6 Proslogion, XVIII.

7 Enneads, VI 9.2.

8 Enneads, VI 9.4. (The phrase ‘the alone to the alone’ is from Enneads, V 1.6.)

9 Periphyseon, 1.14.

10 Periphyseon, 1.12.

11 See Morris, Thomas V., ‘Absolute Creation’, in Anselmian Explorations, pp. 161–78.Google Scholar

12 ST, Ia. 4, 1.

13 Monologion, XVI.

14 Mann (1982).

15 This is one of the areas in which our three spokesmen for the tradition seem to differ. All three speak of the creature ‘participating’ in the Creator, but it is probably correct to say that Augustine and Anselm are more comfortable with the view that creatures somehow ‘share in’ God's being than is the less Platonic Aquinas whose doctrine of participation focuses on the metaphor of ‘copying’ rather than ‘sharing in’.

16 SCG 1, 55. Anselm discusses the idea that in knowing Himself God knows all things at length in the Monologion, see especially ch. XXXIII.

17 See, for example, Anselm's Monologion, chs XXXIII–XXXVI.

18 See, for example, Anselm's discussion of why God is not limited by the fact that He cannot sin. De libertati arbitrii, 1.

19 Natural law ethics is set out most systematically and clearly by Aquinas, but I think it is correct to say that, in general, both Augustine and Anselm agree that the goal of human existence, happiness, is to be achieved by fulfilling human nature. The major difference between Aquinas and his more Platonic predecessors is that for Aquinas ethics, like everything else about the human condition, is a split-level affair. There is a natural man and a supernatural man, and hence a natural goal of earthly happiness, and a supernatural goal of eternal happiness with God in heaven. Augustine and Anselm see the process as a continuum. The only fulfilment for the human being lies in God and everything else must be ordered to God with no intermediate goal.

20 Confessions, XI, 11–14.

21 ST Ia. 14, 13.

22 De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae dei cum libero arbitrio 1, V.

23 Recent defenders of divine eternity include Stump and Kretzmann, , ‘Eternity’, The Journal of Philosophy, LXXVIII (1981), 429–58Google Scholar and Leftow, Brian, Time and Eternity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Both defences argue that on the medieval understanding God's eternity is extended. I argue that, not only is the notion of an extended eternity incoherent, but it is almost certainly not what the medievals had in mind, precisely because extension would vitiate God's perfect unity. ‘Eternity has no Duration’, Religious Studies, XXX (1994), 1–16.Google Scholar

24 Mann (1983), pp. 273–5.

25 Stump and Kretzmann (1985), pp. 357–71.

26 De Genesi ad litteram, IV, 16, 27.

27 Cur Deus Homo, 1, 10.

28 De libertati arbitrii, III.

29 ‘Anselm on praising a necessarily perfect being’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, XXXIV (1993), 41–52.Google Scholar

30 Confessions, XIII, VIII, 10.

31 Expositio Epistolae ad Galatas, XLIX.

32 Scholars often cite De libero arbitrio as evidence that Augustine believed, at least in this relatively early work, that freedom requires options, and that to really be good it must be possible for us to choose evil. But the text does not say this. What Augustine argues is that it is better to have a will, even if it sometimes chooses evil, than not to have a will, because without a will we could not choose good. But to say that it is by our faculty of will that we are able to choose what we choose is not the same as saying that we are able to choose between genuinely open options. Nowhere does Augustine offer what has come to be known as the free will defence in connection with the problem of evil.

33 See, for example, Gilson, , The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Shook, L. K. (New York, 1956), pp. 244–8.Google Scholar

34 The City of God, XII, IX.

35 Opus Imperfectum contra Julianum, V, LVII.

36 De Trinitate, XV, 13.

37 ST 1a, 14, 8.

38 De Genesi ad litteram, XI, X, 13.

39 De casu diaboli, V. This chapter is entitled ‘That the good angels were able to sin before the fall of the bad’, but to prove that Anselm really intends this in a libertarian sense one ought to look at chapters XXI–XXIV where Anselm explains how before the fall all the angels were equally ignorant of the consequences of turning from God.

40 De casu diaboli, XVIII.

41 ‘God's Freedom, Human Freedom, and God's Responsibility for Sin’, in Divine and Human Action, Thomas V. Morris ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 182–210.Google Scholar

42 Mann (1988), p. 208.

43 Mann (1988), p. 206.

44 De concordia, I, VII. Eriugena said roughly the same thing in De divina praedestinatione, his contribution to the bitter debate over predestination in the ninth century. As usual, though, when Eriugena said it it only provoked the wrath of all concerned. Aquinas also offers basically this solution to the question of how God could know evil without causing it. God knows evil simply as the absence of good. ST 1a. 14, 10.

45 De concordia, III, V.

46 I make this case in ‘Omniscience, Eternity, and Freedom’ forthcoming in International Philosophical Quarterly.

47 I am indebted to the editors of this journal for pointing out to me this last difficulty.

48 I would like to thank my colleague, Jeffrey Jordan, for comments on an earlier version of this paper.