On the Gods and the World

This is a fairly short work by one Sallustius, likely written in the 4th century CE. The Greek title is Περί Θεῶν καὶ Κοσμοῦ. It is primarily a Platonist work, but also has stoic elements and may have been written at least in part as a response to the ongoing rise of Christianity.1 The aim is apparently to give a kind of concise overview of some aspects of the work of Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus and others.

The world is a kind of myth, and life is participation in it. The myths took place in the past, but they are also taking place all the time.3 The gods can do everything at once, but for us humans, time is linear; thus, our experience of the world will be like a narrative. And these greater—mythical—narratives can communicate something about the all-at-once-ness of reality such as it really is in itself. We could say that the gods become time, which in turn becomes myth.4 And so from our perspective as humans, the myths make up a ladder with which to climb upwards into time, and from there into the divine.

  1. SHWEP ep. 170, linked above ↩
  2. Thomas Taylor ↩
  3. See also Eliade on “sacred time”. ↩
  4. I am using the word “become” very loosely here. Roughly, to “become” is to come into being, and especially for something that already exists, but in a manner foreign to us humans, to bring about something else that is more mundane, or more easily visible, but therefore also less wholly itself. Like an object casting a shadow—even though we would not normally say that something “becomes” its shadow. But that’s just because the things that cast shadows (i.e. visible, physical things) are themselves already the results of becoming, whereas what generates those visible things (and even some non-visible but still partially accessible things) are much more archaic and much more difficult to describe in any precise terms. ↩