And yet to conceive the vast span of the HEAVENS – to be great in that degree – to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the circling path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this earth of ours – and all in such a way that reason can be given for the plan – this could never be the work of an Image; it tells of that Power (the All-Soul) next to the very Highest Beings. Enneads II,9,12
Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the HEAVENS and the very Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling. of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock; there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength. Enneads II,9,18
This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to themselves, but they are not any the nearer to vision by the claim – or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for ever to the ordering of the HEAVENS, can never stand outside the material universe, they themselves have their freedom in their death. This is a failure to grasp the very notion of “standing outside,” a failure to appreciate the mode in which the All-Soul cares for the unensouled. Enneads II,9,18
The conflict and destruction that reign among living beings are inevitable, since things here are derived, brought into existence because the Divine Reason which contains all of them in the upper HEAVENS – how could they come here unless they were There? – must outflow over the whole extent of Matter. Enneads III,2,4
Now in every living being the upper parts – head, face – are the most beautiful, the mid and lower members inferior. In the Universe the middle and lower members are human beings; above them, the HEAVENS and the Gods that dwell there; these Gods with the entire circling expanse of the heavens constitute the greater part of the Kosmos: the earth is but a central point, and may be considered as simply one among the stars. Yet human wrong-doing is made a matter of wonder; we are evidently asked to take humanity as the choice member of the Universe, nothing wiser existent! Enneads III,2,8
In a word, though Matter is far extended – so vastly as to appear co-extensive with all this sense-known Universe – yet if the HEAVENS and their content came to an end, all magnitude would simultaneously pass from Matter with, beyond a doubt, all its other properties; it would be abandoned to its own Kind, retaining nothing of all that which, in its own peculiar mode, it had hitherto exhibited. Enneads III,6,16
What definition are we to give to Eternity? Can it be identified with the (divine or) Intellectual Substance itself? This would be like identifying Time with the Universe of HEAVENS and Earth – an opinion, it is true, which appears to have had its adherents. No doubt we conceive, we know, Eternity as something most august; most august, too, is the Intellectual Kind; and there is no possibility of saying that the one is more majestic than the other, since no such degrees can be asserted in the Above-World; there is therefore a certain excuse for the identification – all the more since the Intellectual Substance and Eternity have the one scope and content. Enneads III,7,2
Upon the point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the Circuit advances an infinitesimal distance for every infinitesimal segment of Time so that from that observation it is possible to estimate what the Time is, how much it amounts to: but when his purpose is to explain its essential nature he tells us that it sprang into Being simultaneously with the Heavenly system, a reproduction of Eternity, its image in motion, Time necessarily unresting as the Life with which it must keep pace: and “coeval with the HEAVENS” because it is this same Life (of the Divine Soul) which brings the HEAVENS also into being; Time and the HEAVENS are the work of the one Life. Enneads III,7,13
Suppose that Life, then, to revert – an impossibility – to perfect unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life, and the HEAVENS, no longer maintained by that Life, would end at once. Enneads III,7,13