SOPHIA (2013) 52:77–94 DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0270-4

Divine Nature and Divine Will Hugh J. McCann

Published online: 13 September 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between God and those universals that characterize his nature. It is argued that God has sovereignty over his nature, even though he is not self-creating, and does not give rise to the universals that characterize his nature by any act of intellection. Rather, God is himself an act of rational willing in which all that is has its existence. Because the act that is God is one of free will, he has sovereignty over the features it displays, which include all that characterizes his nature. Keywords Aseity . Divine freedom . Divine nature . Divine will . Sovereignty . States of affairs . Tropes The primary purpose of this paper is to examine God’s relationship as creator to those universals that characterize his own nature. One motive for so doing is simply to determine the viability of a project sometimes associated with traditional perfect being theology, of treating God as the creator of the Platonic realm or conceptual order—that is, of universals, sets, propositions and other abstracta. When it comes to denizens of the Platonic realm that pertain to the divine nature, this promises to be a particularly tricky business, because to portray God as in any way creatively disposed with respect to his own essence is to court the danger of making God selfcreating, which is surely impossible. A second reason for looking into the relationship of God to his own nature has to do with a certain challenge to the claim that God has free will, a challenge associated with another tenet of perfect being theology. Traditionally, it was held that God can have no accidental characteristics, that his sovereignty would be impugned if anything that pertains to him did not spring from his own nature. Thus, on this view, all of God’s attributes are essential to him. Now it is widely held that the essential attributes of any entity belong to it of necessity, and however we may wish to parse this claim, it seems to imply that no being has any choice at all as to what its H. J. McCann (*) Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4237, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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essential attributes are to be. Certainly this applies to us creatures. We do not have freedom to select our essence: to decide, for example, whether we shall be mammals or not. Now assume that the same limitation applies to God, and that he holds all of his attributes essentially. Then it turns out that God has no free will at all, as creator or in any other capacity. Rather, he must create the world in which we find ourselves—which, besides yielding the surprising result that this is the only possible world, threatens to render God’s sovereignty over the world essentially vacuous, in that it is in no significant way up to him what occurs in it. We have, then, two problems to resolve. I want to argue that both can be handled if we adopt a version of the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity that I shall articulate.

The Self-Creation Problem That universals pertaining to God’s own nature can have no being apart from his creative will is implicit in much of theological tradition. Aquinas, for example, enjoins us that, ‘It must be said that everything, that in any way is, is from God.’1 More explicitly, Anselm states that although the supreme Substance that is God does not derive its existence from any external cause, ‘Nevertheless, it by no means exists through nothing, or derives existence from nothing; since, through itself and of itself, it is whatever it is.’2 The idea here is that although neither God’s existence nor any other aspect of his nature derives from any external source, neither do they stand as mere brute realities. Rather, the suggestion is, the very being that is God is such as to provide an account of his nature, even including his existence. And one way to unpack this idea is to treat God’s nature as voluntarily derived, as somehow owing to the operation of his creative will. That such a thing should appear plausible is part of what Alvin Plantinga has called the ‘sovereignty-aseity intuition,’ the idea that God is in no way dependent upon or subject to anything beyond his control.3 The sovereignty-aseity intuition would appear to exclude any suggestion that properties pertaining to God’s nature— existence, omniscience, omnipotence, justice and so forth—have being in some sort of independent Platonic realm; certainly, it rules out their existence being ontologically prior to God’s own existence, so that he would be dependent on them or their availability in order to be what he is. God’s nature is to be found nowhere except in him. But that is not all. Also excluded is the possibility that from God’s point of view his nature, notwithstanding that it is based on no external exemplar, counts all the same as a given: that is, as an ontological reality that God simply finds manifested in himself, and over which he exerts no control. According to the sovereignty-aseity intuition, it must somehow be a matter of God’s will not only that he be just and loving, but also that he be omniscient and omnipotent, that he be pure act, and all else that pertains to him. Even if they have no being prior to his own, these features cannot pertain to God’s nature without his say-so; if they did, his 1

Summa Theologica I, ques. 44, art. 1. Anselm, Monologium, ch. 6. 3 Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press,1980), p. 34. 2

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sovereignty would be as much impugned as if they had independent existence as well.4 Yet the moment we seek to portray God as exercising voluntary control over his own nature an unacceptable circularity appears to arise. Perhaps the most natural way to approach the task is to think of the universals in question—omniscience and omnipotence will do as examples—as products of some causal activity on God’s part. But what could that activity be? When it comes to universals that do not pertain to the divine nature—things like triangularity and felinity—there is the option of claiming that God creates these natures simply by bringing into existence the particular triangles and cats that exemplify them. But this cannot be what occurs in God’s own case and not just because as an eternal being God cannot come into existence. The fact is that nothing, eternal or otherwise, can confer existence on itself, in the sense that its own being counts as a causal product of some activity in which it engages. For this to occur, the being in question would have to be ontologically prior to itself; it would have to be on hand to generate itself, yet not on hand since it had not yet been generated. Clearly, this is unacceptable.5 Whatever it may mean, then, to say that God’s nature is a matter of his own will, it cannot entail that he causes himself to exist. Might it be, however, that universals that characterize God’s own essence have their first being not in their concrete instantiation in God himself, but in another way? Perhaps we could claim these universals are generated separately, as objects of divine intellection. This is the view of Morris and Menzel, who in fact understand all abstracta to receive their first existence as products of a causally efficacious sort of divine conceiving.6 Adopting this kind of stance, we would hold that omniscience and omnipotence originate as artifacts of God’s power of conceptualization, and exist as contents of his thought. Such a position is not without advantages: it avoids commitment to an egregious form of Platonism, and it does not call for God to be directly self-causing. Unfortunately, however, there remain ways in which it is unsatisfactory. For one thing, this account leaves us in the dark as to how universals that characterize God’s nature come to do so—rather than others, as we might wonder, that would have left him less than perfect. To be sure, properties like omniscience and omnipotence are fitting in a being who is the source of all that is. Nevertheless, it could still turn out that his having these attributes is just a brute reality, a matter over which God exercises no control—in which case however perfect he may be in other respects, the sovereignty-aseity intuition would be left unsatisfied. The great difficulty with this account, however, is that while it does avoid making God directly self-creating, it seems not to avoid the essential circularity that that notion involves. Is the God who creates omnipotence by sheer intellection not manifesting his omnipotence in that very act? And if so, then does not this universal 4

Someone might object that for God to be unable to control his own nature would not diminish his sovereignty, since the notion of sovereignty relates only to control of things outside of oneself. I see no reason to limit the concept of sovereignty in this way, but in any case this is purely a verbal matter. The point is that if God does not control his own nature he is diminished, and that is what counts. 5 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, Chap. 18. 6 Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, ‘Absolute Creation,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 353–62, p. 355.

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exist in God in a way that is ontologically prior to its own creation? Or, consider the universal having the power to create. Surely God must be characterized by this universal as a logically necessary condition for creating anything. But then this universal must have being in God ‘already,’ antecedent to its appearance as a product of his supposed action of creating it.7 Indeed, in order for God to be God, he must from eternity possess all the properties that are essential to him, so that their presence would be presupposed for any existence-conferring activity we might attribute to him. How, then, can they count as causal products of such an activity? It may be protested that there is no real difficulty here, that any accusation of circularity is vitiated by the fact that, whereas the dependence of these universals on God’s conceptualizing activity is causal, his own dependence on them—assuming ‘dependence’ is the right word—is logical.8 But this will not do. Logical relations obtain among proposition-like entities. God is not proposition-like, and can no more enter into logical relations than you or I can. Rather, any being’s relation to its own, essential nature is an ontological one, so that the being’s nature is presupposed in everything it does. God’s nature must, then, be ontologically presupposed in his activity as creator, and so cannot also be an ontological product of that activity. The circle is therefore real, and we cannot preserve the sovereignty-aseity intuition by treating God as conferring existence on the universals that characterize his nature.9 The universals that comprise God’s essence do not, then, gain their existence as causal products of a divine act of creative intellection. Such a view implies that God is ontologically prior to himself, and nothing is prior to itself. There is, however, another option. It was suggested above that God might create a universal like triangularity simply by creating triangles. Similarly, he might give rise to the universal cold by creating things that are cold, to walking by creating things that are walking, etc. Suppose this is correct. If so, then there is the possibility that God can be creatively disposed toward the properties that comprise his nature simply by engaging in the activity or activities in which those properties are displayed. Things like omniscience and omnipotence, we might suppose, come by their being not as independent, or even mind-dependent, entities produced by God, but simply in that they are instantiated in the activity in which God shows himself to be omniscient and omnipotent. It will turn out that this suggestion is very much on the right track. It must, however, be developed in such a way that the activity in question can be seen to provide a foundation for these universals without involving circularity. Moreover, if the sovereignty-aseity intuition is to be satisfied, the activity in which God’s nature is manifested will have to be a voluntary matter, even though his nature is essential to him—a combination that may appear impossible. We will return to this task, but first let us examine more closely the problem of divine freedom.

Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey Brower, ‘A Theistic Argument Against Platonism,’ Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2 (2006): 357–86, p. 366. 8 This is way of resolving the difficulty is espoused by Morris and Menzel. ‘Absolute Creation,’ p. 359– 60. 9 More complete developments of the objection given here can be found in Bergmann and Brower, ‘A Theistic Argument Against Platonism,’ and in Brian Leftow, ‘God and Abstract Objects’ Faith and Philosophy 7 (1990): 193–217. 7

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The Freedom Problem Among creatures, even those with free will have no claim to being able to decide their essential attributes. It is commonplace for humans, especially believers, to assert that they possess libertarian freedom. Yet none of us supposes it is or ever was up to us whether to be mammals or amphibians, or to have such capacities as sentience, judgment and reason. These things are given to us, as it were, as conditions of our existence, and must be present long before anything that purports to be an exercise of free will on our part can occur. Indeed, the capacity for rational agency—the ability to understand our options, and to deliberate and decide sensibly among them—is presupposed in rational decision making in just the way we would expect the essential attributes of a creator to be presupposed in any creative activity on God’s part. It is paradoxical, therefore, to suppose I could through a rational exercise of will give rise to the attribute of rationality, either in its instantiation as a concrete reality in myself, or as a Platonic entity. And while I can certainly decide to terminate my earthly existence, I have no choice as to whether, if that existence continues, I shall go on as a mammal, as a living being, or anything else that is essential to me. Suppose now that the same is true of God. This would seem to imply that God has no choice about the attributes usually taken to characterize his nature. It is not up to him whether to be omniscient and omnipotent, to be perfectly just and loving, to have no unrealized potentialities, or to display any other feature that defines his nature. Like our own essential attributes, these would appear to pertain to him as conditions of his being, independent of any exercise of will on his part. In God’s case, in fact, even his existence would seem immune to any exercise of his will, since it too belongs to his nature. And since God’s having the nature he does is a matter of the universals comprised in that nature being manifested in him, then neither do these universals appear to owe their being to any creative activity on his part. Rather, they look to be a metaphysical given, an aspect of the universe that— fortunately, we might say, both for him and for us—is there, but that unfortunately escapes divine sovereignty. But that is only the beginning. There is good reason for holding that a perfect God must have all of his features essentially. Anything true of him must be owing entirely to his own nature. Otherwise, there would be something about God that either had no explanation whatever, thus violating Sufficient Reason, or else was explained by some condition or circumstance extraneous to God, so that he would depend in part on something beyond himself to be what he is.10 Either alternative would violate the sovereignty-aseity intuition. But now if all of God’s characteristics arise from his own nature, then everything he does as creator counts as a manifestation of his essence, which presumably belongs to him necessarily. It would seem to follow that God has no freedom as creator. Every detail of the world produced by him, no matter how refined, is something that, simply by virtue of being God, he has to produce: the structure and constituents of the universe and of every atom in it, each of the world’s

10

Cf. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, Chap. 23.

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inhabitants, every event that is owing to his will. God was not free in creating you and me, not free in whatever involvement he may have in those acts in which we sin, not free in whatever salvific action he may take in response to sin. Rather, it seems, the totality of what he creates is fixed from eternity by a fate that overmasters even God himself. For all of it is a manifestation of God’s inmost being, of his essence, the nature he would have no matter what.11 The consequences of such a situation would be untoward, to say the least. There would on this account be nothing approximating to true originality in God’s creating the world. Rather, the content of his creative will would be predestined in God’s own nature, making this the only possible world, at least as far as anything God has to do with it. Taken in itself, of course, the created portion of the world need not exhibit any logical necessity; considered on its own, it might have many alternatives. But if it is a matter of God’s essence that he creates what he does, and if this means that he must do so, as we would say, ‘in all possible worlds,’ then once the relation of the created world to its creator is taken into account we seem headed for just one alternative, namely the world that we have. Perhaps some variation would be possible if the world contained events that are in no way determined, as exercises of human free will are sometimes claimed to be. But this threatens to deprive God of omniscience, by making him unable to know in advance what exercises of free will are going to occur. If on the other hand we claim that God does know in advance— that he has what is known as ‘middle knowledge’—we simply reinstate a situation in which everything appears necessary. For if God knows in advance how the creatures he might create would behave, then his knowledge of that behavior would surely enter into his choice of what world to create—a choice which, if it belongs to his nature, would have to be necessary. There is no quick solution to these difficulties. We could, of course, retreat to a position that denies God creative sovereignty over the realm of abstracta. The realm of concrete reality, we would say, owes its existence to God as creator, but the Platonic realm is independent of his will. A second possibility would be simply to deny that God’s activity as creator is a matter of his essential nature. What he does, we would say, is not finally to be explained by what he is, so that this condition cannot be held to limit his options. Still a third possibility would be to attempt a compromise: to hold that while it is essential to God that he create something, what he creates is strictly an accidental matter.12 To adopt any of these courses would however be to surrender the sovereignty-aseity intuition— something many would be loathe to do, and which I think we should not do if there is another, viable alternative. And I think there is, one that enables us to escape the circularity problem as well. It is to argue that although it is indeed true that all of God’s deeds are essential to him, even so he is not limited by any necessity in their performance.

11 This problem has been pointed out by several authors. See, for example, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Absolute Simplicity,’ Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985): 353–82, p. 358; and Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Divine Simplicity,’ Philosophical Perspectives V (1991): 531–52, p. 533. 12 This was Aquinas’s position. Summa Contra Gentiles I, Chap. 81. Similarly, one could maintain that God’s dealings with his creatures, e.g., his commands and promises to Abraham, are an accidental matter.

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Divine Simplicity It turns out that both the problem of God’s sovereignty over his nature and that of his freedom as creator have the same source: it lies in drawing a distinction to begin with between God and his nature—or more properly, as we shall see, between Him and the activity in which his nature is displayed. This is most easily seen with regard to the issue of freedom. Implicit in the distinction between a being and its attributes is a commitment to the idea that the being in question has a substantive nature—that is, an essence that goes beyond such fundamental metaphysical features as individuality, self-identity, and the like. The discussion of the last section indicates, however, that no individual that may be distinguished from its essence can determine by its own action what its essential attributes are to be. In God’s case, this leads to the result that if all of his attributes are essential then he has no freedom, and there is but one possible world. The case with respect to sovereignty over his essence is similar. However, many his essential attributes may be, if God may be distinguished from his essence and the activity in which it is displayed, then there can be no sense in which he may be viewed as creative with respect to his essence, or to exercise any sort of sovereignty over its manifestation in him. And this is simply because any activity we might postulate as a means by which God achieves such supremacy would presuppose his nature as ‘already’ present in him. By the standards of traditional theology, however, it is a mistake to think of God as a haver of attributes. Among medieval thinkers it was commonplace to claim that the reality we call ‘God’ is completely simple, and cannot be analyzed into elements of any kind. God has no parts, and there is in him no composition, whether of matter and form, potency and act, or substance and attribute. Any complexity at all, it was argued, would make God dependent for his being on the elements of which he is composed, and would require a cause to explain how those elements came to be united in him.13 Yet God is by definition uncaused, and if the sovereignty-aseity intuition is correct he is dependent on nothing. He must, then, be perfectly simple. In particular, for our purposes, there cannot be any distinction between God himself and whatever it is that constitutes his nature. Let us therefore consider whether by collapsing this distinction we can make progress with our two problems.14 There are as it turns out several ways to develop the idea that God and his attributes coincide. Perhaps the most straightforward approach is simply to claim that God is identical with his nature, where by ‘nature’ we understand a set of universals—that is, the set of properties God exhibits. Such a view might appeal to the Platonistically inclined, and indeed to anyone who supposes that when a universal is exemplified what is found in the world is nothing but the universal itself, so that the whiteness of this piece of paper, for example, is nothing other than the universal white. On this interpretation of the simplicity doctrine, God becomes an abstractum associated with the universals that make up his nature. This approach to 13

Anselm, Monologion, XVI; Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, Chap. 18; Summa Theologica I, ques. 3, art. 7. A word of caution is in order at this point. Strictly speaking a being who is utterly simple would have to be entirely sui generis and hence incapable of being described literally. Traditionally, however, God’s simplicity was held not to rule out his being described analogically, so that some understanding of his nature could be achieved. The suggestions that follow are intended to be understood in that spirit.

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the simplicity doctrine is, however, unacceptable. One problem it faces is that, although God is not on this account dependent upon or subordinate to the universals that make up his nature, neither are they in any way subject to him or to his will. God and they are just one and the same. As a result, he is not in a position of exercising genuine sovereignty over them, nor is it possible to discern any freedom he might have respecting his makeup. For these things to obtain, there would have to be some exercise of his will involved in God’s being what he is—something that must be entirely lacking if God turns out to be no more than a universal or a congeries of them. This brings us to what Alvin Plantinga has called the monumental objection to this view of simplicity: namely, the very fact that it turns God into an abstractum, a mere property rather than a person.15 Only a person can create, have knowledge, exercise free will, be loving, and display the other properties usually attributed to God, and a person has to be a concrete reality, in the sense of having actual existence. Exactly the opposite is true of universals, whether alone or in bundles: they possess neither concrete reality nor personality, and far from being capable of action they are generally conceded to be utterly inert. A viable version of the simplicity doctrine cannot, then, be had by taking God to be identical with his properties. If God and his nature are to be brought together in a satisfying way, it will have to be in terms of something that counts as an actual realization of the divine nature abstractly considered.

Simplicity and Actuality: God as a Property Instance One way to approach this task is to treat God as a particular instantiation or instance of the properties that constitute his nature. Particular instances of universals have variously been called cases, tropes or abstract particulars.16 They differ from universals in that while universals are multiply exemplifiable, tropes are not. The universal wisdom is exemplified by both Socrates and Aristotle, but the particular instance of wisdom that is the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from the wisdom of Aristotle, as well as from that of anyone else who is wise. Similarly, the whiteness of the page you are reading is different from the whiteness of the page facing it, even if both are of the same shade, and hence instantiate precisely the same universal. In short, tropes are genuine particulars, and those that belong to the world of our experience are not, like universals, eternal, but instead come to be and pass away just as physical substances do. That the simplicity doctrine may profitably be developed by treating God as a property instance or trope is a view championed by William Mann,17 and there is a good 15

Ibid. See, respectively, Wollterstorff, On Universals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), Chap. 6; D.C. Williams, ‘The Elements of Being,’ Review of Metaphysics 7: 3–18, 171–192; and Keith Campbell, ‘The Metaphysics of Abstract Particulars,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI (1981), 477–88. 17 William E. Mann, ‘Divine Simplicity,’ Religious Studies 18 (1982): 451–71. Mann’s view is criticized by Thomas V. Morris in ‘On God and Mann,’ Religious Studies 21 (1985): 299–318, and by Wollterstorff in ‘Divine Simplicity.’ Mann replies to Morris in ‘Simplicity and Properties,’ Religious Studies 22 (1986): 343–53. 16

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deal to be said for it. Certainly, treating God in these terms brings us much closer to traditional theology than we get by treating him as a universal—a view which, in fact, it is doubtful that anyone has ever held. And if we develop the trope account properly we can retain the advantage gotten by treating God as a universal: that of eliminating any danger that God might be dependent on the universals pertaining to his essence. For if, as I have suggested, universals have no being independent of their instantiations, then the same applies to those that pertain to God’s essence. Properties like omniscience and omnipotence have no being prior to or independent of the trope in which they are instantiated, which as it turns out is nothing other than God himself, who on this version of the simplicity doctrine counts as the only true existent in the picture.18 Hence, his independence, at least, is secure. So treating God as a property instance or trope appears to secure his independence of universals, without the absurdity of holding him to be an abstract or conceptual entity. Nevertheless, the trope interpretation of divine simplicity faces problems. One of them concerns the identity conditions for tropes. There are many attributes we take to pertain to the divine nature: God is just, loving, merciful, etc. If we are to claim, therefore, that God just is the trope that instantiates any universal that applies to him, we are going to have to make multiple identity claims about God. We must say he is identical with the instance of the universal just that is his justice; that he is identical with the instance of courage that is his courage; identical with the instance of wise that is his wisdom, and so forth. It follows that these tropes must be identical with one another. Yet tropes, as instances of properties, seem to lend themselves to identity conditions that militate against this. The standard identity conditions for property instances are rather fine grained: they call for property instances a and b to be identical only if a and b belong to the same subject, occur at the same time, and are instances of the same property.19 This last condition would rule out the above identity claims, for the properties they involve are clearly not the same. Socrates too exemplified justice, courage, and wisdom, but he might have exemplified any one of these properties without the others, which would not be possible if they were one and the same. Now perhaps we could contrive to say that some instances of justice are identical with instances of wisdom and bravery, whereas others are not, and that identity is what holds in the case of God, who in fact just is the trope of his courage, his justice, and much else—most especially, for us, the trope that he is as creator. But if we do, we face a certain dilemma. It is this: the single property instance that is God cannot be regarded as a mere conjunction or sum of specific tropes of justice, omniscience, and the like.20 This Morris maintains that the trope interpretation of simplicity ‘will not do the job’ because it allows that there be at least one property distinct from God on which he is dependent— namely, that of which he is an instance. ‘On God and Mann,’ p. 302. Both Mann in his reply and Wollterstorff in his discussion accept this argument at face value. But the argument has force only if one accepts the principle that in order to be instantiated a property must have prior existence. There is no reason to accept such a principle and very good reason to reject it given that an independently existing property, being inert, would be useless anyway. 19 Jaegwon Kim, ‘Events as Property Exemplifications,’ in Action Theory, ed. M. Brand and D. Walton (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 159–77, pp. 160–61; Alvin I. Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 10. These authors are concerned with instances of event and act properties, but the conditions pertain equally to all tropes. 20 Cf. Mann’s notion of a rich property, ‘Divine Simplicity,’ p. 466–67. 18

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would make God complex rather than simple, an assemblage of a great many parts. If we are to have true simplicity, we would best be served to treat God as an instance of a single universal foundational to all others—perhaps a universal of pure being, in which all that pertains to him and ultimately even to the world he creates is somehow encapsulated in a unified and undifferentiated way. There is a satisfying aspect to this, for the property instance we would claim to be God himself now begins to sound very much like the ipsum esse subsistens of which the medievals sometimes spoke. We need to realize, however, that now the identity claims with which we have been concerned become somewhat problematic. On this account, the true nature of God is rather different from such relatively mundane things as, say, justice, or love, or even omniscience. It involves all of these things and a lot more— so that to think or speak of him as a property instance of any one of them is, if not simply incorrect, at least a kind of misnomer. At best, such statements count only as a collective gesture toward what God truly is, which now turns out to be pretty much indescribable in literal terms. From the standpoint of traditional theology this is actually all to the good; that God is ultimately ineffable has long been acknowledged, and any view that failed to reflect this would automatically be suspect. But it also makes it difficult to elucidate just how it is that God turns out to be omniscient, omnipotent, and all the rest. A second difficulty has to do with the fact that with most universals, we think of their particular instances as belonging to or inhering in the subject that displays the universal. Thus, we think of Socrates’s wisdom as belonging to him, and the whiteness of the paper as belonging to the paper. This suggests a difference between tropes and the entities to which they belong, a difference we seem to overlook if we make God identical with his omniscience, his justice, and so on. The trope theorist may, however, offer a reply here. Ultimately, he may argue, advocates of divine simplicity have to be committed to doing away with any composition in God, including that between subject and attribute or, in the case of the trope theory, between tropes and their possessors. With God, moreover, there is reason for thinking such a move is legitimate. Talk of subjects and their attributes is especially suited to things of our world: that is, to the world of temporal phenomena, where we need to speak of entities that persist through change, and may have dispositional properties that are not always manifested. But God is not a temporal entity: he does not change at all, and since he is pure act he has no unactualized dispositions. Now even in the case of beings like ourselves, the idea of a haver of attributes may be viewed with suspicion, as it is by proponents of bundle theories of substance.21 Perhaps in God’s case, then, the idea should be dropped, in favor of a view on which all that pertains God is on display, in the one property instance with which he is identical. It can be seen, I think, that the trope interpretation of divine simplicity has some appeal, and the objections it faces, though difficult, may turn out to be manageable. 21

The fact that tropes may be taken to require a subject might prompt the suggestion that a trope theory of divine simplicity would have to be untenable. On some accounts of individuality, however, an individual ‘subject’ is in fact nothing but a bundle of tropes. If this is correct then God could turn out to be the limiting case: that is, a bundle with just one member. An excellent introduction to bundle theories can be found in Michael J. Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), Chap. 3.

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It is, however, an austere view of God, who turns out on this account to be an instance of a single property whose content is exceedingly obscure. There is, moreover, a problem yet to be addressed: that of God’s sovereignty and freedom. We have seen that, like the account of simplicity in terms of universals, the trope view obviates any danger that God might be dependent on those universals that characterize his nature. But the trope account does not, at least as so far formulated, offer any progress toward understanding how God could be sovereign over those entities, or their presence in him subject to his will. For all one can tell, it may yet be that from God’s perspective as creator it is completely a matter of happenstance that he instantiates universals like omniscience, omnipotence, and all the rest, even though these traits are essential to him. Let us therefore consider another way of treating God as a concrete reality, one that is less austere, but offers more progress on the issues with which we are concerned.

God as an Actual State of Affairs States of affairs are referred to by gerundive expressions such as ‘the piece of paper’s being white,’ or ‘Booth’s assassinating Lincoln,’22 and here too, as with universals, it is possible to distinguish abstract types from their instances. The abstract state of affairs John bicycling to work may be instantiated once, many times, or not at all; a piece of paper being white has been instantiated innumerable times.23 As the examples indicate, some abstract states of affairs signify change, while others do not. The former count as event or act types, and their concrete instances as events or actions; the latter are state types, and their instances states. The distinction between abstract states of affairs and their instances is less familiar than that between universals and tropes. But it is of the same sort, and every bit as important. The actual or concrete state of affairs that was Booth’s assassinating Lincoln was an action, an act of treason; it plunged the nation into shock, and produced a fierce reaction against the states that had formed the Confederacy. By contrast, the abstract state of affairs Booth assassinating Lincoln is not an act, of treason or of anything else; it is an act type. It is no more shocking than William Seward assassinating Lincoln or George McClellan assassinating Grant, and like any other abstract entity it is utterly incapable of producing anything. Indeed, as with universals, there is no reason to think abstract states of affairs even exist apart from their instances and from thoughts about them; they could serve no purpose in an independent existence, for they too are utterly inert. Actual states of affairs receive little attention in metaphysics—in part, no doubt, because an ontology that speaks of them as well as tropes could be perceived as 22

More precisely, these are imperfect gerundive nominals: that is, nominalized sentences in which the verbal element still functions as a verb, rather than being completely nominalized, as in ‘Booth’s assassination of Lincoln’ or ‘Booth’s killing of Lincoln.’ For a discussion of perfect and imperfect nominals and their ontological significance, see my ‘Nominals, Facts, and Two Conceptions of Events,’ Philosophical Studies 39 (1979): 129–49: also The Works of Agency, Chaps. 2 and 3. 23 Referring expressions for abstract states of affairs differ from those for actual states of affairs in that the subject is nominative rather than possessive. Thus, the particular event that is Booth’s assassinating Lincoln is an instance of the abstract type Booth assassinating Lincoln.

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prodigal. They do, however, form part of the ontology of everyday discourse, and they are plainly not abstract entities. This raises the possibility that we might be assisted in coming to understand the nature of God if he is portrayed as an actual state of affairs—something along the lines of Socrates’s being wise, or, more saliently for our purposes, Michelangelo’s creating the Sistine Chapel ceiling.24 To do so is to compromise a bit on the issue of simplicity, in that the concrete states of affairs familiar to us always exhibit a complexity of subject and property. Tropes do not; in references to tropes the subject is always dispensable. When we speak of Socrates’s wisdom, it is the instance of wisdom that is our focus, and although Socrates is its possessor, we need not in speaking of it refer to him at all. We may speak, for example, of the wisdom that impressed the Athenian youth—or, if the context is clear, simply of the wisdom. But the subject cannot be excised from the corresponding concrete state of affairs. When it comes to Socrates’s being wise, or his exhibiting wisdom, subject and predicate must stay together.25 There is no ‘the being wise’ or ‘the exhibiting wisdom.’ Similarly, we may speak of Booth’s act of assassination, or the killing he committed—even the killing of Lincoln. But there is no ‘the assassinating Lincoln’ or ‘the killing Lincoln,’ only Booth’s assassinating Lincoln and his killing Lincoln.26 There is, then, a complexity of subject and attribute pertaining to actual states of affairs that cannot be eliminated. Because this is so, and because complete simplicity would require that any distinction between subject and attribute collapse altogether, we cannot do full justice to the doctrine of simplicity by treating God as a concrete state of affairs. It is doubtful, however, that any discussion that carried much content could do that; moreover, there is some compensation for this loss in the fact that on this approach God is always to be understood as his being something or other, so that his personal presence in all that he is receives a certain emphasis. And there is another advantage that is far more significant. Concrete states of affairs are much more amenable to identity claims than tropes are. Suppose Mary spends her vacation traveling in Greece. The universals being away from home and being in Greece are not the same, and it would be odd to say that their tropes in this case—Mary’s absence from the one place and her presence in the other—count as precisely the same particular. It does, however, seem fair to say that the Mary’s being away from home is the same actual state of affairs as her being in Greece, that this is in fact the same worldly situation described in two different ways. Or consider again the case of Booth, who in killing Lincoln committed treason. Killing Lincoln and committing treason are different universals, and we may well wish to consider their tropes in this example distinct. Still, there is but one exercise of agency here. Booth committed treason by killing Lincoln, and we do justice to this fact if we say that he accomplished both 24

Plantinga at one point considers the possibility that God might be a state of affairs. Does God have a nature? pp. 48–53. But he has in mind only abstract states of affairs and rightly rejects this as no better than holding that God is a universal. The view to be presented here is quite different. 25 It is worth mentioning here that the word ‘state’ is often ambiguous as between a trope and a concrete state of affairs. The state of the book that is that is its redness is a trope and instance of the universal red that is possessed by the book as its subject. The state of affairs that is the book’s being red is not possessed by the book but rather includes the book, so that mention of the book cannot be omitted in referring to it. 26 There is, of course, Booth’s killing of Lincoln, but the linguistic construction here is a perfect nominal, not an imperfect one, and the reference is still to the trope—that is, the killing, which is picked out by a noun and described using adjectival modifiers. See The Works of Agency, pp. 27–28.

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deeds in one concrete state of affairs, an action that was a the same time both Booth’s killing Lincoln and his committing treason. The same actual or concrete states of affairs may, then, be referred to under descriptions whose significance is very different, which makes this type of entity very useful for discussions of divine simplicity. It is a daunting task, even so, to say much that is useful about the nature of God. Still, some progress can be made. If we are to think of God as an actual state of affairs, we must first decide whether to portray him as a state—something analogous to Socrates’s being wise—or an event or act of some kind, analogous to Socrates’s behaving wisely. Of these the second is by far the better choice. States, as the name implies, are static. Nothing is accomplished in them, whereas in God everything is accomplished. In addition, to portray God as event-like is in keeping with traditional views according to which God must be understood to be ‘pure act’—that is, to involve no unactualized dispositions. As such, God is a unique sort of being. He does not change, for reasons we have already seen, but also because for him to change would simply be a matter of one or another disposition in him coming to realization. Nevertheless, there is a dynamic quality in God that is not captured by the notion of a state. Rather, God must be thought of as a kind of primordial event, but one that does not consist in a transition, and is therefore timeless. What kind of event is that? The traditional answer was: the fullness of being, existing of its own nature—for us, then, an event in which God is identical with his actual or realized essence, which is in turn identical with being itself.27 God is, then, his existent nature, his being, an actual dynamic state to which existence itself is essential, and upon which all else that is real depends. He is not reactive or passive toward anything, awaits no prompting in order to be manifested in any respect, and is not modeled on any archetype. God is, rather, fully and completely spontaneous— nothing held back, nothing hedged, nothing in doubt or subordinated, and by the present account utterly without dependency of any kind. But that is not all, for God is also a personal entity. If this is so, then in the primordial event that is God the features essential to personality, in particular those of knowing and willing, must be displayed. And it is easy to see how these can be displayed in the same act, for it is impossible to will anything, without at the same time comprehending what is willed, without understanding what one is willing. As for the object of that act, for Aquinas the primary object of God’s knowing will is in fact himself; that is, God is an act of at once comprehending and willing his own essential being.28 This should not be taken as suggesting that God is self-creating, in the sense of conferring existence on himself. Rather, I would suggest, it signifies that God fully comprehends and is absolutely committed to being all that he is, and moreover that he is in fact identical with the very act that is his being thus comprehending and committed, that these dimensions of his nature are as fundamental as his being perfectly good, or anything else about him. And there is more still: Aquinas also holds that there is no distinction between God’s willing himself and his willing other things.29 Thus, it is in willing his own being that God 27

Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, ques. 3, arts. 3 and 4. Summa Contra Gentiles I, Chaps. 48, 74. 29 Ibid., Chap. 75. 28

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also wills the being of all other things. This is exactly what we should expect if creation is to be understood in terms that comport with the doctrine of simplicity. The actual state of affairs that is foundational to all actuality must equally be the action that is God’s being his own being, so to speak, and also the action that is his creating the universe. So God is not only identical with his existing; he is also identical with his creating the world. And there are further descriptions that apply to this same act, descriptions that reflect other dimensions of the divine nature, and can provide a glimpse of how the attributes usually ascribed to him are bound together in the foundational reality that is God. For if God’s act of knowing and willing himself is identical with his act of creating the world, then that act is also identical with God’s being omnipotent, because in it all power is exercised; and it is identical with his being omniscient, since in it he comprehends all things. Similarly, because God’s wisdom, justice, mercy, love, and other attributes are fully manifested in his own being and in creation, God is also identical with his being perfectly wise, his being perfectly just, his being perfectly merciful, his being omnibenevolent, and so forth. Thus, the fact that many different abstract states of affairs may be manifested in the same actual or concrete one makes it possible to develop the doctrine of divine simplicity in such a way that we can begin to see something of how the different dimensions of God’s nature that are displayed to us through the created world all flow from and are ultimately bound together in one and the same foundational reality.

Ultimate Sovereignty With this picture in mind, let us turn again to the question with which this chapter began, that of how God is related to those attributes that belong to his nature. We would expect these attributes to be essential to God, and that does turn out to be the case, but in a somewhat unusual way. Consider the case of Michelangelo’s creating the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Obviously, nothing in Michelangelo’s nature as a human being compelled him to engage in this action; rather, he did so freely, so that the attribute creating the Sistine Chapel ceiling is held by him only accidentally, not essentially. Notice, however, that although this attribute is only accidental to Michelangelo, it is essential to his action: the act that was his creating the ceiling could not have existed except through this attribute being displayed, and if the attribute could be taken away, the action would go with it. And now think of God’s action of creating the universe. Here too the universal is essential to the action: God’s creating the universe is by its very nature an activity in which creating and creating the universe are manifested. If these attributes were not present in it, there would be no such action on God’s part. There is, however, a vast difference between this case and that of Michelangelo. For if the version of the simplicity view given above is correct, then God just is his creating the universe. And if that is so then by virtue of being essential to God’s creating the universe, the attributes of creating and creating the universe are likewise essential to God himself. Needless to say, the same thing applies to all of God’s other attributes. For by the simplicity view, God’s creating the universe is precisely the same actual state of affairs that is his being omniscient, his being omnipotent, his being perfectly good

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and just, and the rest of what we think belongs to God as creator. Thus, since there are no accidents in God, the universals out of which these descriptions are built must be essential to God as well. More than that, since the actual state of affairs that is God’s creating the world is equally one of his willing his own being and his existing a se or of his own nature, the universals that define these characterizations are essential to him as well. Finally, as with the trope view, there is no need whatever to think of these universals as having any being apart from their manifestation in the actual state of affairs that is God himself. Accordingly, their existence is in no way prior to his own, so that he is not dependent upon them. On the contrary, since on the present view universals have no existence in their own right, they depend for their being on the primary reality that is God. The same can be said for the multitudinous abstract states of affairs that are instantiated in that reality. What comes first in the order of being is always concrete existence. Still, this does not give God true sovereignty over his nature. For all that has been said so far, the same problem we noticed in discussing views that take God to be either a universal or a trope could obtain here: it may be that even though all these features are a part of God’s nature and hence essential to him, it is from his practical perspective as an agent merely a matter of happenstance that he has the nature he does, so that his possessing these traits is still a matter that escapes his will. Is there a way to address this issue? There is indeed, for on the present view God is an exercise of will, one to which all of the attributes associated with him are essential. And the one thing that cannot happen with an exercise of will is that from the agent’s perspective, it should be a matter of happenstance. I have argued elsewhere that voluntary freedom is characterized by three essential features: the absence of any determining cause, spontaneity or what Carl Ginet has called ‘the actish phenomenal quality,’ and intrinsic intentionality.30 That the first of these conditions must be fulfilled for the act of will that is God should be obvious, for beyond this act there simply is nothing, hence nothing to cause it. That the act is spontaneous or phenomenally ‘actish’ is demanded simply by its being an act of willing, for all voluntary willing is essentially spontaneous or active, rather than passive. In God’s case, however, this claim draws additional support from the traditional view that in him there is no passivity of any kind. Everything about God is pure doing, which is the exact opposite of befalling or happenstance. Finally, and perhaps most important, acts of will are always intrinsically intentional. I cannot will anything without meaning or intending to will exactly as I do. I cannot decide by accident that I am going to play golf this afternoon; if I decide to play, then I mean to decide precisely that. It is important, moreover, to realize that this is not a matter of carrying out some prior decision or intention. My deciding to play golf would be intentional even if the decision were made on the spur of the moment, with no deliberation or forethought. Neither is the intentionality of my decision a matter of the decision being part of its own content, or of making up my mind so to intend. I need never decide that a decision of mine shall be intentional. On the contrary: to engage in any act of will is to commit myself voluntarily to an end, and it belongs to the nature of voluntary commitments that they cannot be undertaken without the ‘The Author of Sin?’ Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005): 144–59; cf. Carl Ginet, On Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p 13.

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intention of entering into them. Exactly the same applies to the act of will that is God: it too is intrinsically intentional, an action he fully understands, and intends with complete commitment, meaning it to have exactly the nature it does. What this comes to is that God is, essentially, an act of free will—an act with no prior determination of any kind, in which he freely undertakes in the very action itself to be and to do all that he is and does. The effect of this is profound and dramatic. Far from escaping his sovereignty, God’s having the nature he does turns out to be in itself an exercise of his sovereignty. That is, the reality that is God’s having the nature he does is itself the action of his freely undertaking to have it, and all that is essential to him is grounded in this exercise of freedom. It does not follow that God confers existence, or any other aspect of his nature, on himself, in the sense that his act of so doing is prior to or causally productive of the aspect being present. But it does follow that his nature falls under his own sovereignty. For even though his nature is essential to God, it is ‘up to him’ in the sense that there is nothing that makes it what it is beyond the very exercise of voluntariness that constitutes it. Thus, just as the features of voluntariness give us control over our own acts of will, so God controls the act of will that constitutes his very being, and thereby exercises sovereignty over it. Finally, there is nothing ontologically prior to God’s willing his own being; most especially, there is not a Platonic template of possible divinity that is already given and merely awaits instantiation. So while God is not self-creating in the sense of causing himself to be or conferring existence on himself, he is creatively disposed toward his nature, in that that nature finds its first and only reality in the completely spontaneous act of God intending to have that nature, the act that is God himself. Accordingly, universals such as omniscience, omnipotence and aseity have the same status as those pertaining to the created world. They have being only in what exemplifies them, in this case just one being: God. And of course they are essential to him. Must we say, as many would, that since these are essential traits of God he possesses these traits as a matter of de re necessity? I see no reason to do so. But if we do choose to say this, we need to realize that in this case necessity would not rule out libertarian freedom. Rather, it would be equally a matter of de re necessity that God possesses absolute freedom respecting all of his attributes. Whatever we may think about de re necessity in other contexts, then, it certainly cannot limit God in any respect. Rather, all that he is falls under his sovereignty, for all of his traits are exemplified in a voluntary act that is God himself, and in which he freely undertakes to exhibit them. What, then, about the question of whether this world, the world in which we find ourselves, is the only possible world? We have seen that if we confine our attention strictly to what is owing to God’s activity as creator, alternatives appear to be possible: we generate no contradiction if, for example, we imagine that the world might have contained one more atom of hydrogen, or that you might not be reading this paper right now. One might worry, however, that when the world is considered in relation to its creator, things change. For we have also seen that for everything God creates, there is a universal that describes his so doing, and that is essential to him. Must we say, then, since any essence is by its nature unchanging, that in relation to God there were no alternatives to the world we have, that our world is the only possible world? The answer is not only that we need not, but that we cannot. But the

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reason is not that God could have done otherwise, for we should not say that either.31 Rather, the situation is this: to speak at all of possibilities and necessities about worlds God might have created is to presuppose that prior to his act of creating the world—the act which, as it turns out—is God himself, there were possibilities and necessities as to what God might be and do. But that is precisely what cannot be the case if, as has been argued here, any abstracta pertaining to God have their first being in the action that is God himself. For if that is so, then God is the ultimate brute reality. There is nothing prior to the actual state of affairs that is God, nothing either concrete or abstract that is prior to his willing both himself and the universe in the one, free act with which he is identical. As to whether worlds other than the one we have are possible in relation to God, therefore, we can answer only that the world is as it is, that the creator of heaven and earth has made it so. Beyond this we can say nothing, for beyond this there is nothing to say. One final point may be in order. Someone could claim that the freedom ascribed here to God does not count as libertarian freedom. For, it might be argued, libertarian freedom consists in the ability to do otherwise when we act. On the view developed here, however, it is strictly speaking incorrect to say of God that in creating the world he can do otherwise than he does. Furthermore, it is characteristic of libertarian freedom that agents who exercise it have options presented to them in advance. Yet this too fails to hold of God if, as I have argued, it is impossible prior to creation to speak of options. How, then, can it be said that God enjoys libertarian freedom? I would reply that while it is indeed incorrect to say that God could have done otherwise in creating the world, neither is it correct to say what this would usually be taken to imply: namely, that he had to behave as he did. What libertarian freedom requires is the absence of compulsion, where this implies a complete foreclosure of alternatives. In God’s case no alternatives whatever are foreclosed. To the contrary: all alternatives that can be delineated within the created world, and indeed the very concept of an alternative, are provided for in an act of creation that is completely spontaneous and fully intended by God to have the exact nature and content it does. If someone decides not to call this libertarian freedom because antecedent possibilities are lacking, then well and good. But the matter is strictly a verbal one, for in fact the freedom that characterizes God’s activity as creator is even less constrained than ours. If it does not deserve the name ‘libertarian’ then we need to define a better, higher type of freedom, one transcending even the ‘libertarian’ variety, and attribute this higher freedom to God.

Conclusion Obviously, any attempt to describe the divine nature must ultimately fail. But some are better than others, and efforts that are equal in value may offer very different insights. The virtue of the present elucidation, I hope, is that it provides for God’s 31

It may be worth pointing out in this connection that the first condition of libertarian freedom articulated here and in Chap. 5—i.e., absence of determining causes—demands alternative possibilities for action only when, as in the human case, there exists a situation ontologically prior to the exercise of will in question in which determining causes might operate. In God’s case there does not, so that the condition is satisfied as a kind of limiting case.

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complete hegemony over the universe, including the abstracta that pertain to his own nature. These universals have their first being in the entity that instantiates them—that is, in God himself. But since God is himself an intrinsically intentional exercise of freedom, God has sovereignty over these universals, in just the way he has sovereignty over universals pertaining to the created world. All owe their being to one and the same exercise of his all-encompassing will.32

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This paper was read to the 2010 Workshop on Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I am grateful for the comments received on that occasion, as well as to those of several readers.