18. The Origin of Evil and the Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science

Several centuries later, the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus attempted to approach the problem of evil from the standpoint of mystical philosophy. He reasoned that the human soul, through further development in the sense of spiritualization, can delve deeper into the spiritual and gradually break free from the laws of material existence. In this, Plotinus, and with him many philosophers, saw that which is the enemy of good; he thought that to the extent that the material world had an effect on the soul, evil intruded to the same extent, and so he saw evil in the material world, which was hostile to the spiritual. But even with this, mystical thinking did not come close to the problem of evil: it has not been explained why material forces oppose good and what the human soul should get from the fact that these forces can play into it.