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Neoplatonism.
Evil is necessary for free-will.
There's beauty in pain and tragedy, imagine all movies being trash comedy of no substance.
There's no progress in utopia, thus no life in paradise.
Every life is an actualization of God's infinite potency, and every evil is only evil due to the limitation of human life.
But Limitations are also the keys of all beauty and meaning, without limit you have no purpose.
Only One who has forgotten herself can experience the beauty of every moment again, the beauty in every kiss, smile, horizon, dawn, and eclipse.

Knowledge isn't understanding.
Information isn't an argument.
Data is a barren seed that can't inspire wisdom from your soil.

>>14854984
Choice is good, the mystery of choice begets the capacity for evil. Therefore there is evil for otherwise Necessity would enslave us, and herself then be evil.
The power and mystery of choice has made each soul that is here to be here longer than it was meant to be according to Necessity.
These choices produce pain, for we have in a way fallen from heaven (or so it appears to our now far more limited souls).
This pain is nothing but the innate "knowledge" that there is more, that we could be more. The irony is that it was the exact same Will thar made us decline from what we believe is heaven.
The One is infinite, we can always rise higher, closer—and every step up the ladder of love is ecstasy, and seeing the step above is suffering (for suffering is nothing but the memory of a better state).
The absence of pain shall itself beget pain, for it is stagnation, and Life is movement.

If someone working through these puzzles should at last come to accept the One as first principle, and should then add as a decisive consideration the grounds that we have no conception or imagination simpler than the One, how then will we speculate concerning what is beyond our most remote speculation and conception? If someone asks this, we shall have sympathy with the problem raised (for it seems unapproachable and thinking about it seems to offer no solution), but nevertheless on the basis of what is more familiar to us, we must stir up the ineffable labor pains in ourselves toward a hidden (for I know not how to express it) consciousness of that sublime truth. For since in our realm of existence that which is unrelated is in every way more valuable than that which is related, and that which is independent is more valuable than that which is coordinated within a system, just as the contemplative life deserves more honor than the political life, and Kronos, let us say, more than the demiurge, and Being more than the forms, and the One more than the many whose principle the One is; so more simple than all causes and effects, and all principles and those things governed by a principle, is that which completely transcends these conditions and stands in no relationship at all and undergoes no conditioning whatsoever. For even as the One is prior to the many by nature and the simple to the composite of any kind, and the greatest container is prior to what is contained within, so in the case of that which can be designated as beyond all: it is beyond any such opposition, not only the opposition of elements within a system, but also [beyond] the opposition between what belongs to the first and what comes after the first.

>>14566659
The word itself is a heresy to us.
>Is the One then unknowable due to its inherent nature, if the unknowable
is something other than the One? The One wishes to be by itself and does not
tolerate being with another. That which is contradistinguished from the know-
able is the unknowable, but that which is beyond the One is entirely ineffable,
and we confess that we have neither knowledge nor ignorance but rather tran-
scendent ignorance with regard to that which, by its proximity, overshadows
the One as well. For since it is nearest the principle that is inconceivable, it as
it were abides in the sanctuary of transcendent silence.

>>14566662
To this man, therefore, should we undertake to return thanks adequate to the benefits which we have received from him; the whole of time would not be sufficient. But if it is necessary, not only[3] that we should have received from others the transcendent good of the Platonic philosophy, but that we should leave to posterity monuments of those blessed spectacles of which we have been spectators, and emulators to the utmost of our ability, under a leader the most perfect of the present time, and who arrived at the summit of philosophy; perhaps we shall act properly in invoking the gods, that they will enkindle the light of truth in our soul, and in supplicating the attendants and ministers of better natures to direct our intellect and lead it to the all-perfect, divine and elevated, end of the Platonic theory.

No.
What's coming is the third true philosophistic (as opposed to the four sophistics).
Thales to Aristotle.
Plotinus to Damascius/or Eriugena (to be generous).
The Renaissance up to the early 20th century was a flood of attempts at reaching the heart of reality through only pure reason—but Intellect cannot take us further than Being, which is why it was all they kept talking about. Like Aristotle unable to see beyond Intellect, for what's beyond the One-Being is naturally beyond thought. They were, to put it bluntly, uninspired. And more like the Gnostics (or the middle platonists) than Philosophers: relentless sectarianism, each thinker concluding the guy before was wrong but this time we got it right, surely.
Which is why we cannot see the numerous infamous enlightenment thinkers as anything more than tools of logic and argument to improve our own reestablishing of the Schools.
And I'm not even going to talk about the "traditionalists" from the last two centuries, they're even worse than the philosophers.
The religions of the world are not equal. And the One is not, in any of his aspects, generic; except perhaps if we speak of the one of Soul and the one of the Demiurge—but these are echoes just as we are echoes of them.

Because Ananke and the Moirai demands it, it is also the shared nature of all essence to beget another like ourselves, generation is the heart of Life. We are ourselves images of our higher self.
And in finitude there's infinity not found in the unlimited, and in the infinite there's limit not found in finite.
Soul, Being and The One are all things and ever-present. But we individual souls, bound by time, must rise to the lowest to the highest in order to fulfill all Being. By ourselves being through our unending life a whole perfect mage of eternity, achieving this we no longer reach for the light for enlightenment but are the very light itself.

He was a mystic who made a radical step into the Void. He understood that the Cloud of Unknowing—the Ineffable Abyss that one experiences before the flood of light we call God/ Being/the Unified/The One-All—is the true core of God and Everything, not the aforementioned Light. The Incandescence shining through the Clouds of Heaven is a mirror, the Abyss peering back at us, as above so below—know yourself and you shall become God.
Plotinus entered the Void and told us to wait for the Light of truth that truly is The One, and indeed the light is the natural eternal actuality of the Ineffable, but The One-is-not, the impenetrable thrice unknown darkness is true reality, the Ineffable everything and the nothing; neither one nor many yet solely One and solely Many, I.
Reality is the ever-splintered eternally whole Dionysus. God is dead, long live God.

>>14409686
Because that's only possible after death.
A composer does it through nothing but music he becomes the beautiful.
A hero by merely being virtuous he becomes the Good.
The mathematician through dialectics knows Being.
A philosopher does it through all these ways, transcending knowledge he knows himself as the One and that he's always been.

>>14387561
We exist in the world because the essence of existence is inspiration and generation. We plunged down by our own intrinsic desire to mimic the above, and like him create.
The desire for the Good can only be matched by the Soul's will to emanate something of our own. To want nothing but "permanent" dissipation into unity is to insult God who Being the One has distinguished himself from himself, if the One is all one should be why isn't he?
It's because he is One and all things, many undifferentiated, Ineffable; not a mere generic One nor the set of all sets, Empty.

>>14278105
Understanding Plotinus view on matter takes at least three reads.
>evil does not exist (lacks ontological existence)
>matter is the image of the indefinites of the Dyad, but only that aspect
>therefore matter is without quality, formless
>but matter can be said to be one
>but not the One itself (OR IS IT?)
>he wants to say that there's a difference between intelligible matter and worldly matter
>but you can't prove this since the only real difference between them is that heavenly matter is enformed by God himself, and bodily matter is enformed by the image of the image of God. But since matter is from the beginning without quality, you can't truly say they're different.
>All definitions of the One can be applied to Matter.
>Except the claim that all things come from the One, but nothing comes from matter.
Matter is the end of generation, therefore necessarily empty, it is nonbeing, yet even it like every, is still a oneness.
The Neoplatonists I believe were afraid, even Damascius (who almost say it), to take the leap of faith that Matter is what the Ineffable is after the divine Subjects twists their vision of the One. It is the veil of knowledge itself, the abyss of the One.

And that's wirhout going into evil and the soul and matter.

Augustine's Confessions (once you get used to his oh so humble and unceasing self-deprecation.)
Everything by Montaigne.
Songs of Wandering Scholars.
Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb
A Room of One's Own
All of Samuel Johnson (like Montaigne, everything he wrote was personal)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Solomon Maimon's Autobiography
Cellini's Autobiography
Diary of William Bentley
The Dyer's Hand (Auden)
Goethe's Italian Journey
Caesar's writings
The Murder of Charles the Good
The Memoirs of Duke of Saint Simon (not the proto-commie).

>>14183988
If they believe christ was a God-man, and that creation was some form of mistake or evil, or that even matter is inherently evil. Sure this might put some of Plotinus tractates 'gnostical' but Plotinus wrote for over 20 years and was very ill later in life, while he might casually describe matter as evil: in Plotinus system, Evil is solely a result from the individual soul's choices, matter here taking a secondary role (the drug of the addict). It was mythically expounded in the myth of Narcissus. Matter is a pond, the bottom of THE FULLY GOOD hierarchy of reality, like water it is formless and thus reflects all the light from God, the soul sees the reflection and for a moment that becomes a life confuses the stars in a pond for a crown.
But even the fall of the soul has a divine purpose, one from Necessity. It might not be so nice for you, but in the whole this too is beautiful.