Welcome to Pines with Aquinas, I'm Matt Fraad.

If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question,

what would it be?

In today's episode, we're going to talk to Aquinas about divine simplicity.

What is it? What are some of the objections to it? Why ought we to hold it?

Despite its name, and quite ironically, divine simplicity is perhaps the most difficult thing

to try and conceive of. So, you know, a beer is probably going to help today.

All right, before I bring Father Chris Prachashko, good mate of mine, champion,

champion priest. You'll love him. We've had him on the show before.

I wanted to say about, let's see, maybe four quick points about divine simplicity.

Just to sort of give you the absolute bare bones basics of what divine simplicity is,

and then we'll have Father Chris sort of elaborate on it far better than I can.

So, first of all, what do we mean when we talk about divine simplicity? Well, the doctrine holds

that God is in no way composed of parts. All right, so here's three quick points about that,

and then one point that we should keep in mind. First, you know, when you hear this,

when people hear that God is in composed of parts, you might be thinking of physical parts,

right? A leg, a wing, a torso, eyeballs, I don't know. So, the first quick point is that it doesn't

mean that. It's right, it does mean that, right? Obviously, like God is not composed of Matt,

he's immaterial. He's not composed of form and matter. So, that's perhaps the most

simplest thing to begin with, right? But divine simplicity also means, and this leads me to the

second point, that God isn't composed of essence and existence, right? So, here's a way to

understand the difference between essence and existence. If I said to you, do you know what a

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