St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of divine simplicity has been a cause of substantial debate among philosophers. While some uphold it as a central, pivotal doctrine within a robust understanding of God, others consider it logically incoherent or necessarily generative of other undesirable theological outcomes. I argue that this doctrine is logically coherent and legitimate in its portrayal of God. What is needed to support this doctrine is an understanding of God’s attributes not merely as properties, but rather as dimensions (or facets) of his nature.
Understanding the Doctrine
Prior to a discussion of the merits and weaknesses of the doctrine of divine simplicity, it will be necessary to consider what this doctrine is in a Thomist framework. A few key ideas arise in summary of this doctrine. First, God (unlike other beings) is “identical with his essence or nature.”1 Most beings are defined by their form (e.g., “human”) and differentiated from each other by their matter (e.g., Fred’s body is not Jane’s body). But since God is immaterial, he has no matter which could differentiate him from any other individual, meaning that he is his own form and his own nature.2 Furthermore, “what subsists in God is God’s existence,” such that that God’s existence is his essence.3 Existing is intrinsic to who God is; he could not possibly fail to exist. It is thus necessary that God exist and that he exist as he is.
Moreover, God is pure substance, such that “there cannot be any accidents in God.”4 Many aspects of any given human are accidental (i.e., nonessential and therefore changeable), such that Fred could (for instance) change his hair color while remaining entirely himself. But this is not true of God. Every dimension, aspect, and attribute of God is essential to him, such that no aspect of him could be altered without changing his nature. If God ceased to be (for example) good, he would cease to be God.
At the foundation of these ideas is the belief that “God is in no way composite, but is instead absolutely simple.”5 God is not the sum of a list of characteristics, nor is he a collection or composition of various parts. Rather, God is fully simple, such that anything which can be said of him can be said of his whole being. As such, God’s relationship with his attributes is not merely one of possession, since possessed attributes could be accidental. God does not have attributes; he is his attributes. In other words, he is “goodness itself, and not only good;”6 he is love itself, and not only loving; he is justice itself, and not only just. The same can be said of all his other attributes. God’s attributes are who he is.
These ideas are more explicit in Anselm’s writing, as Anselm says that God’s attributes “are not parts of [God], but all are one and each one of them is wholly what [God is] and what all the others are.”7 For an attribute like justice, then, it should be clear that “‘being justice’ expresses what [God] is (and not a quality).”8 God’s attributes are not mere adjectival descriptions of what God is like; rather, they are nominal declarations of who God inherently, essentially is.
It is worth considering why this doctrine should be sufficiently significant for Aquinas to intentionally articulate and defend it. Alvin Plantinga answers that Aquinas’ principal reason for articulating this doctrine “is that it seems implied by God’s sovereignty and aseity.”9 Aquinas himself argues that “[e] very good thing, that is not its own goodness, is called good by participation,” such that it “presupposes something else before itself” which gave it its goodness.10 But since “[t]his process cannot go to infinity,” there must be “some first good thing, which is … good by its own essence; and that is God.”11 Thus God, being good in himself, cannot be dependent on any other source or existence of goodness outside himself. If God himself were not goodness itself, he would be participating in some way in goodness outside himself, such that he would be dependent on it for his being.
Plantinga observes that if goodness were extrinsic to God, the nature of his dependence upon it would be twofold. First, if such properties as wisdom and goodness “[were] essential to [God]” (as Aquinas claims they are) while remaining extrinsic to him, then they would precede him in existence, so that “he would not have existed if they had not.”12 This would render God’s existence dependent upon properties outside God, which is unacceptable if he is to be independent. Second, if such properties as wisdom and goodness were extrinsic to God rather than intrinsic, “God would be dependent on these properties for his character.”13 Like the first consideration, this should be a serious concern for the theist who understands God to be wholly independent. Yet it should also catch the attention of those who would say that God is the source of all goodness. If properties like goodness and wisdom were extrinsic to God, he would not be their source, such that true goodness apart from God would be attainable. But if “God is the good of every good”14 as Aquinas says, then it cannot be possible for goodness to exist apart from God, such that God must be goodness. As such, the doctrine of divine simplicity seems necessary for one wishing to claim that there is no goodness apart from God.
Equating God’s Attributes
Yet this doctrine raises some logical questions which merit further consideration. One concern which Plantinga (among others) raises is that in claiming God to be God’s attributes, one seemingly equates those attributes to each other. For “if God = Justice … and God = Wisdom, then … Justice = Wisdom,”15 such that “properties [which] we know to be distinct” become equivalent under this doctrine.16 Much as Anselm is comfortable saying that “each one of [God’s attributes] is wholly…what all the others are,”17 Plantinga hesitates to concur. He believes that God being his attributes (or “properties,” to use Plantinga’s term) would render those properties identical with one another, so that God would have only “one property” rather than many.18 This conclusion appears unacceptable to Plantinga, since God has (for example) “both power and mercifulness.”19 Since such properties are clearly distinct from one another as well as from God’s other properties (love, justice, wisdom, etc.), it must be false that God is his properties.
In response to these considerations, William Mann draws a thread out of Plantinga’s discussion in order to suggest that there is still coherence in the doctrine. He observes that “Aquinas routinely does not say, e.g., that God is Goodness. He says rather that God is his goodness.”20 Based on this distinction, Mann claims it is unnecessary to conclude from Aquinas’ doctrine that (for instance) justice must equate to wisdom. All that must be said is that God’s justice equates to God’s wisdom.21 Such a statement may still be mysterious, but it at least has a better chance at logical viability than an assertion that justice and wisdom are fundamentally the same.
Yet Mann’s solution is problematic in that it creates a fundamental separation between divine attributes and human attributes, thereby precluding genuine human participation in God. If “everything other than God is good by participation”22 in God, then there must be continuity between divine goodness and human goodness, such that human goodness could constitute participation in God. Of course, God’s goodness obliterates the confines of human goodness, since “there is nothing in God that is not the divine being itself,”23 and no human goodness can be the divine being. But while humans cannot replicate God’s perfection, they can still share and reflect a finite portion of his infinite goodness, so that human goodness necessarily “has a certain likeness of the divine goodness.”24 Likewise, “in so far as we are wise, we imitate to some extent the power [of wisdom] by which [God] makes us wise.”25 The same can be said of all human attributes which reflect God, because God is the definition of those attributes which are his.
To suggest fundamentally that God is not goodness in general, but rather his goodness in particular, is to say that goodness as a general property should be understood separately from God. If this is so, then human goodness is not direct participation in God; at best, it is participation in a substance somewhat analogous to God or somewhat like God in resemblance. As such, if the doctrine of divine simplicity is true, and if humans can participate directly in God and in his goodness, it must be the case that God is not merely his attributes. Rather, God is the complete fullness of those attributes which are relevant to him. But this reintroduces the question of how God might be his attributes if those attributes are clearly distinct from one another rather than identical. I will return to this question later.
The Nature of God’s Personhood
Aside from a concern about God having only one property, Plantinga’s greater concern with the doctrine of divine simplicity is that “if God is identical with each of his properties, then, since each of his properties is a property, he is a property.”26 This is problematic for Plantinga because “[n]o property could have created the world,” nor could a property “be omniscient, or, indeed, know anything at all.”27 God being a property would appear to mean that God “isn’t a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, love, or life.”28 This would certainly be an unsettling picture for a theist wishing to know and love a personal, creative, loving God.
Given these troubles, philosophers who would simultaneously uphold God’s simplicity and his personhood have offered two kinds of arguments against Plantinga. One line of argumentation is to propose alternate classifications by which God’s attributes might be identified, such that God could thus be identified (by extension, through his attributes) according to a suitable alternate category. The other option is to challenge Plantinga’s underlying assumption that if God’s attributes are X-classification, and if God is his attributes, then God must also be X-classification. Ultimately, this second line of argumentation yields a far stronger defense of God’s simplicity, but the first still deserves consideration on its own terms.
Classifying God’s Attributes
Mann’s understanding of God reinserts itself here, as Mann believes God’s attributes should be considered “property instances” rather than properties.29 What characterizes a property instance for Mann is that in order to exist, “it must be actual: some existing thing must either exemplify it or be it.”30 To illustrate this idea, Mann argues that “‘[t]he wisdom of God’… refers to one particular instance of wisdom, albeit a very impressive one.”31 Rather than being an abstract property in himself, God is an instance of those properties which apply to him. (Note that this returns to the problematic idea that God is specifically his attributes in the particular, not just his attributes in the universal.) More importantly, God is a person, as property instances can be persons.32 As such, Mann argues, God is both simple and personal, for as a property instance he “ha[s] spatial and temporal location.”33
Yet in identifying God as a property instance, Mann contradicts Aquinas’ assertion that “nothing is prior to God, either in reality or in understanding.”34 If nothing is prior to God, then God is not dependent on anything. But if God is a property instance, such that “‘[t]he wisdom of God’… refers to one particular instance of wisdom,”35 then wisdom is a property extrinsic to God, of which God is not the source. This notion “violates God’s absolute aseity or independence, since it conceives of God as instantiating properties and thus as dependent upon them.”36 God is no longer the source and foundation of all being and all goodness; these exist apart from him in some capacity, and he relies upon them to give him his nature. A theist wishing to consider God independent therefore cannot conceive of God as a property instance.
One might then consider Plantinga’s portrayal of God’s attributes as states of affairs, such that one could speak of God “being wise and having life.”37 The advantage here, according to Plantinga, is that God’s various characteristics could plausibly be identical if they existed as states of affairs rather than properties. One could not claim that “wisdom and power are the very same property;”38 but one might claim that “God’s being wise is the same state of affairs as God’s being powerful.”39 Ultimately, Plantinga rejects this view because it indicates that “God is a state of affairs,”40 which again renders him impersonal. In this case, his position is defensible; it is hard to imagine how a state of affairs could ever encapsulate all who God is.
A third option might be to follow Brian Leftow in rejecting Plantinga’s assumption that God’s attributes being properties necessarily renders God impersonal. Leftow implicitly accepts Plantinga’s argument that God’s attributes are properties and that God must be a property if he is his attributes. But Leftow cautions that “Plantinga’s move from God’s identity with a property to God’s not being a person is a bit fast.”41 If God’s nature is a property, and therefore abstract, it might seem difficult to claim God is personal if he is his nature. But perhaps “the claim God = God’s nature could inform us that that which is identical with God’s nature exemplifies no attributes previously associated with God’s nature.”42 In other words, a new understanding of God’s nature is in order. One might say (in line with Plantinga) that if God is God’s nature, and God’s nature is abstract, then God must be abstract; but one could say just as easily that if God is God’s nature, and God is a person, then God’s nature is personal. If God is God’s nature, there is no specific reason to transfer presumed attributes of God’s nature onto God when one might instead understand God’s nature in light of certain known characteristics of God. Given a deeply personal God, it would make sense to say that God’s nature is personal (rather than abstract), so that God being his nature would naturally entail God being personal.
Of the aforementioned attempts to classify God’s attributes and thereby identify God’s nature, Leftow’s is certainly strongest. Yet Leftow falters slightly in failing to challenge Plantinga’s assumption that God must be a property if he is his attributes and if his attributes are properties. His argument that God might be both a property and a person is admirable, but what is ultimately necessary in this discussion is an understanding that God, far from being a property, cannot be confined to any single genus.
God Beyond Genus
Each proposed solution to Plantinga’s worry about God being a property has assumed that if all God’s attributes are X-classification, and if God is his attributes, then God also must be X-classification. But this assumption fails to account for Aquinas’ insistence that “God is not contained in any genus as his principle.”43 God cannot be any X-classification, whether X be a property instance or a state of affairs or anything else, because no genus can account for who God is. It is therefore short-sighted to assume that a proper classification of God’s attributes will suffice for a classification of God, since God cannot be classified.
For further insight in this matter, it will be helpful to consider Eleonore Stump’s articulation of quantum theology. The crux of her argument is that just as physicists classify light as both a wave and a particle to accommodate their incomplete understanding of the essence of light, so too theologians and philosophers should understand God to be both esse and id quod est — both “being” itself and a concrete particular.44 Humans cannot comprehend how God could simultaneously be existence and a person, but this need not prevent God from being both of those things (or encompassing the traits of both classifications). Rather, the conclusion to draw is that the true essence of God is beyond human comprehension,45 just as the true nature of light is beyond human comprehension. Most truly, God “is neither an abstract universal nor a concrete particular,”46 but some entity exploding and surpassing these finite categories.
Given this, it seems appropriate to return to an understanding of God’s attributes as properties or characteristics. But this must be a conditional return, with the condition being a more expansive view of who and how God is. Although Plantinga is adamant that God being his properties must render God a property, and although he insists that a property cannot be a person, these assertions are narrow-minded. God’s attributes might be properties of a sort, insofar as they are identifiable characteristics of him (though they are also more than properties, as will become clear in later discussion of God’s oneness). But this should hardly require that God be a property. Rather, “what subsists in God is God’s existence,”47 such that the properties who God collectively is are more completely understood as his being than as a property. Thus, to say that God is his properties is not to say that God is a property. Instead, God’s properties are subsumed in God’s existence. God himself is his own existence,48 and he is his properties, such that his properties are his being. As Leftow observes, it is unnecessary to assume that God’s nature being expressed in properties must make God abstract if God is his nature. Instead, there is space to reimagine how God’s nature might be if God is his nature. Far from being abstract, God’s nature is deeply, profoundly personal.
“Though God’s attributes are partially visible in his creatures, the fullness of these attributes’ perfection can be found only in God himself, who is their source.”
This perspective also follows Nicholas Wolterstorff, who endeavors to show that the source of contemporary confusion about the doctrine of divine simplicity is contemporary use of a “very different ontological style” than the one Aquinas presupposes.49 Wolterstorff suggests that in medieval philosophical understanding, “[t]he nature of an entity … is what-it-is-as-such.”50 An entity’s nature is not something it has, like a property, but rather something it concretely is, so that “[i]f an entity is something as such, then it is a certain nature.”51 While contemporary philosophy understands a nature to be “an abstract entity” comprised of “certain properties or sets of properties,” a medieval ontological framework understands “an essence or nature [to be] just as concrete as that of which it is the nature.”52 For God to simultaneously be his nature and be a person is nothing remarkable within medieval understanding, since “everything is a certain something-as-such” — that is, a certain nature.53 Thus, even a human is a certain nature: human. Of course, a human does not consist solely of that nature which she shares with all humans. Rather, she is a composite creature, comprised of her nature and other constituents. She is distinguishable from other humans by her individual matter (that is, her body) and evidently by other immaterial qualities like her own conscience. Nonetheless, she intrinsically is her nature; likewise, God is his nature. But because God shares his nature with no one, he needs no additional constituents to distinguish him from other beings. He is simply, comprehensively, and solely his nature — nothing more or less than the fullness of who he is. Though God is his nature, this does not threaten his personhood, for his nature is intrinsically personal.
As such, God being his attributes need not preclude God being a person. He is being, and he is a person. He is both abstract and concrete, obliterating any finite, comprehensible category in which the human mind might try to contain him. He is far beyond what any human could ever conceive or dream. In short, he is God.
The Oneness of God
That said, if God’s attributes are properties (of a sort), and if God is all his attributes, it still remains to be seen how one should address the seemingly necessary conclusion that God’s attributes are all identical with one another. It is clear that God is both wise and just; it is less clear how wisdom and justice could possibly be the same thing. In answering this quandary, it will be necessary first to evaluate the place in which one begins the conversation. Much of the literature up to this point has conducted the conversation by beginning from an idea of what attributes are and progressing to consider whether the proposed definitions could apply to God. This is understandable, since attributes generally seem like more finite, manageable, comprehensible topics of discussion than does the nature of a divine, infinite being.
Yet such a conversational method has its limits. If God is “the first efficient cause”54 of all reality, then he is the source and definition of everything — including his attributes. Rather than identifying God’s attributes and then deciding whether they could possibly be synonymous with God, it is far more useful to consider God first on his own terms and then seek to understand his attributes in the context of his being. Jeffrey Brower makes this point when he identifies God’s attributes as “truthmakers,” saying that they “necessitat[e] (in a certain way) the truth of the predications [they] mak[e] true.”55 In other words, “[i]f an entity E is a truthmaker for a predication P, then E is necessarily (or essentially) such that P.”56 One can say that God is good not because goodness as an independent category can be equated to God, but rather because God’s goodness in itself grounds the truth that God is good — God, who is goodness, grounds the truth that God is good. The phrase “is good” would have no meaning in the first place apart from the existence of God.
Thus, it is because God exists that his attributes exist. God is the source and foundation of those attributes which can be said of him. By way of analogy, to say that “A is red” is not to say that “there is a property of redness” which exists outside the total collection of all those things which are red.57 Redness exists as a category because there are red things; if nothing in the world had ever been red, there would be neither any concept nor any existence of redness. Likewise, goodness exists as a category because there are good things, including and especially God, who is the source of every good thing. This is why Aquinas says that “the reality in the names said of God and other things belongs by priority in God according to his mode of being.”58 First, God exists and is good and wise and every other attribute which is true of him; subsequently, humans can know and identify God’s attributes in reference to who God is.
As such, God should not be defined or evaluated in terms of his relationship with (for example) wisdom or justice; rather, wisdom and justice can only exist and find their definition and coherence within a broader framework of God’s existence and essence. This is not to say exactly that an atheist could have no concept of wisdom or justice, since even those who profess disbelief in God can glimpse him in creation.59 Imperfect, finite reflections of God’s attributes are visible in the people God made in his likeness and in the world he called good. But it would be a mistake to assume that humans’ imperfect wisdom represents all that wisdom can be. Part of the difficulty associated with understanding the union of God’s attributes is a limited understanding of what those attributes fully and truly are. Though God’s attributes are partially visible in his creatures, the fullness of these attributes’ perfection can be found only in God himself, who is their source. To the human mind, and in the human experience, such attributes as wisdom and justice are distinct; but in God, who is one, all God’s being (which encompasses his attributes) is fully one. His attributes were and are one in him before any distinctions could be observed in his finite creation.
An objector might find this problematic in light of the distinctive attributes which identifiably exist in humanity. After all, humans’ ability to differentiate and identify various attributes separately from one another must have originated with God in some way. This would seem to suggest that God somehow separated his attributes within himself.60 There is something to be said for this, since “the simple being of God … is such that things can be likened to it according to the multiplicity of their forms.”61 But insofar as this differentiation of attributes is true, it reflects limited human cognition rather than essential differentiation in God himself. Aquinas notes that “the higher an intellect is, the more it can know more things through one likeness, while a lesser intellect manages to know many things only through many likenesses.”62 The variety of names we give to God, and the variety of attributes we ascribe to him, indicate our inability to “know him naturally except by arriving at him from his effects.”63 In our minds, God’s attributes are separate; and in the revelation of Scripture, God attests to his own attributes separately, so that we might begin to comprehend them. But in God, all his being and all his attributes are completely one; and someday, when we meet God face-to-face, we will know him “by only one name.”64
Dimensional Oneness
Thomas Morris observes that if “each divine property is identical with every other divine property,” the result is that “there is only one property that God has — a property with which he himself is identical.”65 This, Morris considers problematic, for reasons already traversed; but perhaps it is more coherent than philosophers have acknowledged. It aligns with Aquinas’ assertions that “God’s essence is God’s existence”66 and that “God is supremely one.”67 It is also a defensible Biblical position, given that God’s Hebrew name, shared with Moses in Exodus 3:14, is none other than a third-person singular verb. God is who he is — he is himself — and there is at least an extent to which this will and should remain mysterious to the human mind.
Beyond being and Biblically supported, though, this characterization of God would seem to be logically defensible. Most fundamentally, God is himself — a whole, simple being whose nature is greater than humans can comprehend. Within the singular nature who is God, we as humans can observe many riches and dimensions of God’s wholeness. In our finite minds, we categorize and comprehend the fullness of God as a series of attributes, and we participate in various degrees and dimensions of God through our own limited versions of attributes like wisdom and justice. But while we understand that God’s various attributes “do not signify the same notion,” insofar as we can see distinctions between them, they do “signify the same reality” in God.68 All that God is and all that God encompasses is one. In him, wisdom and justice and all other attributes are one, not because we could understand them to be duplicates of one another, but because they are dimensions (not components) of the fullness of who God is.
What this also indicates is that it is not really sufficient to say that God is each of his attributes. Rather, God is all his attributes, all at once. Truer than “God is Wisdom” is a statement like, “God is Wisdom and Justice and Love and Power [and so on].” His attributes are one, not insofar as one might list them out and then equate each of them individually to God, but rather insofar as all God’s attributes are subsumed in him and his everlasting oneness. In this, one can also see that God’s attributes are not exactly properties (according to human conception) so much as they are dimensions (or facets) of him. He manifests his attributes not as a list of components, but rather as manifold expressions and implications of his infinite simplicity
God’s completion can be observed to human eyes in various revelations of attributes, which humans have the capacity to conceive only in distinct categories. But the real fullness of God is fundamentally and ultimately one, and secondarily conceived in a collection of properties because of the finiteness of human cognitive capacities. Scriptural testimony to God’s oneness69 is not just metaphorical, but literal and metaphysical, insofar as God is truly one and truly simple and complete in his oneness.
Lydia Harrison ‘23 is majoring in Biblical Studies, Classical Studies, and Philosophy, and minoring in Communication. She is from Warsaw, IN. We thank Dr. Jack Mulder (Philosophy) for his involvement with Lydia’s piece.
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Brian J. Shanley, in Basic Works, ed. Jeffrey Hause and Robert Pasnau (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014), I.3.3. Henceforth referenced as ST.
2 ST I.3.3
3 ST I.3.4
4 ST I.3.6
5 ST I.3.7
6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955), I.38.2. Emphasis original. Henceforth referenced as SCG.
7 Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, trans. M. J. Charlesworth, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), XVIII.
8 Anselm of Canterbury. Monologion, trans. Simon Harrison, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), XVI. 9 Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 30.
10 SCG I.38
11 Ibid.
12 Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? 32.
13 Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? 33.
14 SCG I.40.3
15 William E. Mann, “Divine Simplicity,” Religious Studies 18, no. 4 (1982): 453.
16 Thomas V. Morris, “On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity.” Religious Studies 21, no. 3 (1985): 300.
17 Anselm, Proslogion XVIII.
18 Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? 47.
19 Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? 47.
20 Mann, “Divine Simplicity,” 454. Emphasis original.
21 Mann, “Divine Simplicity,” 455.
22 ST I.6.3
23 SCG I.32.3
24 SCG I.40.3
25 SCG I.31.2
26 Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? 47.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Mann, “Divine Simplicity,” 457.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Mann, “Divine Simplicity,” 466.
33 Ibid.
34 ST I.3.5
35 Mann, “Divine Simplicity,” 457.
36 Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25.
37 Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? 49.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid. Emphasis original.
40 Ibid.
41 Brian Leftow, “Is God an Abstract Object?” Noûs 24, no. 4 (1990): 593.
42 Ibid.
43 ST I.3.5
44 Eleonore Stump, “The Nature of a Simple God,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87 (2013): 35.
45 Stump, “Nature of God,” 36.
46 Stump, “Nature of God,” 40.
47 ST I.3.4
48 Ibid.
49 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Divine Simplicity,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 540.
50 Wolterstorff, “Divine Simplicity,” 541.
51 Ibid.
52 Wolterstorff, “Divine Simplicity,” 542.
53 Wolterstorff, “Divine Simplicity,” 541.
54 ST I.3.2
55 Jeffrey Brower, “Making Sense of Divine Simplicity,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 25, no. 1 (2008): 18.
56 Ibid.
57 Graham Oppy, “The Devilish Complexities of Divine Simplicity,” Philo 6, no. 1 (2003): 14.
58 SCG I.34.6
59 Rom. 1:19–20
60 This objection was raised by Ash Moran in discussion.
61 SCG I.35.2
62 SCG I.31.3
63 SCG I.31.4
64 Ibid.
65 Morris, “God and Mann,” 300.
66 ST I.3.4
67 ST I.11.4
68 SCG I.35.1
69 See, for example, Deut. 6:4; Mark 12:29, 32; Gal. 3:20; Jas. 2:19