Chapter XIII: Fate, § 152
CHAPTER XIII: ON FATE
§ 152. Furthermore, what we said about chance and happenstance—that there is a homonym in those terms—we now say about the word “fate” [fatum], namely, that it, too, is a homonym and accordingly must be explained carefully, which Augustine has done before us in De civ. Dei, bk. 5, ch. 8:
As concerns those who use the word “fate” to mean not the position of the stars as it is when something is conceived or born or begun, but the connection and series of all causes by which everything that happens does happen, we should not struggle nor contend with them much in a dispute about a word. Indeed, they attribute the order and so-called connection of causes to the will and power of the Most High God, who, we very correctly and truthfully believe, knows all things before they happen and leaves nothing unordered. From Him come all powers, though the wills of all do not stem from Him.
Chapter 9:
We do not say that all things happen by fate. In fact, we say that nothing happens by fate, because the word “fate,” as it is generally used by people who speak about fate as the position of the stars at one’s conception and birth, means nothing because the matter itself has no meaning, as we prove.
(Treatise 37 on John: “Were your heart not foolish, you would not believe in fate.”)
But as to the order of causes where the will of God especially prevails, we neither deny it nor call it by the word “fate,” unless perhaps we take “fate” to be derived from fari, that is, from “speak.”1 After all, we cannot deny that it is written in Holy Writ: “God has spoken once. These two things have I heard: that power belongs to God, and to You, O God, belongs mercy,” etc. [Ps. 62:11–12]. The phrase “God has spoken once” is understood immovably; that is, He has spoken unchangeably just as He knows unchangeably all that is going to happen and that He intends to do. Therefore in this way we would be able to define fate from fari [“to speak”] if this word were not already generally understood in another sense to which we do not want to turn people’s hearts. Furthermore, it does not follow that, if the order of all causes is certain to God, there is nothing left in the choice of our own will.
Those are Augustine’s words.
Four kinds of fate among the ancients.
§ 153. Johannes Picus Mirandulanus (Cont. astrol., bk. 4) lists four ideas of the ancients about fate. (Consequently, Scaliger writes, Exerc., ch. 7: “It seems to us that there are four whose validity the ancients have accepted with various degrees of assent: nature, fate, fortune, and accident.”) Some say that fate is nature, so that whatever is of choice or of accident is outside fate. Thus Vergil says that Dido, who had committed suicide, did not die by fate. Some take the word “fate” to mean the eternal series of causes connected by necessity. Cicero (De divin., bk. 1) writes on the basis of the opinion of the Stoics: “I call ‘fate’ what the Greeks call εἱμαρμένη [‘destiny’], that is, the order and series of causes, because cause produces cause of itself, that is, the eternal truth flowing from all eternity.” Others derive fate from the position of the stars, as astrologers do. Finally, some call fate the execution of the divine plan. Seneca (De benef., bk. 3): “If you say that this same one” (God) “is fate, you will not be wrong, for fate is nothing other than the interwoven series of causes, that is, the first of all causes on which the rest depend.”
§ 154. Therefore, if the word “fate” is understood as the providence of God itself—which does not exclude inferior causes, natural as well as voluntary, but includes subordinate causes and which concurs with them in the ways we explained earlier—then we must surely concede that fate (that is, divine providence) governs everything. However, if the word “fate” is understood as the necessary connection of all causes by which even God Himself is subjected to that necessity, or if the governance of things beneath heaven is said to depend with a necessary connection on the movement of the stars, or if the freedom of the human will is excluded, then we surely disapprove of and reject such fate.