Perfection is the attribute behind all the others: God as the greatest conceivable being, each good quality maxed out. Two problems surface. If God is the *standard* of perfection, nothing else can be perfect in the same sense; but a *perfect maker* should produce perfect work, and creation is not perfect. And the maxed-out qualities resist composition — each proposed fix must show it can reconcile two of them without weakening a third. If none can, the ontological argument's "a perfect being is possible" premise is blocked at the point of entry.

*What the tradition holds.* Classical theology assigns God the meta-attribute of perfection: that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-conceived, with each great-making property held to apply to maximum degree (Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998), II; (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Mark C. Murphy, 2017). Perfect-being theology functions as the methodological engine producing the attributes the chapter has examined ([§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>)). The doctrine binds *perfectus* to *completus*: that which lacks nothing it could have, that which has every property the having of which would constitute a greater being (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.4; (Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998), V. On the most developed contemporary refinement, perfection is the meta-attribute by which the great-making properties are selected and assembled: each property is included if having it constitutes greatness; the maximal assembly is the divine essence (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Hoffman, Joshua, and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, 2002); (Jeff Speaks, 2018). Perfection is also, on the tradition, the *standard* of perfection in lower beings: a creature is perfect insofar as it participates in the divine perfection, which it does in the analogical sense Aquinas's *analogia entis* develops (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.4.3; Cajetan; (Rudi A. te Velde, 1995); (Steven A. Long, 2011). The doctrine preserves the believer's intuition that God is what greatness names by binding the standard and the bearer in one being: God is perfect by being what perfection is.

*What cannot be answered.* Five questions draw the doctrine up short of what it can answer, once *perfect* is held to the form structural reasoning works in. What sits underneath them is structural, the bind between standard and bearer: if God is the standard of perfection, then perfection is by-reference-to-God; if God is also the perfect creator, then the creator's perfection should propagate into creation.

**Q1.** *If God is a perfect maker, why is creation not perfect?* If God is the *standard* of perfection (that against which all perfection is measured) then perfection is by-reference-to-God, and nothing outside God can be perfect *in the same sense*. A perfect creator need not produce a creation perfect in every respect: the aim may be a finite order, valuable freedom, or goods requiring vulnerability and development. The sharper question is whether this particular creation is proportionate to the creator's stated aims and whether its evils are compatible with perfect goodness and competence. No simple propagation principle settles that issue. The classical analogical move (creation is perfect "in its way," not God's way) either collapses into homonymy (the two senses share only a name) or smuggles in a univocal core (in which case the exclusivity horn revives). The *analogia entis* machinery Cajetan; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.13; (Rudi A. te Velde, 1995) runs into exactly this dilemma; it does not escape it. Hartshorne's dual-transcendence doctrine (Charles Hartshorne, 1941) dissolves the standard/bearer dilemma at the level of the framing: God transcends all creatures in the abstract pole's invariant excellence, and surpasses God's own prior states in the concrete pole's growing actualization. Neither horn of Q1 applies straightforwardly, because the abstract pole is not a bearer that propagates perfection into creation, and the concrete pole is not a static standard but a growing excellence that always exceeds its prior state. The concern here is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) presses: the two forms of transcendence (invariant excellence over creatures; growing excellence over prior states) are attributable to one subject only through the relation between the poles, and [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) shows that relation requires the structural conditions either pole was framed to escape. The single perfection-predicate is borne, if at all, by a subject whose pole-relation instantiates those conditions rather than escaping them. Swinburne's theistic personalism offers a different handle on Q1 (Richard Swinburne, 1979); (Richard Swinburne, 2004): divine perfection is not the metaphysical attribute of a being at the apex of the *analogia entis* but the feature that makes theism the simplest explanatory hypothesis. An infinitely powerful, omniscient, free person is the simplest causal explanation for the universe's existence because a person without physical complexity, spatial location, or temporal constraints on the will is the least arbitrary explanatory posit. On Swinburne's account, *perfect* is as much a methodological as an ontological term: it names the simplicity-of-nature that makes the theistic hypothesis maximally parsimonious. The concern for the Swinburnian recasting is whether simplicity-of-nature for an explanatory agent escapes the chapter's analysis of what any possible explanatory ground requires.

**Q2.** *How do God's maxed-out qualities fit together, if reconciling any two weakens a third?* Perfect-being theology assembles God's attributes by selecting each great-making property and holding that God has each to maximum degree. Whether the maxima compose coherently into a single being has been the central battleground of the literature: Mackie (J. L. Mackie, 1955), Sobel (Jordan Howard Sobel, 2004), and Oppy (Oppy, Graham, 1995); (Oppy, Graham, 2006) press the incompossibility cases. These include: omnipotence vs. omniscience (the freedom-and-foreknowledge problem); omnibenevolence vs. omnipotence (the problem of evil); immutability vs. responsiveness (the prayer problem); aseity vs. relatedness; and the stones-too-heavy-to-lift classics. The classical replies attempt either to refine the great-making properties so that the alleged incompatibilities dissolve (Plantinga, A., 1974) on free will and foreknowledge; (Stump, Eleonore, 2010) on suffering and love or to argue that the apparent incompatibilities reflect inadequate understandings of the properties (Robert Merrihew Adams, 1999); (Mark C. Murphy, 2017). Some refinements relax a traditional property; others clarify its content or deny a contested entailment. The dialectical task is to test each repair rather than assume that every reconciliation is a weakening: the maximally-knowing being on the open-theist refinement does not know what creatures will freely do until they do it; the maximally-loving being on Stump's refinement is constrained by what creaturely natures can receive; the maximally-good being on the free-will-defense refinement permits suffering its omnipotence could prevent. The composition problem is what perfect-being theology has been engaging at every chapter of this book: the repairs surveyed here each purchase composition by relaxation, each relaxation moves the bearer further from what the engine was designed to produce, and no repair has yet composed the maxima without such loss. Hartshorne's dipolar account addresses the composition problem directly: the great-making properties do compose for the dipolar God, because the abstract pole handles the invariant, necessary great-making dimensions (formal omniscience of necessary truths, necessary existence, eternal simplicity) while the concrete pole handles the relational and growth-admitting dimensions: responsive knowing of contingents, cumulative benevolence, aesthetic agency. On the dipolar account, the apparent incompatibilities that drive the classical composition problem dissolve, because each horn of each incompatibility (immutability vs. responsiveness; aseity vs. relatedness; impassibility vs. love) is assigned to a different pole. The concern here is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) presses, and it is the convergence point of the pattern traced from §[§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>)–6.7.4: the relation between the poles is the directed crossing [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) analyzes, requiring an ordering between abstract and concrete aspects (T), a substantial carrier of both (Φ), and the relational structure in which they are aspects of one being (S). The composition problem the dipolar God was meant to solve reappears at the level of the composite. Swinburne's cumulative-case framework (Richard Swinburne, 1979); (Richard Swinburne, 2004) reframes the composition question: the relevant test for the composition of great-making properties is not metaphysical co-instantiation in a single infinite being but whether the composite makes theism simpler and more explanatorily powerful than the naturalistic alternative. Swinburne argues that a perfectly free, omniscient, omnipotent person is a simpler hypothesis than the initial state of a purely physical universe, because simplicity for a person is the absence of constraints on the will, and a person unconstrained by physical complexity, spatial location, or temporal structure is as simple as any explanatory posit can be. The concern here is whether the absence of physical constraints constitutes the kind of simplicity relevant to the chapter's analysis: a person unconstrained by physical structure still requires the structural conditions that make personhood (agency, knowledge, will) coherent predicates.

**Q3.** *What is the most loving or most beautiful, if there is no greatest such thing to reach?* Some great-making properties admit a clear notion of maximum (e.g., omnipotence as the property of being able to do every possible thing). Others do not: maximal beauty, maximal love, maximal wisdom. What is the maximum of these? Morris (Thomas V. Morris, 1991), Murphy (Mark C. Murphy, 2017), and Plantinga (Plantinga, A., 1974), ch. 10 defend the notion of *intuitive maxima*: the maximum is whatever the great-making property's content requires; if the content does not admit a maximum, the property is not strictly great-making. The concern here is that this defense secures the maxima by stipulating that any property without a clear maximum is excluded from the great-making list, which converts the engine from *select the great-making properties and maximize them* into *select the maximizable properties and call those the great-making ones*. The exclusion is the structural concern: a perfect being on the resulting account is perfect in the maximizable dimensions only, which leaves open whether the bearer is perfect *simpliciter* or perfect *in those respects in which perfection admits a maximum*.

**Q4.** *How can the greatest possible being hold every perfection, if each one needs conditions God is said to lack?* Each preceding section of this chapter has examined one classical attribute and located its structural conditions outside the divine being on the classical bundle. The engine that produces the attribute list is the perfect-being engine. The concern here at the level of the engine is that the very procedure for selecting the divine attributes produces, when run consistently, an attribute set the bearer cannot bear: the great-making property *necessary existence* requires structural necessity, the great-making property *omnipresence* requires position, the great-making property *omniscience* requires tensed knowledge, the great-making property *creative power* requires directed transition. The engine is faithful to what greatness names; the bearer is defined as lacking the structural conditions of every great-making property the engine produces. Running the engine to completion is what produced the chapter's inversions. Hartshorne agrees that running the classical perfect-being engine to completion produces contradictions, and proposes an alternative dipolar engine: start not with the negation of all structural conditions but with a bifurcated attribution (invariant formal excellence to the abstract pole, maximal responsive creativity to the concrete pole) and let each pole's great-making properties be selected relative to its pole's structural register. The dipolar engine is designed to produce a being that does not generate the chapter's inversions; it selects its great-making properties with the composition problem in view. The concern here is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) settles: a being with two poles standing in irreducible relation is, on structural analysis, a dyad (two relata in a directed crossing) and [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) shows that crossing obtains only within T, S, and Φ. The dipolar engine produces an entity that instantiates the structural conditions rather than one beyond them.

**Q5.** *By what standard is God perfect — God's own, or one beyond God?* The tradition has resisted this move on the ground that any standard external to God would be a constraint on God, which is incompatible with aseity. The contemporary literature has pressed alternatives. Murphy (Mark C. Murphy, 2017) and Speaks (Jeff Speaks, 2018) defend a methodological perfect-being theology that takes the great-making properties as what the religious life requires of a worship-worthy being, rather than as what the bearer is the standard of. The *Euthyphro*-style move locates the standard in something other than God's will: Adams (Robert Merrihew Adams, 1999), Murphy (Mark C. Murphy, 2002), and Wielenberg (Erik J. Wielenberg, 2014) explore the options for moral perfection. The concern here is that each move that locates the standard outside God admits the structural feature the classical doctrine refused: a standard outside God is a feature of Reality not identical with God, which is what aseity denies. The methodological refinements register, rather than resolve, the structural concern: the standard against which the great-making properties are great is a structural feature of what greatness *is*, and *what greatness is* is a fact about the structure of value within Reality rather than a property of any one bearer.

*What is required.* Worked through, the five pressures spell out what the predicate *perfect* actually depends on. Perfection is either by-reference-to-the-bearer (in which case nothing else can be perfect in the same sense, and the perfect maker's perfection cannot propagate into creation) or by-reference-to-a-standard (in which case the standard is structural and the bearer is at most an instance of it). The analogical reply collapses into homonymy or smuggles in a univocal core. The surveyed reconciliations compose the great-making properties only by relaxation, and each relaxation moves the bearer further from what the engine was designed to produce. Maximal degrees are specifiable for some great-making properties and not others, and the resulting engine selects the maximizable properties rather than the great-making ones. Running the engine to completion produces an attribute set the bearer cannot bear, since the structural conditions of each great-making property are what the bearer is defined as lacking. Locating the standard outside the bearer admits the structural feature aseity refused. After the five pressures, perfection remains a value-laden completeness notion whose compossibility and standard require defense. It cannot be reduced without argument to the modal property of being necessary.

*What is inverted.* The inversion can relocate one aspect of perfection — unconditioned structural completeness — to Nature. But perfection also concerns value, excellence, and fitting activity; necessity alone does not entail any of these. Nature is *perfectus* in the etymological sense of *thoroughly made*, *completed*, but the completion is not the maker's act on a making; it is the modal-structure fact that the conditions of any possible world are the conditions of any possible world. The engine that produced the chapter's inversions produced them faithfully: each great-making property the engine selected pointed at a structural feature the engine then attributed to a bearer defined as lacking it. The inversions returned each property to its structural home. Placed back in the structure that hosts it, *perfect* names the necessity of Nature: the only feature of Reality that cannot have been otherwise, because it is the condition of *otherwise* obtaining at all. Perfection's facet of that necessity is completeness: not the structure's reach across worlds, nor its constancy across time, nor its answering to no higher law, but its lacking nothing it could have, since there is no further condition outside T, S, and Φ for the structure to be missing. The standard of perfection and the bearer of perfection are identical on the structural reading: Nature is what cannot fail to be what it is, and what cannot fail to be what it is is the standard against which lesser perfections are measured. The aporia the engine produces at the level of God dissolves at the level of Nature: there is no separation of standard and bearer to begin with, and the *analogia entis* is a vertical reach within a single structure rather than a relation between two beings of different kinds.

The analysis carries a direct implication for the modal ontological argument. Plantinga's (Plantinga, A., 1974) S5 argument moves from the possibility of maximal greatness to its necessary instantiation in every world: if it is possible that maximal greatness is instantiated, and maximal greatness includes necessary existence, then by S5 maximal greatness is instantiated in every possible world. The chapter's pressures challenge the compossibility of a broad classical-theist bundle. Plantinga's modal ontological argument itself defines maximal excellence through omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection, with maximal greatness adding necessary existence; atemporality, impassibility, and immutability are additional doctrines. Objections to the broader bundle therefore do not by themselves establish that Plantinga's narrower definition is impossible. If the bundle is not possibly co-instantiated, Plantinga's first premise is blocked at the point of entry, and the S5 inference does not run. The result is carried forward at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>).


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← [6.2.3 Infinity](<6.2.3 Infinity.md>) | [6.3 Aseity and Modal Standing](<6.3 Aseity and Modal Standing.md>) →
