Perfection - Ontology and Theology

Ontology and Theology

The Greek philosopher Anaximander described the world as "endless" (apeiron), Xenophanes — as "the greatest" (megistos). But while they ascribed great qualities to the world, they did not regard it as perfect.

Only Parmenides seems to have considered existence to be "tetelesmenon" ("finished"); and Melissos, his successor in the Eleatic school, said that existence "was entirely" ("pan esti"). Thus both saw perfection in existence; true existence was one, constant, immutable. Moreover, Parmenides thought the world to be finite, limited in all directions, and like a sphere — which was a mark of its perfection.

Parmenides' view was embraced to some extent by Plato. He thought that the world was the work of a good Demiurge, and that this was why order and harmony prevailed in the world. The world was the best, the most beautiful, perfect. It had a perfect shape (spherical) and a perfect motion (circular).

But Plato said nothing about the Demiurge architect-of-the-world himself being perfect. And understandably so, for perfection implied finitude, limits; whereas it was the world, not its creator, that had limits. A similar view was held by Aristotle: the world could be perfect, but God could not.

Only the pantheist Stoics held the divinity to be perfect — precisely because they identified it with the world. Cicero wrote in De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) that the world "encompasses... within itself all beings... And what could be more nonsensical than denying perfection to an all-embracing being... Besides the world, there is no thing that does not lack something and that is harmonious, perfect and finished in every respect..."

At a certain moment, Greek philosophy became bound up with the religion of the Christians: the abstract concept of first cause became linked with the religious concept of God; the primum movens became identified with the Creator, the absolute with the divine Person. Features of an absolute existence were discovered in the Person of the Creator: He was immutable, timeless. And absolute existence took on the attributes of a person: it was good, omnipotent, omnipresent. Christian theology united the features of the first cause in Aristotle's Metaphysics with those of the Creator in the Book of Genesis. But the attributes of God did not include perfection, for a perfect being must be finite; only of such a being might one say that it lacked nothing.

There was another reason for the denial, to God, of perfection — in a branch of Christian theology that was under the influence of Plotinus. In this view, the absolute from which the world derived could not be grasped in terms of human concepts, even the most general and transcendent. Not only was that absolute not matter, it was not spirit either, nor idea; it was superior to these. It exceeded any description or praise; it was incomprehensible and ineffable; it was beyond all that we may imagine — including perfection.

Medieval Christian philosophy held that the concept of perfection might describe Creation, but was not appropriate to describe God. Saint Thomas Aquinas, indicating that he was following Aristotle, defined a perfect thing as one that "possesses that of which, by its nature, it is capable." Also (Summa Theologica): "That is perfect, which lacks nothing of the perfection proper to it." Thus there were, in the world, things perfect and imperfect, more perfect and less perfect. God permitted imperfections in creation when they were necessary for the good of the whole. And for man it was natural to go by degrees from imperfection to perfection.

Duns Scotus understood perfection still more simply and mundanely: "Perfection is that which it is better to have than not to have." It was not an attribute of God but a property of creation: all things partook of it to a greater or lesser degree. A thing's perfection depended on what sort of perfection it was eligible for. In general, that was perfect which had attained the fullness of the qualities possible for it. Hence "whole" and "perfect" meant more or less the same ("totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem").

This was a teleological concept, for it implied an end (goal or purpose). God created things that served certain purposes, created even those purposes, but He himself did not serve any purpose. Since God was not finite, He could not be called perfect: for the concept of perfection served to describe finite things. Perfection was not a theological concept, but an ontological one, because it was a feature, in some degree, of every being. The 9th-century thinker Paschasius Radbertus wrote: "Everything is the more perfect, the more it resembles God." Still, this did not imply that God himself was perfect.

The concept of perfection, as an attribute of God, entered theology only in modern times, through René Descartes — and in the plural, as the "perfections" of God.

After Descartes, the concept of perfection as a principal concept in philosophy was upheld by other great 17th-century thinkers. In Benedict Spinoza's philosophy, however, there was no personal God, and perfection became a property of — even a synonym for — the existence of reality (that is, for the essence of things).

Leibniz wrote: "As M. Descartes states, existence itself is perfection." Leibniz added: "Perfection, I call any simple quality, if it is positive and absolute, such that, if it expresses something, it does so without limits."

At the same time, Leibniz also construed perfection, in his Monadology, in an utterly different way: "Only that is perfect which possesses no limits, that is, only God." This concept would last out the entire 17th century. Subsequently Immanuel Kant would describe perfection as "omnitudo realitatis" ("the omnitude of reality"). Thus perfection, which during the Middle Ages could be a property of any individual being, in 17th-century philosophy became as well, and indeed preeminently, a property of God.

Leibniz's pupil and successor, Christian Wolff, took up this concept of perfection — but with a difference. Wolff ascribed perfection not to being as a whole, but once again to its individual constituents. He gave, as examples, an eye that sees faultlessly, and a watch that runs faultlessly. He also distinguished variants — perfectio simplex and composita, primaria and secundaria — and differentiated the magnitude of perfection (magnitudo perfectionis).

Wolff's pupil, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, derived perfection from rules, but anticipated their collisions (regularum collisio) leading to exceptions (exceptio) and limiting the perfection of things. Baumgarten distinguished perfection simplex and composita, interna and externa, transcendentalis and accidentalis; and, positing so broad a construction, he arrived at the conclusion that "everything is perfect."

In short, Wolff and his pupils had returned to the ontological concept of perfection that the Scholastics had used. The theological concept of perfection had lived only from Descartes to Leibniz, in the 17th century.

Thanks to Wolff's school, the concept of perfection lasted in Germany through the 18th century. In other western countries, however, especially France and Britain, in that century the concept of perfection was already in decline. It was ignored by the French Grande Encyclopédie.

The history of the concept of perfection had undergone great evolutions — from "Nothing in the world is perfect", to "Everything is perfect"; and from "Perfection is not an attribute of God", to "Perfection is an attribute of God."

With Christian Wolff's school, every thing had become perfect. This was a singular moment in the history of the ontological concept of perfection; and soon thereafter, that history came to an end.