It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The ABSOLUTE GOOD cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and unable to rest in the Authentic Good. Enneads I,2,4
This ABSOLUTE GOOD other entities may possess in two ways – by becoming like to It and by directing the Act of their being towards It. Enneads I,7,1
How can there any contrary to the ABSOLUTE GOOD, when the absolute has no quality? Besides, is there any universal necessity that the existence of one of two contraries should entail the existence of the other? Admit that the existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of the other – sickness and health, for example – yet there is no universal compulsion. Enneads I,8,6
But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is something quite different. If then Vice is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not Evil-Absolute. Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE GOOD, but a co-operator with it; and if Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE GOOD neither is Vice the Absolute Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beauty or the ABSOLUTE GOOD; neither, therefore, is Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil. Enneads I,8,10
We teach that Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE GOODGOOD and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the starting-point we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud: for if the Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still human, still carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and this is our “going down to Hades and slumbering there.” Enneads I,8,10
Still, how can a Reason-Principle (the Intellectual), characteristically a manifold, a total, derive from what is obviously no Reason-Principle? But how, failing such origin in the simplex, could we escape (what cannot be accepted) the derivation of a Reason-Principle from a Reason-Principle? And how does the secondarily good (the imaged Good) derive from The Good, the Absolute? What does it hold from the ABSOLUTE GOOD to entitle it to the name? Similarity to the prior is not enough, it does not help towards goodness; we demand similarity only to an actually existent Good: the goodness must depend upon derivation from a Prior of such a nature that the similarity is desirable because that Prior is good, just as the similarity would be undesirable if the Prior were not good. Enneads V,3,16
The Supreme, as the ABSOLUTE GOOD and not merely a good being or thing, can contain nothing, since there is nothing that could be its good. Enneads V,5,13
Anything it could contain must be either good to it or not good; but in the supremely and primally Good there can be nothing not good; nor can the ABSOLUTE GOOD be a container to the Good: containing, then, neither the good nor the not good it contains nothing and, containing nothing, it is alone: it is void of all but itself. Enneads V,5,13
If the rest of being either is good – without being the absolute good – or is not good, while on the other hand the Supreme contains neither what is good nor what is not good, then, containing nothing, it is The Good by that very absence of content. Enneads V,5,13
Thus we rob it of its very being as The ABSOLUTE GOOD if we ascribe anything to it, existence or intellect or goodness. The only way is to make every denial and no assertion, to feign no quality or content there but to permit only the “It is” in which we pretend to no affirmation of non-existent attribute: there is an ignorant praise which, missing the true description, drags in qualities beneath the real worth and so abases; philosophy must guard against attaching to the Supreme what is later and lower: moving above all that order, it is the cause and source of all these, and is none of them. Enneads V,5,13
The intellective act is a movement towards the unmoved Good: thus the self-intellection in all save the ABSOLUTE GOOD is the working of the imaged Good within them: the intellectual principle recognises the likeness, sees itself as a good to itself, an object of attraction: it grasps at that manifestation of The Good and, in holding that, holds self-vision: if the state of goodness is constant, it remains constantly self-attractive and self-intellective. The self-intellection is not deliberate: it sees itself as an incident in its contemplation of The Good; for it sees itself in virtue of its Act; and, in all that exists, the Act is towards The Good. Enneads V,6,5
It is with Number as with Good. When we pronounce things to be good either we mean that they are in their own nature so or we affirm goodness as an accidental in them. Dealing with the primals, the goodness we have in mind is that First Hypostasis; where the goodness is an accidental we imply the existence of a Principle of Good as a necessary condition of the accidental presence; there must be some source of that good which is observed elsewhere, whether this source be an ABSOLUTE GOOD or something that of its own nature produces the good. Similarly with number; in attributing the decad to things we affirm either the truly existent decad or, where the decadhood is accidental, we necessarily posit the self-subsistent decad, decad not associated; if things are to be described as forming a decad, then either they must be of themselves the decad or be preceded by that which has no other being than that of decadhood. Enneads VI,6,10
Now to found the good upon the Intellect and upon that state of soul or mind which springs from wisdom does not imply that the end or the absolute good is the conjunction (of Intellect and state): it would follow merely that Intellect is the good and that we feel happy in possession of that good. That is one theory; another associates pleasure with Intellect in the sense that the Good is taken to be some one thing founded upon both but depending upon our attaining or at least contemplating an Intellect so modified; this theory would maintain that the isolated and unrelated could be the good, could be an object of desire. Enneads VI,7,30