sanctification

It's 6 21 AM. I can't sleep. Maybe it's the coffee that I drank hours ago coupled with this new preoccupation of mine.

I've thought about what it means to be holy, what it means to be sacred, and finally, what it means to be perfect.

It boils down to one question.

Can God be "holy" (q d s) without His angels or humans, or without a multiplicity within His own nature?

The answer is:

No.

Because "holiness" is otherness, and otherness must be affirmed by more than one.
YHWH cannot be holy without the Angelic trihagion.
God, manifested in three persons as the Trinity (or at least, a binitarianism), must have multiple persons within Himself in order to declare His own "holiness."

This leads to the question: What exactly "is" holiness?
Is it goodness? No, because then it would be called... well, goodness.
Is it piety? No, for the same reason.
Is it an idealized, spiritualized, and necessarily transcendent form of these virtues attributed to God? Probably not; other things can be holy too, like, the "Holy Bible" which is a book and does not have the consciousness or personality necessary to act on these virtues (because... well, it's a book)

Holiness is simply "otherness" transferred through the creation/process of God as the creator to the created. I am holy only because God has "made" me holy (again).

Sacredness, on the other hand, is the same model of "transferrance" but not necessarily with God as the creator; it is a lower level with "man" as the creator. Thus, we can call civic religion "sacred" or beautiful art "sacred" or even children "sacred" simply because the existing people transfer the sacredness to them.

The emergence of the sacred and the Holy are both co-emergent developments. They are self-contained processes within themselves, thus they are necessarily "other" to outside people.

6 31 AM: Time to try and sleep.