Debating Roman Catholic Absolute Simplicity & Aquinas: Jay Dyer Vs. Dr. Francis Feingold

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Welcome, welcome, welcome, you're listening to Jay's analysis.

And we are going live, let the audience trickle in here a little bit, see if we can build

up a little bit of a watcher viewership, listenership, excuse me, before we actually get

going.

We're not late, I'm on the road so I'm at a bit of a disadvantage, I don't have my library

with me.

And I'm not really familiar with Mr. Fine, Dr. Fine, actually, we have mutual friends,

and friends with some guys for about a decade that set this up.

And I'm glad to do this because it's been so long since I've done a real debate with

a trained person in these kinds of ideas.

We get the internet philosophers, but we don't often get trained academic types.

So I'm going to send him the link now, and I'm going to be going from memory here, I've

got some of my articles pulled up because I'm on the road, but I didn't want to say no

to this debate.

And if need be, we may down the road have successive debates that deal with maybe questions

that get raised in this debate.

So since I'm on the road, I don't have my summa with me, I don't have the summa countries

and T-lays, so I don't have my telemystic commentaries, I'm going to be going from memory.

And, but again, it's not that hard to know what commas is, dogs and dogs, the mind's

simplicity is, it's pretty clearly stated, multiple times in volume one of the summa and

in volume one of the summa countries and T-lays.

So I've sent him the link, so he should be coming in pretty soon.

And I imagine it will be a pretty laid back debate, Dr. Fine Gold, how are you?

Good, how are you?

Mr. Dyer.

Mr. Dyer.

Okay, that's cool, thanks for doing the debate, man, how are you?

I'm doing all right, thank you for having me on, it's an honor.

Yeah, I appreciate Justin putting it together, I know he was kind of looking for somebody

to do a debate for a while, and I think you would be a perfect person for this category.

You want to tell us a little bit about yourself and your research and that you, I think you

did your dissertation on Thomas, right?

Sure, yeah, so my dissertation, which I defended last November, was on divine impassibility

in Aquinas, so specifically trying to deal with the problem of how to reconcile standard

to mistake doctrines like pure actuality and divine simplicity with the dependence of

the love around the beloved, which seems to imply passability.

And are you still there because, yeah, you know, you might want to cut your camera off

because it's good, it'll use a lot of bandwidth, and we might want to do audio, let's see

if I can figure out how to do that, there we go, yeah, yeah, that'll probably be a little

smoother now.

That sounds good.

And I want to add two to the audience that we will, we'll be, are you cool taking questions?

Of course, okay.

So people in the audience, if you want to do super chat questions, we'll take those.

As usual, I always split the super chats with the guests.

So Dr. Fine Gold will get half of the super chat questions that you guys ask.

So come up with some good ones as we discuss here.

I'm thinking maybe we could do a pretty free-flowing conversation style.

It doesn't have to be formal debate mainly because I'm not at my library.

So I'm on the road and I'm kind of going from memory.

You have the home court advantage.

Well, sorry, I might just have my laptops, but, well, that's fine.

So I'll, how do we want to start this off?

Do you want to, let me ask you, are you, are you very familiar with Eastern theology or like the Eastern?

I can't claim a lot of familiarity.

I have a couple of paragraphs on Paul and Austin, my dissertation, but that's about it.

So if you want to, maybe it would be good to do something like this where you give the basic

Palomite position, which I take and you'll be defending.

Where I'll give the basic elevator pitch for Aquinas and then we can start probing.

Sure.

So I'll start off by saying that the Palomite position actually isn't the position just of

saying you're arguing Palomites.

In fact, it's a doctrine that I would say pretty clearly is taught in the

by St. Basil's letter 234, where he makes a distinction between the essence and energy

or the essence and the operations of God.

If we look at St. John Damascus's Orthodox faith in multiple times throughout the work,

he makes a distinction between the essence and energy of God.

The course in book one, he will say that the energy of God is one.

And then he goes on to say that the energy of God is also multiple for us.

That's a one in the many question where we don't actually see a dialectic.

But in fact, the energies of God or actions of God are multiple.

And later on in on the Orthodox faith, he even clarifies this in a more intense way

when he talks about the energies in Christ and the incarnation.

Specifically, the relationship between the two natural wills and operations or energies,

in the two natures.

This, of course, is because the six ecumenical council dealt extensively

with debating the monotheolites on the question of Christ and the incarnation,

having two wills and two energies property to the proper to those natures.

So I would argue as St. Gregory Palomites does against Barlaum and as St. Gregory,

St. Maximus, the confessor did against, against,

a peristomonal feelite that the nature grace question and the question

of the essence and energies distinction in the incarnation is even clearer

when we understand that there's no dialectics.

So there's no dialectics in the relationship between nature and grace.

There's no dialectics between a relationship of Christ's human nature and energy

participating in the divine and nature and energy.

So in other words, the uncreated energies of God,

it's not just a question of God's relationship to creation,

but it's also solidified dogmatically and theologically in the six ecumenical

council when it deals with this specific question.

If you read the debate between St. Maximus and Perist,

you'll see that Maximus relies throughout in that 150 page treatise on this

being a real distinction.

This real distinction allows for God to remain transcendent in his essence

and yet come down to us and allow us to participate in his uncreated glory

and life.

Jesus says in John 17 that he came to give us the same glory that he shares

with the Father from all eternity.

That glory that light is not created is, in fact, uncreated.

And it's not something that just is postponed to an intellectual vision

in the afterlife or to be a Pacific vision.

In fact, it's something that's participated in here and now.

And we know that by the fact of the incarnation.

In fact, when the Father is at the six ecumenical council and at the fifth,

by the way, talk about the incarnation.

They speak of the humanity of Christ as being deified via the incarnation.

Again, this process is done by the uncreated energies,

which proceed from the divine nature.

Certainly, although they're not the exact same as the divine nature in our view,

that is the means by which the humanity of Christ participates in the divine life

that's explicitly stated quoting from St. Gregory and St. Gregory of Nazi Anzus

and the theological orations at the fifth and sixth council.

So it's repeated, it's reaffirmed.

We also have statements at the Council of Ephesus,

citing St. Cyril, the Alexander who gives us a story,

so that the bread and wine in a similar way,

participate in these divine energies.

There are multiple references to these same ideas in the liturgies of the East,

all which talk about the operations of God, the baptismal right,

for example, talks about calling down the energies of God into the baptismal font.

And again, it's all just based on our crystallological understanding,

which we see as, again, dogmatically stating in the sixth and fifth council

that the energies deify the humanity.

So that model of deification of Christ's humanity is the model for the individual believer,

the individual baptized Christian, as they participate in God through the church,

through sacraments, and that participation is a real participation,

but it's a participation in the uncreated glory, an uncreated light,

uncreated grace of God, not a created grace.

So I would contrast this with what's later dogmatized.

So not just theoretically or philosophically speculated upon an Aquinas in terms of

how there might be a relationship between this absolutely simple essence and created beings

or this absolutely simple essence.

And the one person of the Trinity somehow becoming incarnate, rather it is the question

of the Roman dogmas.

And then the Roman dogmas do eventually state.

And I think I'm vindicated by this, not just in my reading of what's at the Roman

councils, particularly like Trent or Vatican one, where dogmatic divide simplicity is

stated pretty clearly.

You also have the outworkings of this in terms of created grace.

You know, Trent has it by recall going from memory, a condemnation of

different speculations about what kind of grace and justification is actually given

in baptism.

And one of the things that's condemned is the idea that it's not created grace.

So in other words, the grace that is stamped upon our soul, the sanctifying grace,

is a created effect.

And of course, this is again in that sort of restituting causal format of God,

the cause, and then we receive the effects of that cause.

But the effects that we receive are in fact created.

And I would argue that the reason that Rome has this issue is precisely because

eventually in the dogma, the uncreated created, or excuse me, the uncreated grace

essence, energy, distinction, doctrine was eventually lost.

So it was perfectly fine in terms of up into the sixth, seventh, eighth council.

If you count the eighth or eighth, that is where it was stated explicitly,

but it eventually, I would say, after the rise of frankish dominance,

Charlemagne, the Carolinians, you eventually have this dogma kind of being lost

and forgotten and Roman Catholic theology pretty much settles into a pretty

ossified solidified doctrine of what divine simplicity is.

So there are a lot of errors.

I'm going to close up here with this opening statement.

I think that's the main point.

We would say that there's a lot of errors that kind of flow out of this,

that you can tease out.

And so my first clarification is that I'm not debating whether Thomas had good

intentions.

I'm not debating whether Thomas in other places in the suma said things correctly.

I'm not here to debate, I guess,

sins and tensions or an sums and tensions, but rather just specifically whether or

not the things that are stated say in book one of Symmothiologica and in book

one of the simiculture dentileist about what divine simplicity is.

If that actually makes sense with and comports with what is stated elsewhere

about how there is a real distinction of persons, because to us,

it doesn't seem that there could be a real distinction of persons.

If distinction implies composition or division, in fact, that's a direct borrowing

from Plotinus, it's Plotinus who first said, well, following other Greek

philosophy beforehand, that all, no, all consideration of distinction implies

division or composition.

And for us, we see that as in many times refuted, particularly in the

Christological Heresies, but also in the triological triatological formations

of the early church.

So for us, all of these questions are linked.

The doctrine of God, how you relate to creation, also the doctrine of

Christology, the doctrine of the sacraments and the doctrine of eschatology

are all intimately connected and ecclesiology in terms of how we view the

essence energy distinction and whether we believe that it's possible or not.

So when it comes to Aquinas' conclusions, I'll say that for my later critique,

given the fact that, for example, I don't see how creation can be a

free action of God if we accept his doctrine of divine simplicity and the idea

that all the actions of God are absolutely isomorphically identical to the

essence of God.

I don't see how we can say that there's a real incarnation.

If God is an absolutely simple essence or, for example, how we would avoid

potropotianism, if God is an absolutely simple essence.

In other words, at one, one hypostasis of the Trinity couldn't enter into

a motive being that the others do not.

So, for example, the Father is not crucified.

The Father does not become incarnate.

It's only the Son, but if God is an absolutely simple essence in which

the distinctions imply composition or division becomes difficult to see how there

is a real incarnation, how God's actions within time and space are real

actions signifying the divine power.

For example, it's common in obviously early fathers to speak of Christ's

human nature being evident when he cries or when he eats,

but we see the Father's also making a strong argument for the divine power

operant in Christ or through Christ when he walks on water,

when he does miracles, when he races the dead.

Those are actions proper to the divine nature, and there are real powers

entering into time and space from the divine nature itself.

Now, we don't believe the divine nature enters into time and space,

but in fact that it is possible for the uncreated to enter into time and space

because of our belief in the essence introduced section.

And I'll close with, I would say, our strongest case in that regard,

is the fact that for us, whether it's the oftenays of the Old Testament,

up until Augustine and book three of on the Trinity is one of its first question.

The Eastern Father's never questioned the belief that it is not

created holograms or angels that are present.

For example, in Exodus three of the Burning Bush, or in Exodus 23,

where God says, I will put my name in my angel, the angel of the Lord,

it is consistently believed that these the oftenays are the pre-incarnate

presence of Christ himself.

Tomas and Augustinian debates and discussions and on the Trinity

or questioning of this led to the possibility that,

or led to the conclusion that it's difficult to see how an absolutely simple

trimitarian essence could manifest within time and space.

Therefore, we have to accept that these are just angelic created forms.

We don't believe that they're angelic created forms.

And neither do the church fathers who argue that these are,

these are, this is the logos manifesting within time and space.

How is that possible?

It's possible because of the essence energy distinction.

So I will close with that and, as my opening statement,

let you let you speak.

All right, well, there's quite a bit there.

Obviously.

So I may be leaving something out, but it sounds as though we've got,

maybe five or six areas that you've covered, right?

So you've got, I don't know if you talked about this one explicitly,

but you've got the distinction of attributes within God.

You're going to have the problem of God's actions with respect to the world.

You've got the problem of the Trinity.

You've got the problem of the hypostatic union and the communication of idioms.

And you have the problem of nature and grace.

And what it means to say that we share in God's life.

All of these are the same problem.

So we should probably take those piece by piece and I'll try to get to that in a minute.

Since you did a little thing saying what you were clarifying is what you were trying to do and what

you're not trying to do, I'll do a little bit of the same.

So I'm a lot of theologian by trade and my job, the thing which I'm trying to do here

isn't primarily to make sense of council documents or the fathers.

What I'm trying to do is to make sense of the coherence of

Aquinas' doctrine of divine simplicity as best as I understand it.

I've messed around with the Trinity some.

I'm not an expert on the Aquinas' theory of the hypostatic union.

So what I'll be saying about that will be mostly guesswork.

So I'm just throwing that out as caveats here.

But yeah, and what you said about impugning motivations, I thoroughly agree with that.

I think we're both here to try to safeguard its transcendence and

try unity as best as we can.

So let me start my elevator pitch, which I'll try to keep fairly short, just by explaining

why somebody like Aquinas would find the doctrine of divine simplicity appealing.

And then we can go over how in the context of that doctrine you try to make sense of the other

things that you talked about. Does that sound good? Sure.

The basic reason for affirming divine simplicity comes from affirming the philosophical and

obviously theological doctrine of the first cause.

What does it mean to say that there is a being who is absolutely first?

What does it mean to say that there is a being which unlike any being that we know of,

does not need a further explanation behind itself.

So all Aquinas' famous proofs for God's existence, and this goes for Aristotle as well,

are going to argue from the our experience of the created world of things which

are a certain way that didn't have to be, and arguing from that to a cause which you might

say, not to use Aquinas' own terms, but something which is the sufficient reason of its own

being that way. So the argument for emotion, we see things that change, we see things that move.

What does that mean? That means we see something which was in potency, becomes actualized,

and we want to figure out why on earth did it do that? What's responsible for it's going from

potency into act? And you can say there was something else that actualized that's fine,

but then you've got to ask the same question about it. Does it have an actualized potency?

If so, what made that one actualized? And so you're going to keep on chasing that ball

until you come up with something which has no potency, but just as pure actuality, right? So that's

the famous mystic doctrine of Octopus Poudus, I'm sure you're well familiar with.

And Aquinas thinks that it's, once you grant the pure act doctrine, in other words, that there is

nothing, there's nothing in God whose reality has to be explained by something outside of itself,

there's nothing in God that could have been otherwise. That was made to be the way it is by

something that wasn't itself. Once you grant that, Aquinas thinks that it's a short step

to the doctrine of absolute simplicity, because Aquinas, whenever you have

parts where you're going to have is some sort of potency act relationship, right? So when you have

talking, there are different kinds of parts, I'm not sure how familiar you are with Aquinas's

muriology with this study of parts and holes, but so most obvious kind of parts is going to be

integral parts, right? So like the bricks make up a house, right? So in the case of a bricks and

make up a house, you've got actually some mutual dependence relations going, right? Because the

house wouldn't be a house unless it was built up out of these parts, right? So there's dependence

there, but likewise, one of these bricks only actually count as what they are in the parts of the

house because of their dependence on the hole, right? Your cells are human cells because they're part

of your human body. And so with regular integral or quantitative parts as they're sometimes called,

you're not going to, you don't want to predicate those of God because then you'd be introducing

potency into what by definition can't have it. If it did have it, then you'd have to ask what

actual as the potency and you want to have reached the actual first cause yet. So that's for integral parts.

Usually what people are worried about when, at least people who grant their gods in material,

what they're worried about when they object to divine simplicity isn't integral parts.

It's usually going to be accidents, right? Either the kind of accident, which I call extraneous

accidents, which in us would be things like color and shape and size and all that stuff. Or proper

accidents, which for us would be things like the powers of our soul, things which we can't help

but having given our nature. So why can't there be a multiplicity in God of those? And so a

coin, this is basic answer here. It's going to be, well, anytime that you have a, so there's a

couple of different lines of argument. Here's one. Anytime that you have a subject and a feature

of that subject, right? So there's me and there's my color. That feature, that accident, makes the

subject be in a certain way. In other words, me, as just as a human being, I can be all sorts of

different colors. I've got potency. And what the accident does is it actualizes that potency

in a certain way, makes me be actually tan or whatever. And that would imply that what's,

it does imply that what's being actualized is of itself potential. And so we don't want to predicate

accidents of certainly of tanness or color of God because, among other things, he doesn't have a

body. We don't want to predicate accidents of wisdom or justice of God either because again,

that would be to imply that what God is the subject of which you're predicating these accidents

or act of that actuality. And so tannistic claims that when we say that God is wise, I'm not saying

that there is an extra metaphysical reality which I'm plugging into the metaphysical reality which

is God. I'm rather saying that the metaphysical reality which is God, I can capture a facet of that,

if you like, by my word wise. And so that's one line of argument. And that argument would be

that if you were to say that God had an accident distinct from himself, then that would mean that

this accident was actualizing God and thus that God was in potency and thus that God could not be

really the first cause. And that's what it'd be got. The other line of argument would be,

I call it the limiting line of argument. And so the idea would be this. Once you grant,

so we'd have to do a couple more steps to show this. But once you grant, that God is the fullness

of existence. So if you grant the act of its produce claim and you also grant the Ipsom

asset claim, and I can defend that if you like, then what you're saying that God is this pure

fullness of existence of itself. And to say that the pure fullness of existence itself is

something limited, which would be the case if I were to say that this pure fullness of existence

itself had this little duhiki attached to it called wisdom, which was different from it and

different from these other attributes. And I'll be saying that the infinite and the pure

and the what is per se through itself is something limited and participated. And I want to say

things that that's also in flat contradiction to the claim that God is the first cause in which

all other things participate, but who himself participates in nothing. So I take those are the two

main lines of arguments against positing accidents, really distinct from God in hearing in him.

Now we have to do a little bit of work to pair what you're calling energies with accidents.

One more thing, and then we can get into the trying to poke at the difficulties in each other's

positions. So there's, you talked about operations in particular, the word anergaya obviously comes

from the Greek word, which is most commonly used for operation. Aristotle uses it that way, although he

also uses it sometimes to talk about form if I'm not mistaken. And so there's this question of

whether these arguments against divine accidents would also apply to arguments, sorry, would also

apply to divine actions. It kind of seems to think that they do. So he classifies actions as a

kind of accident. And so he wants to rule out all actions from God for the same reason that he

rules out accident distinct accidents like justice and wisdom and mercy and stuff like that.

It's not clear to me. So I'm a bit of a heterodox honest. I'm putting my cards on the table here.

It's not clear to me that actions and formal accidents should actually be considered

on the same plane. I think you can make a principled case for allowing a real distinction of

God's creature-directed actions from himself in a way in which you can't make a good argument for

a real distinction of his attributes from himself. And we can get into my crazy theories for why

that's the case later. Okay, so that's my basic argument for Aquinas' position as I understand it.

Should I try to go through the various theological points that you're bringing up or do you want to

speak to what I just said? Well, one thing I would say to in response is that first we do affirm

that God is simple. Every Orthodox doctrine, every Eastern Father, and all the Western

fathers as well, that are we all agree on simplicity. So it's not really a question of do we teach

divine simplicity, but what in fact do we mean by that? For us, one of the key theological

treatises is only Orthodox faith. And of course, Aquinas specifically deals with in his

treatise on divine simplicity. He specifically deals with questions from John Damascus,

right, specifically on the essence energy distinction. So sometimes in Orthodox theology, yes,

operations, inner gay, that's actually used in the New Testament multiple times of divine activity.

So it signifies divine activity within time and space. But there's another important aspect that

I should add to here that for Orthodox, this actually solves a lot of the disputes between the

East and the West over the Philly Oakway and Trinitarian questions, which I'm not trying to

get into that, but it is important to germane toward discussion because we don't believe that

that you know, it's necessarily the case that there's only actions of God towards

creation and or eternity. Now, in a sense, yes, there could be, I mean, there are those two things,

but what I'm trying to say is that we believe in a level of energetic manifestation. So for example,

when many of the church fathers talk about the spirit being manifested eternally from the sun,

that is our doctrine, which is laid out at the Council of Blachernae as eternal manifestation.

We see that as different from hypostatic origin of the spirit. So the reason I say that is because

it's not just the spirit eternally manifesting the sun and the spirit resting in the sun as

St. Gregory Palomas and St. John Damascus say, it's it's John Damascus who makes this distinction between

eternal manifestation and hypostatic origin. This is why St. John doesn't teach the Philly Oakway,

and in fact, he rejects, he says that there's no there's no co cause or co producer of the spirit

other than the father. The sun does eternally manifest the spirit and not just that the sun

and the entire Trinity manifest. In other words, all the Trinitarian operations are from the

father through the sun and the spirit. This applies to eternal manifestation as well. So for

example, some attributes of God are appropriate to all eternity. God's love has eternally manifest

to for all eternity in that Trinitarian way. God's goodness has eternally manifested that way.

But some actions of God, as you said, are appropriate to time and space to history. St. Gregory

Palomas and St. Maximus make this distinction. They talk about how God's justice, for example,

in relationship to Sodom and Gomorrah. That was something that occurred within time and space

and passed away. Some of God's actions occur within time and space and continue on into eternity,

for example, the creation of the church, setting up of the church and so forth, the incarnation of

Christ. These begin in time and space and they continue on into eternity. So not all actions of God

are necessarily just related to the Trinitarian life of God at intra or God at extra. There's also

for us a very important other loveful of energetic manifestation, which is a helpful distinction and

actually explains what is oftentimes confused and run me Catholic teaching on the Filioquate.

So I just wanted to add that caveat and also the second caveat that we don't actually accept

act as purists. So you began your opening statement by saying, well, if we accept the first cause,

argument, and the act as purist position, then it does logically lead to these other things and

I would say, you're right. It does. We would agree with that. However, we just simply don't accept

that starting point. And this is the thing that I think most Thomas don't question, is what if we

just question that starting point? What if we just reject? Which side was starting point? The

Plotinian and the originistic doctrine, the Greek doctrine, the Hellenic doctrine of what simplicity

is. For example, Patanus and the Ineodes, he says, God is an absolutely simple intellectual essence.

God is... Sorry, hold on, because that's not the starting point. The starting point is the notion

of God as first cause. Is that what you're attacking? Well, what I'm saying is that you can reason

back through to talking about a first cause. It doesn't matter whether you want... When we're talking

about divine simplicity, the starting point is that that cause has to be absolutely simple.

Yeah, that's not the starting point. The starting point is that there has to be a first cause,

and we prove from... Or we try. From the notion... Okay, but we have a completely different

order of theologian. We don't do that kind of a reasoning back to the first cause. That's an

Aristotelian doctrine. Now, churchwaters talk about first cause, but we don't talk about

reasoning back to the first cause in order to get to a definition of God as simple. And then later

by supernatural, we tack on the person's orthodox theology is completely reversed. It's the other way

around. We start with revelation from God and Christ, and that's how we don't know

naturally about God being a first cause, and then later, God having three persons. It begins with

a personal revelation of I am that I am. This is why St. Gregory Paloma says, to Marlam, God

doesn't say I am existent being. I am the super essence. He says I am he. For example,

when St. Basil argues against Eunomius, and he specifically argues on the question of what the

one is, to on, he argues that it is a personal claim. It is about hypostasis. It is I am he.

It is not I am essence. I am super being. I am whatever. It's I am he. So even I know that you

want to say I'm not starting with super essence. I'm starting with first reasoning back to first

cause, and then predicating about, you analogically about what this essence is. What I'm saying to you

is that we just reject that whole process, that whole process. There could be two things here.

So maybe you're saying that you just don't think that any proofs for God's existence work.

Is that what you're planning? No, we believe in the transcendental argument as most compatible

with orthodox theology. St. John Damascus makes a transcendental argument. But yes, I do believe

the classical arguments don't work very well, precisely before this. Well, we got precisely

because of what? Because of this issue that we're talking about. I mean, they don't work because

they get you in no place you don't want to be. No, I mean, I argue with atheists all the time and

repute them quite, quite frequently because of the transcendental argument. So it doesn't leave

me to a place. No, no, I don't mean they like you don't want to, don't want to be a God. But

in that is, you don't like the five ways, for example, because they would imply to find simplicity,

is that what you're saying? They are bad arguments based on classical foundational

supistemology and orthodox anthropology doesn't make sense with classical foundations of

epistemology. Okay, so I think I would like for this discussion to be fruitful. I think we should

do maybe two things. I mean, maybe this is a rabbit hole, so tell me if you don't want to do this.

But so on the one hand, I think it would be good to probe this five ways issue a bit,

because I agree with you that if we think that those are bunk, then your arguments for

divine simplicity are going to be taken a shorn of their foundation. But here's this other thing. So

it's right, so let me grant to you for a minute that when you're a starting point as a Christian

should be a revelation rather than natural reason. So start from God speaking in the burning bush

rather than what we can know by the revelation which is written in the world around us to our

first and foremost. All right, granting that surely you would still want to maintain

that whatever the God of Revelation is, it's not cost. And as a sort of thing, who's explanation

you don't have to seek, right? Sure, I mean, Eastern fathers will say at times God is first

cost. St. John Damascus says that on them, sure. And so what I'm trying to do and what I think

divine simplicity does is it's a logical consequence of a coherent claim that God is the first cost.

And so if you don't think that it follows from the claim that God is the first cause,

I would be interested to see where you think that argument comes apart. I can restate

that. Sure. Why does the first cause have to be absolutely simple? Why can't there be

composite first cause? I mean, there's no, in other words, I have to accept a whole bunch of other

logical, philosophical and of course, and I'm trying to figure out which of those premises you're

attacking. So the premise in question would be whenever you have two things that are,

right, so when I have an attribute, let's say, let's just, can we go with that as an example of

composition? Okay, but now I think I'll go ahead. Okay, right, so when I have an attribute,

right, again, that's going to mean that the subject, going to the framework I'm using,

and the subject has been actualized by this distinct reality, which is in hearing in it.

And so it seems as though if you're going to grant that, the composition of subject and accident

can be analyzed into a relation to potency and act, and you want to maintain that God is not,

does not have potency, then you're going to have to grant the God. There are more premises there,

so go ahead, but we don't maintain that again. We don't maintain which part. We don't believe

that God is correct with no potentio. Okay, so let's rewind them. So it seems as little when I look

around at ordinary things, right, and I see that I'm stirring up the coffee mug on my desk.

I see that it is the certain, and I can ask why, right, and that's a good question to ask.

Right, it doesn't explain itself. It didn't have that shape and that color just because of the

nature of the matter that makes it up. Right, so I need to seek outside of the cup for the reason why

the cup is and why it is this way. And it's precisely because the cup didn't have to be this way.

Yeah, I mean, I understand. So in other words, whenever you have a Aristotle that you thought is

the thing which didn't have to be this way, and whenever you've got something which is this way,

but didn't have to be this way, you need to ask why. Okay, so I'm saying that if you say that

God has potency, that's actualized, then you need to explain why that happened. Sure, well, the

question I would say is that if I adopt the tomystic doctrine of what simplicity is and if I identify

God's actions with his essence, then it's very difficult to see, and I would say you can't argue

that creation is actually a free action of God. Now, all of his story, orthodox theology,

because because create the act of creating the world, you know, I know the subjection quite well.

Okay, more to this objection, which I bet you don't know, which is that it's not just a matter of

whether or not the action of creating was constrained by God's essence because they're identified.

There's also a question of the divine exemplars. This is because on its multiple times in the summa

identifies the exemplars, the ideas behind the created things with the essence of God. Now, if creation

is based on the exemplars, then creation, it's hard to see how it's not also just as unchanging

and eternal as the exemplars upon which they're based. And this is why orthodox theology, this is why

St. Maxima St. Gregory, they don't identify the ideas or the logoic with the essence of God. They

are the things around the around God. This is why the Anisius the Aryapa guy who acquires

sites multiple times, it makes the distinction between essence and energy. This is why Dionisius says

that you can never get to God's essence and you can't even be a negativa reason about God's essence.

It's not just a question of univocal or analogical, analogical, analogical.

That's a lot of questions which we should say for a little bit, but analogical doesn't work either

because of the doctrine of the mind's simplicity as stated by Kwanis. Yeah, okay. So first thing,

like I would like to keep the argument which I just gave separate from that. There's two things

that both of us need to do in this debate. So one of them is make the case for why our position has

to be, why we think it has to be the way it is. And the other one is to defend against objections to it.

Right, so when I'm giving you the potency act argument, right, that's why I think it has to be the case

and then I need to defend against objections like and then how do you make sense of freedom.

Right, so like what it's okay, but what I'm saying is what if we're going to leave our energies

essence, hold on just a sec, right, you're saying you need to, one of the reasons why you believe

in the energies essence distinction is because you think it's necessary to see if God divine freedom.

And then you have your block of law and you have to replace the essence of objection.

Right, so let's just keep these two different things separate.

I believe it because it's revealed and I also believe my view of what God is in terms of simplicity

because it's revealed. I don't begin by looking at the composition of creative things like coffee

cups and try to reason back and say, well, there must have been a first simple cause that's not like

a composite coffee cup. In fact, I don't have to go that route. And when you look at the early

church fathers, when you look at the way scripture talks about these things, it's a revealed doctrine.

Both of the persons and of what God's nature is, which we don't know what it is, of course.

So no, we don't begin, as Paul says in Acts 17, the divine Ustia is not like any creative thing

that he's arguing with. You don't need to argue with me about that. That's actually kind of

both of our points. So anyway, keep going. But, but, but Atomas also wants his cake and the

eat it too, because he also says that this absolutely simple divine essence does that, that there

is an analogical similarity between what's in this essence, the the divine exemplars and the

creative forms. And the creative forms are nothing like an absolutely simple essence. So there's a

divide where there's not a bridge between this absolutely simple essence because there's no

uncreated grace, there's no bridge between the absolutely simple uncreated and the created,

and they share no similarity. Then there's no basis for the analogy, analogy,

antithesis or the participation in God in terms of redemption. It's all created grace. It's all

it's all bridged off by doc by by Thomas's doctrine of simplicity. Now, I recognize again that he

wants there to be distinctions of persons. He wants there to be God acting within time and space

in terms of the incarnation, the logos, somehow entering into a mode of being that the father

and the spirit do not. But our our contention is that in the system as a whole with all Thomas's

claims and presubesitions, it doesn't work. It's contradictory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no good. Let's

let's keep. So we've got three issues on the table as of this moment, right? So we've got on the

one hand, my question, which you haven't answered yet, which is how is it? Why is it that some

a compositive potency and act wouldn't immediate an explanation? You know, the second question,

which is you've addressed to me, which I haven't answered yet, which is how would it be possible

for an absolutely simple God to be free? And there's the third question, which isn't a

customizable question, which is if we don't, if we grant the divine essence, it's transcendent,

what is, what are our predicates lashing onto it, right? And that's the problem of analogy.

And so those are, I think, three separate issues, and we should probably go over them one by one.

Okay, so the first one is I've already answered it. I said, first of all, we don't accept that God

is sure act with no potentiality. That's not an answer though, right? Because what you need to

explain to me is, why is it, right? So you're, it isn't answered because in Christian theology,

God is not explained in that way. He's revealed a certain way. So what my answer to you is that we

don't have an answer to, to acquire us to Aristotle's dilemma of accidents and substance,

because that's not how we look at and view God. We don't use that system. It wasn't used for the

first thousand years. So I don't have to answer that question because it's not applicable to how

we know who God is. We know who God is through revelation and to participating in that revealed

way. Right, we're all on board with saying that revelation is true, right? But, but the question is,

right, so I would challenge you to find examples in the scripture of saying that God is in

potency to attributes or stuff like that. You keep asking me, where can I have too much

spiritual work as I do, at least? You keep asking me to use Aristotelian terminology and classifications

and categories. And I just told you that we don't and they're not in scripture and they're not in

the first thousand years of church. Generally speaking, the thing that you had said first was that

you're fine with saying that God has potency. I was trying to speak to your terminology

for example in Brad Shaw's essays in his book where he says that if we follow through with saying

that God has no potentiality, it's difficult to see how there's a free act of creation. But I'm

I'm moving the step back further and I'm saying I we reject your doctrine of what simplicity is

because it's direct from origin and I'm not interested in arguments from authority or where

claims came from. When I'm trying to figure out that's a thousand years and the version is the

base, right? Of course it matters where they came from. If you're just rehashing Flotinus,

then that's a problem and and appointed both of that. No, no, I mean look what we're trying to do

or at least here's what I'm trying to do, right? So we've got we've got a revelation. We know by

revelation a couple of things. We know more than a couple. We know that there is one God that

he's the first cause of all things, that he is three persons and the second person became man and

die for our sins. I mean he's never considered a person. Obviously it matters if something is

directly contained in revelation. But like what where like these distinctions came from and I'm

not sure why that's a germane, right? So to say that Flotinus originated in this way of understanding

what it means to be the first one. So so why does that matter? This is just a method of logic.

It does matter. It does matter because it's the doctrine of the heretics and the doctrine of

the Greeks that the early councils rejected. So every time the Christological controversies happen,

they argue against guys who were influenced by Greek thought. This actually comes up in the

writings of the fathers and in the councils. They say you've been influenced by the Hellenic ideas

of what simplicity is. So if Flotinus talks about simplicity in a certain way and in which it

identifies all the names or attributes of the one with the essence of the one. And then when

you you know me as says the exact same thing and say Gregor of Nistra writes an 800 page book

against you. Numias and makes this very argument saying hey you know me as you got your argument

from Flotinus, I would say that I can just simply repeat that same argument against you because

Aquinas rehashes the same argument from you know me as and from Flotinus. So absolutely.

What you're telling me though is that somebody who by dint of using reason alone of no help from

revelation says some true things and some false things. No that's not right. You who have the

revelation should discard the baby with the bathwater. That's what I'm hearing. Like what I

say. No most of these. Most of these are fine with Flotinus. So you're making a strong man. I

didn't say that we have to throw out all philosophy or anything like. If it's the case the fact

that Flotinus said something means that it's wrong. That's the origin of this area. Do you understand

that? Big part? Do you understand dialectics? So when the early church fathers are arguing

against somebody like Celsius or they're arguing against areas or whether they're arguing against

Unomias, they often talk about how these heretics employed dialectics. And so for example,

it's Flotinus who pioneered this right. It doesn't matter whether it's Flotinus who said it or

whether it's a Nistory who said it. The same heresy as being restated who cares who said it

if it's wrong and in principle. So I'll grant you that. Yes, it doesn't matter ultimately who

said it. But I'm saying that when the church fathers argue against these things they absolutely

are concerned with the origin or the wellspring of where these errors come from. And I'm telling you

that we reject the Greek philosophical origin of how we understand what simplicity is and we

actually just go to what's revealed. That's what the church fathers do. That's why they reject

Hellenic dialectics every time there's a council. And particularly my only point is I'm not going

to accept it as a valid counter argument that you say that this principle or whatever was

articulated by Flotinus and Flotinus tell some heretical views. Therefore we must not hold this

principle. Well, that's not a valid argument. The argument is your doctrine of simplicity is

the same as Burkhanus as in its heretical. And it's certainly not the same as Flotinus is because

the time you look at it and hold the Trinity, right? The the emanation of Nus from the world.

Already you've been told wrong. I already I already had the right one when I said that the

question wasn't whether Thomas also said correct things elsewhere. But whether the doctrine

of simplicity itself wasn't the exact same as what Flotinus said. And when Flotinus says that

all the acts and names and operations of God or the one are exactly the same as the essence,

that's the same as what Aquinas says. And so when this is why origin was led to say that the

sun is a different subsistence, a different kind of created subsistence different from the father

because he identified the who bestaces of the father with the essence. This is why Eunomius

identified the father with unoriginate and with absolutely simple essence. In other words,

you're saying that you think that the Plutinian doctrine was a but Flotinus thinks that the one

is completely simple. Okay fine. And that this one means can only be one hypostasis in itself.

There can't be three that have the nature of the one. If you could even speak of the nature of

the one that you probably can't for him. And Thomas wants to hold that that same doctrine of

divine simplicity, you say, but with... But also the doctrine of persons. Correct. That's inconsistent.

Is that right? Yes, it's the same philosophical Greek idea of what simplicity is. And then

also the idea of let's also tack on persons. Let's use the Greeks in so far as they were good at

talking about simplicity in the Monad and let's tack on three hypostasis. And the argument is that

given what's said in Greek and Hellenic thought generally that I'm talking about here about what

simplicity is, there's no place for real distinctions in the persons. This is why it leads to

modalism. This is why... Do you want to get... Do you want to get... Do you want to get to Aquinas'

Trinitarian theory then? Because that would be our next step. I'm still going to say,

I'm like I would like to go back to the problem of whether or not your willing to say like God

has potency. So I'm going to take that as just bracketed for the moment. Do you want to go to

Trinitarianism then? I mean, if you listen to what I say, right? So when I said yes,

if you want to use your language and say it does God have potency, then I would say in the sense of

him not having to create, but yet he chose to create, that is completely... So this is just

a verbalist. That part is just a verbal distinction, right? So Aquinas constantly uses this distinction

between active and passive potency. And the only kind of which he's going to deny of God

is passive potency, which is the kind of potency which the pot has. Let's just... We can cut past

all this and just make it very clear that Aquinas says that all the distinctions in the attributes

of God are notional. They're not real. They're just conceptual distinctions that we make.

And so God's love is the exact same as the essence is the exact same as the foreknowledge is

exact same as the act of creating. That's ultimately foolish. I agree with the first part of the

claim, right? So he does say that God's essence is the same as his act of loving himself,

which is the same as his act of knowing himself, which is the same as his act of existence,

which is the same as the act by which he makes all things. It's all the attributes that are

the same as the essence of God. Sure. So then you know we're talking about, you've never

known... We're talking about passive power, right? So obviously, right, God can make things that

he hasn't made. But for Aquinas, that doesn't imply that God is... What we need to avoid

is saying that God is receiving something or being actualized by something which he did not

have to receive or be actualized by. Does that make sense? Well, what we're trying to do is

exclude receptivity or passivity from the divine nature. Right. Is that a goal that you're okay with

or do I need to defend that one? I don't think that any Orthodox person would say that God's

that God needed anything in his nature or anything like that. That's what I say that God

doesn't have potency. That's just what I mean. Right. So the cup is in potency to this shape or

that shape by virtue of its matter. And so it's being actualized by that. And so the cups needed

some sort of shape. That's what we deny when we deny that God has potency in Aristotelian terms.

If you like the word need, better, or open slot, or whatever, that's fine. Same idea.

Okay. So are we okay with that? Can we agree that God doesn't have potency in the access?

As far as I can tell, yes, that makes sense. Okay. So that's all that we're trying to maintain when

we hold that God is entirely simple. We don't want anything in God which would fill a slot.

That's not all that's still in need right here. That's not all we think good.

But that's our reason for holding it. Okay. So if you can show what you need to do, and this is

what I tried to do in my own dissertation. I'm arguing with you, but I'm actually at least half

on your side. So if we get to that part in a minute. But what you would need to do is to explain why

the kind of multiplicity that you want doesn't involve actualizing or filling a need or an open slot

or whatever in the divinity. Yeah, I would just because I make sense. I'll just roll out all these

categories. I would throw out. Well, surely, though, you're going to agree.

No, no, look, what you can do is you can tell me that these things, so give me an example

of multiplicity. I say to the divine person. So you can say, I'm not quite as well agree, of course,

this multiplicity does not involve an actualization of the divine essence, and so we can allow it.

Right. But what you need to do is for every case of an energy that you describe, you need to explain

to the Thomas why this doesn't count. Why this, why you don't need these categories, why they don't

apply. I think the honest is on you. No, it's not because first of all, there is a thousand years

of the church using categories and explanations in terms that are not to a mystic and are not

Aristotelian. So we already have this. So it's the honest is not on me, but actually on, and this,

of course, you know, it was very controversial when when Tomism began to adopt Aristotelianism.

So and ultimately, yes, it's not so much about this or that specific term, but it's about the

the almost scientistic approach to dissecting God in this way and not looking at how

the the revelation of what Hupastasis is in the New Testament or what intergeia is as opposed

to Fusis in the New Testament. I don't know what you mean by scientific. We've got is the data

of revelation, right? We've got it's not data. It's not natural revelation as a science.

Theology is not the queen of science. That's what I mean by a scientistic, right? It's about it's

about- I'm not seeking understanding, yes. It is, but that understanding comes through the direct

experience of God, not through the intellect. Well, okay. So if you want to say that the only

proper knowledge of God is by mystical vision and then we're just wasting our time talking about him,

right? That's probably true. Where did I leave in an analogy that's applicable to the energies,

right? So the the logoi to read St. Maximus, the doctrine of the logoi, which he identifies as divine

ideas, they're uncreated energies. They're not the essence of God. And so again, what you notice is

that what distinguishes the orthodox position consistently across the board, that's why I started

out talking about how we have a different anthropology. We have a different triadology. We have a

different doctrine of Christology and a different eschatology and a different ecclesiology is because

of the essence energy distinction and all these different points. So it's a whole system. It's

holistic in our view. I understand that, but so let me just try to plug it. Since we're back to

energies, let's just try to plug in that term energy into the question I was asking you. All right,

so when a Thomas is going to be worried about, when he hears you talking about divine energies,

um, is the question of whether these energies would be such as to actualize the divine essence. I

assume, correct me if I'm wrong. I think you would want to say that. In fact, they don't actualize

the divine essence and that they're not received by or that they're not principles of God's existence

or God's nature at all. What I'm trying to tell you is that you have a new thinking. Is that

for your statement? Yeah, but what I've been trying to convey is that you have to reject

communism, right? This whole system is a problem. So because you are trying to force me into the

Aristotelian categories, I'm trying to tell you. This is not like Aristotle, right? This is

to say that it's not and not, right? And that's something's necessary or contingent. This is not

Aristotle. This is basically what you were talking about. You were talking about impotentia and actuality

and actuality. What does it mean? It means hand-beat, right? It's what can be. That's all it is.

I know what contingent is. That's not Aristotle's copyright. I know what contingency means. What I'm

telling you is that you are a Thomas and these categories that you were talking about did come

from Aristotle and they were introduced by, you know, Thomas and his teacher, Albert Magnus. They

were not the norm for the first thousand years of the church. Now, why weren't they the norm?

Precisely because of other questions. We're not trying to have an argument about terms here,

right? You're saying where we are because we reject your doctrine of simplicity. Can you

not see that how many doctrines of simplicity can be questioned? Of course, it can be questioned,

but I'm saying that this doctrine of simplicity arrests, like it can be questioned. I don't think

that it can be successfully debunked. There's a whole 800-page book that debunks it written by

St. Green. There are lots of books that try to debunk it. That's another answer.

The doctor of the church, and he shows that unominism is modalism based on his doctrine of simplicity.

It's an accent doctrine of simplicity. Hold on. We're not here to just trade claims. You're

wrong or you're wrong. We're here to try to evaluate arguments as best as we can.

That equinist's doctrine of simplicity is exact same as unominious's doctrine of simplicity,

and although the conclusions are different, unominious is refuted in 800 pages by St.

Green and the whole argument is based on Essence Energy Distinction, as well as other things.

Okay, so I'm going to latch on to that then. How are you defining the divine simplicity doctrine,

which you say equinist shares with unominious? Well, I can look at the summa under the questions,

like question three, the simplicity of God, where it's stated very clearly in those eight questions.

I think he says, is God composite? Is he simple? Is God's existence exact same as his essence? Yes,

it is. Is there any accidents in God? No. Are all the attributes the same as the essence of God?

Yes. Are they just logical distinctions? Yes. So forth and so on. I mean, there's not a whole

lot of debate. I wouldn't think about what Thomas says divine. Okay, and so you're holding that

unominious holds, likewise, that God is identical to anything that can be said if him and

therefore, there can't be a trinity. The only difference, the only difference between

equinist and unominious is that a coinist wants there to be a venegetiva and unominious, didn't.

You can fall on two sides of this coin. You can fall on the side of the coin with a

coinist where you want both things to be true or you can fall on both things are why? The trinity

of persons and unity of nature. Is that what? Well, with the three, the two things are a trinity of

persons and simplicity of nature? What two things? Just to hold both things at once. What two

things? Simplicity of nature and trinity of persons? And a venegetiva where we can predicate

analytically of God. I'm not sure that the venegetiva issue is what's at stake here. So let me try

this may or not. This is why it's the exact same debate that St. Gregory had with Barlehem.

Barlehem says that when we predicate of God, we predicate of him substantially but

analytically. And St. Gregory responds by saying, if God is an absolutely simple essence and you

only know created effects, you don't actually know God. You don't actually know God because you

never know whether you're experiencing what attribute because all the attributes are at them

for the divine essence. I mean, no, you're experiencing love. How do you know if you're experiencing

love or justice or foreknowledge or what? You never know because they're all the same as the

divine essence and you don't ever participate in God. I'm happy to get into a problem of

analytical predication, but I'm not sure that's the same problem. Can we trinity for just a sec?

So let me just try, maybe this will or maybe this won't be germane to your point. Let me try to

give Aquinas's defense. So this is now the other side of the coin. It's not arguing for

his position. It's repelling objections explaining why he thinks that his doctrine of simplicity

is compatible with a trinity of persons, right? Because it seems to me that you're just saying it's

straight up. It's just a case of trying to have your cake and eat it too, right? Right. Correct.

Okay. So Aquinas's claim, he holds divine simplicity to this extent. He doesn't want there to be

anything in God which actualizes or is a principle of God's existence.

Now, the reason why he thinks this is compatible with there being three subsistence relations

in the divinity is because of how he understands the nature of relation in particular.

Right. So he is more Aristotelian framework, bear with me. So in his framework,

every anything, all 10 of the categories are going to have two sides to them, right? There's

going to be the essay side and there's going to be the form of the Rossio side.

Right. So you have dog nature and substantial form and you have the essay which is proper to it,

which is subsistence essay. And then you have quantity, this is form and then there's the essay

which is proper to it, which is in essay or inheritance. And the same for quality.

And in the case of these two, there's a double sort of inheritance, according to Aquinas.

So quantity in here's, and this cup is big, let's say, quantity in here is in subject both in

the sense that it draws its existence from that subject, right? It doesn't, quantity doesn't just

hang out on its own and it's always the quantity of something. And in here's in that sense,

and here is in a further sense, which is that it posits that content, that formal content in

the subject and makes that cup B, three ounces, whatever. Right. So the service now is a principle

of that cup's being, makes that cup B in a certain way. Okay. And same for quality.

And so all the things that we normally think of as attributes or as accidents have this

double inheritance, that they exist in the subject, draw their existence from it,

and they make it be in a certain way. So Aquinas is going to deny that there can be any

anything predicated of God, anything really distinct from God in hearing in him,

after the faction of quantity or quality. And the reason is because quantity or quality in here

is in that second way. And thus would, if really distinct from God, add something to God's being.

Relations is different according to Aquinas because it doesn't do that. And in here is only in

the first way. It's still got an essay, one creatures, but it doesn't make

its subject, it doesn't add any new content to the subject. All right. So and you've got these

two cups that are equal in size to each other. The size, right. And that's in the category of

quantity, posits content in the subject, actualizes it, modifies it. And based on the fact that it's

got this thing, which is modifying it, it's got this other feature, which is the relation of

equality, which doesn't add anything to the cup at all. Doesn't make it, doesn't modify,

doesn't actualize it, doesn't limit it, nothing. So it's, it's rots, you're going to

Aquinas is pure, towardness, purely towards something else. And so that's just among creatures,

transposing this to God. He's going to say, okay, so like everything else in God, our arguments for

divine simplicity are right. The essay side of this accident is not going to be in essay, it's not

going to be in here, it's just going to be the self-same divine essay. But I can still talk about

its rotsio, its content, being distinct from, from other relations in God. And because these

relations, right, their towardsness is not towards the essence, they're not positing something in

the essence, they're not modifying, they're strictly looking outward. And so I can say that God,

when climate nature is too, because of the Father or from, in the case of the Son, without

actualizing, modifying, limiting, or what have you, of the divine nature. And so for Aquinas,

it's entirely principled to hold divine simplicity in the sense, which I just stated, namely,

there can be nothing in God, which limits him or actualizes him. And at the same time,

the whole three subsistence relations in that divine nature. And so it's not at Hawk, it's not

just we're going to tack it on, it has to do with what it means to talk about relations in the first

place. Yeah, I'm familiar with what he says. And the problem is that it doesn't work. So for one,

the basic way to refute this is just to talk about the fact that this distinction is spoken of

as relations of opposition. And yes, Aquinas does at times try to say that the Father is still the

RK of the Trinity. But what he doesn't understand is that for the Eastern position, which is already

defined this dogma. Yeah. Can you hear me? Hang on, I think I'll just say that again.

Yeah, what I was trying to say is that this is already defined in Orthodox theology,

we already had a way to understand the relations within the Trinity precisely because we didn't have

the absolute divine simplicity doctrine. So we already had an Eastern tradition that dealt with

these issues, particularly in St. Maxime's confessor, St. Fotoius and so forth, who really flushed

this out on multiple levels. And that's because we don't have the absolute divine simplicity problem

that we needed to even use relations of opposition. This does not come into play until Augustine,

and then later on picked up by Anselma Aquinas. So the problems with this idea and the way that

you formulated it is that I understand that Aquinas doesn't want it to be just tacked on. He wants

it to really be, you know, three hippostasis. But the problem is that when you get to this question

of identifying the persons with the essence, which Aquinas is very dogmatic about. He said

specifically that nature is person. This goes contrary to the fact that St. John Damascus

in on the Orthodox faith says very clearly that the identification of nature in person

is the root of all heresies. And that's because St. John Damascus understood that all the dialectical

heretics would use this as this kind of dialectical relationship between thing and other one and

many simplicity and differentiation. They always set up a dialectical tension. And so relations

of opposition are ironically or the Augustinian shield is a way to define the person's dialectically.

The problem is that it doesn't work. For one, the spirit is subordinate in this relationship because

he doesn't have a property that the other two have. And in fact, in Roman Catholic dogma, it's

actually stated more than once that the father and the son are together a co-caused of the spirit.

So the father and the son share property that the spirit doesn't have. All of this in order to

maintain this system of how to differentiate between persons in an absolutely simple essence.

Again, just toss out the absolutely simple essence doctrine of Aquinas except the Eastern doctrine.

And you don't have this problem. The persons are differentiated because the father is the

archae, the unoriginate, the cause of the persons. The spiration is unique to the spirit,

generation is unique to the son. And you don't need this relation of opposition's doctrine,

which is a dialectical philosophical speculation approach. And actually doesn't really distinguish

a person because in fact, every one of the persons shares this relation of being not the other.

Every one of each of the persons is not the son, is not the spirit, is not the spirit, is not

the father, et cetera. So not being the other two and the spirit not having a property of

producing a person imbalances the Trinity. So the spirit ends up being subordinate. This is the

chief reason why the East has a problem with the Filioquay. So what you're talking about

in a way to distinguish the persons that doesn't do damage to divine simplicity, not only does it

not work, it's actually the root of the Filioquay. The Filioquay was introduced precisely because

of this question and these issues. And it just simply doesn't work. All right. So first off,

so I'm just going to reiterate my point about appeals to authority. So you're in a Roman Catholic

church. No, I know. That's just what you're talking about. You'll do a door to the name of the

Catholic Bible. I would have appreciated if you like later emailed me the quotation you're thinking

of. Which one? The one about the root of all heresies. That sounds fun. Yeah, it's an omnivore

that actually is famous for it. We're talking about crystal. Yeah, but secondly, apart from all that,

so first off, you want to go down to subordination or something? It's not clear to me a

what you gain by or how this problem is more your problem for me than it is for anybody,

including for yourself. Because if you're going to say that subordinationism just means

where that one person is going to be subordinate to another and as much as it is from another,

then I've said the Roman doctrine of the Father and the Son together sharing the property of

being the co-calls of the Spirit subordinate to the Spirit because the Father and the Son

share property that the Spirit does not. So in class, if you read John Damascus or the

Eastern fathers or what's normative even in some Catholic theology, they will make the claim that

whenever we say something about God, the Trinity, it's either applicable to the persons

or to the essence, right? So we're making a statement either about the unity of God or about the

persons. There's no there's no property that two persons share that the others that one other

person doesn't have. And in Filioquism, as it's defined in Florence and the Roman dogmas,

you have the Father and the Son as the co-caused of the hypostasis of the Spirit. It's not just the

eternal manifestation, which is what we believe about the Son, the eternal manifestation of the

Spirit, the Spirit rests in him. But in fact, in the Roman Catholic dogmas, I don't think there's

any question that it's the Father and the Son who are the hypostatic cause of the Spirit. So the

subordination comes by the fact that the Father and the Son share a property that the Spirit does not.

Okay, so it's true that Aquinas will say this too much, that there's four

relations in God. Now there's going to be the relation of paternity, affiliation,

expiration, enough procession. And he holds up of those four, and maybe this is the aesthetic

pleasure that you're having with this. Only three of those, I forget what the technical

term is, but only three of those correspond to a person. The reason is because the fourth,

namely, expiration, is not held in opposition. It's held in common by two persons.

And so it doesn't serve to identify one person as opposed to another.

Well, he uses relations of opposition and he tries to use affiliation, expiration, etc.

So there's both are present in Aquinas, and it's only in the more radical filioquist

that relations of opposition even entered as a way to do it, but it doesn't work. But there is

a section where he talks about relations of opposition. Oh, yeah, no, no. Relations of opposition

is central to Aquinas is theory. My point was just, sure, you have this aesthetic

ugliness, if you like, that of the four relations with the two pairs, right? So paternity,

affiliation, and procession, dispiration, only three of those pick out a person. And the reason

is because the fourth, expiration, is shared in common by two. But itself, I'm not sure why that's

why that's a problem. If you want to, why does the father and the son share a property

of the spirit does not? And anything that you say about God is applicable either to the persons

or to the nature. Okay, so by your theory, don't the son and the spirit both share a property,

which the father does not? No. Being from? No, because the way that they're defined is not

merely being from, the way they're defined is hypostatic origin. So generation, generation defines

the son, spiration defines the spirit, and the father is the sole cause. Okay. And so, okay, but

so it seems easy, try to figure out where to start here. So it seems as though I could say and

reply, right? So what you've got there is they've got, they both share this property of being from,

and one of them is from in this way, which is being generated, sonship, and one of them is being

from in this way, which is being spirated or proceeding or whatever. But it seems as though I can

say the exact same thing with regards to spirations, right? Because I can say that the son spirates the

spirit as from the father, and I can say that the father spirates the spirit not as from. And so,

although, sure, there's a verbal similarity at the level of abstraction of the realities. There's

no like actual or real relation, which father and son both have, which the spirit doesn't.

But in the Roman dogma, they're defined as a co-caused father and son are hypostatically.

No person is caused by any other. Of course they are.

Cause? So if the cause means to receive being, I don't think you want to say that.

This is typical orthodox and church father terminology. The father is the sole cause even

a quantish uses this terminology. So again, it just depends on what you mean by cause, right? So if

by cause you mean something which makes something else, obviously not. It's in your own dogmas

that the father and the son are the co-caused of the spirits, hypostasis.

Yeah. If you want to send me a footnote, it's a good idea to read the dogma to you.

No, no, no. Just go ahead and send me the footnote.

But when I'm trying to do right now, it's just defend a quaint position as I understand it.

To my knowledge, he's never going to say what the father causes the son. He's going to say,

if the father generates a son, he's going to say that the son has the divine nature as from the

father. He's very precise in the terminology. And I think the term cause is used. They don't mean it

in the sense of creating. It's just a term. It's used as synonymous for X's from Y. That's fine.

Well, that's how it's used petristically. So they're not sent, yeah, and many church fathers

use this terminology. Again, it's in Florence, the father and the son are a co-caused. I'm looking

for the other. I think it's later. And it talks about, I'll give you the denzinger here in a second.

But again, the point is that in the, you have a balanced position in the east where

you don't have attributes of properties that to have and saying from a source is not an

attribute because it's not a positive relation. It's a negative relation that doesn't express

anything. That's part of that relation of opposition. We don't do relations of opposition. We do

hypostatic origin as the way to understand the Trinity. And since the father alone is the sole

cause or R.K. of the Trinity, he's the unoriginate one. The only way to distinguish the person's

is by hypostatic origins, by the fact that the son is generated and the spirit eternally proceeds.

Right. But how do you distinguish what it means to be generated and what it means to be

perceived? I will tell you what every single eastern father says to that very question, which is

that we don't know what those words mean. Okay. So what it is, what it is, what it is, what it is

drawing the towel, and what it's trying to do is to give a principled reason for why these two

should not collapse into each other. Right. And it seems as though that's something valuable to do.

And just to go back to the subordination of something again, it's just not clear to me.

It's not clear to me why by saying that the father is strictly too, by saying that the son is

both from and to and saying that the spirit is strictly from. It's not clear to me why I am

saying without one of these is like better or nobler or higher than the other. Right. Because

an acquaintance does discuss this objection and his point is simply that when you're talking about

nobility, the nobility comes strictly from the divine essence, that's something absolute and

that's shared equally by all. To speak of from and to or from and to is not to speak in the

language of better or worse or primary or secondary. The idea of subordination doesn't have to do

necessarily with just defining what is letter or more noble. What do you mean by subordination?

So what is it that you see as the problem with what you're calling subordination? And how do

you define it? But again, in our tridology, which again would argue is from the Eastern fathers

and councils and not just like my speculation, our tridology doesn't argue that we can say anything

about God that isn't applicable to hypostasis or to God considered as unity to one God. So if we say

wisdom, wisdom is a property or attribute that is applicable to all the persons. Right. So it's not

like the father alone has wisdom and the spirit doesn't. Right. So that's a statement about God

considered as God. It's applicable to all the persons because wisdom is a to. Wisdom is a natural

attribute. It's a property or an attribute applicable to nature. So likewise when we say that

we consider the will of God, just got to have three wills or one will. God has one will because

will is a property of nature and not a property of hypostasis. And for us, this is applicable to

anything that's said about God. So when we even when we talk about trinitarian relations, when we talk

about how we distinguish the persons, we distinguish them by their origin, by the fact that the father

alone is the father alone. The fact that you have a problem with the father being a sole archaer

cause, I think shows a lack of understanding of what the Eastern fathers say when they define

the father as the cause. So for us, what you mean by cause is just I think what I meant by

what I meant by sitting in front of you. But we're just talking about the relations of origin.

That's fine. Okay. Okay. But for us, it's not just a question of the

speculating about the Trinity. For us, this is how we know God. God is known first and foremost,

as Paul says, one father. So God reveals himself to us hypothetically or personally. We don't start

with reasoning back and and coming up with a first cause simple essence. We start with the fact

that God says I and he, God is personal. Our or our ordo theology is different or orthology,

right? We start with the father and the father as the sole cause or or archaer or CHE in the

Greek, as Basil uses it, is the cause of the sun in terms of generation and he's the cause of

the spirit eternally in terms of spyration. And so that alone is the way that we distinguish

the person. There's no other way. So anytime we make a statement about God, when we say,

how do we know who the spirit is? We say he, he proceeds eternally from the father through the

sun. Now, who is the son? He's the one, he is the eternally generator from the father

and eternally manifest the spirit, right? So those are the ways that we distinguish. And anything

said about God in our trinitarian theology causes imbalance if we attribute a property, a positive

property to two persons that one of them doesn't have. The spirit therefore lacks in the ability

to produce a person. And in other words, the father and the son have this melded kind of

co-caused here to use the terminology of Florence. And I think the latter encounter, again,

I'm going for memory here. But it is a father and the son together signify a single principle

of the spirit to use the the the terminology. Yeah. Yeah.

The reason I'm having a couple with this argument is that it's just not clear to me what

is so dire about the saying that there's nothing that's said of God. It doesn't produce and

you say things like the other two are because you're happy with saying, you can see the subordination

of the spirit of the Roman church over the last several hundred years. The spirit is not given

his proper role. And this is why you think that, you know, and this is I'm not trying to get up on

our trouble, but the Roman church thinks that you need the papers to settle all the issues because

the idea of Pentecost actually guiding the spirit, guiding the actual churches is suppressed. It

leads to the idea of why we need a pope because you don't understand the meaning of Pentecost

and the reality of the spirit. The spirit is just as divine. He's not lacking in the ability.

You don't need to convince me that the Holy Spirit is divine. All I'm doing is I would want to deny

firmly that being toward another person as towards rather than from is somehow essential to being

a divine person. I don't think you need doesn't produce. I do think that following down the

Filioque trail is a bit of a rabbit hole at the moment, right? Filioque is a result of

absolutely. I understand that. So you're saying that it's a clenching argument against divine

simplicity, that divine simplicity entails the Filioque and the Filioque with Bunk. And that's not

going to work for me because I don't think the Filioque is Bunk unless it seems perfectly legit

to hold divine simplicity. So if you want to argue against the argument that I was giving before.

The father and the son are a co cause or a co principal together. The spirit, the spirit does not

have this property of producing a person. That is subordination. So he's lacking in a property that

the other two share. Yeah, but I mean, you could say the same thing about the right. So

I don't see why that's any more problem. Because the classic thing, the father is. That doesn't

mean that the father is like better. No, you're not getting the point that for the first thousand

years, it was normative to say that anything that we say about God is applicable to either the

person's all of them or to the nature or to the, or to them individually. So there can't be

something that to share that one doesn't. That produces the imbalance. There's only one cause.

And I've got seen the connection between those two claims. There's also not one. Everything

which is predicated only one RK and the Trinity and it is the father and the son does not share

in his RK and his hypostatic property. Biliochism makes the son share in what makes the father

distinct, namely being the unoriginate cause of the of the Godhead. Yeah, so I mean, you're not

going to like this, right? But the, the, the mystic answer to that part of the problem is going to be

what makes the father be the father, right, is the generating of the son in the act of knowledge,

which is this diatic thing. And then what makes the Holy Spirit be the Holy Spirit is the fact

that it results from the love of the two, right? So again, this is why you use the same argument

that the Aryans used that the Holy Spirit is a product of the will of the father and the son.

This is also the exact same argument. I'm aware that you don't like the psychological analogy.

But again, can we, can we keep the, no, because this is a point that my soul is hearing.

Listen, St. Gregory Thomas uses the psychological analogy, but he applies it to eternal manifestation.

And when he critiques the Philiac way, he says the Romans are confused because they mistake

mission for hypostatic origin. And they also mistake eternal manifestation for hypostatic origin.

So that's why I began to talk when I mentioned St. John Damascus talking about eternal manifestation

of the spirit. It's not hypostatic origin. It's, it's John of Damascus who makes that point in

that distinction. And on the other side, what's the hypostatic origin? What's not hypostatic origin?

What we were just talking about with the Holy Spirit, the psychological analogy that you used.

This is from Augustine and it's in the point of saying that it's not the hypostatic origin.

That's a claim. I deny it. What's your argument? Because it doesn't work because the son takes on a

property of the, the, the son takes on the very thing that defines the father, which is to be the

soul archaed. No, what defines the father is to be according to a point is, is to be in Nashibili's

right to not be from what defines the opposition. And I said earlier, that doesn't work because the

other two are not from what you admitted. I can go over the text again. Let's see.

But okay, we can keep on going down the Philly Oak Ray Trail, if you like.

Well, let's put it this way. Let's put it this way. If you read only Orthodox faith, which,

of course, Aquinas references many, many tongues, you will find that everything that I'm saying and

claiming is 100% in line with what same John of Damascus is arguing. And my point is just to say,

that it may or may not be, but that's not really my concern, but okay. I go to, I'm telling you to

read it because you'll find my arguments are all from that, and other Orthodox writers. So I'm

not making arguments that are like out of my head. They're actually, maybe somebody that you

would find worth reading useful, right? For the sake of future dialogue, I'm saying, if you

read that, you'll see all my arguments are there. I would happily take the opportunity to read

Saint John and the Roman Church affirms that, right? So affirms what? He's a doctor of the church

and Aquinas. Yeah, I mean, the doctor of the church is not to affirm everything that they say is

true, of course, but I'm not saying that it's true because instead, I'm saying that the arguments

are there and for future reference, you would, if you want to understand where I'm getting all this,

it's from there. Sure. Well, no, I appreciate that. But again, just to recap what

got us there, right? So you're saying that divine simplicity is irreconcilable with the Trinity

because the only way that you can reconcile it with the Trinity is by subordinationism. I'm not

convinced we can have, we can keep on having that argument if you think that's the linchpin.

But are you understanding what I'm saying, though? Well, the problem is that you don't understand

our position in terms of hypocytic origins as the only way to explain who God is. I mean, even the

idea of the father being your care cause is foreign to you and it's common in the Eastern fathers.

So I think the sudden was inexplicable, right? Because I asked you what procession means as distinct

from a affiliation. And you said that that's in principle non-answerable. And that's the answer

of all the Eastern fathers even Augustus says that we don't even know exactly what these words mean.

We have exactly what these words mean, but I'm asking you to give me some way in which in an

imperfect crucible we can distinguish these things. We don't know how to define it. We don't know

how to procession. We don't not define eternal generation and why these two things are different,

but they are. And if you read the next several hundred centuries after Augustin of debate

on this very question, what you come to find out is that the way that we distinguish the

persons is different from the way Rome tries to do it. Rome tries to do it within a context of

also accepting absolutely divine simplicity. We don't. And because we don't, we have the father

defined by his role as archa or soul origin or cause of the Godhead. That means that for him to

retain his hypostasis, he doesn't share that property of being the cause with anyone else.

So that's why the sun can't take on what is his defining hypostatic term.

I understand that. And the issue is that we're taking two different things as being the defining

note of the father. So I'm looking right now at Deplicanza 99, which is on whether there are

only three persons in God. Hello. Hello.

Well, it looks like we lost being not born. Are you there? My computer is having some issues.

No, no. I'm looking right now at Deplicanza 99, which I think is a coin that is a fullest

explanation of how he thinks the three persons are distinguished from each other.

Could be wrong about that. But so what he takes as the defining attribute of the father is not

being cause of the others, which is what you are taking as that. Right. So I grant you, right?

If you're going to say that mom and the cousin, another person,

then the father and the son would collapse into each other on the filioque of you, right?

When the son, rather what defines the father is being in Na Shibili, which in other words means

to not be born, right? So to not be from a cause. And that's not true if either father works on.

Until I've seen as a that problem that you were just worried about, just depends on what you choose as

the... No, I recognize that Aquinas has a place for giving the father that role.

That's not what the contention is. The contention is that when we see that as the father's only

the main defining property, that the son who was a that being in Na Shibili or being the cause of

another, that he is unoriginate in the soul of Godhead. Godhead, this is again the classical

terminology of who the father is, and Basil, and Gregornausiansus, and Gregornesia, and in the councils,

that can't be something that the son shares in, okay? And the son shares in that if he becomes

also the cause of the spirit. There's no... But it's just a question of what you take about the

finding attribute of the father, right? So if you take the defining attribute of the father as

being the cause of a person, more cause, I mean like the originating toward, and yeah, then there

would be two fathers, and that's what you're trying to avoid. But if you simply take the father to be

that which is which it does not proceed, which is not from another, then there's only one, and I'm

not sure what the problem is. That's just another way of saying that he is the soul cause of the Godhead.

He's not from another, okay? The other two are from another, right? So this is a

relations of opposition, and again, I'm trying to tell you that that doesn't work as a negative

definition of who these people are, excuse me, how distaste these are. In these persons, yes.

Yeah. I'm not sure what I lose by saying that he is that which is by taking the father as

that which is who gives and does not receive, taking the son and see who gives and receives,

and taking the spirit as he who receives. But that seems to distinguish all three quite nicely.

You can say if you like that receiving is common to son and spirit, you can say if you like that

giving is common to father and son, but these are different kinds of giving and they're different

kinds of receiving just like you said. Right. So Aquinas talked about sometimes the Roman

Calutrients will talk about the father as the principal source of the Godhead and then the son

as a secondary source when we talk about this vibration. And what we say is that that's impossible

because number one, the son can't participate in the father's type of stasis. And number two,

it gives two persons a positive property that the spirit doesn't have.

So I get what you're saying, what I'm just going to review what I was saying, which is I don't think I'm

a little bit, let me say it a different way. I don't think I'm giving any of the persons a real

positive property, something which exists. The father and the son produce the spirit.

Yes. Right. That's a real positive property that the spirit doesn't have.

So maybe this is getting into the problems of divine predication or just the problems of

predication in general. So Aquinas is going to claim is that not all of your, just the fact that

you can use the same word for something doesn't mean that there is in both cases the same reality

corresponding isomorphically to your word. Right. So Aquinas is going to say that there's two

relations in the father, one to the son and one to the spirit. Right. Because that would mean that

the father was too subsistence. So what you've got in the case of the father is one relation,

which is not from and toward period. And what you've got in the son is a

relation of from and toward and received giving. And what you've got in the Holy Spirit is a

relation of reception. There's no real thing, which is shared. Although I can speak.

No, the son and spirit and the father and the father and the son really produce the spirit.

Do you say that the son and the Holy Spirit really receive the father?

We don't use any of this gobbling because we don't believe communism, but I mean we have,

but we have a way of distinguishing. I'm just saying that receiving is as much of a

positive predicate as giving and whether or not you have that because you affirm

hypostatic origin supposedly Roman Calvets do supposedly. And for the spirit, it is said to be

from the father and the son as a single principle. There's no single principle in God that two

persons share that the other one doesn't. That's a very simple argument. Yeah, no, I'm not

agree with that. I'm saying that there is no metaphysical reality, which father and son

both are. Yes, there is. Your counsels say together they constitute a single principle of the

spyration of the spirit in terms of this hypostatic origin. So that directors repeat one. No,

because we won't say that there is a no act of causing. There's relations of toward and there's

relations of from the standard to missing model in this right is that you have, you can throw

out the word, word cause and you can just say he's the principle source. The father and the son

in the Roman Catholic dogmas are said to together a single source of the hypostasis of the spirit.

I'm okay with that. That is directly what you said.

You said what's the meaning of a what's it? Right. A property of like whiteness or

greenness or a relation or whatever, which is real in both father and son.

Right. Again, just as you would not want to say that simply the fact that both son and spirit

are from or are are proceed, let's say, from the father. You're willing to say that, right?

That both father and son proceed from the father? No, absolutely not. Because proceed is in the Greek,

the aporosis is a specific term that defines who the spirit is and generation is specific to who

the son is. Okay. We don't we don't use these common attributes of what both are from another,

right? We don't do relations of opposition. Look, that's fine. I mean,

if you want to say that this, so you're talking about cause, right? So you're using this word

cause. Yes. Father causes the quote unquote, the father's in the absolute use this term of the

father. That's fine. But you're going with that, right? Is there a correlative?

That's not the way they don't they don't use the Aristotelian termistic view of this.

That's fine. Are you going to grant that there is a correlative to cause, which is being caused?

Oh, yeah. Okay. Are you going to grant that relative? It is true to say it is true to say that the son

and the spirit are from another. That's true. That's fine. All we're saying is that is not what defines

the persons and lets us know the distinctions of the hypothesis. Right. But simply being to another

is not what defines the persons and to mystic theology either with the father and not from.

But you again understand that it's not supposed to be too. But the whole dogma interjects a new

principle into the Trinity of the father and the son together constituting a single hypostatic

source of the spirit. So you have a new, a new principle of a dyad introduced into the Trinity.

And there is no dyad. It's always whatever is true is true of the persons or of God as a whole.

That's straight up classic orthodox trinitarianism. I'm saying orthodox in the general sense.

Yeah, look, I don't, I'm trying to think of a way to say this without just repeating myself again.

You're admitting hypostatic properties and causes or origins that we get through our

first of all that's standard to mystic trinitarian theology. And the origin of the spirit is from

a father and son as one principle. Correct.

My knowledge of Aquinas' trinitarian theology is not sufficient to allow me to say yes to the

as from well friends. It's in Rome a dog. He doesn't have to check it. He does say that, the

barbeque, but I don't have to sit mo in here. So, but anyway, I would think we're going to

admit that I would be really hesitant to say that I would be surprised that's the dogmatic

and the other teaching. But I would be surprised if he thinks of father and son as together doing

one what's it. Again, there is no action which is coming out of either one of them, right,

in the theology. There's just relations of two in front. So, again, there's no like source of,

right? So, you're talking about a dyad being like a... Yeah, well, again, the reason that

losing arrows, producing a third thing. And I just think that's the wrong way to think about this.

No, it's not the wrong way. It's the right way because that's how the Eastern fathers all

categorize it and that's how it's used. Not just in the councils, but also when it comes to

Christology. I'm saying that that's the wrong way to understand what Aquinas is saying.

Anyone? Yeah. So, do we want to maybe move to a little bit?

What's that? Do we want to move on? I mean, we're just going to keep going, I think, in circles about

this because... Yeah, no. So, maybe reading St. John Damocene is going to convince me,

is that the Filioqués so bad that it's a tremendous roadblock to any divine simplicity theory.

But at the moment, it seems to me that being able to... I'm not feeling the problem.

Of saying that both father and son can be said to Spirate because, again, this is not a name

or real relation according to Aquinas. And so, like... Maybe I should. I would only be moved by it

at the moment if to Spirate were said to be a real relation defining a person for Aquinas.

That would be inconsistent. Aquinas does not hold that. Okay, so let me just... Let's back

out from this. Can I ask you another question about the energies? Okay. So, the central problem,

like I was saying earlier, I thought Atomis is going to have what we're talking about energies,

is if energies are in some way going to be positing something in the subject, right? So, regular

accidents like wisdom and justice, right? So, when I say that I have these, and they're from me,

right? They exist in me, but they also posit something in it. They make me be a certain way.

Right? So, if we were to take energies in that sense, Atomis is going to be very worried,

right? Because it's going to seem as though you're feeling a slot or an opening or something

in God that the divine nature of itself doesn't have. Now, I presume that's not what you're saying,

right? Do you want to characterize how your understanding of energies avoids that?

How is predicating wisdom as an energy of God different from predicating wisdom as an accident to

me? Because we don't identify, at this is the point I was making earlier about analogical

predication, we don't identify the predicates with the divine essence, which then makes them

meaningless. We say that the predicates are analogical to the energies, which are not the divine

essence. That's my question. I don't think that's your question, because what you're talking about

with you is actually an argument that Nissa uses when he says that how do we understand the difference

between act or energy and will and nature in person? He says, well, let's look at a human person.

Right? There's an action that's distinct from the person. The person builds a house that's an

effect of the work that he did. We might learn something about that person, but we don't perceive

his nature or directly know his hypostasis by looking at the house that he built. We might learn a

few things about him. When we interact with a person directly, we interact with his hypostasis,

which is what makes him distinct, and we understand that perhaps we share a common nature between

me and Nissa. So you have Mr. Dr. Fungal have a human nature that I share, but I'm the hypostasis,

Jay, you're the hypostasis Dr. Fungal. So the Eastern fathers make these

analogies to who God is, and they say that in the same way that a man creates a building and we

might learn about him and his wisdom and his works that are proper to human nature through creating

a house. In the same way, there's an analogy to God creating the world and his energy and act

of creating the world as distinct from who he is in his essence because if we said that the act

of creating the world was the same as the divine essence, we would be led to all kinds of

surgeries such as that the creation of the world is exactly the same as the conflagration because

both are divine actions. So what we say is that the energies of God are the things around him.

This is the way that St. Dionysius the area of the guy is the way St. Basil St. Gregory is saying this,

not saying this, they all say that it's the way to understand this is to look at when Moses

goes up on the mountain and we're told an exodus that a Moses saw God face to face, but no man can

see God face to face and live. So how is this possible? Was possible because the Japanese,

the manifestations of God, the energies of God within history that operate can at times even

be made visible if God so chooses to. So I mean all of that you're describing is completely

compatible with what Aquinas says about divine simplicity, right? No, it's not at all.

There it is because Aquinas absolutely maintains that the opportunities are not real in your doctrine.

I don't know what you mean by that. So if you don't believe that you don't believe that God's

goodness was manifest distinct from the essence of God. Moses didn't see the essence

of God. The manifestations of God's goodness are distinct from the essence of God.

Right, so look only because you believe they're created effects, though. You don't believe that

it's actually the goodness of God. You believe that it's a created hologram or effective God.

This is why Rhyme Catholicism tends to not believe that the angel of the Lord

it was the preincarnate logos because that's impossible and absolutely divine simplicity.

It seems to me that you're trying to hold two incompatible things. So let me try to parse this out.

I'm telling you that our view is revealed, right? That the offenies are the logos preincarnate.

Hold on. The person can become manifest within time and space.

Yes, I know the person can manifest in time and space, but you don't believe that.

Sure I do. No, you don't. You don't believe that the angel of the Lord was a logos.

The Rhyme Catholic doctrine is that those are created holograms and not Christ Himself.

That's why you believe that the light of Mt. Tabor is created light.

Let's rewind a little bit.

Okay, so and we can talk about how to make sense.

I have never met a Catholic group that the offenies were real or that the light of a Matthew 17

and transfiguration was uncreated light. Every Roman Catholic I've ever met.

Yeah, but you've said like I've never read.

So I was saying that I was saying a minus agrees with 100% is what you said at the beginning.

Which is that these things which you are calling energies are not attributes of God

in the sense of things that modify Him or exist in Him to sing from His essence.

But rather, they're things that show up in His works.

St. Basil and St. Gregory Nissa use the analogy of the sun and its heat and its rate.

Right, so the sun, the heat and its rays can be genuinely distinguished but they're not exactly the same.

We don't believe that the four knowledge of God is exactly the same as the wisdom of God or the love of God

or the justice of God. Like the bequating the four knowledge of God with the justice of God makes no sense.

Okay, so this is, I want to get into that argument in a minute.

Okay, and quick question, so I know how to pace myself or what's left.

How much time do we have left on this?

I probably need to go pretty soon. We can set up like as part two though, if you want.

But we've been going, how long have we been going?

It's been hour and 50 minutes, I think.

Okay, so let's say two hours and then maybe we can pick up at as part two if you want to do it.

Sure, that's good.

Yeah, so the thing which I was trying to get out with the energy thing, right?

So what Aquinas wants to deny in which I would want to deny with them is that

let's say you picked justice and foreign knowledge, let's go with that.

All right, he would want to deny that these things

standing and manifested in the world.

Right, so let's say the justice of the examination of center is

or as the justice or the foreign knowledge manifestate in prophecy or whatever.

Right, he would want to deny that these

manifestations are attributes existing in God in the way in which I described

quantities and qualities as existing in their subjects.

Right, does that make sense?

In other words, they don't posit what you just described,

what Aquinas is holding with divine simplicity.

This is the same endless respect.

Neither of you seems to me want to say that there is something in God distinct from the essence,

which is nonetheless makes God be a certain way.

Can we agree about that?

As far as I understand your meaning, I don't know, I'm not sure what we do.

So in my soul, there's a little doohickey, if you like,

the virtue of justice, which I wasn't born with,

right, doesn't come with my soul.

Please God, I've acquired a little bit of it over the course of the last 30 years.

And it makes me be in a certain way and it's distinct from me.

That's not what you mean by energies, right?

What you mean by energy in my case would be something like

I do something just, right, and that shows you

that most of the time, for example,

and then you can actually use my just action.

Am I getting that right?

Correct.

For example, in the New Testament, when intergeia is used,

it's for example in Paul talks about the operations of the spirit, right?

So the energy of the spirit is when he's talking about like the gifts of the spirit.

So when the spirit grants prophecy, when he grants mercy to different gifts to the saints,

the charismatic gifts, I don't mean charismatic, so you know what I mean.

The word that's used there is intergeia,

which just signifies divine operations or actions.

Yeah.

And sometimes, yes, we would say that if you're talking about the attributes, the love of God,

we believe that is an energy.

And we even believe that the knowledge that we have that God's essence is one is also an

energetic truth that we learn through bond revelation.

Yeah.

So if I'm trying to make sense of what you're saying and transporting it into my categories,

I think I can ascend to a lot of it, but it's going to sound like this.

So tell me if you've got problems with this translation.

So it seems as though you want to say that the energy can refer to, when I speak of the energy

of God's justice or of his unity or whatever, what you mean is not that there is an attribute

distinct from the divine essence, which in here is in the divine essence, but rather one of two

things. And maybe you think they're the same thing. They don't sound the same to me.

Oh, thing one would be there's a work done in creation, which manifests that which I am

calling God's justice, right? So that would be like the punishment of this center.

And the other one would be the content which I am predicating of God, right? So when I say,

right, so you've got thing one, that's the thing which happened right here that the center got

punished. And there's thing two, which is as a result of seeing this, I'm predicate

this concept that I have of justice of God. And I don't want to say that this concept that I

have of justice is like a concept of God. And I do want to say that I can predicate it off him.

And so because you want to, on the one hand, deny that what I've gotten my mind of justice equals

God, but on the other hand, you want to affirm that it gets to God somehow, you call this an

energy. And this is an energy in a different sense from the actual work of damning the center.

Is that all sound fair so far? Well, I laid out three distinctions at the beginning where I was

talking about the energies of God as relating to eternal manifestation, the energies of God relating

to creation. And then some energies that let's just stick with other things like justice and

foreknowledge for the moment. Well, there's a sense in which, I mean, you could say God is

that's where I wanted this double distinction to show up. Okay, well, you get this

deep thing inside of like trinitarian stuff and leaving aside hypostatic union stuff and all that.

Well, but I want to stress that for us, all these things are related because you're not going to

have the essence energy distinction without the proper doctrine of the Father as the archae

and the right or the theologi. So it's not like these things operate in discrete from the other

other doctors. They all hang or fall together. I'll bear that in mind. And so tell me if I'm

if my lumping things or if my if I'm saying something which would be corrected by bringing in

some of the other sides. So what it might us would want to say, right? So in this case of understand

it, seeing God's justice and predicating it of him, we'll deny that there is a what's it which is

up there in God, which is distinct from God's essence to which I am referring when I say that

God is just what he would affirm is that there are three things involved. There is the action which

is just there is my concept of justice. And there is the divine essence which bears some sort of

result wants to my concept. Yeah, but it doesn't. And that's the whole point because the things that

are particular and they're discrete and they're related to things in time and space and history.

And the absolute the absolutely simple essence which is supposedly identical to divine justice,

God's justice. There's no way to know that that's what you're experiencing or bridging that gap

because all you know is all you know is created effects. Right. So but I mean so but that's true

and this is just true of God, right? So we know all things through their operations, right? I don't

have any direct access to you. Right. I have access to you only in the operation of talking,

right? That's how you and I know each other, but it's not just created effects in terms of knowing

God. In terms of knowing God, it's beyond created effects. That was what was true generally for the

old testament period, signs and symbols. Now we now we see Christ face to face as Paul says in

second Corinthians three. Oh, that's right. No, you believe in the beatific vision. You don't

believe we see Christ face to face. I believe that what it means to say that I see Christ face to

face now is different from what it means to see Christ face to face in the beatific vision. That's

what you mean. Right. Because now it's only created effects. Yeah. So we're mixing issues again, I

think. How do you know you're seeing that? How do you know that it's the justice thing on life?

And I know that this is big for Paul and us in the original. How do you know that it's the

justice of God and not the foreign knowledge or love of God that you're experiencing?

So according to say, depending on what you mean by that, that's

what I think it matters whether I'm under God's justice. Right. If you're talking,

like hold on. If you're talking about

right, so I can say this action right, so let's say that I this action here seems to exemplify

God's work or whatever. So the center gets failed like 20 times and gets this new huge

influx of grace and conversion. Okay. What is it that allows me to say that the name mercy is most

applicable to this situation. It would be because what I see of this situation, most maps

of my creaturely concept of mercy. But to say that your creaturely concepts are analogous,

right? To something that is completely unlike the things that you think you have, like in other

words, the divine justice is not like human justice, right? Of course. I'm going to object to

completely unlike, of course, but so it's analogous, it's analogous. But the thing that you're making

an algae to is absolutely simple. That's right. And all the predicates are actually identified.

So how do you know that you're actually experiencing one or the other? Because they're not really

distinct. Right. So it depends on what you mean by what you're experiencing, right? If you're

saying that I'm experiencing God, right? So like if you're asking which part of God I'm experiencing

I'm saying that Thomas is experiencing any part of God because God doesn't have parts. But

if you're asking why am I applying this name to this manifestation, it's because this manifestation

captures more of this concept that I have than of that concept. Yeah, I don't see a problem.

There's between the concept and the thing. There's no bridge between the concept and the

absolutely simple essence. You never know that actual thing. You only know created effects.

And you don't know. I never know. You don't know if your created effects match up to this thing.

How can they? So this is my Paloma's cause of atheism. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not going to say

repeat what you said right before that last thing.

It's something about all the experience in your life or the created effects of this super

monadessence. You never experience a direct example of God himself or God's justice within time

and space. You only experience created effects of God. And so when you talk about the love of God

or the foreknowledge of God or the mercy of God, you're not actually talking about something that

you know that you've experienced. You're only talking about a creaturely analogue that you hope

matches up to this absolutely simple essence wherein all of the attributes are the exact same.

So it's meaningless. The problem is there were, I think, that we're using talk about in two

different senses. Right? So there's the being that I think doesn't work if absolutely

to mind simplicity is true. That's the crux of the argument.

Because all of the things that you're talking about are not like an absolutely simple essence.

Yes. One creaturely effect is just you're just interpreting a creaturely effect

compared to some other creaturely effect. Yeah, so

I forgot where to start here again. Alright, so look, um, I just disagree with your claim.

And then I'll see if I can give a principal reason for disagreeing with it.

I just disagree with the claim that if x is limited and y is infinite and per se rather than

participated, that it follows that x is that there is no similarity whatsoever between x and all

you all you know is created effects and you never know that thing at all. So you have no reprimand

for it. Yeah, so what I say, let's try to give concrete examples, right? That is the

analogue antis, right? Well, I'm not quite sure how you're using these words. Let's just try to

give a concrete example. So let's see where we part way. The analogue antis and a coin is an

algae of being, right? Is that there's a, we can look at the world, we can see being,

we can predicate that God is the super being, but of course, he doesn't have being in the exact

same way as everything else has being because the being in this world is composite, it's caused.

The being that God has is the super being that's uncaused and not composite, right? So there's

an assumption of analogy, right? And we're not using univocal predication, we're using analogy.

Right. I mean, the idea is that it's supposed to be the same thing signified, but different

mode of signification, right? That's your classic line. Let me just try to give an example. So

when I say that you are loving or whatever, right? So I don't have access to the habit of love,

which is in your soul, but I do have access to the actions by which you work for the good of

others, right? And so on the basis of you're doing these actions, I try to create love of you,

where love means that in you, by virtue of which you will be good for others and you seek their good,

right? So, and in us, by which you will seek work for the good of others, is this extra little habit,

which is added onto your soul, which is different from the habit of wisdom as evidenced by the fact

that you can have one without the other. We just don't use these categories. I'll just try to explain

what I've got to find by this. Okay. And so when I talk about who God's having love, it would be

the same sort of deal in this respect. And I don't have access to God's love. I don't see inside

his essence, but I have access to, just like you said, are these manifestations? I see

God becoming man and dying on the cross for us. Created a threat. Hang on, I'm not quite done yet.

And because of this, right? So I say when I say that God has love or is love, what I mean is that

there is in God that by which he does this act, which is seeking the good of, seeking the good of

others, is just that in this case, the that by which he does this operation is not an extra little

what's it, which is added onto him, it's just him. And I can't fathom that. But that's what in me,

that's why I predicate the same word of me and of you and of God. Yeah, analog.

I'm like, with categories, that's fine, but I'm just trying to make sense of what we're saying,

like why we think that it makes sense to apply the term loving, let's say, to God. But you're only

looking at created analogs and none of those things are the thing itself. So you don't actually know

that God has love. Oh, do I know that you have love? Yeah, but knowing that I love doesn't mean

that you know God, because how do I know that you have love? Because you have a personal

interaction with me and you're in your doctrine, it's not. Do I have to have a personal interaction

with you to know that you have love? Well, you might hear second hand from somebody, but the point

is that we're not, we're talking about God himself, right? Well, not, but I'm saying that both of

these things, right? So it can be, right? So in case of you and me, it can be the case that I see you

doing something good to another, or I can see you doing something good to me, like taking these two

hours out of your day to talk to me. Right. And both of these give me, right, allow me to predicate

a view, something which I don't directly see. But how do you know that is God showing love to you?

As opposed to somebody else? No, if God is an absolutely simple essence, you don't know what,

you don't know that you're actually experiencing any of these things. You can only do

in a logical predication, because the effect, right, the thing which I am seeing, right? Which

you don't know, you don't know that that created effect is an action of love because you don't know

God himself. But you're just getting getting the sequence of questions backwards, right? So what I

mean by love just is, right, that by which you do this kind of operation, you don't know that God

is doing that. I don't, wait, I mean, I don't know that this operation that I see in front of me

is an act of love. Is that what you're saying? You don't know that God is doing that act of love

because God is outside of time and space and absolutely simple, according to this doctrine.

So what? You're saying it could be, for all I know, it could be somebody else. Maybe, maybe God

is exacting justice on you. You don't know. It's because of all, maybe I'm just

doing it. I mean, it really is one bargain. So it seems the tributes are the exact same as the

essence and all the attributes are synonymous with one another. You never know God or what you're

actually experiencing within history is from God. I don't see how that follows at all, right? So it

seems as though it's perfectly possible for one in the same form that I just on the level of

creatures. Forget God for the moment. Just on the level of creatures, it's perfectly possible

for one in the same form. But the reasoning out from creatures. Hold on. Hold on. It's

perfectly possible for one in the same form to be responsible for different operations

and thus for different manifestations and to give that work for God. You can't, what?

You can't reason that up to God like Thomas want to do. I'm telling you, what I'm trying to

argue is that the analogy it doesn't work in your view. Because God is absolutely simple,

if you believe in the essence energy distinction, it would work. You're going to have to repeat,

but let me restate why I'm having attributes are the divine essence. Therefore, within time and

space, you don't actually experience God's love or God's mercy. You don't know why you're

experiencing. If you're experiencing God at all, because all you experience is created effects.

There's no analog between what's in your mind and the absolutely simple essence where all the

attributes are melded into one giant monad. I don't know. Bear with me for a sec and tell me which

part of this picture you're being bothered by. I see this, let's say I'm Adam. Let's say I know

whether, let's say by revelation, whatever, that God just made this place and that he gave me

all this stuff up to and including this help made who's pretty awesome for my good. That's

definitionally an act of love, right? I'm asking you how you know that God did that out of love.

Let's say God sets up. Well, now you're relying on that, which is what we would agree. Yeah,

you should rely on revelation. You can't rely on all these created effects.

Okay. Let me see if I can restate it. So to say that something is an act of love,

means that it is done consciously, it's not done randomly, it's done deliberately,

for the good of another. Yeah. Okay. And so what you're asking is how is it that I can tell that

this act that is the creation of the world around me is an act which was deliberate and which was

done for my good. I mean, I don't mean times I can restate the argument because it's a very simple

argument. I'm not trying to be honest. Are you denying that? I just want to yes or no. Well,

I believe that God created the world in love absolutely, but that's because there's a direct

bridge between God and the world. I was asking now. Right. So I'm just saying this thing out here,

maybe this is the trouble. Right. So you're saying that you can only know whether something

counts as an act of love if I have some sort of direct independent access to the source from

which it's spring. And I'm saying that works exactly the opposite way and that I assume that

I infer, you like, that there is a source from which it's spring if I see the operation.

Right. So I don't have any direct access to your love and I never will. All that I have access to

is your operations of love. And I know that whenever there is an operation, there is corresponding

to it something by virtue of which this operation happened. And that's something I call the

habit of love. And it's exactly, I mean, God is just that in the case of God and that habit isn't

the habit. You're just stating the position. You're not addressing the point, which is that the

the God that you're talking about is absolutely simple and all the actions are identified.

Right. But what I'm trying to say is to call this act an act of love, I don't need to already

know what it's sprang from. The direction of inference goes the other way. It seems as though

yesterday, this is an act of love. I have to first have access to that from which it can be.

I know you're reasoning up from creatures and you're saying creaturely love suggests that there's

some ultimately divine love. And I'm saying that that doesn't work because for one, what you say

God is in terms of absolute divine simplicity bears no resemblance to the creaturely love that you're

trying to make it analogous to. And that's just what I fail to see because it seems like the response

of all the actual people here, I don't know. But for me, God was a good for me because all of the

attributes are identified with the divine essence and the distinctions are only creaturely.

So if the distinctions are only creaturely, you never know if the creaturely idea in your head

actually matches up to the absolutely simple essence that is supposed to mirror.

Let me see if there's another way I can do this. It seems to me that what you're presupposing here

is that in order for a predication of a term to be truly predicated of a subject,

the term has to be isomorphic in content with some discrete reality in the subject.

All right, so in other words, in order for me to say that you are just, there has to be something

in you which has just something real, something distinct from all the rest of the parts of you,

which has just what I mean by the word justice and nothing else. Are you committed to that?

I'm kind of getting a little flustered here, not because I just, I think we're going around and

circles because you're just restating what analogical predication is and I'm asking you to explain

how you can really predicate a god if all of the attributes of God and the names of God are

absolutely identical to the divine essence. And I'm doing my best to explain that, but I'm just

trying to make sure that you're just restating what analogical predication is and I know what it is.

So, I'm just asking you to agree with me or disagree as I go so I know where I need to

set up my battle lines. Are you committed to saying that in order for a true predication to

happen, the formal content of my, the term I'm predicating has to be exactly co-extensive

with a real thing or not for the subject. No. We don't believe in univocal predication.

Okay, so if that's the case, why can't it be that two of my terms should have a formal content

which is less than their referent to which I'm applying them? Because the referent,

namely God in this case, is completely different because he's absolutely simple and all of the

predicates are this are identical. Here we are going in circles. Okay, let's see if I can try

this another way. And by the way, it doesn't work either to say let's start with preacherly love

and then reason up because we all know what love is. No, we don't. In fact, that would again,

that's a classical foundationalist assumption from this kind of epistemology that we would reject.

You don't have a clear idea of something like self-evident maxims or something like this that you

can then reason up to build up to God. In fact, if there's no way to understand those maxims

or those foundations epistemologically or logically or whatever without presupposing God's existence.

Well, that's a whole other argument. Do you want to keep on going with

analogy for a bit or should we just start? I'm going to have to go and let's take some

some so people who are listening if you want to take if you want to ask questions. I'm sure

this will take a few minutes but you can ask your super chat questions now. We already have a

couple here, one from Gile Amos, Russias for $5. He says the father uncreated, the son uncreated,

the Holy Ghost uncreated, not three uncreated but one uncreated, Athenation Crete. Actually,

even Rome admits that the Athenation Crete was not composed by Athenacious. It's a later

forgery and the Orthodox Church does not accept the Athenation Crete but yes, we agree that all three

of the persons are uncreated. Gile Amos, Russias again for $5. When the peri-cleat cometh,

whom I will send to you from the father, the spirit of true to proceed from the father,

right? Proceeds from the father is a statement of our in our view,

a hypothetical origin and the father is the sole archae, is the only source of the spirit.

Jesus says he will send the spirit into time and history, all Orthodox writers believe in

the mission of the spirit being sent by Jesus. This is why the gang that abate back in the distinction

between economia or the mission of the spirit within history, the eternal manifestation of the spirit

which applies the Augustinian psychological analogy in St. Gregory of Palomos, the son eternally

manifests the spirit but then in terms of hypostatic origins, the father alone is the archae,

soul and cause of the persons in our view. Are there any more superchats?

If not, I think we will call it to a close, give them a few minutes.

Yeah, man, this was pretty intense, pretty heated, pretty deep stuff. I appreciate you

helping them and doing it and if we get a few more, I appreciate the opportunity, yeah.

Yeah, if we get a few more superchats, I'll split the money with you but

we've got to know and don't worry about that. Well, I always do that with guests. Any of you,

Theo nerds out there won't ask questions. Send us some money. Do we need two hours?

Well, but other, yep. Okay. All right, well, I'm not seeing any more superchats, so I guess we'll call

to close and thank you, Dr. Finegold, very eloquent, very good at explicating his position,

good defender of Thomism. We will think about this. Let's do on this for a while and we'll come

back with maybe a part two. All right, well, thank you. All right, God bless and have a good day.