Excerpts from “The Six Enneads” by Plotinus (vegetarian) – On the Cosmos, Part 2 of 2

Section 4 “Further: the Cosmos has had no beginning – the impossibility has been shown elsewhere – and this is warrant for its continued existence. Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred? The elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they hold sound forever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the ground of all the change must itself be changeless.

As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul we have already shown the emptiness of that fancy: the administration of the universe entails neither labor nor loss; and, even supposing the possibility of annihilating all that is material, the Soul would be no whit the better or the worse.”

Section 5 “But how explain the permanence There, while the content of this sphere – its elements and its living things alike – are passing?

The reason is given by Plato: the celestial order is from God, the living things of Earth from the gods sprung from God; and it is law that the offspring of God endures. In other words, the celestial soul – and our souls with it – springs directly next from the Creator, while the animal life of this Earth is produced by an image which goes forth from that celestial soul and may be said to flow downwards from it.

A soul, then, of the minor degree – reproducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but lacking in power in as much as it must exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region – the substances taken up into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to duration; with such an origin the living things of this realm cannot be of strength to last forever; the material constituents are not as firmly held and controlled as if they were ruled immediately by a Principle of higher potency.

The Heavens, on the contrary, must have persistence as a whole, and this entails the persistence of the parts, of the stars they contain: we could not imagine that whole to endure with the parts in flux – though, of course, we must distinguish things sub-celestial from the Heavens themselves whose region does not in fact extend so low as to the Moon. […]”