If everything derives from a single good source then evil cannot be a rival principle, and Plotinus takes the consequence seriously rather than avoiding it. Evil is placed at the limit of emanation, in matter understood as sheer lack of form and definition, and it has no positive nature of its own; wickedness in a person is the soul turning toward that lack instead of toward what stands above it. The position is argued at length against the Gnostics, whose teaching Plotinus attacked in a treatise of his own, and against the dualist religions of the period, and its target is exactly the claim that the world is the product of an inferior or hostile maker. Augustine took the argument over, and it became the standard Christian answer to the problem of evil in the Latin West, which is one of the largest single debts Christian theology owes to a pagan philosophical school. Whether it answers the problem or restates it has been contested ever since.
Facts
Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Doctrinal Category Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIf everything derives from a single good source then evil cannot be a rival principle. Evil is placed at the limit of emanation, in matter understood as sheer lack of form and definition, with no positive nature of its own, and wickedness in a person is the soul turning toward that lack instead of toward what stands above it. 2 Disputed
Point in DisputeWhether privation, as Plotinus placed it at the limit of emanation in matter understood as sheer lack of form, answers the problem of evil or merely restates it in different terms; Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1971) notes the objection has been pressed continuously since the argument was first made. 1 Origins
Held ByAugustine took the argument over, and it became the standard Christian answer to the problem of evil in the Latin West, which is one of the largest single debts Christian theology owes to a pagan philosophical school. 1 Position Profile
Principal ProponentPlotinus, who argued the case at length against the Gnostics in a treatise of his own and against the dualist religions of the period. 2 Opposing PositionThe dualist accounts, on which the world is the product of an inferior or hostile maker and evil is a principle in its own right. 2 Learn More
Ennead 2.9, the Treatise Against a Circle Inside His Own School
Plotinus argued the position at length in a treatise scholars now number Ennead 2.9, generally known by the title Against the Gnostics, aimed at a group within his own Roman circle whose teaching he treated as a serious enough threat to answer systematically rather than dismiss. Where Gnostic cosmology typically holds that the visible world is the flawed or malicious product of an inferior craftsman, distinct from and opposed to a true, unknowable God above it, Plotinus insists the material cosmos proceeds from the One through Intellect and Soul in an unbroken chain, so the world, however far down the chain of emanation it sits, cannot be the work of a hostile or incompetent second power, since there is no second power for it to be the work of. Evil, on this account, is not a rival substance requiring a rival explanation, it is the diminishing of reality and form that necessarily occurs at emanation's furthest point, matter understood as privation rather than as an opposing thing.
Augustine's testimony, recorded in his own Confessions, credits reading of this kind, encountered in Latin translations of Platonist writers, with helping free him from Manichaean dualism before his conversion to Christianity, and privation became the standard Latin Christian answer to why a good creation contains evil, repeated from Augustine through the medieval scholastics. The argument answers the coherence problem, a single good source need not explain evil as another thing it also made, more cleanly than it answers the practical problem of why privation is experienced as anything at all.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Related To
The Neoplatonic privation account became the standard answer to the problem of evil in the Latin West.
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