On Absolute Divine Simplicity

“The Persons are impotent as Persons; anything they do is done in virtue of their nature which is their real Being”
— Meister Eckhart

What do we refer to when we use the word ‘God’? We simply refer to Being itself, called ousia by the Greeks, and essentia by the Latins, although ousia is the better term, as the Latins let confusions arise between essentia and substantia. In the Nicene Creed, ‘homo-ousion’ is used to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son (and implicitly also the Holy Spirit). Thus we can say that the three Hypostases (Latin: Substances) are identical in Being. The reason that all three the Hypostases are God is because their identity is in Being. It is already implied in ‘Hypostasis’ that it is lower than the Ousia, as ‘hypo’ (‘sub’) means ‘under’ and ‘stasis’ (‘stare’) means to stand. So the Hypostases literally stand under the Ousia, being an ‘expression’ of it. By their nature they therefore are lower than the Ousia, as an expression is always lower than the thing it expresses. To explain this difference, we can, with Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena, and Meister Eckhart, make the distinction between the God and the Godhead.

Now, we can say that God is being, and that the Godhead is beyond being. For in being we already find multiplicity inherent, and thus the God, while simple, is also triple, both ad intra (the Father as origin, Son as receptive, Spirit as procession) and ad extra (the Father as creator, Son as (incarnated) Word in which all is created, Spirit as generator). But the Godhead, being completely beyond being, even so far as being called Nothing, absolutely incomprehensible, must be absolutely simple. For if it were not, we would be able to comprehend it. Because comprehension requires there to be multiplicity (i.e. a knowing subject and a known object), but in the Godhead there is neither subject nor object. In the God there is subject and object (as Saint Augustine describes the Father knowing the Son via the Spirit), but in the Godhead there is not. We can say that even the Godhead might be comprehended, but this comprehension would more accurately be called a pure forgetting, a negation of all expressed knowledge, a return to the purely unexpressed, a cloud of unknowing.

Metaphors of effusion will have to suffice to explain the relationship between the Godhead and God, and the Being and the Persons. The Godhead flows eternally into the Father, the Father as monarch over the other persons lets this power flow into the other Persons. We can continue this effusion as far as we desire, through the hierarchy of angels, the hierarchy of men, the hierarchy of earthly creatures, even (may God smite me if this is blasphemous) through the hierarchy of demons. We could call this the solution to the problem of unity and multiplicity. The cosmogony is one that goes from absolute simplicity to absolute multiplicity. God as dot in the centre diffuses his rays out into the farthest circumferences of the universe, while the Godhead is the invisible, unextended dot at the same centre. God reaches from naught to naught, and everything in between is Him and Not Him still. To quote Eriugena, the being of God is none other than Him moving from Himself by Himself through Himself to Himself for Himself. There is, in reality, none other than God.

Let us take another approach. We say that God is infinite, and a fortiori we say that God is the Infinite itself. What we mean by this is that He is not limited or circumscribed in any way. This is the same as what St John of Damascus affirms in De Fide Orthodoxa: “the Deity alone is uncircumscribed” and also “We, therefore, both know and confess that God is (…) uncircumscribed, infinite.” So let us grant that the God is the Infinite and completely uncircumscribed. If we then were to say that God is not absolutely simple, i.e. if we were to allow any hint of multiplicity within God, there would arise a contradiction. For every multiplicity is a finitude, every determination a negation. But allowing any finitude into the Infinite, or allowing any negation into Being, would be completely absurd. There can thus ultimately be no multiplicity in the Godhead, and thus we must call it absolutely simple. Of course, as said above, we must allow multiplicity into the God, for we affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as much as we affirm the doctrine of Divine simplicity. We merely need to realise the distinction between the Godhead (absolutely simple) and the God (relatively simple), and then it will be clear to us that there is no contradiction between the two doctrines.

St John of Damascus also tells us that in God “the community and unity are observed in fact” while “it is by thought that the difference (in God) is perceived”. So it is once more exposed that there is a conceptual distinction between the properties of the Persons and the Divine Being, but that in fact there is absolute unity.

We can even say that all kataphatic theology speaks of God, and all apophatic theology speaks of the Godhead. For positive qualities (Being (existence), Light, etc) can only be attributed to that which is comprehensible and has distinction, while negative qualities (Non-Being (Beyond-Being), Darkness (Beyond-Light), etc) can be attributed only to that which is incomprehensible and completely indistinct.

To recapitulate, we have come to the conclusion that there is a conceptual distinction between the Godhead and the God, and that the first is absolutely simple, while the second is simple, but not absolutely, as it ‘contains’ multiplicity and distinction (i.e. the Trinity). We have seen that this is the case by a few ways.
Firstly we have seen the history of the concepts used to formulate doctrine about the Deity and how they (implicitly and explicitly) make the distinction between the God and the Godhead (i.e. ousia, hypostasis).
Secondly we have seen that if the Godhead were not absolutely simple, it would be comprehensible, which is contrary to right doctrine. In this same point we saw that because the God is comprehensible (because of the doctrine of the Trinity (recall John of Damascus saying ‘we both know and confess’)), there must be a distinction between God and Godhead, as otherwise there would be a contradiction.
Thirdly we have seen that Nature (in the widest sense of the word) must reach from absolute Unity to absolute multiplicity, and that thus the Godhead must be absolutely simple, because otherwise the universal effusion would start from a multiplicity, which would be absurd. We saw that this is not only true for the creation of the world, but also for the ontological “coming into being” of the Hypostases of the Trinity.
Fourthly we saw that because God is the Infinite, there can ultimately be no multiplicity in Him, because every multiplicity and distinction results in a finitude, and allowing the finite into the Infinite would be absurd. Thus once more we concluded that there is a complete absence of multiplicity in the Godhead, i.e. that it is absolutely simple. It was then explained how there is multiplicity in the God, so that there arises no contradiction between the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity and the doctrine of the Trinity.
Fifthly it was shown by the word of St John of Damascus that the distinction between God and Godhead is a conceptual one, lest anyone accuse us of introducing a real duality by making this distinction.
Lastly it was shown that even the two forms of theology implicitly contain the distinction between God and Godhead, and that their methods only make sense when the first is seen as relatively simple and the second is seen as absolutely simple.

Here ends our short theoretical exposition on Absolute Divine Simplicity, but let us remember that theory is mere preparation. For this theory is worth nothing if we do not put it into practice. Let us then focus our entire being into the effort to achieve (absolute) unity with God, and may this theory help us not to be led astray on the path to Him.

P.S.
Lest anyone accuse us of ‘pantheism’, let us clear up our opinion of this. ‘Pantheism’ is used to describe a doctrine which declares that God is identical with Nature, which as a consequence is implicitly atheistic as it denies the transcendence of God. Now, we find this doctrine to be completely erroneous, and what we say has nothing in accord with this. A modern term for our position would be ‘Panentheism’, which holds that Nature is an expression (or effusion) of God, but in reality there is no need for this modern term, as there really is no other proper form of ‘Theism’.