What does it mean to attribute properties to God and to speak about God's divine essence?
There's a tradition
of doing so.
We find it in the Bible.
The scriptures speak, for example, about God as good or wise or loving, but also in ancient philosophy there
was a tradition, even with the pre-Christian Greeks, of trying to speak about the very nature of God.
You find this in Aristotle or Plotinus, and in the early fathers of the church there's a lot of rumination about the divine names or the attributes of God.
This carried over into the high Middle Ages, where great authors wrote treatises on the divine attributes.
Examples include things like God's divine simplicity, perfection,
goodness, infinity, omnipresence, immutability, eternity, and unity.
Here I'd like to focus simply on the first two of the divine attributes that St. Thomas speaks about in the Summa Theologiae, simplicity and perfection.
When we talk about divine simplicity, we could think at the beginning that that's something very counterintuitive.
Human beings are complex.
Their thinking and willing is complex.
If God understands us, he must be even more complex than we are in order to understand everything that's going on in the world.
But actually simplicity in Aquinas is denoting something like non-composition.
God, who is simple, is not composite, not complex ontologically in some of the ways that creatures are.
Let me talk about four of those ways briefly.
First of all, each of us has a body and a soul.
So we are a composite creature because we have a spiritual, rational soul and an animal body with organic parts.
But God has no body.
He's not a composite body and soul.
He's not an animal or physical object.
So God is simpler than we are.
God is wholly immaterial.
Second, each of us is a kind of thing that shares our nature with many others.
So for example, each of us is a human being.
In that respect, we're all equal.
We have the identical and same human nature.
None of us could say, I am man.
I am what it is to be human.
We're realizations of human nature.
We're individuals who share a common species and kind.
This is true of everything we see around us in the universe.
Many aardvarks, many trees, many stars, many kinds of things, each kind instantiated in many individuals.
This is not the case with God.
There's no composition of essence and individual.
God is the only one who is God.
There are not many gods who are creators of which our God is only one.
Rather, the creator is the creator of all things and only he is God.
You might say it this way, only God has deity or divine nature.
Only he who has made all things is he who is entirely unique as the giver of being to all things.
No one is like God.
No one has the divine nature but God.
Third, God doesn't receive his existence from others and so there's no composition in him of essence and existence.
We're dependent beings.
But God is the unilateral giver of being to all things.
He receives his being from no one.
So he is not essentially dependent or created rather it is essential to God.
It is of his very nature to exist even in a certain way we could say to be pure existence.
So for example, when God speaks to Moses in the burning bush in the story in Exodus 3, 14, and 15, he says, I am he who is.
Only God can say that of himself truly.
I am he who is.
I am.
Because in God it is of his very nature to exist and his existence is perfect and pure.
Lastly, God does not have any properties of knowledge that perfect his substance or nature.
So for example, in you and I we could become mathematical over time and we could perfect our knowledge of mathematics or we could become morally virtuous.
We can evolve or devolve in the mind and in the will.
But God doesn't have properties of this kind.
In fact, we have to say in some sense God simply is his knowledge and his love.
So for example, none of us could say I am love or I am wisdom.
But John in his first letter says God is love, essentially love in all he is.
And it's also said in the Bible that God is wisdom, subsistent and substantial wisdom.
And ultimately this wisdom and knowledge in God is one with his love and his goodness.
Now when we speak about God's divine perfection, we're speaking about something that pertains to him in virtue of his pure actuality.
God is not in potentiality to become something greater or something lesser based on how he interacts with the world.
God didn't create the world to improve himself morally.
He doesn't help us or save us to improve himself.
He can't fail to do well.
He can't fail to be noble.
God is above those kinds of finite realizations, of properties of perfections.
So the perfection terms of God signify a mystery that God has life, being, knowledge, wisdom, goodness without limitation.
Now from these two divine names we can begin to think about a whole host of other
divine attributes that follow as it were logically from thinking about the simplicity and perfection of God.
For example, from his simplicity we can begin to think about God's immutability and eternity.
From his perfection we can think about his goodness and infinity.
And we can then go on to go into topics like his omnipresence and his unity.
Aquinas shows us how this order of knowledge unfolds in the first part of the Summa Theologiae.
And it's a kind of spiritual exercise.
It's an ascent of the intellect up to God to think deeply about who God is and to grow closer to God by knowledge and by love.
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