The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
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PROVIDENCE
p. 17
of law and unreason exist because Reason exists — not that these better things are directly the causes of the bad but simply that what ought to absorb the Best is prevented by its own nature, or by some accident, or by foreign interference. An entity which must look outside itself for a law, may be foiled of its purpose by either an internal or an external cause ; there will be some flaw in its own nature, or it will be hurt by some alien influence, for often harm follows, unintended, upon the action of others in the pursuit of quite unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the other hand, as have freedom of motion under their own will sometimes take the right turn, sometimes the wrong.
Why the wrong course is followed is scarcely worth enquiring ; a slight deviation at the beginning develops with every advance into a continuously wider and graver error — especially since there is the attached body with its inevitable concomitant of desire — and the first step, the hasty movement not previously considered and not immediately corrected, ends by establishing a set habit where there was at first only a fall.
Punishment naturally follows ; there is no injustice in a man suflering what belongs to the condition in which he is ; nor can we ask to be happy when our actions have not earned us happiness ; the good, only, are happy ; divine beings are happy only because they are good.
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Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this Universe, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the place but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine ; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good — only to the evil are they disastrous — and where there is body there must be ill-health.
Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the coordination and completion of the Universal system.
One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason — whose control nothing anywhere eludes — employs that ending to the beginning of something new ; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction.
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loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or order.
that ending to the beginning of something new ; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction.
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loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers — poverty and sickness, for example — and as for vice, even this brings something to the general service : it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even, produces good ; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to work ; by the contrast of the evil under which wrongdoers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose ; but, as we have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends ; and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.
The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in good, and good cannot be at full strength in this Sphere where it is lodged in the alien : the good here is in something else, in something distinct from the Good, and this something else constitutes the falling short for it is not good. And this is why evil is ineradicable : there is, first, the fact that in relation to this principle of Good, thing will always stand less than thing, and, besides, all things come into being through it, and are what they are by standing away from it.
6.
As for the disregard of desert — the good afflicted, the unworthy thriving — it is a sound explanation no doubt that to the good nothing is evil and to the evil nothing can be good : still the question remains why should what essentially offends our nature fall to the good while the wicked enjoy all it demands ? How can such an allotment be approved ?
No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true happiness and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions matter little : as well complain that a good man happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome.
Still, under such a dispensation, there would surely be a propriety.
p. 2
to true happiness and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions matter little : as well complain that a good man happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome.
Still, under such a dispensation, there would surely be a propriety.
III. 2. 7]
PROVIDENCE
p. 19
a reasonableness, a regard to merit which, as things are, do not appear, though this would certainly be in keeping with the noblest Providence : even though external conditions do not affect a man’s hold upon good or evil, none the less it would seem utterly unfitting that the bad should be the masters, be sovereign in the state, while honourable men are slaves : a wicked ruler may commit the most lawless acts ; and in war the worst men have a free hand and perpetrate every kind of crime against their prisoners.
We are forced to ask how such things can be, under a Providence. Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when these parts have Soul, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings : the Providence must reach to all the details ; its functioning must consist in neglecting no point.
Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the Universe lies under an Intellectual Principle whose power has touched every existent, we cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what way the detail of this sphere is just.
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A preliminary observation : in looking for excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot require all that is implied in the excellence of the unmingled ; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and since this Universe contains body, we must allow for some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if the mingled existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the Divine Reason.
Thus, supposing we were enquiring for the finest type of the human being as known here, we would certainly not demand that he prove identical with Man as in the Divine Intellect ; we would think it enough in the Creator to have so brought this thing of flesh and nerve and bone under Reason as to give grace to these corporeal elements and to have made it possible for Reason to have contact with Matter.
Our progress towards the object of our investigation must begin
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PLOTINUS
from this principle of gradation which will open to us the wonder of the Providence and of the power by which our universe holds its being.