Principal Question Three of Chapter Nine
On fate: whether the rational soul, with respect to the will and its acts, is subjected and necessitated by fate
Under this principal question seven little questions will be resolved.
Little Question One of Principal Question Three
On fate according to the poets
It is asked what fate is according to the poets.
To this it is answered that fate is the immovable and determined series of secondary causes itself, and the order of future things which, under divine disposition, necessitates human affairs.
Hence Ovid, speaking of Paris in the Epistles, says:
Your own fates draw you, nor can you abandon what you have begun. Do not draw back your spirit; your fates draw you.
Thus Homer spoke in two verses which Cicero rendered into Latin:
Such are the minds of human beings as Father Jupiter himself, with his light, surveyed the fruit-bearing lands.
And from this root certain ancient poets invented certain fatal Ideas, which they called the sisters known as the Parcae, by contrariety, because they spare no one. These were three, as Plato says: namely, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. They said that the first carried the distaff, the second drew the thread, and the third cut it. Hence the verse:
Clotho carries the distaff; Lachesis draws; Atropos harrows.
The first carries future contingent things. The second draws them forward so that they are placed in the present. The third dispatches them into the past. The first gives life to things; the second prolongs it; the third breaks it.
From this flowed that false opinion of country people and old women who say that those fatal goddesses were accustomed to appear to human beings, giving them infallible answers and promises. But all these things are fictions and fabrications of demons who, under the image of these three sisters, mocked superstitious human beings, who then sowed this darnel of false credulity.
Therefore, leaving aside the poets, who offer nothing certain concerning their fate, let us come to the philosophers and astrologers.