Introduction. In Search of Doctrinal History
Introduction
In Search of Doctrinal History
God is simple, without parts and composition. For centuries, Christian theology spoke of the one God in terms of divine simplicity. Speaking of God as simple is not to discount the mystery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God; as St. Augustine famously put it, “And this Trinity is one; and none the less simple, because a Trinity.”1 But the doctrine of divine simplicity has received severe interrogation and criticism in modern theology. By ruling out multiplicity in God, is divine simplicity compatible with the scriptural depiction of God’s diverse acts in the history of salvation? Furthermore, if God is simple, how is it possible to affirm with Augustine the proper distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? This book retrieves the intelligibility of divine simplicity by tracing the doctrine’s historical emergence and developments before Nicaea. This focus derives from the underlying conviction that there is something distinctive and illuminating about ante-Nicene sources that have hitherto been neglected. For it is common today to approach divine simplicity either in medieval scholastic (primarily Aristotelian-Thomistic) or fourth-century “pro-Nicene” (especially Augustinian) terms because these formulations are often regarded as representative of “orthodoxy.” My burden in this book is to show that ante-Nicene sources of divine simplicity, though they might be perceived as presenting a “pre-orthodox” understanding, actually better clarify why the doctrine was never considered incompatible with Trinitarian theology. For a close examination of these sources reveals why later patristic authors (1) did not regard divine simplicity as reducible to “modalism” and (2) frequently discussed divine simplicity in the context of the Son’s generation from the Father. This book will chart this neglected history in order to substantiate the point that ante-Nicene developments help us make sense of why there was no awareness of conflict between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology among early Christians.
The stress on the “ante-Nicene” in the title of this book reflects not only a delineation of scope but also a historiographical orientation. In tracing the life of the idea of divine simplicity before Nicaea, I intend to open a conversation about how we narrate the development of patristic Trinitarian theology. As will be evident in due course, the argument of this book calls into question how we describe the transition from ante-Nicene to fourth-century developments that led to the formation of “pro-Nicene” Trinitarian theology. One way to narrate this transition is to study ante-Nicene developments retrospectively, that is, to read the sources as anticipating later fourth-century developments. But instead of looking back at ante-Nicene developments through fourth-century spectacles, may we gain new insights by looking forward to the fourth century through ante-Nicene developments? In this book I analyze key ante-Nicene doctrinal episodes in their own contexts with the view of exploring an alternative, forward-looking (what I have called prospective) historiography, making sense of later fourth-century developments through the lens of doctrinal categories prominent in the late second and third centuries. The historiographical orientation underlying this book is that allowing ante-Nicene theological language to remain in the contexts of these categories before Nicaea promises to deepen our understanding of fourth-century developments. For we can gain insights into the meaning of later “orthodoxy” from considering the shift from the doctrinal landscape of the third century to the one found in the early fourth century. In the epilogue I shall spell out in greater detail how the recovery of divine simplicity as a principle for safeguarding both the unity and the distinction between Father and Son—one distinctive feature of the ante-Nicene “pre-orthodox” understanding uncovered in this book—offers a new lens through which to make sense of the emergence of rival visions of the Trinity after Origen.
THE CRISIS OF DIVINE SIMPLICITY IN MODERN THEOLOGY
The doctrine of divine simplicity has been the subject of intense debate in modern systematic and philosophical theology.2 The problematization of the doctrine has its origin in the classics of modern Protestant systematic theology.3 In this context, the doctrine has been understood as the basic idea that there are no distinctions in God. As early as Isaak August Dorner (1809–84), we already find the judgment that “all distinctions in God are expunged as objective existences” due to Augustine’s doctrine of divine simplicity in Trin. VI.7.4 If divine simplicity allows no internal distinctions in God, then everything in God is identical to everything else. Along this line, many consider divine simplicity as a notion of divine unity in which “all difference becomes swallowed up,” as Dorner puts it.5 The great German Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014), commenting on Augustine again, finds in the Bishop of Hippo’s affirmation of divine simplicity an attempt to define the unity of the divine substance “in such a way as to rule out any idea of substantial distinction.”6 More recently, Robert Jenson (1930–2017) rehearses the same point that divine simplicity in Augustine expresses nothing but the view “that no sort of self-differentiation can really be true of him [i.e., God].”7 Thus a consensus emerges from the classics of modern Protestant systematic theology: divine simplicity as found in classical Christian theology constitutes a purely metaphysical notion of the divine nature that rules out all distinctions in God.
Interpreted thus, divine simplicity seems to generate many grave theological conclusions. Most embarrassingly, the doctrine appears to be in conflict with the doctrine of the Trinity, as Dorner sums up well: “The contrast between . . . simplicity of the divine essence, which excludes all distinctions from God, and the doctrine of the Trinity, which it is still hoped to retain, needs simple mention.”8 If God is utterly simple, ruling out all distinctions in God, how could there be any distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? Pannenberg argues that Augustine was committed to divine simplicity “even at the cost of making the differentiation of the three persons in God an impenetrable secret.”9 What Pannenberg is hinting at is that Augustine’s commitment to divine simplicity ultimately led to a lack of clarity regarding whether we can really speak of the three divine persons as distinct. In line with Pannenberg’s judgment, Jenson argues that Augustine’s theology fails to affirm the Trinitarian distinctions because of his commitment to divine simplicity: “Moreover, he [Augustine] did not notice that Nicaea asserts eventful differentiation in God. The reason he did not is apparent: . . . 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.”10 For the giants of Protestant systematic theology, Augustine’s statement in Civ. Dei XI.10 appears less as a profound proclamation of the mystery of the divine life and more as a sign of the problematic tension that had gone unnoticed. Modern philosophical theologians, like their systematic counterparts, also suspect that classical Trinitarian theology is ultimately unable to uphold the distinctions between the divine persons due to the commitment to divine simplicity and hence in danger of falling into the heretical view of “modalism.”11 This potential incompatibility between simplicity and Trinity has received a precise formulation from philosophers in recent years. They argue that divine simplicity leads to a logical incompatibility with upholding distinctions between divine persons.12 If the lack of distinctions in God leads to various “identities” being posited, then we are left with the following logic:
1. All that is distinct in God must be identical to the same reality due to divine simplicity.
2. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct.
3. (a) The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit must be identical to each other, and (b) each divine person must be identical to the Godhead as a whole.
If this is correct, then it is difficult to see how divine simplicity would not simply dissolve the proper distinctions between the divine persons.13 The sentiment underlying contemporary philosophical analyses is summed up well by G. C. Stead (1913–2008). On the basis of his pioneering work on the history of the doctrine, Stead concludes that the classical affirmation of divine simplicity seems to lead inevitably to an understanding of God that is “totally unrelated to the Trinity of Persons in which we believe it [divine simplicity] is deployed.”14
DOCTRINAL HISTORY AS A MEDIUM FOR DOCTRINAL CLARIFICATION
The foregoing reception history illustrates the problematic status of divine simplicity in modern systematic and philosophical theology. This has divided contemporary scholarship into two camps, those wishing to defend the doctrine and those wishing to highlight the unpalatable theological and philosophical consequences following from the doctrine.15 My starting point in this book is that the contemporary debate has been too reliant upon pure doctrinal analysis. Rigorous analysis of the language of simplicity no doubt yields fruitful metaphysical and theological insights. Yet doctrinal analysis alone can never entirely establish the intelligibility of certain points that have been woven into the fabric of classical Christian theology.16 In a perceptive reading of John Henry Newman’s The Arians of the Fourth Century, Rowan Williams remarks that for Newman, it is not possible to grasp the meaning of the Nicene Trinitarian doctrine simply by analyzing and expounding on the Symbolum Nicaenum, as in the tradition of Bishop Bull’s Defensio.17 Rather, the meaning of doctrine must be grasped in light of the history of theological concepts and vocabularies or, in Williams’s terms, how doctrinal language forms an ecology—a complex web of theological terms and contexts that give meaning to one another.18 Doctrinal history is thus “no less a necessary task for the theologian,” for “a sound dogmatic theology depends on honest doctrinal history.”19 My argument in this book seeks to inject a similar impetus to the contemporary debate on divine simplicity by establishing that the doctrine has a history dating from even before Nicaea and this history is essential for a sound analysis of the doctrine that avoids distortion and oversimplification. My overarching claim is that developments of divine simplicity before Nicaea have resulted in a distinctive “doctrinal ecology” that grants intelligibility to the doctrine and its involvement in Trinitarian discourse in the first place.20 It is by renarrating and reimagining the formative contexts surrounding divine simplicity that we can make sense of the intelligibility of the doctrine and its significance for Trinitarian reflections for Christian theology today. Only in this light, I argue, can analysis of divine simplicity proceed in a sure-footed way.
Two issues discussed in this book suffice to illustrate my point. First, as the above reception history has shown, modern discussions of divine simplicity have relied on a definition that seems to entail the deprivation of all multiplicity in God. Divine simplicity, understood as the absence of parts or composition in God, implies that multiple terms (“divine attributes”) applied to God must be identical to each other (the “identity thesis”). This assumption makes some sense when one analyzes the concept of simplicity on its own. But this is ultimately an oversimplification when viewed in light of developments within the Platonic tradition. What cannot be gleaned simply from rigorous philosophical analyses apart from doctrinal history is that divine simplicity emerged in the patristic period carrying over the background of The Republic and the Platonic theory of forms. This background offers conceptual clarification on a couple of important points. First and foremost, it is the absence of contrary qualities in God that is affirmed by divine simplicity. Moreover, this insight on the definition of divine simplicity can be grasped only if one situates the doctrine in light of the Platonic concern with safeguarding God’s goodness, the initial context in which the doctrine emerged in Book 2 of The Republic. The insistence on divine simplicity, then, is fundamentally bound up with what one might call the ethical simplicity of God—the sense in which God is pure goodness and self-consistent.21 When interpreted this way, it will certainly be less difficult to imagine how divine simplicity could accommodate the plurality of acts, characteristics, and thoughts in God so long as these do not bring about internal conflicts within God that would render him untrustworthy.
The second example relates to the frequently rehearsed worry that divine simplicity seems to be making a claim that is logically equivalent to “modalism” and so cannot be compatible with Trinitarian theology.22 For a philosopher like Hasker, it seems incomprehensible that a great mind such as Augustine would fail to see this elementary issue.23 This perception is understandable when one operates with a methodology in which the meaning of doctrine is examined purely on the basis of logical analysis. However, such an approach leads to an oversimplistic account of the relationship between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. As I shall highlight in chapters 3–7, divine simplicity emerged as a central part of early Christian Trinitarian language (strictly speaking, Father-Son language) through specific ante-Nicene polemical contexts. An analysis that lacks sensitivity to these contexts would lead to a distorted picture. For divine simplicity could not possibly be identified with Monarchianism in the patristic period because the origin of the latter in the late second and early third centuries was mainly connected with the issue of prosopological exegesis, concerned primarily with identifying the number of speakers required to make sense of the Scriptural narrative.24 Later patristic theologians identified and defined the Monarchian position primarily as the approach to interpret the narrative of Scripture that assumed only one divine “subject” acting and speaking, whereas divine simplicity was understood primarily as a “grammar of theology” that safeguards God from unworthy theological language that attributes self-inconsistencies or possibilities of dissolution to him. Hence there was no danger, in the minds of early Christian writers, of conflating divine simplicity with Monarchianism. This differentiation, though, is not available from the perspective of pure logical analysis apart from a historical account of Monarchianism and divine simplicity.
These examples illustrate the need of deeper engagements with the ante-Nicene developments charted in this book for advancing current debates on divine simplicity. My aim is not to replace doctrinal analysis by doctrinal history. Rather, I seek to highlight key aspects of how divine simplicity emerged before Nicaea that have hitherto been neglected and yet would be indispensable to strengthening the rigor of theological and philosophical engagements with the doctrine today. This book is my attempt to engage with issues arising from contemporary doctrinal analysis through the medium of doctrinal history. As such, I aspire for it to stand in the tradition represented by the works of Newman and Williams, taking the elucidation of the history of doctrine as a task that possesses a strictly theological contribution, namely, clarification of the meaning of doctrinal language.
THE PATRISTIC DOCTRINE OF DIVINE SIMPLICITY: STATUS QUAESTIONIS
This book both draws upon and moves beyond scholarship that has previously shaped the doctrinal history of divine simplicity. The origin and development of divine simplicity have been extensively investigated in light of the Greek philosophical tradition by the pioneering works of Stead and the magisterial survey presented in an article by Pannenberg.25 The narratives offered by Stead and Pannenberg are animated by the claim that the doctrine of divine simplicity in early Christian thought was the legacy of the problems arising in Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. As a result, both Stead and Pannenberg seek to narrate how the Christian doctrine of divine simplicity emerged as a series of attempts to wrestle with the legacy of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy in the context of Christian theology. This classical approach to the doctrinal history of divine simplicity in light of the developments in Greek philosophy will not be abandoned in this book. Like Stead and Pannenberg, I am committed to the assumption that the emergence of divine simplicity in ante-Nicene Christian sources will not be intelligible apart from the developments in the Greek philosophical tradition. But I offer chapters 1 and 2 as an attempt to revise the picture offered by Stead and Pannenberg by rethinking the developments in light of The Republic. For Stead and Pannenberg, divine simplicity is a purely metaphysical doctrine that has little room for making sense of any multiplicity attributed to the Christian God, not least that necessary for any notion of a Triune God or divine freedom. However, as will be evident in chapters 1 and 2, my argument is that if Plato’s discussion in The Republic is given a more central role and the developments of divine simplicity within Platonism read in light of it, one will be led to rather different conclusions. In particular, one will be forced to place a stronger emphasis on divine simplicity as an ethical idea, chiefly concerning God’s perfect goodness, communicated through a sense of perfect self-consistency. In the present study, then, I in no way seek to minimize the role of developments in Greek philosophy in narrating the emergence of divine simplicity in early Christian thought. I seek rather to provide a more nuanced account of the philosophical developments that will in fact lead to a different interpretation of the significance of divine simplicity for ancient writers, including ante-Nicene theologians.
More recent scholarship has stressed the need to move on from the kind of analysis and narrative exemplified in the classical accounts of Stead and Pannenberg. By focusing so much on identifying divine simplicity as a remnant of non-Christian philosophical theology, these accounts offer very little about what actually motivated the early Christians to introduce divine simplicity into their discourse about God and, further, how they appropriated the idea for their own theological, polemical, and ecclesiastical agendas. Lewis Ayres and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz have advanced an alternative approach in which they seek to attend to how divine simplicity functions in early Christian sources.26 They propose to pay much closer attention to the immediate contexts of the patristic sources in order to determine the role divine simplicity played in these contexts.27 It is by determining the function of divine simplicity as a “grammatical rule”—a rule that regulates theological speech—that one can gain a fuller picture of the intelligibility of divine simplicity in early Christian thought. The result is a much richer doctrinal history of divine simplicity in the patristic period. It is my aim in this book to add to this emerging picture from Ayres and Radde-Gallwitz’s work. The bulk of this book, chapters 3–7, follows this new approach by attending to divine simplicity’s “grammatical” function in ante-Nicene sources. While Radde-Gallwitz has already spelled out how divine simplicity serves as a “grammatical rule” in the ante-Nicene period in relation to theological epistemology, this book offers a complementary narrative by further clarifying how divine simplicity also assumes a “grammatical” role in the context of ante-Nicene Trinitarian theology—specifically on the question of the Father-Son relation. This book will thus further fill out the picture painted by Ayres and Radde-Gallwitz on the patristic developments of divine simplicity.
Ayres and Radde-Gallwitz have successfully mapped out the way divine simplicity functions in the post-Nicene context in both anti- and pro-Nicene theological trajectories. But the narrative of this book will raise a significant issue that remains unaddressed by their works. This is the question concerning the transition from ante- to post-Nicene understandings of divine simplicity. As Ayres and Radde-Gallwitz note, there are divergent theological accounts of divine simplicity across the patristic period.28 But, most notably in the fourth century, divergent accounts in turn led to radically incompatible theological visions of the Trinity. How are we to make sense of this puzzling phenomenon? While in this book I do not pretend to resolve this puzzle, the ante-Nicene developments set out in chapters 3–7 nonetheless are intended to offer fresh ideas to this end. The decisive insight is that before Nicaea, divine simplicity seems to have assumed two roles in relation to the Father-Son relation. It was possible for ante-Nicene theologians to utilize simplicity as a tool to frame both the distinction and the unity between the Father and the Son. In the epilogue, I shall return to how this observation might open up new possibilities for narrating the development of patristic Trinitarian theology in the fourth century.
NEITHER “NICENE” NOR “SUBORDINATIONIST”: THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF ORIGEN’S TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY
Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 253), arguably the most important Christian thinker before Nicaea, occupies a central place in my argument. This choice is intentional. Origen offers a unique vantage point for grasping the doctrinal ecology before Nicaea for three reasons. First, Origen offers the richest and most sophisticated presentation of divine simplicity in the ante-Nicene period, as we shall see in chapter 5. His understanding of the doctrine thoroughly integrates the Platonic developments mapped out in the early chapters of this book, in particular uncovering the intelligibility of the close connection between the ethical and metaphysical senses of simplicity. Hence Origen provides an excellent portrait of divine simplicity in ante-Nicene Christian thought, highlighting how philosophical ideas were interwoven with Scriptural exegesis on this theme. Second, Origen’s works were explicitly engaged with the two most significant doctrinal contexts that shaped ante-Nicene Trinitarian thought: Valentinianism and Monarchianism, as will be evident in chapters 3 and 4. Given Origen’s involvement in these disputes, his writings are especially illuminating for spelling out the unique role played by divine simplicity in the formation of Trinitarian reflections before Nicaea. And finally, Origen provides the most natural reference point for measuring the transition from ante-Nicene to Nicene and post-Nicene Trinitarian discourse. As Christoph Markschies has observed, Origen remains “the systematic point of departure for the severe Trinitarian conflicts of the fourth century.”29 This is because Origen sets out a discussion of all the key theological issues that in one way or another became controversial later on: the doctrine of three hypostases,30 the unity of will between the Father and the Son,31 the image of God Christology,32 subordination,33 eternal generation,34 and homoousios.35 As a result, focusing on Origen will enable this study to further facilitate comparisons between ante- and post-Nicene understandings of divine simplicity, especially in the context of Trinitarian theology. In light of these considerations, Origen provides an excellent focus for appreciating the ante-Nicene developments concerning divine simplicity and its role in the formation of early Christian Trinitarian discourse.
More than any other theologian in the ante-Nicene period, Origen invites retrospective analysis. This is partly inevitable due to the close proximity between Origen’s thought and the central issues that consumed the fourth-century controversies.36 However, this proximity is a double-edged sword, as it has far too often led to Origen being considered largely in relation to questions and categories that gained centrality only in the fourth century. In one of the most comprehensive studies of Origen’s Trinitarian thought in recent years, Christoph Bruns argues that Origen has yet to reach “systematically coherent and conceptually unambiguous solution with regard to the ontological status of the Son as the divine Logos.”37 According to Bruns, these shortcomings were due to the theological immaturity of Origen’s age, but overall, while there are inconsistencies and terminological uncertainties in Origen’s Trinitarian theology, the great Alexandrian master’s thinking corresponds in substance to the whole of what was to come in the Nicene teaching. Bruns concludes that Origen should be regarded as a forefather of the Nicene faith, as was first suggested by Athanasius (Decr. 27) and more recently by Ilaria Ramelli.38 But as Mark Edwards aptly puts it: “A historian trained in any other discipline will want to know why Origen should be subjected to any judgement, even a charitable one, according to standards that were only defined a century after his death (if even then)?”39 Such a retrospective perspective is found not only among scholars who wish to demonstrate Origen’s continuity with later Trinitarian orthodoxy. For much has also been written on the claim that Origen’s theology provides a kind of precursor to “Arianism.”40 Less often, though, is Origen’s Trinitarian theology studied in light of his own ante-Nicene context.41 Given that we know Origen himself articulated the key doctrinal boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” he was working with, it seems natural to approach Origen’s Trinitarian thinking in light of his own contexts.42 This approach characterizes my reading of Origen’s Trinitarian theology in chapters 6 and 7. In these chapters I read Origen primarily in light of his third-century context. In doing so, I am committed to the claim that Origen’s Trinitarian thought was perfectly intelligible within his own doctrinal context, providing that we interpret his theological language within the doctrinal ecology in which it belongs. I reconsider two main strands of Origen’s thought—the distinction and unity between the Father and the Son—by contextualizing these ideas in relation to Monarchianism and the Valentinian account of emission. It is through such a reading of Origen that I proceed in this book to uncover the distinctive roles divine simplicity played in shaping Trinitarian reflections before Nicaea.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT
In this book I set out to examine the origin of the doctrine of divine simplicity and how it first emerged as a major part of theological speech in early Christian reflections. I propose to do so by narrating the developments before Nicaea that played a crucial role in establishing the doctrine’s prominence in early Christian theology, especially in the context of Trinitarian reflection. The book begins by laying the philosophical groundwork. Chapters 1 and 2 retrieve a richer philosophical understanding of divine simplicity, engaging with the developments within Platonism and tracing the roots of the idea in Plato’s Republic. Though Aristotelian developments are clearly important, I focus on Platonism because viewing divine simplicity in light of The Republic and the Platonic theory of forms offers new clarity on one thorny issue that has puzzled contemporary philosophers and theologians, namely, the kind of multiplicity supposed to be absent in a simple God. My goal in the early chapters is thus to establish the lesser-known Platonic background for understanding the origin of divine simplicity in early Christian thought, complementing the heavy focus in recent discussions on the Aristotelian formulation of the doctrine found in Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics.
The rest of my narrative (chapters 3 to 7) charts the emergence of divine simplicity in early Christian theology. In chapters 3 and 4 my focus shifts to the significance of divine simplicity in ante-Nicene Trinitarian discourse. The burden of these chapters is to show that historically, divine simplicity was integral in shaping how early Christians approached speaking of the Father-Son relation, a crucial element in the formation of Trinitarian theology. Supposing that God is simple, what is the consequence for our understanding of the Father-Son relation emerging out of Scripture? Early Christian thought on this issue was clarified, as I shall argue, through responding to the ideas of Valentinian emission and Monarchian identification of Father and Son, respectively. What emerged from this engagement was a problematic that brought divine simplicity to bear on early Christian language of the Father-Son relation: can one maintain an anti-Monarchian distinction between Father and Son while holding onto an anti-Valentinian account of generation compatible with divine simplicity? As I shall argue, the possibility of going beyond the binary of Valentinian emission and Monarchian identification of Father and Son makes the search for a via media an intelligible option in the ante-Nicene period. This via media was most fully worked out by Origen.
In the final three chapters the narrative focus is on the figure of Origen. As a Christian philosopher, Origen drank deeply from the wells of Platonic philosophy.43 It is therefore unsurprising that divine simplicity is a central idea in the Alexandrian’s doctrine of God, thoroughly integrating the Platonic developments mapped out in chapters 1 and 2. But as a churchman and exegete, Origen was directly responding to the two doctrinal issues that shaped ante-Nicene Trinitarian thought charted in chapters 3 and 4, namely, Valentinian emissions and Monarchianism. Chapters 5–7 together therefore present how Origen’s understanding of divine simplicity and the way this doctrine shapes his account of the Father-Son relation consummate the Platonic-philosophical and ante-Nicene doctrinal developments charted in the earlier chapters of the book.