Divine simplicity is the doctrine that God has no parts, not only no physical parts, but no metaphysical composition of any kind: no distinction between God and God's attributes, none between God's essence and God's existence. Where the other classical counter-moves contest how structure applies to God, simplicity denies that it applies at all.

It is not austerity for its own sake. It is meant to secure divine ultimacy by ruling out composition, dependence, and metaphysical parts in God: were God assembled from features more basic than itself, aseity would already be lost, for the more basic features would ground God rather than vice versa. The doctrine has two tightly linked expressions, simplicity proper and *actus purus* (pure act without potency), which classical theism treats as mutually entailing. Strict Thomistic simplicity takes both to their limit: *Deus est suum esse*, God's essence just *is* God's existence, without distinction.

The doctrine has a long history and a contested one. Augustine (*De Trinitate* VI) articulates an early form: God's attributes are identical to God's being. Maimonides (*Guide of the Perplexed* I.50–60) presses the most austere version: the divine attributes are equivocal with creaturely attributes, and positive predication of God is strictly impossible. Avicenna (*Metaphysics* VIII) develops the essence-existence identity later inherited by Aquinas. Aquinas (*ST* I.3–I.4) gives both doctrines full rigor and argues their mutual entailment. The doctrine was contested even within its home tradition: Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus, John, (c. 1300) 1987) introduces the formal distinction as a middle ground, arguing that God's attributes are formally distinct though really identical, an internal concession that the strict reading generates problems.

Contemporary defenders: Dolezal's *God Without Parts* (Dolezal, James E., 2011) defends strict simplicity; Brower (Brower, Jeffrey E., 2009) and Stump's *Aquinas* (Stump, Eleonore, 2003) refine it through truthmaker and phased-identity variants; Feser's *Aquinas* (Feser, Edward, 2009) defends the act/potency distinction as the metaphysical basis of simplicity; Kerr's *Aquinas's Way to God* (Kerr, Gaven, 2015) reconstructs *esse* as the central Thomistic category; Pruss (Pruss, Alexander R., 2006) supplies contemporary PSR groundwork; Leftow's *God and Necessity* (Leftow, Brian, 2012) develops an alternative modal-theistic framework preserving key simplicity commitments; Rogers's *Perfect Being Theology* (Rogers, Katherin A., 2000) defends a contemporary Anselmian simplicity.

Against the doctrine: Plantinga's *Does God Have a Nature?* (Plantinga, A., 1980) presses the charge that strict simplicity either identifies God with a property (ontologically incoherent) or abandons the doctrine; Hughes's *On a Complex Theory of a Simple God* (Hughes, Christopher, 1989) develops the analytic critique at length; Mann's "Divine Simplicity" (Mann, William E., 1982) is sympathetic but catalogs the unresolved problems; Mullins's *The End of the Timeless God* (Mullins, R. T., 2016) presses the combination of simplicity and timelessness as internally inconsistent; Wolterstorff's "Divine Simplicity" (Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 1991) rejects the doctrine in favor of a richer divine psychology.

The structural account sits closest to the Plantinga–Mullins wing in finding a deep tension between strict simplicity and active divine predicates. Its narrower claim is not that every simplicity doctrine is immediately contradictory, but that any account on which a simple God grounds, donates, sustains, knows, or wills must explain how those relations acquire determinate content without the structural roles the account identifies.

Against the structural account, simplicity is the counter-move with the longest pedigree. The canonical line is run end-to-end at [§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>), which defends Necessary Possibility and S5 invariance; Cartesian Certainty for change's bilateral witnesses is supplied at [§2.2](<2.2 Cartesian Certainty.md>); the necessary modal constraint, tying the possibility of change to T, S, and Φ, is established at [§2.4](<2.4 Structural Requirement.md>); that constraint is lifted to the unconditional Triconditional Necessity of the three Conditions at [§2.5](<2.5 Triconditional Necessity.md>); and those Conditions are identified with Nature through the Triconditional machinery at [§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>). Simplicity, in its strict form, denies the application of that whole structure to God.

The classical theist answers that a maximally ultimate being is precisely one that does not instantiate the structural roles: a being with no composition cannot be assembled from parts the way structured entities are. One coherent being lacking relational non-identity, causal persistence, and temporal succession is all the position requires.

Pressure turns on whether that one being is coherently specifiable. Nine questions take up the objection: one at the level of the commitment, eight across its forms. They test three connected matters: whether the divine subject can be distinctly specified, whether it can stand in a real relation to creation, and whether its predicates retain differentiated content. The replies test whether any form avoids dissolving into ∅ or reinstating the roles under a different name.

*First.* The commitment question asks what simplicity delivers beyond its negative specification. Simplicity names the absence of composition without naming the activity the doctrine performs with it. Negatively specified, the doctrine rules out parts, composition, potency, and any distinction between essence and existence. A position that did nothing beyond negation would be inert. Simplicity earns its place because the theist uses it to affirm: that God grounds creation, donates existence, sustains the created order, and is fully actualized without potency. Each operative verb is a positive predicate. *Ground* requires an asymmetric dependence relation and a distinction between grounder and grounded; *donate* requires directed source–recipient content, though not necessarily a temporal transition in the donor; *sustain* requires an enduring or counterfactually stable dependence relation; *fully actualized* must retain content beyond bare self-identity. These are thin role-level demands, not yet an identification with loaded physical Time, Space, and Substance. The doctrine is specified by negation and cashed out by positive structural operations. The remaining eight questions test whether any form of the doctrine can accommodate the affirmations the doctrine is used to make.

*Second.* The relational-extension form tests whether a being with no spatial extension can be a distinct existent. Strict Thomistic simplicity holds that God has no parts, no composition, no distinction between essence and existence. God is not assembled from features; God is God's features, wholly and undividedly. Structural categories (distinction, succession, persistence) apply to creatures, not to the ground of creatures.

The absence of spatial extension does not by itself prevent numerical distinctness: abstract objects, if admitted, supply an obvious countermodel. The sharper question is whether the simple being has enough determinate identity and relational content to be distinguished from creation and to ground it without composition. Pressed to this limit, the worry is whether the doctrine leaves in place the structural conditions under which a distinct existent can be picked out at all.

Even granting existence as a hypothesis, a simple being collapses the architecture required for causal power. For any being to be a causal agent (to ground, sustain, or relate to creation), it must be a distinct relatum capable of entering into relationships. Interaction requires a between. Simplicity removes the between. The result is a *Point-State* — a would-be existent contracted to a dimensionless point, with no extension across which anything could be held apart from anything else: no relational manifold to host distinct coordinates, no gap between divine will and divine act, no distinction between divine subject and object of knowledge. Without Space in its distinction-grounding role, no distinct relata; without distinct relata, Substance's interaction has nothing to connect. The advocate who strips all distinction performs one in the act of stripping: individuation requires exactly what absolute simplicity removes.

The classical theist has one reply left here: God's distinctness from creation is transcendent, not positional; numerical, not at a distance; God distinct as Being Itself rather than as one relatum standing off from another. Grant the reply for distinctness taken statically; it still cannot be purchased for the verbs the doctrine refuses to drop. To *ground*, *donate*, or *sustain* is more than merely to differ from the recipient: it requires determinate asymmetric dependence. Metaphysical grounding need not involve motion or transit across a spatial interval. The burden is therefore to explain the direction and content of the relation without introducing composition, not to supply a literal crossing. The move that rescues the static distinctness forfeits the active verbs, and those verbs were the doctrine's entire reason for asserting the distinctness to begin with.

*Third.* Brower's truthmaker simplicity and Stump's phased-identity simplicity refine non-compositional distinctness. Simplicity does not require God's properties be strictly identical in the strong Thomistic sense; it requires only that no composition grounds God. The properties may be distinct in some sense but not compositional; what is ruled out is metaphysical dependence, not distinctness as such.

The refinement concedes the structural point while relabeling the relation. If God's properties are distinct in some sense but non-composite in another, then some relational structure holds among them: a structure that distinguishes the properties while unifying them. That is exactly what relational non-identity within a unified manifold consists in. Space at the role-definition level does not require a unified whole be dissolved into its parts; it requires parts be distinct within the whole. Brower's truthmaker simplicity and Stump's phased-identity simplicity both concede distinct relata within a unified divine being, a description of a structurally unified substance with distinct aspects. The structural conditions the argument names are retained in the refinement; what changes is the vocabulary under which they are described.

*Fourth.* Dolezal's apophatic form pairs strict simplicity with the claim that creaturely concepts cannot fully articulate what it amounts to, and holds that structural categories do not apply to the uncreated ground. The categories of our thought (including the structural roles the argument invokes) apply to creatures, not to the uncreated ground. Simplicity is a truth affirmed of God even though the categories we use to describe God fall short; the structural objection applies a creaturely measure to a non-creaturely reality.

Apophatic simplicity makes the position immune to objection only at the cost of making it immune to assertion. If the structural categories do not apply to God, neither do the categories of existence, power, will, or ground, each of which the theist affirms. The apophatic move is selectively applied: negation is invoked against the argument's categories but suspended for the categories the tradition wants to preserve. Either the negation is global, in which case the doctrine says nothing about God at all, or it is selective, in which case its selectivity requires a justification apophaticism was meant to avoid. Selective apophaticism does work the doctrine needs done while exempting itself from the obligation to justify where the negation stops. The structural analysis does not apply a creaturely measure. It applies the measure any affirmation of existence requires.

*Fifth.* The *actus purus* form presses simplicity through its metaphysical architecture. God is pure act: the complete actualization of all perfections with no unrealized potential. Whatever has potency is partly not actual; whatever is pure act has no potency. God is therefore pure act and the unconditioned ground of everything partly actual.

Pure actuality generates its difficulty more specifically than the crude charge that “no potency” means “no power.” The Thomist is right to reject that formulation: potency in the act/potency scheme is not active power, and pure act is meant to be fully actual causal power rather than inertness. The problem is not active power as such. The problem is the transition from not-exercising to exercising, from no creaturely effect to creaturely effect, from source alone to source-related-to-recipient. If the effect is contingent, the exercise of power must be related to that effect in some determinate way; if the exercise is eternal and unchanged, the effect seems eternal with it; if the effect is not eternal, some relational asymmetry has entered the account.

Feser's refinement distinguishes pure act from static immobility: pure act is not absence of causal capacity but fully realized causal capacity, a being whose power is entirely actualized. The refinement sharpens the structural question rather than removing it. An act that genuinely produces, sustains, or donates being is an exercise of causal capacity. It requires determinate source–effect difference, asymmetric dependence, and a bearer of the causal role. Those thin requirements do not by themselves establish spatial extension, temporal succession, or physical substance; the stronger identification needs the independent arguments supplied elsewhere. *Sustains* is itself a maintenance relation: to sustain is to hold something in being across the relevant interval or dependence-structure. An atemporal pure act can be asserted; what remains missing is how it produces, sustains, or donates without the structured relation those predicates require.

What the Way–Possibility Convertibility ([§3.2](<3.2 Triconditional Necessity Positive Account.md>)) makes inescapable here is the way-side of the predicate. Pure act forecloses potency, and the Thomist can refuse the potency framing without contradiction: the act/potency scheme is internal Thomistic vocabulary, and *actus purus* declines the predicate on the Thomist's own terms.

The way-predicate is not declinable. The Thomist's own characterization of God as *ipsum esse subsistens* (subsistent being itself, a determinate manner-of-being rather than dependent or composed) is itself a *way* of being. To say God's mode of being is *subsistent rather than dependent*, *simple rather than composed*, *necessary rather than contingent* is to specify a way under each predicate (direction, difference, link). By the Convertibility, whatever bears a way bears the structural conditions a way decomposes into. The exit *actus purus* offers against potency is not available against way: the Thomist commits to God's way of being as part of the doctrine's positive content, and cannot then deny the structural conditions that way-talk presupposes.

Two Thomist replies deserve direct hearing. Dolezal's *God Without Parts* (Dolezal, James E., 2011) apophatic move holds that *way* is creaturely vocabulary, predicated of God only analogically and not univocally, so the way-predicate does not carry its structural conditions across the analogy. The Fourth question above answers this in the general case: selective apophaticism cannot disqualify *way* while retaining *subsistent*, *simple*, *actus purus*, and *ipsum esse* as positive content. Either all the positive predicates the doctrine asserts of God fall under the apophatic disqualification (in which case the doctrine asserts nothing), or none of them do, in which case *way* stands with the rest. Brower's (Brower, Jeffrey E., 2009) and Stump's *Aquinas* (Stump, Eleonore, 2003) truthmaker-identity reply holds that one simple truthmaker can ground distinct predicates (*subsistent rather than dependent*, *simple rather than composed*) without those predicates introducing real distinctions in the truthmaker. The general form of that reply is met at the Seventh question below; the point that bears here is way-specific: as soon as the truthmaker is the condition under which *way of being* is correctly predicated, the truthmaker bears a way under the Convertibility, regardless of whether the multiplicity of senses is located on the creaturely-concepts side.

The same wedge applies to creation specifically. Classical theism reads creation as either a way *from* God (efficient donation outward, source-to-recipient) or a way *through* God (sustaining medium across which created being is held). Both readings require God to occupy a way-role: the former requires source-direction (T) and source/recipient distinction (S); the latter requires medium-as-carrier (Φ). The Convertibility forecloses both, because neither way-from nor way-through can be predicated of a being held outside the structural conditions ways decompose into. The doctrine cannot drop both readings, because dropping both abandons creation as a relation between God and creatures, which the doctrine is constructed to maintain.

The underlying critique (that classical simplicity is in tension with creation as a real relation) is well-trodden ground: Mullins's *The End of the Timeless God* (Mullins, R. T., 2016) presses it as the modal-collapse argument; Schmid's "From Modal Collapse to Providential Collapse" (Schmid, Joseph C., 2022) sharpens the tension for atemporalist simplicity by showing that avoiding modal collapse forces providential collapse; Wolterstorff (Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 1991) rejects simplicity partly on the ground that it cannot accommodate God's responsive relation to creatures. The standard Thomist reply invokes the doctrine of mixed relations (real on the creature side, conceptual on the divine side, *ST* I.13.7) together with simultaneous causation (treated at [§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>)); the atemporalist's further resource is the Stump–Kretzmann eternal-present account (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981), whose ET-simultaneity is offered to dissolve the modal-collapse and timelessness tensions by denying the temporal sequence they presuppose; its eternal-present mechanism is handled at [§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>), where the Boethian eternal present and ET-simultaneity are met directly.

The way-foreclosure framing isolates what these replies must still concede: even a relation merely conceptual *quoad nos* requires *some* way-role on the divine side to terminate the creaturely relation, and a pure terminus with no way-role at all is ∅ articulated in classical vocabulary rather than an alternative to it.

Feser's *Aquinas* (Feser, Edward, 2009) and subsequent work extends the *actus purus* defense through the Thomistic doctrine of the analogy of being (*analogia entis*): predicates like “ground,” “donate,” and “sustain” apply to God not univocally (importing creaturely conditions) nor equivocally (as mere homonyms) but analogically: in a mode proportioned to the divine being, tracking a real divine attribute without importing the full creaturely profile. This is a refined attempt to hold the positive predicates and the simplicity negations simultaneously: the analogy licenses the affirmations while the simplicity doctrine strips the structural conditions those affirmations normally presuppose.

The structural reply addresses the analogical mode directly. Analogical predication requires a real proportion grounded in something real about the divine subject: the predicate must track a real divine correlate that stands in the appropriate proportion to its creaturely counterpart. A feature that distinguishes God-sustaining from God-not-sustaining is a relational position, Space in its distinction-grounding role. To be the *source* rather than the *recipient* of sustaining is to occupy a directed role, Time in its ordering sense. To be the *medium* through which sustaining propagates is Substance's persistence role. The analogical mode does not eliminate these structural conditions; it reasserts them under a mode of predication that is itself a structural fact about the proportion between divine and creaturely attributes. The doctrine of analogy, taken seriously, presupposes the structural conditions it is designed to moderate. The same cluster recurs at [§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>) (Feser's act/potency machinery under direct scrutiny) and [§5.2.2](<5.2.2 Via Negativa.md>) (the analogical-apophatic complementarity); the structural question at each is whether an analogical-relational claim can be grounded without the structural conditions any relational claim presupposes.

*The eminent-containment retreat.* One form of the analogical reply is not yet exhausted. Pressed past predication to its ground, the classical theist may hold that the perfections are present in God not as ways God is (not as direction, difference, or link) but *eminently*: as the positive plenitude in which every perfection pre-exists in a higher mode than its creaturely realization (Aquinas, *ST* I.4.2). On this retreat God is neither a being among beings exhibiting the structural roles nor bare being, but positive fullness *containing* what creatures have in structured form, without the structure. The retreat concedes that *way*-talk carries the conditions the Convertibility names, and for that reason declines to predicate *way* of God at all: what is affirmed is content, not a way of being.

The Convertibility reaches the retreat through what positive content is. Content that is genuinely positive is determinate: it is thus and not otherwise, the fullness of being rather than its privation or limit. Determinacy is contrastive: to be the fullness rather than the privation is to exclude the privation, and a content that excluded nothing (compatible with every state, including its own absence) would not be content but an idle word (*omnis determinatio est negatio*, in its minimal logical form). To exclude is to stand in relational non-identity to what is excluded, and relational non-identity is Space in its distinction-grounding role, the same feature the analogical reply already conceded must distinguish God-sustaining from God-not-sustaining.

A defender may resist the step from determinacy to Space by pointing to abstracta: the number seven is fully determinate (seven and not eight) yet stands in no spatial relation, so determinacy alone seems not to force relational non-identity. The example is granted (the status of abstracta is treated in its own right at [§4.2.4](<4.2.4 Platonism.md>) and conceded at [§5.1.7](<5.1.7 Modal Ontological Argument.md>)), and it does not rescue the retreat. The contrastive determinacy of an abstract object describes what the structural conditions afford without grounding, donating, or sustaining anything; it is determinate the way a value is determinate, not the way an agent is. The eminent content the retreat needs is not inert in that way: it is the positive plenitude *from which* creation is grounded and sustained, and a determinacy that does grounding work distinguishes the source from what it grounds in the very act of grounding it. That distinction is relational non-identity in its concrete, distinction-grounding role, Space. The dilemma therefore re-presents one level up: either the eminent content is abstract-like, in which case it grounds nothing and the doctrine forfeits the creation, donation, and sustenance the retreat was invoked to preserve, or it does the grounding work, in which case its determinacy is the concrete contrastive determinacy that reinstates Space.

Eminent content is therefore not a *tertium quid* beside way-of-being and bare being. Either it is determinate, in which case it is contrastive and reinstates the structural condition under the name *eminence*; or it excludes nothing, in which case it is content-free and is ∅ after all. The *tertium quid* the retreat needs would have to be positive content that is neither contrastive nor empty, and there is no such option to occupy.

Before that premise is named, its reach is worth marking, because it is far narrower than the result it secures: it is load-bearing only here, against the eminent-containment retreat. Every form of the doctrine that keeps the active verbs (*ground*, *donate*, *sustain*) was already closed by the way-foreclosure, which needs no truthmaker premise at all; only the retreat that drops the verbs for pure content reaches this far, and only it forces the question of what then distinguishes that content from ∅. The closure rests on one premise worth making explicit: that what bears no feature discriminating it from ∅ is ∅, a discernibility principle for being. The classical theist's only coherent refusal is to hold that divine positive content is really distinct from the Null State while bearing no discernible differentiator from it, a primitive positivity distinct from nothing by no feature at all. That refusal is not free here, because [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>) precludes the Null State on exactly this ground: a putative something with no feature to distinguish it from nothing is nothing described as if it were something. The eminent-containment retreat and the Null State stand or fall together; the doctrine cannot reject the principle for ∅ and keep it for God.

The principle is not a stipulation the argument helps itself to; it is the truthmaker demand the doctrine already honors. *God is not nothing* is either true in virtue of something on the divine side (a *fundamentum in re*, some feature answering to the distinction), or it is a distinction drawn in our concepts alone, with nothing in God answering to it. The seventh question below presses the first horn for the attribute-predicates: *good* and *omnipotent* are true of God only if they track something real about him. The existence-predicate is not exempt. If a *fundamentum* distinguishes God-existing from the Null State, that feature is a discriminating position (relational non-identity, Space in its distinction-grounding role), and the structural condition stands reinstated under the name *fundamentum*. If nothing answers to it, then nothing on the divine side makes *God is not nothing* true rather than false, and a distinction with no foundation in re is exactly the empty, merely-verbal distinction the tradition refuses when it insists the divine names are not synonyms.

So the primitive-positivity refusal is an exemption, and a local one: it asks that a single predication (*God is*, *God is not nothing*) be released from the truthmaker demand the doctrine accepts for everything else it says of God, and the release falls exactly where the doctrine needs it.

The exemption is neither free nor Thomist. A reader who rejects truthmaking outright can decline the demand; the classical theist, having already grounded the divine names in what is real about God, cannot withhold it for the one predication on which the simplicity of God and the reality of the Null State are made to part.

What stays genuinely open is one premise, and it is worth scoping exactly, because it is narrower than full truthmaker commitment. The closure needs no truthmakers for all truths, and none for negative or general truths, the contested precincts of truthmaker theory. It needs only that a single positive existential (*God is*, *God is not nothing*) be true in virtue of something on the divine side: that there be a difference in re between God-existing and the Null State.

Nor can the Thomist slip the demand by recasting this as a negative truth: *God is not nothing* read as the bare denial of a competitor, exempt the way negative and general truths are exempt. That recasting is foreclosed by the doctrine's own center: *Deus est suum esse*, God's essence is God's existence. On that thesis *God is* is made true by the divine *esse* itself, the most positive *fundamentum* the tradition recognizes, the act in virtue of which anything whatever exists; it is the one existential the doctrine can least afford to make costless. A theist who downgrades *God is* to an exempt negation has not reached for the negative-truth exemption but denied that God's essence is *esse*, which is to abandon simplicity at its root. That is the least controversial corner of the doctrine, and it is one the classical theist already occupies. Aseity is the claim that God's existence is grounded in God rather than in another; a theist who denies that *God is* has an ontological ground has not escaped the argument but abandoned aseity, the classical project's load-bearing commitment. So the closure holds as firmly as aseity, and no more firmly: which is as firmly as the doctrine needs, since aseity is not negotiable for the position under examination.

*Sixth.* The ipsum esse subsistens form holds that being itself precedes structural characterization. *Ipsum esse subsistens* (the sheer act of existing, prior to any structural characterization) is the version of the doctrine that goes deepest. God is not a being among beings but Being itself, the unconditioned ground in virtue of which beings are. T, S, and Φ are features of creatures, of beings that have existence. The source of that existence is not itself a being with structural features; it is the pure act of existing, which precedes every structural distinction. The stratification proposal makes this precise: created being exists within T, S, and Φ; uncreated being stands at a prior level; the two levels are related by the act of *esse*; God donates existence to creatures, and the donation is neither a structural event (which would place God in the structure) nor a non-event (which would leave the donation inexplicable). It is a transcendent act that stratifies being itself.

The stratification does not escape the structural conditions. It relocates them to the interface. For God to donate existence to creatures, there must be a relation between donor and recipient, and a relation is a structural fact. (The simultaneous-causation mechanism classical theism offers to explain this relation is [§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>).) Donation is a causal relation connecting source to recipient across an ontological transition: distinction between donor and recipient (S), direction from source to product (T), structural persistence across which the donation runs (Φ). The Thomist who claims God's being is prior to structure must invoke structure to explain how that being relates to anything, which is to invoke structure to explain how what is supposedly prior to it grounds anything at all. Read charitably, the Thomist's deepest insight (that being is not a property added to an essence but the fundamental act making anything real) is precisely what the structural picture affirms. The disagreement is about whether that act is identical to the structural conditions or prior to them. The above establishes that the “prior to” reading is either vacuous or covertly structural.

*Seventh.* The multiple-descriptions form tests whether a strictly simple being can ground distinct true predicates. Strict simplicity holds that God has no real distinctions: God's goodness, power, and knowledge are not separate properties but identical with God's simple essence. The multiplicity is in our creaturely concepts, not in God.

This generates a dilemma the doctrine cannot discharge. If “God is good” and “God is omnipotent” describe genuinely distinct divine attributes, then the attributes are distinct, and distinction is composition. If they are not descriptions of genuinely distinct attributes (if both sentences describe the same simple fact), then they are informationally equivalent: swapping them out changes nothing, and the divine names the tradition treats as distinct turn out to be synonyms. The classical response (the multiplicity is in our concepts, not in God) does not close the gap. Even if the multiplicity is on the concept side, those concepts must be tracking something real about God to be true of him. “God is good” is true in virtue of something. If that something is numerically identical to what makes “God is omnipotent” true, the truthmaker-identity defender (Brower, Jeffrey E., 2009); (Stump, Eleonore, 2003) replies that one simple truthmaker can ground distinct predicates the way one Venus grounds both “morning star” and “evening star”: same referent, distinct senses. The reply preserves distinct content only as long as the senses do no metaphysical work. As soon as “good” and “omnipotent” require even minimally different aspects of the divine essence to be the conditions under which the predicates apply correctly rather than incorrectly (as they must, on pain of becoming synonyms), those aspects are real features the predicates discriminate among. Discrimination among real features within one being is what relational non-identity within a unified manifold consists in.

The dilemma re-presents at the level of aspects: either the aspects collapse and the predicates are synonyms whose multiplicity is unprincipled, or the aspects are real and strict simplicity has conceded the structural condition under the name “aspect.” The doctrine of analogy ([§5.2.2](<5.2.2 Via Negativa.md>)) addresses the linguistic question of how predicates apply; this question precedes it: what the predicates must track if they are to have multiple applications at all. A being of which only one thing can be truly said (because all descriptions collapse into one simple identical fact) is not a being the theological tradition has described. It is a being that exhausts itself in a single predicate the tradition has not been able to name.

*Eighth.* The softenings (Leftow, Scotus) preserve assertability by conceding enough structure to make the doctrine statable. A kindred softening is Leftow's (Leftow, Brian, 2012) divine-modality framework, which preserves key simplicity commitments while allowing some distinctions within God: specifically, between God's nature and God's will. The softer version does the work kindred deflations always do: it concedes enough structure within the divine being to make the being assertable, and the conceded structure is what the argument identifies as T, S, and Φ at the appropriate level. The line is independent of the apophatic reading's fate: grounding modality in divine nature and will places necessary-possibility-of-change inside God, which Modal Identity ([§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>)) identifies with T, S, and Φ. Scotus's formal distinction, anticipating the contemporary softenings by seven centuries, makes the concession inside the Catholic tradition itself. Open-theist softenings (Hasker, Sanders) concede still more (temporal duration, genuine response, real relation to creatures) and concede the structural commitments most explicitly. The softenings rescue assertability at the cost of simplicity: the doctrine that remains is a structural doctrine with the word *simplicity* still on the label.

*Ninth.* The essence/energies form is the Eastern counterpart to the softenings, and it concedes the structural point more openly than any other while most insisting it has not. Gregory Palamas (*Triads* III.2), systematizing the hesychast tradition, distinguishes within God the imparticipable essence (*ousia*, utterly unknowable, beyond participation) from the uncreated energies (*energeiai*), the divine operations in which creatures genuinely participate: the deifying grace and the light of Tabor through which theosis occurs. The distinction is held to be real, *in re* and not merely in our concepts, yet to introduce no composition: the energies are God wholly in act, not parts of God, so simplicity is claimed to stand. Lossky's *The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church* (Vladimir Lossky, 1957) and Bradshaw's *Aristotle East and West* (David Bradshaw, 2004) develop the position as the one account securing both divine transcendence (the essence withdraws absolutely) and real communion (the energies are genuinely God and genuinely shared), the pair strict Western simplicity is pressed on at the Fourth and Fifth questions. Taken at its strongest, it is the most direct rival to the structural account in the neighborhood, because alone among the forms it does not deny distinction in God: it affirms one and asks to keep simplicity anyway.

That affirmation is where the form supplies the structural conditions rather than evading them. The distinction between essence and energies is either real or not. If it is merely nominal (a distinction in our mode of access, essence-as-hidden against energies-as-revealed), it collapses into the strict simplicity of the Third and Fourth questions and inherits their verdict, at a cost Palamas cannot pay: theosis becomes participation in the bare essence, which the doctrine exists to deny. If the distinction is real, then God internally carries the inventory the argument names: a relational non-identity between essence and energies (S), a directed procession from essence as source to the energies as its uncreated activity (T in its ordering sense, directed origin without clock-time), and a participation across which the energies are conveyed to creatures (Φ, the carrier-role of an interval something crosses). A real distinction held in God, with a directed origin and a participable activity, is structure under the name *energies*.

The defender answers that this is a distinction *sui generis*: neither real as between two things nor merely logical, but the Palamite middle. That middle is the formal distinction of the Eighth question pressed one tradition over: Scotus's formal distinction and the essence/energies distinction are the same concession made in two tongues, and the structural conditions never required separability; a real but inseparable distinction, with a directed order and a carried activity, is the paradigm of an articulated structure rather than an exemption from one.

The plurality of the energies presses the point a second time, more bluntly. The energies are many (wisdom, power, foreknowledge, providence, deifying grace) and each is held to be uncreated. Either they depend asymmetrically on the essence, which is a directed dependence-order within the divine (T) and an internal articulation simplicity was meant to exclude, or they are co-primitive, in which case the uncreated is an irreducible manifold (S) and the unity that secured aseity is already surrendered. The doctrine multiplies the uncreated; the argument has only to register the multiplication. Read at its most careful, the essence/energies distinction does not bypass the structural conditions classical simplicity strips from divine being: it is the form that supplies them itself, uncreated, and names the supply *energies*.

A being denied every determinate distinction, dependence direction, and stable bearing role could not support simplicity's positive predicates. Mere lack of spatial extension or temporal succession, however, does not establish that stronger absence.

*What converges.* The nine questions survey the principal defenses considered here, and each returns to a common burden: the doctrine is specified by negation and cashed out by positive structural operations, so that strict identity secures at most a static distinctness that leaves the doctrine's active verbs without relational content; non-compositional distinctness retains the structural conditions under a different label; selective apophaticism does work it exempts itself from justifying; pure act still owes an account of the transition from source alone to source-related-to-recipient; *ipsum esse subsistens* relocates structure to the donation interface; multiple true descriptions of a strictly simple being collapse into informational equivalence or reinstate real distinction; the softenings concede the structural commitments explicitly; and the essence/energies distinction either collapses into the strict simplicity it meant to refine or, taken as real, supplies the structural conditions itself under the name *energies*.

All the ways necessary for possibility are held in place by the structural conditions classical theism strips from divine being. The doctrine asks the reader to grant every condition possibility requires while denying every one of them to the being possibility was supposed to terminate in.

What the doctrine calls simplicity may preserve a minimal structural floor whenever it retains determinate active predicates or real relations to creation. A defender may instead posit an essence-prior or apophatic ground; that move is not answered by merely repeating the floor, but owes an account of how the proposed ground and its relation to creatures are determinately specified. The chapter's conclusion is therefore a burden: strict simplicity does not by itself deliver a structure-free ground, and its strongest versions must discharge the relation and predication problems developed here.

Sibling theistic counter-constructions: Rasmussen's Limits-plus-Isomorphism derivation ([§5.1.1](<5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument.md>)), Swinburne's probabilistic simplicity ([§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>)), and the PSR-demand variant ([§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>)). The downstream severance this defeat produces for classical predication (how the attributes come apart once simplicity no longer holds them together as one act) is [§6.2](<6.2 Constitution.md>).


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← [5.2 Doctrines of the Divine Nature](<5.2 Doctrines of the Divine Nature.md>) | [5.2.2 Via Negativa](<5.2.2 Via Negativa.md>) →
