Wainwright, Augustine, and God’s
Simplicity: A Final Word
Richard La Croix
The New Scholasticism 53, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 124-27
Professor Wainwright presents three objections1 to my account2 of Augustine’s attempt to explicate the
doctrine that God is simple. I shall answer these objections in the order that they are presented.
His first objection is that I have not shown that a contradiction is entailed by what appears to be
Augustine’s attempt to formulate a distinction between relative and non-relative properties. Wainwright
formally reconstructs my argument against what I take to be the two possible ways suggested by
Augustine for formulating that distinction and then points out a difficulty with my argument. The
difficulty is that premise (5), The entity worshipped by Augustine is God, and premise (12), The property
I am thinking of is omniscience, are true, but only contingently true. What follows from this is that
premises (1) and (2), the two formulations of the distinction in question, have not been shown to be
self-contradictory because it has not been shown that (1) by itself or (2) by itself (along with necessary
truths and the laws of logic) entails a contradiction. All my argument establishes is that (1) and (5) jointly
entail the contradiction in line (9) and that (2) and (12) jointly entail the contradiction in line (16). In
short, Wainwright’s point is that in order to show that (1) and (2) are logically incoherent I must show
that they are self-contradictory and to do this I must show that a contradiction is deducible from each of
those premises by appealing only to them and to necessary truths and the laws of logic. Wainwright is
quite correct on this point and I am grateful to him for exposing this defect in my argument. However,
this defect is not as serious as it may first appear because it is easily enough corrected by considering
slightly different counter-examples. Rather than considering the entity worhsipped by Augustine
consider instead the entity worshipped by Augustine when Augustine worships God; and rather than the
considering the property I am thinking of consider instead the property I am thinking of when I am
thinking of omniscience. With these changes Wainwright’s formal reconstruction of my argument can be
restarted by simply replacing premises (3), (4), (5), (10), (11), and (12) with the following re-statements
of them:
(3’) ‘The entity worshipped by Augustine when Augustine worships God is omniscienct’ is a
statement that refers to a being not identical to the entity worshipped by Augustine when
Augustine worships God, viz., Augustine.
1
“Augustine on God’s Simplicity: A Reply to Richard La Croix,” The New Scholasticism 53, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 11823.
2
“Augustine on the Simplicity of God,” The New Scholasticism 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1977): 453-69.
(4’) Omniscience is relative with respect to the entity worshipped by Augustine when Augustine
worships God. (From 1 and 3’.)
(5’) The entity worshipped by Augustine when Augustine worships God is God.
(10’) ‘God has the property I am thinking of when I am thinking of omniscience’ is a statement
containing a predicate that refers to a being not identical to God, viz., William Wainwright.
(11’) The property I am thinking of when I am thinking of omniscience is relative with respect to
God. (From 2 and 10’.)
(12’) The property I am thinking of when I am thinking of omniscience is omniscience.
When these reformulated premises are substituted for their counterparts in Wainwright’s
reconstruction of my argument, line (6) follows from (4’” and (5’), line (13) follows from (11’) and (12’),
and the deductions from lines (6) through (9) and from lines (13) through (16) follow as they did before
the substitutions. These revisions correct the defect in the original formulation of my argument because
the contradictions derived in lines (9) and (16) now follow from (1) and (2) respectively by appealing to
only necessary truths and the laws of logic since (5’) and (12’) are necessary truths. So, it turns out that I
am correct in claiming that (1) and (2) are logically incoherent and cannot be true.
Wainwright’s second objection is that (1) and (2) do not provide the only plausible formulations of the
distinction between relative and non-relative properties. In rebuttal he proposes (2’), a revision of my
original (2), as a satisfactory formulation of that distinction. I am not altogether just how it is that (2’) is
supposed to overcome the difficulties raised by my argument as it was originally stated, but my lack of
understanding on this point is not important at this juncture because it seems quite clear that (2’) will
not do, given the revisions in my argument that were just made above. Formulation (2’) will not do
because omniscience is necessarily identical with the property I am thinking of when I am thinking of
omniscience and the statement ‘God has the property I am thinking of when I am thinking of
omniscience’ is a statement the predicate of which refers to a being not identical to God, viz., La Croix.
So, by the second disjunct of (2’), omniscience is a relative property with respect to God and so he
cannot subscribe to Wainwright’s (2’). It turns out that Wainwright has not provided a suitable
formulation of the distinction between relative and non-relative properties.
The third and final objection presented by Wainwright is that there is a difference between
interpretation of Augustine’s account of the doctrine of God’s simplicity that is preferable to my own
interpretation. According to Wainwright I explicate Augustine’s doctrine of God’s simplicity in terms of
the doctrine that God possesses His non-relative properties non-contingently and, Wainwright claims,
“while Augustine does indeed believe that these doctrines are equivalent (my italics), what he means
(his italics) by God’s simplicity is that God is what He has.” But this account of the matter is extremely
misleading because it claims a difference where none actually exists. I do not simply explicate
Augustine’s account of the doctrine of God’s simplicity in terms of the doctrine that God possesses His
non-relative properties non-contingently. What I explicate in those terms is a specific account of the
doctrine that God is simple, namely, Augustine’s claim that “a nature is said to be simple on the grounds
that it cannot lose any of the properties that it possesses; that is, there is no distinction to be made
between what that nature is and the properties that it has” (my translation). (The translation that
Wainwright relies on renders this same passage as: “When a nature is called simple we mean that it can
have nothing that it can lose; that it cannot be different from what it has.”) To be sure I focus on the first
part of this claim rather than the second part in an attempt to gain some understanding of Augustine’s
version of the doctrine that God is simple. I do this by using the distinctions between relative and nonrelative properties and contingent and non-contingent properties to explicate the troublesome concept
of a nature that cannot lose any of the properties that it possesses. But the passage from Augustine that
is quoted above makes it quite clear that he regards the claim “God is simple means (because) He
cannot lose and of the properties He possesses” and the claim “God is simple means (because) there is
no difference between what He is and what He has” as equivalent claims, whether that equivalence is
regarded as logical equivalence or equivalence in meaning. What this shows is that there is no reason at
all for thinking, as Wainwright does, that the latter claim asserts what Augustine “means” by saying that
God is simple while the former does not. Both of these claims represent what Augustine means by
saying that God is simple, for on his view they both mean the same thing. To explicate one is to explicate
the other and following the indications provided by Augustine I explicate them in terms of the relative /
non-relative and contingent / non-contingent distinctions.
Furthermore, when Wainwright describes his interpretation he says that Augustine’s claim that God is
simple is to be understood as meaning that God is what He has non-relatively. But, since Augustine does
not hold that God is identical with His contingent properties, Wainwright must add to the description of
his interpretation by saying that Augustine’s claim that God is simple means that God is what He has
non-relatively and non-contingently. In short, Wainwright would appear to be forced into holding that
Augustine’s doctrine that God is simple is to be understood as meaning that God is what He has, and
that “God is what He has” is to be explicated in terms of the distinctions between relative and nonrelative properties and contingent and non-contingent properties. So, since Augustine’s view “God is
what He has” means the same as “God cannot lose any of the properties that He possesses,” there is no
reason to think that Wainwright’s interpretation is any different from mine let alone preferable.