If this be so, how do we explain the teaching that evils can never pass away but “exist of necessity,” that “while evil has no place in the divine order, it haunts mortal nature and this place for ever”? Does this mean that HEAVEN is clear of evil, ever moving its orderly way, spinning on the appointed path, no injustice There or any flaw, no wrong done by any power to any other but all true to the settled plan, while injustice and disorder prevail on earth, designated as “the Mortal Kind and this Place”? Not quite so: for the precept to “flee hence” does not refer to earth and earthly life. The flight we read of consists not in quitting earth but in living our earth-life “with justice and piety in the light of philosophy”; it is vice we are to flee, so that clearly to the writer Evil is simply vice with the sequels of vice. And when the disputant in that dialogue says that, if men could be convinced of the doctrine advanced, there would be an end of Evil, he is answered, “That can never be: Evil is of necessity, for there must be a contrary to good.” Enneads I,8,6
In the immaterial HEAVEN every member is unchangeably itself for ever; in the HEAVENs of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms – and, when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell with the one<one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: individual or partial things exist by virtue of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the divine. Enneads III,2,4
The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the HEAVENs and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude (physical extension) they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from HEAVEN to the very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness. Enneads IV,3,15
Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast HEAVEN and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being. Enneads V,1,2
How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived: That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very HEAVENs. Into that HEAVEN, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the HEAVENs has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the HEAVENly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body – clay and water – or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, “the execration of the Gods.” Enneads V,1,2
For assuredly all the Gods are august and beautiful in a beauty beyond our speech. And what makes them so? Intellect; and especially Intellect operating within them (the divine sun and stars) to visibility. It is not through the loveliness of their corporeal forms: even those that have body are not gods by that beauty; it is in virtue of Intellect that they, too, are gods, and as gods beautiful. They do not veer between wisdom and folly: in the immunity of Intellect unmoving and pure, they are wise always, all-knowing, taking cognisance not of the human but of their own being and of all that lies within the contemplation of Intellect. Those of them whose dwelling is in the HEAVENs, are ever in this meditation – what task prevents them? – and from afar they look, too, into that further HEAVEN by a lifting of the head. The Gods belonging to that higher Heaven itself, they whose station is upon it and in it, see and know in virtue of their omnipresence to it. For all There is HEAVEN; earth is HEAVEN, and sea HEAVEN; and animal and plant and man; all is the HEAVENly content of that HEAVEN: and the Gods in it, despising neither men nor anything else that is there where all is of the HEAVENly order, traverse all that country and all space in peace. Enneads V,8,3
It is so with the lesser gods; of many standing in their presence it is often one alone that sees them; that one alone was alone in the power to see. These are the gods who “in many guises seek our cities”; but there is That Other whom the cities seek, and all the earth and HEAVEN, everywhere with God and in Him, possessing through Him their Being and the Real Beings about them, down to soul and life, all bound to Him and so moving to that unity which by its very lack of extension is infinite. Enneads VI,5,12
The content of that living thing must surely be alive – as in this sphere – and all that lives must of necessity be There. The nature of the major parts determines that of the living forms they comprise; by the being and content of the HEAVEN There are determined all the HEAVENly forms of life; if those lesser forms were not There, that HEAVEN itself would not be. Enneads VI,7,12
To ask how those forms of life come to be There is simply asking how that HEAVEN came to be; it is asking whence comes life, whence the All-Life, whence the All-Soul, whence collective Intellect: and the answer is that There no indigence or impotence can exist but all must be teeming, seething, with life. All flows, so to speak, from one fount not to be thought of as one breath or warmth but rather as one quality englobing and safeguarding all qualities – sweetness with fragrance, wine – quality and the savours of everything that may be tasted, all colours seen, everything known to touch, all that ear may hear, all melodies, every rhythm. Enneads VI,7,12
But even there we are not to remain always, in that beauty of the multiple; we must make haste yet higher, above this HEAVEN of ours and even that; leaving all else aside we ask in awe “Who produced that realm and how?” Everything There is a single Idea in an individual impression and, informed by The Good, possesses the universal good transcendent over all. Each possessing that Being above, possesses also the total Living-Form in virtue of that transcendent life, possesses, no doubt, much else as well. Enneads VI,7,16