Divine simplicity is complicated
Today the “Divine Simplicity” entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was updated. Divine simplicity is no simple topic, and I’d love to ignore it. Unfortunately it pops up whenever I read an early church father or medieval theologian. So if I want to understand important theologians of the past — including those who first articulated the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation — I need a basic grasp of their notions of divine simplicity. If you’re in the same boat, read on!
God and/as God’s attributes
Philosopher William Vallicella defines divine simplicity as the view that “God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical.”[1] This doctrine is deeply entrenched in historic Christian thought. In fact, Stephen Holmes argues that the fourth-century Trinitarian consensus includes the claim that the “divine nature of simple, incomposite, and ineffable.”[2] By the twelfth century, Richard of St. Victor asserts, “Every theologian knows with indubitable reason that there is a supremely simple being in the true divinity.”[3]
Divine simplicity, while historically popular, comes at a strange price. “God is,” Vallicella writes, “in a sense requiring clarification identical to each of his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one.”[4] In the words of Richard of St. Victor,
If you interrogate every theologian, you will receive this response from all of them: the power of God is identical to his wisdom, and his goodness is nothing other than his wisdom or power. If you ask them what these three properties are, then you will discover that they are nothing other than the divine substance.[5]
God is not an abstract object
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga suspects that divine simplicity renders God an abstract object. If God is identical to God’s properties, which are identical to each other, then God just is a single property. “God has just one property: himself.”[6] Plantinga continues,
This view is subject to difficulties both obvious and overwhelming. No property could have created the world; no property could be omniscient, or indeed know anything at all. If God is a property, then he isn’t a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, love, or life. So taken, the simplicity doctrine seems an utter mistake.[7]
Instead, Plantinga is committed to the view that “God is a living, conscious being who knows, wills, and acts . . . God is a person.”[8] This conviction (rightly) trumps divine simplicity so understood.
Behind the absurdity of simplicity
If divine simplicity entails renders God an abstract object, why was it once so popular? Why wasn’t it rejected sooner? Dr. Vallicella’s (recently updated) SEP entry sheds light on this very question.
Vallicella explains that Plantinga’s objection assumes a particular ontology in which God and his properties belong to “radically disjoint realms.”[9] God exemplifies his properties, which are themselves abstract objects. The relationship between God and God’s properties is asymmetric exemplification rather than symmetric identity. As such, “if God exemplifies his nature, then God is distinct from his nature.”[10] We must therefore choose between Plantinga’s ontology and divine simplicity.
The ontology behind divine simplicity
If I want to understand theologians who embrace divine simplicity, I need to understand an ontology in which divine simplicity makes sense. Dr. Vallicella describes the needed ontology in his SEP entry. Rather than thinking of attributes as abstract objects that individuals exemplify, one can take “a thing’s nature to be a constituent of it, together with some individuating constituent.”[11]
For example, Socrates and Plato share a common human nature yet are distinct individuals by virtue of being separate chunks of matter. Socrates is then a composite being, composed of his human nature and his physical matter (never mind his soul). By comparison, God is immaterial. This allows for God to simply be God’s nature. This doesn’t render God an abstract object since, on this ontology, natures are not abstract objects but rather constituents of individuals. As such, Vallicella writes, “The divine nature is not an abstract object related across an ontological chasm to a concrete individual; the divine nature is self-individuating.”[12]
Concluding thoughts/assertions for debate
- Theological doctrines — such as simplicity, Trinity, incarnation, atonement — make the most sense within the ontology of their framers.
- It is easy to prematurely dismiss a doctrine as misguided, when it is simply misunderstood, just because it doesn’t make sense within a modern ontology. This should be avoided.
- Ontological commitments often vary from culture to culture. Important Christian doctrines ought not to rest on ever-shifting ontological commitments.
- Historic Christian doctrines deserve to be translated — if possible — into other ontologies to determine which elements are “ontology-invariant”, to coin a term.
- Put another way, Christian doctrine ought to be compatible with an appropriate degree of ontological agnosticism.
- I see no reason to adopt a constituent ontology in order to save divine simplicity.
[1] William F. Vallicella, “Divine Simplicity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2010, 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/divine-simplicity/, emphasis added.
[2] Stephen R. Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 146, cf. 199.
[3] Richard of St. Victor, “On the Trinity,” in Trinity and Creation, ed. Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coulter, trans. Christopher P Evans, Victorine Texts in Translation : Exegesis, Theology and Spirituality from the Abbey of St. Victor 1 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2011), 283.
[4] Vallicella, “Divine Simplicity.”
[5] Richard of St. Victor, “On the Trinity,” 269–270, emphasis added.
[6] Alvin Plantinga, “Does God Have a Nature?,” in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, ed. James F. Sennett (Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 235.
[7] Ibid., emphasis added.
[8] Ibid., 239.
[9] Vallicella, “Divine Simplicity.”
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., emphasis added.
[12] Ibid., emphasis added.
Originally published at bennasmith.wordpress.com on January 3, 2015.
