The Monarchy of the Father as Relation
AKA: Relational Plenitude and Divine Simplicity: Monarchy Without Composition
Introduction
A perennial challenge in Trinitarian theology is articulating how God can be both absolutely one (simple) and yet internally differentiated as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The question often arises: if the relations in God are really distinct, doesn’t that introduce components or parts into God, undermining divine simplicity? In other words, does speaking of a plenitude of relations in God amount to claiming some kind of real composition in the Godhead? This essay directly addresses this concern. Drawing on my Principle of Relationality and related insights, we will show how God’s relational plenitude does not constitute metaphysical composition nor violate divine simplicity. The key lies in understanding that God’s very essence is a single, indivisible act of relational self-giving love, fully expressed in the three Persons. Within this framework, even the ancient doctrine of the monarchy of the Father (the Father as source of the Son and Spirit) is reinterpreted in a relational, non-hierarchical way. The Father’s role as source is a relational self-donation, not a partition of the divine essence or a higher “part” of God. This approach preserves the unity of God without partition or causal dependence among the Persons.
By contrast, we will critique recent “grounding-based” models of the Trinity (such as Joshua Sijuwade’s), which attempt to explain the Father’s monarchy via metaphysical grounding and hierarchy. While aiming for clarity, those models inadvertently introduce an ontological class structure within God – effectively treating the Father as more fundamental than the Son and Spirit – thereby smuggling in hidden parts or levels in the Godhead. Such hierarchical frameworks reduce divine mystery to mechanism and risk reintroducing subordinationism (one Person ranked above others), undermining the co-equality of the Persons and violating the orthodox conciliar teaching on the Trinity. Through careful analysis of both classical sources and modern theological developments, the essay will demonstrate that self-donative relationality is a primitive and “pre-ontological” reality in God that upholds simplicity, whereas grounding-based hierarchies fall short. The goal is a clearer vision of how relational plenitude in God actually manifests and protects divine simplicity rather than compromising it.
The Principle of Relationality: God’s Essence as Self-Donative Love
My Principle of Relationality provides a constructive model for harmonizing Trinity and simplicity. It begins with a radical claim about God’s very being: the divine essence is not a static substance composed of attributes or parts, but an eternal, dynamic act of self-giving love. That is, to be is to be given; to exist is to be self-given relationally, if you will. God’s existence itself is understood as relational self-donation – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct modes or ways in which the one divine essence is wholly lived-out as love. Each Person is an irreducible, perfect expression of the one simple divine essence, distinguished only by their relational orientation (the Father as giver, the Son as begotten, the Spirit as proceeding). Crucially, these distinctions are intrinsic to the one divine being and identical with it, not additions to an underlying nature. The fullness of the Godhead exists in each Person, but as a relational mode of the one infinite act of love.
[Going forward I’m going to refer to myself in the 3rd person to make the grammar editing easier and work with my AI automation techniques to save me time. I appreciate your open mindedness to this approach.]
Because relationality just is1 God’s essence in this model, introducing personal distinctions does not multiply components in God. The three Persons are not three pieces of the divine nature, but the one simple divine nature wholly in three relational expressions. Dryer emphasizes that the relational modes are intrinsic to God’s essence, not extra attributes or parts. In other words, God’s triune distinctions “are not additive but are expressions of God’s unified being”. This ensures that recognizing Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct does not compromise divine simplicity. We are not saying God = essence + Father + Son + Spirit (which would indeed be composite); rather, God is one simple act of begetting, being begotten, and proceeding love. The distinctions reside entirely within the unity of that single act. As Aquinas classically noted, “the persons are the subsisting relations themselves. Hence it is not against the simplicity of the divine persons for them to be distinguished by the relations.”. The relational distinctions subsist in the same simple essence, so “relation suffices for their distinction” without introducing any division in the divine being.
Dryer’s Principle of Relationality explicitly addresses potential worries about complexity. It shows that God’s relational plenitude (having Father, Son, Spirit truly distinct) does not violate simplicity because those relational distinctions just are God’s own being under different relational aspects. We can summarize the advantages of this approach as follows:
- No Metaphysical Composition: Because the Father, Son, and Spirit are intrinsic relational expressions of the one divine act, we do not have God composed of parts or pieces. The distinctions are internal to the simple divine essence, not things added alongside it. There is no “whole greater than the sum of parts” here – the whole divine essence is in each Person.
- Real Distinctions without Modalism: The Principle of Relationality affirms that the Persons are genuinely distinct (the Father is not the Son, for example), but these distinctions are entirely relational rather than essential divisions. Unlike modalism, which would treat Father/Son/Spirit as mere roles of one person, Dryer’s model maintains real interpersonal relationships – yet unlike tritheism, it does not make them separate substances. The Father, Son, and Spirit “each entirely manifest the single divine essence” without carving it up.
- Preservation of Divine Unity and Independence: By making relational self-giving the very content of God’s nature, this model avoids positing any external principle or material to unite the Persons. God’s unity is preserved from within – the three are one because the essence that each one is fully possessed of is numerically the same. There is no dependence on something outside God to hold God together, nor any part-to-whole dependence internally. The triune relations are self-standing and eternal, depending on nothing outside the Godhead. This upholds the doctrine of divine aseity (God’s independence and self-sufficiency) even while embracing internal distinctions.
In short, Dryer reframes relationality as intrinsic to God’s simple essence. The irreducible Father-Son-Spirit relations are treated as “self-standing primitives” of God’s being – fundamental, underived realities that constitute who God is. Because nothing more basic underlies God than this triune self-gift, we are not fragmenting God’s unity by acknowledging the tri-personal life. The divine simplicity is expressed through the perfect communion of the three, not in spite of it. God’s essence is one infinite act of love, in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit fully share as co-equal participants.
Monarchy of the Father as Relational and Non-Hierarchical
With this relational ontology in view, we can address the monarchy of the Father – the teaching that the Father is the unique source or principium of the Son and Spirit – in a way that safeguards simplicity and co-equality. Classical theology, especially in the East, has affirmed that “the Father is the sole unoriginated source of all divine life”, from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds eternally. This monarchia of the Father was intended to uphold the unity of God (one ultimate origin rather than three independent gods) while still affirming the full divinity of Son and Spirit. However, if misconceived, the idea of the Father as “source” can sound like a hierarchical ordering – as if the Father were a greater deity and the Son/Spirit lesser derivatives. Dryer’s relational model offers a way to articulate the monarchy in non-hierarchical terms: the Father’s role as source is understood as an eternal act of self-donative relation, not an exercise of domination or a division of essence.
In this view, the Father’s unbegottenness signifies that he is the giver in the eternal processions: he eternally gives the whole divine being to the Son (by begetting) and jointly with the Son gives that same being to the Spirit (by spiration). Yet this conferral is not a temporal event nor a portioning out of being – it is an eternal, immutable relationship within God’s own life. Dryer emphasizes that “the Father’s monarchy, his role as the unoriginated source (archē) of all divine life, is not an assertion of unilateral domination, but rather the eternal foundation of a relational self-gift”. The Father’s “greater” role is simply to be the fountain of the Godhead – an act of giving that constitutes the Trinity’s unity. Everything the Son and Spirit have, they receive from the Father, yes; but crucially, what they receive is nothing less than the full divine essence. Thus the Son and Spirit lack nothing that the Father has, and are no less God. The monarchy of the Father, “properly understood, secures the relational balance of the Trinity without compromising the essential unity of divine nature.” The oneness of God is secured because there is one ultimate source, and yet this source communicates one identical divinity to another two Persons, so that all three share one simple nature even as they are distinct in origin.
To avoid any notion of hierarchy or division, the Father’s causality here must be seen as unique – unlike causes in the created world. The Father begets the Son not as a prior being making a lesser being, but as an eternal act of self-communication that is internal to God. Patristic theologians like St. Gregory of Nazianzus stressed that we must not conceive the Father’s generation of the Son in crude causal terms. Gregory warned that we should posit “neither… three first principles if we want to avoid the polytheism of the Greeks, nor a single one [in the Sabellian sense]; unity is worshipped in Trinity and Trinity in unity, both its union and its distinction miraculous.” In other words, the “one principle” of God (the Father) is not a separate reality from the Triune unity, nor are the three Persons separate principles — rather, the one God exists in a Trinity such that the monarchy of the Father coincides with the unity of the whole Godhead. The Father is the source of the Son and Spirit, yet in doing so he does not impart some fragment of divinity but the entirety of the divine being, which remains one and indivisible among them. Thus, Gregory insists the distinctions of origin “do not fracture the indivisible divine essence” but instead reveal a mystery: a Trinity that is one in essence and coequal in glory. The Father’s archē (principle) is a relational one, not a division of substance.
Dryer builds on such insights by describing the Father’s generative act as “an eternal grounding that is pre-ontological”. That is to say, it is a foundational reality of God’s being, beyond the ordinary categories of cause and effect that imply sequence or inequality. The begetting of the Son and procession of the Spirit are eternal, timeless operations – a continual, unbeginning and unending communication of the one simple essence. As such, this relational grounding is the very way the one divine nature is eternally shared, and it preserves the full, coequal unity of the Godhead. Because it is pre-ontological, we mean that one cannot step “behind” these relations to find a more basic reality – the self-donative relationships are themselves the basic reality of God. The Father’s Fatherhood, the Son’s Sonship, the Spirit’s Procession define God’s one being prior to any abstract notion of “essence” apart from persons. In this light, calling the Father the source does not make him a separable part or a higher tier of Godhead; it simply names his relational position (unbegotten giver) within the eternal life of the one God. This position carries no superiority of nature or power, only a logical primacy in the order of relations. Indeed, the Son and Spirit are co-eternal with the Father – there was never a “time” when the Father existed without them, since his very identity as Father implies the Son’s existence as co-eternal offspring and the Spirit as co-eternal procession. The monarchy of the Father thus in no way undermines the Son’s and Spirit’s equality or possession of the divine nature; it simply affirms that the Godhead is unoriginate in one Person (the Father) and not independently tripartite. All three Persons ”remain fully co-equal and consubstantial” in this understanding.
Far from introducing hierarchy, this relational monarchy underscores the unity-as-communion: the Father’s entire divine being is given to the Son and Spirit, so that God’s unity is a unity-of-gift. Dryer describes this beautifully: the Father’s eternal self-giving is “the foundation of a relational self-gift that reveals unity in complete donation that is also complete donation that is unity.” In God, to be one and to be self-giving are identical. The monarchy is an eternal giving that results in one shared life, not a stratified chain of command. Thus, the Principle of Relationality can affirm the ancient formula of one God, the Father Almighty, from whom are all things (1 Cor 8:6), and simultaneously insist that this one God is never without His Son and Spirit who receive the identical divine fullness. Divine simplicity is preserved because this entire relational procession happens within the single simplex of God’s being – it is not a composition of one thing causing another, but one light eternally kindling another without diminution, like one candle lighting others with the same flame. It is in this sense an ineffable mystery of self-donative communion rather than an explainable mechanism. The unity of God “is worshipped in Trinity and the Trinity in unity”, and as Gregory says, both the unity and the distinction are “miraculous”, beyond full human comprehension. We are therefore dealing with a transcendent relational unity in God, not a composite unity assembled from parts.
Relational Distinctions Without Composition
A critical aspect of preserving divine simplicity is showing that these real relational distinctions do not break God into components. In classical terms, God has no parts – no physical parts, no metaphysical constituents (like matter/form, substance/accident, essence/existence distinctions in Him). How then can we say “Father is not Son” without implying part of God is Father and another part is Son? The answer lies in the unique metaphysical category of relations of origin in God. St. Thomas Aquinas clarified that in God, relation is a subsistent reality, not an accident. The personal properties (paternity, filiation, spiration) are identical with the Persons and with the divine essence, differing only in their mutual relations. Thus, the Father is the relation of paternity (Fatherhood) subsisting, the Son is the relation of being begotten (sonship), and the Spirit is the relation of procession. These relations oppose each other (Father to Son, etc.) and thereby distinguish the Persons, but they do not attach as qualities to an underlying substance – they are the substance in relational mode. Therefore, when we distinguish Father and Son, we are not splitting the divine essence between two owners; we are recognizing a relational opposition within the one essence. Everything in God is one and the same except where there is a relative opposition (as the Fourth Lateran Council stated). And “relation”, when understood as subsisting and divine, does not introduce complexity the way a new attribute or part would. As Aquinas succinctly states: “the persons are the subsisting relations themselves. Hence it is not against the simplicity of the divine persons for them to be distinguished by the relations.”. The being of God remains absolutely one and simple; what is different is the relation of each Person to the others. This kind of distinction is the “least type of distinction” – it divides nothing of the substance, only the persons “by that which distinguishes the least possible,” namely relation alone.
This model here [“Dryer’s”/mine] strongly aligns with this classical understanding. By treating the relational self-giving as the very essence of God, it ensures that when we speak of multiple “relational modes” we are not positing multiple independent entities or principles in God. The Father, Son, and Spirit each are God in His entirety; they differ only as Father, Son, Spirit. There is no fourth thing (a “divine nature” apart from the persons) composed of or divided among them – the divine nature is simply what each of them is, fully and perfectly. As the Athanasian Creed later summarized the orthodox faith: “Nothing in this Trinity is before or after, nothing is greater or smaller; in their entirety the three persons are co-eternal and co-equal with each other.”. This means that acknowledging real distinctions does not give us three unequal parts of God, but rather three coequal who together are the one God. When we say plenitude of relations, we mean that God’s life is richly personal, not that God is a composite being. There is an irreducible plurality of interpersonal communion (hence plenitude) within the indivisible unity of the divine existence. This idea is paradoxical, but it is safeguarded by sticking to relational language and denying any composition or division in God’s essence.
Relational self-donative unity is “primitive” – it is the fundamental reality about God, not derived from something more basic. One might say that for God, communion is an ontologically primitive fact. Consequently, one cannot talk of God’s essence on the one hand and God’s relations on the other as two different things that need to be glued together; the essence exists in the interpersonal communion. This eliminates any notion that the Trinity is a assembly of three entities sharing one category. Instead, the one God simply exists triply-personal. When we conceptualize it this way, the specter of metaphysical composition (which would compromise simplicity) is avoided. God is simple unity, and precisely in that simplicity exists a triune fullness of love. As I’ve explained elsewhere, divine simplicity is reinterpreted not as a barren unity, but as “dynamic, relational communion”. There is no tension between simplicity and Trinity once we grasp that God’s oneness is inherently alive with Father-Son-Spirit relationality. The eternal generation and procession are not things added onto God’s essence; they are that essence in action. Thus, the distinct relations do not introduce any ontological composition in God, they introduce only conceptual distinctions that follow the real relational order, an order that, paradoxically, is itself a facet of the simple divine being.
Grounding-Based Models: Hidden Hierarchy and Mechanism
Having outlined how relational plenitude avoids composition, we now turn to contrasting approaches that attempt to “explain” the Trinity via metaphysical grounding and hierarchy. Joshua Sijuwade’s recent grounding-based model of the Trinity is a prime example of a well-intentioned framework that unfortunately reintroduces complexity and subordination. Sijuwade seeks to formalize the monarchy of the Father using the philosophical notion of ontological grounding or building relations. In his account, the Father is treated as the one fundamental reality who grounds or “builds” the Son and the Holy Spirit (and indeed everything else). By casting the Trinity in a hierarchy of fundamentality, this model implies a structured set of levels within God: the Father at the top as the source, and the Son and Spirit as derivative entities that depend on the Father as their ontological ground. The language used makes this clear – Sijuwade explicitly describes an “essential asymmetry, distinct ordering, and status distinction” between the Father and the other Persons. “The Father, as the independent and complete entity (i.e. the ungrounded ground of everything else), is fundamental,” he writes, “and the Son and the Spirit, who, as dependent and non-complete entities… are thus derivative, non-fundamental entities.”. In this depiction, the Father alone is ontologically complete and self-sufficient, whereas the Son and Spirit are ontologically incomplete (they do not exist except as grounded by the Father) and rank lower in the hierarchy of being. Such a schema effectively carves out degrees of divinity – a primary divine entity and secondary divine entities. This is precisely the kind of internal composition and inequality that the orthodox doctrine of simplicity and consubstantiality rejects.
What are the consequences of a grounding model like this? First, it introduces implicit “parts” or layers in God. The Father, on this account, has a unique status that the Son and Spirit do not share: he is ungrounded and fundamental, while they are grounded outcomes. This makes it difficult to say the three Persons are one in the same way – rather, they now occupy different metaphysical categories (the Father in the category of fundamental being, the Son/Spirit in the category of derived being). This resembles a class structure within the Godhead: the Father alone belongs to the “fundamental” class of being, whereas Son and Spirit belong to a subordinate class. Instead of three coequal persons all simply being God, we get one primary God and two secondary gods (however emphatically one might insist they are still divine, the metaphysical picture belies a rank). Sijuwade even tabulates this hierarchy, stating for instance that “the Father ranks higher than the Son and the Spirit and any other entity in the hierarchical structure of reality”. He asserts that the Father’s existence necessitates the existence of Son and Spirit, while the converse is not true. He says the Father’s intrinsic nature “fixes the existence and intrinsic nature of the Son and the Spirit”. Such statements amount to a clear subordination of the Son and Spirit in being and causality. The Son and Spirit become, in effect, dependent parts of reality that flow from the Father-part. God is no longer conceived as an irreducible unity, but as a structured whole in which one piece (the Father) generates and sustains the other pieces. This violates divine simplicity at a fundamental level: a simple being has no such internal stratification of more basic vs. less basic constituents. Yet the grounding model creates exactly that by positing the Father as the more basic constituent who produces the others. The result is an implicit composition of God into the source and what is sourced.
Second, the grounding approach reduces the mysterious, eternal generation to a mechanism of dependency. Grounding is a philosophical concept meant to explain how one thing can account for or give rise to another in a non-temporal, metaphysical sense. It usually comes with formal properties like asymmetry and transitivity (if A grounds B, and B grounds C, then A grounds C, etc.). By importing this into Trinitarian theology, Sijuwade turns the Father-Son relationship into a kind of explanatory chain: the Father (A) grounds the Son (B), who in turn grounds… perhaps the Spirit or other realities (though he has the Spirit also directly from Father in his model). The point is that the Trinitarian relations are being analogized to a dependency relation that we use to explain creaturely realities. This approach “demystifies” the Trinity by treating it as something to be formally explained. Indeed, Sijuwade explicitly aims to “further demystify” the doctrine by applying Karen Bennett’s building-relations framework. The unintended effect is that the ineffable generation of the Son becomes analogous to, say, how an object’s existence might ground the existence of a set that contains it (one of the typical examples in grounding literature). The sublime transcendence of how the Father begets the Son (which the Fathers said is beyond comprehension) is here flattened into a metaphysical formula. Gregory of Nazianzus would caution strongly against this tendency: he said, “Do not trouble yourself about how [the divine begetting] occurs…”, precisely because the manner of the Son’s generation is incomprehensible and not like ordinary causation. By contrast, a grounding model purports to tell us in principle how it occurs (in virtue of what it occurs: in virtue of the Father’s fundamentality and a grounding relation). This is an example of imposing a mechanistic framework on a divine mystery. It is akin to taking the inner life of God and squeezing it into a tidy explanatory schema – thereby losing the true depth and paradox. The Cappadocian Fathers (like Gregory) and others insisted that while we know that the Son is begotten of the Father, we do not know how this begetting is; all analogies fail beyond a certain point, and we must leave room for reverent unknowing. Gregory “consciously resist[s] any overly technical, mathematical categorization through terms like ‘cause’ and ‘principle’” in describing the Trinity. The grounding model seems to do the opposite: it leans fully into a technical category (“ground”) and its formal rules to map out the Trinitarian order, as if charting a mechanism. In doing so, it forfeits the apophatic balance that orthodox theology maintained.
Third, and most gravely, grounding-based monarchy models undermine the co-equality of the divine Persons, drifting into subordinationism. Subordinationism – the idea that the Son and/or Spirit are inferior in divinity to the Father – was the central error that the Nicene Creed and Athanasian Creed sought to eliminate. Sijuwade would certainly affirm that the Son and Spirit are God, but his structural portrayal speaks otherwise: calling the Son and Spirit “non-complete” and “non-fundamental” entities is tantamount to saying they are less in some ontological respect than the Father. This contradicts the Nicene affirmation that the Son is homoousios (of the same being) with the Father, possessing the fullness of deity, “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.” In the homoousion understanding, the Son has everything the Father has (except the personal property of being Father). Nothing is lacking in the Son’s divinity; he is fully complete God. It would be unthinkable for Athanasius or the Cappadocians to call the Son a “dependent, non-complete entity” in reference to the Father – they instead stressed the Son’s equal glory, equal eternity, equal power. The Athanasian Creed explicitly declares, “And in this Trinity none is before or after another; none is greater or less than another”. Yet Sijuwade’s model plainly says the Father “ranks higher” and is the explanatory because of the Son and Spirit – in direct conflict with “none is greater or less.” A hierarchy of grounding is a hierarchy of greatness in all but name. Even if the intent is to secure monotheism by saying the Father alone is the “one God” in a primary sense, this comes at the cost of demoting the Son and Spirit’s status, making them derivative. That he uses the term “subordinate” for the Son and Spirit (in explaining his Figure 1) is telling. This approach thus skirts dangerously close to the Arian or semi-Arian view where the Father alone is autotheos (God of Himself) and the Son is God in a lesser, derived way. It effectively reintroduces the very subordinationism that the doctrine of co-equal consubstantial Trinity was formulated to avoid. By contrast, the relational model we outlined earlier keeps the Persons on one ontological plane – all are equally God, even though one is source and others are originated – and thus upholds that everything the Father is (as God), the Son and Spirit are also. There is no ontological gradation among them.
In sum, grounding-based models, by imposing an ontological hierarchy within the Trinity, end up compromising both divine simplicity and orthodox equality. They turn the living mystery of the consubstantial Trinity into a fixed structural diagram where God is divided into the “fundamental part” and the “grounded parts.” This is a form of conceptual composition (the whole consists of a foundational element and subsequent elements) and a form of conceptual subordination. It may provide a feeling of philosophical order, but it does so at the expense of the mystery and the majesty of the Trinity. As one theologian quipped, attempts like this answer the “how” of the Trinity at too great a cost: “solving” the mystery by redefining God in our image of logical hierarchy, rather than reverently preserving what has been revealed. The Fathers and many later theologians would urge that it is better to let the paradox stand – one God in three coequal Persons – than to force it into a scheme that diminishes one side of the truth (either unity or equality). The Principle of Relationality covered on this website can be seen as a contemporary effort to deepen understanding without falling into such reductionism. It keeps the monarchy of the Father intact (one source) but within a communion of equals, and it upholds simplicity (no parts) by making the relations themselves constitute the unity, rather than result from a layered assembly.
Conclusion: Unity Without Partition or Hierarchy
The question we began with – if real relational distinctions exist in God, where is the simplicity? – can now be answered: The simplicity of God is found precisely in the relational plenitude of God’s triune life, not in opposition to it. When we conceive of God’s essence as the one eternal act of self-donative love, we see that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not partitions of the divine being but the personal modes of its full presence. Relational distinctions in God do not introduce composition because they do not divide or multiply the divine essence; they mutually indwell one another in the unity of an indivisible nature. In Dryer’s relational ontology, God’s unity is maintained without partition because the self-giving relations are “primitive,” irreducible, and entirely within the Godhead’s own existence. There is no “compound” of God plus relations – the relations are God in relation. Thus, the Trinity is not a puzzle of how three things equal one thing; it is one perfect reality (God) existing in three relational ways. This preserves the mystery of the Trinity as something unique: the only instance where one essence subsists triply, a truth ultimately beyond full human comprehension but made intelligible in part by the concept of subsistent relations.
Moreover, understanding the monarchy of the Father as a relational (not hierarchical) reality allows us to uphold that “for us there is one God, the Father” without lapsing into subordinationism. The Father is the one God as principle, yet not alone or apart – his very Fatherhood implies the coexistent Son and Spirit who share his divinity fully. The “monarchy” in this light means the unity of origin, which yields the unity of being: all divinity streams from the Father as from a fountain, and is wholly given to the Son and Spirit, establishing a unity of communion. This self-donative monarchy entails no inequality, since the Son and Spirit receive all that the Father is (except being Father). It entails no composition, since what is communicated is not a piece of God but the whole indivisible essence. Divine simplicity is safeguarded because the causal language is understood in a sui generis, eternal sense – a “pre-ontological” self-giving that does not break apart the unity of God. By contrast, the grounding-based model, which tries to explicate the monarchy via a chain of dependence, ends up conceptualizing God as if composed of distinct layers of being. It transforms the mysterious processions into a kind of metaphysical manufacturing, thereby violating both simplicity and the equal deity of the persons. It effectively mechanizes the Trinity and revives subordination under a new guise.
Ultimately, the relational plenitude approach celebrates the Triune God as one indivisible mystery of love. God’s unity is not the unity of a bare point but the unity of an eternal communion. This means that any language of “distinction” is carefully balanced by an understanding of profound unity-of-being. We avoid the pitfall of real composition by refusing to imagine the Trinity as a sum of parts. Instead, we accept that God’s very simplicity is so fecund that it contains relational fullness. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church eloquently puts it, the consubstantial Trinity is an “inseparable in what they are… only distinct in the relations of origin.” And as Gregory of Nazianzus taught, we must worship this reality rather than disassemble it – unity in Trinity and Trinity in unity, an ever-flowing dance of self-giving that yet is one God. The Principle of Relationality invites us to view the Triune relations as the living content of God’s oneness. It thereby resolves the composition objection: the relations are distinct relations, but not separate things – they are the one God, in relational communion. There is no violation of simplicity because nothing in God is composition of more basic parts; all is one essence, and the distinctions are relational, not thing-like.
In closing, the contrast is clear. A relational-plenitude, self-donative model of the Trinity upholds that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each are the one simple God, united in an eternal exchange of love. This preserves mystery – acknowledging that we cannot fully fathom how one essence exists in triplicity – yet it gives a coherent account of why this does not amount to tritheistic composition. On the other hand, a grounding or causal-hierarchy model attempts to explain the Trinity by analogy to creaturely ontological dependence, but in doing so it compromises God’s unity and the co-equality of persons, effectively splitting the Godhead into a primary and secondary tier. Such an approach turns the Trinity into a problem of cosmology rather than the mystery of God’s inner life. Orthodox theology, ancient and modern, steers us away from such mechanistic thinking and towards adoration of the triune mystery. In that mystery, divine simplicity is not the negation of plurality but the perfection of unity wherein relational plurality coexists without division. The plenitude of relations in God is, in fact, the highest form of simplicity – a unity so perfect that it can never be broken, even as it shines out in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the unity without partition or hierarchy that the doctrine of the Trinity professes and which the Principle of Relationality helps us to explicate in a faithful, illuminating way.
Sources:
Sijuwade, Joshua. “Building the Monarchy of the Father” in Religious Studies (2021) – grounding model of Trinity (criticized).
Dryer, Robert M. Principle of Relationality (SSGO model) – Harmonizing Divine Simplicity and Trinity.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, qq. 39–40 – on persons as relations and simplicity.
Gregory of Nazianzus – Orations (esp. Oration 25, 23.11) on the Father as source without polytheism or Sabellianism.
Athanasian Creed (5th cent.) – statement of Trinitarian co-equality and unity.