Chapter XII: Chance, § 149
CHAPTER XII: ON CHANCE AND HAPPENSTANCE
§ 149. From these points one can readily understand: Because of the providence of God is there no place for chance or happenstance? We must respond that providence does not exclude chance and happenstance from every order but from only one, namely, from that of the universal cause. Therefore something can be called accidental and coincidental with regard and respect1 to a particular cause, but it does not escape the order of the universal cause. For example, Deut. 19:5: “When a man goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, and the head slips from the handle and strikes his neighbor so that he dies.” This killing is called “accidental” [fortuita] in Num. 35:22, namely, with regard to a particular cause. At the same time, with regard to divine providence, we read in Exod. 21:13 that God lets that person who is killed in this way “fall into the hand of his killer.” So also it was possible [ἐνδεχόμενον] that a man with a jar of water met the disciples, and yet this was certain to divine foresight (Luke 22:10). If you wish, you can explain the matter more richly with the example of a master of a household who sends two slaves to the forum by different ways. As far as they are concerned, their meeting is accidental, but not to the master of the household. (Thomas uses this example in [ST,] part 1, q. 22.)
How to understand the word “fortune.”
§ 150. Nevertheless [the statement of] Augustine (Retract., bk. 1, ch. 1) should be added: “By ‘fortune’ [fortuna] I do not mean a goddess.”—(In this sense Bishop Anastasius says, Biblioth., vol. 1, p. 59: “Among the Greeks ‘fortune’ is called the administration of the world without providence. Therefore if a Christian confesses fortune, he falls outside of Christian doctrine.”)—“Rather, I mean the coincidental outcome of affairs whether of our body or in external goods or evils; and from this [meaning] are derived these words, which no religious devotion forbids one to say: ‘by chance,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘by happenstance’ [forte, forsitan, fortasse, fortuito]. Nevertheless we ought to refer this entire matter to the providence of God.” Briefly: “By ‘chance’ we mean nothing else than affairs whose reason and cause have been concealed.” Augustine again (Cont. Acad., bk. 1, ch. 1): “We maintain that those causes which are called fortuitous are not nonexistent, but hidden.” Augustine again (De civ. Dei, bk. 5, ch. 9): “Chance and happenstance are words of human ignorance.” Philipp Camerarius (Succis. hist., part 1, ch. 80, p. 395) provides these very lovely verses:
If you look at the lives of men, and their behavior, too,
You might think that skill, might, and deceit all these things do.
If you look closer still, fortune is the arbiter of things;
You don’t know how to say it, but you see that it is so.
But if you will look very deeply and connect the end
To the beginning, God alone the world doth tend.
§ 151. Bonaventure covers all of this (Sent., dist. 37, q. 2):
They posit something as fortuitous and coincidental in terms of an outcome. They also deprive something from the concurrence of causes begun for the sake of something else. For chance and fortune imply a lack of intent or foreknowledge. To be sure, “lack of intent” can be understood in two ways: In the first way, it can be understood universally with respect to every agent, whether particular or universal, operating or cooperating, following or governing, and in this way nothing is coincidental or fortuitous, and chance and fortune do not exist. In the second way, “lack of intent” can be understood with respect to a particular agent, namely, to a particular nature and created intelligence. In this way something is accidental, and chance is something that does exist. It is in this sense that Boethius defines chance as “the unexpected outcome of a situation.”
1 Read ratione ac respectu with Cotta instead of ratione respectu.