§ 1. By “fate” I mean not divine ordination, foreknowledge, and permission, but that which men wish to depend upon a necessary connection of things, upon the world, and upon the position of the stars, concerning which the eloquent but impious poet exclaims:
Alas, that the gods have contended as inferiors to the fates.
If some good and orthodox authors use the name of fate while thinking rightly about divine providence and freedom of the will, I do not reprehend their opinion. Nevertheless, I prefer to correct their manner of speaking rather than dispute dangerously on account of the weakness of many. Let them hear the counsel of Augustine, City of God, Book V, chapter 8:
But as for those who apply the name “fate” not to the constitution of the stars as it exists when each thing is conceived, born, or begun, but to the entire connection and sequence of causes by which everything that happens is brought about, it is not necessary to labor and contend greatly with them in a controversy over a word. For they attribute the very order and a certain connection of causes to the will and power of the supreme God, who is most rightly and truthfully believed both to know all things before they occur and to leave nothing unordered—from whom are all powers, although the wills of all are not from him.
That they call principally the very will of the supreme God—whose power extends invincibly through all things—“fate” is proved thus. These verses, unless I am mistaken, belong to Annaeus Seneca:
Lead me, highest Father and ruler of lofty heaven, whithersoever it shall please you; there is no delay in obeying. I am present, energetic. Make me unwilling: I shall accompany you groaning; as an evil man I suffer what it was permitted me as a good man to do. The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.
§ 2. We detest the fate of the astrologers, enclosed within the insuperable force of the stars, and the fate of the Priscillianists, Bardesanists, and others, which is more powerful than almighty God himself. We acknowledge the gentle providence of God, which through intermediate causes orders and permits events according to their capacity and does not wrest their decisions from free wills. Accordingly, we reject these statements which are uttered by the impious with a profane meaning, such as:
The fates rule the world; all things stand by a fixed law.
From the origin of the world this day remains fixed for war, and the peoples were born for battles.
Does anyone seem to himself to have so much power that he might even overcome the fates?
Unless these statements are softened by a benign interpretation, they cannot be tolerated. The importunity of atheists compels me to dispute at greater length about this matter. For while they revive those fates, long since buried, and lead them out of darkness, they not only entangle kings and states in the worst arts, but also make them subject to soothsayers, astrologers, and magicians, so that they commit themselves and the state to the most criminal and ruined of human beings.
Behold a man whom you would deservedly deny to be a Christian and by trusting whom you would lose your kingdom sooner than learn true things. In Book II, chapter 28 of Discourses on Livy, he speaks thus:
If we contemplate the vicissitude of affairs, we shall discover that many things occur through fate pressing in such a way that no one can go to meet them, although remedies may have been at hand. [Machiavelli devises an impious fate.] And if certain things of this kind happened to the Roman people, among whom virtues of every kind shone forth and the study of religion and especially of military affairs flourished, to whom ought it to appear wonderful if they also befall other states and provinces in which none of these virtues shine so brightly? Account must therefore be taken especially of those things which appear to occur by fate itself, or the influence of the stars, and which fortune does not permit us to resist. The most evident example of them is that which the Roman people received in the Gallic disaster.
§ 3. He therefore calls the influence of the stars “fate,” and a fate from the stars that is inevitable. “I shall pronounce only this,” he says, “concerning the powers of fortune and the necessity of fate, which will readily appear to one who runs through histories of every kind: human beings cannot avoid the necessity of fate, but they can produce and advance an easier outcome for the things that hang over them from it, and so weave the webs of the Parcae, but not unweave or break them.” And in chapter 25 of his Prince:
It is not obscure to me that there are, and formerly have been, very many of the opinion that the administration of human affairs is so completely held by fortune and by God himself that it cannot be corrected in any way by human prudence—indeed, that no remedy can be applied. On that account it could be thought that one should not labor much in these matters, but should permit oneself to be borne wherever fortune drives. This opinion has been received with greater conviction in our times because of the manifold transformation of affairs, since changes have always been seen, and are seen daily, beyond every human conjecture that could be formed. When I had sometimes considered this in my mind, I inclined in some part toward that opinion. But lest our free choice be extinguished, I follow this opinion: that one half of our affairs is administered at the discretion of fortune, while the other, or a little less, is left to us to administer. For I am accustomed to compare fortune to a mountain river that lays all things low. When it is borne headlong, it pours into the fields, lays trees low, and tears up houses; carrying away much earth from here, it deposits that same earth elsewhere. It drives all things before it; all things flee from its sight; all things yield to its fury, every means by which it could be restrained having been removed.
Behold, he compares fortune to a mountain river which can be resisted by no force, art, or reason.
My prince, senate, city, and army shall entrust themselves to the one, true, good, and just God. They shall certainly persuade themselves that the wanderings of the stars, or their fixed periods and circuits commanded by God, pertain in no way to them and possess no jurisdiction or efficacy over their own freedom or that of others. Thus they shall neither be cast down in spirit amid evils, mindful that it is God who appoints an end to sorrowful affairs, nor be elated amid prosperity, ignorant of the hidden counsel by which pride is suddenly punished. In this way, by a great and hidden but never unjust efficacy, in a moment that which had long been a forest becomes ashes; at the sound of a trumpet, that which had been a camp becomes a heap of corpses.
Truth compels Machiavelli himself to acknowledge this, either unwillingly or unknowingly. For what does he mean when he says that we can weave the webs of the Parcae? They therefore do not carry things along by the inevitable necessity of the heavens and configurations of the stars, but each man is the craftsman of his own fortune, as the proverb says. For if that necessity has as its causes the positions, aspects, elevations, retrogradations, houses, inclinations, and triangles of the stars, their ἐπισκιάσεις, or overshadowings, their obscurations, obliquities, and the συζυγίας, or conjunctions, that are as vain as they are innumerable and are, as it were, their marriages, it is no more within the power of human beings to weave their own fates than to restrain the most rapid courses of the stars, since the fates fixed to the heavens are drawn along by an immutable and insuperable connection and by adamantine bonds.
Next, how can a human being who is wholly driven by fate produce and advance an easier outcome for those things that hang over him from it? I shall use Machiavelli’s examples. He attributes to the inexpugnable necessity of the fates the battle of the three Fabii—who had been sent as legates to compose peace between the people of Clusium and the Gauls—by which they incited the Gauls against the Romans. He imputes Camillus’s exile to the same fate, so that the Gauls could not be resisted by so distinguished a commander. Indeed, the stars also brought it about that they did not name a dictator; that the tribunes did not fortify the camp; that they were not mindful of the gods; that they did not draw up the battle line after taking the auspices and obtaining favorable omens; that they did not close Rome; that they did not permit the unarmed multitude to flee; and that they did not destroy Rome. As he thinks, the stars carried these things along by absolute necessity.
In these matters I ask first how either Camillus or Manlius could have produced a better outcome from these fates. For either that better outcome, which he locates in human prudence and caution, was outside the force of fate and the conspiracy of the stars, or it too stood bound by the same chain of necessity beneath the blow of fate and the engine of fortune. If the better outcome was from fate, then the fidelity and industry of Camillus could no more produce and advance it than they could those things which had already happened by fate. If the better outcome was within Camillus’s discretion, outside the right and dominion of fate and fortune, why does he not place the remaining things in the same category? For if he liberates some things from fate, by what right does he deliver the others over to the fates?
It belongs to a man of little consideration to ascribe calamities to fate and a better outcome to ourselves. For if calamities occur by an unforeseen and inflexible necessity, we cannot turn them aside in any other direction. For it is as much in the fates that I receive upon my bare breast a blow balanced with a heavy weight as it is in the fates that I be wounded. For if the fates bring disaster, they also keep under number its measured magnitude, manner, and all the critical details of its circumstances. If they strike, they strike by determination; and nothing is now ours except to suffer—although, if he philosophizes consistently with his beginnings, he will assign to the fates even how much and how greatly it hurts. For if the heavens fated a bloody death for Julius Caesar, they also decreed twenty-three wounds: the first from Casca beneath the throat, the second and only fatal one beneath the breast, and the remaining ones lighter. What Machiavelli asserts concerning fate is therefore empty and contrary to his own opinion.
This, as I have shown, belongs to an imprudent man. But his judgment that they were forbidden by fate to be mindful of the gods and to draw up their line after taking the auspices and obtaining favorable omens possesses an impiety peculiar to itself together with its folly. For if he speaks as a defender of fate and an astrologer, what protection could there have been in the gods, since they are inferior in contending with the fates, and since Jupiter himself subjects the prayers and unjust anger of Juno to the fates?
The fates will find a way,
he says.
The auspices, inspections of entrails, disembowelments of wretched cattle, a cleft liver, discolored entrails of victims, birds on the left, and every observation of chance utterances cannot bend the violence of the fates. If, therefore, it was in the fates that the Romans be conquered, no birds and no hecatombs could avert the evil.
If he is a Christian, how does he judge that it came from fate that the battle line was not drawn up after taking the auspices and obtaining favorable omens? If the fates forbade magical consultations, the tripudium solistimum, and the rebounding of food cast from the chicken’s greedy mouth, he now ascribes something good to the fates, because it was not glorious to conquer even by such deceptions. But what is his meaning, what is his religion, when he judges the prevention of so many crimes—the chief of which were magic and idolatry—to have been the cause of the disasters and the loss of the city?
You are a Christian, and yet among the causes of the state’s affliction and reduction to extreme straits you also relate this: that they did not seek counsels from a demon, did not offer it nefarious sacrifices, and did not obtain favorable omens? So many armies that despised the gods attained victory while fighting without taking the auspices or obtaining favorable omens. Why, therefore, is this reprehended in the Romans?
But let us dispute that controversy more widely, for it is necessary to ascribe the safety of all kingdoms to God: all things are from God. “All things that are not from God are perverse.” Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women. “For God has as his witnesses this whole thing which we are and in which we are.” The same Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book I: “He disposes all things that exist by word and reason, and completes them by power.” “The safety of human beings is in God’s guardianship,” said even that man who doubted concerning God, in Book III of On Ends.
Let no king swell with pride. We are all servants, for we have God as Lord. God is the Lord of so many cities and so many kingdoms in which you are worshiped more laboriously than God; he leaves to you their usufruct and their use for an uncertain time. So many peoples serve you; you serve the one God who subjected them to you. There is no more pernicious plague of the state, no disaster that has more greatly oppressed its vital parts, than when the authority of the magistrate and the majesty of government are broken. Yet the calamity is greater when the prince or state stands accused of injury to the supreme majesty.