Holiness includes set-apartness, moral purity, and fittingness for worship. The relational analysis bears most directly on the first strand and should not be treated as exhausting the attribute. But being set apart is a relation: you are apart *from* something, standing distinct within some field. A being with nothing to stand apart from and no field to stand in is not supremely set apart; it is simply indistinct, with the word "holy" laid over it.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine holiness assembles several reinforcing claims. Holiness is the attribute under which the others are confessed: the believer's God is holy before it is simple, and the perfect-being maxima are received as the holiness of God made specific. God is *qodesh*: set apart, separated from the common and the profane (Leviticus 11:44–45; 19:2; Isaiah 6:3 NRSVUE, the seraphic *trisagion*). Holiness is the first predicate the worshipper reaches for and the one the liturgy repeats: *hagios, hagios, hagios* (holy, holy, holy), the Sanctus. On the phenomenological refinement, holiness is *sui generis*: Rudolf Otto's numinous -(Rudolf Otto, 1917), the *mysterium tremendum et fascinans* (the awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery), a category irreducible to the ethical or the rational, encountered as the *wholly other* before which the creature knows itself as creature. The phrase carries a henological ancestry older than the phenomenology: it descends from the Plotinian One beyond being (*Enneads* V.5; VI.9), whose absolute set-apartness is its philosophical root. Even so, the numinous is no unmediated given: with Katz -(Steven T. Katz, 1978), the *wholly other* is itself constituted by the tradition that receives it, not a datum prior to all mediation. In the dogmatic tradition, holiness is God's transcendent separateness as such: Aquinas treats *sanctitas* as purity together with the firmness by which the mind is fixed on God (*ST* II-II.81.8), and the broader scholastic settlement reads divine holiness as the incorruptible separateness of pure act from every creaturely admixture. Barth (*CD* II/1) develops holiness as the form of the divine love that simultaneously gives itself and resists, judges, and sets apart. Contemporary dogmatics (John Webster, 2003) recovers holiness as the mode in which each of the other perfections is God's own. The doctrine carries two strands the tradition holds together: ontological set-apartness (God's categorial separateness from everything creaturely) and moral purity (God's separation from sin and defilement, of which the demand *be holy, for I am holy* is the creaturely echo). At its most ambitious, the doctrine names a being set apart not by degree but by category: the wholly other, separate from all that is not God by the very kind of being it is.

*What cannot be answered.* Four questions find the doctrine of divine holiness, in the form structural reasoning can take hold of, unable to answer them. What underlies them is that set-apartness is a relation before it is a perfection. To be holy is to be set apart, and to be set apart is to stand distinguished from what one is apart from, within a manifold in which the distinction can obtain (S), maintained as the same set-apart being across what would erase the distinction (T and Φ). The classical God is defined without T, S, and Φ. The four pressures run one at the level of the predicate, two at the level of the conditions holiness-talk runs on, and one at the level of what is left to revere when the conditions are gone.

**Q1.** *What is set apart, when nothing stands over against it to be set apart from?* Set-apartness is contrastive: the holy is holy in distinction from the common, as the sacred is sacred against the profane. The contrast requires a field of the not-holy for the holy to be marked off within. The classical reply is that divine holiness is not the relational set-apartness of one item marked off from others but the intrinsic perfection of the divine nature — holiness as the purity of pure act, not a standing-apart from creatures (*ST* II-II.81.8; the simplicity tradition of [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>)). The reply is available, and it does the work the doctrine asks. The reply shifts holiness from relational apartness to intrinsic purity. That is a legitimate change of strand; the remaining question is how intrinsic purity is specified and related to moral value. On the relational strand, a wholly other with no manifold to be other within is not supremely distinct but indistinct; the intrinsic-purity reading escapes that verdict only by carrying the specification burden just noted.

**Q2.** *From what does the wholly other stand apart, if it stands in no position relative to anything?* Otto's numinous and Barth's holy God are encountered as *wholly other*, and otherness is a standing-over-against, a positional-relational predicate that requires S, the manifold within which two stand distinguished as the ones they are. The same point is pressed for presence at [§6.8.1](<6.8.1 Presence.md>): a being equidistant from every point alike has no position from which to stand apart. The classical reply relocates the otherness from spatial standing to the analogical transcendence of the Creator–creature distinction. The concern here is the one [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>) raises for analogy: the Creator–creature distinction, if it is a real distinction and not a verbal one, is itself a structural relation — directed, asymmetric, obtaining within a manifold that holds the two terms apart. Levinas's absolutely Other *Totality and Infinity*, -(Emmanuel Levinas, 1961) is borne by the face and indexed to the encounter; strip the indexing and the otherness loses the contrast that made it other.

**Q3.** *How is anything made or kept holy, if both consecration and purity require a being that stands in time to bear them?* Holiness in the scriptural register is verbal before it is adjectival: *qadash* is to consecrate, to set apart, and what is consecrated is then kept pure: the sabbath, the temple, the people are *made* holy and *guarded* holy. Both moments are structural. Consecration is a transition from the common to the set-apart, and a transition requires T, a before and an after across which the same thing is first common and then holy. Purity is the maintained integrity of a being that could be defiled and is not, a property with a bearer (Φ) and a standing across what would compromise it. The classical God is the source of all sanctification yet is immutable, atemporal, and without Φ, and on strong simplicity sustains no real relation to what it sanctifies; its purity, likewise, is the purity of a being with nothing to keep intact and no defilement so much as possible. The classical reply is that God sanctifies eternally and without change in God (the change is in the creature, the immutability settlement of [§6.3.3](<6.3.3 Immutability.md>)) and that divine purity is not the contingent cleanness of a defilable being but the impossibility of defilement in pure act. The concern here is the one [§6.3.3](<6.3.3 Immutability.md>), [§6.4.1](<6.4.1 Awareness.md>), and [§6.9.1](<6.9.1 Benevolence.md>) reach from their own sides: a sanctifying that terminates on the creature at a moment is a temporally located effect, though a classical theorist can posit a timeless cause. Impossibility of defilement is a modal purity claim, not by itself an ∅-like absence. Both moments take their content (the transition and the maintained integrity) from the temporal side of the relation; the timeless-sanctifier model faces an interface burden there, not yet a semantic failure.

**Q4.** *What is left to revere, once the wholly other is conceived without the otherness that made it holy?* The conceivability question for divine predicates in general is taken up at [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>); the local form concerns reverence. The numinous, conceived without T, S, and Φ, terminates at the point [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>) reaches: a referent for which *holy* retains no determinate content, only the affective residue of an encounter the conditions of encounter have been removed from. The reply is Otto's own: holiness is the very category that exceeds conceptual capture, and the demand for determinate content mistakes the numinous for a concept. The concern here is that exceeding conceptual capture is consistent with the set-apartness belonging to the modal structure rather than to a being beyond it. The mystic's silence before the Holy is the honest terminus of refusing to predicate; the worshipper who goes on to address, revere, and stand before the Holy One re-enacts, in every act of address, the positional and relational structure the encounter requires.

*What is required.* The four pressures lay out the structural shape of holiness. Holiness, on its set-apartness strand, needs a field of the not-holy for the holy to be marked off within; an apartness apart from nothing is indistinction, not the maximum of distinction. It needs a manifold in which the wholly other can stand over against what it is other than; otherness with no position is the language of distinction without its content. Creaturely consecration involves transition. A timeless sanctifier model retains an asymmetric causal relation while relocating transition to the creature, and therefore faces an interface burden rather than semantic failure. It needs a bearer whose integrity is maintained across what would defile it; purity with no possible defilement and no bearer risks collapsing into ∅'s immunity rather than a being's holiness; the modal-purity reading owes the difference. The set-apartness strand can be analogically relocated to the categorial difference between a modal structure and its occupants: the way Time, Space, and Substance stand to every inhabitant as that which is not itself one of the inhabitants.

*What is inverted.* The inversion relocates categorial set-apartness to Nature. Moral holiness and worship-worthiness are not established by structural difference alone. The English *holy* descends through Old English *hālig* from Proto-Germanic *hailagaz*, bound to *whole* and *hale*: the holy is the whole, the intact, that which is set apart by the integrity that makes it inviolable. The Latin *sacer* and the Hebrew *qodesh* carry the same logic of separation: cut off, consecrated, removed from the common. The tradition reaches for a being set apart from everything creaturely by the very kind of being it is, and names the wholly other. Read structurally, what is set apart from every inhabitant by the very kind of thing it is, is the modal structure: Nature is not one of the things within Nature, and its categorial distinctness from all it grounds is the set-apartness [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>) turns on. A being defined without T, S, and Φ cannot be set apart, for it has no manifold to stand apart within and no contrast to be holy against; its purported holiness inverts into *Divine Indistinction*: the limiting case of a holiness with no conditions of distinction left to it. The set-apartness the tradition reveres as the holiness of God is the apartness of Nature itself, which §7 takes up directly.


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← [6.5 Intrinsic Value](<6.5 Intrinsic Value.md>) | [6.5.2 Beatitude](<6.5.2 Beatitude.md>) →
