Page:Enneads (IA enneads05plot).pdf/243
If God is nowhere, then not anywhere has He "happened to be"; as also everywhere, He is everywhere in entirety: at once, He is that everywhere and everywise: He is not in the everywhere but is the everywhere as well as the giver to the rest of things of their being in that everywhere. Holding the supreme place—or rather no holder but Himself the Supreme—all lies subject to Him; they have not brought Him to be but happen, all, to Him—or rather they stand there before Him looking upon Him, not He upon them. He is borne, so to speak, to the inmost of Himself in love of that pure radiance which He is, He Himself being that which He loves. That is to say, as self-dwelling Act and Intellectual-Principle, the most to be loved, He has given Himself existence. Intellectual-Principle is the issue of Act: God therefore is issue of Act, but since no other has generated Him He is what He made Himself: He is not, therefore, "as He happened to be" but as He acted Himself into being.
Again; if He preeminently is because He holds firmly, so to speak, towards Himself, looking towards Himself, so that what we must call his being is this self-looking, He must again, since the word is inevitable, make Himself: thus, not "as He happens to be" is He but as He Himself wills to be. Nor is this will a hazard, a something happening; the will adopting the Best is not a thing of chance.
That his being is constituted by this self-originating self-tendance—at once Act and repose—becomes clear if we imagine the contrary; inclining towards something outside of Himself, He would destroy the identity of his being. This self-directed Act is therefore his peculiar being, one with Himself. If then his act never came to be but is eternal—a waking without an awakener, an eternal wakening and a supra-Intellection—He is as He waked Himself to be. This awakening is before being, before Intellectual-Principle, before rational life, though He is these; He is thus an Act before Intellectual-Principle and consciousness and life; these come from Him and no other; his being, then, is a self-presence, issuing from Himself. Thus not "as He happened to be" is He but as He willed to be.