In Christian thought, God as a simple being is not divisible; God is simple, not composite, not made up of thing upon thing. In other words, the characteristics of God are not parts of God that together make God what he is. Because God is simple, his properties are identical with himself, and therefore God does not have goodness, but simply is goodness. In Christianity, divine simplicity does not deny that the attributes of God are distinguishable; so that it is not a contradiction of the doctrine to say, for example, that God is both just and merciful. In light of this idea, Thomas Aquinas for whose system of thought the idea of divine simplicity is important, wrote in Summa Theologiae that because God is infinitely simple, he can only appear to the finite mind as though he were infinitel