On Trinity and Divine Simplicity
Picking up from Fr Simon Cuff’s essay on creation and divine simplicity, Dr Simon Hewitt offers reflections on the Trinity and divine simplicity. Dr Hewitt is Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He has recently published Church and Revolution: Continuing the Conversation between Christianity and Marxism.
After having provided what he takes to be valid proofs of God’s existence, St Thomas Aquinas takes what is, to modern eyes, a surprising turn. At the start of the third question of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas observes that usually when we have shown that something exists we can go on to ask what that thing is – we’ve discovered the Higgs Boson; great that’s a subatomic particle of a particular sort, it fits into our best physical theories in particular ways, and we can do some more science to find out more about it! But things are not like this with God, thinks Thomas, we cannot know what God is, only what God is not. God lies beyond our ability to grasp or categorise, not because we are not quite clever enough, but because of the radical difference between the creator and us creatures. In fact, and here God differs from the Higgs Boson, the way forward from our realisation of God exists is modest and negative – we have the task of saying what God is not.
This might sound like an impossible position for a Christian theologian. Don’t we say lots about God? And doesn’t Thomas himself go on for hundreds of pages talking about God? In particular don’t we want to say that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God in whose life we are called to share? Yes, we do. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that Thomas’ view that God is fundamentally mysterious (what we might call his apophatic theology – a theology which proceeds by denial), far from undermining distinctively Christian claims, allows us to see them in their proper light. In order to do this, we need to get clear about the foundation stone of Thomas’ account of divine mystery, the doctrine of divine simplicity.
That God is simple is an unfashionable claim. Many theologians and philosophers have rejected it, often on the grounds hinted at above, that it sits uncomfortably with Christian basics and with the doctrine of the Trinity in particular. Yet it has historically been viewed as a key Christian claim about God. It is affirmed by the Thirty Nine Articles, included in the Westminster Catechism and taught by the Roman Catholic Church. For God to be simple is for God to lack composition. There are no parts of God. I have many parts – my spleen and my kidneys go togather with other bits to make me – it is not like this with God. Nor is there any coming together of distinct components in God. So, thinks Thomas, there is no distinction within God between God’s properties and God herself. My wisdom, such as it is, is distinct from me. It could cease to exist – I could go off to an alt-right training camp and become a Trump enthusiast – but I would still exist, albeit in an impoverished fashion. Whereas God’s wisdom just is God, for God to be wise is for God to exist. Similiarly, in a move guaranteed to wind up philosophers of a certain stripe, Thomas holds that God’s existence (esse) is in no way distinct from what God is: to be God just is to exist divinely. In particular, then, God’s existence is necessary: it is not possible that God doesn’t exist (which isn’t of course the same as saying that God’s existence is obvious, or undeniable), nor is it possible that God cease to exist. [1]
Thomas goes on, in question 3, to deny several other kinds of composition of God. The motivation for denying all these things of God is a recognition that God is the creator. God, that is to say, is the reason why there is something rather than nothing at all. The question to which ‘God’ is the answer lies at the end of a series of ‘why’ questions, the question we ask when science has said all there is to be said about this world. God is, in this sense, the ultimate explanation (not, it should be stressed, that God explains particular features of the world, as scientific posits do: rather God is the reason for everything). So God himself had better not stand in need of explanation in any way. Yet, if there were parts in God (or some other kind of composition) than there would be something that stands in need of explanation – we can always ask of parts why them come together to compose a whole: how come those legs and that surface came together to make a table? The affirmation that God is simple reassures us that there are no good questions of this sort about God. The explanatory buck stops with God.
An obvious implication of divine simplicity is that God is very unlike the things of our everyday acquaintance. (In fact, we ought not to call God a ‘thing’: God is not an identifiable material individual). Our language, and the thought which it shapes, is equipped to pick out objects and distinguish them from their properties, but this distinction has no purchase on the reality of God. As Herbert McCabe put it, God wears our words as though they were second-hand clothes. The simple God is a mystery. Our ability to say anything about her is profoundly hampered by the fact that our languages evolved, and couldn’t have done otherwise, for talking about medium sized objects in the world, things like toasters and Boris Johnson. God is not a medium sized object in the world.
But doesn’t this cause problems for orthodox Christianity’s insistence that God is Trinity? Well, it certainly rules out an interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity on which God has three parts. Implicit in the appalling shamrock metaphor often attributed to poor old St Patrick, and more subtly present in recently fashionable ‘social’ models of the Trinity (according to which God is a committee with three members), this is miles away from the settled trinitarian faith of the Church. This speaks of three hypostases (in Greek) or personae (in Latin, a horribly misleading word in contemporary context) in God. But this talk is not intended to suggest that we have a grasp on what the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are. We say “three persons”, writes St Augustine, “rather than saying nothing at all”. These are hardly the words of a man who thought he had the inner life of God sewn up.
What we ought to say, rather, is that we do not know what God is, but whatever God is, God exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Prayer Book’s translation of so-called Athanasian Creed captures the point when it talks of ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible’. We must confess that these three are God, because we have encountered God in the work of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit. And we must confess that this ‘threeness’ somehow reflects the real life of God, that it is not a mere matter of how things appear to us. God’s self-communication is faithful.
Theologian Karen Kilby has done useful work in recent years in stressing the possibility of this kind of apophatic understanding of the Trinity, and I commend her writing. One aspect of her work of particular interest here is her opposition to social models of the Trinity. We can so easily project our own views or fantasies concerning human societies onto God, and then get a vision of a perfect society (now divinely authorised) reflected back. As is so often the case, inadequate views of God and the possibility of political domination go hand in hand. A decent apophaticism – and I think divine simplicity is a good basis for that – heads off this kind of inadequate view. We don’t know what God is. We certainly don’t know that God is a society (in fact, in anything other than a highly figuritive sense, simplicity assures us that God is not a society).
The Trinity, which is to say God, is not just another portion of reality, susceptible to our investigation and manipulation. Rather the triune life of the simple God is the font from which our being views, and the end to which we are called, out of love, through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. God’s approach to us in Christ doesn’t lessen the mystery, rather it makes the mystery our mystery. We are, as Thomas quotes pseudo-Dionysius as saying, united to God ‘in this life as to one unknown’. Reminding ourselves of divine simplicity helps us resist the temptation to domesticate God, the temptation towards what the Bible terms ‘idolatry’.
1. This is not to say that God exists “by definition”. The claim there that God’s existence is necessary is not tantamount that the nonexistence of God is logically impossible: it is the claim that God’s nonexistence is metaphysically impossible.
