This was specifically a dispute against the Christians. It comes down to a really fundamental difference in one's entire worldview/cosmology:
For the traditional pagan philosophers, as you say, the world is eternal, forever proceeding from the Gods. This chapter also implies a corollary to this: a kind of *goodness* to that world, insofar as the world is not inclined to decay by its very nature. Note as well the way in which the argument in this chapter at least implies the view that the world had no *beginning* in time: roughly, given how long (perhaps forever!) the world has already been around, if it were going to fall apart on its own, it would have already done so!
For the Christians, on the other hand, the world was created at a particular moment in time, will move through a very particular trajectory in time, and then come to an end—after which there will never be another one like it(!). This calls into question not only "eternality" as such, but also the goodness and sufficiency of the world.
This basic difference in orientation makes a huge difference for how you approach philosophy and theology in general, and at Sallustius' time, also came with life-and-death political and social implications.
And even within Christian intellectual circles, this is an issue that never really went away. One of the biggest barriers to allowing the teaching of Aristotle in the European Middle Ages was precisely his unambigious defense of an eternally-existing cosmos!
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Date: 2022-02-23 05:03 pm (UTC)For the traditional pagan philosophers, as you say, the world is eternal, forever proceeding from the Gods. This chapter also implies a corollary to this: a kind of *goodness* to that world, insofar as the world is not inclined to decay by its very nature. Note as well the way in which the argument in this chapter at least implies the view that the world had no *beginning* in time: roughly, given how long (perhaps forever!) the world has already been around, if it were going to fall apart on its own, it would have already done so!
For the Christians, on the other hand, the world was created at a particular moment in time, will move through a very particular trajectory in time, and then come to an end—after which there will never be another one like it(!). This calls into question not only "eternality" as such, but also the goodness and sufficiency of the world.
This basic difference in orientation makes a huge difference for how you approach philosophy and theology in general, and at Sallustius' time, also came with life-and-death political and social implications.
And even within Christian intellectual circles, this is an issue that never really went away. One of the biggest barriers to allowing the teaching of Aristotle in the European Middle Ages was precisely his unambigious defense of an eternally-existing cosmos!