Absoluteness

Jeoldaeseong (절대성 / Absoluteness): The Ontological Ground of the Divine Attributes in the Theory of the Original Image

Jeoldaeseong (절대성 · 絶對性), absoluteness, is the divine attribute of being absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal—the quality by which God is wholly without relative limitation, comparison, or counterpart.

In Unification Thought, it is not a freestanding superlative but a structural feature of the divine Original Image (원상, wonsang): the oneness of God’s dual characteristics, original internal nature (Sungsang) and original external form (Hyungsang), is itself a single absolute attribute.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle (DP) grounds the same claim in its opening account of God as the Subject in whom the dual characteristics are harmonized.

I argue that absoluteness, on the Unification reading, is a derived attribute rather than a primitive one — the structural consequence of the oneness of God’s dual characteristics, established through the static give-and-receive action of the Original Image — and that it therefore ranks below Heart (shimjeong) in the order of the divine nature, even as it grounds every further claim about God’s unchanging, eternal, and self-existent being.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong; address of 10/31/1997) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The sentence is the pivot of the doctrine: absoluteness is teleological, ordered toward a love that itself bears the four attributes. The metaphysics and the relational purpose are inseparable, and it is Unification Thought that supplies the structural account of how the attribute arises. This entry treats absoluteness as a divine attribute; its extension into conjugal and reproductive life—absolute sexual ethics—is the subject of the companion entry Absolute Sexual Ethics (절대성윤리), to which the present entry repeatedly points rather than duplicating.

This entry reads the Theory of the Original Image in Unification Thought (Sang Hun Lee), as published at uthought.org and in the Essentials of Unification Thought, together with the Exposition of the Divine Principle (1996), the Cheon Seong Gyeong (CSG) English compilation held in project knowledge, the official English of the November 21, 2006 Peace Message verified on tplegacy.net, and the local Korean speech archive (volumes 483–609) for title-level chronology.

The canonical and systematic-philosophical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation.

The entry confines itself to absoluteness as a metaphysical attribute of God; the conjugal-ethical application is treated under Absolute Sexual Ethics. Korean philosophical terms are translated by the author where no fixed English form exists; CSG passages are quoted from the English compilation, and the Peace Message from verified official English.

This section establishes that the head of 절대성 is an abstract noun of nature and that the term denotes the unconditioned.

The compound divides cleanly. 절대 (絶對) joins 絶, “to sever or cut off”—the graph depicts a thread being cut—and 對, “the opposite, the counterpart, the relative.” 절대 therefore reads as “severed from the relative,” that which stands in no comparison and admits no opposing term; its standing antonym is 상대 (相對, sangdae), the relative.

The suffix 성 (性) is the ordinary Korean nominalizer of quality, “-ness” or “nature,” as in 유일성 (uniqueness), 불변성 (unchangeability), and 영원성 (eternity). 절대성 is thus “the quality of being without relative”—absoluteness.

The same syllable 性 also carries the meaning “sex,” and on that reading, 절대성 can be heard as “absolute sex.” That homographic sense is real in the late corpus, but it is the conjugal application of the attribute rather than its core meaning, and it is treated under Absolute Sexual Ethics.

In the present entry, 性 is the abstract suffix of nature, the sense it carries in classical East Asian metaphysics, where 絶對 names the unconditioned that lies beyond all pairs.

This section establishes the central philosophical claim: in Unification Thought, absoluteness is not assumed but derived from the oneness of the Original Image.

Unification Thought locates the discussion of God’s nature in the Theory of the Original Image, where God is described through dual characteristics—original internal nature (Sungsang) and original external form (Hyungsang) — that are not two parts but one being. Lee’s formulation is that Sungsang and Hyungsang are “essentially the same absolute attribute,” from which the difference between internal and external is only later engendered in creation (Lee 2006).

Absoluteness, on this account, names precisely that prior oneness: God is absolute because, within the Original Image, there is no division to be reconciled, no relative term against which He is measured.

The oneness is articulated through give-and-receive action within the Original Image. When that action takes place centering on Heart, it is static — its result is union, a harmonized body—and from this static give-and-receive, Lee infers that the divine attributes include “absoluteness, harmony, and eternal unchangeability” (Lee 2006).

The Original Image, on this reading, exists outside time and space in absolute oneness: no front or back, no before or after, an infinite “here” and an eternal “now.” Absoluteness is the name for this timeless, spaceless self-identity of God.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong; address of 08/07/1998) Cheon Seong Gyeong

True Father’s bare predication matches the systematic derivation: what Unification Thought reaches by analysis of the Original Image, the devotional teaching states directly. The EDP supplies the canonical warrant, describing God as “the Subject in whom the dual characteristics of original internal nature and original external form are in harmony” (EDP 1996).

The decisive interpretive point is one of rank. Lee insists that Heart, not any metaphysical superlative, is the most fundamental attribute of God, and that the older philosophical picture of God as “the absolute mind” or as reason is, by comparison, secondary (Lee 2006).

Absoluteness is therefore real and foundational for the system of attributes, yet it is not the summit of the divine nature; it is the structural condition under which Heart expresses itself unchangingly.

This section establishes that absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal are mutually entailing, not a catalogue of separate perfections.

In True Father’s exposition of the divine nature, the four predicates are derived from one another: “absolute” arises because God is unique, and “eternal” arises because He is unchanging.

Only what is non-relative, non-comparable, and non-mutable can be called absolute, which is why God alone is the Absolute One, 절대자 (絶對者), the Self-Existent One, 자존자 (自存者), who is also omnipresent, 무소부재 (無所不在)—present in no single place because absent from none.

The four attributes form a single closed circle: take away uniqueness, and absoluteness collapses into one option among many; take away unchangeability, and eternity has nothing to preserve. This is the same logical oneness that Unification Thought locates in the Original Image, now stated as a chain of entailments rather than as a structure.

The systematic and the devotional registers converge here. Where Unification Thought derives unchangeability and eternity from the Identity-Maintaining structure of the Original Image, the speeches present them as the plain grammar of the word “absolute” itself. Both deny that the attributes can be separated, and both make the unity of the four the ground of everything the tradition will go on to say about God’s constancy toward His creation.

This section establishes that absoluteness is the metaphysical root of the Unification doctrine of absolute value (절대가치).

The bridge from the attribute to value is built in the Axiology of Unification Thought, which grounds a “new view of absolute value” in the absoluteness of God (Lee 2006).

The reasoning is relational: because God is the absolute Subject who pursues an absolute standard, the object-partner who stands before Him acquires, in that relation, an absolute value; the value of created-original nature is therefore itself absolute rather than relative or negotiable.

Absoluteness thus does double duty—it secures God’s own self-identity, and it confers an unconditioned worth on the creature made to resemble Him.

— Sun Myung Moon (“The Family is Rooted in Absolute Sexual Ethics…”, 11/21/2006; vol. 545, sermon 4) The Family is Rooted in Absolute Sexual Ethics

The Peace Message states the relational logic in one line: the absolute being makes children whose worth is fixed by His own absoluteness (Moon 2006).

This is the hinge at which the metaphysical attribute turns toward ethics. Because the creature’s value is absolute, the standard binding the creature is absolute too—and the most concrete form of that standard, in the late teaching, is the discipline of absolute sexual ethics. The present entry stops at the metaphysical hinge; the ethical development belongs to Absolute Sexual Ethics.

This section establishes a tension that the philosophical reading resolves: the concept of absoluteness is foundational and early, while the word 절대성 as a foregrounded topic is conspicuously late.

As a concept, absoluteness is present from the systematic beginnings of the tradition. The DP’s account of God’s harmonized dual characteristics already implies it, and Unification Thought, developed across the 1970s through the 1990s, makes it an explicit attribute of the Original Image.

In this sense, absoluteness is not a Cheon Il Guk-era novelty; it is part of the original architecture of Unification metaphysics.

As a word, however, 절대성 behaves very differently. A title-level scan of the indexed sermon corpus finds the term in no sermon title before 2005 and clustered entirely within 2005–2009, with its earliest title-level occurrence on January 21, 2005 (vol. 483, sermon 7) and its latest on April 9, 2009 (vol. 609, sermon 12). These dates, Korean titles, volumes, and sermon positions are verified from the archive filenames.

The resolution is the entry’s thesis in chronological form. The philosophical attribute did not appear in 2005; what appeared then was its public foregrounding as a sermon theme, driven by the late providence and overwhelmingly in the conjugal register.

The metaphysics belongs to the Original Image; the late surge of the word belongs to the doctrine of absolute sexual ethics. Distinguishing the two is not a scholarly nicety, but reading the corpus itself forces.

Absoluteness as a divine attribute resonates across the monotheisms; what is distinctive in Unification Thought is its derivation and its rank.

In Christianity, the corresponding doctrines are aseity and immutability. God names Himself out of the burning bush as the self-existent One, and Scripture affirms that He does not change.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.

The “I AM” of Exodus is the Self-Existent One, the 자존자 of Unification teaching, and the immutability of classical Christian doctrine answers to 불변 (Mal 3:6; Jas 1:17 KJV).

The genuine difference is structural: classical theism treats aseity and immutability as primitive divine perfections following from divine simplicity, whereas Unification Thought derives absoluteness from the oneness of God’s dual characteristics and ranks it below Heart.

In Judaism, the resonance lies in the absolute oneness and uniqueness of God confessed in the Shema.

Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one.

This is 유일성, or uniqueness, in its purest scriptural form, and Unification Thought agrees that uniqueness is internal to absoluteness.

The divergence is that the Shema’s oneness excludes any sharing of the divine nature, whereas Unification teaching holds that the absolute value grounded in God’s absoluteness is conferred upon His children.

In Islam, the parallel is close at the level of attributes. The Qur’an names God al-Ahad, the One, and al-Samad, the Eternal and Self-Sufficient.

Say: He is Allah, the One! Allah, the eternally Besought of all!

Al-Ahad and al-Samad answer almost term for term to “absolute,” “unique,” “eternal,” and “self-existent.” A fainter East Asian parallel appears in the Daoist 道 (dao), the unconditioned beyond all pairs, close to 절대 itself.

Across all of these, the Unification distinctive is twofold: absoluteness is derived from an internal oneness rather than posited as a bare perfection, and it is subordinated to Heart—for Unification Thought, God is absolute, but He is first a being of Heart.

The thesis advanced here is that absoluteness, in Unification doctrine, is a derived and Heart-subordinate attribute rather than a primitive one.

The strongest internal alternative is the classical-theistic reading available within the tradition’s own borrowed vocabulary: that absoluteness is the first and highest divine perfection — God’s aseity — from which uniqueness, unchangeability, and eternity simply follow, and to which even Heart is logically posterior because a God who is not first absolute could not have a Heart worth the name. On that reading, the entry inverts the true order.

The cited evidence tells against it. Unification Thought does not begin with absoluteness and deduce the rest; it begins with the dual characteristics of the Original Image and identifies their oneness as the absolute attribute, so that absoluteness is the name of a structure rather than a starting axiom (Lee 2006).

More decisively, Lee explicitly demotes the philosophical picture of God as “the absolute mind” to secondary status and names Heart the most fundamental attribute (Lee 2006)—a deliberate departure from the classical order, not an oversight.

The devotional corpus agrees in substance: the four attributes are presented as mutually entailing rather than as a hierarchy descending from absoluteness, and even the Peace Message frames God’s absoluteness as ordered toward children and toward love (Moon 2006).

Absoluteness is foundational for the system of attributes without being its apex; it is the floor, not the ceiling.

Two clarifications fix the scope. The argument does not deny that God is absolute in the fullest sense the monotheisms intend; it specifies how the tradition reaches that claim and where it places it.

Nor does it absorb the conjugal application: the demand for absolute sexual ethics follows from the absolute value grounded in God’s absoluteness, but it is a distinct doctrine with its own canonical center in the 2006 Peace Message and is treated under Absolute Sexual Ethics.

Absoluteness is the metaphysical attribute; absolute sexual ethics is what that attribute requires of those made to resemble Him.

• Jeoldaeseong (절대성) is the divine attribute of being absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal—the quality of having no relative term or counterpart.
• In Unification Thought, absoluteness is derived, not primitive: it names the oneness of God’s dual characteristics, Seongsang and Hyeongsang, within the Original Image.
• The static give-and-receive action of the Original Image, centering on Heart, yields the attributes of absoluteness, harmony, and eternal unchangeability.
• Absoluteness ranks below Heart: Unification Thought names Heart the most fundamental attribute and treats the older idea of God as “the absolute mind” as secondary.
• The four attributes — absolute, unique, unchanging, eternal — are mutually entailing, not a list; only the non-relative and non-mutable can be absolute.
• Absoluteness grounds the doctrine of absolute value: the absolute Subject confers an unconditioned worth on the creature who stands before Him.
• As a concept, absoluteness is foundational and early; as a sermon-title word, 절대성 surfaces only in 2005–2009, largely in the conjugal register of absolute sexual ethics.
• Across the monotheisms' absoluteness, answers to aseity, divine oneness, and al-Ahad, the Unification's distinctive feature is to derive it from internal oneness and to subordinate it to the Heart.

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed. Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Lee, Sang Hun. 2006. New Essentials of Unification Thought: Head-Wing Thought. Tokyo: Unification Thought Institute. Theory of the Original Image. Accessed at uthought.org.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2006. “The Family is Rooted in Absolute Sexual Ethics, Which Is the Model for God's Absoluteness, Peace, and Ideal, and the Global Kingdom.” Address, Forty-seventh True Children's Day, November 21, 2006