Divine Simplicity and the Triune Identity

A Critical Dialogue with the Theological Metaphysics of Robert W. Jenson

Jonathan M. Platter

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110736014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

There has been a recent revival of interest in the doctrine of divine simplicity in systematic and philosophical theology, following decades of intense reflection on the tri-personhood of the Christian God. While recent studies have produced a greater appreciation of patristic and scholastic theologies, they have not yet engaged in dialogue with proponents of the trinitarian revival that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century in anything other than polemical terms. This book offers a theological defense of the doctrine of divine simplicity through careful reading of both exemplary historical theologians and Robert W. Jenson, an important American contributor to the trinitarian revival. After tracing continuities and discontinuities amongst select historical theologians, the book approaches Jenson with a multivalent account of divine simplicity. The result is a more nuanced interpretation of Jenson's theology, an account of divine simplicity that responds to perceived problems, and new constructive proposals for divine simplicity in trinitarian theology.

Part I Conceiving divine simplicity

1 Divine simplicity: orientation to current discussions

1.1 Introduction

The doctrine of divine simplicity has become contentious and often hotly debated. Consequently, it is important to become familiar with some of the main contours of the doctrine and the debates connected with it. While varying in formulation, its minimal claim is that God is not composed of any more basic constituents – or, according to St. Augustine, God is all that God has.¹ Many theologians reject simplicity entirely, often with a diagnosis of either incoherence or incompatibility with Christian theology and scripture. Yet others have claimed that simplicity is necessary for the coherence of the Christian conception of God. So David Bentley Hart has averred, ‘any denial of divine simplicity is equivalent to a denial of God’s reality’, and even more pointedly, ‘a denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism’.² No small contributing factor in these oppositions is a lack of consensus on the role of metaphysics in theology, though even here the disagreements are multifaceted.³ When rejection of divine simplicity is voiced by process theists, for example, it is not as a result of the rejection of metaphysics but rather as a corollary of their metaphysical commitments.⁴ While many defenders of simplicity are also committed to ‘classical’ metaphysics (Hart being a ready example), others would prefer to remain agnostic towards issues metaphysical, while yet others would reformulate simplicity in explicit rejection of its metaphysical form.⁵ Consequently, there are two broad concerns to be addressed in understanding the doctrine of divine simplicity: (2.2) its regulative function in speech about God, and (2.3) the use of metaphysics in its formulation. After introducing these two concerns, I will then turn to (2.4) three central theological uses to which simplicity is put: the Creator–creature distinction, multiplicity of divine names, and the doctrine of the Trinity. These three theological uses will guide my interpretations and arguments in the following chapters.

1.2 Simplicity as a regulative category

Divine simplicity has a regulative function in theology; consequently, David Burrell calls it a ‘formal feature’ of divinity.⁶ In this role, simplicity governs or regulates the apprehension, interpretation, and formulation of speech about God. By using simplicity as a ‘formal feature’, any implicit or explicit attribution of composition in God is precluded – our speech about God simply does not have direct purchase on the ontological constitution of God. Because created things are composite, simplicity as a formal feature serves as a reminder not to think of God in creaturely terms. While attention to the regulative function need not exclude a metaphysical or descriptive function of simplicity, it is helpful to appreciate its distinct role. This can be seen in Paul Hinlicky, who advances a purely regulative, ‘rule-based’ understanding of divine simplicity.⁷

For Hinlicky, divine simplicity has two regulative functions when purged of its ‘protological’ orientation. First, it serves to free theology from idolatry by governing our language according to the Shema, understood as an ethical injunction to remain faithful to the one singular God with whom we have a covenant relation (rather than the other gods we might encounter).⁸ Second, simplicity functions as a rule of eschatological confirmation and union. This function is regulative because it primarily works to shape the kind of faith and speech that is appropriate in response to God’s promises. In a world of competing deities – competing objects of trust and faith – God has promised eschatological participation in the triune life. Consequently, proper faith – regulated by divine simplicity – is exclusively oriented toward eschatological fulfilment. For Hinlicky, then, simplicity does not describe the plenitude of divine being self-subsisting as the identity of essence and existence, as a more metaphysical rendering might conclude. Instead, it is fundamentally a rule for situating faith between promise and fulfilment and accepting the instability of the present, wherein one’s theological claims are not brute givens but are tentative proposals for directing one’s life and mind to the eschatological consummation of all things in the ‘Beloved Community’.⁹ Although Hinlicky himself concedes that this rule-version of simplicity has ontological implications, he prefers not to develop the doctrine in a metaphysically robust manner and, consequently, refers to his version as ‘weak simplicity’. Hinlicky’s approach is one example of the regulative function of simplicity, developed explicitly in distinction from metaphysical formulations. While the two need not be opposed, Hinlicky’s example helps to demonstrate the difference between them. Simplicity is regulative insofar as it governs the grammar of speech about God, ensuring that God is spoken of differently than creaturely beings (avoiding idolatry) and as the one on whom our faith exclusively rests (eschatological union).

1.3 Simplicity as a metaphysical category

In contrast to Hinlicky’s approach, traditional doctrines of simplicity have explicitly developed the doctrine’s metaphysical function. Central to metaphysical approaches is the metaphysics of composition, for what it means to say that God is metaphysically simple depends on the kinds of composition one is denying. Creatures can be simple in the sense of having no component parts, like electrons or quarks are simples, while still being metaphysically composite by virtue of having properties distinct from their being, an essence distinct from existence, and by being defined by genus and differentia.¹⁰ For Thomas Aquinas, the distinction of essence and existence is one of the most metaphysically basic forms of composition.¹¹ In creatures there is a real distinction between essence and existence, between ‘what something is’ and ‘that it is’. In Aquinas’ view, existence is ontologically prior to essence in created beings, in the sense that existence is an activity, the self-communicative act by virtue of which an essence stands out from nonbeing.¹² The priority of existence signals that a creature’s essence does not account for its own existence – a creature does not cause itself to be – and yet insofar as a creature does exist there is a real unity of essence and existence and not a simple mereological sum of the two. This unity-in-distinction of essence and existence (or ‘polarity’, as Hans Urs von Balthasar calls it) both reflects the connection of creatures to their Creator and marks their distinction from the Creator.¹³ The unity of essence and existence in creatures is a reflection of the perfect identity of essence and existence in God, while the real distinction of essence and existence marks creation’s dependence on God as the self-subsisting source and plenitude of existence (ipsum esse subsistens). Hence, the affirmation of divine simplicity in terms of the identity of essence and existence requires metaphysical explication insofar as it depends on an interpretation of creaturely being.

The metaphysical explication of divine simplicity relies on the categories of essence and existence, but both terms have changed meaning over time. Consequently, what Aquinas, for instance, meant by them is significantly different from what many modern philosophers and metaphysicians take them to mean. It is important to clarify these differences in order to navigate the debates of the last fifty years. This is especially evident in the metaphysics of analytic philosophers.¹⁴ Relying on the modal logic of possible worlds, the most common use of ‘essence’ in analytic philosophy, deriving from Saul Kripke’s theory of modality, is to name a set of properties a being possesses in every possible world in which they exist, whereas those properties a being possesses in some but not all of the worlds in which they exist are ‘accidental’ or ‘non-essential’.¹⁵ For ancient and medieval philosophers, however, essences were understood as the ‘active’ principle of a being – relative to their matter, properties, and accidents – which is expressed through properties but is not identical to those properties. The essence of a being, for these earlier thinkers, is the definition of the being according to genus and differentia (i. e., a human essence is an animal (genus) that is rational (difference)).¹⁶ The essential definition makes the being and its action intelligible by enabling one to recognize the form of the individual being.

‘Existence’, with some exceptions, has tended to be reduced to a quantifier in analytic philosophy, following Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, which is a view in metaontology known as the redundancy theory of existence.¹⁷ According to Frege, ‘existence’ is not a real predicate, and any sentence which appears to use it as a predicate can without remainder be paraphrased or analyzed without it.¹⁸ Consequently, such sentences are transformed into propositions of the form (∃x)(x=E), which means, it is the case that there is some object x such that x is identical to E (or has E as its essence or properties). The existential quantifier, ∃, simply modifies the proposition (x=E), which consequently does not itself contain reference to existence.¹⁹ On this view of existence, it is practically meaningless to assert that God’s essence and existence are identical, which can be seen in Christopher Hughes’ criticism of divine simplicity. Hughes charges that if God is identical with God’s existence, then God is just divine existence existing, but without ‘being the existence of anything … [which] is like supposing that something could be a shape, without being the shape of anything but that shape … a merely existent substance is too thin to be possible’.²⁰ For Hughes, Aquinas’s claim that essence and existence are identical in God is like saying God is a quantifier that quantifies nothing but itself.

As will be discussed below and in the next chapter, Aquinas understands existence in a very different way.²¹ Drawing on Aristotle’s priority of act over potency and Plato’s participatory metaphysics, Aquinas articulates existence as the activity by virtue of which a being, its essence, and all its properties are actual. In God, for Aquinas, the activity of existence is unbounded by essence, for God’s essence is ‘to be’, and consequently all finite beings have existence by participating in God’s infinite act of being.²²

1.4 The theological deployment of simplicity

The difference between God and creation, which I suggested is central both to the regulative and metaphysical functions of simplicity, is the first theological deployment of simplicity that I consider. Not only is the Creator–creature distinction the most immediate theological use of divine simplicity, it also shapes how the other two theological deployments are approached and articulated. Consequently, I turn to it presently. In the sections that follow, I briefly introduce the other two theological uses: multiplicity of divine names, and Trinity. In the next chapter, I discuss how Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas approach all three uses of simplicity.

1.4.1 Simplicity and the Creator–creature distinction

The difference between Creator and creation is sui generis ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Conceiving divine simplicity
• Part II Divine simplicity in the revisionary metaphysics of Robert W. Jenson
• Part III Toward a dramatic theology of divine simplicity
• 6 Conclusion
• Person Index