All tagged divine simplicity
August 16th marks 14th anniversary of Barry Miller’s death. Miller was a philosopher and Marist priest, and our series on divine simplicity gives us a good opportunity to discuss his work. Fr Jonathan Jong tries to explain Miller’s quite difficult ideas on this topic.
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.
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.
