4.5 Comments on Aquinas on Divine Simplicity
4.5 Comments on Aquinas on Divine Simplicity
It cannot be sufficiently stressed that what Aquinas says in SCG 1,18–27 represents a line of thinking that is fundamental to the SCG as a whole. Aquinas draws on it continually. Indeed, his SCG thinking on simplicity is central to almost all of his major writings. So perhaps I should make some comments on it so as to help you to reflect on it, especially since it currently seems to be out of favor in many philosophical and theological circles.16
To start with, then, let me note a number of criticisms that have been leveled against it.17 We can summarize them as follows.
1. Aquinas’s notion of divine simplicity conflicts with the picture of God conveyed by the Bible, which portrays God as an individual person undergoing change and interacting with things in the world. Talk about God as immutable, as not distinct from his nature, and as “pure being,” is foreign to the Bible and incompatible with what we read about God in it.
2. Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity seems to leave him saying that God is just a property, which is not what people who believe in God commonly take him to be. In the words of Alvin Plantinga: “If God is identical with each of his properties, then, since each of his properties is a property, he is a property. … Accordingly God has just one property: himself. … This view is subject to a difficulty both obvious and overwhelming. No property could have created the world; no property could be omniscient, or, indeed, know anything at all. If God is a property, then he isn’t a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, love or life. So taken, the simplicity doctrine seems an utter mistake.”18
3. God cannot be the same as his nature since that would mean that the different things said about God would, if true, be synonymous. Those who believe in God hold, for example, that God is both powerful and knowing. Yet “powerful” and “knowing” differ in meaning. It cannot be that God’s power and knowledge are both what God is since God’s power and knowledge would then just be God and would not be distinct, as power and knowledge actually are.
4. To say that it is God’s essence to exist is erroneously to suppose that existing is a property that some individual can have. And to say that God’s essence is to exist is erroneously to assume that God can be identified with this property.
5. Those who believe that God exists insist that God is free to act as he does. But God cannot be free to act as he does if Aquinas is right about divine simplicity. He holds that God is immutable and is what he eternally is, while something that is free to act as it does is capable of being different from what it is.
If these criticisms are good ones, then, as David Hume might have said, much of the SCG can be committed to the flames as containing nothing but sophistry and illusion.19 Yet I think that they are not, in fact, very good criticisms.
1. It is true that the Bible does not provide an account of divine simplicity such as Aquinas offers in the SCG and elsewhere. Indeed, it often portrays God in very human terms. According to the book of Genesis, God once took a walk in the garden of Eden.20 According to Exodus, “the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”21 In the Old Testament we find God described as having hands, eyes, ears, and a face.22 He laughs, smells, and whistles.23 He also undergoes emotions such as hatred, anger, joy, and regret.24 Then again we have the New Testament referring to God as our father and as loving us as such.25 It is obvious that the Bible frequently talks about God as if he were a kind of “top person” to be ranked higher than all the people we know.
Yet the Bible contains many texts that point in a different direction, one implying a profound difference between God, people, and anything else. While various biblical texts ascribe physical attributes to God, others insist that God is not physical. A notable text here is John 4:24, which says that God is spirit and thereby echoes a long-standing Old Testament line of thought according to which God is not a bodily thing but the maker and organizer of physical objects. Another text worth noting is Colossians 1:15 in which Christ is said to be “the image of the invisible God.” Yet another text worth noting is 1 Timothy 1:17, according to which “the only God” is “invisible.” And while the book of Exodus tells us that God spoke to Moses face-to-face, it quickly goes on to provide a serious qualification as it reports God as saying to Moses “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”26 In Exodus 33:23 God tells Moses that the best that he can hope for is to see his backsides.
And there are biblical texts that seem to insist that God is radically different from all that he has made. A classic one is Isaiah 40:25: “To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One.” The text continues: “Lift your eyes on high and see Who created these? … Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.”27 The book of Isaiah obviously does not take God to be a being among the beings in the world with which we are familiar. Nor does it think of God as something that we can imagine to be like us or like anything else in the world. So I take it that the Bible, while sometimes speaking of God as being like a human person, also says things that should lead us to deny that God is seriously such a thing.
Sometimes the Bible talks about God in anthropomorphic terms. Sometimes it does not.28 How are we to deal with these apparent discrepancies? If our interest in biblical texts merely extends to noting what they appear literally to say verse by verse, then we can do just that and not worry about interpretation. But we might, as Aquinas did, think of the Bible as helping us to some understanding of God and ourselves, in which case we have to introduce what I can only call philosophical reasoning.
Does God have a body or not? There are biblical texts that can be cited on both sides here. So, what if we claim that God is a body? Then we presumably need nonbiblical arguments, philosophical arguments, for supposing that God is indeed corporeal, and that anything in the Bible that suggests otherwise should be regarded as figurative or not literally true. Again, what if we think that God does not have a body? Then we presumably need to appeal to nonbiblical arguments for supposing that God is indeed incorporeal and that anything in the Bible that suggests otherwise should be read as figurative.
This is how Aquinas proceeds. He was deeply immersed in biblical texts and recognized very well that if they are all taken literally, then some of them effectively, even if not formally, contradict each other. Yet he also thought that one can give nonbiblical reasons for reading some biblical texts literally and for reading some of them as being figurative, and this thought is at work in SCG 1,18–27. Here Aquinas is trying to elaborate on matters that, in his view, should help us better understand the Bible or, at least, better appreciate what biblical texts can be taken to imply if thought about.
One might still, of course, insist that “God is a person” is fundamental to the nature of belief in God and that Aquinas is casting this proposition aside because of an unbiblical taste for philosophical argument. Yet how fundamental to belief in God is the claim “God is a person”? It has been said that it is utterly fundamental.29 In point of fact, though, “God is a person” is a relatively recent mantra. I gather that its first occurrence in English comes in the report of a trial of one John Biddle (b. 1615), who in 1644 was brought before magistrates in Gloucester, England, on a charge of heresy. His “heresy” was claiming that God is a person, which was taken at the time to be a Unitarian slogan favored by people wanting to deny the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, according to which God is three persons in one substance (and certainly not three persons in one person).30 You might think that all who believe in God take God to be personal in some sense since knowledge and will can be ascribed to him. As I will show, however, Aquinas does not deny that there is knowledge and will in God. Indeed, he argues that there has to be.
2. Plantinga takes a property to be an “abstract object,” a nonmaterial individual that cannot fail to exist and is not created by God. Plantinga also believes that there are many abstract objects. As well as properties, he takes propositions and “states of affairs” to be abstract objects, and he claims that all of them exist independently of God and independently of what we would normally think of as any individual thing. I take my cat to be an individual thing, an individual cat. Plantinga would agree that my cat is, indeed, something individual; but, he would add, to say that my cat is a cat, or that he is black and white, or that he is agile, is to say that he “exemplifies” or “instantiates” properties (“being a cat,” “being black and white,” “being agile”), which exist necessarily and independently of him. Plantinga seems to be asserting that Aquinas is wrong on divine simplicity since God is not an uncreated abstract object.
This line of thinking, however, does not engage with what Aquinas says as he develops his account of divine simplicity in the SCG. Unlike Plantinga, Aquinas does not believe in uncreated abstract objects, so he is manifestly not claiming that God is one of them. He would never say that there is an uncreated property called “being a cat” that preexists the coming-to-be of all cats. He would say that to call something a cat is to ascribe a nature to what actually exists without having to exist by nature. Therefore, when Plantinga suggests that Aquinas’s teaching on God’s simplicity is erroneous since it implies that God is what Plantinga thinks of as a property, he is talking past Aquinas rather than at him.
Friends of Plantinga when it comes to divine simplicity might argue that, when Aquinas says that there is no distinction in God of subject and nature (that God is his essence), he must mean that, for example, to say “God is good” and “God is living,” though seeming to ascribe different attributes to God, is merely to ascribe one attribute to him, an attribute identical with God. Such friends of Plantinga might then go on to suggest that this account of God is wrong since different attributes are different and since God is not an attribute. But Aquinas does not hold that to say, for example, “God is good” and “God is wise” is to ascribe one and the same attribute to him. He denies that “God is good” and “God is wise” mean the same, are synonymous.31 In this sense, he agrees that God has different attributes. For Aquinas, however, to make this point is only to say that we have different ways in which we speak of God, who is not to be distinguished from what we ascribe to him as we talk about him. It is not to say that God is an individual having different attributes in the sense that we can think of my cat having different attributes. And Aquinas certainly does not think of God as being what we mean when referring to a creaturely attribute.
3. The merit of criticism 3 lies in the evident truth that, when things in the universe exhibit different attributes, the attributes in question are really distinct from each other. My cat’s agility is a reality in him that might well survive his being inquisitive. Or, as Aquinas would say, my cat’s agility is an “individualized form” possessed by him, as is his inquisitiveness. Agility and inquisitiveness can be had by many different things and are, considered as such, universal rather than particular. But when agility and inquisitiveness come to be possessed by an individual, then individual instances of a universal arise: the agility of X, say, or the inquisitiveness of Y. These, for Aquinas, are unique realities, not one and the same reality.
Yet we can assume that Aquinas is not abandoning this line of thinking when ruminating on divine simplicity. So we can suppose that, when he defends the claim that God is simple, he is not telling us that there is something in which different attributes are actually one and the same attribute. Indeed, it is clear that he is not doing so.
As I have stressed, what he is doing, and what he says he is doing, is denying something of God. He is maintaining that God, unlike my cat, is not a being with distinct attributes or properties. Aquinas, of course, is aware that people who believe that God exists often speak as if God were a being with different attributes. He is aware that they utter subject/predicate sentences like “God is good” and “God is powerful”: sentences that would be naturally taken to be ascribing different attributes to something if they did not have the word “God” in them. However, thinks Aquinas, what this should lead us to say is not that God has different attributes but that the simple reality of God is often spoken of in a way that fails to capture the reality in question. Aquinas thinks that there are reasons for employing different words, and meaning them literally, when talking about God. He thinks, for example, that there are reasons for speaking of God as literally both omnipotent and good.32 However, he also thinks that there are reasons for not taking God to be an individual exhibiting a variety of attributes, and he wishes to give weight to all the reasons in question here. So he concludes that goodness and power in God do not amount to different realities. One might, of course, now complain that Aquinas is making God seem terribly mysterious or vastly different from the things with which we are acquainted in day-to-day life. But Aquinas would not regard this complaint as undermining his position, for his final verdict, of which his teaching on divine simplicity is a part, is that God is terribly mysterious and is vastly different from the things with which we are acquainted in day-to-day life.
4. Criticism 4 has been defended in one form or another by many philosophers, but I take the most rigorous statement of it to be found in the writings of C. J. F. Williams (1930–1997).33 According to Williams, “___ exist(s)” cannot meaningfully be asserted of individuals. Rather, says Williams, here echoing things said by the famous logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), existence is a property of concepts.34 On this account, to say, for example, that readers of Aquinas exist is not to tell us anything about any particular reader of Aquinas. It is to tell us that “___ is a reader of Aquinas” is truly affirmable of something or other. Or, in Williams’s language, which also echoes what we find in the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), “existence” or “being” is not a property of individuals.35
To say of some individual that it exists is, thinks Williams, unintelligible, and with this thought in mind he turns to Aquinas on simplicity. He argues that what Aquinas says on this topic wrongly presupposes that existing is a property of individuals and then, ludicrously, identifies this property with God in an attempt to tell us what God is.36 The idea here is that Aquinas has no business saying that God brings it about that various individuals simply exist, and that Aquinas has no business identifying God with a property of existence had by these individuals.
One of Williams’s arguments for the view that it is nonsense to ascribe existence to an individual holds that if existence were attributable to individuals, then we could never, as we surely can, intelligibly say things like “Readers of Aquinas do not exist.”37 Why not? Because if existence were intelligibly attributable to individuals, to say, for example, that readers of Aquinas do not exist is to say that they lack a certain property, while to say this is implicitly to assert that they exist. In other words, according to Williams, if existence is a property of individuals, then statements like “Readers of Aquinas do not exist” is true only if it is false. This argument, however, wrongly assumes that negative existential assertions (assertions like “Readers of Aquinas do not exist”) have to be taken as presupposing the existence of their subjects and to be denying something of them. To say that readers of Aquinas do not exist is not to suppose that nonexisting readers of Aquinas lack a property of some kind. It is to deny that anything can be truly said to be a reader of Aquinas.
Williams also argues for his position by claiming that sentences ascribing existence to individuals are ones for which we have no use “outside philosophy.”38 He means that we do not normally say things like “I exist” or “President X exists.” But this also seems to be a poor line of argument. People would, doubtless, be puzzled were I to accost them and assert “I exist.” They would probably be equally puzzled if, out of the blue, I announce “President X (you can supply a name here) exists.” But would anybody seriously take me to be talking nonsense were I to say, for example, “The great pyramid at Giza exists, but the Colossus of Rhodes does not,” or “You and I exist, but we will not exist if a giant meteorite hits the earth tomorrow”? Contrary to what Williams suggests, “exists,” as affirmed of an individual, is hardly some esoteric piece of meaningless baggage. To be sure, and as Aquinas recognized, what it is for one thing to exist might be different from what it is for something else to exist. For my cat to exist is for him to be a cat. For me to exist is for me to be a human being. For a cabbage to exist is for it to be (what else?) a cabbage. And cats, humans, and cabbages are obviously things of different kinds. But individual examples of these kinds can surely, and as individuals, be sensibly thought of as existing.39
Williams, I presume, would have replied that in answer to the question “What is God?” it makes no sense to say that God is existence or Being Itself. Yet Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity in the SCG is not an account of what God is. It is an account of what God cannot be. When saying that there is no distinction in God of essence and existence, Aquinas is not seeking to describe God. He is noting that, whatever God is, he cannot be something the existence of which is derived. And why does he do so? Because he thinks that there are things the existence of which does not derive from what they are (their essence), things that, therefore, have to be caused by what is distinct from them when it comes to essence and existence. Drawing on the Bible, and on what he finds in the writings of various theologians, and noting that nothing we take to be part of the universe exists by nature, Aquinas thinks that “God” is the obvious word to use so as to name what accounts for the existence of the universe. And why should he not? It would be fallacious to argue that since everyone has a mother the entire human race must have one. But Aquinas’s case for God being simple is not like this argument. He is not saying that the existence of everything in the universe has a cause and that the universe as such therefore has a cause. And, as I have explained, he thinks that the causes of what confront us now might, as far as philosophers can prove, depend on a series of causes going infinitely backward in time. In his defense of divine simplicity, Aquinas is saying that the existence of anything that does not exist by nature has to be caused by what does exist by nature. He is saying that the existence of the entire universe has to be caused no matter when we take it to be existing.
5. Criticism 5 supposes that people have freedom of choice, and that, when they do such and such freely, they are also freely not doing something or other. The idea here is that freedom of choice is bound up with the notion of different courses of action, and also bound up with different ways in which a human agent can be described. With this idea in mind, 5 is suggesting that Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity should be rejected since God is free to create or not to create, and that he is free to create worlds of many different kinds.
The argument goes like this: (1) God has freedom to create or not to create; (2) God is free to create different kinds of worlds; (3) If (1) and (2) are true, then God could be different from what he is; (4) But if God could be different from what he is, then he cannot be simple, for to say that God is simple is to say that he and his nature are changelessly one and the same, which is to say that God cannot be different from what he is.
This argument is sometimes advanced using the notion of a “contingent property,” a property that something that exists might have or lack. When my cat has eaten, he is not hungry. When I forget to feed him, he becomes hungry. We might put this by saying that being full or being hungry are contingent properties of my cat, and we might add that many of its properties are not contingent since they are properties that it has to have in order to exist at all. Since it is a cat, it is a mammal, so being mammalian is a necessary property of it. Now, so it has been suggested, according to Aquinas’s claim that God is simple, God has no contingent properties. Yet God must have contingent properties if he is free to create or not to create, and if he is free to create worlds of different kinds. Why? Because, without ceasing to be God, he is different from how he could be. If he had not chosen to create, he would have been different from what he is given that he chooses to create. If he had chosen to create a world without cats, he would be different from what he is given that he has created cats.
The merit of this argument lies, I think, in the fact that freedom and difference, or freedom and contingent properties, do come together when we are thinking of people. I and my teeth would have come to be different from what I and they were last night had I chosen not to brush my teeth before going to bed. The problem with the argument, however, lies in the fact that if God is, in Aquinas’s sense, the first cause, then he cannot be thought of as able to be different from what he is, and he cannot be thought of as having contingent properties.
When Aquinas speaks of the order of things produced by God, he is thinking about everything involved in the world of being and becoming. So he resists the suggestion that God is a being who comes, or could come, to be different as time goes by. For him, such a being would just be part of the spatiotemporal universe, not its cause. As I will show, Aquinas wants to assert (1) that God is free to create or not create, and (2) that God does not have to create a world just like ours.
By (1), however, he means that God’s nature does not compel him to create, that he is not forced into creating given what he is essentially. He also means that there could be nothing distinct from God that, so to speak, pushes him into creating. Given what we are by nature, we cannot but urinate, or breathe, or vomit if digesting certain substances.40 According to Aquinas, however, divinity has no need of creatures and does not come with an inbuilt compulsion to create. If it did, then it would, contrary to fact, make no sense to say of any creature that it might not exist.41
As for (1), Aquinas’s meaning is that, logically speaking, lots of things that do not exist could exist, and that they would exist only if God made them to be. I live in the United States. Could I live in Russia? There seems to be no logical impossibility in the suggestion that I might live in Russia. So the world could be different in that I could live in Russia rather than in the United States. But Aquinas takes this point to mean no more than that there is no logical impossibility when it comes to my living in Russia.
Applying all of this to the objection to divine simplicity now in question, it seems fair to observe that, for Aquinas, to say that God is free to create or not create, or that he is free to create a world different from what we find ourselves in, is not to suggest that God might be different from what he essentially is, or that he might acquire “contingent properties.” Aquinas’s “God is free to create” is a comment on what God is not. God is not something whose nature forces him to create. It is also a comment on what exists in the world and on what can be thought to exist without logical contradiction.
An objector to Aquinas on simplicity might reply “But if God had not created Davies’s cat, God would be different from what he is now.” But why suppose that God creating or not creating my cat makes for any difference in God? To suppose that it might would be to think of God as a spatiotemporal individual who is modified as he lives his life and makes these choices rather than those choices. If Aquinas’s approach to God is right, however, to think of God in that way is just not to think of God. For, so Aquinas would say (and here note the following negations), God is not part of space and time, is not (in a serious sense) an individual, and does not live a life consisting of many changes. If we had lived our lives differently, then we would be different from what we are now. But why suppose that God is something with a life history that could have taken a different course?
You may, of course, disagree with what I have been saying in response to the five criticisms of the SCG’s account of divine simplicity noted above. Even if you do, however, it is incontestable that Aquinas sees what he says about divine simplicity in the SCG as primarily an account of what God is not. SCG 1,18–27 is a treatment of what has sometimes been referred to as God’s “negative attributes.”42 In that case, however, it surely cannot be taken as a proper account of God since those who believe that God exists frequently speak of God by seeming to ascribe positive characteristics or attributes to him. Yet, as I will begin to show in the next chapter, Aquinas is aware of this fact and himself wishes to speak of God in positive or nonnegative terms.