In theology, the doctrine of divine simplicity says that God is without parts. The general idea of divine simplicity can be stated in this way: the being of God is identical to the "attributes" of God. In other words, such characteristics as omnipresence, goodness, truth, eternity, etc. are identical to God's being, not qualities that make up that being, nor abstract entities inhering in God as in a substance. Varieties of the doctrine may be found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophical theologians, especially during the heyday of scholasticism, though the doctrine's origins may be traced back to ancient Greek thought, finding apotheosis in Plotinus' Enneads as the Simplex.
Read more about Divine Simplicity: In Christian Thought, In Jewish Thought
Famous quotes containing the words divine and/or simplicity:
“Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous
crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Both Socrates and Jesus were outstanding teachers; both of them urged and practiced great simplicity of life; both were regarded as traitors to the religion of their community; neither of them wrote anything; both of them were executed; and both have become the subject of traditions that are difficult or impossible to harmonize.”
—Jaroslav Pelikan (b. 1932)