Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 3: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four PeriodsPlotinus
Philosophy
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 3: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods
Plotinus
Plotinus
Nor is it any more accurate to insist that the Good exists by chance.
Chance occurs only in the lower and multiple things. We on the contrary
insist that the First does not exist by chance, and that one cannot
say that He is not master of His birth, since He was not born.[187]
It is not any less absurd to assert that He is not free because He
acts according to His nature; for such an assertion would seem to
imply that freedom consists in actions contrary to one's nature. Last,
His solitariness (or, unity) does not deprive Him of liberty, because
this unity does not result from His being hindered by anybody else
(from having anything else), but from His being what He is, from His
satisfying (or, pleasing) Himself, as He could not be any better;
otherwise, it would be implied that one would lose one's liberty on
attaining the Good. If such an assertion be absurd, is it not the
summit of absurdity to refuse to predicate autocratic liberty of the
Good because of His being good, because He remains within Himself and
because since all beings aspire towards Him, He Himself aspires to
nothing else than Himself, and has no need of anything? As His higher
hypostatic existence is simultaneously His higher actualization--for
in Him these two aspects fuse into one, since they do so even in
Intelligence--His essence is no more conformed to His actualization,
than His actualization to His essence. He cannot be said to actualize
according to His nature, nor that His actualization and His higher life
are traced up into His higher being (so to speak). But as His higher
being and His higher (actualization) are intimately united, and coexist
since all eternity, the result is that these two entities constitute a
single Principle, which depends on itself, and nothing else.
PHYSICAL QUALITIES USED OF THE SUPREME ONLY BY ANALOGY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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