counsel of perfection

noun

Etymology

From Latin consilium perfectionis, Aquinas et al., from consilium in Tertullian's translation of 1 Cor. 7:25.

Definitions

  1. Advice as to a means of striving for moral perfection.

  2. Noble but impractical idealistic advice.

    • To a practical statesman that will seem perhaps a counsel of perfection; and, certainly, it is a counsel that, at every stage, will encounter acute difficulties of practical operation.
    • Lessius qualified his position on killing in self-defense for defense of honor by noting that although it is permissible to kill for these reasons, it is a moral counsel of perfection to allow oneself to be killed rather than to kill.
    • In the end, their “Recommendations for Designing and Evaluating Qualitative Research” concludes with another counsel of perfection: “These guidelines amount to a specification of the ideal qualitative research proposal [original emphasis].

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for counsel of perfection. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA