I’m back to reading, and hopefully writing. My current book is Francis Aveling’s The God of Philosophy. I’m currently writing… well, this!

How I even got a hold of this book is a story itself. All the way back in 2016, I was reading one of Edward Feser’s news updates. He occasionally puts out round-ups of news in theology and philosophy. He included a linked entry to Logos Bible, who was crowdfunding a 24 volume “Neo-Scholastic Theology and Philosophy Collection”. The game was, Logos would go through the hassle of digitizing these out-of-print tomes only if they received enough pre-orders.

I was a graduate student at Saint Louis University not yet halfway through my PhD classes, still unsure what my dissertation would be on, but confident it’d be theological. And whenever I’m doing theology, I always check to see what the Catholic Scholastics have already written. I’ve always found Scholasticism to be helpful, the only downside being that I annoy my Orthodox mentors (all of my academic mentors since undergrad have been Antiochian Orthodox). On a related note, I took a class with David Bentley Hart, and he gave me the nickname “Mini Manualist” when I organized my presentation like a Scholastic manual.

I knew whatever I would eventually write my dissertation on, I’d want to study the Scholastics for it. So I entered a pre-order on the Logos website. They wanted 100 pre-orders, and I was around #70.

It took 4 years. I forgot about it.

I wasn’t even living in Saint Louis anymore when I got a random email with a link to my brand new 24 volume collection of obscure Scholastic manuals. I thought it was a phishing scam at first.

But it was perfect timing. I was now writing my dissertation on the neuroscience of free will. And I found the best support I could ask for in Michael Maher’s (S.J.) Psychology Empirical and Rational, included in the collection. It’d take another 3 years to get the dissertation finished, and the theology chapter alone is 100 pages, but this one book in that Logos bundle became the backbone of my dissertation.

And that was only 1 out of the 24 books I still have sitting in my library on the cloud. What awaits within the other 23? That brings us to today, as I’m reading through Francis Aveling’s The God of Philosophy.

Aveling got me thinking about divine perfection. Perfection is such an important concept for God. But perfection is also a lot more complicated than we take for granted. This post is my attempt to organize my line of inquiry about divine perfection and share what I learned along the way.

When you read Scholastic theology, it’s only a matter of time before you hear God is perfect. Absolutely perfect. Let’s look at two standard Scholastic arguments about God that revolve around perfection.

Aveling dedicates some time in his book to discussing this first argument, which is a demonstration by contradiction that there could only be one absolutely perfect Being.

In short, there can only be one fully perfect being (which we call God, by the way) because two or more fully “perfect” beings would cause a contradiction: there must be a difference between the two. If there isn’t, then we were mistaken and we’re talking about the same being. If there are two beings, then they must have some difference to distinguish them, and that difference will introduce a limit somewhere, like “this one had a beginning, this one didn’t” or “this one has something the other one is missing”.

That first argument isn’t discussed enough to have its own name. This next one, though, is famous: Aquinas’ Fourth Way, sometimes called “the Argument from Degrees of Perfection”. Aquinas’ original text of the Fourth Way is short enough to quote in full:

So that’s enough to see how important “perfection” is as a concept. We need this concept to think about God. According to the Fourth Way, any perfection in Creation will lead us to God. And according to the first argument, we can know God is, well, God, by His perfection: He has all perfections, eminently, so there could only ever be One like God, and that’s God. There can only, logically, be One all-perfect Being.

But what does “perfect” mean, exactly? When we say something is “perfect”, we’re saying it’s the highest quality of goodness.

And here’s the problem: goodness is a transcendental, one of the few traits that applies to all kinds of things, literally all kinds. Anything can be “perfect” in its own way: a math equation, a van Gogh painting, a ballet, a home, a pet snake, a person, an idea, a relationship, an angel… Goodness applies across the entire spectrum of reality. Which is cool, especially if you’re a Platonist looking for ideal forms.

But that means “good”/“perfect” is one of the broadest concepts we have, and we ask it to pull a ton of weight in our words, thoughts, and prayers about God.

It’s so broad it risks becoming vague, a buzzword, a misunderstanding, or even an idol. But it’s important, and unavoidable.

Since perfection is a transcendental that can apply to anything, and shifts depending on what we’re talking about, it’s hard to give a pithy definition. And as we’ll see, the definition of perfection changes dramatically, depending on whether we’re talking about a creature or God.

If I had to define it with one word, I’d say “completion” is a pretty good synonym. But there’s a lot more we have to deal with before we can pack it up and be satisfied.

For creatures, both animate and inanimate, natural and artificial things, something is perfect when it expresses its nature as completely as possible, and without flaws. As Aveling wrote, "By perfection, we ordinarily mean the total completion of a nature…" (pg 168)

When we’re talking about God, however, “perfection” circles around two of His unique traits:

Of course, we could expound on either definition and refine them for the rest of time. But I think these definitions align well enough with common sense and get us on the right track.

Why does “perfection” get redefined between creatures and God? It’s because created things are limited, God is not.

“Perfection” is relative to nature.

As we focus our attention on different things, what counts as “perfect” shifts to match up with each of them. If you change the essence, what counts as “perfect” is going to change alongside it, in proportion.

The definition of perfection changes so much between creatures and God because it reflects the difference in being between each kind of creature and God. And one quick way to express these differences is that each creature has distinct limits that distinguish them from each other. And all creatures have limits, but God does not.

To be a created thing is to exist as an individual with a particular form and particular matter. Both the form and matter act as limits: they define where one thing ends and other things begin.

Form and matter act as limits, but provide definition. Form and matter are double-edged swords, what Simone Weil would’ve called “metaxu” (a Greek word, μεταξύ, originally meaning between or amongst): things that divide and unite in the same action. All creatures have limits. We always think it’s bad to have limits. Nobody wants to be limited, but limits are good too: they make us who we are.

Each thing can only have one essence, and that essence defines everything it does. So a thing can either fulfill its essence or fail. Each thing has clear defining limits built into its nature. When something expresses its limited nature as best it possibly can, as flawlessly as it can, we say it’s perfect.

The one being that doesn’t have any of these limits is God. As the creator, God is above essences and matter and all the limits that come with them. But wait… we just said that we need form and matter to define things. So if there’s no form or matter to distinguish God, what else is left to define Him by? How would we even know Him when we encounter Him?

One aspect we could look for is His power. We’re talking about God here, so He should have power, and it should be inimitable.

So let’s think through what it means to be powerful. Power manifests in two ways:

So, if we’re looking for God, we’re looking for a being with the absolute maximum in both kinds of power:

But compare how we’re defining God’s power here with how we defined God’s perfection earlier.

They’re the same definitions.

That’s a hint there’s a real connection between power, being, and perfection, since we find them converging in God. When we talk about God’s perfection, we tend to talk about His power. Lucky for us, His power is a great way to identify Him.

A few additional thoughts on both kinds of divine power.

God doesn’t exist like we do, because He has internal power that a creature never could. Following the logic of The Fourth Way, we arrive at a being perfect beyond any individual perfection we encounter.

In technical terms, I like how John Deely describes God’s existence: essences of created things are “relatively absolute” but God alone is “absolutely absolute” and God is the only being who could ever possibly exist in that mode. God has a unique mode of existence all to Himself.

God’s perfection is tied to His independence. He alone exists without relying on anything else. Hence why Aquinas, and many others, say God is “pure act”, “the Uncaused Cause”; He has no potential that needs to be activated by an external cause. His existence is already fully active, and fully good. He’s perfected simply by being who He is.

The second aspect of divine perfection is that external power. We might call it creative potency.

There’s a maxim about cause-and-effect in Aquinas, which he probably inherited from Aristotle, that goes like this: the more powerful the cause, the greater the effects created from less effort. So, the most powerful (and most perfect) cause will create maximum effect with minimum effort.

So, if we’re looking for a being of absolute perfection, we’re looking for a being who can create the greatest good with the least effort. We’re looking for a creator of the universe and everything within it.

One creative power that can account for everything from quarks to the human intellect to TON 618 (one of the largest black holes in the known universe). We’re looking for a being with the power to create all these things, so it must be a strong power indeed.

Given all the variety of beings we encounter in the world, the power behind it must be creative indeed, and much more potent than the creative power of these individual things. And since this being should be totally independent anyway, we should expect it to create without need of anything else.

So one way we know God is by his unparalleled creativity as a cause. It makes sense, then, why so many people first come to know God as the Creator.

And actually, the implication of that cause-and-effect maxim is even stronger: we should find one being along who can produce absolute perfection by doing nothing at all. Maximum good from zero effort.

How do we make sense of that? If we’re still thinking about the external power to cause Creation, this begins sounding counterintuitive.

“How can anything, even God, create without any effort or intention?”

Are we forced to say that God creates unintentionally? Is He like Maturin, the turtle god from Stephen King’s novels, who can’t control his creative power and projectile vomits the universe into being?

Not so fast. The Scholastic image of God doesn’t lead us to Maturin. It makes more sense once we realize that the logic of this maxim is leading us back to God’s own being, culminating in His internal power.

God Himself is already that absolute perfection. He already exists as the maximum good, and He doesn’t have to put forward any effort or intention to maintain His own existence. So God could put forth zero effort and intend to create nothing else, yet absolute perfection would still be there. God can just exist and the maximum good will still exist through Him.

If you can’t imagine a God like that, you need to work on your idea of God.

But notice something strange that just happened as we followed the logic: the cause-and-effect maxim bled through both God’s power in creation, and God’s power in His own existence. We started by considering God’s “external” power in Creation, then pushed the logic to its maximum and ended up back in His “internal” power. It seems to imply there’s some link between these powers. I might follow that thread some other time.

While we’re thinking about God’s “external” creativity, we should also consider what kind of cause God is. Thankfully, Scholastic thought already has the tools to get precise about this.

God is what’s known as a “eminent” cause, meaning His perfection is a higher quality than all the kinds of perfections we encounter throughout creation. The same applies to all of His other traits. There’s a real connection between God and His creations, and I love St. Maximus the Confessor’s expression for this connection: creatures are “λόγοι”, they’re “little words of The Word”.

But no creation can ever fully express the divine creativity that gives it being. God doesn’t share the same form with any creation, which would be the same as saying God is univocal with creation. If God was a univocal cause, He’d need to be the sum of all created things: a being with one form pressing that same form onto something else.

That would get incoherent, fast. God would need to contain within Himself the forms of a quark, a rock, a snake, a human mind, a black hole, and so on, in order to create any of those things. But how do you mix all these forms together in one being? How do you mix even just two forms together? Do you end up with something like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly? A giant misshapen amalgamation of all things, wadded together into an ugly blob? Probably.

That’s why it’s important to hold that God’s creativity is analogical to creation, not univocal. Creation is analogical to God: similar in a way, proportional, but still different. We might say that each creature is a “living metaphor” of God. He doesn’t share any forms with creation. Hence, Aveling wrote that,

Instead, His existence AND His creative power are somehow higher than even forms, in such a way that He can create forms without becoming them. The closest analogy we have is how the mind thinks of an idea. We can think of a fly without becoming a fly in any way (thankfully, unlike Jeff Goldblum in The Fly).

The same holds true for God, except He can do more than think about it, He can make it a reality, all without needing to become something else. And that reinforces what we said earlier about God: he’s in His own class of existence, “absolutely absolute” and super-potent.

This is why Aveling, along with the rest of Orthodoxy, concludes that:

By now, we have some clarity on what “perfection” really means, yet we now also know that the concept, since it’s analogical, can only go so far. Like all other creations, natural and artificial, this concept has limits even though its a transcendental, one of the broadest concepts we can possibly have. We ask for a definition, and we get one, but a definition is a kind of limit.

Yet, if all things in our universe are supposed to be living metaphors for God, things that reflect a divine idea, then are all these limits to our words and existence really a bad thing? Perhaps the limits were part of the divine plan, and were meant to be good.

The purpose of a metaphor is to point towards something outside of it. A metaphor is a subtle reference to something outside of itself. A good metaphor is one that you don’t get caught up in. Perhaps it’s not so different with all the perfections we encounter in our world; even a limited perfect thing points to the One beyond it.

In fact, if Aquinas’ Fourth Way is correct, then becoming our most perfect self will make us point to God most perfectly. We can better appreciate, then, why we should strive to “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” - Matthew 5:48