On creation and divine simplicity
Fr Simon Cuff begins our series on the doctrine of divine simplicity by considering its relationship to the doctrine of creation, and in particular what it means for God to be the creator. This article is based on parts of his forthcoming book, Only God Will Save Us: The Nature of God and the Christian Life (SCM Press).
If they had known the Scriptures, and been taught by the truth, they would have known, beyond doubt, that God is not as men are; and that are not like the thoughts of men. For the Father of all is at a vast distance from those affections and passions which operate among men. He is a simple, uncompounded Being, without diverse members, and altogether like, and equal to himself, since He is wholly understanding, and wholly spirit, and wholly thought, and wholly intelligence, and wholly reason, and wholly hearing, and wholly seeing, and wholly light, and the whole source of all that is good.
Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies 2.13.3
Divine simplicity is a deceptively named concept. Far from simple, it’s a concept which is difficult to understand. There is good reason for this. At its heart, divine simplicity reminds us that God is like nothing we encounter in creation. Whereas everything we encounter is ‘composite’ or made up of parts, God is not. God is simply God. There are no bits to him or aspects of himself that are prior to him. He is simply what or who he is.
Moreover, God is simple in terms of his attributes. He is identical with them. God’s doesn’t just love or have love, he is love. As John Behr notes: ‘Likewise for all the other divine attributes, wisdom, truth, omnipotence, and so on; yet if each of these is not something that God “has,” as distinct from himself, but they are each what God is, they must, as applied to God, be identical in meaning, describing the same reality, even if for us, as we conceive them, they are formally distinct.’ [1]
This prayer of S. Anselm (1033‒1109 ce) encapsulates this notion of divine simplicity: ‘There are no parts in you, Lord; neither are you many, but you are so much one and the same with yourself that in nothing are you dissimilar with yourself. Indeed you are unity itself not divisible by any mind. Life and wisdom and the other (attributes), then, are not parts of you, but all are one and each of them is wholly what you are and what all the others are’. [2]
Divine simplicity has consequences for everything else we think and say about God. As Nicholas Wolterstorff has noted, if God is simple ‘then one also has to grant a large number of other divine attributes: immateriality, eternity, immutability’ [3]. If God is simple he cannot be made up of stuff because that would require him to be composite. If God is simple, he cannot be mutable (changeable) or subject to time because that would require him to go from one state to another, which would mean he was not simply God.
Such an understanding of God is fairly alien to much modern theological understanding. Our picture of God or the ways we think and speak about him often present him as a composite being. He is often presented as an agent who bears a striking resemblance to us. He might be better than us, more powerful than us, more faithful than us, but often he is a God in our own image. We often have an image of the ‘God’ we need to do that which we want to do ‒ to “fight our battles” ‒ or we gravitate towards church traditions who display a way of thinking or speaking about God to which we can relate. This can be true even within academic theology where the fundamental categories with which the success or failure of a doctrine of God is judged are human ones. The limitations of human comprehension become the test case of a good or bad doctrine of God, as we shall see below.
The doctrine of divine simplicity was once held in common by both Catholic and Protestant theology as a shared feature of the Christian doctrine of God. James Dolezal points out that ‘the doctrine's ecumenical credentials are truly impressive. Historically it has been confessed by Orthodox churches, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists … But this common confession of divine simplicity is no longer common.’ [4] Divine simplicity has been abandoned in much modern theological discourse, or as Thomas White notes, ‘more commonly it has simply been ignored’ [5].
However, divine simplicity is making somewhat of a comeback, even if the recovery and re-articulation of divine simplicity is still in an infant stage. A wave of recent publications have sought to defend the simplicity of God according to classical theism. Others defend a slightly altered form of the doctrine. However, like the simple God the doctrine espouses, divine simplicity is difficult to alter without fundamentally disturbing the insight which divine simplicity gives us into the nature of God.
It is important to note that divine simplicity is, like all theology, as much a set of rules or grammar about how we can speak less badly of God as it is a substantive claim about God’s nature. Divine simplicity provides rules about how we understand two important and inter-related features of the Christian doctrine of God. Firstly, Christian monotheism, the oneness or unity of God. Secondly, the fundamental distinction between God as creator and his creation.
These two concerns come together on the question of how the unity of God differs or resembles that of creatures. A creature’s unity is in the harmonious relationships among its constituent parts. Is this also true of God’s unity? The doctrine of divine simplicity denies this equivocation: whatever God’s unity is like, it is not like this. At one level then, divine simplicity is a reminder about what we cannot say about God. We cannot say that what it means for him to be one is what it means for us to be one. In the sense, divine simplicity stands in the tradition of ‘apophatic’ or negative theology which affirms truths about God by ruling out what God is not.
The Heavens are Telling (1918), Emil Carlsen.
The most common ground for a rejection of divine simplicity is a rejection of this ultimate distinction between creature and creation. Modern critics who downplay such a distinction by including God and creation within the same account of what is (in technical terms ‘ontology’) in effect describe a God who is fundamentally similar to us. When the distinction between creature and Creator is not affirmed clearly, divine simplicity makes little sense. Divine simplicity is therefore grounded in the confession of God as Creator. Affirming divine simplicity is a consequence of acknowledging that—until the Incarnation—God is ‘outside’ of the world of created beings he is calling into existence and with which he relates. Whereas we and all creatures, even time itself, rely on him for our existence, God stands outside of the world of composites as pure existence. God simply is.
It is often stated that divine simplicity is unscriptural because we encounter a God on the pages of Scripture who does not seem to be simple in the way divine simplicity suggests. This is sometimes talked about as the gulf between the “God of the Bible” and the “God of the philosophers”, also called “classical theism”. The perceived gulf is predicated on what Brian Davies has called ‘an awful misreading of classical theism’ [6]. The God of classical theism demonstrates a God who is anything but static. The Incarnation, a central feature of the Christian account of the God of classical theism is the ultimate disproof that the God of classical theism is static or inert. The God of classical theism is the Creator who transforms his creation from the inside in the Incarnation, becoming one of us in Christ.
Moreover, it is important to note that one of earliest witnesses to divine simplicity in the Christian tradition, S. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130‒c 200 ce), asserts divine simplicity against his opponents with the introduction ‘if they had known the Scriptures’ (see epigram above). His opponents were a group of heretics known in scholarship as ‘gnostics’ who taught that God is made up of a series of processions and emanations (or parts) and is therefore composite. The Christian concept of God meanwhile is simple: ‘He is a simple, uncompounded Being, without diverse members, and altogether like, and equal to himself.’
For our purposes it is important to notice that Irenaeus does not derive divine simplicity from a pagan or philosophical source. While he notes that even ‘the religious and pious are wont to speak concerning God’, and he can describe divine simplicity using pagan philosophical resources, his source is Christian Scripture. He alludes to Isaiah 55.8 (‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord’) to make the fundamental distinction between God and his creatures: ‘God is not as men are.’ (Against Heresies 2.13.3).
Divine simplicity for Irenaeus is revealed in the Christian doctrine of creation and the distinction between creation and ‘the Father of all’ creatures we have begun to trace. Elsewhere in Against Heresies Irenaeus makes this distinction clear: “in this respect God differs from man, that God indeed makes, but man is made; and truly, He who makes is always the same; but that which is made must receive both beginning, and middle, and addition, and increase”. After stating this distinction between creature and Creator, Irenaeus once again grounds it in the doctrine of divine simplicity: ‘God also is truly perfect in all things, Himself equal and similar to Himself.’ (Against Heresies, 4.11.2).
Likewise the distinction between creature and Creator is key to understanding another important account of divine simplicity, that of St Thomas Aquinas (1225‒74) in his Summa Theologica. Aquinas devotes an article (I.3) to the question of God’s simplicity. Aquinas begins his discussion of divine simplicity by asking whether God is a body or composed of matter and form (I.3.1‒2). He rejects these on the grounds that God is pure act. By saying that God is ‘pure act’ he means that there is no potential in God ‒ he simply is. Put another way, there is no other way of being God else God would not be perfectly God. There can be no other way of being God: he simply is who he is. There follow some technical discussions including whether God is identical to what it means to be God (I.3.3) and whether what it means to be God and what it means for God to ‘exist’ are the same (I.3.4) before turning directly to the question of God’s simplicity.
Aquinas answers that God is simply God, unlike a human being who is a particular instance of humanity: ‘humanity and a man are not wholly identical … since God then is not composed of matter and form, He must be His own Godhead, His own Life, and whatever else is thus predicated of Him’.
Throughout this article, Aquinas appeals to God's role as Creator as the grounds for divine simplicity. Composite creation requires a cause or creator, whereas no such external cause can be presupposed of God. As uncaused, there is nothing prior or external to him. If there were to be something prior or external to him, then he would not be the creator of it. Therefore, he must be simple.
Rowan Williams’s Christ the Heart of Creation spells out the distinction between creation and Creator in terms that help us see how the doctrine of divine simplicity underlines God’s unique identity as Creator. Williams demonstrates that the attributes of the ‘God of classical theism far from being abstract and alien importations into a properly scriptural and/or experientially grounded theology, allow created existence its own integrity and dignity, and deliver us from a theology in which God is in danger of being seen simply as a very important or uniquely powerful agent in the universe competing with other agents in the universe for space or control’ (p. 11). [7]
God is not just another actor on the stage of creation. We might say however that God writes the play, provides the playhouse and the costumes and does all the casting himself. We do not say we can see God acting here and here and here, playing in this part in the cosmic play or making this or that cameo appearance. Instead God as Creator holds the entirety of creation in being at any given created moment: ‘what infinite agency causes simply is the system of secondary causality within which we finite agents act … what it means for infinite causality/agency to be at work is that a system of finite causes is operating ‒ not that a more impressive instance of finite causality is invoked to complete the picture’ (p. 2). God is not just another actor in the play.
This notion of God as ‘not another’ is also found in the medieval German theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401‒64). Williams takes over from Nicholas of Cusa the notion of God as non aliud or ‘not another thing’. This notion of God as ‘not another’ thing is important for any understanding of divine simplicity. For Nicholas of Cusa, God is not another thing in the universe. However, nor is God that ‘thing’ in the universe which is not a thing (the only God-thing there is). Rather God is simply God, he is ‘not another’. To put this another way God is outside the world of ‘others’ and things which he created. God is not this thing or not that thing, he is completely outside the networks of things that make up the world of things as their Creator.
Werner Beierwalters notes that Nicholas’s notion of God as ‘not another’ puts God outside the world of differentiation between things ‒ beyond the world of “this thing or that thing but not this thing or not that thing” ‒ while also relating God intimately to everything thing that ever is. God as ‘not another’ means that God is acting in that ‘another’ ‘as its constituting ground’. God is the eternal ‘other’ which makes each created instance of another “this” or “that” in the created order the particular “this” or “that” which God is calling it to be. [8]
This is a good a place as any to end the beginnings of our explorations of the doctrine of divine simplicity, as Nicholas of Cusa’s is one of the clearest formulations of what is central to its affirmation: that God is Creator, that God is distinct from creation but intimately involved in creation as he holds it in being, and that God is nothing like any-thing we have experienced. Miller paraphrases Nicholas’ insight well: ‘the divine Not-Other is not one of the things we are familiar with in the world we inhabit, where all is multiplicity and difference’ [9]. A reminder then, that we are in these explorations plumbing the depths of a great mystery.
1. Behr, J. ‘Synchronic and Diachronic Harmony: St. Irenaeus on Divine Simplicity’ in Modern Theology 35.3 (July 2019) 428‒441, 428.
2. Anselm, Proslogion XVIII (trans. Charlesworth, M. J.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965).
3. Wolterstorff, N. ‘Divine Simplicity’ in Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 5, Philosophy of Religion (1991), pp. 531‒552.
4. Dolezal, J. E., ‘ Review of Duby. S., Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016)’ in Pro Ecclesia XXVI.4 (2017) 463‒467.
5. White, T. J., ‘Divine Simplicity and the Holy Trinity’ in International Journal of Systematic Theology 18.1 (January 2016) 66‒93.
6. Davies, B. 'Classical theism and the doctrine of divine simplicity' in Language, Meaning, and God: Essays in Honor of Herbert McCabe (Eugene: Wipf and Stock 2010), pp. 51-74
7. Williams, R. 'Christ the heart of creation'. (London: Bloomsbury 2018).
8. Beierwalters, W. ,’Centrum tocius vite: The Significance of Procus’s Theologia Platonis in the Thought of Nicholas Cusanus’ in Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2000) 141‒156.
9. Miller, C. L. ‘God as Li Non-Aliud: Nicholas of Cusa’s Unique Designation for God’ in Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 41.1 (2015) 24‒40.
