Divine Simplicity is simply too simple

Recently the amazing Fr. Aidan Kimel has written an article on how the "free will theodicy" is incompatible with Thomas Aquinas' concept of Divine Omniscience. This "free will" argument is that evil and suffering and death are the consequence of creatures freely choosing to deny and destroy themselves and others, and not because God has directly willed evil to happen. Yet, Aquinas' account of Divine Knowledge would deny this, and posit God as the active cause for all choices and events.

A friend online asked exactly how all this worked out, since for him Divine foreknowledge means that God simply knows eternally what people have chosen in the future, but God did not make them choose such horrid things. I think Fr. Kimel will work this out in future installments of his blog, but the termination of this essay does not make it entirely clear: Is he trying to show the deficiencies of Divine Impassibility as conceived by the Western Aquinas tradition? Or is he trying to make the point that the classic “free will defense” is indefensible?

If I have read Kimel's friend David Bentley Hart correctly, I think Hart would say that Divine simplicity and impassibility, via Augustine and Aquinas, are self defeating concepts if they are taken to imply that God actively causes anything less than Goodness. And it seems Hart would further affirm a more libertarian version of human freedom which is not causally determined by God, at least in the sense that persons are free to chose rationally (in accordance with Divine goodness) or to make choices which fall into the insane depravity of sin (in denial of Divine goodness). I further think Hart would say that affirming the simplicity and unity of God requires affirming that God will work good for all created beings eventually, because the one will and singular purpose of God is final Goodness and Reconciliation for all created beings. 

This is generally the position I hold. But this is not how Divine impassibility and simplicity work in much of the Western Classical Theist tradition which flows from Augustine and Aquinas. Here is how that works out in my understanding:

First, let's begin with what Aquinas seems to be saying: Typically in Aquinas' Western Classical Theism position, God’s "simplicity" leads to God’s "impassibility" and therefore God’s knowledge is not a passive experience of reality, but instead God’s knowledge actively causes reality to be what it is. God knowing something to be a certain way actually causes it to be that way. Divine providence and causation and knowledge are all aspects of the same thing: They are one. This is because for Aquinas God is simple unlike all other beings, and NOT a mixture of different kinds of elements, like all other beings are. This simplicity is closely aligned with “aseity” (God as self-caused, totally independent, and thus sui generis) if you want to do a deeper dive. 

There’s a few different ways to get at how this works out in Aquinas' system. Perhaps the easiest is to say that God is “actus purus” (as Aquinas says it): God is pure actuality with no possibility or potentiality. God is categorically different from all other beings because God is Being Itself. While other beings have an aspect of becoming to them, because they have unrealized potentials that they manifest in spacetime, God does not have any un-manifested potential, and never "becomes" different than God is. God is fully realized in continuously creating and actualizing all other beings within history. Back to Divine Simplicity: Since all other beings are a mixture of actual and potential, God is simply actuality. Pure actuality. 

If God is pure actuality, then God is completely perfect with no potentiality unrealized. And if God is perfect, then any change in God would show God to be less than perfect, because God had moved from a less actualized state to a more actualized state. And if God’s knowledge changes, then God’s perfection is diminished. So therefore God’s knowledge of all reality cannot change lest God change (and become imperfect). This makes God’s knowledge causal: The state of affairs of reality will never change from how God knows them to be, and there are thus no free choices in reality (even if we feel ourselves to be free). Time is "a moving image of eternity", bringing about the process of all things happening just as God exhaustively knows they will happen, in accordance with his perfectly actualized knowledge that flows from his Divine simplicity. 

That’s the theory, of course. 

There are a whole swath of people within the Classical Tradition seeking a way out of this (such as so-called "Open Theism") as well as people who have left the Classical Tradition due to these reasons (such as Process Theists). There are also many Aquinas interpreters who make cases he should be interpreted otherwise than I have above. While I agree Aquinas' concept of simplicity is problematic and even pernicious, I do not agree with their understanding of Aquinas. I think Aquinas says basically what I accuse him of above, and that any change in this concept has to come in from OUTSIDE of the Classical Augustinian-Aquinas tradition. I think Anglican Philosopher Keith Ward and Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart have pretty good cases to make about this, and compelling alternatives to offer beyond both Open Theism and Process Theism. 

For me, the major problem with Classical Divine Simplicity/Asiety is threefold: First, it makes God the active cause for all evil acts who knows and wills all forms of evil as a direct expression of the Divine Self. This God comes very near being a Satan, but even worse, because this Satan that is all-powerful and all knowing. Second, it does not play well with Orthodox Trinitarianism which posits a complexity and community within the Divine Self of three Persons/Relations within one Essence/Reality. It seems to go beyond paradox and into contradiction to say God is both simple, without internal "parts" or "complexity", and also a Threefold Relational Reality within Godself from all eternity. Third, it denies relationality to God and turns all relationships and free choices into a farce, since we are puppets who merely act out what God has ordained us to do eternally. And yet we are puppets who feel free and feel like we can obey or disobey, accept or deny, Divine Love. Yet this would be a farce or illusion imposed on us by a simple God who wills that we feel fundamentally different than how reality actually is (thereby making God the author of at least one pervasive lie). 

As a side issue: One implication of Classical Divine Simplicity is that God is impassible: God does not suffer nor have any emotional response to, or connection with, the created world. All Biblical materials which state an emotional reaction from God are simply anthropomorphisms and metaphors attributed to God by humans, and thus are, strictly speaking: False. It is actually a lie to say that God yearns or feels anger or feels compassion or feels love in an emotional sense. As you might guess, I feel this makes Scripture fundamentally false, and again makes God into a liar who actively deceives us into thinking God has emotions toward us and is relational with us. Furthermore, a strong doctrine of Divine Impassibility would seem to be completely falsified by a God who suffers for us and as us on the cross. 

Thus, there are a ton of reasons to ditch Classical Divine Simplicity and much of how God is conceived in Western Orthodox Christian Systems (both Catholic and Protestant). But the cost of ditching these ideas is distancing oneself from these traditions and possibly causing oneself to doubt other aspects of these systems. For instance, many Process Theists have left any identifiably Christian form of theology behind. And yet, from the Orthodox Christian Tradition, as well as from Western Idealists like Hegel, there seems to be ways to find a robust form of Trinitarian Incarnational Theism which has none of the limitations of Western Classical Theism. Again, I would recommend Hart and Ward as suitable (and similar) alternatives.

For my own understanding of Divine Simplicity, and how it must become both more complex and more focused on God's essence as Love in order to be a meaningful and life-giving idea about God, see my next installment on the Complexity of Love's Simplicity. 

Aquinas Admiration Addendum: In saying all of this, it probably sounds like I am trashing Aquinas. And I am not. He is an amazing thinker of immense breadth, and his vision stretches so much further than many in the Western Tradition. I respect and even admire how he systematized and even expanded the Western tradition using tools from Aristotle in conversation with Islamic philosophy. But the matters that Aquinas does not settle are myriad, and there are fundamental deficiencies in his system, and the Catholic system that evolved from him. Nevertheless, when I appear face to face with Jesus and find out how wrong I have been on many matters, I look forward to a heavenly pint with Thomas to discuss the exact nature of his vision at the end of his Earthly career, and discussing what he got right and wrong as well.

*The cover image was generated by Dall-E artificial intelligence.