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The Divine Simplicity in St Thomas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert M. Burns
Robert M. Burns
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths' College,University of London
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Extract

In the Summa Theologiae ‘simplicity’ is treated as pre–eminent among the terms which may properly be used to describe the divine nature. The Question in which Thomas demonstrates that God must be ‘totally and in every way simple’ (1.3.7) immediately follows the five proofs of God's existence, preceding the treatment of His other perfections, and being frequently used as the basis for proving them. Then in Question 13 ‘univocal predication' is held to be ‘impossible between God and creatures’ so that at best ‘some things are said of God and creatures analogically’ because of the necessity of using ‘various and multiplied conceptions’ derived from our knowledge of created beings to refer to what in God is simple for ‘the perfections flowing from God to creatures… pre–exist in God unitedly and simply, whereas in creatures they are received divided and multiplied’ (1.13.5). In line with this, in the De Potentia Dei the treatment of analogical predication is integrated into that of ‘the Simplicity of the Divine Essence’ (Q 7). Moreover, it lies at the root of Thomas's rejection of any possibility of a Trinitarian natural theology such as, for instance, St Anselm or Richard of St Victor had attempted to develop, on the grounds that ‘it is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason’ since ‘we can know what belongs to the unity of the essence, but not what belongs to the distinction of the persons’ (1.32.1). Even modern minds sympathetic to Thomas have clearly found it difficult to understand his concern for the divine simplicity: in his Aquinas Lecture Plantinga speaks for many in stating that it is ‘a mysterious doctrine’ which is ‘exceedingly hard to grasp or construe’ and ‘it is difficult to see why anyone should be inclined to accept it’. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the most widely read twentieth–century commentators on Aquinas have paid little attention to it. Increased interest has recently been shown in it, but a number of discussions pay insufficient attention to the historical context out of which Thomas's interest in the doctrine emerged, and consequently tend to misconstrue its nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 271 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 271 note 1 All unspecified references are to the Summa Theologiae (referred to as ‘ST’) using the Shapcote translation published in Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945). Other texts cited using the following codes. E, The Enneads, Plotinus, trans. MacKenna, S. (London: Faber and Faber, 1956).Google ScholarGP, The Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides, trans. Friedländer, M. (New York:) Dover Publications, 1956.Google ScholarSCG, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles (New York: Image Books, 1955–1957). TF, Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifah), trans. Kamali, S. A. (Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1968).Google Scholar

page 271 note 2 Plantinga, A.Does God have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 27–“8.Google Scholar

page 272 note 1 One recent particularly influential instance is Plantinga who maintains (see preceding note) that Aquinas's ‘fundamental reason… for holding this doctrine (of the divine simplicity) …is to accommodate God's aseity and sovereignty’ (p. 28, cp. p. 51). This was Thomas’s, ‘underlying motivation’ (p. 51)Google Scholar and ‘pious and proper concern’ (p. 53). Yet the term ‘divine sovereignty’, which is not characteristic of Thomas, does not occur in ST 3, and, as Plantinga proceeds, it becomes apparent that it is he rather than Thomas who is so motivated, his Calvinist background leading him to regard ‘free and sovereign creative activity’ (p. 80) as the supreme divine attribute, which requires that the doctrine of simplicity ‘be taken with real seriousness’ (p. 34). Eventually interest in Thomas and the divine simplicity falls by the wayside as discussion, guided by the lodestar of the divine sovereignty, focusses on Descartes' view that even mathematical truths depend on God's free decision (pp. 110–11). In fact, Thomas does not argue for the divine simplicity from the premise of an almighty divine will: neither divine volition or omnipotence is mentioned in Question 3, being discussed only much later in the Summa, at which point his treatment is clearly conditioned by awareness that many in the tradition from which he derived his arguments for the divine simplicity denied not only free will in God but also omnipotence and omniscience, his primary concern being to show their compatibility with the divine simplicity, which he had established on quite different grounds.

page 272 note 2 Davies, B. in his ‘Classical Theism and the Doctrine of the Divine Simplicity’, in Language, Meaning, and God, ed. Davies, B. (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).Google Scholar

page 273 note 1 To a striking extent, the treatise on the Trinity (ST 1.27–43) consists of the use of ‘the philosophical disciplines…in order to make its (revealed theology) teachings clearer’ (1.1.5 ad 2) or to show that the Trinity is ‘not impossible’ so that attempted philosophical disproofs of it ‘can be answered’ (1.1.8). Thus, Arians and Sabellians should have been able to see through natural reasoning that although external processions must be ‘irreconcilable with the idea of a first principle…an intimate and non-diverse procession by way of an intelligible act is included in the idea of a first principle’ (1.27.1 ad 3). The philosophical status of such points is sometimes indicated by conditional terms, e.g. ‘if there is a being whose life does not proceed from potentiality to act, procession (if found in such a being) may have the kind of generation which belongs to living beings’ (1.27.2), and by appeals to Aristotle (e.g. 1.28.4; 1.29.2). For ‘classificatory’ use of natural reasoning see, e.g. 1.39.5 ad 11.31.2. Among the ‘necessary’ philosophical truths to which Thomas appeals are that there may be ‘real relations’ (28.1) implying ‘relative opposition’ and ‘real distinction’ within God (1.31.2) which would have to be ‘subsisting’ and not ‘accidental’ and therefore would be ‘persons’ because this ‘signifies a relation as subsisting’ (1.29.4) with each having distinctive ‘properties’ or ‘characteristics’ (notiones). Thus, after all, the ‘supreme unity and simplicity of God’ does not exclude inner ‘plurality of relations’ (1.30.1. ad 3), ‘transcendental multitude’ (1.30.3) and ‘real plurality’ (1.32.3 ad 2).

page 274 note 1 Augustine argues that ‘a nature is called simple’ when ‘it cannot lose any attribute it possesses, that there is no difference between what it is, and what it has’ and consequently that ‘the fact that… this one God… it is a Trinity does not mean that it is not simple’ (City of God XI. 10, trans. Bettenson, H. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972)).Google Scholar Pseudo-Dionysius makes room for the Trinity by stating that ‘the One’ must be ‘a Unity in a manner far different…above all unity which is in the world: yea, he is an Indivisible Plurality’ so that he can affirm ‘instances of Undifference and Differentiation in the Ineffable Unity’ (pp. 71, and 79–80, ‘The Divine Names’, in Dionysius the Areopagite on the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. Rolt, C. E. (London: SPCK, 1920)).Google Scholar Anselm, after repeatedly affirming that God ‘alone exists simply, and perfectly and absolutely’ (Monologium in St. Anselm: Basic Writings trans. Deane, S. N. (La Salle Ill: Open Court Publishing Co. 1962. pp. 28–9))Google Scholar argues that it would be ‘most absurd’ if he did not ‘express Himself eternally’ so that His ‘Word… must be coeternal with him’ (p. 32) so that in ‘conceiving of itself by expressing itself’ it must ‘beget a likeness of itself consubstantial with it’ (p. 33) so that ‘a strange plurality, as ineffable as it is inevitable, is proved to exist in the supreme unity’ (p. 43). Likewise because they must ‘love’ one another they must jointly produce or ‘breathe a Spirit’ (p. 57), these reflections amounting to ‘cogent proofs’ (p. 64).

page 274 note 2 al-Ghazali, , ‘The Deliverance from Error’, translated by Watt, W. Montgomery, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), p. 33.Google Scholar

page 274 note 3 E.g. Bacon's, Roger extended panegyric on mathematics as ‘the gate and key…of the sciences’ in the Opus Maius, translated Burke, R. B., Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Hyman and J. J. Walsh (Indianopolis: Hackett, 1983), pp. 480–5.Google Scholar

page 275 note 1 The apparently unrestrained confidence with which Thomas makes these claims is elsewhere severely qualified (e.g. SCG 4.1.3) but such remarks seem no more than admissions that human knowledge-claims frequently t'ail to live up to the criteria to which genuine knowledge must conform.

page 275 note 2 He recognizes a distinction between logical implication and efficient causality but clearly presumes their close similarity (1.44.1).

page 275 note 3 Lonergan, Bernard is seriously mistaken in maintaining in Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1968)Google Scholar, that Thomas was opposed to ‘conceiving science simply in terms of certitude’, his Trinitarian theology being offered as ‘speculation’, ‘no more than a hypothesis which does not attempt to exclude the possibility of alternatives’ which aims not at ‘rigorous demonstration’ but ‘understanding’ (pp. 196, 211), i.e. ‘to attain some limited but most fruitful inlelligenlia of the mysteries of faith’ thereby coming closer to our ‘contemporary ideal of science’ (p. 212). Thomas insists on the contrary on the exclusion of arguments of ‘congruence’ from scientific theology (1.32.1) and claims that it is a ‘nobler science’than the rest ‘in point of its greater certitude because other sciences derive their certitude from the natural light of human reason, which can err, whereas this derives its certitude from the light of divine science, which cannot err’ (1.1.5). Thus, ‘the articles of faith stand in the same relation to the doctrine of faith as self-evident principles to sciences based on natural reason’ (2–2.1.7). ‘Faith’ is explicitly contrasted with ‘opinion’ for which ‘it is essential… that its object should be deemed possible to be otherwise’ whereas ‘the object of faith’ is ‘deemed impossible to be otherwise’ (2–2.1.5 ad 4). Indeed ‘faith’ is needed precisely ‘for the sake of certitude’ (2–2.2.4) which it manifests through the work of ‘God moving man inwardly by grace’ (2–2.6.2. and ad 1).

page 276 note 1 Avicenna seems to have been his main source (e.g. see chs 21, 22 and 24 of The Metaphysics of Avicenna, translated Morewedge, P. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)).Google ScholarWeisheipl, J. A. remarks: ‘Although Thomas occasionally mentions Avicenna only to reject his errors, elsewhere Thomas's exposition of Avicennas's doctrine may be taken as implicit acceptance of it. Avicenna's influence is particularly evident in chapters 22, 25, and 26 of Book I (of the SCG) where Thomas discusses the absolute simplicity of God, who is necesse esse. The metaphysical apogee of Thomas's natural theology is found in chapter 22, where he argues that esse and essence are identical in God. This chapter adheres almost verbatim to Avicenna's Metaphysics VIII, 4, but Avicenna's name is never mentioned in it’ (Friar Thomas D'Aquino (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975, pp. 132–3).Google Scholar Avicenna was in turn dependent on al-Farabi, and he on al-Kindi, who probably first fashioned these arguments into their standard format.

page 276 note 2 See section v of my ‘Bernard Lonergan's Proof of the Existence of God’, Modern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell), Vol. 3, No. 2. The implicitly hypothetical nature of Thomas's argument is often noted, (for instance by Davies, Brian, see op.cit., p. 63)Google Scholar and indeed of proofs of God's existence in general, but its radical implications have been insufficiently acknowledged. ‘Transcendental Thomists’ such as Maréchal and Rahner have tried, unsuccessfully in my view, to find in Thomas an absolute vindication or apodeictic transcendental deduction of the existence of God as the condition of the possibility of human knowledge. See my ‘Meynell's Arguments for the Intelligibility of the Universe’ (Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1987) and ‘Rahner and Aquinas on the Agent Intellect’ (Heythrop journal, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1988).

page 277 note 1 Gilson, E., The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Shook, L. K. (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 40.Google Scholar Similarly Maritain, J. writes of Thomas's ‘intellectual intuition of that mysterious reality disguised under the most commonplace and commonly used word in the language, the word to be …the intuition of being in its pure and all-pervasive properties, in its typical and primordial intelligible density–in that richness, that analogical and transcendental amplitude…attained or perceived at the summit of an abstractive intellection’, Existence and the Existent, Eng. version by L. Galantiere and G. B. Phelan (new edition, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1964) pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

page 277 note 2 Burrell, D. B., ‘Distinguishing God from the World’, in Language, Meaning, and God (see note 2, page 272) pp. 78–9.Google Scholar

page 277 note 3 Gilson, E., Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1949), pp. 180 and 183.Google Scholar

page 277 note 4 Ibid. p. 188.

page 278 note 1 Concerning Being and Essence, trans. Leckie, G. G. (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1937), section 5.Google Scholar

page 278 note 2 On this issue see my discussion in The Great Debate on Miracles (London: Associated University Presses, 1981), pp. 183–215.

page 279 note 1 See Aquinas's, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, trans. Larcher, F. R. (Albany, N.Y.: Magi Books, 1990).Google Scholar

page 282 note 1 Burrell is therefore unjustified in suggesting that Maimonides in ‘recommending the artisan analogy’ for divine knowledge of the world was making ‘claims of a radical disanalogy with speculative knowing’, Burrell, D. B., Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), p. 88.Google Scholar

page 284 note 1 Periphyseion: On the Division of Nature John the Scot, ed. and trans. Uhfelder, M. L. (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1976), book 5, ch. 6.Google Scholar

page 285 note 1 The incompatibility of ‘free choice’ and ‘simplicity’ is well illustrated by Burrell in ‘Distinguishing God from the World’ (see note 2, page 277). After presenting what purports to be an exegesis of Thomas's doctrine of simplicity, he offers an account of divine ‘freedom’ diametrically opposed to Thomas's (though there is no acknowledgement of this), since he is convinced that it is required to maintain ‘the plausibility of a simple divine nature’: ‘If (creative) activity is conceived as a selection among alternatives, it will require a distinct act of will … If the activity is rather understood as a practical knowing, by analogy with doing or making (creation strongly suggests this), then no distinct act of choosing will be needed … freedom need not (and I contend ought not) primarily to be considered as freedom of choice … making … need not demand a distinct “decision” on God's part. In other words, the sense in which creation is at once gratuitous yet utterly fitting, according to the axiom that “good diffuses itself” reminds us that divine freedom may be better understood on the model of Zen “resonance” than on that of a western penchant for “decisions”…If the good moves us by drawing us rather than constraining us, so that following the bent of one's nature can be at once natural and free, why cannot creation be similarly understood?’ p. 86). I fail to see how Burrell can consider that the nature of human artistic creativity lends support to the view that it can ever occur with no consciousness of multiplicity, and Aquinas himself clearly did not think so (‘a builder could not conceive the idea of a house unless he had the idea of each of its parts’) 1.15.21 but one need not, of course, leave the West for Japan in order to find examples of Burrell's view, which is basically that of Plotinus.

page 285 note 2 The fullest statement of this position is found in De Potentia 8.1, cp. 9.5. See also SCG 1.53.3 and 4. A thorough survey of scholarship on the development of Thomas's views on the necessity of a verbum cordis in human cognition out of earlier uncertainty is available in Richards, R. L., The Problem of an Apologetical Perspective in the Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Rome: Analecta Gregoriana 131, 1963).Google Scholar

page 286 note 1 Using Velecky's translation in the new Blackfriar's edition of the Summa. At this point a yawning gap opens up separating Thomas from his position in Q 14, which he tries to cover over in the following passage: ‘the more a thing is understood, the more closely is the intellectual conception joined and united to the intelligent agent; since the intellect by the very act of understanding is made one with the object understood. Hence, as the divine understanding is the very supreme perfection of God, the divine Word is of necessity perfectly one with the source whence it proceeds, without any diversity’ (1.27.1 ad 2). But in the very next Question he states that the relation of the Word to the Father is one of ‘relative opposition’ and ‘real distinction’ (1.28.3) and later says that they are ‘other’ (alius, 1.31.2).

page 286 note 2 But note the modification implied in the doctrine of the ‘appropriation’ of the divine attributes to the divine persons (1.39.7).

page 287 note 1 See Bougerol, J. G., Introduction to the Works of Bonaventure, trans. Vinck, J. de (Paterson N.J.: St Anthony Guild Press, 1964), p. 64.Google Scholar

page 287 note 2 See Wolfson, H. A., Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), esp. pp. 29–40.Google Scholar

page 287 note 3 The following account is derived from Wolfson, H. A., Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

page 287 note 4 Ibid. pp. 322–3.

page 288 note 1 A condensation of Ibid. pp. 121–2.

page 288 note 2 Ibid. p. 12.

page 288 note 3 Very occasionally he does state it: ‘any manifold, anything beneath The Unity, is dependently combined from various constituents, its essential nature goes in need of unity… it depends upon its factors; and furthermore each of these factors in turn – as necessarily inbound with the rest and not self-standing – sets up a similar need both in its associates and to the total so constituted’ (E VI. 96). But this contradicts his repeated insistence on the irreducible complexity of the Nous.

page 289 note 1 But no doubt ultimately influenced by Aristotle's description of the divine self-thinking thought in Metaphysics XII, 9 which however should not be read as implying absolute simplicity.

page 291 note 1 This account has been derived from Markus, R. A., ‘Marius Victorinus and Augustine’ Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 333–7.Google Scholar

page 292 note 1 Nagel, T., The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 56–7, 60, 62, 67, 131.Google Scholar

page 292 note 2 He did so in reacting against his own youthful espousal of the idealism of Fichte, whose ‘transcendental ego’ is for our purposes closely comparable with Plotinus's, ‘One’: ‘The new philosophy (i.e. Fichtean idealism… has put …in God's place… an empty infinite for it is) the denial or non-recognition of… primordial negating power… The philosophy calls God the most unlimited power (ens illimitatissimum) without considering that the impossibility of any limit outside of him cannot undo the possibility of something in him whereby he limits himself from within, renders himself, to a certain degree, finite (as an object) for himself. To be infinite is by itself no perfection; rather it is the token of the imperfect’, Ages of the World, trans. Bolman, F. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 98.Google Scholar

page 292 note 3 ‘In the generation of the Word of God the notion of mother does not enter, but only that of father’ say Thomas, because the former implies passivity (SCG 4.11.19).

page 293 note 1 It is Creel's, Richard E. ‘plenum’ (Divine Impassibility Cambridge University Press, 1986) which is the ‘dwelling–place of all possibilities’ (p. 68)Google Scholar and ‘the “material” cause of all contingent existence… as the will of God is the efficient cause (p. 71), and is ‘other than God himself’ (p. 78) even though it is ‘contingent upon the existence of God’ (p. 68), is ‘in God's power’ (p. 73) and ‘given to God and God alone’ (p. 77). But why then not regard the whole interrelated and interdependent complex of material and efficient cause, of ‘plenum’ and creative will, as divine? Creel's conviction that he must choose only one of these elements and name it ‘God’ is hard to explain except in terms of an unstated presumption that God cannot be complex.

page 293 note 2 See Schelling, F., Of Human Freedom, trans. Guttman, J. (Chicago: Open Court, 1936), pp. 32–3.Google Scholar

page 293 note 3 Ages of the World (see note 36), pp. 118–19.