Origen and the Emergence of Divine Simplicity before Nicaea

One of the significant implications of Newman’s Arians is that “a sound dogmatic theology depends on honest doctrinal history.” Contemporary scholars have echoed this predicament. Khaled Anatolios has argued that the historical development of Trinitarian theology is key to its intelligibility. The far-reaching implication of this claim is that doctrinal history is indispensable for understanding the meaning of doctrine. This book has sought to contribute to this enterprise of connecting doctrinal history and theological understanding. The upshot for contemporary theology is that pure doctrinal analysis of divine simplicity apart from historical understanding, whether theological or philosophical, is fraud with danger. Throughout I have hinted at a number of ways that illustrate this danger. The task remains, however, for systematic and philosophical theologians to think through the implications of the fresh issues and nuances of divine simplicity arising from ante-Nicene doctrinal history set out in the preceding pages. In particular, the distinctive ante-Nicene developments I have charted have significant ramifications on two central issues that have animated the crisis of divine simplicity in modern theology. The first concerns how divine simplicity should be understood; the second, the compatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology.

First, this book has clarified that the understanding of divine simplicity operative in modern systematic and philosophical theology is overly narrowed. The definition of divine simplicity is often spelled out metaphysically but what is missed is that ethical considerations were also central to the ancient philosophical and early Christian accounts of divine simplicity. What I have uncovered, through narrating the philosophical developments from Plato to Origen, is that the intelligibility of the doctrine rests significantly on the integrity of the deep interconnection between the metaphysical and the ethical. This, in turn, grants the possibility of a much richer definition of divine simplicity. Divine simplicity not only implies that God is partless and without composition. First and foremost – if the Republic is to be granted as the locus classicus – divine simplicity refers to God’s perfect self-consistency. It is for the purpose of safeguarding this perfect goodness of God that Middle-Platonists and early Christians affirmed the absence of multiplicity in God. When read in light of the Platonic theory of forms, these affirmations are statements of the total absence of contraries in God. What the doctrine of divine simplicity intends to rule out then are only multiplicities that would violate the perfect self-consistency of God. A simple God may not possess goodness and justice as opposing aspects – in this sense they are one and the same. Understood this way, it becomes difficult to imagine divine simplicity as a doctrine that obviously leads to conflict with divine freedom or violates the integrity of God’s distinctive acts in salvation history. Thus, the puzzlement regarding the simplicity in the modern crisis may have resulted from an overly accentuated disjunction between metaphysical and ethical doctrines of God. Further, it will be fruitful to rethink whether the seeds for a theologically rich doctrine of divine simplicity were already be hidden in the Platonic frameworks inherited by early Christian theologians. Along these lines, further explorations on divine simplicity as a metaphysical-ethical synthesis promise to advance contemporary debates, especially for reinstating the theological integrity of divine simplicity in modern theology. For a starting point, this book recommends no better place to look than Origen’s understanding of divine simplicity spelled out in chapter five.

This book has also highlighted further issues regarding the intuition central to the modern crisis, namely, that there is an incompatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. By charting the distinctive shape of the ante-Nicene Trinitarian problematic, I have clarified why patristic theologians hardly ever noticed the logical incompatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. In light of the ante-Nicene sources, it becomes clear that it is too simplistic to suppose that divine simplicity collapses into Monarchianism. Divine simplicity does not entail this position, at least not in any obvious sense, because the historical Monarchian position was not simply treated as a thesis about logical identity. Thus, the analysis underlying the “logical problem” frequently offered by modern philosophers today makes little sense for patristic theologians who had the historical form of Monarchianism in mind. Moreover, for the purpose of constructive theology, it will be fruitful to attend to a different theological issue that was indeed noticed by patristic theologians concerning the implication of divine simplicity for Trinitarian theology: how do we conceive of the generation of the Son while safeguarding the simplicity of God the Father, the generator? As I have argued, this was the theological location where early Christian theologians first recognized a potential incompatibility between divine simplicity and the anti-Monarchian emphasis on the Father-Son distinction. This issue may turn out to be a fruitful site for contemporary theological and philosophical reflections. This book thus challenges the commonplace intuition that divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology are logically incompatible; in fact, historically, divine simplicity played an indispensable role in shaping Trinitarian reflections in the ante-Nicene period.

(excerpted from epilogue)