Principal Question Four of Chapter Nine
On fortune: whether voluntary acts and chance events are necessitated by it
Under this principal question five little questions will be resolved.
Little Question One of Principal Question Four
What fortune is according to the poets, how it is depicted, and what things are subjected to it
It is asked what fortune is according to the poets and gentiles; how they depict it; what they ascribe to it; and in what respects they think badly concerning fortune.
To this, beginning from a higher point, it is answered that the ancient philosophers and poets spoke in various ways concerning inferior effects and chance events which occur without order.
For Epicurus, together with Democritus, ascribed chance effects and human events to no determinate superior cause, but to chance; and chance, as Burley testifies in Book V of the Physics, is found properly in inanimate, irrational, and natural things.
Others, however, endeavored to reduce not only fortuitous and contingent effects but also human choices and acts to a certain superior cause necessitating all things. They called that cause fate, concerning which more was said above.
There were also certain third philosophers—gentiles and poets—who endeavored to reduce fortuitous events, choices, and human acts to a certain cause or intelligence hidden from the human intellect, which they called the goddess Fortune.
And they depicted her thus.
For they fashioned a single idol or maiden, whom they named a goddess from the universality of her causation. They depicted her blind, because she measures past, present, and future things; for they said that, while all were ignorant, good and evil things came from her. They depicted her two-faced, white in front for misfortunes, hairy in front because good fortunes assist at a suitable time, but bald behind because she harms at an unsuitable time.
They depicted her sitting upon a wheel, that is, distributing all things changeably, and they believed that she turned that wheel; for fortune does not know how to rest, as Seneca says.
They said that she was the happiness and unhappiness of human beings, and that she directed human beings immediately—that is, without the providence of God—to choose advantageously or disadvantageously. They held that she impressed upon the intellect and will of a human being hope or cognition of her effects. They set her over all distributions of good and evil things, over all good fortunes and misfortunes.
In their person Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 9: “I turned myself to another matter and saw under the sun that neither is the race to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favor to craftsmen, but time and chance are in all things.”
And Seneca says in his Epistles: “Fortune rules human affairs with no order, and scatters gifts with a blind hand, fostering the worse.”
And Juvenal says:
We make you, Fortune, a goddess and place you in heaven.
And Sallust says in the Catilinarian: “Fortune assuredly rules in every matter. According to her whim, not according to the truth, she celebrates and obscures all things.”
And Plutarch, in the book On the Remedy for Anger, said in the person of Euripides: “God rules great things, but he has left our small things in the hands of fortune.”
And Juvenal again:
If fortune wills, you will become a consul from a rhetor; if this same fortune wills, you will become a rhetor from a consul.
Evander, addressing Aeneas in Book VIII of the Aeneid, complained of her, saying:
Me, driven from my fatherland and following the furthest reaches of the sea, omnipotent Fortune and inevitable fate placed in these regions.
And Seneca said in his first tragedy: “O Fortune, envious of brave men, how unequally you divide rewards among the good.”
When Caesar saw King Pharnaces fleeing from the face of Pompey, he said of her, as Quintus Curtius reports: “Who denies that even exceptional glory is more often a benefit of fortune than of virtue?”
And Cicero says in Book II of On Duties: “Great is the power of fortune in either direction: who is ignorant of the prosperous or adverse circumstances which come from it?”
And Julius Celsus said: “Fortune is more efficacious than virtue.”
But certainly all these err.
First, because they hold that fortune impresses something upon the intellect and will of a human being. We rejected this a little above, showing that it is impossible for celestial bodies to act directly upon the human intellect by impressing a species or cognition of their effects. Thomas also proves this in rejecting it in Book III Against the Gentiles, chapter 8.
Second, they err because they say that this fortune makes human beings fortunate and unfortunate. That this is false is evident as follows.
For, properly speaking, to make someone fortunate is to move someone, or to impress something upon him, toward choosing something for an end, so that he may obtain a good accidentally joined to some choice.
Celestial bodies, or fortune, cannot move and direct a human being through the influx of any sensory or intellectual apprehension, or of any appetite, toward choosing some future thing such that some accidental and unexpected event, good or evil, occurs to him. Therefore, they cannot make him fortunate or unfortunate.
The minor premise is proved. For it is proper to nature to tend toward one thing in the majority of cases. But that toward which someone is inclined and the chance event which is joined to that choice are not one thing in themselves, since they have no mutual order or agreement. For that someone should be instigated to go to a spectacle and should find his debtor there, or that he should be inclined from birth to dig a grave and should find a treasure, are not one thing except accidentally.
It follows, therefore, that this goddess or intelligence does not make someone fortunate or unfortunate.
Nor can a human being have from fortune or from celestial bodies that he always, or in the majority of cases, chooses those things to which certain advantages or disadvantages are accidentally joined. For, if this were so, he would always, or in the majority of cases, be made fortunate or unfortunate.
It follows, therefore, that the gentile poets and the others who are not true philosophers speak falsely when they posit an intelligence, some divine numen, or a star, as has been said.
For this reason Augustine deservedly refutes the aforesaid opinion concerning fortune in Book IV of The City of God, chapter 18, saying:
You call Fortune a good goddess, evidently because she receives a temple, has merited an altar, and sacred gifts are paid to her. How, therefore, is she a goddess if she is sometimes good and sometimes evil? Or perhaps, when she is evil, she is not a goddess, but is suddenly changed into a malignant demon. How, moreover, is she good, when without any examination of merits she happens fortuitously to good and evil human beings? And why is she worshiped when she is so blind, running indiscriminately into any persons whatsoever, that she very often passes by her own worshipers and clings to her own despisers?
Or, if her worshipers accomplish anything, so that they are seen and loved by her, she now follows merits and does not come fortuitously. Where, therefore, is that definition of fortune?
These are his words. From them the refutation is evident of the gentile poets and of those who are philosophers only in name, who affirm nothing certain or true concerning fortune.