The Perfection of God: What It Means for God to Be Perfect

The perfection of God is His completeness: He lacks nothing that belongs to being, and every perfection found in a creature is found first, and without limit, in Him. That is the classical answer of Anselm and Aquinas. It is a claim about a difference in kind, not about a score at the top of a scale of greatness, and read that way it survives the strongest modern objections to it.

Key takeaways

• The perfection of God means He lacks nothing. Aquinas defined the perfect as that "which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection," and God, as subsisting being itself, can lack nothing of being.
• The strongest challenges come from two directions. Yoram Hazony argues that the Bible's God is not the philosophers' perfect being; others call a maximally great being incoherent.
• Most modern answers treat perfection as a position on a scale. Perfect being theism maximises each attribute, the maximal God revision trades them off, and process theism lets God grow.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps the classical doctrine whole, where modern perfect being theism and process theism each concede the scale: God's completeness is original and ours is conferred.

What does the perfection of God mean?

To say that God is perfect is to say that He is complete. Aquinas gave the definition the tradition still uses: "we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection." He then argued that the first cause of all things "must needs be most actual, and therefore most perfect" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 4, a. 1, New Advent). A thing is perfect in proportion to its actuality, and God is actual without remainder.

Aquinas also noticed that the word does not quite fit. "Perfect" means thoroughly made, finished, and "that which is not made is improperly called perfect." The word is kept because it "signifies whatever is not wanting in actuality," and because, as he says with Gregory the Great, "Though our lips can only stammer, we yet chant the high things of God." Every creature we call perfect became so; God never became anything. The word reaches Him from our side, carrying a history of completion that He never had.

Scripture praises the same completeness in the works and ways that flow from it. The Song of Moses opens:

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"I will proclaim the name of the LORD. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he." (Deuteronomy 32:3–4, NIV)

David confesses the same: "As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the LORD is flawless. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him" (Psalm 18:30, NIV). The greatness of God and the perfection of His works are one confession. His works are perfect because He is.

The classical method derives the rest of the doctrine from divine perfection. Aquinas's next article holds that "All created perfections are in God," and that "Since therefore God is subsisting being itself, nothing of the perfection of being can be wanting to Him" (a. 2). Reasoning from that conviction is the method now called perfect being theology, which builds the attributes of God and the whole doctrine of God out of it. Creatures resemble Him, Aquinas adds, "only according to some sort of analogy; as existence is common to all" (a. 3).

Volume One begins from the same conviction about God, and it is free to read.

Is God perfect? The challenge at its strongest

The question asks two things: whether the perfect being of the philosophers is the God of the Bible, and whether a perfect being is possible at all. Both have serious answers on the other side.

The first comes from the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony. He writes: "The fact is that the God of Hebrew Scripture is not presented as the 'perfect being' of classical perfect-being theology. He appears to be neither eternally unchanging nor impassable." His diagnosis is historical: "An immutable perfect being is a Greek conception of what God must be like, not a biblical one" (Hazony). He finds the point even in the divine name. God answers Moses, in Hazony's rendering, "I will be what I will be," and "the great four-letter name of God, YHVH, is likewise couched in the imperfect tense, again suggesting incompleteness and change." The evidence he points to is real. God regrets having made Saul king, relents from disaster when Moses pleads, and grieves over His people. A doctrine of divine perfection that cannot read those texts has stopped reading the Bible. Whether God changes His mind, and whether He can make mistakes, each has its own page.

The second challenge is logical. Reviewing the most thorough recent defence of perfect being theism, Jonathan Kvanvig sorts the objections into three families: "those that find some great-making property inconsistent," "those that find conflict between great-making properties," and "those that find conflict between maximal greatness and contingent facts, especially evil and the hiddenness of God" (NDPR). The first family includes the stone paradox against omnipotence and the Cantorian argument that there is no set of all truths for omniscience to know. The second sets justice against mercy and immutability against responsiveness. A God perfect in justice, the objector says, must punish every sin, and a God perfect in mercy must pardon some; if both are maxima, one of them gives way. The third is the problem of suffering and the problem of divine hiddenness.

Beneath all three lies a worry about the word "greatest." Gaunilo, a contemporary of Anselm, answered Anselm's argument with a parody: conceive the greatest possible island, and by the same reasoning it must exist (SEP). The deeper version is mathematical. Greatness looks comparative, a matter of more and less, and some of the scales it measures seem to have no top. If there is no greatest number, why think there is a greatest possible knower or a greatest possible power? A "greatest conceivable being" would then be like a largest integer, a phrase that names nothing.

If the concept of a perfect being is incoherent, theism loses its God before any argument for His existence begins.

Perfect being theism and its rivals: the standard answers

The classical answer begins with Anselm. In the Proslogion he addressed God as "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" (ch. II), and from that formula, that than which nothing greater can be conceived, he drew the rule that God is "whatever it is better to be than not to be" (ch. V, Fordham). Anselmian theism, the view that God is the greatest conceivable being, remains the working definition of God in most philosophy of religion. Its strength is that it gives every attribute one measure. Its strain is the word "greater," which sounds comparative and invites Gaunilo's parody. Anselm himself went beyond his formula: God is "not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are a being greater than can be conceived" (ch. XV). His method, and what it can and cannot settle about freedom, is taken up in Book 1 of the Many Beings series, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma.

Aquinas grounds perfection in act. God is pure act, with no unrealised potential, and He is "subsisting being itself," being itself rather than a being who has it. Since every perfection is a way of being actual, nothing can be missing from Him. The Thomist tradition ties this to divine simplicity: God does not have perfections the way a person has skills; He is His perfection. On this view perfection is not a score at all, but modern readers hear "without potential" as "without life," which is the worry Hazony presses.

Modern perfect being theism made the idea precise. Alvin Plantinga's version defines a maximally great being: "a being is maximally great if and only if it exists necessarily and is essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect" (SEP). The precision serves the modal ontological argument, which is surveyed with the other evidence for God. It comes at a price. Each attribute becomes a scale pushed to its maximum, so every objection that two maxima collide, or that a scale has no maximum, now bites.

Yujin Nagasawa's revision accepts the price and lowers it. Perfect being theism, on his account, is "the claim that there is a greatest metaphysically possible being," and God is "the being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence" (NDPR). This maximal God need not hold every attribute at its own maximum if two maxima cannot coexist; He holds the best combination that can. The revision escapes the inconsistency objections. It also turns perfection into a trade-off at the summit, a best available package, which is not what Anselm or Scripture meant by a God who lacks nothing.

Process theism and open theism move in the opposite direction. Process thinkers following Charles Hartshorne hold that perfection, for God, includes growth, so that God can surpass His own earlier states though no other being surpasses Him. Open theism holds that a perfect God is affected by His creatures and learns what they freely do. Both take the relational texts at face value. The cost is arithmetic: a God who grows lacked, before He grew, what He gained, and a God who learns lacked what He learned. The wider family of these views is set out under theistic personalism.

Set side by side, the rivals share one assumption. Plantinga maximises each scale, Nagasawa trades the scales off, and process and open theism place God on a scale that keeps rising. Only the classical answer denies that perfection is a position on a scale at all, and it has struggled to say why in terms a modern reader accepts.

The whole series is listed, volume by volume, on the books page.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers: God's perfection is a difference in kind

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) answers by supplying the reason behind the classical denial. Where modern perfect being theism maximises God on our scales and process theism lets Him climb them, FICT holds that the scale itself belongs to us. FICT is a research program in analytic theology that treats the classical dilemmas as artifacts of one error. One reality is known in two incommensurable ways, in God's frame and in ours, and treating a term as though it meant the same in both is what FICT calls the Many Beings Fallacy (the full statement).

The series begins where Anselm began. Its foundations adopt "the maximally great conception of God," His aseity and His atemporality, and reason from it. The first result is that God and creatures differ in kind, not degree: He exists of Himself and we exist from another, and those two qualities contradict each other. That contrast is the subject of the page on aseity.

Apply that to the word "greater." For us, to become more perfect is to become more complete, and we become more complete by gathering: a skill learned, a collection finished, a character formed over years. Our completeness is always conferred, given by an act that drew the many into one. That is why our "greater" is comparative and why every scale we build can be extended. Volume Five states the contrast in one sentence: "God's completeness is original; ours is conferred." God's infinity, it says, "is a perfection, not a magnitude," not the far end of a scale but the absence of any limit in the One whose being is underived. The infinity of God has its own page. Aquinas saw the same thing in the word itself: "perfect" means thoroughly made, and God was never made.

This is why the conflict objections miss. They picture God as a bundle of maxima, each pushed to the top of its own scale, and then ask what happens where two scales meet. Volume Four argues that the many perfections are not many things in God. The simple God, received by a finite mind, arrives as many perfections, as white light passed through a prism arrives as many colours, and the colours are true knowledge of Him. Its conclusion is that "no addition or refinement of attributes ever yields the one undivided reality." Justice and mercy, power and goodness, are distinct in our knowing and one in Him, so there is no summit where they collide. Each specific charge, from the stone to the set of all truths to the modal collapse argument against simplicity, dissolves on its own page once the divine term is read in its own frame. The full argument is in Volume Four.

Hazony's challenge receives the same index. The God who relents and grieves in the narratives is no illusion. In our frame those are the true forms His one act takes as it meets a sinner's repentance or a people's ruin; in His own frame He is whole. The Bible's own word for perfect already means whole and complete, not frozen. Jesus closes His command to love enemies, and to be like the Father who "causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good," with this:

"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48, NIV)

The perfection asked of us is a finite wholeness of love, conferred and growing. The Father's is the original it imitates. The verse sets the two side by side without putting them on one scale.

A coherent doctrine of a maximal God, one that does not contradict itself, defeats the claim that such a God is impossible. It also supplies the possibility premise that modal arguments for God's existence need. It does not by itself prove that God exists; that is the work of the arguments gathered under evidence for God.

Volume Five works out perfection without magnitude; see where it stands.

Has the perfection of God survived its hardest objections?

We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. Three of them bear directly on this doctrine, and each presses on a point where Anselmian theism and modern perfect being theism are exposed as well.

If God is greater than can be conceived, can we know He is perfect?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The objection comes from Anselm himself. In the Proslogion God is "a being greater than can be conceived" (ch. XV), and Anselm draws the consequence at once: "this is the unapproachable light in which you dwell," and "whatsoever I see, I see through it, as the weak eye sees what it sees through the light of the sun, which in the sun itself it cannot look upon" (ch. XVI). Aquinas agrees that no one in this life sees God's essence (Summa Theologiae I, q. 12). So any account that has finite minds grasping the divine nature, and then reads His perfection off what they grasp, claims too much. One passage in the series spoke as though the finite mind's knowledge ended on the divine nature itself.

The defense agrees with Anselm, and the books now say it in his terms. We know the perfect being through His works as they are refracted into our frame, never as He is in Himself. Volume Five puts it in one line: "The colors are real, and none of them is the beam." That is the weak eye seeing by the light rather than looking into it. Knowledge of His perfection is real knowledge through His effects, and it never claims to have looked into the sun. Paul says the same of the God "who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen." (1 Timothy 6:16, NIV). What the objection corrected was a wording.

Is a maximally great being only ever more or less great?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The philosopher James Studd defends a position called generality relativism. Its engine is an argument modelled on Russell's paradox: for any domain of things, however large, we can specify a collection that is not in it. "Whatever domain D the absolutist may claim to be absolutely comprehensive," Studd writes, "the Russell Reductio purports to show that D lacks something" (Studd). The argument assumes nothing about what the domain is. Turned on theology, it says that no whole is complete in an absolute sense, because every whole can be widened. "Complete" then only ever means "more complete than," and God's completeness becomes the top of a scale after all. A maximally great being would be maximal only relative to some range of comparison.

The defense grants Studd everything he proves about wholes that are gathered. Every collection a finite mind forms is complete only because an act of gathering closed it, and every such collection can be extended; Volume Five already describes our mathematics in exactly those terms. The books never marked the divine completeness by the size of a domain. The mark is whether wholeness is original or conferred: "God's completeness is original; ours is conferred." To aim the reductio at God, one must first treat His knowing as a gathering of units into a set, reading "whole" and "complete" in the creature's sense. That is the Many Beings Fallacy, not a discovery about God. The difference between His perfection and ours is a difference in kind, and it needs no contested premise about absolute generality.

Is God's perfection just the absence of lack?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

This objection comes from the Anselmian and Boethian tradition. One chapter of the series argued that God cannot live in succession because to lack anything, even for a moment, would violate His self-sufficiency. The objector replied that this gets perfection backwards. An argument built on avoiding lack is negative, and "lack" shifts its meaning from step to step. The classical ground of God's eternity is positive fullness. Boethius defined eternity as "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life" (SEP): not the absence of a deficit but a whole life possessed at once.

The defense accepted the correction. The chapter now grounds God's timelessness in His simple and infinite nature, "the possession of boundless, infinite life all at once," the tota simul, and the line about lack follows from that plenitude as its negative face. Aquinas drew the line in the same place: "perfect" signifies "whatever is not wanting in actuality," and what makes God not wanting is that He is subsisting being itself. Divine perfection is first a fullness, and only then an absence of lack. God and time are treated in full in Volume Three, and the eternity of God has its own page.

The position these defenses hold is set out in one place; read the statement.

Frequently asked questions about the perfection of God

What does it mean that God is perfect?

It means God lacks nothing that belongs to being. Aquinas defined the perfect as that "which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection," and held that God, as subsisting being itself, contains every perfection found in creatures in a higher way. Scripture says His works and His way are perfect because He is. On the classical view, His perfection is not a high score but completeness without any unrealised potential.

What is the greatest conceivable being?

It is Anselm's description of God: "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived." Perfect being theism takes the phrase as its method, attributing to God whatever it is better to be than not to be. Anselm added that God is also "greater than can be conceived," so the phrase names a being our concepts point toward rather than one they contain. Plantinga's "maximally great being" is its modern descendant.

Can God become more perfect?

No. To become more perfect is to gain something one lacked, and a being that lacks nothing has nothing to gain. Process theism holds that God grows with the world, and open theism that He learns what free creatures do; both make His perfection something still being completed. Classical theism and FICT hold that His completeness is original, never conferred, while the world He sustains grows and changes.

How can we be perfect as God is perfect?

Jesus' command in Matthew 5:48 closes a teaching on loving enemies, so the perfection in view is a wholeness of love that reaches even those who hate us. Our perfection is finite and conferred: it is given, it grows, and grace completes it. The Father's is original. The verse calls us to imitate His perfection in our own measure, not to reach His on a shared scale.

What is the difference between perfect being theism and classical theism?

Classical theism, from Augustine through Anselm to Aquinas, holds that God is simple, eternal and pure act, so His perfection is His very being. Modern perfect being theism often treats each attribute as a great-making property raised to its maximum, which makes the perfections separate scales that can conflict, and theistic personalism revises them to fit a God who changes with us. FICT sides with the classical view and explains why the scales belong to our way of knowing, not to God.

Where to go from here

Nearly every objection on this page assumed a scale: greatness measured in more and less, with God at the top of it or somewhere below. The scale is real, and it is ours. We grow, gather, compare and complete, and those words are true of every creature. None of them was ever true of God, which is why "Is God perfect?" has a better answer than "yes, the most." He is the fullness from which every measure of greatness is taken.

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