Divine Simplicity and the Complexity of Creation | Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

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Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on July 17, 2022 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. for the Fourth Annual Thomistic Philosophy and Natural Science Symposium: Complexity, Simplicity and Emergence. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Thomas Joseph White completed his bachelor’s in religious studies from Brown University (1993) and his Master’s (1995) and Doctorate (2002) in Theology at Oxford University. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2003. He completed his licentiate in Sacred Theology (2007) at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He professed final vows in 2007 and was ordained a priest in 2008. His research and teaching concentrate on Thomistic metaphysics, Christology and Roman Catholic-Reformed ecumenical dialogue. He was appointed an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2011. White taught at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C from 2008-2018, and was the founder and Director of the Washington DC Thomistic Institute from 2009 until his departure for Rome in 2018. In 2015 White became co-editor of Nova et Vetera Journal, an American Catholic Theological journal. In 2018 he was assigned to teach at the Angelicum and function as the Director of the Angelicum Thomistic Institute. In June 2021, he was appointed rector of the Angelicum in Rome, and in June 2022 White was appointed president of the Academy of Catholic Theology, one of the principal societies of academic Catholic theology in the United States.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:04.1	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.4	So what you have in front of you is a simple, actually, depiction of a very intriguing and difficult topic, which is the way that the Western intellectual
0:25.7	tradition, and to some extent also the Eastern Christian intellectual tradition has thought
0:29.3	about divine simplicity. There are pre-Christian precursors in non-Christian thinkers, I mean,
0:37.0	especially in platonic and Aristotelian sources.
0:40.2	But the reflection on divine simplicity underwent an amazing set of developments and debates
0:45.2	in ancient and medieval thinking, and it's making a comeback in debate and interest now in,
0:52.1	I mean, in contemporary analytic philosophy, there's a kind of new set of
0:55.0	debates about analytic conceptions of divine simplicity or objections to it. So what I've got here
1:01.1	is a fairly simple toomistic schema based on Summa Theologia, question three, of the first
1:08.5	part of the Summa. So it's only one place where he goes into divine
1:12.3	simplicity, but it's a place where you see Aquinas both engaging with the tradition and also
1:16.9	making his own innovative and somewhat original contributions. So this is a to mystic theory
1:23.9	of divine simplicity. There are others in Aquinas and, I mean, Anselm, Augustine, Scotus,
1:29.5	and so forth. But this is a to mystic account. And then what I'm going to do is flip the board
1:33.3	over and look at complexity in composite creatures and the way in which, first I'm going to
1:39.8	emphasize how we are composite and God is simple. And then I'm going to look at how, despite our
1:43.8	complexity, we do somehow image the simple perfection of God in various ways.
1:50.9	Okay, so I want to start with on the far left of the board. So these are four forms of
1:55.3	composition, which Aquinas says exist in us. Now, this is nothing like what you're thinking
1:59.9	about, like if you're thinking about biological, chemical, or physical composition, except perhaps the first.
	...

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