Classically theologians have affirmed that the divine being is simple, i.e. utterly one: there are no parts – spatial, temporal, of any kind – in God. God is necessarily and utterly and only himself, identical with his own nature. Also, it follows, that divine attributes all have the same referent: we are not picking out some distinct ‘part’ of God when we speak of his wisdom nor yet another when we discuss his power.  

The critics of simplicity like to point out that this leads us to a conundrum of the following sort: 

Conundrum A 

1. God is power. 
2. God is wisdom. 
3. Therefore, given that there are no parts in God, wisdom is power in God.  

The problem with the conclusion is that if ‘wisdom is power’ in God we do not seem to have a very good grasp of what wisdom and power really mean with respect to God. What is wisdom that is identical with power? What is power that is the same as wisdom?

In addition to this, some (I think it was at least William Alston) have argued that doctrine of simplicity also leads to the following conundrum: 

Conundrum B 

4. God is his own nature.  
5. Therefore, nature is God.  

To specify:  

6. God is identical with his goodness. 
7. Therefore, goodness is God.  

From this would follow, so the critics say, the unfortunate conclusion that God is not a person but a nature. That is, simplicity would force us to say not only that God is good but that goodness is God. And this, of course, would go against the Christian thinking that God is not ‘a thing’ or ‘a nature’ but a living, active, personal being. 

I recently heard an interesting paper given by Nicholas E. Lombardo, O.P., at Campion Seminar at Oxford titled The Grammar of Divinity: A Genealogy of Confused Thinking About the Divine Essence in Western Trinitarian Theology. I think his argument concerning Trinitarian grammar can be applied to simplicity to solve the conundrums just introduced.  

First, note Frege’s famous distinction between objects and concepts. Objects, to put it simply, pick out things in the world, they are logically complete by themselves. Examples of objects include: the White House, Venus, cat, pencil. God is also an object in this logical sense. Objects can relate to concepts but they do not need to. Concepts, to put it simply again, are properties of objects and to mean something they need an object. (Hence, I say ‘wide’ and you ask ‘wide what?’) Concepts are parasitic on objects, if you like. Concepts include things like: wide, thick, red, and Trinitarian. However, some words can be used both as objects and as concepts, such as the word planet which can be both an object and a concept but is most properly logically considered a concept (there is, in actuality, no such thing in the universe as ‘a planet’ but only collections of matter [Venus, Mars, Jupiter] designated as such).  

Following this, note also Frege’s crucial insight with regards to the word ‘is’, namely, that there are two kinds of ‘is’: the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identification. Consider: 

8. The barn is red. 
9. The evening star is planet Venus.  

Sentence (8) is a matter of predication ’is’: a concept (red) is predicated of an object (barn). These cannot change places: it does not follow from (8) that ‘red is barn’. Sentence (9), on the other hand, is a matter of identification ’is’: it’s an object-object predication. Hence, the predicate and the object can change places and the meanings is the same. Hence, we can infer from (9) that ‘Venus is the evening star’. Consider another example: Bruce Wayne [object] is Batman [object]. This can be turned around: Batman is Bruce Wayne. Both sentences make sense and are true. Try the following, though: Bruce Wayne [object] is tall [concept]. This cannot be turned around: tall is not Bruce Wayne.   

Noting the difference between (8) and (9) already solves Conundrum B: saying that [God is good = goodness is God] is like like saying that [the barn is red = red is a barn]. We are confusing object-object predication with object-concept predication. Goodness is not ‘a thing’: rather goodness is a concept predicated of “a thing” we call God. And yet, because God is simple, we can also say (as long as we keep the relevant distinctions just introduced in mind) that ‘Goodness exists’ or that we ‘worship Goodness’ – here we are using Goodness as a title of God, as a name. (Nota bene, this is not mere nominalism: we can still say that goodness is a metaphysical reality – namely, the reality of God. In this sense, as a simply another term for the personal divine being, we can speak of goodness as an object.)

But how about Conundrum A? According to the critics of simplicity ‘God is power’ and ‘God is wisdom’ are are akin to (9): they are a case of object-object predication. But here, too, divine attributes are mistakenly treated as objects or things rather than concepts. Hence, the logical sequence in (1)-(3) is thought to be the same as in the following:  
 

10. The evening star is the planet Venus. 
11. The morning star is the planet Venus. 
12. Therefore, evening star is the morning star.  

 However, this is in fact not the case. In actuality, (1)-(3) represent a logical fallacy of the following sort: 

13. The barn is red.  
14. The barn is wide. 
15. Therefore, red is wide.  

This logical fallacy stems from not distinguishing between the ‘is’ of predication and ‘is’ of identification. The words ‘wisdom’ and ‘power’ are not objects in (1)-(3), but concepts. You see, the whole point of the doctrine of simplicity is that divine attributes cannot be predicated of the divine essence as separate things or objects: they are not ‘parts’ or ‘things’ in God.  Rather, they are concepts that signify the undivided, utterly simple divine essence. Hence: 

1. God [object] is power [concept]. 
2. God is [object] is wisdom [concept]. 

16. Therefore, God is both power and wisdom. 

Now the critic might jump in, though, pointing out that we have predicated a plurality of attributes of a simple being (God is both power and wisdom). For, the critic might say, in the barn-case ‘wide’ and ‘red’ are indeed distinct attributes of the barn, because the barn is not an undivided, simple entity but has parts. Hence, there is nothing objectionable in the conclusion that we predicate a plurality of attributes of the barn (‘wide’ and ‘red’) but it is incoherent to predicate such a plurality of God who is supposed to be simple. With simplicity we are not saying that God is wise and powerful. We are saying, rather, that in God these are the one and the same: there is no distinction whatsoever between them. To make this clearer, imagine, at the risk of nonsense,  a barn that is simple: if a barn was simple, we would have to say that somehow redness just is wideness in the barn. The words would not pick out two distinct aspects of the thing but somehow they would pick out the one and the same thing. And this of course seems to make very little sense in terms of how we use words like ‘red’ and ‘wide’. Indeed, the whole sentence (“redness is wideness”) sounds entirely nonsensical – or at least it would leave open the question why we would want to use two different terms for the exact same reality, terms that in our common usage don’t pick out the exact same reality but two different realities. 

But here the doctrine of analogy comes in: it is not that the meaning of ‘power’ and ‘wisdom’ is the same, but rather that their referent is the same and their meaning is analogical. ‘Power’ and ‘wisdom’ both have the same referent: the simple, undivided divine being – in that sense the reference works as in ‘morning star/evening star’. However, the doctrine of simplicity does not force us to say that we mean the same thing when we say ‘God is wise’ and when we say ‘God is power’. Rather, these are just concepts that pick out the same object (God) under different descriptions. This is just what it means to say that ‘God is power’ is an object-concept predication and not an object-object predication.  

As Eleonore Stump put its: “Finite human minds contemplating the deity must break the one divine nature into separable attributes; limited human minds cannot take in as one whole the greatness of the divine nature” and so “human minds, like a prism, break the white light of God’s nature into a rainbow of divine attributes”. (Stump, Atonement [Oxford University Press, 2018], 409). 

Hence, I content, to say that divine attributes are predicated of God analogically is to say just this: they all reliably pick out the same, simple object under different, plural descriptions (or meanings). The root of the analogousness – the ‘dissimilarity’ of Lateran IV – is in the fact that divine nature is simple: somehow these distinct descriptions (concepts) do not pick out distinct realities (like ‘wide’ and ‘red’ do in the case of the barn). Divine attributes have the same exact referent, but different meanings. This is not to say that language about God is ultimately nonsensical (i.e. that we are forced to say things like ‘wisdom is power’ or ‘omnipotence is loving-kindness’). Rather, this is to say that the attributes are analogical.