Joseph Steineger: John of Damascus on the Simplicity of God

In De fide orthodoxa I.9, John of Damascus argues that since the divinity is simple, anything that is said of God cannot signify him essentially, but rather, must indicate either (i) what he is not, or (ii) some relation with that which is distinguished from him, or (iii) that which is consequential to his nature, or (iv) activity.  An interpreter of this argument, perhaps one with Neo-Palamite sympathies, might claim that these classes of predication correspond to respective classes of attributes which are really distinct in God such that an activity is not consequential to the divine nature, that which is relative is not privative, etc.  In contrast to this view, I will argue in my paper that the “or” which the Damascene uses in this list is not a disjunctive-or but an inclusive-or meant to convey the mutual implication between these four ways of speaking about an ontologically simple God.  To argue that each of the four classes is mutually implicative of the others, I analyse key passages in the Dialectica and De fide orthodoxa which draw together every binary combination between the classes, i.e. (i)’s relation to (ii), (iii), and (iv), (ii)’s relation to (iii) and (iv), and (iii)’s relation to (iv).  In sum, the analysis shows that the Damascene recognizes a distinction in God between essence and activity where the former constitutes that which is always inexpressible to a being that is not God while the latter provides that which is expressed of God to a being that is not God.  While he clearly distinguishes between the essence and activity, he nevertheless claims that both the essence and the activity are ontologically simple (De fide I.10,12,14).  Since the activity itself is “one and simple,” and it is the sole ontological means by which God is expressed to those beings which are not God, any diversity that arises when indicating something about that activity occurs in virtue of diverse non-divine beings and not in virtue of God.  For the Damascene, then, divine simplicity is not threatened by a distinction between essence and activity, but neither is the activity of God multiple because human beings speak of it as such.