Perfection

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The form of the word long fluctuated in various languages. The English language had the alternates, "perfection" and the Biblical "perfectness."^[2] The English noun "perfection" derives from the Latin noun "perfectio", and the adjective "perfect" – from the Latin adjective "perfectus". These expressions in turn come from the Latin verb "perficio" – "to finish", "to bring to an end". "Perfectio(n)" thus literally means "a finishing", and "perfect(us)" – "finished", much as in grammatical parlance ("perfect tense").^[2]

The genealogy of the concept of "perfection" reaches back beyond Latin to Greek, whose equivalent term was "teleos". The Greek term generally had concrete referents, such as a perfect physician or flutist, a perfect comedy or perfect social system. Thus the Greek "teleiotes" was not yet so fraught with abstract and superlative associations as would be the Latin "perfectio" or the modern "perfection". To avoid the later associations, the Greek term has generally been rendered as "completeness" rather than "perfection".^[3]

The Greek polymath Aristotle (384–322 BCE), in Book Delta of the Metaphysics, distinguished three concepts to the term. That is perfect

1. which is complete – which contains all the requisite parts;

2. which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better;

3. which has attained its purpose.^[4]

The first of these concepts is fairly well subsumed within the second. Between them and the third, however, there arises a distinction which would be expressed by the medieval Scholastic Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) writing, in the Summa Theologica, of a twofold perfection: when a thing is perfect in itself – as he put it, in its substance; and when it perfectly serves its purpose.^[4]

The variants on the concept of perfection would have been of a piece for two thousand years, had they not been confused with other, kindred concepts, the chief one being the concept of that which is the best: in Latin, "excellentia" ("excellence"). In antiquity, "excellentia" and "perfectio" made a pair; for example, dignitaries were called "perfectissime", even as they are now called "excellency." Nevertheless, the two expression of high regard differ fundamentally: "excellentia" is a distinction among many, and implies comparison; whereas "perfectio" involves no comparison, and if something is deemed perfect, then it is deemed so in itself, without comparison to other things. The early-modern polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who held the world to be the best of possible worlds, did not claim that it was perfect.^[5]

Term and concept

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