City of God (Penguin Classics), page 29
7. The choice of a day for marriage, or for planting and sowing
Who could believe the notion that by selecting certain days one can in a sense create new destinies for one’s own acts? It would mean that the savant in the anecdote was not born so as to be destined to beget a remarkable son, but, on the contrary, destined to beget a contemptible offspring. That is why that learned man carefully chose the time for marital intercourse. That is, he created a destiny which was not his before and as a result of his act something was fated to happen which was not destined at his birth. What an extraordinary piece of nonsense! You carefully choose the day for marriage, for fear, I imagine, of hitting on an inauspicious day, and making an unhappy match! So what has happened to what the stars decided at your birth? Can a man then alter what has been fixed for him by the choice of a day? If so, cannot what he has fixed by that choice be altered by some other power?
Then again, if it is only men who are subject to the celestial conjunctions, and not everything else under the heavens, why are days selected as specially appropriate for the planting of vines or other trees, or for sowing crops, other days for training cattle, or for their mating, so as to build up herds of oxen or mares, and so on? Suppose that the choice of days is of such importance because every body and every living being on earth is dominated by the position of the stars which varies at different moments. Then let those who believe this consider the innumerable beings which are born, or come to be, or start at any given instant of time, and have such diverse destinies, so diverse as to convince any schoolboy that those astrological observations are utterly ridiculous. Who is so bereft of his senses as to allow himself to assert that all trees, vegetables, animals, snakes, birds, fishes, worms have their individual and different ‘moments of nativity’? And yet it is common for people to put the competence of astrologers to proof by bringing them the ‘conjunctions’ of dumb animals, whose moment of birth they note carefully at home with a view to this astrological examination. And they put into the top class those astrologers who, on inspection of the ‘conjunctions’, declare that they signify the birth of an animal, not a man. They even have the audacity to name the kind of animal, and whether it will be good for wool-production, or as a draught-animal, or fit for the plough, or a useful watchdog. For astrologers are consulted even about canine destinies and their replies are greeted with loud shouts of admiration. Men are such fools as to imagine that when a man is born all other births are stopped, so that not even a mouse is born at the same time and under the same tract of the heavens. For if they allowed a mouse, they would be led step by step by a process of logical reasoning to camels and elephants! They will not observe that even when they have selected a day for sowing a field, a vast number of seeds fall on the soil at the same time and germinate at the same time; then when the crop springs up, they put out shoots, come to maturity and turn golden, all at the same time; and yet, though the resultant ears are all contemporary and, to coin a word, ‘congerminal’, some are wiped out by blight, some are plundered by birds and some plucked off by men. They notice that these ears have very different ends; are they going to maintain that they had different ‘conjunctions’? How can they? Or are they going to change their minds about selecting days for those operations, and to say that such things have no connection with the celestial decisions? Will they subject only mankind to the stars, men being the only creatures on earth on whom God has bestowed free will?
When one ponders all this, one has some justification for supposing that when astrologers give replies that are often surprisingly true, they are inspired, in some mysterious way, by spirits, but spirits of evil, whose concern is to instil and confirm in men’s minds those false and baneful notions about ‘astral destiny’. These true predictions do not come from any skill in the notation and inspection of horoscopes; that is a spurious art.
8. ‘Fate’; a name given by some people not to the position of the stars but to a chain of causes dependent on God’s will
There are those who use the name ‘destiny’ to refer not to the conjunction of stars at the moment of conception, or birth, or beginning, but to the connected series of causes which is responsible for anything that happens. We need not engage in a laborious controversy with them about the use of a word. For in fact they ascribe this orderly series, this chain of causes, to the will and power of the supreme God, who is believed, most rightly and truly, to know all things before they happen and who leaves nothing unordered. From him come all powers, but not all wills. What they mean by ‘destiny’ is principally the will of the supreme God, whose power extends invincibly through all things. This is demonstrated by the following lines, written, if I am not mistaken, by Seneca,8
Father supreme, thou sovereign of the heavens,
Lead where thou wilt. I hasten to obey,
Eager to do thy will. If mine be crossed,
I’ll follow, though in tears. If I be wicked
I will endure to have that done to me
Which, virtuous, I could choose to do myself.
Fate leads the willing, drags the reluctant feet.9
It is quite evident that in the last line the poet uses ‘fate’, or destiny, to refer to what he had earlier called the will of the ‘supreme Father’. He says that he is ready to obey, so as to be led willingly, not dragged against his will; for
Fate leads the willing, drags the reluctant feet.
The same sentiment is expressed in the lines of Homer, turned into Latin by Cicero,
The mind of man is governed by the light
Which Jove dispenses on the fruitful earth.10
The opinions of poets should not carry weight in the present discussion. But since Cicero tells us that the Stoics generally appropriate those lines of Homer in support of their assertion of the power of destiny, we are not dealing with the ideas of the poet, but the notions of philosophers. In those lines, which they introduce into their arguments about fate, their idea of the nature of destiny is made abundantly clear. They refer to destiny under the name of Jupiter, whom they suppose to be the supreme god, and they assert that it is on him that the causal chain of every destiny depends.
9. God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will; a criticism of Cicero
Cicero11 tries hard to refute those philosophers, while realizing that he cannot make head against them without abolishing divination. He tries to get rid of it by denying the existence of knowledge of the future. He uses his best efforts to establish the utter impossibility of such knowledge and of any prediction of events, whether in man or in God. Thus he denies the foreknowledge of God, as well as trying to demolish every prophecy, even though it is clearer than daylight. He does this by spurious arguments, and by setting up as targets certain easily refutable oracles,12 which, however, he fails to invalidate, although in his exposure of the conjectures of astrologers, his eloquence carries all before it. The fact is that such guesswork is self-destructive and self-refuting. Yet the theory that the stars decide destiny is much more tolerable than the attempt to get rid of all knowledge of the future. To acknowledge the existence of God, while denying him any prescience of events, is the most obvious madness. Cicero himself realized this, and almost ventured on the denial referred to in Scripture, ‘The fool has said in his heart: God does not exist.’13 But he did not say it in his own person; he knew that such an assertion would disturb people, and incur odium. And so he represents Cotta14 as arguing this point against the Stoics, in the book On the Nature of the Gods.15 Cicero preferred to give his vote to Lucius Balbus,16 to whom he entrusted the defence of the Stoic position, rather than to Cotta, who denied the existence of any divine nature. However, in his book On Divination he comes out openly in his own name in an attack on the notion of foreknowledge. His whole purpose in this is to preserve free will by refusing to admit the existence of fate. He assumes that the admission of foreknowledge entails the acceptance of fate as a logical necessity. For our part, whatever may be the twists and turns of philosophical dispute and debate, we recognize a God who is supreme and true and therefore we confess his supreme power and foreknowledge. We are not afraid that what we do by an act of will may not be a voluntary act, because God, with his infallible prescience, knew that we should do it. This was the fear that led Cicero to oppose foreknowledge and the Stoics to deny that everything happens by necessity, although they maintained that everything happens according to fate.
Now what was it that Cicero so dreaded in prescience of the future, that he struggled to demolish the idea by so execrable a line of argument? He reasoned that if all events are foreknown, they will happen in the precise order of that foreknowledge; if so, the order is determined in the prescience of God. If the order of events is determined, so is the causal order; for nothing can happen unless preceded by an efficient cause. If the causal order is fixed, determining all events, then all events, he concludes, are ordered by destiny. If this is true, nothing depends on us and there is no such thing as free will. ‘Once we allow this,’ he says, ‘all human life is overthrown. There is no point in making laws, no purpose in expressing reprimand or approbation, censure or encouragement; there is no justice in establishing rewards for the good and penalties for the evil.’17
It is to avoid those consequences, discreditable and absurd as they are, and perilous to human life, that Cicero refuses to allow any foreknowledge. And he constrains the religious soul to this dilemma, forcing it to choose between those propositions: either there is some scope for our will, or there is foreknowledge. He thinks that both cannot be true; to affirm one is to deny the other. If we choose foreknowledge, free will is annihilated; if we choose free will, prescience is abolished. And so, being a man of eminent learning, a counsellor of wide experience and practiced skill in matters affecting human life, Cicero chooses free will. To support this, he denies foreknowledge and thus, in seeking to make men free, he makes them irreverent. For the religious mind chooses both, foreknowledge as well as liberty; it acknowledges both, and supports both in pious faith. ‘How?’ asks Cicero. If there is prescience of the future, the logical consequences entailed lead to the conclusion that nothing depends on our free will. And further, if anything does so depend, then, by the converse logical process, we reach the position that there is no foreknowledge. The argument proceeds thus: if there is free will, everything does not happen by fate; if everything does not happen by fate, there is not a fixed order of all causes; if there is not a fixed order of all causes, there is not a fixed order of events for the divine prescience, for these events cannot take place unless preceded by efficient causes; if there is not a fixed order for God’s prescience, everything does not happen as he has foreknown them as due to happen. Thus, he concludes, if everything does not happen as foreknown by God, then there is in him no foreknowledge of all the future.18
Against such profane and irreverent impudence we assert both that God knows all things before they happen and that we do by our free will everything that we feel and know would not happen without our volition. We do not say that everything is fated; in fact we deny that anything happens by destiny. For we have shown that the notion of destiny, in the accepted sense, referring to conjunction of stars at the time of conception or birth, has no validity, since it asserts something which has no reality. It is not that we deny a causal order where the will of God prevails; but we do not describe it by the word ‘fate’, unless perhaps if we understand fate to be derived from fari (speak),19 that is from the act of speaking. We cannot in fact deny that it is written in Scripture, ‘God has spoken once, and I have heard those two things: that the power belongs to God; and that mercy belongs to you, Lord, and you render to each in accordance with his works.’20 The words ‘has spoken once’ mean ‘he has spoken immovably,’ that is, unalterably, just as he knows unalterably all that is to happen and what he himself is going to do. For this reason we should be able to use the word ‘fate’, deriving it from fari, except that this word is generally used in a different sense, a sense to which we should not wish men’s hearts to be directed.
Now if there is for God a fixed order of all causes, it does not follow that nothing depends on our free choice. Our wills themselves are in the order of causes, which is, for God, fixed, and is contained in his foreknowledge, since human acts of will are the causes of human activities. Therefore he who had prescience of the causes of all events certainly could not be ignorant of our decisions, which he foreknows as the causes of our actions.
Cicero’s own concession21 that nothing happens unless preceded by an efficient cause is enough to refute him in the present question. It does not help his case to assert that while no event is causeless, not every cause is the work of destiny, since there are fortuitous causes, natural, and voluntary causes. It is enough that he admits that every event must be preceded by a cause. For our part, we do not deny the existence of causes called ‘fortuitous’ (from the same root as the word ‘fortune’); only we say that they are hidden causes and attribute them to the will, either of the true God, or of spirits of some kind. The ‘natural’ causes we do not detach from the will of God, the author and creator of all nature. The ‘voluntary’ causes come from God, or from angels, or men, or animals – if indeed one can apply the notion of will to the movements of beings devoid of reason, which carry out actions
in accordance with their nature, to achieve some desire or to avoid some danger. By the wills of angels I mean both the wills of the good angels of God, as we call them, and of the evil ‘angels of the devil’, or even ‘demons’. The same applies to the wills of men; there are those of good men, and those of evil.
This implies that the only efficient causes of events are voluntary causes, that is, they proceed from that nature which is the ‘breath of life’. (‘Breath’ also refers to the air or the wind; but since that is corporeal, it is not the ‘breath of life’.) The breath of life, which gives life to everything, and is the creator of every body and every created spirit (breath), is God himself, the uncreated spirit. In his will rests the supreme power, which assists the good wills of created spirits, sits in judgement on the evil wills, orders all wills, granting the power of achievement to some and denying it to others. Just as he is the creator of all natures, so he is the giver of all power of achievement, but not of all acts of will. Evil wills do not proceed from him because they are contrary to the nature which proceeds from him. Bodies are mostly subject to wills, some to our wills – that is to the wills of mortal beings, the wills of men rather than of animals – the others to the wills of angels. But all bodies are subject above all to the will of God, and to him all wills also are subject, because the only power they have is the power that God allows them.
Thus the cause which is cause only, and not effect, is God. But other causes are also effects, as are all created spirits and in particular the rational spirits. Corporeal causes, which are more acted upon than active, are not to be counted among efficient causes, since all they can achieve is what is achieved through them by the wills of spirits. How then does the order of causes, which is fixed in the prescience of God, result in the withdrawal of everything from dependence on our will, when our acts of will play an important part in that causal order? Let Cicero dispute with those who assert that this causal order is decided by destiny, or rather who give that order the name of destiny, or fate – a position which shocks us particularly because of that word ‘fate’, which is generally understood in a way which corresponds to nothing in the real world. But when Cicero denies that the order of all causes is completely fixed and perfectly known to God’s foreknowledge we execrate his opinion even more than do the Stoics. For either he denies the existence of God, which indeed he has been at pains to do, in the person of a disputant in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods; or else, if he acknowledges God’s existence while denying his foreknowledge, he is even so saying, in effect, exactly what ‘the fool has said in his heart’; for he is saying, ‘God does not exist.’22 For a being who does not know all the future is certainly not God.
Thus our wills have only as much power as God has willed and foreknown; God, whose foreknowledge is infallible, has foreknown the strength of our wills and their achievements, and it is for that reason that their future strength is completely determined and their future achievements utterly assured. That is why, if I had decided to apply the term ‘destiny’ at all, I should be more ready to say that the destiny of the weak is the will of the stronger, who has the weak in his power, than to admit that destiny, in the Stoic sense of ‘the causal ordar’ (a use peculiar to Stoics, in conflict with the generally accepted one) does away with the free decision of our will.
