<p> Historically, pneumatology has had little influence on the Christian doctrine of God. In particular, although Christians throughout the ages have defended the deity of the Spirit, they have not adequately taken the economic activity of the Spirit into consideration when formulating the doctrine of the divine attributes. In an effort to correct the historical lack of influence that pneumatology has had on the doctrine of the divine attributes, this book advocates and explores the potential of a pneumatological approach to the doctrine of the divine attributes by presenting pneumatological revisions to classical theism. The thesis of this book is that a pneumatological approach to the doctrine of God recovers an emphasis on divine immanence, which has been marginalized by classical theism's imbalance toward divine transcendence. After the introductory chapter, chapter two illustrates how classical theism neglects the doctrine of the Trinity (and pneumatology in particular) in its formulation of the doctrine of the divine attributes and how classical theism privileges divine transcendence. Chapter three provides a review of how process theologians, evangelical theologians, and trinitarian theologians critique and revise classical theism and displays how contemporary theologians have only begun to develop a pneumatological approach to the doctrine of the divine attributes. Chapter four continues by recommending a pneumatological approach to the divine attributes. The remainder of the book illustrates how pneumatology provides a way to revise the classical accounts of divine impassibility, immutability, and omnipotence. In contrast to classical conclusions regarding these doctrines, pneumatological perspectives on the doctrine of the divine attributes portray God as suffering, changing his presence, and exercising his omnipotence kenotically.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The subject of this essay is the concept of omnisubjectivity, which is a form of omniscience introduced by Linda Zagzebski. I will analyse the concept in detail, its possible implications, objections and further developments and critically examine these.      Omnisubjectivity is the idea that God has constant access to our consciousness and all our mental states and that God can grasp all conscious creatures’ first-person perspectives at the same time as God has his own first- and third-person perspective. As a model for this Zagzebski uses human empathy, where she means that God has perfect total empathy which implies that God has constant access to all our mental states at the same time as God never forgets that those mental states aren’t God’s own.      Some of the possible implications that I bring up in this essay are that omnisubjectivity can explain how God hears prayers, how God’s love and providence can deepen, how God might or might not be affected by humans’ mental states, especially their failings and immoral actions and thoughts, and how God’s judgement can be perfectly fair. The objections concern Zagzebski’s use of empathy as a model for omnisubjectivity, the definition of perfection, God’s relation to time and what the first-person perspective contributes to. The developments concern Thomas Aquinas thought of God as everything’s first cause and christology.      This essay’s conclusion is that omnisubjectivity is, to a large extent, already a part of omniscience, but that it also contributes with new aspects and opens up for new questions and deepens the meaning of omniscience and God’s relation to his created creatures.

Cette thèse est consacrée à une analyse doctrinale et philologique du commentaire de Thomas d'Aquin sur la distinction 35 du premier Livre des Sentences de Pierre Lombard. Le sujet de cette distinction est la science que Dieu a de lui-même et des autres choses. La première partie de notre travail est une présentation conceptuelle et historique de l'arrière-fond de cette distinction. Elle est divisée en quatre étapes. Dans la première, nous nous sommes interrogé sur la science divine dans une perspective linguistique. Dans la seconde, nous avons discuté le rôle de l'autre, en tant qu'objet, dans la connaissance divine. Dans la troisième,nous avons étudié la synthèse chez Thomas des éléments aristotéliciens et pseudo-dionysiens, comme la notion d'actus purus et la notion d'esse. La quatrième étape, présente brièvement le contexte historique pour comprendre la méthode du commentaire des Sentences, ainsi qu'un bref panorama de l'Université de Paris au XIIIe siècle. La deuxième partie de la thèse offre une édition critique de la distinction 35. Après avoir collationné les témoins manuscrits selon les critères de la Commission Léonine, nous avons présenté le texte avec une introduction où nous établissons les différentes familles de la transmission textuelle. / This dissertation provides a doctrinal and philological study of Aquinas' Commentary on Book I, dist. 35 ofPeter Lombard's Sentences. At issue is the knowledge that God has of Himself and of the things other thanHimself. The first part of the dissertation investigates the conceptual and historical background of dist. 35. Itdivides into four sections. First, we approach the topic of the divine science from a linguistic perspective.Secondly, we examine the role of things other than God as objects of the divine knowledge. Thirdly, we drawattention to Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotelian and pseudo-Dionysian elements, namely the notions of actuspurus and esse. The fourth section provides an overview of the historical context and the XIIIth-centuryUniversity of Paris, in order to better understand the method of commentaries on the Sentences. The secondpart of the dissertation intends to provide, for the first time, the critical edition of Aquinas' Commentary onBook I, dist. 35 of Peter Lombard's Sentences. The manuscripts are collated according to LeonineCommission's criteria. The critical text is introduced by a philological study in which we investigate the textualtransmission of dist. 35 and we propose a stemma.

This thesis offers a constructive account of the doctrine of divine simplicity in Christian theology. In its methodology, the thesis aims to present this divine perfection as an implicate of the scriptural portrayal of God, to draw upon the insights and conceptual resources of Thomas Aquinas and various Reformed orthodox theologians, and to respond to some objections to divine simplicity. The focus on exegetical elaboration of biblical teaching and the use of Thomas and the Reformed orthodox distinguish this work from a number of recent accounts of God in both systematic theology and analytic philosophy. The case for God's simplicity is made by examining God's singularity, aseity, immutability, infinity, and act of creation in Holy Scripture and then tracing the ways in which these descriptions of God imply that he is (negatively) not composed of parts. Rather, he is (positively) actus purus and really identical with his own essence, existence, and attributes, each of which is identical with the whole being of the triune God considered under some aspect. In light of the constructive work, this study then addresses the three most pressing objections to divine simplicity: (1) that it denigrates God's revelation of his many attributes in the economy; (2) that it eliminates God's freedom in creating the world and acting in history; and (3) that it does not cohere with the doctrine of the Trinity.

This study examines the role of history in the writings of the English deists, a group of heterodox religious controversialists who were active from the last quarter of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its main sources are the published works of the deists and their opponents, but it also draws, where possible, on manuscript sources. Not all of the deists were English (one was Irish and another was of Welsh extraction), but the term ‘English Deists’ has been used on the grounds that the majority of deists were English and that they published overwhelmingly in England and in English. It shows that the deists not only disagreed with their orthodox opponents about the content of sacred history, but also about the relationship between religious truth and historical evidence. Chapter 1 explains the entwining of theology and history in early Christianity, how the connection between them was understood by early modern Christians, and how developments in orthodox learning set the stage for the appearance of deism in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a different line of argument which the deists employed against orthodox belief. Chapter 2 examines the argument that certain propositions were meaningless, and therefore neither true nor false irrespective of any historical evidence which could be marshalled in their support, as it was used by John Toland and Anthony Collins. Chapter 3 traces the argument that the actions ascribed to God in sacred history might be unworthy of his goodness, beginning with Samuel Clarke’s first set of Boyle Lectures and then progressing through the writings of Thomas Chubb, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and William Warburton. Chapter 4 charts the decline of the category of certain knowledge in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the rise of probability theory, and the effect of these developments on the deists’ views about the reliability of historical evidence. Chapter 5 is a case-study, which reads Anthony Collins’s Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) in light of the findings of the earlier chapters. Finally, a coda provides a conspectus of the state of the debate in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, focusing on the work of four writers: Peter Annet, David Hume, Conyers Middleton, and Edward Gibbon.

Cette étude souhaite contribuer à une meilleure connaissance et compréhension de l’idée de simplicité divine, qui signifie l’absence en Dieu de toute composition. Pièce centrale de la pensée théologique médiévale, elle fut redécouverte il y a 35 ans par des philosophes de tendance analytique, qui en contestèrent la cohérence. Elle est depuis lors l’objet d’un débat philosophique fourni, mais le détour par l’histoire de la philosophie est nécessaire pour dégager le réseau de concepts, d’arguments et de problèmes qui lui donne sens. Après avoir étudié la première élaboration de cette idée dans les textes antiques et patristiques, puis son traitement par Pierre Lombard à la veille du IVe concile de Latran de 1215, qui intègre pour la première fois la simplicité divine dans une profession de foi authentique du magistère, nous nous concentrons sur les œuvres de Bonaventure de Bagnoregio et de Thomas d’Aquin, qui accordent à cet attribut divin un rôle fondateur dans leur étude du mystère de Dieu. L’idée de simplicité divine s’y trouve sans cesse prise dans la dialectique de la ressemblance et de la dissemblance entre Créateur et créature. Tandis que Thomas associe de façon unilatérale la simplicité absolue à la transcendance de l’incréé, Bonaventure propose également des similitudes créées de la simplicité divine qui en favorisent l’intuition. Loin d’apparaître comme incohérente, l’idée de simplicité divine est un outil puissant pour ouvrir notre intelligence à un plan de réalité supérieur, certes mystérieux, mais néanmoins lumineux. / This study seeks to contribute to a better understanding and comprehension of the idea of divine simplicity, which means the absence in God of any composition. Cornerstone of medieval theological thinking, divine simplicity was rediscovered 35 years ago by philosophers of analytical leanings, who challenged its coherence. It has since formed the subject of abundant philosophical debate, however, the detour via the history of philosophy is necessary in order to draw out the network of concepts, arguments and issues, from where divine simplicity derives its meaning. After the study of the first development of this idea in ancient and patristic texts, and its treatment by Peter Lombard on the eve of the 4th Council of Lateran in 1215, which integrates for the first time divine simplicity in a genuin profession of faith of the magisterium, we shall focus on the works of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and Thomas Aquinas, who grant this divine attribute a founding role in the study of the mystery of God. The idea of divine simplicity keeps being comprised in the dialectics of similarity and dissimilarity between Creator and creature. While Aquinas associates in an unilateral way absolute simplicity and transcendence of the uncreated, Bonaventure offers also created resemblances of divine simplicity which favour its intuition. Far from appearing incoherent, the idea of divine simplicity is a powerful means to open our minds to a level of superior reality, indeed mysterious, but nevertheless radiant.