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What does it mean to attribute properties to God and to speak about God's divine essence?

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There's a tradition 

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of doing so.

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We find it in the Bible.

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The scriptures speak, for example, about God as good or wise or loving, but also in ancient philosophy there

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 was a tradition, even with the pre-Christian Greeks, of trying to speak about the very nature of God.

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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.

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This carried over into the high Middle Ages, where great authors wrote treatises on the divine attributes.

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Examples include things like God's divine simplicity, perfection, 

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goodness, infinity, omnipresence, immutability, eternity, and unity.

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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.

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When we talk about divine simplicity, we could think at the beginning that that's something very counterintuitive.

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Human beings are complex.

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Their thinking and willing is complex.

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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.

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But actually simplicity in Aquinas is denoting something like non-composition.

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God, who is simple, is not composite, not complex ontologically in some of the ways that creatures are.

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Let me talk about four of those ways briefly.

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First of all, each of us has a body and a soul.

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So we are a composite creature because we have a spiritual, rational soul and an animal body with organic parts.

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But God has no body.

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He's not a composite body and soul.

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He's not an animal or physical object.

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So God is simpler than we are.

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God is wholly immaterial.

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Second, each of us is a kind of thing that shares our nature with many others.

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So for example, each of us is a human being.

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In that respect, we're all equal.

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We have the identical and same human nature.

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None of us could say, I am man.

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I am what it is to be human.

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We're realizations of human nature.

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We're individuals who share a common species and kind.

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This is true of everything we see around us in the universe.

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Many aardvarks, many trees, many stars, many kinds of things, each kind instantiated in many individuals.

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This is not the case with God.

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There's no composition of essence and individual.

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God is the only one who is God.

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There are not many gods who are creators of which our God is only one.

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Rather, the creator is the creator of all things and only he is God.

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You might say it this way, only God has deity or divine nature.

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Only he who has made all things is he who is entirely unique as the giver of being to all things.

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No one is like God.

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No one has the divine nature but God.

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Third, God doesn't receive his existence from others and so there's no composition in him of essence and existence.

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We're dependent beings.

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But God is the unilateral giver of being to all things.

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He receives his being from no one.

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So he is not essentially dependent or created rather it is essential to God.

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It is of his very nature to exist even in a certain way we could say to be pure existence.

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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.

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Only God can say that of himself truly.

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I am he who is.

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I am.

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Because in God it is of his very nature to exist and his existence is perfect and pure.

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Lastly, God does not have any properties of knowledge that perfect his substance or nature.

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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.

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We can evolve or devolve in the mind and in the will.

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But God doesn't have properties of this kind.

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In fact, we have to say in some sense God simply is his knowledge and his love.

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So for example, none of us could say I am love or I am wisdom.

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But John in his first letter says God is love, essentially love in all he is.

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And it's also said in the Bible that God is wisdom, subsistent and substantial wisdom.

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And ultimately this wisdom and knowledge in God is one with his love and his goodness.

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Now when we speak about God's divine perfection, we're speaking about something that pertains to him in virtue of his pure actuality.

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God is not in potentiality to become something greater or something lesser based on how he interacts with the world.

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God didn't create the world to improve himself morally.

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He doesn't help us or save us to improve himself.

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He can't fail to do well.

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He can't fail to be noble.

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God is above those kinds of finite realizations, of properties of perfections.

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So the perfection terms of God signify a mystery that God has life, being, knowledge, wisdom, goodness without limitation.

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Now from these two divine names we can begin to think about a whole host of other 

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divine attributes that follow as it were logically from thinking about the simplicity and perfection of God.

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For example, from his simplicity we can begin to think about God's immutability and eternity.

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From his perfection we can think about his goodness and infinity.

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And we can then go on to go into topics like his omnipresence and his unity.

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Aquinas shows us how this order of knowledge unfolds in the first part of the Summa Theologiae.

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And it's a kind of spiritual exercise.

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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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For readings, podcasts, and more videos like this, go to Aquinas101.com.

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