Beatitude is God's perfect blessedness: the fullness of self-sufficient joy in which God, lacking nothing, wants nothing it does not already have. The pressure is that the same tradition calls God a lover who wills the good of creatures, a giver whose goodness pours outward, a will that creates what need not have been. Desire and hope ordinarily concern an unattained good, but willing and giving need not arise from lack. The classical distinction between desire and beneficent willing is therefore central rather than something the section may erase. And once God is said to will goods that the world's history may not deliver, a further question opens that the doctrine cannot close: can such a being be satisfied?

*What the tradition holds.* Classical theology assigns God beatitude: the perfect and self-sufficient blessedness of a being that possesses the complete good and so lacks nothing it could want. The doctrine inherits the eudaimonist conception of blessedness as the self-sufficient life (*makária*, the life of one who, having every good, needs nothing further; Aristotle, *Nicomachean Ethics* -(Aristotle, (4th c. BCE) 1984), I.7, X.6–8) and locates that life in God as its unqualified instance. Aquinas treats the attribute directly: beatitude (the perfect good proper to an intellectual nature) belongs to God supremely and essentially, one with the act of divine self-understanding, so that God is not made blessed by anything beyond it but *is* its own beatitude, with every other beatitude contained eminently in the divine (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.26). The doctrine binds beatitude to the attributes the chapter has already examined: a being that is *actus purus*, with no unrealized potential (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.3.1), and *perfectus* in the sense of *completus*, lacking nothing the having of which would make it greater (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.4), is a being for which nothing is left to want; its blessedness is not the satisfaction of a desire but the eternal possession of the good it is. Yet the same tradition holds that God loves (wills the good of the creature; Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.20) and that the divine goodness is diffusive, pouring outward in creation. The contemporary literature divides on whether blessedness so understood survives as a coherent predicate of a personal God. Theistic personalism takes God to be everlasting rather than timeless, a person whose perfect well-being is lived through time (Richard Swinburne, 1977); (Richard Swinburne, 2004); (Mullins, R. T., 2016); the dipolar tradition assigns invariant blessedness to an abstract pole and a growing, world-enriched joy to a concrete pole (Charles Hartshorne, 1941); (Charles Hartshorne, 1948); and the account of love as union and desire for the good of the beloved (Stump, Eleonore, 2010) makes the beloved's good internal to the lover's own flourishing. The position the classical doctrine, fully stated, holds is that God's blessedness is complete, invariant, and underived: nothing the creature does or fails to do adds to or subtracts from the divine joy, which is God's eternal possession of its own infinite goodness.

*What cannot be answered.* Five questions take the doctrine to the edge of what it can answer once blessedness is recast in the form structural reasoning operates in. Underneath them the concern is structural: blessedness, in the sense that distinguishes it from bare self-identity, is the *satisfaction* of a being that could have wanted, and wanting, satisfaction, and the rest that follows attainment are features of substances oriented through Time toward states not yet actual.

**Q1.** *How does a being that lacks nothing desire, will, or hope?* To desire is to be oriented toward a good not yet possessed; a temporal act of willing an end may be directed at a state of affairs that does not yet obtain; to hope is to lean toward a future not yet actual. Each predicate carries, in its ordinary sense, a reference to the not-yet: the structure Time names ([§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>)). The classical reply removes the not-yet: God does not desire the good as absent but possesses it eternally, and God's will is not a motion toward an end but the eternal act by which the end is willed (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.20). The concern here is that this empties the predicates of the content that made them predicates of a *blessed* being rather than of a bare fact: a timeless will needs an account of contingent objects and effects, but willing another's good need not involve frustrated desire, and joy need not be analyzed solely as desire-satisfaction. The orientation-toward-the-not-yet-actual that *desire* and *hope* name is the structural feature Time carries; the doctrine keeps those words only by removing it, and the non-deficient willing that remains must be specified without them.

**Q2.** *Can a being that lacks nothing want anything — and if it cannot want, can it love or create?* Perfection in the classical sense is *completus*: God has every property the having of which would constitute a greater being, and lacks nothing it could have (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.4). Pressed from the property-side to the want-side, completeness entails that God lacks no state of affairs it could want, because wanting is the relation of a being to a good it does not have. But a being that is *actus purus* has no potency to be actualized (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.3.1), and wanting is precisely the potency to be moved by an unattained good. The reply that God *wills* the good of creatures without *wanting* it (willing as pure act, not as desire; Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.20) preserves plenitude by distinguishing the willing of an end from the wanting of it. The concern here is that the distinction, pressed, leaves creation and love without the feature that made them acts of a blessed will: to will the creature's good and bring about a contingent state requires intentional direction, but it is not therefore wanting under another name. A beneficent agent can choose an outcome without needing it for completion. The dilemma is therefore conditional: either God wants the goods it wills, and is not complete, or the willing is non-deficient beneficence, in which case the doctrine still owes an account of why *this* outcome is chosen that never borrows the orientation wanting supplies.

**Q3.** *Can God be satisfied?* Three commitments the tradition holds together generate the question. First, God loves universally — wills the good of every creature (Aquinas, *ST* -(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.20). Second, on orthodox eschatology, not every creature attains the good God wills for it; some are finally lost. Third, God's blessedness is complete, invariant, and impassible — not added to or diminished by what creatures do ([§6.3.3](<6.3.3 Immutability.md>), [§6.3.4](<6.3.4 Impassibility.md>)). Add the contestable value-theoretic premise that divine love includes a desire whose satisfaction contributes to divine well-being. Classical theorists reject that premise, and traditions also differ over whether God wills every creature's final salvation in the same sense. The three commitments and the premise cannot all hold. If some willed good is finally unattained, a being whose blessedness tracked its loves would not be fully satisfied, but the doctrine says God is fully blessed. If God is fully satisfied regardless of whether its loves attain their goods, then the willed goods are not goods God wanted attained, and universal love is emptied. And if the divine satisfaction varied with the world's history (full where its loves are attained, less than full where they are not), beatitude would change, which immutability and impassibility forbid. The trilemma therefore arises only under a desire-satisfaction model plus a specific account of universal salvific will; it is not internal to every doctrine of beatitude. The trilemma is the beatitude-register form of the composition pressure [§6.2.4](<6.2.4 Perfection.md>) develops: perfect love, perfect blessedness, and invariance do not compose without relaxing one of them.

**Q4.** *Which commitment gives way?* The tradition's resources for the trilemma are systematic, and each resolves it by relaxing one of the three commitments. The atemporal-eternalist holds that God's beatitude is timeless, so there is no before-and-after of satisfaction to vary, but this relaxes the sense in which God wills goods *for* a history whose outcomes are not yet actual, the pressure of Q1. The pure-act Thomist holds that *satisfied* and *unsatisfied* apply to God not univocally but only analogically, but this concedes that beatitude-as-enjoyment is not literally predicated, and the analogical move faces the homonymy-or-univocal-core dilemma [§6.2.4](<6.2.4 Perfection.md>) presses (Q1). The open theist and the theistic personalist hold that God's blessedness genuinely tracks the world and can be less than it would otherwise be God grieves what is lost; (Richard Swinburne, 1977); (Richard Swinburne, 2004); (Mullins, R. T., 2016), but this relaxes immutability and impassibility ([§6.3.3](<6.3.3 Immutability.md>), [§6.3.4](<6.3.4 Impassibility.md>)) and concedes a temporal, affected God. The dipolar theist assigns invariant blessedness to the abstract pole and world-tracking joy to the concrete pole (Charles Hartshorne, 1941); (Charles Hartshorne, 1948), but, as [§6.3.4](<6.3.4 Impassibility.md>) and [§6.2.4](<6.2.4 Perfection.md>) press, the two poles are one subject only through the directed crossing between them ([§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>)), which imports the structural conditions the abstract pole was meant to escape. The Reformed-Edwardsian holds that God's last end is the manifestation of its glory (Jonathan Edwards, (1765) 1989), so that the finally lost manifest divine justice and no willed good goes unattained, but this relaxes universal love, narrowing what God wills the good of. The Aristotelian-Thomist returns beatitude to its eudaimonist root: God's blessedness is the self-contemplation of its own goodness, *makária* in the strict sense, and does not consist in the attainment of any creaturely good, but this relaxes the diffusiveness of the good and the love of Q2, severing blessedness from the willing of creaturely goods altogether. Every exit pays in one of the three commitments; none holds all three.

**Q5.** *By what is God blessed — by its own goodness, or by the attainment of what it wills?* The eudaimonist root makes blessedness self-sufficient: God is *autarkēs*, blessed in the contemplation of its own complete goodness, needing nothing outside itself. The relational commitments make blessedness include the good of what God loves: a God whose joy is wholly indifferent to whether its loves attain their goods does not love them in the sense the believer's life rests on. If blessedness is self-sufficient, then creation, love, and the creature's good add nothing to it, and the diffusiveness of the good is a giving that costs and returns the giver nothing: beatitude sealed off from the history it is said to govern. If blessedness includes the attainment of willed goods, then it depends on what is received and brought about (on states of affairs realized through Time, in Space, by the persistence of substances) and is conditioned by the structure the doctrine placed beatitude beyond. The concern here is that *blessed* is either self-sufficient, in which case it names not a relation to any good but the completeness of a structure that has no outside, or relational, in which case it is conditioned by T, S, and Φ. The doctrine wants both: the self-sufficiency of a being that needs nothing and the responsiveness of a being whose loves are answered.

*What is required.* Carried through, the five pressures bring out what the predicate *blessed* actually depends on. Desire and hope are ordinarily oriented toward the not-yet-actual, while will can be construed as non-deficient intention; a beatitude that removes the orientation keeps the words only if joy can be specified apart from desire-satisfaction, and that specification is still owed. Wanting is the potency to be moved by an unattained good, which pure act excludes; plenitude and the diffusiveness of the good compose only through a non-deficient willing whose account of directed choice remains open. The satisfaction-trilemma, under its desire-satisfaction premise, cannot be answered while all three commitments stand: universal love, complete blessedness, and invariance then do not compose, and every classical exit relaxes one of them. And blessedness is either self-sufficient (in which case it names the completeness of a structure with no outside to want) or relational, in which case it is conditioned by Time, Space, and Substance. What survives is a disputed distinction between non-deficient self-sufficiency and relational joy. Structural completeness may illustrate the first, but it does not itself possess joy.

*What is inverted.* The inversion relocates self-sufficiency to Nature at the structural level; it does not establish that Nature is a blessed subject. *Blessed* (*makarios*, *beatus*, the predicate of a life that lacks nothing and needs nothing outside itself) names, in the one sense the dilemmas above leave standing, not a subject enjoying its own completeness but the modal completeness of the structure that has no outside: □(T∧S∧Φ) exhausts the field of real possibility, so there is no possibility beyond Nature that Nature could lack, want, or be oriented toward. The eudaimonist tradition fixes the mark of blessedness as *autarkeia*, self-sufficiency: the blessed life is the one that, possessing every good, depends on nothing further. What is genuinely *autarkēs*, depending on nothing outside itself because there is no outside, is not a being among beings but Nature, the structure within which every good, every want, and every attainment occurs. The classical doctrine reaches for a being whose joy needs nothing the world can add and fears nothing the world can take, and locates it in a subject that, to be blessed, has to be lifted out of the Time, Space, and Substance through which anything is ever wanted or attained. Viewed within the structure that hosts it, *blessed* names the self-sufficiency of Nature: not the rest of a will that has stopped wanting, but the completeness of the modal structure that has no beyond. Desire, satisfaction, and the rest that follows attainment belong to the configurations within Nature whose wanting is the felt form of the modal pressure running through the whole ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)); blessedness, the predicate the tradition reserved for the being beyond all wanting, belongs to the whole within which all wanting moves. The aseity [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) returned to the modal self-grounding of Nature and the perfection [§6.2.4](<6.2.4 Perfection.md>) returned to its necessity meet here: what depends on nothing and lacks nothing is the structure that is the condition of dependence and lack, not a being exempt from them. The result is carried forward at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>).


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