Why do threads like these always derail themselves so quickly here....
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Originally Posted by Formendacil
Absolute good would be the possession of all goodness. Manwë (and any other purely good character you might think exists in Arda) is not perfectly good, because he is not perfect. Although immensely powerful, he is still a limited being, and a limitation of power or knowledge is also a limitation of good, because it would be better (ie. "gooder") to have the power or knowledge that is lacking.
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Hmm, then you say that in order to be absolutely good, one has to be perfect (in this case, all-knowing)? Of course a good person's actions would be better if he was omniscient, and Manwe certainly made quite a couple of mistakes in his career, but wouldn't this make the threesome of all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful partly redundant? My knowledge of theology is admittedly rather limited, but I always took the meaning of all-good to be only that a person's will and intentions are absolutely good (setting aside whether this is equal to absence of evil here). I don't see why it should be impossible to have a person that is all-good, but not all-knowing and all-powerful. In any case, this was at least my idea when I labelled Manwe absolutely good.