monad or triad,” he says, “can express the all-transcending hiddenness of the all-transcending super-essentially super-existing super-Deity.[162]” But even in the midst of this barbarous jargon he does not quite forget his Plato.  “The Good and Beautiful,” he says, “are the cause of all things that are; and all things love and aspire to the Good and Beautiful, which are, indeed, the sole objects of their desire.”  “Since, then, the Absolute Good and Beautiful is honoured by eliminating all qualities from it, the non-existent also ([Greek:  to me on]) must participate in the Good and Beautiful.”  This pathetic absurdity shows what we are driven to if we try to graft Indian nihilism upon the Platonic doctrine of ideas.  Plotinus tried hard to show that his First Person was very different from his lowest category—­non-existent “matter”; but if we once allow ourselves to define the Infinite as the Indefinite, the conclusion which he deprecated cannot long be averted.

“God is the Being of all that is.”  Since, then, Being is identical with God or Goodness, evil, as such, does not exist; it only exists by its participation in good.  Evil, he says, is not in things which exist; a good tree cannot bear evil fruit; it must, therefore, have another origin.  But this is dualism, and must be rejected.[163] Nor is evil in God, nor of God; nor in the angels; nor in the human soul; nor in the brutes; nor in inanimate nature; nor in matter.  Having thus hunted evil out of every corner of the universe, he asks—­Is evil, then, simply privation of good?  But privation is not evil in itself.  No; evil must arise from “disorderly and inharmonious motion.”  As dirt has been defined as matter in the wrong place, so evil is good in the wrong place.  It arises by a kind of accident; “all evil is done with the object of gaining some good; no one does evil as evil.”  Evil in itself is that which is “nohow, nowhere, and no thing”; “God sees evil as good.”  Students of modern philosophy will recognise a theory which has found influential advocates in our own day:  that evil needs only to be supplemented, rearranged, and transmuted, in order to take its place in the universal harmony.[164]

All things flow out from God, and all will ultimately return to Him.  The first emanation is the Thing in itself ([Greek:  auto to einai]), which corresponds to the Plotinian [Greek:  Nous], and to the Johannine Logos.  He also calls it “Life in itself” and “Wisdom in itself” ([Greek:  autozoe, autosophia]).  Of this he says, “So then the Divine Wisdom in knowing itself will know all things.  It will know the material immaterially, and the divided inseparably, and the many as one ([Greek:  heniaios]), knowing all things by the standard of absolute unity.”  These important speculations are left undeveloped by Dionysius, who merely states them dogmatically.  The universe is evolved from the Son, whom he identifies with the “Thing in itself,” “Wisdom,” or “Life in itself.”