Simplicity is the claim that God has no parts: no inner distinctions of any kind, so that each divine attribute, the divine essence, and the bare fact that God exists are one and the same undivided reality. The strain is that telling anything apart as the being it is (even telling its wisdom from its goodness) takes exactly the internal differentiation the doctrine removes. A being with nothing in it to distinguish is not the most unified being but the one whose identity has lost the structure identity tracks. What *subsistent being itself* reaches for, fully stated, is not the absence of structure but its ground, and that ground is Nature.

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> **Core concept.** Divine simplicity says God has no parts and no inner distinctions whatsoever—God's power just *is* God's knowledge just *is* God's very existence, with nothing to tell apart. It's meant to be the deepest unity there could be. The strain: telling anything apart as the thing it is—even telling its wisdom from its goodness—takes exactly the inner difference the doctrine erases. A being with nothing inside to distinguish isn't the most unified being; it's one whose identity has lost the structure that identity is tracked by. What 'being itself' reaches for, spelled out fully, isn't the absence of structure but its ground.

*What the tradition holds.* Divine simplicity holds that God has no parts and no inner distinctions at all: God's power just *is* God's knowledge just *is* God's existence, with nothing to tell apart. The classical tradition makes this identity definitive of God in a register the structure cannot host: no real composition, no distinction between essence and accidents, no distinction between essence and existence, no distinction among the divine attributes themselves: a stripping of internal differentiation from the divine being (Augustine, *De Trinitate* -(Augustine of Hippo, (400–428) 1991), VI; Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.3). *Ipsum esse subsistens* (*ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.3.4) identifies essence with existence, so that God *is* being rather than *has* it: a being whose what-it-is is its that-it-is, and so a being whose identity is not contingent on anything beyond itself.

The doctrine of the Trinity (Athanasian Creed; Augustine, *De Trinitate* -(Augustine of Hippo, (400–428) 1991); Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.27–43) holds three persons in one substance, distinguished only by relations of origin (paternity, filiation, procession), preserving distinction without composition. Necessary being Anselm, *Proslogion* -(Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998), II–III; (Plantinga, A., 1974) extends self-sameness modally across every possible world, so that divine identity is preserved not just within a world but across the space of worlds.

Each formulation tries to keep divine identity from being one more identity among identities, and each is defended in contemporary form (Stump, Eleonore, 2003); (Stump, Eleonore, 2016); (Dolezal, James E., 2011); (Dolezal, James E., 2017); (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018); (Leftow, Brian, 2004); (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Brower, Jeffrey E., and Michael C. Rea, 2005) as expressing not a property but the condition under which a being can be without dependence. Taken at the tradition's own fullest formulation, the doctrine names the deepest unity philosophical theology has reached for: a being whose identity rests on nothing prior, because there is no internal structure to rest on and no external structure to depend on. Classical simplicity is not the only target in the neighborhood: the temporalist repair (drop simplicity and keep a temporal, personal God) is engaged at [§6.7.3](<6.7.3 Interaction.md>), and the embedded-deity concession at [§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>), so the pressures below are not aimed as if strong simplicity were the sole option. The doctrine's full treatment, run end-to-end against the nine forms of its defense, is at [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>); the present section presses simplicity specifically as a great-making attribute and draws on that treatment rather than re-litigating it.

*What cannot be answered.* Six questions press simplicity where the doctrine owes its most demanding answers.

**Q1.** *If God has no parts, then how are his wisdom and goodness distinct?* Plantinga's -(Plantinga, A., 1980) pressure on strong simplicity has not been answered in the form it was put. If God's wisdom is identical with God's power, and God's power with God's goodness, transitivity gives wisdom-is-goodness, and these are clearly distinct properties on any predicative reading. The contemporary defenses (Stump, Eleonore, 2003); (Dolezal, James E., 2011); (Dolezal, James E., 2017); (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018) recast simplicity as non-composition rather than strict property-identity, and the most developed form of the recast invokes the analogy of being (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.13): *wisdom*, *power*, and *goodness* pick out distinct content at the level of signification (grounded in diverse creaturely perfections eminently contained in the one undivided essence) without internal differentiation in God and so without composition. That move slips between the two crude horns, so it has to be met on its own terrain. Analogical predication earns its distinct content only if each predicate tracks something real about the divine subject: a real proportion between the creaturely perfection and a divine correlate that holds it. Ask what that correlate is. If *wisdom* and *goodness* track the same undifferentiated correlate, they track one thing under two names: the senses do no metaphysical work, and the attribute-tradition collapses into synonymy: a being of which only one thing can truly be said. If they track distinct correlates (distinct aspects of the essence in virtue of which the one predicate applies rather than the other), then those aspects are real features the predicates discriminate among, and discrimination among real features within one being is relational non-identity wearing the name *aspect*. Eminent containment does not dissolve the dilemma; it relocates it inward, and the relocation is worth making explicit, since eminence is the one horn the dilemma cannot be charged with begging. Grant the Thomist exactly what is asked: a superabundant actuality determinate enough that *wisdom* applies to it truly and *goodness* applies to it truly. Then press the discriminating question the predicates themselves force: in virtue of what does *wisdom* apply rather than merely *goodness*? Either something on the divine side answers to the difference between the two true predications, in which case that something is content the predicates discriminate among, and discrimination-among is differentiation whatever its dignity; or nothing answers to it, in which case the two predications are made true by the same feature-less actuality, one truthmaker under many names, which is the synonymy horn in superabundant dress. Eminence does not name a third region between the determinate-and-differentiated and the undifferentiated-and-empty; it names the demand that there be one, and the discriminating question is the test that demand has to pass. The one apparent counterexample, abstracta (determinate, it seems, yet not spatiotemporally differentiated), is not one: [§3.4.3](<3. Convergence.md>) finds the familiar candidates for a determinate-but-structureless residue, abstracta among them, each presupposing T, S, and Φ rather than exhibiting determinacy without them. The content-requires-differentiation step is substantive: one truthmaker can in principle ground several truths. The pressure is therefore not an automatic truthmaker rule but whether the single divine reality explains why these predicates have different inferential and modal profiles without treating their difference as merely creature-side. The most refined Thomist names the relation precisely here: the perfections are *virtually* distinct: a *distinctio rationis ratiocinatae* in the Cajetanian idiom, distinct neither really nor by any relation in God, but by a distinction of reason carrying a foundation in the thing, *wisdom* and *goodness* picking out one eminent perfection under aspects the intellect cannot fuse. The virtual distinction does not escape the dilemma; it restates it. Ask what the *foundation in the thing* is. If it has a *fundamentum in re* (some feature of the divine essence in virtue of which *wisdom* applies rather than *goodness*, the foundation the qualifier *ratiocinatae* is coined to claim), then that foundation is a real feature the predicates track, and the differentiation the doctrine denies has been readmitted at the level of the foundation; the distinction is virtual only in that we read off in two concepts a duality already seated in the essence. If it has no foundation in the thing (a *distinctio rationis ratiocinantis*, purely in our minds with nothing in God answering to it), then *wisdom* and *goodness* track one undifferentiated point under two names, and the attribute-tradition collapses into the synonymy the analogy of being was invoked to avoid. The Cajetanian middle demands that the distinction be founded in the thing *without* being a real or relational feature of it; but a foundation that grounds the discriminating application of one predicate rather than another simply is a feature the predicates discriminate among, and discrimination among features within one being is relational non-identity whether it is christened *real*, *formal*, or *virtual*. The 'aspect = relational non-identity' step is therefore not assumed against the sophisticated Thomist; it is what remains once the virtual distinction is held to the foundation its own name promises. Either the perfections collapse to a single nameless point, or the essence carries the differentiated content the doctrine was built to deny: composition readmitted under a more careful label. A last Thomist resort relocates the diversity from the foundation to the manner of signifying. On Aquinas's distinction between the *res significata* and the *modus significandi* (*ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.13.3), *wisdom* and *goodness* signify one undivided *res*, the simple essence, under diverse *modi significandi* grounded in diverse creaturely effects, so that the senses do their metaphysical work in the mode of signifying rather than in distinct correlates in God: the synonymy horn is supposed to fail without composition being readmitted. The reply is given in full at [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>), the chapter's meta-home for religious language; in brief, the defense does not clear the fork, because the differentiated modes must themselves be grounded in something the predicates discriminate among (the diverse creaturely effects taken back to the essence as variously imitable) and a ground in virtue of which *wise* applies rather than *good* is once more a real feature the predicates discriminate among, relational non-identity under the name *mode*. The structural cost reappears at the level of grounding, exactly as it did for the virtual distinction (Mullins, R. T., 2013). The same dilemma is pressed against omniscience in [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>): a being that knows a differentiated manifold needs differentiated content to do the knowing, and a simple essence cannot carry that content without reinstating the internal differentiation the doctrine rules out. Identity in creatures is a function of the structural relation between a being and the differentiated content the being carries. A being whose essence has no differentiated content is not a being whose identity has been preserved more strictly than ours; it is a being whose identity has lost the structure identity tracks.

**Q2.** *If there's nothing in God to tell apart, what tells the Father from the Son?* Trinitarian distinction has to be real distinction or there is no Trinity, and real distinction requires determinate non-identity between the persons. It does not by itself require a spatial interval. The patristic and Thomistic reply locates the distinction in relations of origin (paternity, filiation, procession; Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.27–43) rather than in real composition. But relations of origin are themselves structured: paternity and filiation are not interchangeable, procession is a directed relation of source and term, and origin-order is asymmetric even when it is explicitly denied to be ordinary temporal before-and-after. That is the book's Temporality role in non-clock form: directed order, not a sequence of divine moments. Latin trinitarianism (Leftow, Brian, 2004); (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Brower, Jeffrey E., and Michael C. Rea, 2005) keeps distinction-without-extension by treating the persons as distinct only by relation within a single divine consciousness; social trinitarianism (Richard Swinburne, 1994); (Hasker, William, 2013) keeps distinction-with-extension by treating the persons as distinct centers held in perichoresis (their mutual indwelling in one another). The first preserves unity by attenuating distinction toward modalism (collapsing the persons into mere aspects of one God); the second preserves distinction by attenuating unity toward tritheism (three separate gods). The middle the tradition has wanted for sixteen centuries is the middle T, S, and Φ pick out (three relata distinguished by asymmetric origin-order and held in a persisting substance), and the doctrine has placed every term of that middle outside divine being.

**Q3.** *When we call God necessary, are we saying something about God, or just about every possible world?* Kant's -(Kant, I., (1781) 1998) objection (existence is not a real predicate) is sharper than Plantinga's modal reframing acknowledges. Plantinga -(Plantinga, A., 1974) reads necessary existence as instantiation in every possible world and so escapes the Kantian objection at the level of the predicate. Instantiation in every possible world can be expressed either as a de re modal property of a thing or as a fact represented by the modal structure. Plantinga's reframing therefore can say something about God. The remaining issue is whether the relevant individual and cross-world identity conditions are coherent and whether the possibility premise is warranted. The locus of necessity has shifted from the being to the modal structure. What modal-structure necessity comes to is taken up at [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>); the present concern is more local. The predicate the doctrine wants (necessarily existing as a way of being self-same across modal space) has been preserved by relocating its referent from a being to a feature of how worlds are structured. What is necessarily instantiated across every possible world is T, S, and Φ; what is not necessarily instantiated is a being defined by not instantiating any of them.

**Q4.** *If all we can say is that God is, have we said what God is?* *Ipsum esse subsistens* (subsistent being itself) closes the gap that, in creatures, makes existence contingent on something other than essence. The closing preserves aseity; what it does not preserve is identity in a sense the predicate could pick out. Every creaturely being is a particular kind of being, and being-this-kind is what makes the being identifiable as the being it is. A being whose essence is its existence is not the most identifiable being but the one whose identity has thinned to the bare fact that it is, a fact with no kind-content for identity-talk to track. Stump -(Stump, Eleonore, 2016) and Dolezal -(Dolezal, James E., 2017) defend the position as expressing divine non-contingency rather than as a determinate metaphysical claim, and the move is genuinely available. The doctrine survives, on that reading, by narrowing the work the predicate is asked to do: *ipsum esse subsistens* names God's non-dependence rather than supplying a determinate kind-description. That is not a mere retreat; it is the most defensible Feser-style way to keep the doctrine from becoming one entity inside a wider genus. The structural cost remains that the believer who calls God *the Holy One of Israel* is not invoking the bare fact that something is; they are invoking a determinate being with a determinate kind. *Ipsum esse subsistens* preserves the term while leaving the being without determinate content.

**Q5.** *If God isn't a being among beings, what makes God anyone at all?* The post-Heideggerian critique (Heidegger, M., (1927) 1962); (Heidegger, Martin, 1957); (Jean-Luc Marion, 1991); (Marion, Jean-Luc, 2002) puts the dilemma sharply. If God is a being among beings, divine transcendence collapses into supremacy within a category; if God is being itself, divine identity loses the structural conditions any identity requires. The Thomistic reply (Burrell, David B., 1979); (Westphal, Merold, 2001) reads *ipsum esse subsistens* as precisely the move past being-among-beings. Plotinus gives the older and more radical version of the same pressure: the One is prior to being and to number, the source of intelligibility rather than an intelligible item within it (*Enneads* -(Plotinus, c. 270 CE), V.5, VI.9; [§5.3.2](<5.3.2 Neoplatonism.md>)). The reply trades one structural concern for its mirror image: a being among beings has identity but loses transcendence; being itself, or the One beyond being, has transcendence but loses identity. The analysis here does not pick a horn. What *being itself* names, when fully stated, is the conditions under which any being can be individuated, distinguished, and sustained across the time within which it persists. T, S, and Φ are not a being among beings, and they do the work *being itself* was meant to do without leaving the structural side of identity unprovided.

**Q6.** *If God is the greatest in every way at once, what makes God this being and not another?* Perfect-being theology (Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998); (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Mark C. Murphy, 2017) generates the divine attributes by maximizing each great-making property. The methodological assumption is that maxima compose: that maximally wise, maximally powerful, maximally good, maximally simple, maximally eternal can be jointly predicated of one being without internal contradiction. Swinburne's use of simplicity is different: it is a theoretical virtue in a cumulative explanatory case, not the strong ontological identity of attribute and essence the Thomistic doctrine asserts (Swinburne -(Richard Swinburne, 1979); -(Richard Swinburne, 2004); [§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>)). Each Chapter 6 section presses the ontological attribute against its structural conditions and finds the predicate unable to land on a being defined by the negation of those conditions. The cumulative case is developed from the joint side at [§6.2.4](<6.2.4 Perfection.md>); this section presses the same point from the individuating side. Sobel -(Jordan Howard Sobel, 2004), Martin -(Martin, Michael, 1990), and Everitt -(Everitt, Nicholas, 2004) press incompossibility (the impossibility of the maximized attributes being jointly instantiated in one being) from a different angle. What individuates an identity is the structured content the maxima have been defined to exclude. There is no determinate identity for a being whose individuation has been removed at the level of every great-making property at once.

*What is required.* What the six pressures together surface is the structural inventory identity actually depends on. Identity depends on six conditions. (i) Internal differentiation: distinct predicates of a being have to pick out distinct content, or the predicates collapse into verbal identity without the work the predicate was supposed to perform. (ii) Asymmetric relational ordering: distinct relata require an interval (S) and a directionality (T) between them, without which "distinct" is a verbal claim with no structural correlate. (iii) A structure-grounded locus of necessity: what is necessary across modal space is necessary because the modal structure is configured a particular way, and that configuration is where the necessity lives. (iv) Determinate kind-content: a being is the being it is by virtue of being *a kind of being*, and identity-talk tracks the kind, not the bare fact that something is. (v) Structural individuation: what makes a being identifiable is not the withdrawal of all dependence but the structural conditions under which the being can be individuated, distinguished, and sustained. (vi) Structured content sufficient to support each great-making property: the maxima cannot compose into a coherent identity unless the structured content the maxima predicate is preserved rather than negated. These six conditions are not extrinsic to identity; they are what the predicate *identity* names when its referent is examined. T, S, and Φ (succession, distinction, and the substance-substrate through which both run) are not optional supports for identity that some beings can do without. They are the conditions under which any being is the being it is across the moments through which it persists.

*What is inverted.* For persisting concrete beings, identity includes persistence through time; identity more generally also covers instantaneous and abstract candidates. The inversion therefore needs a determinate individuation and continuity floor without defining every identity as temporal substance. *Ipsum esse subsistens* (Latin *esse*, "to be," present-participial *subsistens*, "standing-under, standing-firm") names exactly the substrate that stands under and the standing-through that holds it together: Substance (Φ) that stands under, Time (T) that runs through, Space (S) that holds it distinct. The Latin tradition's deepest formulation reaches for the conditions under which a being can be the being it is, and names Nature without recognizing what is being named. Nature has no kind because it is the condition for kind. It has no internal composition in the sense of being assembled from prior parts, because composition among parts is what it makes possible. Nor is Nature's changeability the unrealized potency the objection presses (that a mutable, composite Nature is act/potency-laden and so cannot occupy the unactualized terminus reserved for Pure Act, Feser's frontal move): the mutability is the *necessary possibility* of change internal to a Nature whose co-instantiation is itself necessary ([§2.8.6](<2.8.6 Exclusivity of Nature.md>)), not a potency awaiting actualization from without; and since potency cannot reduce itself to act save through the substance-ontology the scheme itself presupposes ([§3.1.2](<3. Convergence.md>)), the regress terminates not in an *actus purus* stripped of structure but in the changeless ground the act/potency scheme runs within ([§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>)).

Nor is a structureless Pure Act available as the other horn: *pure act* is itself a structural predicate. It is marked off from impure act by a distinction, and a distinction is relational non-identity (S) by the step Q1 already presses; and it is *act* only as the actualizing of what it affects, a directed relation of actualizer to actualized (T) across the interval between them (S), exercised by what persists as the agent of the actualizing (Φ). An actuality that causes an effect must stand in a determinate causal relation to it. Thomistic pure act forecloses passive potency in God, not active causal power; the seam at [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) is whether an unchanged necessary act can explain contingent effects without modal collapse. What structures whatever it touches cannot itself be structureless, and proportionate causality, the doctrine's own principle, says as much from the effect's side: a cause produces only what it contains, so a structured world needs a cause proportioned to structure, and the retreat to eminent containment carries the very differentiated content the production discriminates among, structure readmitted in the cause (Q1). The terminus is therefore neither horn the objection offers, neither a composite item within the order nor a bare actuality above it, but the conditions any actuality meets in being one; strip even the structure by which *pure act* differs from empty actuality and what remains is not a supreme simple but ∅ ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)). *Actus purus*, when used to support differentiated causal and cognitive predicates, incurs the thin role-floor of determinate order, difference, and bearing. The upgrade from those roles to T, S, and Φ remains a further argumentative step. And the triad the doctrine would press as a many is no aggregate: by the Triconditional Identity ([§2.6.10](<2.6.10 Triconditional Identity.md>)), Time, Space, and Substance are one Nature read three ways, co-instantiated so completely that to lack any one is to lack all three ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>)). The unity a henological One is summoned to supply is therefore not added to the triad from above but is what the triad is; closing the regress needs neither a fourth relation binding the three nor a One beyond structure standing over them. It is necessarily what it is because there is no second vantage from which it could be otherwise.

*Subsistent being itself* is what T, S, and Φ are, read in the structure that supports the phrasing. The property-list classical theism specifies for *ipsum esse subsistens* (atemporal, aspatial, prior to composition) is the property-list [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>) specifies for the Null State; where the doctrine refuses Nature, what it names is ∅.

The one premise this verdict turns on is the one the doctrine cannot surrender: that *God is* (*God is not nothing*) is made true by something on the divine side rather than by nothing at all. That is aseity, read as a truthmaker demand; a being whose existence answered to nothing in it would exist from nothing, the one thing aseity forbids. The discernibility principle the inversion uses is not imported against the doctrine: it is the doctrine's own first commitment, turned on the bare predicate *is*.

The doctrine of divine simplicity, pressed through these questions, either supplies a determinate account of differentiated predication and relation or leaves the structural burden unresolved; it is not thereby identical to Nature by definition.


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← [6.2 Constitution](<6.2 Constitution.md>) | [6.2.2 Unity](<6.2.2 Unity.md>) →
