Origen and the Emergence of Divine Simplicity before Nicaea

by Pui Him Ip

Overview

This book establishes how the doctrine of divine simplicity was interwoven with the formation of a Christian Trinitarian understanding of God before Nicaea.

For centuries, Christian theology affirmed God as simple (haplous) and Triune. But the doctrine of the simple Trinity has been challenged by modern critics of classical theism. How can God, conceived as purely one without multiplicity, be a Trinity? This book sets a new historical foundation for addressing this question by tracing how divine simplicity emerged as a key notion in early Christianity. Pui Him Ip argues that only in light of the Platonic synthesis between the Good and the First Principle (archē) can we make sense of divine simplicity as a refusal to associate any kind of plurality that brings about contraries in the divine life. This philosophical doctrine, according to Ip, was integral to how early Christians began to speak of the divine life in terms of a relationship between Father and Son.

Through detailed historical exploration of Irenaeus, sources from the Monarchian controversy, and especially Origen’s oeuvre, Ip contends that the key contribution from ante-Nicene theology is the realization that it is nontrivial to speak of the begetting of a distinct person (Son) from a simple source (Father). This question became the central problematic in Trinitarian theology before Nicaea and remained crucial for understanding the emergence of rival accounts of the Trinity (“pro-Nicene” and “anti-Nicene” theologies) in the fourth century. Origen and the Emergence of Divine Simplicity before Nicaea suggests a new revisional historiography of theological developments after Origen and will be necessary reading for serious students both of patristics and of the wider history of Christian thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268203627
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	08/15/2024
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Pui Him Ip is tutorial programme director and research associate at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, and an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge.

Rowan Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. He became Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in 2013, retiring in 2020.

Read an Excerpt

One of the significant implications of Newman’s Arians is that “a sound dogmatic theology depends on honest doctrinal history.” Contemporary scholars have echoed this predicament. Khaled Anatolios has argued that the historical development of Trinitarian theology is key to its intelligibility. The far-reaching implication of this claim is that doctrinal history is indispensable for understanding the meaning of doctrine. This book has sought to contribute to this enterprise of connecting doctrinal history and theological understanding. The upshot for contemporary theology is that pure doctrinal analysis of divine simplicity apart from historical understanding, whether theological or philosophical, is fraud with danger. Throughout I have hinted at a number of ways that illustrate this danger. The task remains, however, for systematic and philosophical theologians to think through the implications of the fresh issues and nuances of divine simplicity arising from ante-Nicene doctrinal history set out in the preceding pages. In particular, the distinctive ante-Nicene developments I have charted have significant ramifications on two central issues that have animated the crisis of divine simplicity in modern theology. The first concerns how divine simplicity should be understood; the second, the compatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology.

First, this book has clarified that the understanding of divine simplicity operative in modern systematic and philosophical theology is overly narrowed. The definition of divine simplicity is often spelled out metaphysically but what is missed is that ethical considerations were also central to the ancient philosophical and early Christian accounts of divine simplicity. What I have uncovered, through narrating the philosophical developments from Plato to Origen, is that the intelligibility of the doctrine rests significantly on the integrity of the deep interconnection between the metaphysical and the ethical. This, in turn, grants the possibility of a much richer definition of divine simplicity. Divine simplicity not only implies that God is partless and without composition. First and foremost – if the Republic is to be granted as the locus classicus – divine simplicity refers to God’s perfect self-consistency. It is for the purpose of safeguarding this perfect goodness of God that Middle-Platonists and early Christians affirmed the absence of multiplicity in God. When read in light of the Platonic theory of forms, these affirmations are statements of the total absence of contraries in God. What the doctrine of divine simplicity intends to rule out then are only multiplicities that would violate the perfect self-consistency of God. A simple God may not possess goodness and justice as opposing aspects – in this sense they are one and the same. Understood this way, it becomes difficult to imagine divine simplicity as a doctrine that obviously leads to conflict with divine freedom or violates the integrity of God’s distinctive acts in salvation history. Thus, the puzzlement regarding the simplicity in the modern crisis may have resulted from an overly accentuated disjunction between metaphysical and ethical doctrines of God. Further, it will be fruitful to rethink whether the seeds for a theologically rich doctrine of divine simplicity were already be hidden in the Platonic frameworks inherited by early Christian theologians. Along these lines, further explorations on divine simplicity as a metaphysical-ethical synthesis promise to advance contemporary debates, especially for reinstating the theological integrity of divine simplicity in modern theology. For a starting point, this book recommends no better place to look than Origen’s understanding of divine simplicity spelled out in chapter five.

This book has also highlighted further issues regarding the intuition central to the modern crisis, namely, that there is an incompatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. By charting the distinctive shape of the ante-Nicene Trinitarian problematic, I have clarified why patristic theologians hardly ever noticed the logical incompatibility between divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology. In light of the ante-Nicene sources, it becomes clear that it is too simplistic to suppose that divine simplicity collapses into Monarchianism. Divine simplicity does not entail this position, at least not in any obvious sense, because the historical Monarchian position was not simply treated as a thesis about logical identity. Thus, the analysis underlying the “logical problem” frequently offered by modern philosophers today makes little sense for patristic theologians who had the historical form of Monarchianism in mind. Moreover, for the purpose of constructive theology, it will be fruitful to attend to a different theological issue that was indeed noticed by patristic theologians concerning the implication of divine simplicity for Trinitarian theology: how do we conceive of the generation of the Son while safeguarding the simplicity of God the Father, the generator? As I have argued, this was the theological location where early Christian theologians first recognized a potential incompatibility between divine simplicity and the anti-Monarchian emphasis on the Father-Son distinction. This issue may turn out to be a fruitful site for contemporary theological and philosophical reflections. This book thus challenges the commonplace intuition that divine simplicity and Trinitarian theology are logically incompatible; in fact, historically, divine simplicity played an indispensable role in shaping Trinitarian reflections in the ante-Nicene period.

(excerpted from epilogue)

Table of Contents

Introduction: In Search of Doctrinal History

1. The Locus Classicus of Divine Simplicity

2. From the Simple God to the Simple First Principle

3. Irenaeus’ Critique of Valentinian probolē and the Proto-Trinitarian Problematic

4. Monarchianism and the Fully Trinitarian Problematic

5. Divine Simplicity as a Metaphysical-Ethical Synthesis in Origen

6. Divine Simplicity as an Anti-Monarchian Principle of Differentiation between the Father and Son

7. Divine Simplicity as an anti-Valentinian Principle of Unity between the Father and Son

Epilogue: Towards a Prospective Historiography

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

This impressive study offers what I think is the very first genealogy of Christian usage of the idea of divine simplicity up through Origen of Alexandria.” —Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, author of Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works

"Readers will find the discussion of Origen's relation to the Platonists of his time especially valuable in its erudition and its conceptual sophistication. This book is a contribution, not only to patristics, but to the history of philosophy." —Mark Edwards, author of Christians, Gnostics and Philosophers in Late Antiquity

"Ip’s elegant discussion of divine simplicity in pre-Nicene theology helps us to see with new clarity the diversity of ways this doctrine was articulated, and the functions it performed. By showing us this rich diversity, Ip also offers further arguments for taking the doctrine seriously as an integral and important part of the Patristic heritage. Students of Trinitarian theology, of Irenaeus, and of Origen will all need to come to terms with Ip’s work." —Lewis Ayres, author of Augustine and the Trinity

"Ip's lucid and surefooted book provides an historical and conceptual anchorage for any future discourse on divine simplicity, giving the doctrine a more human and concrete face, and enabling a new flexibility in addressing the formidable conundrums it poses." —Reviews in Religion & Theology

"The attentive reader will find in these pages persuasive, careful arguments based on detailed analyses of the relevant texts. This study . . . is as useful as an introduction to ancient philosophical theology and methods of its study as it is as a contribution to scholarly understandings of the numerous individual passages, figures and broader narratives it engages." —Scottish Journal of Theology

"A good example of careful historical work and a valuable contribution to understanding the development of the Christian teaching on the Trinity. Moreover, the book charts some ways forward for better understanding how Trinitarian theology developed from the third century into the fourth. Those interested in early Christianity, historical theology, and systematic theology will gain insight from this book."—Journal of Theological Studies

"The author’s way of presenting his research has the great advantage that it makes the positions clear and provides a good insight into the sources. Many authors could learn a lesson from Pui Ip’s way of presenting his research. If there are more details to add to the picture—and there probably are—Ip puts the reader of the book in a very good position to dive deeper into the sources to discover more details of this important theological theme."—Modern Theology

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