Divine Simplicity - in Christian Thought

In Christian Thought

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See also: Classical theism, Trinity, and Nontrinitarianism

In Christian theism (to be accurate "Classical theism"), God is simple, not composite, not made up of thing upon thing. In other words, the characteristics of God are not parts of God that together make up God. Because God is simple, God is those characteristics; for example, God does not have goodness, but simply is goodness. For typical Christian theologians, divine simplicity does not entail that the attributes of God are indistinguishable to thought. It is no contradiction of the doctrine to say, for example, that God is both just and merciful. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, in whose system of thought the idea of divine simplicity is central, wrote in Summa Theologica that because God is infinitely simple, God can only appear to the finite mind as infinitely complex.

Theologians holding the doctrine of simplicity tend to distinguish various modes of the simple being of God by negating any notion of composition from the meaning of terms used to describe it. Thus, in quantitative or spatial terms, God is simple as opposed to being made up of pieces, present in entirety everywhere, if in fact present anywhere. In terms of essences, God is simple as opposed to being made up of form and matter, or body and soul, or mind and act, and so on: if distinctions are made when speaking of God's attributes, they are distinctions of the "modes" of God's being, rather than real or essential divisions. And so, in terms of subjects and accidents, as in the phrase "goodness of God", divine simplicity allows that there is a conceptual distinction between the person of God and the personal attribute of goodness, but the doctrine disallows that God's identity or "character" is dependent upon goodness, and at the same time the doctrine dictates that it is impossible to consider the goodness in which God participates separately from the goodness which God is.

Furthermore, according to some, if as creatures our concepts are all drawn from the creation, it follows from this and divine simplicity that God's attributes can only be spoken of by analogy — since it is not true of any created thing that its properties are identical to its being. Consequently, when Christian Scripture is interpreted according to the guide of divine simplicity, when it says that God is good for example, it should be taken to speak of a likeness to goodness as found in humanity and referred to in human speech. Since God's essence is inexpressible; this likeness is nevertheless truly comparable to God who simply is goodness, because humanity is a complex being composed by God "in the image and likeness of God". The doctrine aides, then, in interpreting the Scriptures so as to avoid paradox—as when Scripture says, for example, that the creation is "very good", and also that "none is good but God alone"—since only God is goodness, while nevertheless humanity is created in the likeness of goodness (and the likeness is necessarily imperfect in humanity, unless that person is also God). This doctrine also helps keep trinitarianism from drifting into tritheism, which is the belief in three different gods: the persons of God are not parts or essential differences, but are rather the way in which the one God exists personally.

The doctrine has been criticized by some Christian theologians, including Alvin Plantinga, who in his essay Does God Have a Nature? calls it "a dark saying indeed." Plantinga's criticism is based on his interpretation of Aquinas's discussion of it, from which he concludes that if God is identical with properties of God such as goodness etc., then God is a property; and a property is not a person. Plantinga concludes that divine simplicity does not do justice to the personal nature of the Christian God.