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
Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the AUTHENTIC GOOD, why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into happiness? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul. Enneads I,4,6
We understand, now, why good men have no other Love other Eros of life – than that for the Absolute and AUTHENTIC GOOD, and never follow the random attractions known to those ranged under the lower Spirit Kind. Enneads III,5,7
When, on the contrary, the agent falls in love with what is good in those actions, and, cheated by the mere track and trace of the AUTHENTIC GOOD makes them his own, then, in his pursuit of a lower good, he is the victim of magic. For all dalliance with what wears the mask of the authentic, all attraction towards that mere semblance, tells of a mind misled by the spell of forces pulling towards unreality. Enneads IV,4,44
And again: the multiple must be always seeking its identity, desiring self-accord and self-awareness: but what scope is there within what is an absolute unity in which to move towards its identity or at what term may it hope for self-knowing? It holds its identity in its very essence and is above consciousness and all intellective act. Intellection is not a primal either in the fact of being or in the value of being; it is secondary and derived: for there exists The Good; and this moves towards itself while its sequent is moved and by that movement has its characteristic vision. The intellective act may be defined as a movement towards The Good in some being that aspires towards it; the effort produces the fact; the two are coincident; to see is to have desired to see: hence again the AUTHENTIC GOOD has no need of intellection since itself and nothing else is its good. Enneads V,6,5
Matter would have Forming-Idea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; body would look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands Intellectual-Principle; above that again is the principle we call the Primal. Each of these progressive priors must have act upon those minors to which they are, respectively, the good: some will confer order and place, others life, others wisdom and the good life: Intellectual-Principle will draw upon the AUTHENTIC GOOD which we hold to be coterminous with it, both as being an Activity put forth from it and as even now taking light from it. This good we will define later. Enneads VI,7,25