i.e.the order of spiritual beings, including angels and human souls. Of these S. Gregory argues that they are capable of an ἀκινησία πρὸς τὸ ἀγαθόν which is death in them, as the absence of motion and sense is bodily death: and that they may therefore be said to have an end, as they had a beginning: so far as they are eternal it is not by their own power, but by their mutable nature being upheld by grace from this state of ἀκινησία πρὸς τὸ ἀγαθόν. On both these grounds therefore—that they have an end, and that such eternity as they possess is not inherent, but given ab extra, and contingent—he says they are not properly eternal, and he therefore rejects the proposed parallel.