If the sensible world is good, despite its partial, perhaps even phenomenal fallenness and temporary subjection to evil angels and gods—a point of dispute, I acknowledged in the last entry, between Platonists, gnostics, and more orthodox Christians—then what is evil, at the formal and final levels of causality (that is, not just its potential mechanical origins in the machinations of demons)? We all surely experience it: “natural evil,” in modes catastrophic (monsoons, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, droughts), ubiquitous and atmospheric (the cosmological principles of thermodynamic decay and dissolution; the violence of plants and animals against one another and others of their respective kingdoms; time’s kiss of aging and lost abilities) and personal (the crushing weight of gravity upon a falling car and the human frame it encompasses; the ruinous power of disease; death’s unforgivable theft of loved ones). We also experience—if not uniquely with respect to kind, then certainly with regard to degree—moral evil: the devastation of our will, its temptations and proclivities towards misbehavior and exploitation of being for our own ends, its justifications for violence to get what it wants, its agreeability with demons, its dark depths and indulgence of selfish fantasies. And this is just within! We encounter it in all our sins against others and of others against us and the world beyond. If war is at least a natural evil of atoms against atoms, time against life, and living things against one another in the pursuit of their needs, then we, too, make it a moral evil, for it is truly our closest experience of hell (and, perhaps, it is also a moral evil in the nonhuman creation as well, though how exactly may be beyond our ken). Even the best of us, and the best creatures we know, are capable of evils great and small, some of them very close to if not indicative of their natures. My dog, Daisy, is a very good dog; she is a completely lovely animal, in fact, most of the time, relishing doggish things, like napping, eating, pets, the outdoors, watching field and sky, digging about in dirt, and meeting new friends. And each spring, despite my best efforts, I will often catch the moonlight shining in her eyes and a young rabbit in her teeth, her sweetness notwithstanding. Even our licit enjoyment of goods can harm us or others; the world can sometimes appear drunk with the blood necessary to sustain it.
From the outset I will say that I do not pretend to be capable of solving the problem of evil in toto and that those who do so presume are usually untrustworthy, perhaps because they have not experienced it at any great length themselves or because they have not fully internalized their experiences in an honest way. The protection privilege affords from many natural and moral evils, both suffered and chosen, should never be underestimated. I will also say that in deigning to speak about evil I am broaching the one topic that I think provides any intellectual justification whatsoever for atheism—though at best, I think it is a partial and contingent justification (since, as Plotinus will say below, it is only knowledge of the transcendent Good that God is that allows us to name evil in the first place). Atheism, even purely at the level of allegiance, may even be a morally superior response to the world’s sufferings in certain instances: the person who renounces, curses, or doubts God in response to the death of children or mass extinction events is likely possessed of a superior moral sensibility to the one who blandly praises God’s sovereignty in response to such blatant blight in the world, though the man who, like Job, sits in silent contemplation, neither praising nor cursing God, may well be wiser than either of them (Job 1-2). Certainly, nice, philosophically sophisticated theodicies are not good medicine for everyone who experiences profound dukkha, from mundane ennui to true existential despair: they work for an educated elite, like Boethius, but less so for someone like Martha, who says between simple, honest tears that if Christ had just been there, her brother would not have died (Jn 11:21); and more powerful and important than Christ’s own theodicy around Lazarus’ death, that it happened that God’s glory might be revealed (11:14-15, 25-27), are his own tears in reply to the sight of his friend’s tomb (11:36).
Still, at some point we will have to attempt to frame evil within a wider vision of reality, just as we do goodness: blight must be accounted for as much as beauty, maya (in its illusory quality) as much as truth. On the one hand, our best philosophical and religious experiences and their practical mediations in tradition and scripture suggest the primacy of the Good, the absolute, unconditioned character of raw existence in luminous, delighted mind, and the emptiness of all contingencies as only so many dancing, playful expressions of that transcendent in the immanence of the world, allowing us to take up our part in the game without becoming attached to the transient. And on the other hand our experience of the game itself—perhaps even our most pressing and regular experience—is that it is subject from beginning to end to pain, to distress, to frustration, to surreal dysfunction, epic failure. How we make sense of that antinomy matters.
There are basically two ways to talk about evil at the cosmic and metaphysical levels: myth and philosophy. Both are necessary, and it is the case that myth is even more necessary than philosophy is. Myth is story with staying power: it is inarguably more important to most people than abstract reasoning is, being more deeply influential on the affections of the soul and thus more pedagogically useful than syllogism in the majority of cases. Religion’s most powerful practices and devotional discourse come from myth rather than philosophy. And indeed, philosophers and theologians both traditionally need and use myth as the sacred basis for their aspirations of universal intelligibility: Hellenistic, Imperial, and Late Antique Greek philosophy depended on traditional myths as sources of allegorical knowledge about the universe, and Early Jews and Christians treated scriptural narrative in much the same way. Philosophy may have saved myth for a more intellectual era of antiquity, but many of philosophy’s most important ideas are derived in some way from myth.1 And it is not the case that myth is incapable of expressing truth ad litteram, even if it often does not. Our modern myths bear this out: the Big Bang is a myth, insofar as it is a story about the universe’s origins with a profound hold on our cultural psyche; it also happens to be a myth we have decent reason to believe is in some sense close to the literal truth, as far as it goes. When myths describe cosmic and spiritual powers at work in the world, we do not have the same reason to doubt that this is literally and not just metaphorically true that we do to doubt other aspects of the cosmology of ancient myths. We no more know now than we did in antiquity, for instance, whether gods and monsters have battled for the sensible cosmos in the distant past; we no more know now than we did before whether stars might be gods or fay and demons might haunt the world. It is causal confusion and contemporary hubris that suggests otherwise. There are some things we can only reason in the aftermath of, not towards as towards a first principle; myth can, but does not always, name those entities and events for us, where philosophy depends on myth as a resource to make sense of the concrete reality. And myth can be made fact where it was not previously so, as the Inklings insisted of Christ, and as contemporary people often experience in the continual rehashing of ancient imagination in modern myths about our current and future possibilities as a global, interplanetary, and interstellar civilization. We cannot avoid myth’s account of evil: we will have to first deal with it to then approach a more philosophical vision.
In the Hebrew Bible, God—whether Elohim, YHWH, or YHWH Elohim—creates the world by taming primordial chaos, a process that requires him (especially in Yahwistic myth) to do battle with chaotic gods or monsters that resist the order he desires to impose on the world. While the chaoskampf motif is arguably mitigated in importance in the Priestly creation story (Gen 1:1-2:3), it is not wholly absent, either: as Jon Levenson argues, “we must be careful about overdrawing the contrast” between the theomachic material of other Southwest Asian dramas of creation, like Enuma Elish, and the creation mythologies of ancient Israel and Judah.2 After all, “Nowhere in the seven-day creation scheme of Genesis 1 does God create the waters; they are most likely primordial.”3 True: “the God of Israel has no myth of origin,” and “[n]ot a trace of a theogony can be found in the Hebrew Bible” (though I am less confident than Levenson that this means there in fact was no theogony for YHWH in ancient Israel and Judah; there almost certainly was, not least since he was originally El’s viceregent before merging with El himself). But alongside him, “other divine beings” also “seem to have been primordial”; God’s consultation with them about whether to create humanity (Gen 1:26-28) implies that “God’s authority…involved some element of collegiality.”4 The dynamic of divine collegiality and mastery is visible elsewhere, too, as in, for instance, God’s hymn of accession in Psalm 82, performed cultically with the intention of solidifying anew God’s rule (“Arise, God, and rule the world / Take possession of all peoples”; 82:8), suggests that “God’s assumption of mastery is not complete,” either, “and that the demise of the dark forces in opposition to him lies in the uncertain future.”5 Other material in the Hebrew Bible underlines YHWH’s path to rule over the gods and the created order through theomachy or chaoskampf: in Psalm 74:12-17, for example, he fights the sea dragon Leviathan, and after destroying him creates the world. In Isaiah 51:9-11, the monster is Rahab rather than Leviathan, identified with the Dragon (Heb: Tannin, who also makes an appearance in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle), and is humbled together with the Sea (Yamm) and the deep (Tehom, cognate with the name of Tiamat), and YHWH’s mighty act of defeating them in the past is invoked as the paradigm for his return of the Judahite exiles in the present. YHWH defeated the monsters, potentially saving the other gods as in other ancient Near Eastern literature, thus demonstrating the power necessary to create and rule the world; hence the cosmic order is a product of his victory. But these texts, as Levenson says, “attest to a view of creation in which God’s ordering of reality is irresistible, but not constant or inevitable.”6 Indeed, “the endurance and stability of nature is not intrinsic; it is only a corollary of God’s faithfulness. Should he in his freedom choose to dishonor his covenantal pledge, the created order would vanish.”7 And so just as God’s victory in the past established the world, and prophets like Deutero-Isaiah called for its repeat to re-create the world in the present, so, too, Early Jews under Persian, Macedonian, and Roman rule envisioned a future and final victory, so great that “those past acts of redemption and patronage [would be] only earnests of [the] coming consummation, which will dwarf them.”8 In Isaiah 25:6-8, for example, written during the First Temple, it is imagined that YHWH will undergo another theomachy—this time against Mot, the God of Death—which will conclude with his swallowing Death (in a reversal of the Ugaritic myth, where Death swallows Baal, YHWH’s counterpart in wider Levantine mythology), bringing about a change in the natural order itself (hence, the resurrection in Isa 26:19). But in the Second Temple, this future victory becomes the important one: “the combat myth is invoked” in later Jewish literature “in hopes of reactivating the victorious God of yore, who seems to slumber as his chosen people or his adopted viceroy suffers. In the case of apocalyptic eschatology, the myth of victory is not abandoned, but projected onto an imminent future which stands in astonishing contradiction to the afflicted present.”9 Such eschatology can also shift the source of evil in the universe from primordial and residual chaos to the moral decision-making of angelic and human powers, as it does in the Book of Jubilees, the Book of the Watchers (1 En 1-36), and the Parables of Enoch (37-71), and in some rabbinic and kabbalistic literature, where the source of evil in the universe is the yetzer hara, the “evil impulse” (which is not entirely evil in itself since it has a positive purpose in the wider cosmic drama). Chaos as the source of evil in the world, continually kept in abeyance through the cultic and covenantal reassertion of God’s kingship over the world, is not here completely sidelined, but it is focused: the unique conduits for chaos’ continued activity in a universe where God’s power everywhere restrains it is the one place where God does not exercise totalizing control, namely, the free will of creatures. God’s victory over past, present, and future monsters of chaos is not yet complete, and so creation itself is not yet quite complete, either; and, at least for the rabbis and the later kabbalists, it may even be that evil represents an incompleteness in God himself (at least in his cosmic, manifest, incarnate form of the sefirotic universe).
Though he did not seek to philosophize about this mythos in particular, Plotinus offers a philosophical account of evil that many later Jews, Christians, and Muslims took to be an effective allegorization of the biblical theology depicted above. In Ennead I.8, Plotinus addresses the origin and nature of evil. There, Plotinus offers a classic exposition of the doctrine of evil as privatio boni, which would later be associated with Augustine of Hippo. The primary question is whether evil is a form, and therefore an eternal, permanent aspect of intelligible reality. Plotinus thinks not: “how could one imagine that evil is a Form, when it is situated in the absence of every good?” (I.8.10).10 To the contrary: “it is necessary for those who intend to know evils to comprehend good, since the better precedes the worse, that is, among Forms, and some of the worse are not Forms but rather a privation of Form. It is, all the same, a matter for investigation how good is contrary to evil, with perhaps one a beginning and the other an end, or the one as Form the other privation” (I.8.1). Because “[t]he Good is that upon which all beings depend and that ‘which all beings desire,’” such that “they have it as their principle and are also in need of it,” that which “itself lacks nothing, being sufficient unto itself and in need of nothing,” “the measure and limit of all beings, giving from itself Intellect and Substantiality and Soul and Life and the activity of Intellect,” “itself above Beauty” and “the transcendent ruler of all that is best, all that is in the intelligible world,” it is the case, so thinks Plotinus, that “Intellect is the primary activity that comes from “the Good, and the primary Substance that comes from it, while it remains in itself.” (I.8.2). “Soul,” not to be forgotten, “dances outside this, looking at it and, in contemplating its interior, looks at god through Intellect” (I.8.2). This, indeed, “‘is the life of the gods’” (quoting Phaedrus 248a), “carefree and blessed, and evil is nowhere here.” Hence, “if the procession stopped here, there would be no evil but only the first and the second and the third order of goods. ‘All things are around the king of all, and that is the cause of all beauties, and all things come from that, and second things are around the second, and third things around the third’” (I.8.2; quoting Plato, Epistula II 312e). This, recall, is the intelligible world for Plotinus: the intellectual and psychic orders that unfold from the One prior, in the order of being, to the sensible realm. “Indeed,” he writes, “if all that exists were these Beings and what transcends them” (that is, the One or the Good), “evil would not exist among Beings, or in what transcends them. For these beings are good” (I.8.3). Logically: participating in the Good, they are themselves good. “So it remains that if indeed evil does exist, it exists among non-beings as a sort of form of non-being and is involved in some way with that which is mixed or associated with non-being” (I.8.3). The convertibility of goodness and being means, consequently, that evil, the antonym of goodness, must also logically be the antonym of being; ergo, evil is non-being. The kind of non-being Plotinus has in mind is not general nothingness but more specific: “This non-being belongs to every sensible object and every state sensible objects are in, whether as something posterior to or accidental to them or as a principle of these or as some one of the elements that together comprise being of this sort” (I.8.3). In other words, “someone might immediately arrive at a conception of evil as a sort of absence of measure as opposed to measure, or absence of limit as opposed to limit, or absence of form as opposed to what is productive of form, or what is always in need as opposed to what is self-sufficient”: that is to say, not infinity, in the sense of transcendence of boundaries, but indeterminacy: “always indefinite, in no way stable, absolutely passive, insatiable, and completely impoverished” (I.8.3). Hence, “the substrate of figures and forms and shapes and measures and limits and whatever is ordered by an ordering alien to it, not having good from itself, but being like a reflection in relation to beings—that is actually the substantiality of evil, if indeed something can be the substantiality of evil.” This means that bodies and souls partake of some evil because they partake of the principle of evil, which is the substrate, but they are not wholly evil, because both also manifest intelligible form (I.8.4); to the contrary, “evil consists not in any particular type of lack,” which every body and soul possess, “but in absolute lack” (I.8.5). And so Plotinus is able to be blunt here: “when something is absolutely lacking—which is what matter is—this is really evil, having no share of good. For matter does not even have existence, which would have allowed it to partake of good to this extent; rather, we say that ‘existence is said of it equivocally, so that the true way to speak of it is as non-existent” (I.8.5). All particular evil is a metric of either corporeal or psychic submission to matter’s indeterminacy over the primacy of the indwelling intelligible Forms; and as far as that goes, “[w]hatever evils take hold of human beings, they take hold of us unwillingly” (I.8.5). Plotinus then engages in a bit of theodicy: “Though matter is present to the sensible gods, evil is not present…For these gods master matter—though the gods in whom matter is not present are better—and they master it by that in them which is not enmattered,” i.e., their superior souls (I.8.5); “evils are not eliminable” and “exist of necessity,” but “they do not exist among gods,” for “heaven is always purified of evils” (I.8.6); “evil’s existence contains something false, which is primarily and really false; but the existence of the divine is true existence” (I.8.6). Gods, whether sensible or intelligible only, may or may not partake in matter, but not all partake in evil, so says Plotinus (more on this below). He subsequently asks: “how, then, is it necessary that, if the Good exists, so does evil?” (I.8.7). Plotinus thinks that because “[t]his universe is indeed of necessity made of contraries,” and “these would not exist if matter did not,” therefore “evils come from ‘the archaic nature’, meaning the material substrate before it has been ordered by some god” (I.8.7, alluding to the theology of Statesman 273b-c and Timaeus 53b). Conversely, this means that “‘[b]eing among the gods’ means being among the intelligibles” (I.8.7), beyond matter and matter’s gods altogether. Evil is “in the eternal descent and removal from [the Good], a last point, and after this it would not be possible for anything else to come to be; and this is evil,” in fact the terminal nothingness of pure matter that stands at the far end of the Good’s emanative powers. “[T]he forms in matter are not identical with what they would be if they existed by themselves,” he says, “but rather are enmattered expressed principles corrupted and infected by that nature” (I.8.8). Therefore, “whereas the unmeasured is the primary evil, that which, having come to be in that which is unmeasured either by assimilation or participation, which is accidental to it, is a secondary evil” (I.8.8). Matter is “without qualities…in the sense of having no nature” and '“to be without quality” is to be “evil” (I.8.10); and, since “the nature that is contrary to all form”—that is, matter—“is privation,” and hence “evil” is “the absence of Good” (I.8.11). Evil in the soul—i.e., vice—is an error in intellectual vision (I.8.11-13); it is “weakness in the soul” (I.8.14). The possibility of this weakness or sickness emerging is complex. “Matter is among things that exist and soul exists,” Plotinus says, “and there is one sort of region for them. For the region of matter is not separate from the region of soul—say, matter on earth and soul in the air—but the region for the soul that is separate is not being in matter, that is, not being united with matter” (I.8.14). Hence, “a unity does not come to be out of soul and matter. And this means that soul is not in matter as in a substrate” (I.8.14). Matter desires entry into the soul, and, indeed, has plentiful opportunities, for “there is nothing which is without a share of soul”; and so, “[t]hrowing itself under soul, then, it is illuminated, and i snot able to receive that by which it is illuminated.” But this has the effect of “darken[ing] the illumination and hte light there by mixing with soul and has made it weak, presenting generation to it and the explanation for its coming into matter.” This, indeed, “is the fall of the soul; to come in this way into matter and to be weakened, because all of its faculties are not present in the activity” by matter’s obscuration of the intelligible reality. Hence, “matter is the cause of weakness in the soul and the cause of vice.” Unfortunately, it will not do to simply insist on the unreality of matter: “the necessity of its existence” is unavoidable (I.8.15). But, strangely, “Because of the power and nature of Good,” from which everything, even Good’s privation, unfolds, “evil is not just evil; since it appeared of necessity, it is bound with certain beautiful chains, like prisoners bound with golden chains, hidden by these, so that, being like this, it is not seen by the gods, and human beings do not always have to look at evil,” since “whenever they look, they are accompanied by images of Beauty to recollect.” These chains are, obviously, the sensible world itself, matter qualified by Soul’s transmission of the Forms it perceives in Intellect.
Plotinus investigates the issue around matter more deeply in Ennead II.4: there is intelligible matter (II.4.2-4), and insofar as there is intelligible matter, there is also substantial matter (II.4.5). Sensible matter is obvious from generation and decay (II.4.6), but it is utterly without quality (II.4.8-9). But sensible matter is indeterminate (II.4.10), and only appears to be like something through our efforts to envision it (II.4.11); it is the substrate that enables things like quality, magnitude, and corporeality to manifest (II.4.12), without itself being a quality (II.4.13-14). Intelligible and sensible matter alike are “unlimitedness:” again, not in the sense of simple numeric infinity, nor even qualitative infinity (since, again, matter is not a quality), but in the sense of absolute indeterminacy, since “what is ordered is different from what orders, and what orders is limit and boundary and expressed principle—then what is ordered and defined is necessarily what is without limit” in itself (II.4.15). The distinction between the two is that “the matter in the intelligible world is Being,” since “What is prior to it transcends Being”; “[b]ut here in the sensible world what is prior to matter is being. It itself is, therefore, not being, being different from being and exceedingly evil” (II.4.16). That is not to say, Plotinus is careful to point out, that intelligible matter is as it were the very form of Difference itself, but it is a “a part of Difference that is organizationally opposed to Beings in the principal sense, and these are expressed principles”; hence, “even if matter is not-being, it is still being in a way and is identical to privation, if privation is opposition to what is contained in an expressed principle.” Sensible matter is by contrast absolute privation, the source of the dualism of potentiality and actuality in the sensible world (see II.5.4-5).
For someone who devoted an entire tract to the refutation of the gnostics, Plotinus certainly agrees with them that matter in se is evil (the tract is II.9, which follows on this series in the second Ennead concerning the cosmos [II.1], heaven and the stars [II.2-3], matter [II.4], potency and act [II.5], quality [II.6], blending [II.7], and optics [II.8], suggesting that Porphyry may have been aware that it would be relatively easy to coopt some of Plotinus’ ideas in service of a gnostic metaphysics). Platonists, gnostics, and dualist religions and philosophies of the late antique Mediterranean generally agreed on this point: where they dissented was on whether or not a.) reality was ultimately monistic and b.) whether matter’s status as evil meant that the sensible, corporeal cosmos itself was evil, perhaps even the creation of an evil god.11 Contingent dualism was possible and even necessary from within a Platonic framework, and was agreeable to Jewish and, further afield, Zoroastrian cosmologies; but what if dualism were ultimate? What if, indeed, there were finally two gods engaged in a more-or-less equal bout with one another for the spirits of good humans?12 Distantly akin to Valentinus and Basilides in the second century, the Manichaeans were a significant and successful Christian movement from Persia promoting exactly that:13 an absolute cosmic dualism.
In this environment, the subtlety and care with which the mainstream Christian position—that, as Plotinus says, matter as the nothingness of pure potency or indeterminacy is evil itself, while the sensible cosmos is not evil in itself but good due to the indwelling forms and only accidentally evil insofar as matter is its substrate, though it is subject to the negative influence of nefarious gods and angels, especially those ensconced in matter—emerged is more appreciable. The Christian answer was, on the one hand, much closer in spirit to the traditional answer in Jewish myth and philosophy both during and after the Second Temple period; it was, on the other hand, perhaps more committed to Hellenistic philosophy’s monism and monotheism than were late antique Jews (whose monotheism did not necessarily require God’s present perfection). Yet the Christian adoption of Plotinus’ theodicy does not, per se, eliminate its own foundational commitment to the mythic and apocalyptic language of chaoskampf and theomachy: instead, it finds a way to subordinate that conflict to an overriding monism, in which God is indeed (though perhaps it is not yet fully manifest!) One, Father, Almighty, and Creator. It leaves room for the reality of the experience of evil, and the mystery of evil’s presence in the will—even in the nonhuman will!—in a way that Plotinus himself perhaps did not even consider or could not fathom. And it leaves room for Christianity’s most fundamental offer to the conversation: where Plotinus would have insisted on evil’s necessity, Christianity offers both Christ as the Savior of the kosmos from the evil that beguiles it, and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy of Christ’s disciples as his own present answer to evil. To this we might add sacraments and tefilah, the mitzvoth, tzedakah, salat and zakat, the dharma, whatever: for the most important answer that any sangha can make to evil is how it chooses to live in a world that experiences evil rather than to try to explain evil. But the explanations can help, too, in their way.
See Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5-106; see also Stephen RL Clark, Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
See Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 5.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 5.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 7.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 14.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 14.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 29.
Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 32.
The translation is from the Gerson edition.
See M. David Litwa, The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
See Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
On Manichaeans as Christians, I commend Nicholas J. Baker-Brian, Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 1-33, especially 15-24, and Iain Gardner, The Founder of Manichaeism: Rethinking the Life of Mani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 18-58. In a nutshell: Mani thought of himself as the “apostle of Jesus Christ,” Manichaeans thought of themselves as devoted to the teachings, rites, and worship of Jesus, and the heresiological descriptions of them by other Mediterranean Christians of the more orthodox/catholic persuasion implies that the identification was close enough to make them anxious. This does not mean that one has to accept Manichaean theology as valid if one is a Christian, but only that one should exercise the Golden Rule enough to acknowledge how these people thought of themselves before applying a more rhetorically convenient identity to them.
Mysterium Iniquitatis
A very thoughtful piece, David. Thank you.