That Pesky Deus Ex Machina

[sdi]

When the God saw the waggoner kneel,
Crying, "Hercules! Lift me my wheel
 From the mud where 'tis stuck!"
 He laughed—"No such luck;
Set your shoulder yourself to the wheel!"

THE GODS HELP THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES

(Walter Crane (tr.) and Edmund Evans (illust.), Baby's Own Æsop)

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But it is important [...] to be clear about the reasons why Plotinus disliked [the Gnostics] so intensely and thought their influence so harmful. [...] They reject the only true way of salvation through wisdom and virtue, the slow patient study of truth and pursuit of perfection by men who respect the wisdom of the ancients and know their place in the universe. They claim to be a privileged caste of beings, in whom alone God is interested, and who are saved not by their own efforts but by some dramatic and arbitrary divine proceeding; and this, Plotinus says, leads to immorality.

(A. H. Armstrong, Introduction to Enneads II ix "Against the Gnostics")

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We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly. Thus beauty is of the Divine and comes Thence only.

(Plotinus, Enneads V viii "On the Intelligible Beauty" §13, as translated by Stephen MacKenna)

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Is it not, then, out of place for you, who are confident that there exists in you both the savior and that which is saved and the destroyer and that which is destroyed, [...] to yearn for the shadow of a leader as though you do not have the true leader within yourself?

(Porphyry to Marcella, as translated by Kathleen O'Brien Wicker)

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Yes, gods and dæmons alike help us in that last and greatest task of overcoming death—but just like I always tell my daughter, "help" doesn't mean "doing it for you."