Divine simplicity
Based on Wikipedia: Divine simplicity
Here is perhaps the strangest idea you will encounter in all of philosophy: God does not have goodness. God is goodness. God does not possess existence. God is existence itself.
This is divine simplicity—the claim that God has no parts whatsoever. Not physical parts, not metaphysical parts, not even conceptual divisions. Everything we might say about God—that God is powerful, knowing, eternal, good—these are not separate qualities stuck together like ingredients in a recipe. They are all the same thing: God's very being.
If this sounds bewildering, you are in excellent company. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga called it "a dark saying indeed."
Why Would Anyone Believe This?
The doctrine emerges from a problem that plagued ancient philosophers: what makes something truly ultimate? If you say God is made of parts—say, power plus knowledge plus goodness—then those parts are more fundamental than God. They existed first, and God is just their combination. But that cannot be right. Whatever is truly ultimate cannot depend on anything else.
Think of it this way. A car is made of an engine, wheels, a chassis, and thousands of other components. The car depends on those parts; take them away, and there is no car. But if God depends on divine attributes the way a car depends on its parts, then God is not really the foundation of reality. The attributes are.
So theologians concluded: God must be absolutely simple. No composition. No parts. What we call divine "attributes" cannot be separate things. They must all be identical with God's very essence.
The Greek Roots
This idea did not spring from religious revelation. It grew from Greek philosophy, finding its most extreme expression in the work of Plotinus, a philosopher who lived in Roman Egypt during the third century. Plotinus described ultimate reality as "the One"—something so simple, so utterly without parts, that even calling it "one" was already saying too much.
Plato, centuries earlier, had moved in similar directions. His Form of the Good was supposed to be the source of everything else, including truth and being itself. Thales and Anaximenes, among the earliest Greek philosophers, sought a single fundamental principle underlying all reality—water for Thales, air for Anaximenes. The impulse toward simplicity and unity runs deep in Western thought.
When Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians encountered Greek philosophy, they adapted these ideas for their own purposes. If there is only one God, and that God is the source of everything else, then God must be the most fundamental thing. And the most fundamental thing cannot be a collection of parts.
Medieval Minds at Work
The doctrine reached its fullest development during the medieval period, when scholastic philosophers—scholars working in the great universities of Europe—systematically worked out its implications.
Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar who remains the most influential Catholic philosopher, made divine simplicity central to his understanding of God. For Aquinas, God is utterly unlike creatures in a crucial respect: in God, there is no distinction between essence and existence.
What does that mean? Consider yourself. Your essence—what makes you human—is one thing. Your existence—the fact that you actually are—is another. Your essence does not guarantee your existence; you might never have been born. The universe would have gone on without you. Your existence is, in a sense, added to your essence from outside.
But God, according to Aquinas, is different. God's essence is existence itself. God does not receive existence from anywhere. God simply is "to be." This means God cannot fail to exist. God's existence is not contingent on anything else.
Aquinas went further. If God's essence is existence, and if God is simple, then all of God's attributes must be identical with that essence. God's power is God's knowledge is God's goodness is God's eternity—all of them are simply God's existence, viewed from different angles by our limited minds.
The Jewish Tradition
Moses Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher of the twelfth century, took simplicity to an even more radical conclusion. In his masterwork, The Guide for the Perplexed, he argued that we cannot really say anything positive about God at all.
The problem is that any positive statement seems to introduce complexity. Say "God is powerful." That seems to distinguish God's power from God's other qualities—wisdom, goodness, justice. But if these are truly separate attributes, you have made God into a collection of parts. You have, in Maimonides' view, denied God's unity while claiming to affirm it.
Those who believe that God is One, and that He has many attributes, declare the unity with their lips, and assume plurality in their thoughts.
Maimonides' solution was severe: all our statements about God should be understood as negations. When we say "God is powerful," we really mean "God is not powerless." When we say "God is knowing," we mean "God is not ignorant." We chip away at what God is not, but we never arrive at what God positively is.
This led Maimonides to a striking conclusion. Citing the Psalms, he declared that the highest praise of God is silence. Language simply cannot capture what God is. Every word we use was designed for creatures, for composite beings in a material world. Applied to God, those words crack under the pressure.
The Paradox
You may have noticed a tension building. If God is absolutely simple—no parts, no structure, not even conceptual divisions—how can God contain all perfections? Goodness, knowledge, power, justice, mercy, creativity, eternality: these seem like very different things. How can they all be the same?
The eighteenth-century Italian rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto articulated the paradox directly. On one hand, God must be absolutely simple, containing no combination or addition of any kind. On the other hand, God must contain every possible perfection. How can something with no structure whatsoever encompass such variety?
Luzzatto's answer was, essentially: we cannot understand this. It lies beyond human comprehension. God's nature is a single attribute that somehow intrinsically encompasses everything that could be considered perfection. The perfections are not additions to God's existence but identical with it.
This is not an argument but an acknowledgment of mystery. The doctrine pushes thought to its limits and then declares that those limits have been reached.
Formal Distinctions: A Medieval Compromise
Not everyone was satisfied with the strictest version of divine simplicity. John Duns Scotus, a Franciscan friar who was Aquinas' great rival in medieval philosophy, proposed a more moderate view.
Scotus agreed that God has no metaphysical parts. God's nature is not composed of separate properties like a machine is composed of gears. But Scotus introduced what he called a "formal distinction" between God's attributes.
A formal distinction is not a real division—it is not as if you could separate God's power from God's wisdom the way you could separate the wheels from a car. But neither is it merely a distinction in our minds, a matter of how we think about God rather than how God actually is.
The distinction exists, as the medieval philosophers put it, de re—in the thing itself—rather than merely de dicto—in what is said about it. Omnipotence and omniscience are inseparable; you could not have one without the other, not even for an omnipotent being. They have different definitions. And yet they are not separate parts. They are logically distinct aspects of a single simple nature.
Whether this actually resolves the problem or merely restates it in more technical language is a question philosophers continue to debate.
Different Kinds of Simplicity
Theologians have distinguished several varieties of divine simplicity, each denying a different kind of composition in God.
Spatial simplicity denies that God is made of physical parts. God is not a body with arms and legs. God has no location in space, or is wholly present everywhere—not divided across different places like a cloud spread across the sky. Most traditional theists accept this without controversy.
Temporal simplicity is more contentious. It claims that God exists outside of time altogether, experiencing all of history in a single eternal "now." God does not wait for the future or remember the past; God sees everything at once. This view has ancient roots but troubles many modern theologians who think it conflicts with the biblical portrait of a God who acts in history and responds to human choices.
Property simplicity is the most radical version. It says that God has no properties at all—or rather, that God is all the properties we attribute to God. The philosopher Thomas V. Morris described this, somewhat paradoxically, as "the property of having no properties."
Medieval Metaphysics: Why Natures Mattered
To understand why medieval thinkers found divine simplicity so compelling, you need to grasp how they thought about natures and properties.
Medieval philosophers held what scholars call "constituent ontology." They thought of natures—like humanity or horseness—as real things that are somehow in individual humans or horses. Your humanity is not identical to my humanity; each of us has human nature, but our particular instances of it are individuated by the matter we are made of.
For beings without matter—like angels, in traditional theology—things work differently. An angel has no matter to distinguish its nature from itself. Each angel simply is its nature. This means each angel is literally one of a kind. There could not be two angels of the same species, because there is nothing to distinguish them. Each angel is its own species.
If angels are identical with their natures, how much more so must God be? God is not merely identical with the divine nature. God is existence itself—the nature of existing, fully realized and standing on its own.
The Challenge of Language
Divine simplicity creates a peculiar problem for religious language. If God is truly simple, can we say anything meaningful about God at all?
Aquinas answered with the doctrine of analogy. Our language about God is neither univocal (meaning exactly the same thing when applied to God as when applied to creatures) nor equivocal (meaning something completely different). It is analogical—our words point toward God's reality while acknowledging that they cannot capture it precisely.
When we say a human is good and God is good, we are not using the word "good" in exactly the same sense. Human goodness is a quality that inheres in a substance; divine goodness simply is divine existence. But the words are not unrelated either. There is an analogy, a proportional similarity, between creaturely goodness and whatever it is in God that grounds all goodness.
Critics find this unsatisfying. If we cannot use words univocally about God, how can we reason about God at all? How can we argue for divine simplicity itself if our language becomes slippery the moment we apply it to the divine?
Official Church Teaching
Divine simplicity is not merely a philosopher's speculation. It became official doctrine in the Catholic Church, affirmed by two ecumenical councils.
The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 declared that God is "one sole, absolutely simple and immutable spiritual substance." The First Vatican Council in 1870 repeated and elaborated this teaching:
There is one true and living God, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, almighty, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in intelligence, in will, and in all perfection, who, as being one, sole, absolutely simple and immutable spiritual substance, is to be declared as really and essentially distinct from the world.
The theological language piles up superlatives—almighty, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite—but the word "simple" does perhaps the heaviest lifting. It is precisely God's simplicity that guarantees God's distinction from everything else. Creatures are composite; God is not. That is the fundamental divide.
Eastern Orthodox Dissent
Not all Christians accepted this. In 1368, a synod of the Eastern Orthodox Church, organized by the Patriarch of Constantinople, condemned Thomistic divine simplicity along with Aquinas' theology more broadly.
The Eastern Church instead affirmed the teachings of Gregory Palamas, a fourteenth-century monk who distinguished between God's essence—which is utterly unknowable and beyond all description—and God's energies, the activities by which God relates to creation. Humans can participate in the divine energies, Palamas taught, but never in the divine essence.
This distinction troubled Western theologians committed to divine simplicity. If God's essence is really distinct from God's energies, have you not introduced composition into God? Have you not divided what must remain simple?
The Orthodox answer, roughly, is that the distinction between essence and energies is real but does not compromise simplicity because the energies are not parts of God. They are God in action, God as God relates to creation. The energy-essence distinction is not like the distinction between parts of a machine but like the distinction between the sun and its rays—different for us, but the sun remains undivided.
Modern Critics
In contemporary philosophy of religion, divine simplicity has come under sustained attack.
Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the most influential Christian philosopher of the late twentieth century, raised several objections. If God is identical with divine attributes, and divine attributes are abstract objects (like properties or universals), then God is an abstract object. But abstract objects cannot create anything, cannot act, cannot love. A God identical with abstract properties would not be the personal God of biblical religion.
More puzzling still: if all of God's attributes are identical with God's essence, then they are all identical with each other. But being omnipotent is not the same thing as being omniscient—you can define one without defining the other. How can things with different definitions be identical?
And consider properties like "being a horse" or "being a turkey." If all properties are somehow identical with God, then being a horse is identical with being a turkey, which is absurd. Defenders of simplicity must find some way to distinguish properties that exist in God from properties that merely exist in creatures.
Plantinga also challenged the move to analogical language. If proponents of divine simplicity say we cannot reason univocally about God, they undercut their own arguments. You cannot use precise philosophical reasoning to establish that God is simple and then deny that precise reasoning applies to God.
Defenders Respond
Defenders of divine simplicity have not been silent. Edward Feser, a contemporary Thomist philosopher, has argued that Plantinga attacks a strawman. Analogical language is not the same as metaphorical language. When we speak analogically of God, we are not using mere metaphors. We are making genuine claims about God's nature, but with the recognition that our concepts, drawn from creatures, cannot apply to God in exactly the same way.
Other defenders distinguish between properties and predicates. Just because we use different words—"omnipotent," "omniscient," "omnibenevolent"—does not mean there are different properties in God. The multiplicity is in our language, not in the divine reality.
Still others emphasize that divine simplicity does not mean God has no relation to the world. God creates, sustains, and interacts with creation. But these relations are on God's side, as it were, not parts of God's essential nature. God's decision to create this particular universe is not part of what God eternally and necessarily is.
Why It Matters
You might wonder why anyone should care about such abstract metaphysical questions. What difference does it make whether God is simple or composite?
The stakes, for traditional theists, are high. Divine simplicity is meant to protect God's transcendence—the claim that God is utterly different from creatures, not just a bigger or more powerful version of ourselves. If God has parts, God is a thing among things, perhaps more impressive than other things but not fundamentally different.
Simplicity also connects to other divine attributes. If God is simple, God cannot change, because change requires parts that can shift in relation to each other. If God is simple, God is eternal, existing outside of time, because temporal existence implies a before and after—parts of God's life. If God is simple, God is self-sufficient, depending on nothing else, because dependence implies composition.
Take away simplicity, and the whole classical picture of God begins to unravel. You might end up with a God who changes, who develops, who depends on things outside himself—a God more like the process theologians describe, or like the limited deities of Greek mythology.
Whether that would be a loss or a liberation depends on your theological commitments. But the doctrine of divine simplicity stands at the center of traditional theism, holding many other doctrines in place.
The Silence of the Wise
Perhaps the deepest insight of the tradition comes from Maimonides' counsel of silence. The doctrine of divine simplicity pushes language to its breaking point. It says: God is so different from everything else that our words, designed for a world of composite creatures, cannot capture what God is.
This is not anti-intellectualism. The philosophers who developed divine simplicity were among the most rigorous thinkers in history. But they recognized that rigorous thinking, if honest, eventually encounters its own limits.
The doctrine asks: What would something have to be like to be truly ultimate, truly the foundation of everything else? The answer is: nothing we can fully imagine. Our minds, themselves composite, cannot picture something without parts. Our language, designed for a world of things and properties, cannot describe something that is not a thing with properties but rather the ground of all things and properties.
Divine simplicity is, in the end, a finger pointing at mystery. It does not explain God. It explains why God cannot be explained.