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{"id":17032,"date":"2015-02-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1858"},"modified":"2015-02-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T00:00:00","slug":"triune-simplicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/02\/triune-simplicity\/","title":{"rendered":"Triune Simplicity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

S<\/span>tephen John Wright\u2019s\u00a0Dogmatic Aesthetics<\/a> offers a dogmatic treatment of beauty using the work of Robert Jenson. Though Jenson hasn\u2019t written a theological aesthetics, Wright is correct that Jenson\u2019s work is shot through with aesthetic concerns: \u201cJenson\u2019s theology is irreducibly aesthetic.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Jenson\u2019s fundamental claims is that the relation of Creator and creation is an aesthetic one. In Wright\u2019s summary, \u201cGod is the artist, and creatures are the art. God creates by giving voice to creation, yet created beauties are susceptible to decline and decay. Rather than treating this mutability as a flaw, Jenson celebrates the gratuity of transitory beauty. By drawing on Japanese aesthetics, I will expand upon Jenson\u2019s insights to argue that the proper mode of creaturely beauty\u2014as distinct from divine beauty\u2014is temporality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wright argues that Jenson\u2019s work forces the question of how to reconcile the aesthetic notion of \u201cproportion,\u201d which Jenson links with Triune harmony, with the affirmation of divine simplicity. Some would say that Jenson resolves the problem by denying simplicity, but Wright correctly recognizes that this is unfair to Jenson. In a substantial chapter, he examines Jenson\u2019s fraught relationship with the axiom of simplicity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the one hand, Jenson can \u201cunproblematically\u201d appeal to Aquinas\u2019s claim that God\u2019s essence is His existence, and he affirms aseity without question. What he objects to is not simplicity per se<\/em>, but some of the ways it has been formulated. He worries that simplicity can lead to a retreat from redemptive history into a negative theology, \u201cso that the Trinity in its turn disappears into the old distant timelessness, carrying its internal reflection of evangelical history right with it\u201d (Jenson). He\u2019s concerned with the way simplicity smudges the differences between the persons, between the ways the persons are \u201crelated\u201d to the one substance. In some cases, \u201cthe three persons are not only equally related to the one substance, but identically related, so that the . . . relations are irrelevant to their being God\u201d (Jenson again). In both of these ways, simplicity can be formulated in a way that \u201coccludes the perception of divine form\u201d and \u201cfunds only an apophatic theology of the sublime\u201d rather than a theology of the beautiful (this is Wright summary).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jenson thinks that Thomas\u2019s aesthetic instincts are overwhelmed by simplicity: \u201cIf God is utterly simple, as Aquinas supposes, then there is no proportion or brightness internal to divine being; God is ineligible to be beautiful, so being beauty itself is impossible\u201d (Wright). At beast, in this framework, God is beautiful to us, but not in Himself. But that is just another way of saying that God is shapeless, unknowable sublimity rather than beauty.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>hough \u201cJenson does not accept any doctrine of simplicity that obscures the differentiation of the divine persons,\u201d he affirms simplicity itself. For him, the essence of God is what the persons are together. Turning Thomas around, eh argues that if God\u2019s essence is existence, then existence \u2013 the concrete divine communion of Father, Son, and Spirit \u2013 must be God\u2019s essence. As Wright explains, \u201cIf the divine essence is whatever the three are together, then a doctrine of simplicity is not incompatible with a theology that prefers to make constant reference to the mutual activity of the Father, Son, and Spirit\u2014which is simply the revealed name for the singular divine essence. The grammar of simplicity is a subset of a Trinitarian grammar.\u201d Thus means that simplicity is Triunely differentiated: \u201cWhatever we want to assert in the form \u2018God is . . . \u2019 -that he is good, or great, or whatever \u2013 we must say three times for it to be true of the gospel\u2019s God\u201d (Jenson, of course!). Or, more specifically, on the goodness of God: \u201cGod is good as a promised Gift is good; God is good as a Giver is good; God is good as the Giving is good.\u201d That is, God is <\/em>His own goodness, but the God who is His own goodness is the Triune God who is Triunely good.<\/p>\n

Triune simplicity is shaped, formed simplicity; it has proportion and harmony. It is beauty, and only <\/em>such a Triunely simple God can be infinite beauty.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"