A Catholic on the Areopagus: September 2024

"The Acts of the Apostles provides evidence that Christian proclamation was engaged from the very first with the philosophical currents of the time. In Athens, we read, Saint Paul entered into discussion with 'certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers' (17:18); and exegetical analysis of his speech at the Areopagus has revealed frequent allusions to popular beliefs deriving for the most part from Stoicism. This is by no means accidental. If pagans were to understand them, the first Christians could not refer only to 'Moses and the prophets' when they spoke. They had to point as well to natural knowledge of God and to the voice of conscience in every human being (cf. Rom 1:19-21; 2:14-15; Acts 14:16-17). Since in pagan religion this natural knowledge had lapsed into idolatry (cf. Rom 1:21-32), the Apostle judged it wiser in his speech to make the link with the thinking of the philosophers, who had always set in opposition to the myths and mystery cults notions more respectful of divine transcendence." -- Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

On an Argument from Divine Simplicity to the Eternality of Creation

Are you toying with me and turning me around in an impossible maze of logic? For now you enter by the way you left, and then you leave by the way you entered. Or are you weaving some wonderful web of divine simplicity?

— Boethius

The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) holds that God is absolutely metaphysically simple. In Catholic theology, this doctrine has the status of a formal dogma as defined by Lateran IV and reaffirmed by Vatican I. The DDS is commonly understood to entail that everything in God (i.e., everything intrinsic to God) is identical to God (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I.28.2 ad 1).