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Divine Simplicity, Trinity, and Understanding Simplicity’s Role Through the Relationality
by Robert Moses Dryer Posted on January 10th, 2025 (with minor updates on 02/01/2025)
SSGO: A Unified Worldview of the Triune God
In this introductory piece, we pursue two intertwined objectives. First, we explore how to reconcile divine simplicity with the genuine, eternal plurality of Persons in the Trinity—a central claim of orthodox theology. Second, we elucidate the meaning of divine simplicity as revealed through the Self‑Standing Givenness Ontology (SSGO), drawing on the full integration of classical theism, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of simplicity, Jiri Benovsky’s insights on metaphysical primitives, and an inspiring nod to Jean‑Luc Marion’s notion of givenness. SSGO is presented as a comprehensive framework—a re‑visioned expression of timeless truths concerning God’s absolute unity and His tri‑personal self‑communication.
Part I – The Foundation
We begin with the unassailable premise that God is absolutely one and utterly simple. Catholic teaching—exemplified in the Catechism (sections 200–202) and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae—declares that God has no composition: there are no physical parts, no form–matter dualism, and no separation between essence and existence as found in created beings. Scripture itself testifies in Deuteronomy 6:4 that “The LORD is one,” signifying a Being wholly actual, unburdened by any addable or subtractable parts; for if God were composite, He would be dependent on something external, contradicting His identity as the absolute, uncaused principle.
Yet, the same tradition affirms the real, co‑eternal, and co‑equal distinctions among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are not fleeting roles but genuine hypostases that fully embody, share, and dispense the one divine essence. From the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed onward, the distinct language of begetting and procession—commanding baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”—underscores the biblical insistence on true personal distinction. While the Church has long rejected both tritheism and modalism, it upholds that any perceived multiplicity does not imply partitioning the divine substance; rather, it reveals the profound mystery of a one God expressed in three self‑giving relational modes.
A central insight from Jiri Benovsky’s metaphysics provides a corrective and clarifying resource here. Benovsky teaches that primitives—irreducible relational elements—allow us to understand identity and compresence without appealing to a composite framework. In SSGO, these primitives are recognized as “relational modes”—the fundamental, non‑compositional ways in which the one divine essence is fully self‑expressed. Following Aquinas’s language of subsistent relations, SSGO articulates that:
The Father is the mode of self‑standing begetter;
The Son is the mode of self‑standing begotten; and
The Holy Spirit is the mode of self‑standing procession.
These modes are not additional parts of God; they are the very manners in which the undivided essence is manifested. As the Catechism (para. 255) affirms, each Person is wholly God (consubstantial), with genuine distinctions arising solely from their unique relational origins. Thus, we reconcile personal diversity and divine simplicity: the relational distinctions inherent in self‑givenness do not divide God’s essence but reveal its dynamic, unfragmented expression.
Part II – A Concise Expression of Divine Simplicity
Divine simplicity, as understood within SSGO, is encapsulated by four core claims:
No Composition: God is entirely without parts—nothing in Him can be added or subtracted, whether physically, metaphysically, or conceptually.
Absolute Unity: God’s essence is fully one and undivided; everything in God is simply God.
No Multiplication of Attributes: Any apparent distinctions in God’s attributes are merely conceptual, not indicative of a partition of His essence.
Complete Self‑Sufficiency: God is fully actualized, devoid of any unrealized potential that would imply a need for an external principle.
By treating the divine Persons as self‑standing relational modes of one simple essence, SSGO upholds both the fullness of divine simplicity and the genuine, eternal distinctions within the Trinity. This model shows that the tri‑personal life of God is not a composite of parts, but the manifestation of one undivided, self‑donating Being.
Part III – SSGO’s Premise
Please note: The following is my original contribution to philosophical theology—a premise for understanding divine simplicity through the lens of relational self‑givenness. Accept no substitutes.
A. Beyond Authority and Onto Relation as a Proposal My approach employs contemporary metaphysical tools—specifically, the notion of relation and relationality—to transcend mere appeals to authority. It is intuitive that a relation can embody the entirety of being from a given vantage. Here, God’s self‑disclosure in Christ reveals a unique perspective that bypasses an infinite dissection of His nature, fusing Catholic tradition, Aquinas’s insights, and the modern tools offered by Benovsky and Marion into a forward‑looking presentation of divine simplicity.
B. What Is “Relation” in SSGO? Critics might dismiss relational modes as reiterations of old debates on eternal relations, but in SSGO, “relation” is elevated to a robust philosophical category. A divine Person is not merely a fragment of God but the complete, fully actualized expression of the one essence from a unique relational vantage. This proposal goes beyond “trust me” theology by offering a clear criterion for non‑compositionality, where each self‑standing relational mode is the entire exercise of the divine essence—not an added attribute.
C. A Proposed Premise for Genuine Disagreement From the standpoint of moderate realism and relational ontology, each self‑standing relational mode is not an incomplete fragment but the total, irreducible expression of the divine essence from its own unique stance. For example, the Father’s identity is not a mere clustering of attributes but an expression of unbegottenness that fully embodies the divine reality. SSGO thus enables a robust “monarchy of the Father” model that secures the integrity of tri‑une self‑givenness without reducing the divine to derivative or finite categories. In this way, the synthesis of Marion’s insights, Benovsky’s metaphysical primitives, and the re‑interpretation of classical tradition coalesce into an original and compelling articulation of divine simplicity. Enjoy!
The argument set forth above, contextualized within the claim that by grounding each Person in a self‑standing relational mode of the one divine essence, we uphold both divine oneness and the real, eternal distinctions among the Persons, is and as central to the SSGO way of doing theology. A self‑standing relational mode is the foundational concept that describes how each divine Person (Father, Son, Spirit) fully embodies the one simple essence without any added “parts.” In this framework, the distinct identity of each Person arises precisely from the way the essence is possessed—its relational mode—rather than from partitioning the essence into separate pieces.
