Divine Simplicity and Relational Plenitude:
The Self-Donative Vision of God: A Synthesis of Robert Dryer’s Metaphysical-Theological System
[please note at some point in this paper I switch to 3rd person for formatting and editing purposes. In the future I’ll fix the voicing.]
Introduction
My theology centers on what he calls the Principle of Relationality – the idea that God’s very being is an eternal act of self-giving love, a self-donative, relational life at the heart of the divine nature. In this vision, God is not a static, isolated substance, but “Being-as-Communion,” to use the evocative phrase of Eastern theologian John D. Zizioulas. All that God is – His oneness, goodness, and even His timeless perfection – is understood as an active communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in mutual self-outpouring. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger succinctly put it, “In God, person means relation. Relation… is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself”. Dryer builds upon this insight, asserting that “to be, for God (and by extension, for all reality), is fundamentally to be in relation — a continual act of self-giving love”. This approach reframes classical metaphysics by shifting focus from substance to communion. It means that relation is no mere accident in God; rather, “relationship itself is… identical with the divine essence”, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught when he affirmed that the Trinitarian relations “are the divine essence itself”. Each divine Person – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is the one simple divine essence, existing as a subsistent relation of self-donating love.
Importantly, this relational vision does not negate traditional attributes like divine simplicity or immutability; instead, it illumines their meaning afresh. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) professed that God is “one absolutely simple essence… Father, Son and Holy Ghost; three persons indeed, but one absolutely simple substance or nature”. Dryer wholeheartedly affirms this: God is utterly simple, without parts, without composition. But simplicity is understood dynamically – not as the inertia of an impersonal monad, but as the unity of a life of infinite self-giving. In Dryer’s words, God is “one pure act of being”, self-subsistent Love in which all that is in God is God. Even God’s unchangeable perfection is seen as “a life of supreme giving and receiving”: the one true God “needs nothing” yet “created the world… to manifest His perfection by the good things which He bestows on creatures”. In short, self-giving love is no afterthought or added quality in God – it is the eternal heartbeat of God’s being.
This treatise presents a full synthesis of my metaphysical and theological system. We will see how the entire panorama of theology – from God’s inner simplicity and triune relations, through His goodness, eternity, and revelation, to an anthropology of grace, theosis, liturgy, and eschatology – coalesces around one guiding vision: the divine life as eternal self-donation. The discussion will proceed in structured sections: first examining God’s essential attributes (His one self-subsisting, self-sufficient being), then His relational Trinitarian life, then the “fully-given” attributes (divine love and goodness revealed as total gift), followed by considerations of God’s immutability, freedom, and engagement with creation. We will also delve into the philosophical grounding of my approach (his use of metaphysical “primitives” and the phenomenology of givenness), and finally explore the implications for humanity’s participation in God’s life – in the Church’s worship and the eternal destiny of creation. Throughout, we remain rooted in Scripture and Catholic Tradition – from the Church Fathers and St. Thomas Aquinas to St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and contemporary thinkers – showing that this “relational ontology” is not a novelty but a deepened understanding of the Mystery of God as the Mystery of Love.
- Divine Simplicity: God as Pure Act and Self-Standing Being
At the foundation of my system is the classical doctrine of divine simplicity, read through the lens of God’s self-giving being. Catholic theology has long taught that God is absolutely one and simple: “without parts, composition, or division”. In God, “essence and existence are identical,” and every attribute (omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, etc.) is just God’s one infinite being under a different aspect. St. Thomas Aquinas expressed this by calling God actus purus – Pure Act, with no unrealized potential. Dryer fully embraces these tenets, summarizing six key facets of simplicity:
- God as Pure Act: God’s essence is fully actualized; there is no potentiality in Him. He is the fullness of being itself (ipsum esse subsistens).
- No Composition: God has no parts or composition. He is not made up of body and soul, essence and attributes, or any other components – nothing in Him is “added on”. Even what we call His attributes (knowledge, will, power, love) are one and the same reality in Him.
- Identity of Essence and Existence: Unlike creatures (where what we are is distinct from that we are), in God there is no distinction between what He is and that He is. God doesn’t have existence as a quality – He is existence, “the One who is” (cf. Exodus 3:14).
- Immutability: Because He is Pure Act with no unrealized possibilities, God cannot change. Change implies acquiring or losing some actuality, whereas God is already the fullness of perfection. He is “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).
- Unity in Trinity: Here Dryer’s unique contribution emerges – despite God’s absolute simplicity, within His one essence there exist the three real relational distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These distinctions are not parts or separate pieces of God; they are relations, which paradoxically are the one essence fully expressed in three modes. We will explore this more in the next section.
- Aseity (Independence): God is utterly self-sufficient and dependent on nothing outside Himself. Nothing “causes” God or adds to Him; He is the uncaused source of all. His simplicity means He cannot lose or gain from creation – the doctrine of aseity assures us that God’s being is in no way contingent on the world.
My Self-Standing Givenness Ontology (SSGO) takes these truths and reframes them around God’s self-giving life. The term “self-standing” underscores God’s aseity – God simply is, owing His existence to no other. The term “givenness” highlights that God’s very existence is an act of giving – an eternal self-donation. Thus, in SSGO, God’s utter self-sufficiency and His radical self-giving are inseparable aspects of the one divine reality. In other words, God’s being remains perfectly undiminished even as He pours Himself out in love. There is no conflict: God can fully give Himself without ceasing to be fully God. This insight does not add new doctrine, but re-articulates age-old truths in a dynamic way. It shows that divine simplicity and transcendence are not cold abstractions – they safeguard that God’s love is dependable (since He needs nothing, His love is purely free) and inexhaustible (an infinite source that can never be depleted).
To illustrate, consider God’s eternity and immutability. Classical theology says God is eternal and unchanging because any change would imply a lack being filled or a perfection gained/lost – impossible for the Perfect Being. Dryer concurs: as actus purus, God has no unrealized potentials, so He cannot “upgrade” or “diminish.” But far from making God remote or inert, God’s changeless fullness of being is precisely what allows Him to be faithfully self-giving. Since “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), His love is not fickle; because God does not change, the “steadfast love of the LORD endures forever” (cf. Ps 136). Put in a similar may: “because God is immutable, His love is steadfast and freely given — nothing external can disrupt His resolve”. In God, unchanging means unswerving in the outpouring of goodness. Thus, rather than seeing immutability as static isolation, we see it as the ever-constant torrent of divine charity that nothing can thwart.
The metaphysics here upholds all the classical attributes – unity, simplicity, aseity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability – but interprets them through God’s self-communicative act. God’s oneness is the unity of a triune love; His perfection is plenitude of life that overflows; His timelessness is endless vitality without decline; His independence is the freedom to love without need or compulsion. “God’s self-standing nature is not a solitary aloofness but the very source and wellspring of endless self-giving”. The one simple God is an “utterly simple and dynamically relational” reality – an infinite Act of To-Be, which is identical with an Act of To-Love. We now turn to how this one simple God is understood as an eternal Trinity of self-donative relations.
- The Triune Communion: Relationality at the Heart of the Divine Essence
Christian faith confesses that the one God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – an eternal tri-personal communion of love. Dryer’s Principle of Relationality takes this Trinitarian reality as “the starting point and interpretative key” for understanding God. In fact, it asserts that God’sd simplicity itself is triune: the only “ingredients” in God’s simple being are the Father, Son, and Spirit in their mutual relations. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church beautifully states, “God Himself is an eternal exchange of love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC §221). Moreover, “in God everything is one, where there is no opposition of relation” (CCC §255). In other words, the three Persons are distinct only by their relations of origin – Fatherhood, Sonship, and Spirit-procession – and these relations do not divide the divine unity. They are the unity. Each Person is the one God, yet each in a unique relational mode: the Father as unbegotten source, the Son as begotten of the Father, the Spirit as breathed forth from Father and Son. These relational distinctions are the only distinctions in God, and they are not attributes or parts, but subsisting relations – relations “subsistens,” as Ratzinger notes.
I want to emphasize that “to be God is to be in relation”. Accordingly, each divine Person can be described as an eternally actualized self-gift within the Godhead. The Father from all eternity pours out the fullness of the divine being in generating the Son; the Son is the perfect recipient of that love who eternally offers it back in filial love; the Holy Spirit is the living bond of love, proceeding as the mutual fruition of Father and Son’s self-gift. The Greek Fathers used the term perichoresis (interpenetration or mutual indwelling) to describe how each Person contains the others: “the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit…” and vice versa. The Council of Florence (1439) taught that because of the perfect unity of nature, “each of the Persons is wholly in the others”. Thus the divine life is like an eternal embrace of love: each Person distinct, yet each Person contains the one whole divine life, pouring it into the Others in an unceasing exchange. This image of an “eternal embrace” (proposed by Dryer as an analogical model) vividly captures the mystery: God’s unity is the very communion of self-giving love, and all reality is encompassed in that embrace without collapsing Creator and creature. There is no tritheism (for the Three are one reality of love), and no modalism (for the Three enjoy true reciprocal relationship, not merely masks).
A cornerstone of a relational system like here is identifying the Trinitarian relations as metaphysical primitives – foundational, irreducible realities in God’s being. In classical terms, one might say the divine personae are subsistent relations (Aquinas) or “relationes subsistentes”. The point is that one cannot explain the Trinity by anything deeper than relation, because relation is itself an ultimate feature of God. The Father, Son, and Spirit are self-standing relational modes of the one essence. They are “self-standing” in that each Person is not a part of God but is God in full; yet each is a distinct relational vantage point of that one reality. And they are called “primitives” because this relational threeness is a fundamental fact about God that doesn’t derive from something else – it is an ultimate metaphysical given. By positing relation itself as a primitive in God we have a coherent way to hold simplicity and plurality together. The relations are inside the divine essence, not bolted on from outside, so they do not compromise simplicity. Yet, because they are primitive and irreducible, they ensure that real distinctions exist (the Father is not the Son, etc.), avoiding any collapse into a solitary monad. This is my answer to the age-old puzzle: how the Trinity’s “Three” coexist with God’s “One.” The answer is that God’s oneness is a unity of relationship – an internal self-differentiation that doesn’t split His being but expresses it. Each Person “fully possesses the same divine essence”, distinguished only by “unique relational modes of self-donation”. The Father gives the one divine essence in begetting the Son; the Son receives and returns that same essence in filial relation; the Spirit receives the essence from Father and Son and personally is their mutual love. None is “part” of God – each is God wholly, but each as a distinct relation of origin.
This relational ontology revolutionizes how we understand personhood in theology. As Ratzinger observed, the Trinitarian doctrine forced a shift beyond the old substance-accident schema: God is not an individual substance with relations as accidents; God is communion as such. Relation in God is “not something superadded…but it is the person itself”. Boethius’s classical definition of person as “an individual substance of rational nature” is transcended here. Instead, Person is pure relationality. The Father exists only in relation to the Son (there is no “Father” apart from begetting the Son); the Son exists only as Son of the Father; the Spirit exists only as proceeding Love from the Father and Son. These relations are immutable and eternal – there was never a time the Father was not Father of the Son, etc. (the processions are not events in time, but eternal realities). Thus God’s internal life is eternally dynamic without being temporal: the Father is always loving the Son, the Son always responding, the Spirit always uniting – “there was never a time when God was not triune”. Paradoxically, this eternal activity of love constitutes an unchanging fullness: it is a changeless change, an “eternal movement” of love that is God’s stable being. Some spiritual writers have dared to say “God is eternal movement”; Dryer would add, that movement is reciprocal love, and it doesn’t contradict immutability because it is a fully actual, perfect act (with no unfinished process).
From this vantage, the classic divine attributes appear in a new light. God’s unity is nothing other than the total co-inherence of the Three – “without confusion” yet “without separation,” to borrow Chalcedonian language. God’s goodness and love are seen to be not merely things God has but what God is in this triune exchange. And notably, God’s freedom and necessity are uniquely reconciled: the Father’s begetting of the Son, for instance, is not a “choice” as if it could be otherwise – it is necessary, in the sense that it flows from God’s very nature (the Father could not not be Father). Yet it is not a constraint on God’s freedom, because this procession is internal and eternal – it is simply who God is. The Father’s nature is to beget the Son, and He does so freely and eternally, not under compulsion but as the natural “fruitfulness” of His being. Ratzinger, notes that “the processions are both necessary and freely given” – necessary, because they belong to God’s essence; yet free, because they are identical with the divine freedom itself (nothing external forces them). This has profound implications: it means the very essence of God’s freedom is self-giving love. God is most free in giving Himself; the triune life is the paradigm of freedom as love, not freedom as indifference. As St. Augustine analogized, the Trinity is like Lover, Beloved, and the Love between them – love is constitutive of God’s being.
Trinitarian theology shows that relation is as real and fundamental as substance – indeed, in God’s case, relation is substance. This “relational monotheism” preserves everything classical theism holds (one omnipotent, simple God) while illuminating that within that oneness is an inexhaustible life of communion. It gives a satisfying resolution to the “one and three” tension: God’s simplicity is the unity of threefold relationality, not the simplicity of a solitary essence enclosed in itself. Thus, divine simplicity and the Trinity are in harmony: “relationality does not divide God but constitutes His very unity”. Each Person is fully the one God, yet each is “distinguished solely by [His] unique relational mode of self-donation”. This principle – that self-donative relationality is intrinsic to the simple divine essence – is the master key for unlocking subsequent doctrines. With it in hand, we can now approach God’s relationship to creation, the meaning of divine goodness, and the drama of salvation, all under the aspect of self-giving love.
III. Creation and Goodness: The Outpouring of Divine Self-Gift
If God’s inner life is perfect self-giving love, how does that relate to the world? Here we touch on creation, revelation, and grace – the external works of God – which, in my account, are understood as the overflow of God’s internal relational fullness. Classical theology carefully distinguished between God’s internal processions (the Son and Spirit) and external processions (creation, salvation history). The internal relations are necessary and eternal (God must be triune; He could never be “without” His Son and Spirit), whereas the act of creation is free and contingent (God chooses to create and could have refrained). I try to maintain this distinction. He echoes St. Thomas Aquinas: because God is already complete in Himself, creating the world does not change God or fulfill some unmet need. “Before” creation (speaking logically, not temporally), God already knew and loved Himself infinitely; after creation, God knows and loves Himself and His creation in one single eternal act, without any mutation in His being. The act of creation adds nothing intrinsic to God – it is entirely gratuitous, a free gift of being to creatures. My Principle of Relationality strongly reinforces this: if God is already an eternal communion of love lacking no perfection, then creation can only be understood as an act of pure generosity – God creates not to get something, but to give something. “God does not require creation to actualize relational potential;” “God is eternally complete in relational love; hence, creation is a free gift – an overflow of divine love rather than a remedy for any deficiency”. In other words, the world exists because the triune Love wanted to share the bounty of His love outwardly, not because He had to or needed to. As the First Vatican Council taught (in Dei Filius), God created “not for increasing His own beatitude, nor for attaining any perfection, but in order to manifest His perfection through the benefits which He bestows on creatures”.
Creation, then, is the first “gift” of God’s love to the other. All things are brought forth by the Word through the Spirit’s presence, freely and in love. The act of creating ex nihilo (from nothing) is an expression of God’s omnipotence and freedom, but I urge that we see it foremost as an expression of God’s goodness. God is “the Good” diffusing itself. He made a world to communicate some share of His own being and goodness to creatures – to let others participate in the love He is. This is why, in Genesis, after each act of creation, “God saw that it was good.” The goodness of creation reflects the goodness of the Creator who gifted it being. Yet, crucially, this view preserves the Creator–creature distinction with utmost clarity: however intimate God’s presence in creation, creation never becomes a piece of God or an emanation of the divine essence. The “embrace” analogy he uses – God holds creatures within the encompassing love of the Trinity without the creatures being the Trinity – safeguards this. The world lives within the creative embrace of God’s love and is sustained by it, yet the world ever remains distinct – a finite gift from the Infinite Giver. There is no pantheistic fusion. God’s immanence in creation (intimately sustaining all in being) never undermines His transcendence above creation. As Dryer succinctly puts it, creation exists “within the nurturing context provided by God” yet “remains distinct from the infinite, self-subsistent source” of that love. The Giver and gift are not confused, though they are in relationship.
What of divine providence and God’s involvement in history? Here, the same principle applies: God’s governance of the world is not an external manipulation by a distant deity, but the continuous self-communication of the immanent God who is Love. God’s actions in the world “are not distant interventions by an aloof monarch, but the constant presence of an omnipresent Love inviting creation into communion”. In other words, providence is God’s love at work in every moment, “holding” all things in existence (cf. Wisdom 11:24-26) and guiding them toward their fulfillment – which is ultimately communion with Himself. Because God is utter Love, even His justice and sovereignty are ordered by love. There is no tension in God between justice and mercy, or power and tenderness; these attributes, too, are one in the self-giving God. Scripture can thus say, paradoxically, “For whom the Lord loves He disciplines” (Hebrews 12:6) – not because love and discipline oppose, but because God’s governance of creatures is aimed at their true good (union with Him), and sometimes that involves painful pruning out of love. Yet unlike the capricious gods of myth, the true God’s will is consistently loving and good, even when mysterious to us. Dryer’s relational lens helps us trust that behind all providence is the God who “so loved the world” (John 3:16).
The Incarnation of the Son of God is the ultimate expression of God’s self-giving in revelation and salvation. If creation is the first gift, the sending of the Son to become flesh is the unsurpassable gift – God literally giving Himself to unite with our nature. “The entire drama of salvation history unfolds as the self-gift of God’s love”, I’ve observed elsewhere. At the climax stands Jesus Christ, in whom “God literally gives Himself – ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son’” (John 3:16). In Christ, God’s self-donation is made visible: “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) – Love itself put on human nature. Every facet of Christ’s life reveals divine love: His birth, teachings, healings, and ultimately His death on the Cross and Resurrection. The Paschal Mystery as Love’s most radical form: “His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against Himself in which He gives Himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form”. Here he quotes Pope Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est to underscore the point: on the Cross, God’s love “holds nothing back,” even to the point of the Son experiencing a kind of “distance” or abandonment (Matt 27:46) as He offers Himself for our sins. In Jesus’ cry “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” we see how far divine love will go – God enters even into the feeling of God-forsakenness on our behalf. I interprets this as God “going against Himself”, not in the sense of inner division, but in the sense of God’s love transcending every divine prerogative (immortality, impassibility) to share our plight and overcome it. The Son, who in His divine nature cannot suffer or die, freely assumed a human nature precisely so that He could suffer and die for us, without ceasing to be God. This is the mind-bending mystery of the Incarnation: the impassible God unites Himself with passible humanity, and thus “enters into our suffering for our salvation”. The divine nature remains unchanged (God doesn’t turn into a mutable being), but by the hypostatic union, the Son of God experiences all that we experience (except sin) in His human soul and body. Far from compromising God’s perfection, this extreme condescension manifests God’s perfection – it shows that omnipotence is most truly itself as omnipotent love, a love so powerful it can make even suffering and death into the instruments of life. As Ratzinger observed, “God is love” means God is total self-gift, and because He is omnipotent love, nothing from outside can force or change Him. Jesus’s Passion reveals that what is deepest in God (self-giving love) is stronger than sin and death.
From the Cross flows the grace of redemption – forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit – which is nothing other than God imparting His own life to humanity, allowing us to share in the triune communion. The Church Fathers had a famous way of describing this exchange: “God became what we are, that we might become what He is”. St. Athanasius said it, and St. Irenaeus likewise taught that the Son of God “became what we are so that He might enable us to become what He is Himself”. Dryer cites these patristic witnesses to emphasize divinization (theosis): salvation is not just moral improvement, it is literally a participation in the divine nature (cf. 2 Peter 1:4) – an elevation of humans into the life of God’s family. By the gift of the Holy Spirit, Christians are adopted as sons and daughters in the Son, crying “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:15). We are invited into the Trinitarian exchange of love: “the triune communion of love expands to include humanity”. This is grace: a creaturely share in God’s own life, accomplished through the Paschal Mystery and communicated in the Church. God’s holiness, goodness, mercy – traditionally understood attributes – now appear most clearly in this economy of salvation. Holiness, for example, is not merely separation from sin; it is the positive fire of divine love that purifies and transforms the beloved. Dryer writes, “Holiness is not aloof purity but the burning fire of love that sacrifices itself for the beloved”. Likewise, mercy is not just leniency; it is “the compassionate self-gift that heals the other”. Every divine attribute shines brightly when seen as an aspect of God’s self-giving: omnipotence, for instance, is manifest as the power of sacrificial love that “overcomes sin in the weakness of the Cross” (cf. 1 Cor 1:25). Even God’s wrath in Scripture, Dryer suggests, can be interpreted through this lens – not as a loss of temper, but as the expression of God’s love in the mode of vehement opposition to sin, because sin harms the beloved.
In this way, my framework reframes all God’s actions and qualities as facets of one reality: God giving God. This yields an elegant unity to theology. Instead of a seemingly disjointed list of divine attributes (omniscience, justice, mercy, etc.) and separate theological loci (creation, providence, Christology, sacraments, etc.), everything converges on the truth that “God’s very being is self-communicating love.” Dryer even proposes a guiding question or “unifying theorem” for theology: whenever we speak of a divine attribute or action, we should ask how is this an aspect of God’s self-gift?. So for example, God’s truth is not a cold facticity or mere logical consistency; it is God’s faithful self-revelation – “His truth is His self-disclosure to us, ultimately exemplified in Christ who says ‘I am…the Truth’”. God’s justice can be seen as the form love takes in restoring right order – ultimately accomplished when Love incarnate satisfies justice on the Cross, upholding the moral order while saving the sinner. And God’s glory is not divine vanity, but the radiant display of His goodness, which paradoxically reaches its zenith when God humbles Himself to save us (for Christ says on the eve of the Passion, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him” – John 13:31, referring to the Cross).
[please note at this point I’m switching to 3rd person for ease of editing and formatting for the website]
It is vital to note that Dryer’s synthesis remains thoroughly orthodox and within the bounds of Catholic doctrine. He is not replacing classical concepts but integrating them. As he carefully points out, this framework “introduces no new dogmas” but highlights what the Church has always taught, in a fresh relational idiom. He does not, for instance, suggest that God actually changes or suffers in His divine nature – what changes is our relationship with Him and our participation in Him. God eternally is self-giving love; in time we come to share in that love ever more (or resist it). The immutable God can do “new” things in history (like the Incarnation or miracles) precisely because in Himself He eternally contains those acts in His sovereign will. From our temporal perspective, God’s love story with us unfolds sequentially; from God’s eternal perspective, it is one single act of outpouring. Dryer uses the classical distinction: the communication of God’s goodness ad extra (to creatures) is simply the overflow of the processions ad intra (within God). Grace is an extension of the Trinity: the Father eternally gives the Son and Spirit; in salvation, the Father sends the Son and Spirit to the world so that we might be taken up into that eternal giving. The Catechism, as noted, says God “has destined us to share in that exchange” of triune love. This is the ultimate meaning of goodness: bonum est diffusivum sui (the good is self-diffusive). God’s goodness is seen in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8) – He gives Himself to the unworthy to make them worthy. And His holiness is not threatened by coming into contact with sinners; rather, it is like a purifying fire that sanctifies those who draw near. All told, Dryer’s system paints a compelling picture that “everything begins and ends in God’s gift of Himself”. Creation’s beginning is grace and love; history’s goal is our total communion with the God who is Love. We turn now to consider more explicitly that final goal and its foretaste: the sharing in the divine life that defines both the Church’s worship and the hope of eternal glory.
- Theosis and Communion: Humanity’s Share in the Divine Life
In Dryer’s vision, the destiny of human persons – and indeed of all creation – is bound up with the self-donating life of God. The end (telos) of creation is that the creatures come to share in the Creator’s triune communion. This is essentially the doctrine of theosis or divinization mentioned above. The Catechism’s statement bears repeating: “God is an eternal exchange of love, and He has destined us to share in that exchange”. Dryer calls this “the ultimate vocation of every creature”. We are made for communion – communion with God and, in God, communion with each other. This gives a profound relational cast to Christian anthropology. As Ratzinger wrote, “The human person is the event or being of relativity… I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for [the other]”. Human nature, being in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), finds its fulfillment not in isolation but in relationship – ultimately, relationship with the divine Persons and all those united in God. Dryer’s system affirms that grace perfects (not abolishes) this creaturely social-relational nature. In grace, we are elevated to supernatural communion: we become, by participation, what the Trinity is by nature – a familial exchange of love.
One practical and mystical expression of this destiny now is the sacred liturgy. Although Dryer’s writings do not extensively treat liturgy in this context, the implications are clear. The liturgy – especially the Holy Eucharist – is where the Church participates here and now in the self-giving life of God. In the Eucharist, Christ gives us His Body and Blood, that is, He gives us His very Self, drawing us into His one sacrifice of love to the Father. It is the sacramental participation in the Son’s self-offering and the Spirit’s life. Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) argued that liturgy is inherently relational and participatory: in worship we respond to God’s self-revelation by offering ourselves back to Him, and thus we enter the relational dynamic of love (Father receiving our gift in the Son, and giving us anew the Spirit). Dryer would certainly resonate with this: the Church’s worship is not just a human activity, but the extension of Christ’s self-offering and an anticipation of the heavenly communion. When believers gather as the Body of Christ, they form, as St. Augustine said, the “whole Christ” (Christus totus) – head and members united. In that assembly, “I alone am not myself, but only with others am I myself” – a truth reflecting both human and divine communion. The liturgy, then, can be seen as a present foretaste of deification: we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) most tangibly when we receive the divine life (grace) in Word and Sacrament. In the Mass, heaven and earth unite; the eternal exchange of love touches time, and we are swept up into it. Thus, liturgy is rightly called “the source and summit” of the Christian life (Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium 10) – it both springs from God’s self-gift and leads us toward the consummation of that gift in eternity.
Looking toward eschatology, Dryer’s framework envisions the fulfillment of all things as perfect communion. In the end, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) – which is to say, the love of God will permeate and unite creation without destroying the distinctness of creatures. The glory for which we hope is nothing other than full participation in the triune life of God, seeing Him “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12) and living in the unity of the Spirit. Dryer references the “exchange of love” of CCC §221 as the destiny of creation, and speaks of it in terms of “gift and communion”. In heaven (the final state), the self-donation that God has extended to us in Christ will achieve its purpose: we will respond with total self-gift back to God and to each other, in a created reflection of Trinitarian love. This is the Communion of Saints – a multitude of persons completely united in love, each distinct and yet all one in God, much as the triune Persons are distinct yet one. It is significant that Revelation describes the end as “the marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7) – a wedding feast, an image of intimate union and joy. God and humanity will be united as bride and Bridegroom in an eternal covenant of love (cf. Eph 5:31-32). In Dryer’s terms, one could say that the horizontal (human-to-human) and vertical (human-to-God) relations will be perfected together: every division caused by sin will be healed, and all relationships will subsist harmoniously within the overarching relational unity of God’s love.
Notably, this eschatological vision underscores the goodness of creation and the value of the material world. Because creation is the overflow of God’s love, it is destined not for annihilation but for transfiguration. The Resurrection of Jesus (and the promised resurrection of our bodies) shows that God’s self-gift includes even the physical order – “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). In the end, the New Heaven and New Earth will be the theater of God’s indwelling presence (“the dwelling of God is with men” – Rev 21:3). All creaturely goodness will be taken up and perfected in the direct presence of the Creator. In scholastic language, grace perfects nature, it doesn’t replace it. Dryer’s approach, focusing on God’s giving, aligns well with this: God doesn’t scrap His gifts; He brings them to fulfillment. The gift of created existence will become the gift of uncreated life within us, but it remains gift – gratuitous participation, not something owed or possessed by right. All will redound to God’s glory, which, again, is simply the manifestation of His love fully triumphant in His creatures.
Before concluding, let us address a potential tension: how can God’s immutability and impassibility be reconciled with the dramatic story of salvation, where God seems to “change” (e.g. the Word becoming flesh, the Father “sending” the Son, God’s wrath turning to mercy, etc.) and to “suffer” (in Christ’s Passion)? Dryer tackles this head-on. He makes a crucial distinction between God in Himself (ad intra) and God’s work in time (ad extra). In Himself, God is eternally the same triune act of love – nothing can be added or subtracted. But in the world, new effects unfold as God’s one eternal plan is executed. The Incarnation, for example, is a new reality in creation, but it is the fruit of God’s eternal decision (the Logos did not begin to exist at incarnation; rather the Logos, eternal in God, assumed a human nature at a point in time). So God appears to change from our perspective (Old Covenant to New Covenant, etc.), but it is we who change relative to Him as we enter into new phases of relationship. Likewise with impassibility: God cannot suffer in His divine nature – nothing can disturb the eternal divine beatitude. Yet, out of that infinite love, God the Son was free to unite to Himself a passible human nature, and in that nature truly suffer and die. The suffering is real, but it is carried by the humanity of Christ, not by a change in the divinity. The Council of Chalcedon (451) clarified that Christ’s divine nature and human nature are distinct yet united in one Person. So, whatever Jesus experiences in His humanity (hunger, pain, death) is truly experienced by the Person of the Son, but does not make the divine nature itself subject to these limitations. Dryer uses this to uphold that God’s self-giving does not compromise His transcendence. Rather, it showcases a miracle of divine condescension: God remains God, yet truly joins us in our condition. This mystery reassures us that even as we assert “God suffers in Christ,” we can still trust that “God cannot be overcome”. Love is so powerful that God can take on suffering and transform it from within, without ceasing to be the impassible Almighty. Hence Christ’s death is not defeat, but victory; and His Resurrection is the proof that divine life cannot be extinguished. After the Resurrection, the scars remain on Jesus’ glorified body, but as glorious trophies – suffering subsumed into glory, pain transfigured into love’s triumph.
In the eschaton, there will be no contradiction between God’s eternal rest and eternal dynamism. Revelation speaks of the saints enjoying “rest” from their labors (Rev 14:13), yet also depicts an everlasting worship, a “new song” ever being sung (Rev 5:13, 7:15). Dryer’s relational vision helps parse this: the rest is the perfect stability of possessing God (nothing lacking, no anxiety or change for the worse), and the song is the ever-living active interchange of love that never grows old. We may say the blessed in heaven are “unchangeably in love” – fixed in the supreme good, yet love’s expression is an eternal living act, not a static pose. This parallels God’s own eternal, immutable yet dynamic life.
Thus, the final state of creatures is participation in the eternal Act of Love that is God. That is their glorification and God’s glory as well – since God is glorified when His goodness is reflected in and acknowledged by His creatures. Summarizing Dryer: “All traditional divine attributes, all of salvation history, and every aspect of creation find their coherence in one thing: God giving God”. When creatures finally receive God fully and give themselves fully back in love, the circle is complete – the purpose of creation is realized.
- Philosophical Foundations: Being-as-Gift and Metaphysical Primitives
Dryer’s theological synthesis is reinforced by a rich philosophical underpinning, engaging metaphysics and phenomenology to articulate how self-donation can be the foundation of reality. A key concept he employs is that of metaphysical primitives, drawn in part from contemporary philosopher Jiri Benovsky. Benovsky explains that in any metaphysical explanation, one must eventually come to some fundamental “things” or principles that are not explained by deeper ones – these are “primitives” which stop the infinite regress of why’s. They serve as the basic explanatory starting points. For example, a materialist might take fundamental particles as primitives (“they just are and have these properties”), or an Aristotelian might take substance and form as primitives. Benovsky notes that such primitives are indispensable because without them we could never account for anything – we’d always be looking for a deeper cause. They give explanatory power precisely by being the point beyond which you don’t push the explanation further.
Benovsky himself (working in a nominalist framework) suggests a very sparse ontology of particulars as primitives. Dryer, however, appropriates the methodological insight while moving it into a realist and theological register. For Dryer, as we discussed, the Trinitarian relations are primitives within God – you can’t reduce Father, Son, and Spirit to anything more basic in the Godhead. They are sui generis realities. But Dryer goes further: he asserts that relational self-givenness is the fundamental reality at all levels of existence, not just within God. In other words, instead of substance or matter-energy or Plato’s forms or any impersonal principle at the base of reality, the base is love-in-relation – the primal fact that “to be is to be given and received.” This is a bold meta-metaphysical claim, effectively identifying gift (donation) as the ground of being. How can one justify such a claim? Dryer finds corroboration in the phenomenological philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, particularly Marion’s notion of givenness (donation). Marion argues that in the realm of how things appear to consciousness, the gift (the given-ness of phenomena) precedes and exceeds any conceptualization. “What shows itself first gives itself,” Marion says – meaning that the primary experience is that something is presented or given to us, and only afterward do we try to constitute or analyze it. Phenomenologically, the act of something showing itself is irreducible – it is a “self-presenting donation” that cannot be fully explained by our mental categories. Marion emphasizes that givenness itself is a kind of “primitive event” – it just happens, it gives itself without a why. Furthermore, “the phenomenon does not show itself because we constitute it; it shows itself insofar as it gives itself”. This upends the Kantian idea that the subject imposes conditions on the object; for Marion, the initiative lies with the gift of the phenomenon. It appears on its own accord, as it were.
The interplay of Benovsky and Marion yields an interesting synthesis. Benovsky provides the idea that one must accept some brute starting-point in an explanation (the concept of primitives). Marion provides the insight that givenness is at the heart of how reality manifests to us – the first thing is the giving of itself, not our grasp of it. Dryer combines these by suggesting: what if relational givenness is the true metaphysical primitive? What if the ultimate explanation of why anything exists and acts as it does is that being itself is a gift – an act of self-donation from the Source (God), received and participated by creatures? If this is so, then we have a coherent “primitive” that is both metaphysically and phenomenologically satisfying: relational self-gift halts the regress of explanation (we can say reality is fundamentally relational because that is how God is, and there is nothing beyond God), and it also matches our deepest intuition of reality as something given to us, not our own creation. Marion’s emphasis that givenness is foundational and not derivative resonates with Dryer’s view of God: God’s own being is “fully and autonomously given” – complete in itself yet pouring itself out.
Dryer also engages classical Thomistic metaphysics in this context, especially the idea of participation. Aquinas viewed all finite being as participating in God’s being (God is the only being whose essence = existence; creatures exist by a participated act of being given by God). In traditional terms, substance and relation were categories, with substance primary; but in light of the Trinity and Marion’s insights, Dryer sees a shift: instead of starting with substance and fitting relation into it, we start with “relational being” – being that always already implies being-in-relation. He is careful not to discard Aquinas’s realism – indeed, he recontextualizes Marion’s phenomenology (which can be quite abstract) “in light of Aquinas”. The result is not to deny substance altogether, but to assert that the deepest layer of any substance is its relatedness (to God and to others). In the Trinity, relation is substance; in creation, relation is a transcendental aspect of being (since all creatures relate to God as effect to cause, and to each other in the order of the universe). Dryer’s “meta-ontology of gift” claims that relational self-gift is the most fundamental way to think about existence. Hence he often repeats the formula: “to exist is to be given, received, and actualized in an eternal, self-donative relationship”. This captures it: existence (for God primarily, and by extension for creation) is not a static fact or a lonely possession; it’s an act, a giving of oneself and finding oneself in the context of communion.
By framing reality this way, Dryer provides a philosophical grounding for why love (agapic self-gift) is not merely a moral ideal but the very structure of being. If one accepts this, then all the theological claims we discussed gain a kind of logical harmony: it’s “fitting” that God is Trinity (the source of being is relational love), fitting that creation is donation (finite being is received from God), fitting that fulfillment is communion (being reaches perfection when it mirrors the self-giving of the Source). It also addresses modern concerns: many people today sense that impersonal or materialistic metaphysics are inadequate – we intuit that persons and relationships are more real or at least not reducible to atoms and molecules. Dryer’s system gives intellectual heft to that intuition by tying it to the doctrine of God. It aligns with a broader move in 20th-21st century theology (as seen in thinkers like Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Zizioulas, and others) to assert the primacy of love and relation in ontology. Dryer explicitly engages such sources; for instance, Balthasar’s insight that God’s love is kenotic (self-emptying) or Rahner’s rule that the “economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity” – which emphasizes that how God gives Himself in salvation history truly reveals who God is eternally. Dryer’s contribution is making these insights systematic under the rubric of SSGO.
Before concluding, let us recall how this system navigates classic heresies or errors: It avoids modalism by insisting on irreducible relational distinctions (the Persons are not just masks or roles, but real “whos”). It avoids tritheism by affirming the one shared essence (the Three are not three substances, but one being in three relations). It avoids pantheism by upholding the Creator-creature distinction even as it emphasizes God’s presence (creatures participate in God, but are not parts of God). It avoids any notion that God needed the world (love in God is already perfect without us, so creation is sheer gift). It also avoids voluntarism or arbitrary divine will by rooting God’s actions in His loving nature (God’s will is not a cold decree but expressive of who He is – Love). In sum, it provides a robustly Catholic (universal and balanced) account that integrates Scripture, Patristic theology, Scholastic metaphysics, and contemporary thought into one coherent vision.
Conclusion: God is Love – All in God is God
Robert Dryer’s metaphysical-theological synthesis culminates in a simple yet profound affirmation: God is love (1 John 4:8), and everything in the Christian faith flows from and returns to this truth. By articulating God’s very essence as relational self-donative love, Dryer offers a unifying principle that illuminates every doctrine. The mystery of the Trinity is no longer an abstract puzzle but the living heart of reality – the eternal communion that is the source and goal of all things. The doctrine of divine simplicity is seen not as a dry philosophical tenet but as describing God’s perfect unity of love – “the dynamic unity of a triune communion of love,” where simplicity and intimacy coincide. In this view, “Divine simplicity is seen in the perfect unity of the triune relations; divine immutability is the ever-constant love that flows freely; and God’s transcendence is upheld even as His immanent presence fills all things in love”. The Incarnation and salvation are the extension of that triune love to creation – God does not change in Himself, but in Christ He “moves” toward us while eternally remaining who He is (love). Grace and sacraments become the tangible means by which we are invited into the divine exchange; prayer and liturgy become our response of self-gift back to God. Eschatology is nothing other than this exchange brought to fulfillment, the moment when God’s invitation reaches its ultimate fruition and we enter into the joy of our Master – the joyous perichoresis of the saints in God.
The strength of this approach is that it marries intellectual rigor with spiritual depth. It satisfies the mind by providing explanatory coherence – one can see the logical harmony of doctrines under the light of self-donative being – and it warms the heart by preserving the mystery of love. This is no arid theism of a first cause in the sky; nor is it a vague sentimentalism. It is a vision of the Christian God that does justice both to classical metaphysics (God as actus purissimus, the most pure act) and to the biblical revelation of God as the Loving Father, Son, and Spirit who save us. Indeed, Dryer’s work can be seen as a contemporary answer to the modern dilemma of believing in a transcendent yet personal God. He shows that the God of classical theism (all-powerful, simple, eternal) is identical with the God of Scripture who “so loved the world that He gave His only Son” (John 3:16). There are not two different “Gods” (one of philosophy, one of religion); they are one and the same – the One is Love. Thus, “the God of classical theism, actus purissimus, is joyfully identified with the God of Scripture who ‘so loved the world’”. In Dryer’s words, “the one God, the Alpha and Omega, is an eternal Act of Love who gives Himself without reserve. All things spring from this love and find their fulfillment in it”. This encapsulates the entire metaphysical vision: origin (Alpha) and end (Omega) are in Love. Creation’s beginning is God’s free self-gift of being; creation’s end is sharing in God’s being of self-gift.
Such a theology has practical ramifications too. It calls us not merely to analyze divine things from afar, but to encounter and imitate God. If ultimate reality is self-giving love, then to live in accord with reality is to live a life of charity, generosity, and relationship. Dryer notes that this vision “invites us not merely to study God, but to encounter Him and be drawn into relationship”. The Christian moral life, then, is not about conforming to arbitrary rules, but about reflecting the fundamental structure of reality – when we love and make a gift of self, we are living in the truth of our being. Conversely, selfishness and isolation are a kind of unreality, a contradiction of the very fabric of existence which is relational. In an age where alienation and individualism run rampant, this relational theology offers a healing counter-message: we are made for communion, and fulfillment is found not in grasping for oneself but in sincere self-gift.
By framing it all with love, hopefully on sees how we avoid reducing God to a tidy equation or order. There remains the awe that God’s love “surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:19). Dryer frequently reminds that theology ultimately bows before mystery – not a darkness of ignorance, but an excess of light that our minds cannot exhaust. Terms like “self-standing relational givenness” are pointers to an ineffable reality: the living God. Thus, even as we benefit from this coherent framework, we remain worshippers in mystery, moved to praise.
“Such is the God we worship: ‘all in God is God,’ and that God is Love”. In that one line – all in God is God, and God is Love – we hear the resounding summary of his entire system. Everything in God (all His being, all His attributes, all His acts) is just God Himself – utterly simple – and that God is Love – an eternal triune love, “an eternal exchange of love” into which we are invited.
This is a vision at once ancient and new – ancient in its roots in Scripture and the Church’s Tradition, new in its fresh language and integration for our times. It reminds the Church that at the core of all our dogmas beats a “relational heartbeat” – the heartbeat of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, who out of sheer goodness created us, redeemed us, and is drawing us into His own eternal life. In this way, as Dryer’s work makes explicit, “the Mystery of God [is] the Mystery of Love – absolute, simple, immutable Love in relational communion, freely shared with us and calling us to communion”. This is the truth that grounds all reality and the gospel that gives life to the world. Let us conclude with that ultimate affirmation of our faith: God is Love, and those who live in love live in God, and God in them (1 John 4:16).
Key Quotes
“God is love” – 1 John 4:8
“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three, no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the One,” – Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40 § 41
“The soul cannot live without love … and, by love, I created her.” – Catherine of Siena, Dialogue of Divine Providence ch. 88
“a fire ever burning and never consumed.” – Catherine of Siena, Prayers 12
“lives and light … each one God, if contemplated separately … the three God, if contemplated collectively, because their activity and nature are the same.” – Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31 § 14
“unity is worshipped in Trinity and Trinity in unity” – Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 23 § 11
“It then follows that everything, because it exists, is good. And it also follows that whatever falls from goodness ceases to exist.” – Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy IV pr. 2
“[T]he supreme God is to the highest degree filled with supreme and perfect goodness … true happiness is to be found in the supreme God.” – Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy III pr. 10
“Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil … is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good.” – Augustine, Confessions VII 12 18
“In him we live and move and have our being.” – Acts 17:28
“Between Creator and creature no similarity can be so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.” – Fourth Lateran Council, De fide catholica ch. 1
“Man … cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” – Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes § 24
“Creaturely being is a suspended middle between God and nothingness.” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis p. 210
“Between Creator and creature every likeness is always outdistanced by an ever-greater unlikeness (maior dissimilitudo).” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis p. 117
“The analogy of being is no bridge constructed from below to above; it is the very oscillation that both separates and relates Creator and creature.” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis p. 68
“All metaphysical (and other) theories have something in common: they all contain primitives.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta-Metaphysics p. 4
“Metaphysical theories are equivalent if they do the same job in the same way.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta-Metaphysics p. 4
“Primitive problem-solvers are the pillars that sustain the structures of our theories.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta-Metaphysics p. 22
“A problem-solver is a primitive that is there to solve a problem.” – Jiří Benovsky, “Primitives,” Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics p. 22
“Primitives are individuated by what they do, what their functional role in a theory is.” – Jiří Benovsky, Meta-Metaphysics p. 4
“The more the reduction reduces (itself), the more it extends givenness, so much reduction, so much givenness.” – Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness pp. 203-204
“It is therefore necessary to admit the fact of givenness as the ultimate authority.” – Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics p. 7
“There are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness… that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded, saturated!” – Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics p. 2
“If the given gives itself as a call… what is shown always stays behind and late in comparison with what gives itself.” – Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics p. 10
“Religion attains its highest figure only when it becomes established by and as a revelation.” – Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed p. 22
“Revelation presents itself in a horizon only by saturating it.” – Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed p. 37
“I have made a Bridge of my Word, my only-begotten Son … so that, crossing the deep flood, you may not be drowned.” – Catherine of Siena, Dialogue of Divine Providence Treatise §§ 290-295
“That Bridge reaches from heaven to earth, joining the lowliness of your humanity to the greatness of the Deity.” – Catherine of Siena, Dialogue of Divine Providence Treatise §§ 296-297
“Raised on high and yet touching earth, the Bridge remade the road so that humanity might come to true happiness with the angels.” – Catherine of Siena, Dialogue of Divine Providence Treatise §§ 300-301
“Goodness and being are really the same in things, differing only conceptually; and because being is the first actuality of every thing, goodness likewise follows upon being.” – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q. 5 a. 1 ad 1
“Evil has no positive nature; the loss of good has received the name ‘evil’.” – Augustine, Enchiridion XI
“God is love … and the world-order stands upon that ultimate ground.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic I pp. 165-166
“There is nothing equivocal about God’s action toward humanity; it is sheer good, springing from love that seeks only to give itself.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I p. 16
“Because the actors enjoy real freedom, they bear real responsibility for their performance.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I p. 130
“At the lowest pitch of self-surrender, the splendor of the forma Dei shines out.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale p. 17
“Wherefore I have told you that I have made a Bridge of My Word, of My only-begotten Son… I have given you the Bridge of My Son, in order that, passing across the flood, you may not be drowned.” – Catherine of Siena, Dialogue of Divine Providence Treatise §§ 290-295
“What greater destiny can befall man’s humility than that he should be intermingled with God, and by this intermingling be deified…?” – Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30 § 3
“This is my Body, given for you…” – Luke 22:19
“This cup is the new covenant in my Blood.” – Luke 22:20
“My flesh is true food and my blood true drink… whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” – John 6:55-56
“O sacrum convivium… the memory of His Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us!” – Thomas Aquinas, Antiphon “O Sacrum Convivium”
“The most formal foundation of a creaturely metaphysics is the suspended tension between consciousness and being.” – Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis p. 67
“There we shall rest and see, we shall see and love, we shall love and praise.” – Augustine, City of God XXII 30
“Since the actors enjoy genuine freedom, they also bear genuine responsibility for their own performances.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I p. 130
“…when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.” – 1 Corinthians 15:28