Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2019 DOI:10.1111/moth.

12507
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

INTRODUCTION: WHY THINK ABOUT

DIVINE SIMPLICITY?

MATTHEW LEVERING and GEORGE KALANTZIS

In an Anglican sermon titled “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul,” John Henry Newman
pairs Ephesians 5:14, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you
light,” with Psalm 36:7-9, which states that “the children of men” “feast on the abundance of
your [God’s] house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the
fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” This passage, of course, was central to Augustine
and to later Christian understandings of human knowledge. Newman sums up the reason for his
interest in these passages: “Now the doctrine which these passages contain is often truly
­expressed thus: that the soul of man is made for the contemplation of its Maker; and that nothing
short of that high contemplation is its happiness; that, whatever it may possess besides, it is
unsatisfied till it is vouchsafed God’s presence, and lives in the light of it.”1 To know God! It is
not just a matter of assembling and contemplating facts; rather, not least because God is Trinity,
contemplation must be rooted in a communion established by faith.
In his sermon, Newman goes on to describe people who are filled “with warm affections,
perhaps, for their families, with benevolent feelings towards their fellow-men, yet stopping
there; centring their hearts on what is sure to fail them, as being perishable.”2 He urges us to
consider whether, in fact, only “the thought of God, and nothing short of it, is the happiness of
man.”3 All other things—good and wonderful though they are—cannot satisfy or fulfill our
hearts, since anything that is not God is finite and passes away. If so, then only the thought of
God can rightly ground and order our loves. Newman observes that “the contemplation of Him,
and nothing but it, is able fully to open and relieve the mind, to unlock, occupy, and fix our
affections.”4
How does this relate to our topic of divine simplicity? Through contemplation, we seek to
understand more fully what it is that we know in knowing God. Scripture teaches that “the Lord
our God is one Lord” (Deut. 6:4). Jesus confirms these words; the scribe with whom Jesus is

Matthew Levering
Mundelein Seminary, 1000 E. Maple Avenue, Mundelein, IL 60060, USA.
Email: mjlevering@yahoo.com
George Kalantzis
Wheaton College, Department of Biblical and Theological Studies, 501 College Avenue, Wheaton, IL 60187, USA
Email: george.kalantzis@wheaton.edu.
1
John Henry Newman, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul,” in John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain
Sermons (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1987), 1147-55, at 1148.
2
Newman, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul,” 1154-55.
3
Newman, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul,” 1149.
4
Newman, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul,” 1150.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2  Matthew Levering and George Kalantzis

speaking states that God “is one, and there is no other but he” (Mark 12:32). Jesus proclaims
during his farewell discourse, “this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and
Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Similarly, in the Book of Acts, Paul teaches that
“the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live
in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since
he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25).
We know that God is one and there is no other God. And yet even in “the revelations of the
Old Testament,” as Newman says in a sermon on “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” we already
find the suggestion that “while God is in His essence most simply and absolutely one, yet there
is a real sense in which He is not one.”5
Newman goes on to explain what the revelation of the Trinity involves. He states that “this
Mystery, which the Old Testament obscurely signifies, is in the New clearly declared; and it is
this,—that the God of all, who is revealed in the Old Testament, is the Father of a Son from
everlasting, called also His Word and Image, of His substance and partaker of all His perfec-
tions, and equal to Himself, yet without being separate from Him.”6 At the end of his description
of the Trinity, Newman underscores that although we cannot say “how it is that that same
Adorable Essence, indivisible, and numerically One, should subsist perfectly and wholly in
Each of Three Persons,” nonetheless we are in a position to affirm, without logical contradic-
tion, that “that God who is in the strictest sense One, is both entirely the Father, and is entirely
the Son,” and that “what is true of the Son is true of the Holy Ghost.”7
For our purposes in introducing this special issue on divine simplicity, two things are note-
worthy: Newman’s point that our minds are made for thinking of God, and it is only this that
fulfills us as human beings; and Newman’s point that the doctrine of the Trinity does not in any
way undermine the unity of God. These two points lead directly into the existential urgency, for
a faith-filled thinker, of reflecting upon divine simplicity.
Metaphysically speaking, perfect and absolute unity entails simplicity. It does so because
anything that is not metaphysically “simple” is in some way composite, and to be composite
means to have parts of some kind—which entails limitation and finitude in being. A perfect
unity can only be simple actuality, without any parts or limitation of being. Furthermore, meta-
physical reflection can go further. A composite entity cannot be the source of all beings and
cannot account for its own existence, since, as a composed reality, a composite entity would be
necessarily limited and finite due to the limitation and finitude of its parts. The Creator there-
fore must be metaphysically simple.
Indeed, the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has insisted that the stakes are rather
high: “If God is to be understood as the unconditioned source of all things, rather than merely
some very powerful but still ontologically dependent being”—and surely all Christians would
want to understand God as the absolute source or creator of all things—“then any denial of
­divine simplicity is equivalent to a denial of God’s reality.”8 No Christian wants to deny God’s
reality!
Yet, Hart grants that there is no “perfect agreement across schools and traditions” with regard
to all the elements of the doctrine of divine simplicity.9 He is well aware that there are plenty of

5
Newman, “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1389-99, at 1397.
6
Newman, “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” 1397.
7
Newman, “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” 1398.
8
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2013), 134. See also Tyler R. Wittman, God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 40-54.
9
Hart, The Experience of God, 134.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Introduction: Why Think about Divine Simplicity? 3

Christian theologians who, in their contemplation of God, “contend that divine simplicity and
impassibility would make it impossible for God to be affected by and so aware of any contingent
truths, or for him to create freely, or for him to create without absolutely determining the course
of all events.”10 He argues that such positions are rooted in anthropomorphic errors or over-
sights, but he accepts that such positions—and others like them vis-à-vis divine simplicity—are
held by many Christians today. He grants that no “religious tradition has ever adopted any sin-
gle set of answers to the questions that the principle of divine simplicity raises.”11
In Hart’s view, however, the contemplation of God, with respect to the question of divine
simplicity, must hold fast to a particular metaphysical point—or at least be sure not to deny this
point. The metaphysical point is “that God is not like a physical object, composed of parts and
defined by limits.”12 More amply, Hart explains that a perfect metaphysical simplicity means
that God “must transcend all those limits that alienate and exclude finite realities from one an-
other,” and furthermore that God must do so “in such a manner that he can embrace those finite
realities in a more eminent way without contradiction.”13 Or as Hart puts it a bit earlier, what all
Christians must agree upon, whatever else they might wish to say about divine simplicity, is that
at least God “cannot be composed of and so dependent upon severable constituents, physical or
metaphysical, as then he would himself be conditional” and unable to be the one God, the source
who needs no source.14
Hart is aware of difficulties that Christian contemplatives such as the late Robert Jenson have
raised. Jenson is willing to travel some distance with Hart along the path of divine simplicity, but
he thinks that the error arises when we come to ask whether the agency of the Father, Son, and
Spirit is one simple agency. Simplicity, in other words, must not get in the way of a real personal
differentiation of the divine Persons’ agencies. According to Jenson, these agencies “are per-
fectly mutual” and therefore in this sense are one; but they are not perfectly simple if by that is
meant utterly identical.15 For Augustine, Jenson argues, an “unquestioning commitment to the
axiom of his antecedent Platonic theology, that God is metaphysically ‘simple,’ that no sort of
self-differentiation can really be true of him” produced a colossal failure to render account of
Scripture’s testimony to the divine Persons’ truly possessing differentiated agency in the Trinity
and in the world. Recall that Augustine holds that agency, insofar as it is understood as intellec-
tion and volition, pertains to the simple unity of the essence, whereas the distinction of the divine
Persons pertains to their relations in the order of origin. The distinct relations of origin, certainly,
are not absent from the acts of the holy Trinity ad extra. But for Augustine, nonetheless, the di-
vine Persons are not distinct in any mode that would differentiate (in the Persons) what pertains
to the simple and undifferentiated divine nature, such as will, intellect, agency and so forth.16
In Jenson’s view, the result is cataclysmic: the Augustinian position on divine simplicity, in
holding that the Persons are utterly simple with respect to anything that we could associate with

10
Hart, The Experience of God, 138. For examples of such views, see Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine
of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), chap-
ters 1 and 2.
11
Hart, The Experience of God, 139.
12
Hart, The Experience of God, 140.
13
Hart, The Experience of God, 135.
14
Hart, The Experience of God, 134.
15
Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 113.
See also the cognate concerns about divine simplicity in Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of
Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016).
16
See also Thomas Joseph White, O.P., “Nicene Orthodoxy and Trinitarian Simplicity,” American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2016): 727-50; Thomas Joseph White, O.P., “Divine Simplicity and the Holy Trinity,”
International Journal of Systematic Theology 18 (2016): 66-93.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

4  Matthew Levering and George Kalantzis

the divine nature, “bankrupts the doctrine of the Trinity cognitively, for it detaches language
about the triune identities from the only thing that made such language meaningful in the first
place: the biblical narrative.”17 But if we posit three intra-trinitarian agencies—and “agency”
here means volitional and intellectual distinction—how can we hold to the view that the
divine Persons are identically “God,” identical in “nature,” unless we suppose that “nature”
here is like three humans sharing in human nature, in which case the Persons are three finite
agents?
For Augustine, what is at stake is tritheism; for Jenson, what is at stake is “the old dissonance
between the metaphysical principles of the Greeks and the storytelling of the gospel.”18 Jenson
emphasizes that the storytelling of the Gospel reveals a God who is one—and who thus must be
simple in some sense—but a God who has an intra-Trinitarian life marked by three distinctive,
though mutually united and complementary, agencies.
These difficulties were not unknown in earlier centuries. For example, the great ninth-cen-
tury Jewish philosopher (and translator of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic), Saadia Gaon, consid-
ered that Christians had deviated from “the orthodox belief” regarding “the truly One.”19 His
charge is intended to apply not solely to uneducated Christians with their “crass materialistic
trinity,” but also to eminent Christian thinkers.20 According to Saadia, what has happened is
that Christians have taken elements that pertain to divine agency—namely, divine knowledge
and divine vitality—and hypostatized these as “Word” and “Spirit.” The supremely one divine
agency thus is turned into three divine agencies, going by the names Father, Word, and Spirit.
Saadia argues that such a differentiation of the divine agency can only be a differentiation in the
divine nature, turning the one God into three gods. (He does not know of the Augustinian con-
tention that the divine nature is not differentiated by the relational distinctions in the order of
origin.) Saadia insists that if God is not utterly simple in nature—if the divine attributes are
hypostatized and, in any way, truly differentiated—then, indeed, God is not infinite but is a
composite of three finite entities, and thus is a creature.
Saadia invites the exponents of Christian Trinitarianism to realize that we must “deny that
God’s vitality and omniscience are things distinct from His essence, since any being whose
­vitality and knowledge are distinct from its essence is created.”21 The knowledge and life of a
particular human being are distinct from his or her essence, but the knowledge and life of God
are not and cannot be distinct from his essence, given that God is infinite and perfect knowledge
and life.
Saadia is aware of how Christians argue from texts of the Old Testament to the conclusion
that (as we found in Newman) “while God is in His essence most simply and absolutely one, yet
there is a real sense in which He is not one.”22 Saadia quotes a large number of such Old
Testament (or Hebrew Bible) texts. He firmly disputes the claim that they can be read in a
Trinitarian manner. For Saadia, when Old Testament books speak about God’s breath, word,
spirit, or hand, these are plainly “figures of speech,” not attempts to divide the unity of God.23
Saadia’s view that Christians divide the simple divine essence does not touch the arguments
advanced by Augustine or by other pro-Nicene Fathers, since they were aware of this critique

17
Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 112.
18
Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 112.
19
Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1948), 103.
20
Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 103.
21
Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 104.
22
Newman, “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1389-99, at 1397.
23
Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 107.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Introduction: Why Think about Divine Simplicity? 5

and sought to head it off. But it does witness to the fact that, as Jenson makes clear, the plain
sense of the New Testament and the names “Word” and “Spirit” seem to imply differences be-
tween the Father, Son, and Spirit that would differentiate the divine nature, thereby making the
divine nature itself metaphysically composite (a creature) rather than the absolutely simple God.
Similarly, we might take note that the Qur’ān calls Christians to pull back from the doctrine
of the Trinity, on the grounds that God, who is one and who alone is to be worshipped, has no
plurality (let alone having the physical associations implied by a “son”). In Sura 4.171, for
­instance, we read the command: “O People of the Book! Do not exceed the bounds in your
­religion, and do not attribute anything to God except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary,
was only an apostle of God, and His Word that He cast toward Mary and a spirit from Him. So
have faith in God and His apostles, and do not say, ‘[God is] a trinity.’. . . God is but the One
God.”24 In the contemporary context, surely, Christians have to take these concerns with the
greatest seriousness.
The existential and theological urgency of the doctrine of divine simplicity, then, imbues our
symposium on divine simplicity with its real power. We recall that Augustine’s own reflections
on divine simplicity developed from highly personal concerns. As a young man, he had become
a Manichee because he could not believe that the good God could have allowed the material
world’s terrible mess. On this view, God could have no part in the mess that is human and cos-
mic history—other than the task of seeking to overcome it and seeking to liberate spirits from
it. Augustine also seems to have feared that the Catholic Church held that God literally took
“the shape of the human body” in becoming incarnate, as if God became literally coextensive
with the confines of Christ’s flesh.25 When, after rejecting Manicheanism as based upon absurd
quasi-scientific speculations, he began to investigate Catholic teachings more seriously, he
­already held that God is incorruptible and immutable. Yet, as he tells us in his Confessions, he
still thought of God as in some way taking up space—whether diffused throughout the cosmos
or diffused throughout some domain beyond the cosmos. He explains, “I thought that anything
from which space was abstracted was non-existent, indeed absolutely nothing, not even a vac-
uum.”26 He could not conceive of an existent that was not in some way physical.
Everything changed for Augustine when, guided by the Neoplatonists—and by Christian
interpretations of Exodus 3:14 as well as Jesus’ “I am” statements (especially in the Gospel of
John)—he arrived at the insight that God, like truth, is utterly non-spatial. The source of the
human light of truth, then, is the infinite divine light of Truth. Likewise, the source of finite
things is infinite, simple Being. Augustine describes realizing that finite things cannot be said
“absolutely to be or absolutely not to be.”27 They are metaphysically composite: they are not
being itself, and yet they exist (in a finite mode). Augustine came to realize that the difference
between finite beings and the Source of all finite being—the Source who is perfectly transcen-
dent and perfectly immanent vis-à-vis beings—is that God is simple Being. Augustine describes
his joyful metaphysical epiphany, which preceded his salvific embrace of Christ: “in the flash
of a trembling glance it [Augustine’s mind] attained to that which is.”28 Only a simple God,
sheer Being, can be the transcendent and non-competitive source of all finite being, possessed
of the infinite power needed to create all that is. As Augustine proclaims in praise of God, “You

24
Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and the Bible: Text and Commentary, Qur’ān translation by Ali Quli Qarai
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 185.
25
Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), VII.i.1, 111.
26
Augustine, Confessions, VII.i.1, 111.
27
Augustine, Confessions, VII.xi.17, 124.
28
Augustine, Confessions, VII.xvi.23, 127.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

6  Matthew Levering and George Kalantzis

alone are in absolute simplicity. To you it is not one thing to live, another to live in blessed hap-
piness, because you are your own blessedness.”29
Does this mean that Augustine, in his Confessions, lacks appreciation for the Trinitarian
differentiation of Father, Son, and Spirit? On the contrary, Augustine already remarks in the
Confessions that “in ways beyond finite understanding, the ultimate Being exists in both sim-
plicity and multiplicity, the Persons being defined by relation to each other, yet infinite in them-
selves.”30 If each Person possessed an agency (intellection and/or volition) of his own, then
these three agencies would be finite in nature, since the Father’s volition or intellect or self-
consciousness would end where the Son’s volition or intellect or self-consciousness began—just
as three angels are differentiated even if they mutually know and will the same thing. Augustine
therefore insists that each Person is the infinite divine nature and that all three Persons together
are the infinite divine nature. It is not the divine nature that is differentiated, but, in a mysteri-
ous way conveyed by the category of relation in the order of origin, it is the Persons themselves
who are the differentiation.
A further question should inform our quest to think about God’s simplicity. When Jesus says
“I and the Father are one” and “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58; 10:30), does he mean to
be referring to the divine simplicity? Are we to attribute metaphysical precision to the evange-
list John’s statement that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1)?
Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, in fact, have considered the evangelist John to
be a great contemplative, rich in intimate knowledge of God, including the knowledge of God’s
absolute unity and lack of composition. In the prologue of his Commentary on the Gospel of
John, Aquinas teaches that “the contemplation of John was high as regards authority, eternity,
dignity, and the incomprehensibility of the Word. And John has passed on this contemplation to
us in his Gospel.”31 Thus, Aquinas feels free to associate the evangelist with certain elements of
Greek philosophical contemplation of God.
Arguably, even if the philosophical insight has not yet been articulated in the evangelist’s
mind, the reality that the divine simplicity describes is present in the Gospel of John. Likewise,
even if the fourth-century theological doctrine of the Trinity is not present in John (or in Paul),
the reality described by the pro-Nicene Fathers is arguably present in John (or Paul). We find
something similar in what the Old Testament scholar Bill Arnold says about Genesis 1:1-2 and
the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Arnold states, “To the question whether God used preexistent
material to create the universe or rather he created it ‘out of nothing’ (the early Jewish-Christian
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo . . .), it must be admitted that Gen 1 neither precludes nor defends
the possibility.”32 Genesis 1—like John 1—is not a metaphysical treatise. Nonetheless, adds
Arnold, if the author of Genesis had been asked the question of whether God created ex nihilo
or from preexistent matter, everything in Genesis indicates that he would have answered in
favor of ex nihilo.
Over the centuries, Christians have not fully agreed about the implications of divine simplic-
ity. Some Christians, including an increasing number of philosophers and theologians today,
reject the doctrine of divine simplicity. In this light, we here gather an ecumenical group of
leading scholars to address what divine simplicity has meant in the Christian tradition. A few
of these scholars have published books on divine simplicity, and they reprise and advance their
29
Augustine, Confessions, XIII.iii.4, 275.
30
Augustine, Confessions, XIII.xi.12, 280.
31
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John: Chapters 1-5, trans. Fabian Larcher, O.P and James A.
Weisheipl, O.P., edited by Daniel Keating and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press, 2010), §6, 3.
32
Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35-36.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Introduction: Why Think about Divine Simplicity? 7

work here: D. Stephen Long, Steven Duby, and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz. Others bring to the
issue their knowledge of ancient philosophy and its connection with early Christian exegesis;
these include Michel Barnes, John Behr, Paul Gavrilyuk, and Brian Daley. Still others explore
the thought of key figures of the Christian tradition, as in the essays by Marcus Plested, David
Luy, Keith Johnson, and Jennifer Newsome Martin. Lastly, since in the emerging school of
analytic theology the question of divine simplicity has become an area of intense and fruitful
controversy, we close the issue with an essay by Oliver Crisp.
Most of these essays took shape at a symposium hosted by the Chicago Theological Initiative,
with the support of the Center for Early Christian Studies at Wheaton College and the Center
for Scriptural Exegesis, Philosophy, and Doctrine at Mundelein Seminary. Although the partic-
ipants sometimes disagreed about divine simplicity, they all agreed with John Henry Newman’s
exhortation, “May we never speak on subjects like this [the unity and Trinity of God] without
awe; may we never dispute without charity; may we never inquire without a careful endeavour,
with God’s aid, to sanctify our knowledge; and to impress it on our hearts, as well as to store it
in our understandings!”33 For in speaking about divine simplicity we are dealing with a mystery
whose denial may well be “equivalent to a denial of God’s reality.”34

33
Newman, “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” 1399.
34
Hart, The Experience of God, 134.

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd