One of the things you well noted is the connection back to that original mode of thinking about the unchanging nature of the gods. The passage from Sallustius is indeed dense, but one of those recurring strategies or modes of thought, as it were, is contemplating these "larger than life" (literally, beyond Being) aspects of reality as far as one can in a "Positive" way, only to exhaust the ideas and their alternatives. Not sure if I'm explaining it right, but I feel like the approaches are similar.
Some later Christian thinkers tried to marry the two visions, of a time-limited vs. eternal universe, with the concept of the Aion, which denotes finite amount of time (or a cycle) enclosed within Eternity, as it were. The issue this raised, as I understand it, was whether Christ's sacrifice was then unique: occurring in this particular aion, did it provide surety for all time, or just this particular cycle? If it wasn't unique...then what? And ultimately, a finite amount of time backstopped by an eternity that generates other such finite amounts suggests, then, that the Eternal is the default mode for the Universe.
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Date: 2022-02-23 11:24 pm (UTC)Some later Christian thinkers tried to marry the two visions, of a time-limited vs. eternal universe, with the concept of the Aion, which denotes finite amount of time (or a cycle) enclosed within Eternity, as it were. The issue this raised, as I understand it, was whether Christ's sacrifice was then unique: occurring in this particular aion, did it provide surety for all time, or just this particular cycle? If it wasn't unique...then what? And ultimately, a finite amount of time backstopped by an eternity that generates other such finite amounts suggests, then, that the Eternal is the default mode for the Universe.