The Simplicity of The Living God

Modem Theology 21:2 April 2005
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
THE SIMPLICITY OF THE LIVING

GOD: AQUINAS, BARTH, AND SOME
PHILOSOPHERS
CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS
The notion of divine simplicity could hardly be mistaken for a favorite of
most modern theologians. Simplicity is part of that set of divine attributes,
along with immutability and impassibility, derived by way of a process of
remotion often assumed to represent ancient Greek sensibilities rather than
biblical ones. Twenty years ago, Robert Jenson could observe that "rejection
of the dominant tradition just at this point is endemic in contemporary
theology".1 The past twenty years have done little to alter the situation.
Alongside this theological dismissal has stood a robust tradition defending divine simplicity. Philosophers of religion have analyzed the notion
intently, not to defend it against suspicious theologians so much as to
demonstrate to those suspicious of theism that the traditional concept of God
is not incoherent.2
Although these two conversations stand in some ways at cross purposes,
the theologians and the philosophers share some significant agreements
about simplicity. Specifically, these philosophers typically take themselves
to be arguing about a notion of simplicity exemplified by Thomas Aquinas,
and theologians rarely dispute the supposed identity between Aquinas's
account of simplicity and the subject of contemporary debate. The simplicity discussed by so many pre-modern theologians is commonly understood
by both theologians and philosophers to be a specifically philosophical (i.e.,
not derived from revelation) teaching in broad continuity with ancient
Greek thought.3 For philosophers, that is what recommends it for defense;
for theologians, that is what marks it as a non-biblical accretion to be rooted
Christopher A. Franks
Department of Religion and Philosophy, High Point University, Box 3511, University Station,
High Point, NC 27262, USA
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Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA.
276 Christopher A. Frante

out. Thus, just as much recent philosophy of religion seeks to analyze simplicity with no reference to revealed doctrines, so much contemporary theology echoes the sentiment of Barth that in scholasticism simplicity was
"exalted to the all-controlling principle, the idol... devouring everything
concrete".4
This essay calls for a reconsideration of the notion of divine simplicity,
especially as understood by Aquinas. The agreements I have described about
the status of this notion only obscure the true character of Thomas's teaching. In response, I question the assumption that the traditional notion of
simplicity was imported relatively unchanged from ancient Greek thought,
largely unaffected by a theological investigation of biblical sources. On the
contrary, Thomas's notion of simplicity is shaped by the church's reflections
on trinity and Incarnation. Indeed, far from being a philosophical distortion
that theologians can jettison without loss, this notion of simplicity, Thomas
shows us, is at the heart of a fully Christian account of God. In particular,
simplicity teaches us how to think about a God who is the fully Living One,
the one who lives so fully and completely that this Life is uncontradictable.
This God is the source of life for others, and precisely as cause of being, this
God is fully free to create (or not to create), free even to enter into union with
creation, even the intimate union of the Incarnation, without abandoning
that Life.
After explicating this notion of simplicity, I will spend a great deal of the
article comparing it with what is often taken to be Thomas's understanding
of simplicity. The notion of simplicity is analyzed most often and in the most
depth by philosophers of religion, and I will look at a particularly subtle
example of such analysis in the defense of simplicity offered by Eleonore
Stump and Norman Kretzmann. Stump and Kretzmann consider simplicity
in abstraction from the ecclesial reflections on Trinity and Incarnation that
are in fact determinative for how Thomas discusses simplicity. As a result,
their analysis remains innocent of the lessons Thomas tries to teach by way
of simplicity. Thomas fundamentally reorients our thought about God by
pointing to the peculiar sort of discontinuity between God and creatures
required by Christian doctrine. Thus, they discuss a God who is different
from creation, but not different enough. Their concept of simplicity develops within the horizon of being, rather than pointing to being's source. They
end up struggling mightily over the problem of reconciling God's simplicity with God's freedom to create: how can a being with no distinctions, who
wills himself necessarily, also will some things without necessity? The
problem does not arise for Thomas's teaching, in which simplicity does
nothing if not guarantee the divine freedom to be the same fully actual Life
whether as creator or without creation. Because they miss the specific character of what it means for Thomas to consider God as source of being, Stump
and Kretzmann conduct their discussion in too univocal a fashion. As a
result, although they claim to have solved the problem and rescued a
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The Simplicity of the Living God 277

reduced version of simplicity, they remain stuck within the distinctions
made within the world, and so cannot reconcile simplicity and freedom.
Their 'defense' turns out to be a sell-out. Looking at how their defense of
simplicity fails is instructive for recalling the crucial elements in an account
of simplicity that is faithful to Thomas.
If we grasp how the standard assumption that simplicity is intelligible
apart from revelation distorts our understanding of Aquinas's concerns, then
perhaps we can come to see that Barth, rather than folks like Stump and
Kretzmann, is truly the modern heir to Thomas's understanding of divine
simplicity. I conclude this essay by showing how Barth's treatment of simplicity, while not at all identical to Thomas's, stands on the same lessons
about God's causality, learned from reflection on the Trinity and the
Incarnation.
Some of the confusions over what divine simplicity means have recently
been confronted by Stephen R. Holmes.5 He tries to reclaim Christian tradition for theologians by showing how old texts have been read in terms of a
modern ontology. Simplicity in the tradition is not about the perfectly actualized monad whose attributes are explored by philosophers of religion and
whose alleged Greek pedigree prompts its dismissal by theologians. Against
such assumptions, Holmes suggests, on the one hand, that traditionally theologians have been more circumspect about accounting for God in terms of
their own ontological assumptions, and, on the other, that recent attempts
to recover "the assumed personal and relational ontology of the patristic tradition"6 offer a set of ontological assumptions in which divine simplicity
might be less problematic.
The present article pushes the case for simplicity further. Holmes not only
defends the traditional notion of simplicity while distinguishing it from the
concept debated by analytic philosophers. He also suggests that simplicity
might even be useful theologically. For example, it helps cut through the
medieval nominalism-realism debate regarding universal ideas; they are
neither arbitrary names nor real things that constrain God, for they are ideas
in the divine mind, which are therefore nothing other than God.7 This is, of
course, an important place to apply the doctrine of simplicity, but Holmes
understates the importance of simplicity significantly. Simplicity is not
merely a teaching that could be useful and could be recoverable if we
rejected certain modern ontologies. In fact, the suggestion that our ontology
makes all the difference seems to misidentify what is wrong with modern
construals of simplicity. To recover the ancient teaching on simplicity, what
is needed is not a revision in our account of being, but a lesson in what it
means in the Christian story to be a cause of being. Simplicity learned from
Aquinas not only proves useful in resolving certain theological puzzles; it
conforms our speech about God to Christian convictions about the Godworld relation learned from reflection on the Trinity and the Incarnation, and
therefore it is crucial to a fully Christian discussion of God.
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I also extend Holmes's treatment by paying sustained attention to the
concept of simplicity employed by certain philosophers. Holmes acknowledges the philosophical debate, but leaves it to one side, citing his suspicion
that "the forms of the doctrine being debated are not necessarily the most
useful ones from a specifically Christian perspective".8 I concur with this
judgment, but will show why the notion of simplicity under debate is problematic for Christian theology, why it is unlike Aquinas's view, and why it
ultimately fails even on its own terms. In short, the notion of simplicity
evident in Stump and Kretzmann neglects the radical construal of the relation between God and creation at the center of Aquinas's discussion of simplicity. It therefore proceeds too univocally and ends up describing not the
Living God but what Barth would call a human notion of "the simple", a
notion that cannot sit coherently with a free act of creation.
Thomas on Simplicity
My claim that Thomas's notion of simplicity depends on lessons learned
from revelation may seem dubious. Surely Aquinas is among those Barth
faults for treating simplicity first within the doctrine of God.9 The whole
point of Barth's diatribe is to suggest that such a procedure fails to allow the
doctrine of the Trinity to condition the discussion of simplicity.
It is true that the connection to Trinity and Incarnation is not emphatically
announced in Thomas as it is in Barth. Nevertheless, Trinitarian and Incarnational concerns play a formative role. The key to understanding the distinctive shape of Thomas's treatment of simplicity is to see how his whole
discussion of God reflects a particularly Christian account of the distinction
between God and creatures.
This distinction is such that God cannot be grasped from the side of the
creature. A growing chorus of scholars has helped us to perceive the
apophaticism of the Summa Theologians early questions on God.10 The five
ways of question two, it has been noted, do not achieve anything like a
knowledge of what God is; rather, natural theology "terminates in the judgment that there is that of which we have no knowledge".11 The following
nine questions (3-11) must be read in light of the preface to question three
on simplicity. There Thomas insists that having determined that God is, the
inquiry must now turn not to what God is, but to what God is not, since from
God's effects humans can have no knowledge of God's essence. These questions thus do not develop a concept of God according to certain attributes.
Rather, they develop a sort of negative theology, outlining rules for what we
cannot say about the God of whom we have no concept. Not that we can say
nothing, for we can in fact identify several rules for talking about God. But
these rules do not mark out the space of a concept. On the contrary, they disqualify the use of certain earthly distinctions in talking about the One who
cannot be captured by demarcations that set off one being from another. Such

distinctions fail before the One who causes all being, the One who is "outside
the order of all beings".12
At work in these questions is, of course, a neoplatonic sensibility learned
from Dionysius the Areopagite. But precisely as Dionysian, it goes beyond
pagan neoplatonism to reflect the truth of the world as created. Thomas's
fundamental insight into the discontinuity between God and the creature is
expressed in his famous rejection of any distinction between existence and
essence in God.13 His point is to shake up our normal assumption that
"being" is a sort of given substratum onto which forms are added, bringing
perfections with them. Burrell points out that when Aquinas interprets esse
in terms of act, essence becomes not the perfecting factor but the limiting
factor.14 Therefore, in Carlo Leget's words, "esse as actuality contains every
possible perfection and the fact that a substance does not possess every perfection must be ascribed to the limitations of its essence".15 A reversal is
worked here whereby our existence, which appears more sure to us, is confessed to be contingent and fragile in the face of the absolute priority of the
existence of God. This does not give us some handle by which to understand
God. In fact, by identifying God's essence with esse as pure act, Thomas
excludes the sorts of distinctions we would need to get a grasp on God. But
this move does help us see the sort of dependence all beings have on their
Creator, and thus it points in the direction of just how radically different God
is from any being.
Using this notion of pure act to specify how God is incomprehensible to
us is precisely what Thomas is doing in the discussion of simplicity. For
Thomas, simplicity is not an attribute of a being with no distinctions. It is
the necessity of denying that any of the distinctions that help us discern
created realities can possibly help us when our subject is the One who is the
cause of all being. Again, simplicity is a way of ensuring that the One of
whom we speak is indeed the prima causa of all things. Something that does
not exist, that is not "in act", cannot bring anything about. Thus, what is only
"potential" cannot bring itself about, but must be brought about by something in act. If God has any potency, God would need to be acted on by some
other agent, and so would not be the ultimate cause of which Thomas is
trying to speak.16 If this notion of actus purus in all simplicity does help us
speak properly of God, then we certainly must confess that everything that
is in God is God. But this is, again, simply to guarantee the proper distinction between God and the world, a distinction that reminds us that how our
language refers to God remains a mystery to us.
This way of thinking about God is central to Aquinas's whole discussion
of the one God. Beginning with the treatment of simplicity, Aquinas discusses many predications that can be made of God, and each of them is
described according to its ability to point to some aspect of God's full actuality. If perfection is predicated of God, as it must be according to the scriptures, Aquinas relates perfection to the lack of any potency, i.e., the full

actuality, of God.17 If immutability is predicated of God, again as the scriptures demand, Thomas shows how mutability would imply potency, and
hence not full actuality, in God.18 It is the fully actual God who is the central
referent of all these predications. Every question, therefore, reflects that
reversal whereby God is acknowledged as cause of being and creatures in
turn are recognized as contingent and dependent. It is God's Life that is
determinate and uncontradictable, while our lives hang on the participation
in Life granted us by God.
Since God's essence is simply esse, "to be", all other things have being by
participation in God. Thomas likens God's esse to fire. "Just as that which
has fire but is not itself fire is on fire by participation, so that which has being
but is not being, is a being by participation."19 This is not to say that God is
simply that "being in general" that is predicated of all things.20 God is distinct from such diffused "being". God is self-subsistent. But God is that
primary actus purus, so as to be the source of existence for all other things.
Thus, existence belongs to other things by participation, but it is said of God
essentially. So "every being that is in any way is from God".21 The universe
utterly depends on God for its existence. The fullness of God's action in this
respect just is God's simplicity. God is simple in God's uniqueness as the one
on whose unchanging activity everything else depends.
The notion of "unchanging activity" must not be misunderstood. God's
unchangeableness for Aquinas is not some static prison that makes attributing "activity" to God paradoxical. Rather, he connects mutability with the
possibility of going from not existing to existing and back again.22 It is precisely this mutability that God does not have, for rather than depending on
existence coming to him from some other agent, God is the source of existence, with the power of bestowing it or withdrawing it from all beings. So
God's immutability is a function of God's fully actual power of existence. In
contrast, creatures are totally dependent on God for their existence, so that
"if He took away His action from them, all things would be reduced to
nothing".23 The fullness of this activity just is God's changelessness and
God's simplicity.
Since we will see how Stump and Kretzmann find an intransigent tension
between God's simplicity and God's freedom to create, it is important to note
at this point that the changelessness of God's creating activity does not mean
for Thomas that God cannot be God without creation. Indeed, God would
be no different had God not created. God's activity is fully realized as it is,
and is unchangeable. It is no different activity for God if existence is participated by creatures, for willing creatures is simply another way of willing
Godself,24 Thus, God's simplicity, the unity of God's uncontradictable action,
the identity of God's action whether creation is or not, is exactly what guarantees God's freedom with respect to creation.
It should be evident that Thomas's Christian account of the doctrine of
creation is behind his discussion of simplicity, but it is perhaps not quite
evident how this discussion is conditioned by the doctrines of Trinity and

Incarnation. But the relation between creature and Creator that Thomas
assumes is precisely an articulation of the creature-Creator relation that the
church worked out in the course of its reflections on Trinity and Incarnation.
The notion that the three divine persons are one God involved the confession over against various sorts of Arians that there are no gradations and
distinctions within the divine, but rather there is only divinity with no gradation and distinctions on the one side and creatures on the other.25 As
Aquinas summarized this conclusion centuries later: "Everything which is
not the divine essence is a creature."26 In this way Trinitarian debates fostered the sort of creature-Creator distinction we see worked out in Thomas.
There is the one, uncreated, simple God, and there is everything that is not
that one, simple essence, which is created.
Not only does the church's confession of the unity of the three sharpen
the distinction between creature and Creator, but so does the confession of
the triplicity of the one as well. According to Thomas, that God acts in creation and redemption through the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit is precisely what demonstrates the gratuity of creation.27 For God uttered rather
than emanated the Word, reaching out in Love rather than from necessity.
But this awareness of the non-necessity of creation deepens our grasp of
what it means for God to be the cause of being, to be the simple actus purus,
to be the fully Living One. If God did not have to create, our own contingency and fragility stand forth all the more. Of course, just because God is
Trinity, it is truly appropriate to God's character to create, for God is Word
and Love. God goes forth in self-communication among the three persons,
and so it is perfectly fitting for such a God to seek, through creating and
redeeming others, "to communicate by likeness its own good to others as
much as is possible".28 But just because that self-communicating impulse
already finds a terminus within the divine life, God's character does not
dictate creation. Although the connection is not explicitly drawn in the
Summa Theologiae, in his commentary on the Lombard's Sentences Thomas
suggests that God's will to communicate Godself would be fulfilled without
creatures exactly because of the intra-Trinitarian relations.29 It is important
to remember that such Trinitarian reflections are behind Thomas's talk of
God willing creation by willing Godself as participatable. Such talk easily
calls to our minds a lonely monad contemplating itself. But when Aquinas
speaks of God knowing all by knowing Godself and willing all by willing
Godself, he is speaking of the same knowing that is God's Word, the Son,
and of the same willing that is God's love, the Holy Spirit.30
If Trinitarian reflections stand in the background of Thomas's account of
the God-world relation, so do reflections on Christ's person. The church's
Christological discussions concerning the unity of the two natures bring out
especially starkly the radical otherness of God. Within the distinctions that
define for us the essences of things in the world, a thing is what it is pre Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005

cisely by its not being something else. A man is a man partially in virtue of
not being a horse. Mixing a man and a horse can only destroy the essences
that define "man" and "horse", and so we have a centaur, neither man nor
horse. In rejecting various attempts at truncating Christ's essence as a man
or limiting the extent of his essential divinity, the church determined that
divinity is not something that must destroy earthly natures to make a place
for itself. Indeed, God can join in such intimate union with the creature
exactly because God is simply not part of the order of beings. God is different from creationso different, that God can unite with the creature without
losing that difference. In this way "the denial that God in his divinity is part
of or dependent on the world, was brought forward with greater clarity
through the discussion of the way the Word became flesh".31 These lessons
are evident in Thomas's teaching on the creature-Creator relation. They are
especially clear in that Thomas takes God's radical otherness to be a necessary part of the confession that God enters into unions with the creature,
either at the most intimate level, in the incarnation, in a lesser way in the
grace of union, or even in that lesser intimacy God shares with all that is sustained in being.32 The unfathomable intimacy of God with creation, witnessed supremely in the Incarnation, proclaims how radically discontinuous
God is with creatures, as the source of their being.33
Thomas's discussion of simplicity is thoroughly dependent on reflections
stemming from the revelation of God in Christ. Those reflections press
toward the radical otherness of Godso great an otherness that the greatest intimacy with creation is possibleand toward the determinateness of
God's uncontradictable Lifeso great a determinateness that creation can
only be a radically free and gratuitous act. It is just that fully actual Life, that
free and unchangeable Life, hinging on God's "already fulfilled activity",
that is God's simplicity. Thus, simplicity as Thomas sees it is a pivotal aspect
of a fully Christian account of God. And this is a notion of simplicity that,
as Barth rightly points out, must be distinguished from any human idea of
"the simple".
Stump and Kretzmann on Simplicity
I contend that the crucial features of the understanding of simplicity outlined above are generally missing from discussions of divine simplicity
among philosophers of religion. If theologians by and large accept the philosophically debated concept of simplicity as the genuine article, it is no
wonder that they tend to reject it. For it bears the marks of what Barth called
the consideration of an "ens vere unum". As such it does not reflect the sense
of the radical distinction between God and the world I have been developing. And perhaps we should not expect it to, because the notion of simplicity is intentionally treated in abstraction from doctrines like Trinity and
Incarnation, the very doctrines that helped to refine the church's under Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

standing of simplicity as referring to God's determinate and uncontradicatable Life. Yet Stump and Kretzmann in particular claim to be following at
least the spirit of Aquinas, and exegesis of Aquinas forms a standard mode
of operating for them. But absent the relation between God and creation
worked out above, their treatment fails to grasp what Aquinas means by
"simplicity".
None of this is to say that Stump and Kretzmann do not get many things
right about Aquinas. They offer many thoughtful and more or less Thomistic
considerations to show how simplicity has been misunderstood by many of
its modern critics. They offer compelling and useful arguments to show that
the notion of divine simplicity is not necessarily incompatible with God
acting in history, with divine perfection, and with divine freedom. The result
is a notion of simplicity that has much in common with that of Thomas. But
while adequately sketching some of the outlines of Aquinas's notion of simplicity, they miss its heart and center.
At this juncture let me recount briefly what Stump and Kretzmann do in
the article in question.34 They begin by characterizing divine simplicity as a
denial of distinctions in God. They then point out three sorts of difficulties
entailed in predicating such simplicity of a God who is believed to have
acted in history and to have freely created the world. First, a simple God
acting in history appears nonsensical because simplicity would require that
God's act at one time in history be identical with God's essence, which would
also be identical with God's act at another time in history. Thus, acts at two
different times would have to be essentially identical. Stump and Kretzmann
resolve the difficulty by referring to the notion of pure act. There is no contradiction, they say, in claiming that God as an eternal, unchanging act can
have various temporal manifestations or effects. The same logic helps them
to resolve the apparent difficulty in asserting that two of God's attributes,
for example omnipotence and omniscience, are identical. These various
predications simply describe God differently according to God's various
manifestations and effects.
Second, even if a simple God acting in history is not nonsensical, such a
God must not be free, since what this God does is identical with God's
essence. The key to the resolution here is how "will" is understood. A simple
God acting in history is not free if will is understood as the neutral capacity
to choose. But Stump and Kretzmann propose, following Aquinas, to think
of will as a "self-directed rational wanting of the good".35 Thus, the possibility of doing otherwise than one does is not the criterion of true freedom.
Instead, freedom means facing no obstacles in one's pursuit of the good. God
cannot do other than God does only because nothing can frustrate God's
goodness. God's simplicity, then, is perfect freedom.
Third, even if God's simplicity can be squared with God's acting in history
and with those acts being understood as free, it apparently cannot be squared
with God's freedom to create. Traditionally, neither God's creating nor God's

abstaining from creating would frustrate God's goodness. Therefore, the
freedom operative here is of a fundamentally different order. That is to say,
when we consider God's creating activityunlike God's acts in history
God's acting otherwise than God does must be a real possibility. To preserve
God's simplicity, apparently the creating God and the (possible) noncreating God would have to be identical. Here Stump and Kretzmann
concede that a strong version of simplicity is impossible to mesh with a freely
creating God. But they refuse to abandon their defense of simplicity altogether. They claim that divine simplicity can be thought of in a "weakened
sense". God's simplicity could mean not that God is the same in all possible
worlds, but that given a creating God, God is the same in all time-lines possible under such circumstances. This seems to mean that although God could
have not created (and so is not simple in the "strong sense"), God might still
be simple (in a "weakened sense") if beyond that there are no further distinctions in God. Stump and Kretzmann conclude their article by suggesting
some tricky issues in theology that might be helped if the doctrine of divine
simplicity were available.
This summary is necessarily sketchy, and leaves out several important
moves Stump and Kretzmann make. But it is enough to give the reader a
sense of the interests that animate the article and to hint at some of the
assumptions at work in it. In what follows, I hope to make clear how some
of those assumptions separate Stump and Kretzmann from the notion of
divine simplicity espoused by Aquinas. Specifically, they neglect the particular (Christian) shape of the discontinuity between the radically contingent
creation and the uncontradictably Living God, and hence proceed too univocally and end up parsing not the Living God but a human idea of "the
simple".
Following Aquinas, Stump and Kretzmann do acknowledge that the doctrine of divine simplicity derives from the notion of God as pure actuality.36
But they do not seem to recognize just what this notion of "pure actuality"
is supposed to accomplish, or its place in the whole structure of Thomas's
doctrine of God. Indeed, they appear to miss that structure altogether. As we
have seen, the idea of "pure act" has a central place in Aquinas's explication
of God since every predication retrains our thinking in light of the confession of the ultimate source of being. This construal of the distinction between
the completely living God and the determined and contingent creation is
exactly what Stump and Kretzmann miss.37 They talk about a God one of
whose aspects is to be "entirely actual, or in act",38 but without attention to
how that full actuality places all of our talk about God on this side of a great
apophatic divide; they fail to point to the Living God and instead end up
explicating a human concept of a being with no potency. Thus they approach
much more closely to what Barth derides as the ens vere unum implied by
many discussions of divine simplicity.

Analogy
The most obvious indication of this failure to grasp what actus purus means
for Aquinas is the excessively univocal approach Stump and Kretzmann take
toward God's predicates. If they had recognized the extent to which God as
actus purus means radical discontinuity between God and creation, then they
would have appreciated (but in fact do not) how analogical language
follows. For example, consider how Stump and Kretzmann approach the
problem of identifying both "perfect power" and "perfect knowledge" with
God. They appeal to a time/eternity distinction to reconcile these concepts.
While no distinctions apply in God's eternal being, God may have different
temporal manifestations that lead us to identify God alternatively as
"power" or as "knowledge". This time/eternity distinction has the potential
to support the radical otherness between God and creation. But Stump and
Kretzmann actually intimate a great deal of continuity between the eternal
and temporal realms. The simile Stump and Kretzmann employ likens the
distinction between power and knowledge in the temporal realm to the distinction between opposite slopes of a mountain, and likens the identity
between perfect power and perfect knowledge to the one summit that completes both slopes.39
The trouble here is the suggestion of an unbroken continuity between
where we creatures are, near the bottom of the slope, and where God is at
the top of it. Such continuity betrays any possibility of the sort of radical discontinuity between God and creatures expounded by Thomas. The image of
two slopes leading to one summit suggests a spectrum of degrees of power
on which God has the same thing we have, but God has more of it. It also
suggests that if "power" is understood in a high enough degree it is identical to an equally high degree of knowledge. This approach to God's predicates Aquinas would call univocal.40
Of course, this image of the mountain slopes is only a simile, and if
pressed, we might expect Stump and Kretzmann to reply that it is not meant
to convey just how power and knowledge coincide in God as res significata,
but only to evoke the imaginative possibility for us that such a coincidence
need not be judged incoherent. Indeed, in later work Kretzmann in particular has paid a good deal of attention to the way our language falls short of
reaching God. In The Metaphysics of Theism, a reading of Summa contra
Gentiles I, Kretzmann highlights Thomas's repeated statements about the
limitations of our speech about God.41 Yet, even here the full meaning of
Aquinas's insistence on analogical language remains in the dark. For
Kretzmann our language is limited because of our cognitive constraints and
because of the way "Alpha" (his generic term for whatever is prima causa)
so transcends all our experience. But these limitations are limitations the
Greeks knew, and limitations that philosophy since Scotus has known. They
are the limitations of earthly beings trying to account for the highest being.

These limitations do not yet approach the limitations involved in discussing
the very source of being who is not part of the order of beings. Thus, even
if Kretzmann can say that none of our language actually reaches God, that
what is appropriate predication according to our modus significandi must be
distinguished from the res significata, nevertheless the only possible horizon
envisioned for that res is still the horizon of being. So itfitswith their neglect
of the full range of the creature-Creator distinction that Stump and Kretzmann
give us metaphors that suggest a shared horizon between humans and God.
The problem is related to Kretzmann's assumption that there is a tradition
connecting him with Aquinas that can be called a tradition of "perfect-being
theism".42 For Aquinas, God is precisely not a being. God's simplicity, then,
is not the simplicity of a perfect being. So illustrations that fail to undermine
the assumption that God is a being will necessarily be too univocal, regardless of disclaimers about the limitations of our language.
If, as Thomas believes, we know God through creatures, then in order to
understand God we must form "conceptions proportional to the perfections
flowing from God to creatures, which perfections pre-exist in God unitedly
and simply, while in creatures they are received divided and multiplied".43
This does not mean that we predicate things of God by looking at the multiple perfections of creatures and intensifying them until we have a conception of a being who unites all those perfections. If we do that we arrive at
Barth's ens vere unum. On the contrary, Aquinas says that the perfection in
the effect (the creature) may not even be in the cause (the creator) in the same
manner. As an example of how predications we make of creatures might
signify differently when predicated of God, Thomas points to the difference
between what "healthy" means when predicated of medicine versus
what "healthy" means when predicated of an animal.44 The term applies to
animals because they have health, but it applies to medicine because it is the
cause of such health. "Healthy" is predicated of medicine and of animals in
ways that are only analogous. In no way is there a spectrum of healthiness
that includes the animal at one point and medicine at a much higher degree
of the same thing. So Thomas suggests that, although the use of the term is
not completely equivocal, the sort of continuity between the two predications evoked by the slope analogy cannot be presumed between creatures
and God.
Yet, neither is our language about God wholly misleading, for God not
only causes our perfections, but causes them precisely as One in whom
those perfections pre-exist in a higher way. So when we call God the Living
God, we do not merely mean that God causes life in us. Rather, we mean
that life pre-exists in God in a preeminent way.45 Still, such preeminence
does not mean that God has a higher degree of the same thing we have. It
means that what we have is an effect that falls short of fully representing
its cause, even though it derives "some kind of likeness to it, even as the
forms of inferior bodies represent the power of the sun".46 Although such

terms are certainly not totally equivocal, God is far enough above continuity
with creatures that the same term applied to both cannot be used univocally. A term that is
applied to man in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the
thing signified; but this is not the case when (the term) is applied to God,
but it leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding
the signification of the name.47
Another way to say this is that "life" is in fact more properly said of God,
according to the res significata, because God lives more fully and determinately and perfectly than we do; but according to our modus significandi "hie"
does not appropriately refer to God, for we understand "life" from our
knowledge of creatures, which fails as a basis for grasping what "life" is in
God.48 The fully Living One cannot be circumscribed or comprehended, even
by calling God the Living One. Predications like "perfect knowledge" and
"perfect power" must be attributed analogically, and thus we cannot pin
down precisely how they refer to God. Much less, then, can we employ
similes suggesting that "perfect power equals perfect knowledge" is a proposition we might be able to make sense of without reference to our inability
to comprehend the Living God.49
The Puzzle of Simplicity and Freedom
Stump and Kretzmann deal not with the Living God but with an idea of "the
simple" as it might apply within the order of beings. This appears most crucially in the way their univocal treatment leads them to see divine simplicity as a threat to God's freedom rather than the guarantee of it.50 We have
seen how for Aquinas the affirmation of God's simplicity lives from the confession of God as the fully determinate Living One who is the same with or
without creation and on whom creation utterly depends. This approach roots
simplicity in the understanding of who God is gleaned from the church's
reflection on the Trinity and Incarnation. Stump and Kretzmann, on the other
hand, work from ideas of "the simple", of "eternity", and "freedom" conceived without recourse to the church's deliberations, and hope to pry from
them some understanding of God. It turns out that these versions of
"simplicity" and "freedom" are only compatible if simplicity is truncated.
Had they truly followed Aquinas, Stump and Kretzmann would have seen
that God's simplicity is exactly what guarantees that God's creative activity
is totally free. God has no need to create, but neither is God bound not to
create. Indeed, God's simplicity means that creating fits God's character, as
it were, even though God's character would be no different had God not
created. Aquinas's explication of God's simplicity in terms of God's full actuality does nothing if not preserve God's freedom. The ungraspable cause of
all being knows and loves Godself, and thereby knows and loves whatever

participates in being. Whether anything participates in being is thus a matter
of sheer gratuity. This construal of simplicity preserves God's freedom inseparably from preserving God's mystery and incomprehensibility. It means
that humans can place no limits on the ability of God, as the fully living,
determinative, uncontradictable one, to be who God will be. Not that there
are no limits on who God will be. In sacra doctrina, God has certainly revealed
to faith who God is and who God will be. But our faith does not "give us a
handle" on God. Through faith we know God, and precisely in that faith we
know God's incomprehensibility. God's simplicity, freedom, and incomprehensibility all hang together. If faith offers no handle on God, a fortiori neither
does an exhaustive analysis of the conceptual possibilities of a human idea
of the "simple". Following such a methodology, unlike Aquinas's procedure,
loses the coordination of simplicity, freedom, and incomprehensibility.
Indeed, Stump and Kretzmann come up with an idea of the simple that is
all too comprehensible and for that reason is difficult to square with God's
freedom.
The question that troubles Stump and Kretzmann is how an agent can
have real freedom without positing a distinction in the agent between what
is willed necessarily and what could be willed differently; yet the very necessity of that distinction seems to threaten the agent's simplicity. What has
been said is sufficient to indicate why Aquinas was never troubled by this
question. Stump and Kretzmann come up with an answer, but it is an answer
that manifests the univocity of their approach and ends with a simplicity
that is no simplicity at all (at least in any theologically fruitful sense).
The simplicity Stump and Kretzmann investigate is the simplicity of a
simple being. A simple being must dwell in a static eternity. Of course, this
threatens God's freedom, since a being of static simplicity cannot be or do
other than it is and does. Our authors resolve the tension by proposing that
God could have chosen a different static eternity in place of the creating static
eternity God has in fact chosen. God's act of creating is therefore free, but
simplicity applies only in a "weakened sense", in that it does not hold
together who God is as creator and who God would be without creation. In
other words, God is simple relative to the circumstance that does obtain (creation exists), but God's decision to create forms the boundary of God's
simplicity.
The main threat to this solution is the distinction between God's necessary
willing of Godself and God's contingent willing of other things. Stump and
Kretzmann elide the gap between willing necessarily and willing contingently by showing how what God wills contingently already involves a sort
of necessity. Even what God wills most freely, i.e., the existence of other
things, is tinged with a sort of necessity insofar as it is willed eternally by
God, so that there is no part of that eternity where God's willing to create is
contradicted or uncertain. This observation does not give God's willing of
creation logical necessity, but it does make it necessary in a significant sense.

Once we see that God's willing of creation has this sort of necessity, there is
no reason to posit a distinction between God's willing of the contingently
necessary and the absolutely necessary. It is all one act of willing in God's
eternity.
Here Stump and Kretzmann's misunderstanding of Thomas on simplicity
finds support in their misunderstanding of eternity Of course, for Thomas
there is no need to posit a real distinction in God between God's willing of
Godself and God's willing of contingent things. But that has to do with the
mysterious and gratuitous confession that creatures can and do participate
in the God who is actus purus. Since they miss this radical construal of the
creature-Creator distinction, Stump and Kretzmann conceive not the source
of being, but a being who wills two things. They turn to a static eternity as
the setting for all God's willing to make the two willings compatible.
Thomas's account of eternity does agree that what God wills God eternally wills. But the same reversal of our normal assumptions about being by
which Thomas renders God as the determinative, Living One in whom we
participate is reflected also in the discussion of eternity, where Thomas
reverses our assumptions about time to render God as the ultimate source
of all times, in whom our times participate. For Thomas, describing God as
"eternal" is a way to ensure that we are discussing the fully actual, living
Godto ensure that there is no potency in God. Thus Aquinas explicates
eternity in terms of immutability, which earlier he had described with reference to God as pure actuality.51 That God is eternal means that God is too
fully actual to be contradictable or changeable. God's eternity is not a prison
that keeps God alienated from time or from action. On the contrary, God is
so fully in act that no time is only potentially related to God. Rather, God
holds all times together. Scripture can apply past, present, and future time
to God because God's "eternity includes all times".52 Nor is eternity a
measure that bounds or circumscribes God. We do not learn about God by
understanding eternity and then subsequently fitting our idea of God into
that description. Instead, "eternity is nothing else but God Himself".53 So if
we would grasp anything about eternity, we must first know something of
the Living God.54
Stump and Kretzmann's characterization of eternity as a static, timeless
present builds on their work in an earlier essay.55 There the focus is the definition of eternity presented by Boethius, defended by Aquinas, "the complete possession all at once of illimitable life".56 Yet their treatment of God
as if God were a being is evident in the first problem the essay tackles. The
conundrum is how a being existing in an eternal "present", who is thus
simultaneous with each temporal moment, can have this simultaneity with
such a diversity of moments. They investigate this question in terms of
various species of simultaneity all of which fall under the one genus of things
that "exist at once (together)".57 Here we see that God, conceived as a being,
albeit an eternal being, can fall under a shared genus with other beings. In

contrast to Aquinas, eternity means that God enters along with creatures into
the realm of things that can be measured.58 Although Stump and Kretzmann
stress the difference between eternal and temporal simultaneity, they discuss
not the incomparable Living God but a being continuous with creatures.
Simultaneity, as Stump and Kretzmann point out, is a relative term. Events
are simultaneous only relative to a certain observer. For an event in the temporal realm to be simultaneous with an eternal present, the event must be
present relative to observers in both the eternal and the temporal frames of
reference.59 Now, the notion of God as an "observer" may be just afigureof
speech. But it is a misleading one, especially since our authors do not point
out the crucial differencethat God is causing the created realities that God
"sees". So they liken God to the temporal observer, noting that God must
discern whether events are present to God eternally or temporally.60 Here
God is a being, who senses the presence of events similarly to the way creatures do. God becomes one more character in Stump and Kretzmann's
drama, rather than the actus purus on which all creatures, all temporal events,
and all dramas depend.
This eternal observer's simultaneity with all times becomes a straitjacket,
locking him into a "static instant". Again beginning with human assumptions about what eternity must be like, Stump and Kretzmann explicate a
view of eternity identified with atemporality. Temporality involves past,
present, and future, so atemporality is understood only as a constant present.
Since a human understanding of what it means to be "in the present"
governs their view of God's eternal present, they think that the idea of eternity as an isolated static instant is "not so far off the mark" as the idea of
eternity as limitless duration.61 For Aquinas, God is simultaneously whole
and perfect, but is not therefore closer to being an instant than a duration.
In fact, God exceeds duration: God "endures beyond every age, that is,
beyond every kind of duration".62 But for Stump and Kretzmann the key to
God's eternity is not God's full actuality. Eternity thus becomes a prison that
locks God into doing whatever God does. That is how God's willing of creation acquires the sort of necessity that makes any distinction between that
willing and God's willing of Godself superfluous.
Clearly, Stump and Kretzmann have missed Aquinas's notion of simplicity. For Aquinas, God's simplicity means that God is the completely
Living One, the One who alone can share life with what does not exist by
granting a participation in God's own existence. Simplicity, then, is exactly
what obviates any need for a distinction between God's willing of creation
and God's willing of Godself. That Stump and Kretzmann resort to eliding
the distinction by attributing necessity to creation bears witness to the
fact that Aquinas's notion of simplicity is beyond their metaphysical
imaginings.
The prison-like view of eternity presented in their earlier article is also
behind the relevant moves in "Absolute Simplicity". Here they explain

further why a static instant view of eternity entails such a strong sense of
necessity. It may seem that God's eternity only entails a suppositional necessity to what God does. Of course, if God is creating, God must be creating.
But our authors distinguish God's creating from the merely suppositional
necessity that if Socrates is running, he must be running.63 The claim about
Socrates, while necessary, does not appear to impinge on Socrates's freedom
to run or not to run. This is because "before the time of his running Socrates
could have brought it about that he not be running at that later time".64 There
is no such antecedent time of decision for God, whose act of creating is "a
timeless action in the eternal present."65 This gives the conditional necessity
of creation a stronger sense than the suppositional necessity of Socrates's
running, so that God's willing of it can sit more neatly in one act of will with
what God wills with absolute necessity.
The univocity in their idea of eternity is here supported by a univocal view
of freedom. Just as what we are doing is free because determined by a prior
free choice, so what God is doing cannot be truly free unless preceded by a
time of decision. But with God there is no preceding time, so what God is
doing is not really free, but simply given. Unlike the God of Aquinas, an
"eternal being" must in a sense merely receive the way things are. Consider
Stump and Kretzmann's comparison between God's act of willing and a
woman named Monica's act of looking into a mirror.66 God can will Godself
and other things in one act, just as Monica can see herself and other things
in one act. The illustration suggests that just as Monica receives what she
sees in the mirrorher looking is not creating what she seesso God
receives what God wills. But they neglect to point out the crucial difference:
that God's willing of other things is the very source of those things. Here
God's action of creating, though willed by God, seems mysteriously to be
treated as part of the way things are, a given that God must receive but never
had time to choose. This procedure is supposed to demonstrate a certain
necessity to God's creating activity in order to preserve the simplicity of
God's eternal willing. The cost, though, is the loss of Aquinas's living actus
purus and its replacement with a human idea of the simple.
The foregoing arguments sketch the main elements of Stump and Kretzmann's defense of simplicity. We see that it differs greatly from Aquinas's
discussion. It is the static simplicity of an eternal being, not the living activity of the simple cause of being. Furthermore, it is a simplicity that only
obtains within the creating eternity that God has chosen. When they turn to
the possibility that God might not have created, Stump and Kretzmann show
how the simplicity they have defended is a truncated simplicity.
After associating God's willing of creation so closely with God's necessary
willing of Godself, they are concerned to present God's will to create as
nevertheless not absolutely necessary. In order to do this after having put
God in such a box of necessity on account of God's eternity, Stump and
Kretzmann point out that creating is not logically entailed by God's nature.

Thus God's eternity could have been a non-creating eternity rather than a
creating eternity. Consequently, God is not the same "in all possible worlds".
In view of this distinction, Stump and Kretzmann admit that they can
only weaken "the claims basic to the doctrine of simplicity".67 Freedom and
simplicity are finally incompatible, and they save simplicity by narrowing
its applicability.
Stump and Kretzmann refuse to admit defeat. They claim that something
really worthy of the name "simplicity" can still be salvaged. In place of a
simplicity implying sameness through all possible worlds, they advocate a
divine simplicity understood as sameness through all possible time-lines
emanating from a single initial world-state. But this would seem not to
"weaken" the notion of simplicity, but to abandon it. Divine simplicity,
however it is construed, would seem to require that God is the same no
matter what God might do. Claiming that God is simple, excepting consideration of God's decision to create, abandons the doctrine of simplicity. Nor
can this quasi-simplicity accomplish even the modest uses for which Stump
and Kretzmann themselves commend it. For example, they suggest that the
doctrine of simplicity overcomes the nominalist-realist dilemma with regard
to morality.68 God's goodness need not be an arbitrary divine invention nor
an extrinsic measure that limits God, since God simply is God's goodness.
But this use of the doctrine of simplicity shows that simplicity is not simplicity unless God's simplicity and the standards by which God judges are
identical. It is precisely that identity that Stump and Kretzmann have already
abandoned. If God's decision to create is excluded from the understanding
of God's simplicity, then God's simplicity is not identical to the standards by
which God determined to createindeed, those standards are totally external to God's simplicity. Stump and Kretzmann thus end up calling something simplicity that is no simplicity at all.
The truth of the matter is that Stump and Kretzmann explicate not the simplicity of the Living God of Aquinas, but the notion of a being who is simple.
Their neglect of the radical distinction between creature and Creator that
characterizes Thomas's account of simplicity leaves them imagining God as
a being within the order of beings. The limits of their horizon within the
order of beings is especially evident in their language of various "possible
worlds". They quite naturally render the difference between God-withcreation and God-without-creation as a difference between various possible
worlds. What could be more intuitive from a human perspective than to
describe the way things are, including even the way God is, as "the world"?
But following such natural and intuitive leadings of our normal speech is
precisely what throws us off the track of speaking about God. For in God
we learn that the way things are is not the ultimate horizon. Rather, "all
worlds" have their condition of possibility in the God who is other than all
worlds. This God alone is the only final horizon. Thus, it would never occur
to Thomas to describe the-way-things-would-be-if-God-had-not-created as

a "possible world". That is not a possible world, but the possible absence of
any world. Our authors can say, "although there are possible worlds in
which God wills not to create, none of those worlds lies along any branches
of the time-line of the actual world".69 Aquinas could only say, "There are
possible worlds which God wills not to create." There are no worlds in which
God wills not to create, for if God wills not to create, there is no world and
no time-line. Further, since God is radically other from creation, God is not
in any world. But the thought of Stump and Kretzmann begins not with the
Living God who is other than the world or any possible world, but with conceptions of the divine abstracted from any dependence on revelation and
therefore dependent solely on reasoning for which the world itself must be
the broadest possible horizon.
Barth on Simplicity
If at the beginning of this essay my claim that Barth is the true heir in modern
theology of Thomas's account of divine simplicity seemed dubious, perhaps
by now its pertinence is more evident. The human concept of "the simple"
that Barth derides is far from Aquinas's discussion, and is much closer to the
subject of the investigations of Stump and Kretzmann. While Stump and
Kretzmann claim to continue a tradition that includes Aquinas, their treatment of simplicity differs drastically from his. This is partly due to their
neglect of the church's reflections on the Trinity and the Incarnation that
bring out in all its sharpness the radical distinction between contingent creatures and the Living God on whom they depend.
Unlike Thomas, Barth is not one to leave the precise significance of the
Trinity implicit. He insists that the doctrine of the Trinity must determine a
Christian understanding of divine simplicity. Thus, he attacks those "older"
theologians who treat simplicity at the very beginning of their discussion of
the doctrine of God. The trouble is that by putting simplicity first, they
give the impression that what is argued and considered is the general
idea of an ens vere unum and not the God of the doctrine of the Trinity
and of Christologyalthough this is in flat contradiction to the way in
which this recognition originally forced itself on the Church.70
Barth clearly applies his wariness of human religion to the issue of divine
simplicity. Humans extrapolate from their own composition to an idea of the
uncomposite, and when that idea comes first in the doctrine of God, undisciplined by specifically Christian conceptions of God, the door to idolatry is
opened. The way to close that door is to keep talk of God's simplicity tied
to the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation. The simplicity of God is nothing
other than "the unity of the triune God and of the Son of God with man in
Jesus Christ".71 Barth may have included Thomas among those who had

been misleading about this but, as we have seen, the character of Thomas's
treatment of simplicity is no less conditioned by these confessions.
Precisely because he refuses any human idea of "the simple", Barth
manages to repeat many of the lessons about the distinction between God
and the world that we saw in Thomas. It is exactly this sort of difference
between God and creation that Barth underscores with his talk of God as
"wholly other". In his explication of how it is that we humans participate in
the truth of God's revelation, Barth emphasizes the "general incongruence
between God and man".72 Humans are by nature not fit for the knowledge
of God, and it is this lack of fit that induces awe in the human knower when
she finds herself possessed of knowledge of God. But the incongruity is not
only between human minds and knowledge of God. If Barth left us thinking that the incongruity was only there, we might think it due to the fact that
our minds use words to think and thus are tied to the sensuousness of
human speech, while God is not sensuous, but spiritual. Then we might seek
to overcome the disparity through some process of spiritualization. But this
incongruence, between the sensuous and the spiritual, is not the incongruence between God and the world, for it "exists within the world and can
therefore be overcome within the world".73 The incongruity to which Barth
points is that between the world with all its internal incongruities, on the
one hand, and the God who stands over against the world, on the other. As
Barth says elsewhere, God cannot be compared with any creature, for "God
is an instance outside every genus."74
Not only is the distinction between God and creation radical in a way that
recalls Aquinas but also, like Aquinas, Barth renders God as the ultimately
determinate term in this distinction. It is God whose activity is full and unwithstandable. This unchangeable fullness of action reflects God's simplicity. God's action is crucial for Barth, because given the "otherness" of God,
we need God's action if we are to come to know God. "God is the One whose
being can be investigated only in the form of a continuous question as to His
action."75 And God's action displays the simplicity of God, for in all God
does, God is "wholly and undividedly Himself".76 Because of the lack of division or contradiction within God, nothing can contradict or withstand God's
action. Thus, in the incongruity between God and creation, it is God who is
determinate and un-contradictable. The world is incongruous with God
insofar as it is determinable and contradictable by God. It is the world which
cannot withstand God, and not vice versa.
Characteristically, Barth draws out the importance of this fullness of
God's activity through reflection on how we are able to know God. Of
course, the world cannot by its nature know God or lift itself up to God.
But God's activity is so determinate that it is not confined to some divine
realm on the far side of the discontinuity between God and creation. Rather,
God's activity can even make us know what we are not fit to know. Indeed,
although human knowledge works through created objects, such as signs

and concepts, and God is no object, God in fact deigns to make Godself an
object to be known by humans. That we may really know God, God
becomes a real object, like other objects of our consideration and conception. Yet even here, when it seems that we have found God within the
created world, God distinguishes Godself. The same human activity of
knowing happens, but it happens in a different way, by the "union of man
with God". So this is special knowledge, and though God has become an
object for us, God is not "considered and conceived as one in a series of like
objects".77 The distinction that remains corresponds to the veiling in every
act of revelation, a veiling that requires our language about God to be analogical.78 Even the mode of our knowledge of God, then, teaches us that God
is not a fixture among the world's furnishings, and that for our knowledge
of God we are constantly at the mercy of the un-contradictable activity of
this "wholly other".
This dependence on the determinate activity of God is not only epistemologica!, but also ontological. The event of revelation binds us to God with
clarity and certainty. So clear and certain is this binding that "our own existence stands or falls with the existence of God. In the light of the existence
of God it is lessinfinitely lessclear and certain to us than His existence."79
This binding of our existence to God's more certain existence points to the
notion that whatever certainty our existence has, it has by participation in
God. God is the one who truly exists; we (and indeed the whole universe)
exist only secondarily, as it were by participation. As Barth says in his discussion of God's eternity, our time is "not merely apparent but real time"
only because it is really in God's hands.80
The incongruity between God and creation goes even further, in a way
that again echoes Aquinas. Not only does creation utterly depend on God's
determinate activity, but also that activity is so full and free that God has no
need of creation in order to be God. We have seen that for Barth God is fully
Godself in God's actions. But that does not mean that God is not God without
the particular action of allowing creatures a participation in time and existence. It is true that God's unchanging action is at the "very deepest depths
(of) God's Godhead",81 and that that action is the love that reaches out in fellowship. But that love needs no object outside God.82 Indeed, already in
Godself God "has that which He seeks and creates between Himself and
us".83 That is why God can truly do without creation:
He is the same even in Himself, even before and after and over His
works, and without them. They are bound to Him, but He is not bound
to them. They are nothing without Him. But He is who He is without
them.84
Further, God's Life is so full and free that although God can do without
creation, God does not need to do without it to be who God is. Barth claims
that what is most revealing of God's freedom is the freedom God has not to

be bound by that freedom. God is free "not to surrender Himself to it, but
to use it to give Himself to this communion (with the creation) and to practice this faithfulness in it, in this way being really free, free in Himself".85
Barth characteristically links this assertion to the Trinity, for God's activity
of reaching out in loving fellowship is already fulfilled in Godself, with or
without creation.86 So God's creating and loving of the world fits the character of God's activity, but is not the necessary upshot of that activity. God's
freedom, in God's simplicity, to be for the universe or to do without it shows
the radical contingency of it. In light of this understanding of the relation
between God and creation, divine simplicity is seen to entail both that God
is simply and wholly "other" from the world and that God, in God's uncontradictable activity, is the simply unchangeable and determinate one
on whom the complex but fragile universe depends. In comparison with
the opposition between freedom and simplicity that we saw in Stump and
Kretzmann, a much more "Thomistic" position is articulated by Barth when
he asserts that "God's freedom and therefore His simplicity are the freedom
and simplicity of His love".87
And of course, Barth is not reticent about showing the importance of the
Incarnation for his understanding. Thus, the same lessons we saw in Thomas
about how the Incarnation manifests that radical otherness of a God who
could join creation in such union while remaining God appear as well in
Barth. In that union of God and creature, "God does not cease for a moment
or in any regard to be the one, true God".88 If such a distinction can remain
even in the union of God and creature, God must be radically different
from us. God is so different from us even to be capable of this "inconceivable act".
The inconceivable fact in it is that without ceasing to be God the Word
of God is among us in such a way that He takes over human being,
which is His creature, into His own being and to that extent makes it His
own being. As His own predicate along with His original predicate of
divinity, He takes over human being into unity with Himself
It is not
the act of the human being and nature. How can it be capable of such
an act?89
If God is able to overcome the discontinuity in such a way as to leave it intact,
an overcoming that is inconceivable to us, the difference between God and
creatures must be greater than we could have previously thought. Indeed,
instead of God standing on the far side of a chasm running through the order
of being, the Incarnation suggests that God is somehow other than the whole
order of being itself, capable of presence in that order in such a way that no
corresponding absence of created being is required.90
Barth's concurrence with Thomas on these issues is nicely captured in a
comment he makes about Thomas's notion of actus purus. He notes the idea
with approval, even intensifying it to actus purissimus,91 and he suggests that

what Thomas means by it is finally this: "Life is in the highest degree properly in God."92 As Barth emphasizes, the focus of the divine simplicity is on
God as the Living One, as the one who possesses life to the fullest. It is God
who is Life in Godself, fully and completely, with or without creatures. It is
God who lives, totally independent of the world, but who is free to create
the world, granting it a share of life. It is the completeness and full actuality of this Life that is the divine simplicity.
Conclusion
I have sought to suggest that standard assumptions about the traditional
doctrine of simplicity, assumptions reflected in the notion of simplicity discussed by Stump and Kretzmann, fail to do justice to the role of simplicity
in the thought of Aquinas. While the common concept of simplicity is typically understood to be Thomas's concept as well, that common concept as
presented by Stump and Kretzmann is marked especially by an innocence
of the full implications of the creature-Creator distinction, implications that
simplicity for Aquinas is supposed to protect. Abstracting from the Christian sources and doctrines that stand behind Thomas's teaching on simplicity, they end up describing not the Living God but a divine being who seems
really like a very strange human being.
Aquinas's view is unlike Stump and Kretzmann's exactly because it bears
the marks of the early church's investigation into the Trinity and Incarnation. That is why it is not surprising that it bears such similarity to Barth's
view, and that is why theologians who dismiss simplicity out of hand would
do well to take another look. The view of simplicity outlined here is not only
a useful tool for the theologian. It is crucial for conforming our speech about
God to what we learn about God and the world from reflection on the Trinity
and Incarnation. The simple God is radically otherso other that the greatest intimacy with the creature is possibleand determinately Livingso
determinate that creation must be a radically free and gratuitous act. That
fully actual, free, and unchanging Life just is God's simplicity, and that is
why simplicity is such a crucial aspect of a fully Christian account of God.93
NOTES
1 Robert Jenson, "The Triune God/' in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Robert Jenson and Carl
Braaten, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), Vol. 1, p. 166.
2 See, for example, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, "Absolute Simplicity", Faith
and Philosophy Vol. 2 (1985), pp. 353-382; and W. E Vallicella, "Divine Simplicity: A New
Defense", Faith and Philosophy Vol. 9 (1992), pp. 508-525.
3 Katherin Rogers attests that among the religious philosophers, Stump and Kretzmann
"do offer the correct analysis of the traditional view of divine simplicity". Katherin Rogers,
"The Traditional Doctrine of Divine Simplicity", Religious Studies Vol. 32 (1996), pp. 165186.
4 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 11/\ (New York: Scribner's, 1957), p. 329. Hereafter referenced
as CD.
5 Stephen R. Holmes, " 'Something Much Too Plain to Sa/: Towards a Defence of the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity", Neue Zeitschrift r Systematische Theologie Vol. 43 Bd. S (2001),
pp. 137-154.
6 Ibid., p. 154.
7 Ibid.,p.l52.
8 Ibid., p. 138.
9 CD /1, p. 447.
10 Josef Pieper anticipated some of these themes in Philosophia negativa: zwei Versuche ber
Thomas von Aquin (Munich: Ksel-Verlag, 1953). Other important texts include Victor
Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princet
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); and Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
11 Preller, Divine Science, p. 180.
12 Herbert McCabe, O. P., "Aquinas on the Trinity", New Blackfriars Vol. 80 (1999), pp. 268-283,
here p. 269. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 113.7; 3.5; 6.2 ad 3.
13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I 3.4. Passages from the Summa Theologiae are taken
from the translation by the English Dominican Fathers. Hereafter referenced as ST.
14 David Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN
University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), p. 45.
15 Carlo Leget, Living with God: Thomas Aquinas on the Relation between Life on Earth and "L
after Death (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), p. 34.
16 For this way of describing Thomas's teaching, I am indebted to Herbert McCabe, "Aquinas
on the Trinity", p. 272.
17 ST I 4.1.
18 STI 9.1.
19 ST I 3.4.
20 ST I 3.4 adi.
21 STI 44.1.
22 ST I 9.1.
23 ST I 9.2.
24 ST 119.2 ad 2.
25 See, for example, Gregory of Nyssa, "On 'Not Three Gods' ", trans. William Moore and
Henry Austin Wilson, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, reprint 1976), Vol. V, pp. 331-336.
26 ST I 28.2, sed contra.
27 ST 132.1 ad 3. For more on Trinity and creation in Thomas, see Gilles Emery, O. P., Trinity
in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003).
28 Sril9.2.
29 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super IV libros Sententiarum, I, d. 2, q. 1, a. 4, sed contra, quoted
in Norman Kretzmann, "Goodness, Knowledge, and Indeterminacy in the Philosophy of
Thomas Aquinas", The Journal of Philosophy Vol. 80 (1983), pp. 631-649, here p. 634.
30 ST I 27.3.
31 Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason, p. 37.
32 Henk J. M. Schoot, Christ the "Name" of God: Thomas Aquinas on naming Christ (Leuven:
Peeters, 1993). See also the very helpful article by Michael J. Dodds, O. P., "Ultimacy and
Intimacy: Aquinas on the Relation between God and the World", in Ordo Sapientiae et
Amoris, ed. Carlos-Josaphat Pinto de Oliveira, O. P. (Fribourg: ditions Universitaires,
1993), pp. 211-227.
33 The coincidence of intimacy and otherness, of immanence and transcendence, is nicely
traced by Kathryn Tanner in God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empower
ment? (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988).
34 Stump and Kretzmann have co-authored other things since this article in 1985, but this is
their definitive statement on simplicity. Further, a perusal of their more recent work shows
that the issues I address here largely apply to their later work as well. I will, on occasion,
refer to such later work to clarify their position.
35 Stump and Kretzmann, p. 362.
36 Ibid., p. 353.

37 This lacuna relates to a misunderstanding of the nature of "activity". On God's intending
of the world as a sort of practical reasoning, see Thomas S. Hibbs, Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom,
Prudence, and the Human Good (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), p. 24.
38 Stump and Kretzmann, p. 355.
39 Ibid., p. 357.
40 Among the many important works on analogy, let me mention Gregory P. Rocca, O.P.,
Speaking the Incomprehensible God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1994).
41 Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra
gentiles I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), esp. pp. 147-157.
42 For more on the difference between Kretzmann's theism and Thomas's, see Thomas S.
Hibbs, "Kretzmann's Theism vs. Aquinas's Theism: Interpreting the Summa Contra Gen
tiles", The Thomist Vol. 62 (1998), pp. 603-622.
43 ST 113.4.
44 ST 113.5.
45 ST 113.6.
46 ST 113.2.
47 ST 113.5.
48 Leget, Living with God, p. 39.
49 In footnote 9, Stump and Kretzmann acknowledge that power is predicated differently of
God than of creatures (p. 379). But they clearly do not apprehend this difference in the
radical way Thomas does. In fact, their clarifying example seems to indicate only a differ
ence of the means by which this power is exercised. In short, they seem to proceed in a
thoroughly univocal manner when predicating "power" of God and of humans.
50 For them the problem of God's freedom to create is "the hardest of the problems for the
doctrine of simplicity". Stump and Kretzmann, p. 367.
51 ST 110.1, 2. On immutability interpreted in terms of pure actuality, see Leget, Living with
God, p. 42.
52 ST 110.2 ad 4.
53 ST 110.2 ad 3.
54 Thomas's view of eternity is not dissimilar to Barth's view. For Barth also, we learn about
eternity not by abstracting from time, but by gaining knowledge of God (CD II/l, p. 609).
Eternity is not a prison, nor does it keep God alienated from time (Ibid., p. 610). Rather, eter
nity is predicated of God exactly because God is so fully actual that no time is only poten
tial to God. God holds all times together. Indeed, eternity includes all of being (Ibid.).
Regarding how eternity is seen in terms of God's full actuality and how it points to the radical
distinction between God and creatures, Aquinas and Barth are quite close, although Aquinas
does not seem to invoke Trinitarian modes of thought to clarify eternity, as Barth does. Cf.
George Hunsinger, "Mysterium Trinitatis: Karl Barth's Conception of Eternity", in Disruptive
Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2000), pp. 186-209, and CD II/l, p. 639. It should be noted that Aquinas does not
advocate what Hunsinger calls the nunc starts view of eternity. Cf. ST 110.2 ad 1.
55 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, "Eternity", The Journal of Philosophy Vol. 78 (1981),
pp. 429-458.
56 Ibid., p. 431.
57 Ibid., p. 435.
58 Ibid.,p.U3.
59 Ibid., 39.
60 Humans must do the same, although just how a temporal observer is to observe an event
as eternally present is not explained.
61 Stump and Kretzmann, "Eternity", p. 430.
62 ST 110.2 ad 2.
63 Interestingly, Thomas uses a similar illustration to argue that God's eternal willing of con
tingent things is only suppositional. Cf. ST 119.3 and ad 1.
64 Stump and Kretzmann, "Absolute Simplicity", p. 368.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., p. 372.
67 Ibid., p. 369.
300
Christopher A. Franks
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
Ibid., p. 375.
Ibid., p. 368.
CD II/l, p. 447.
Ibid., p. 446.
Ibid., p. 220.
Ibid., p. 223.
Ibid., p. 447; cf. p. 83.
Ibid., p. 61.
Mi., p. 445.
Ibid., p. 15.
M*., p. 240.
Ibid., p. 39.
M*., pp. 613f.
.,.263.
Ibid., p. 282.
IM., p. 273.
Mi., p. 260.
Jb/d.,p. 303.
Ibid., p. 275.
Ibid.,p.A57.
IM., p. 446.
CD 1/1, pp. 160f.
I owe my understanding of this link between the implications of the Incarnation and the
distinctively Christian view of the distinction between God and creation to Robert
Sokolowski. See his The God of Faith and Reason, especially chap. 4, "The Incarnation and
the Christian Distinction".
91 CD II/l, p. 263.
92 ST 118.3.
93 I would like to express my gratitude to Reinhard Htter for his encouragement and to the
anonymous readers appointed by this journal for their helpful comments.
^ s
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Modem Theology 21:2 April 2005

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

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