Can God Have a Human Virtue Like Courage?

This is a really wonderful question. Courage is clearly a moral virtue; it is morally virtuous to be courageous rather than cowardly. And yet, when you think about it, courage is not a moral virtue that God can exemplify. Why? Well, because God is omnipotent; nothing can harm him or even threaten him, and therefore he doesn't need to be courageous. Indeed, he can't exemplify courage. And so what that suggests, I think, is that while courage is a virtue exemplified by human beings, it is not what philosophers call a perfection. A perfection is a property which it is absolutely better to have than not to have. And no perfection can imply or entail an imperfection. And courage would be like that; to be courageous, though a good thing, implies an imperfection, namely weakness or vulnerability or something of that sort. So courage I would say is not a perfection – it's not absolutely better to have than not – and therefore not an attribute that God, as a maximally great being or perfect being, exemplifies. So perfect being theology would exclude certain properties from being exemplified by God because they are inconsistent with perfection.