Categoria: Tratado 47 (III,2)

4. No nos admiremos de que el fuego sea apagado por el agua, o de que cualquier otra cosa sea destruida por el fuego. Alguna otra cosa trajo al fuego a la existencia y, como no se ha producido por sí mismo, algo también que no es él le destruye. El fuego vino a la…

15. Todo esto se dice de las cosas consideradas en sí mismas. Pero se da una trabazón de todas ellas, bien en aquellas cosas que ya fueron engendradas, bien en las que se engendran a cada instante, con lo que se originan obstáculos y dificultades. Comprobamos que los animales se devoran unos a otros y…

The Third Ennead Second tractate. On providence (1). Eneada-III-2

6. Dícese que ningún ser es tratado según su mérito, y así, que en tanto los buenos son alcanzados por los males, los malos; en cambio llegan a poseer los bienes. Deberá contestarse a esto primordialmente que ningún mal hace mella en el que es bueno y que ningún bien, a su vez, aprovecha al…

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…

15. These considerations apply very well to things considered as standing alone: but there is a stumbling-block, a new problem, when we think of all these forms, permanent and ceaselessly produced, in mutual relationship. The animals devour each other: men attack each other: all is war without rest, without truce: this gives new force to…

Eneada-III, 2, 1 1. To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense. Such a notion could be entertained only where there is neither intelligence nor even ordinary perception; and reason enough has been urged against it, though none is really necessary.…

2. By derivation from that Authentic Kosmos, one within itself, there subsists this lower kosmos, no longer a true unity. It is multiple, divided into various elements, thing standing apart from thing in a new estrangement. No longer is there concord unbroken; hostility, too, has entered as the result of difference and distance; imperfection has…

3. Nor would it be sound to condemn this Kosmos as less than beautiful, as less than the noblest possible in the corporeal; and neither can any charge be laid against its source. The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of deliberate purpose: it is due to a higher Kind engendering…

4. That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things should not astonish us. The thing destroyed derived its being from outside itself: this is no case of a self-originating substance being annihilated by an external; it rose on the ruin of something else, and thus in its own ruin it suffers nothing strange; and…

5. 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…

7. 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…

9. It would not be just, because Providence cannot be a something reducing us to nothingness: to think of Providence as everything, with no other thing in existence, is to annihilate the Universe; such a providence could have no field of action; nothing would exist except the Divine. As things are, the Divine, of course,…

10. But: if the evil in men is involuntary, if their own will has not made them what they are, how can we either blame wrong-doers or even reproach their victims with suffering through their own fault? If there is a Necessity, bringing about human wickedness either by force of the celestial movement or by…

11. Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by Necessities rooted in Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that everything is as good as anything can be? No: the Reason-Principle is the sovereign, making all: it wills things as they are and, in its reasonable act, it produces even what…

12. Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the Reason-Principle applying itself, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle – then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the Reason-Principle could not be a thing…

13. And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is something more to be considered than the present. There are the periods of the past and, again, those in the future; and these have everything to do with fixing worth of place. Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave…