ABSOLUTE. - A word derived from the Latin "absolutus," which corresponds, in part of its meaning, to the Greek terms ὅλος and τέλειος, and takes on now one and now the other of the two senses, connected in any case, of this participle: freed or completed. Absolute is that which is independent of every condition, relation, impediment; thus in philosophy one speaks of absolute truth, that is, independent of every condition of time, place, person, and therefore universal and necessary. But absolute is also that which is complete, as in absolute perfection, an absolute change. Not rarely the two senses interpenetrate; indeed, in modern thought "absolute" is used technically, to signify the supreme principle, at once perfect and independent, God or that which is put in the place of God.
Modern Scholastics distinguish two degrees of the absolute: they are accustomed to speak of absolute truth, of absolute principles, of absolute nature, even in the field of the created; but in so speaking they intend only to exclude certain determinate dependencies that usage or the context indicates. Such an absolute, however, is not independent of the first cause; indeed the exigency of the dependence of those created absolutes on an uncreated absolute furnishes an argument adopted by many, to demonstrate the existence of God, according to the affirmation of St. Thomas, that the notions called eternal (that is, the absolutes) are not themselves eternal, but are founded in an eternal principle (Contra Gent., II, 84). This principle is the absolute in the supreme degree, truly freed from every dependence or limitation, perfect and infinite, and therefore transcendent and personal.
Against the existence of the absolute this objection is customarily raised: we cannot think and affirm the absolute without putting it in relation to ourselves and without measuring it against the capacity of our intellect, therefore conditioning it. We cannot, then, affirm the absolute. But it is not difficult to discern in such an argument a fundamental defect: it proves nothing against the existence of the absolute, but only demonstrates the imperfection of the knowledge we have of it; nor does it even demonstrate that such imperfection is irremediable and that God cannot, supernaturally, unite Himself to our intellect, without any intermediary. It is true only that in the present condition we do not know the absolute except through reasonings and concepts drawn from the experience of the sensible world and of our spiritual acts. Which does not, on the other hand, remove the possibility of a rigorous demonstration of the existence of the absolute and therefore of a knowledge, certainly deficient and only analogous, but real and in some way positive, of its nature. Even Hamilton, who starts from the principle that "to know is to condition," inasmuch as conditional limitation is the fundamental law of the possibility of thought, does not at all deny the possibility of the absolute. He recognizes that the Unconditioned implies no intrinsic contradiction. In his footsteps Mansel affirms that the knowledge of the Unconditioned accessible to the human mind is only negative. For both thinkers the concrete inconceivability of the absolute in no way prejudices its existence: faith is called upon to integrate and perhaps to supplement, on this subject, reason. The thought of Hamilton and Mansel influenced the Spencerian conception of the Unknowable.
A deeper difficulty has led some, among whom not a few place Aristotle, to deny to the absolute, precisely because of its absoluteness, every relation with other beings: it has not created them, does not know them, does not love them. Otherwise it would lose its independence, as subject of relative acts, and its perfection, since it would no longer be immutable. To this it is replied that the relation existing in created beings toward God as their first cause is not necessarily reciprocal. The world is indeed dependent on God, from whom it has being, movement, direction, but it does not follow that God depends on the world in any way. From His wholly immanent action, He receives no perfecting and no change. The infinite dominion of God over being brings it about that, as it pleases Him, the universe, outside of Him, exists and moves without any mutation altering the infinite act of His being.
The post-Kantian idealists have often given to the supreme principle the name of absolute, striving, however, to unite it more intimately to the universe. They have thus constructed radically pantheistic systems, in which the impossible identification of the finite with the infinite is sought in every way. Fichte conceives the absolute, impersonal I, which expresses itself in the different individuals living in history. Schelling and Hegel, still more clearly, admit no reality other than that of the world of experience in which the intelligible world becomes concrete. Schelling conceives the absolute as the indifferent unity of opposites and strives to make nature, man and history spring from it. In Hegel, the absolute is the Idea which unfolds in a dialectical process, according to a triadic rhythm. The last triad of the Hegelian system constitutes the absolute spirit, stricto sensu, which realizes itself as art (thesis), religion (antithesis), philosophy (synthesis of objectivity and subjectivity, unity of art and religion). The Idea, eternal and subsisting in itself and for itself, actualizes itself, creates itself and eternally enjoys itself as absolute spirit (Enc., § 577). Those systems, which no one any longer admits integrally, have left large parts of themselves in the different forms of later idealism. Their incurable weakness lies in this, that, despite every spiritualistic premise and claim, they end up resolving, in fact, every reality into that of the mutable and finite universe, of nature and of history, of which they fail to give a rational explanation, and arrive at the enormity, of which V. Delbos spoke, "of the deduction that is prepared and of the creation that is wrought in the unconscious and of the unconscious" (Figures et Doctrines de philosophie, 10th ed., Paris 1918, p. 259).
The problem of the absolute has been taken up particularly by Anglo-American idealism, which does not arrive, even with the acute philosophizings of Josiah Royce, at a truly positive and exhaustive solution.
In Trinitarian theology, the absolute signifies one of the predicaments admitted in God, namely substance, the other being relation. Precisely because relation by its nature posits nothing absolute, it does not appear impossible that each of the three relations subsisting in God be really identical with the divine substance or essence, and yet really distinct from the other relations to which it is opposed in the relative order (v. TRINITÀ).