/lit/ - Literature

>Both systems, however, the emanational and that of Christianity, leave unanswered the question which they regard as beyond the power of the human mind to solve, although they make some attempt to do so: namely, how did the degradation of Being take place? The way this question is formulated varies according to the conception of the Absolute: in the first case it is 'Why did the One give rise to the manifold?', in the second 'Why did God create the world?' The one in Plotinus's thinking, like the Creator in Augustine's, is characterized by absolute self-sufficiency, and it would be blasphemous to suppose that the needed other beings or lacked anything that could be supplied by the created world. Nor can the question 'Why?' be asked in the sense of discovering an external cause that could influence the will of God or the emanational activity of the Absolute. A being which is completely self-sufficient, lacking and needing nothing, unable to be more perfect than it is, cannot display to the human mind any 'reason' prompting the act of creation. The very notion of an Absolute Creator contains within itself a kind of contradiction: if absolute, why does he or it create human kind? If created reality includes evil - even though we regard this evil as mere negation, defect, or insufficiency - how can we explain its presence in a world brought into being by an Absolute which is itself supreme Power and supreme Goodness?

Why does he never get discussed here?

He BTFO'd the marxists and the atheists.