DOGMATICS I NUMBER 35 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> You mentioned that simplicity was an attribute of God. That doesn't mean that God is easy to understand, does it? >> Well, after all we talked about these past hours, that's definitely not a statement we want to make: "God is easy to understand." Maybe you feel like the man who said that his brain hurts when you think all of that. No, simplicity means here in this context not that God is simple to understand. It means that God is noncomposite, that God has no parts. Again, that seems to be a rather abstract concept. Why did that come up? Actually, it came up because of the discussion of the relationship of the divine attributes to the divine essence. We said that God is identical with his nature or his properties; that the divine attributes are not parts of the divine essence. The problem is that as humans we cannot have a concept of an absolute, simple essence. So does that mean that the divine attributes are really not distinguished? It's just a way how we conceive God? It's one way how in tradition theology looked at it. For example, Thomas Aquinas looked at God like that. The attributes of God are not really distinct from another, since God is simple. They are identical with a divine essence. Divine intelligence is not really distinct from the divine essence nor is the divine will. If you would comprehend the divine essence as it is in itself and if you could give it its proper name, we should use one alone. We cannot, however, comprehend the divine essence and we know it only by means of diverse concepts. We have therefor to employ diverse words to express the divine essence, though we know at the same time that the actual reality corresponding to all these names is one simple reality. The question that is raised by that then is if you conceive God differently than he really is, is then our perception not wrong? No, actually, it is not. Because for we know that God is actually a simple being, but we conceive in a composite manner the object which we know to be noncomposite. That means that our intelligences are infinite and discursive and that they cannot apprehend God saved by means of his different reflections in a creature. Our knowledge of God is thus inadequate and imperfect, but it is not false. There is indeed a certain foundation in God for our composite and distinct concepts. This foundation, however, not being any real distinction in God between the divine attributes, but simply his infinite perfection, which precisely because of its infinite richness cannot be apprehended by the human mind in one concept. Why was that question debated? Why did people discuss such a rather abstract idea like simplicity of God? Maybe you can get very excited about that. It has to do with a philosophical debate in the middle ages and its consequences for theology. In the middle ages there was a debate about the status of universals. What are universals? Universals are terms that are used for more than one individual entity. Let's take an example. We say this book is red. We say this chair is red. We say the flower is red. We say this fruit is red. So "red" is used for all these different things. Why can you do that? Does something like redness exist? Or to use a different term, we say this is a good meal. This is a good book. This is a good show. This is a good man. Why can we use the word "good" for all these different things? Is there something like goodness in which all these different entities share? The position of the realists was that universals are real. That's why they were called "realists." Universals are real. That is, there is such a thing like redness. There is such a thing like goodness. And things are good when they share in the universal of goodness. They were opposed by the nominalists, who said that universals are nothing more than words. For any nominalist, properties do not really exist, only particular things exist. There is no such thing as redness or goodness. The only thing that exists is this apple and this good person. Now, the extreme realists took properties like wisdom and goodness and hypostatized them into existing entities. When we transfer that towards God, then we get into trouble. It's one thing to say a human person is good, because he in some way partakes in the idea of goodness. But what does that say about God? It says that God is good because in some way he partakes in the idea of goodness. And lo and behold, we have something which is higher than God. God's goodness depends on something outside of him. With such a concept, God would be a composite being. Then God's nature is rather like a construct of more basic building blocks; namely, the hypostatized attributes. That was a threat to the traditional image of God. God would no longer be first, but ideas or universals would have ontological preeminence. Extreme nominalists said there are no properties. Remember there is no such thing as goodness or redness. According to extreme nominalists, the attributes differ only in subjective reason. They only have a connotation with respect to diverse effects. So you have to steer clear between this extreme realism that makes God into some kind of composite being, like a wall built out of different bricks, like one is goodness and the next is mercy and the next is omnipotence and so on, and extreme nominalism, where there is no real foundation in God for us saying God is good or God is merciful. That means when we talk about simplicity, we have to avoid this idea that God is made up of things. No. He is a unity. He is not composite. When we talk about God's attributes, it's neither that we look at God like, again, the wall made out of blocks, nor is it that there is the divine essence, like a pin cushion and then you put needles in it and these are the different attributes. But you can also take the needles away and you still have the divine attributes. No. God is God and not additionally good, but as God He is good. Being God means that He is good. Being God means that He is omnipotent. Being God means that He is merciful. Being God means that He is righteousness. So we must neither divide God's essence into different parts nor confuse the attributes so to imply that there is no difference between them. So that our speech about the divine attributes would actually be rather meaningless. So, instead of looking at the attributes like a building block or the pin cushion model, the best way to look at it would actually be to look at them as the facets of a diamond. The essence of God is not something that is hidden beneath the attributes. The essence or being of God is unitary. The attributes are not really separate from one another, but they are simply different facets, different ways of viewing His nature in relation to different perspectives.