Absolute Divine Simplicity as the Alleged Root

Farrell locates the taproot of the whole Western “dialectic” in a particular doctrine: absolute divine simplicity (ADS) as developed in the Augustinian tradition — the claim that God is utterly without composition, identical with his attributes, so that the persons can be nothing but subsistent relations within the one simple essence. This file expounds Farrell’s argument that ADS is the metaphysical premise from which the Filioque and the dialectical Trinity follow, and distinguishes the Orthodox critique of ADS (which is real) from Farrell’s maximal causal claim (which is his own).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; Trinitarian theology)

The Doctrine at Issue

Divine simplicity — that God is not composed of parts — is common patristic teaching, East and West. What Farrell targets is a particular and stronger form of it, which he calls the doctrine of absolute divine simplicity and associates with Augustine and the Latin scholastic tradition that followed: the claim that in God there is no real distinction whatever between essence and existence, essence and attribute, or essence and person — that God simply is his goodness, his wisdom, his will, and that whatever is in God is the divine essence (Farrell, GHD, Vol. II, The Dialectical God of Augustinism; on Augustine’s simplicity, see St. Augustine: De Trinitate). On this strong construction, the divine essence is a single, undifferentiated, actus purus in which nothing is really distinct from anything else.

The Argument: From ADS to Dialectic

Farrell’s argument is that absolute divine simplicity, once adopted, forces a specific and fateful account of the persons. The reasoning runs:

  1. If God is absolutely simple, there can be no real distinction in him except one that is compatible with utter simplicity. A real distinction of things would introduce composition and so contradict ADS.
  2. The persons are really distinct — this the faith requires; the Father is not the Son.
  3. Therefore the only distinction available is a distinction of relation — and, since a relation that did not oppose would not distinguish, a distinction of relations of opposition (relatio oppositionis). The persons must be subsistent relations of opposition within the one simple essence: paternity, filiation, and passive spiration (Farrell, GHD, Vol. II; this is indeed the classic Latin scholastic formula, later crystallized at the Council of Florence’s language of “everything is one where there is no opposition of relation”).

The consequence, Farrell argues, is that ADS makes the essence primary and the persons derivative: the one simple essence is the fundamental reality, and the persons are only the relational “folds” within it. This inverts the First-European order, in which the person of the Father is primary and the essence is common to the three (see The Two Triadologies). And because the persons are now constituted by opposition, dialectic has entered the doctrine of God (see What “Dialectic” Means).

From ADS to the Filioque

The Filioque follows, on Farrell’s account, with the same logical inevitability. If the Spirit must be distinguished from the Son by a relation of opposition, and if the only such relation available is one of origin, then the Spirit must proceed from the Son as well as the Father — otherwise there would be nothing to distinguish the Spirit from the Son within the simple essence. The double procession is thus not, for Farrell, a free-floating Western innovation but the required output of absolute divine simplicity plus relations-of-opposition: given the premise, the Filioque is not optional (Farrell, GHD, Vol. II; see The Filioque as Watershed). This is one of the book’s genuinely illuminating claims: it explains why the Latin West found the Filioque not merely acceptable but theologically necessary, in a way that mere accusations of arbitrary tampering with the Creed do not.

The Orthodox Critique of ADS — Which Is Real

That Orthodox theology has a real and principled objection to absolute divine simplicity is not Farrell’s invention. It is bound up with the essence-energies distinction: because Orthodox theology distinguishes the imparticipable divine essence from the uncreated energies in which God really acts and is really participated, it denies that God is simple in the absolute Latin sense — for the energies are really (not merely notionally) distinct from the essence, though not separate from it, and God is genuinely multiple in his energies while one in essence (see The First Europe: Photius, Palamas, and the Councils; Orthodoxy: Theosis). The Palamite councils of the fourteenth century dogmatized exactly this real distinction, over against a Barlaamite position that pressed a more Latin, absolutely simple God. David Bradshaw’s Aristotle East and West makes the same contrast in careful philosophical terms, tracing how the Greek notion of energeia allowed the East to hold a God who is really active and participable, where the Western (ultimately Augustinian and Thomist) trajectory tended toward an actus purus in which essence and energy collapse into one (Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West [2004]). So the critique of ADS is a serious, established Orthodox position, and where Farrell states it he stands in good company.

What Is Farrell’s Own

The distinctively Farrellian step is not the critique of ADS but the causal-historical use to which he puts it: the claim that ADS is the single metaphysical root from which the entire dialectical pathology of the West grows — the Filioque, then scholasticism, then the Reformation, then secularization — as a continuous unfolding of one premise. That is theological history in the strong sense (see The Genre of Theological History), and it is a thesis, not a dogma. Moreover, whether Augustine himself held absolute divine simplicity in the rigid scholastic form Farrell describes, and whether his relations-of-opposition really subordinate person to essence, are precisely the points contested by the recent scholarship that dismantled the “de Régnon paradigm” (Barnes, Ayres) and by the Orthodox re-readers of Augustine gathered in Orthodox Readings of Augustine (see The Scholarly Debate; St. Augustine: The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion).

The clean distinction the reader should keep (per METHODOLOGY.md, §4.1) is this: (a) the Orthodox denial of absolute divine simplicity, grounded in the essence-energies distinction, is Church teaching; (b) the claim that ADS is the mono-causal root of the whole cultural history of the West is Farrell’s thesis; (c) whether Augustine’s own simplicity is as rigid and as dialectical as Farrell needs it to be is a genuinely disputed scholarly question. Keeping these apart is the whole discipline of reading GHD well.

See Also

References

  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. II: The Dialectical God of Augustinism. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
  • Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26/2 (1995): 51–79.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Augustine and the Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.