Simply Sunday
At a supervisory meeting, one of my honours students made a mention of the patristic idea of divine simplicity as part of his research on the early medieval Platonist philosopher Boethius.
Divine simplicity draws on the Neoplatonic tradition in which the transcendent source of all being is attributed with absolute simplicity, which is indicated by its name: the One. Out of this simplicity comes forth the wealth of diversity that we see in everything in existence. Every entity in existence has a uniqueness that is a participation in the sublime uniqueness of the One. This idea of divine simplicity became Christianised in the medieval period and can be found in the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, just to name a couple.
The spiritual upshot of divine simplicity in the Christian life is that the closer one gets to God, the simpler things become, until you eventually arrive at God who is simplicity itself. Conversely, the more we situate ourselves in the things of this world as merely temporal realities, the more complex things become.
As my student reminded me of this, I realised that this point gave a metaphysical underpinning to the practice of the Sabbath outlined in RJ Snell’s Acedia and its Discontents. According to Snell, the day of rest is not merely a pause in work. Rather, the Sabbath is meant to reveal what he calls:
the existential richness at the heart of the world, understood by Christians as the infinite dance of generosity, which is the Godhead and the endless outpouring of that generosity to the world (107)
By extension, the Sabbath was designed by God to train us to become open to this reality, by first and foremost enjoying the things of this world for themselves. To do so would be to participate in God’s divine simplicity. We need this training, Snell suggests, because as we become preoccupied with the complexity of temporal realities qua temporal realities, the more we start to complexify things by turning things into instruments, valued not for themselves, but for their ability to give us something else that is not related to the instrument. For example, we do not work because of the goodness of work, but because of the money that it gives us. We do not enjoy the company of people because of their dignity as persons, but because of the emotional, pyschological or physical benefit they give us.
When we complexify and instrumentalise the things of this world, we end up forgetting about the dignity of the creature itself. We forget that this was a creature made by God and has the image of God imprinted in it. We also end up forgetting the existential richness that came with the creation of that thing, and start viewing the world from a presumption of scarcity. When we get to this point, we shift from becoming receivers to becoming takers. When we turn a thing (or person) into an instrument for our own ends that we ourselves have devised, we end up becoming like gods ourselves.
By contrast, participating in divine simplicity should turn our attention to enjoying the thing for itself, rather than for what we can take from it. We can celebrate things for what they are, rather than for what value we can extract for some other purpose. By extension Sabbath, the day where we mark this divine simplicity, pivots us to learn and receive the inbuilt abundance of the world, which in turn comes from the abundance of the paradoxically simple Creator.
This then brings us to a liturgical twist, which in turn gives us a more concrete definition of the very old Catholic practice of “offering it up”. Snell says that when we celebrate the Sabbath, we do things that might seem to “waste time”. We do things that do not seem to yield any measurable benefit or dividend. We engage in liturgical actions seemingly devoid of any productive power. We take otherwise productive commodities like bread and wine, which we could sell for three hundred denarii, and turn it into the body of the Son of God. Following this liturgy, we then take a walk in the park and celebrate with friends and family rather than yield results in the office. We enjoy things simply because.
Snell then says that when we live this time of simply enjoying, “lacking external return”, we wind up “giving up the usual expectation of reward or yield or profit”. Furthermore, we learn the art of “offering its labour, sacrificing without hope of return on the sacrifice”. In other words, we learn to offer up all those times when we have strived to make the world complicated by trying to use things or people for some purpose other than themselves. We especially learn to offer up those times we have failed to fulfil that external purpose. in the Sabbath we are trained to hand those times of complexity over to the simplicity of the Creator of those things and people, trusting in the generative and transformative creativity of an otherwise simple God.
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