Preparation for the Gospel — Book VI

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

praef.1| PREFACE. The way the oracles work has now been sufficiently exposed in what has gone before, and the divine power of our Savior has been shown, through his gospel teaching, to be at once worthy of God and profitable for life, since it was through that teaching alone, and through no other, that all men gained their freedom from the demonic phantoms which from ages past had darkened and defiled the whole of life. Come, then, let us turn our argument about these same beings to their false opinions about fate, so that the demons who are believed to move the oracles may be shown to be base and powerless not only by the wickedness of their ways but also by the things they hold wrongly and untruly.

praef.2| Consider, then, whether you too will not find the account of them foreign to divine power, both from the arguments I shall set out that overturn the doctrine of fate and directly from the method by which they are said to give their prophecies.

praef.3| For they say that these beings have not obtained their knowledge of the future through any superior power, but that they guess at what is to come from observing the movement of the stars, as men also do. And so, they say, they can neither help nor do anything at all except what falls under fate. The proof of this is that very advocate of the demons himself, in the work he entitled "On the Philosophy from Oracles", where he speaks as follows, word for word:

1.1| "For what the gods say, if indeed they speak with knowledge of what has been allotted, they declare by the movement of the stars; and nearly all the truthful gods have made this plain."

1.2| Then, a little further on, he says: "When Apollo was asked what the woman would bear, he said from the stars that it would be a girl, having learned it from the time of conception. He speaks as follows: 'It springs from the earth along the roads, where the meadows in their thirst for rain have seized all the drink of its own mother, as she stirs within for the due time; no boy, but a girl: for keen-eyed Phoebe has ploughed holy Cypris as she speeds on; a female offspring, my friend, is yours.'

1.3| You see: he said a girl would be born, since from the time of conception the moon was moving toward Aphrodite. And indeed they foretell diseases from the same source as well. Listen: 'Truly an evil poison overpowers him in his chest, welling up with the painful sickness of the lung.'

1.4| And next, where he adds: 'These things the mind of the Fates has brought about, and has fixed him in dark strife, to be overpowered by sickness, as Cronus who ranges on high travels an evil path.'

1.5| And after other lines: 'But the painful bane of mortals, driving on against Cronus, has hurried you to fill up the fated day of your life, and has razed the foundation of your mind; therefore he has also threatened the holy heart of your godlike father, that it must flee from evil-working Ares.'

1.6| So much, then, to show that they do not prophesy by any divine power of their own, but from watching the stars according to the methods of the astrologers, so that in this they differ in no way from men and display no work of any higher or more divine nature.

1.7| And see how they abolish even what lies in our own power, ascribing to the course of the stars not only external things and what is not in our power but our own choices as well.

2.1| "So too Apollo, speaking about a certain man and at the same time explaining where his eagerness for soldiering came from, said: 'He has swift Ares in his birth-chart, who rouses him, nor will he bury him; for the counsel of Zeus has fallen upon him, which will at once hold out to him the glory of war from Ares.' And again, about another: 'Cronus of the flowing locks bore down upon him, and with hateful goads brought pain on the stormy dawn of the son of Talaus.'

2.2| The noble gods tremble before fate to such a degree that they admit they cannot protect even their own temples when these are struck by lightning. Great hope, then, would men have of obtaining help by prayer from beings who cannot even come to their own aid! And why should one go on practicing piety and worshiping and serving the gods, when they are wholly unable to help even themselves? Listen, then, to what the oracle says:

3.1| "So too there are fates of temples and shrines, and the very shrine of Apollo was fated to be struck by lightning, as he himself says: 'You who are born of the holy race of Erichthonius, you have dared to come and inquire of my voice how the seats of the beautiful sanctuary came to be ravaged. Hear the divine voice from the laurel-roofed inner chambers. When the winds blow aloft, roaring in the air, and grind against one another in clashing strife (and a windless frost will lie over the boundless world), and the afflicted upper air, smoky about the earth, finds no way out, a fiery bolt falls wherever it chances. Wild beasts on the mountains flee from it in terror to their furthest hiding places, and do not stay to look with their eyes at the descending spear of Zeus. By the flight of that blazing weapon as it draws near, the temples of the blessed, tall trees, the peaks of steep mountains, and ships upon the sea are overcome; and even Amphitrite, Poseidon's companion, struck by it, recoils again and again with a roar. You, then, though you hold an unbearable grief in your hearts, endure in spirit the unalterable counsels of the Fates; for to them the son of Heaven, Zeus, has nodded his head, that whatever they spin on their spindles shall remain unshaken. For it is fated that after long ages the beautiful sanctuary be overcome by the Zeus-sent flights of fiery bolts.'

3.2| If, then, the temples of the venerable gods and their sacred dwellings are overcome by the spindles of the Fates and by blazing flights, what hope could still remain for mortal men of escaping what is fated? And if no help comes from the gods, and one must in every case endure in spirit the unalterable counsels of the Fates, what is this vain zeal about the gods? One might well ask.

3.3| And why must libation and the savor of sacrifice, and the honor that comes of these, be paid to those who are not even worthy of them, if they cannot help us in any way? For they ought not to have been thought givers of good things either, but, as they themselves admitted, causes also of the opposite.

3.4| For if something is fated for men, whether good or the opposite, it will come to pass of necessity and be present whether the gods wish it or not. Necessity alone, then, should be served, with the gods receiving little attention, or rather none, since they can neither grieve us nor benefit us.

3.5| But if the one God who presides over all is the only one set over the Fates, and is the only master of them (for he says, 'To them the son of Heaven, Zeus, nodded his head, that whatever they spin on their spindles shall remain unshaken'), why do you not set everything else aside and confess that the universal King and Master of fate is the only God, and the only giver of good things and the only Savior? For it is easy for him alone to turn and change what you call the unalterable counsels of the Fates; so that the man consecrated to God, who is King of all, and who worships him alone, is a slave to neither necessity nor fate, but, as one free, and released from every bond follows, unhindered, the divine and saving dispensations. Such is what the true account reveals. But see, in contrast, through what means that other account says the decrees of fate are loosed.

4.1| For when someone asked to receive a god, the god replied that he was unfit, since he was bound by nature, and prescribed rites of averting evil on this account, then adds: 'For the demonic force has swept in a sufficient rush upon your birth, and this you must escape by such magic arts.'

4.2| By these words it is also clearly shown that magic was given by the gods for the loosing of the decrees of fate, to turn them aside in some way."

4.3| This is Porphyry speaking to you, not I. Now the god who counsels loosing the decrees of fate by magic arts: how, being a god himself, did he not loose what was fated when his own temple was set ablaze by a thunderbolt? And would not the one who urges men to practice magic, and not philosophy, be plain as to what manner of being he is? On top of all this, the same author admits that the gods lie.

5.1| "But already the precise knowledge of the revolution, and of the events that follow from it, is beyond human grasp, and not only that of men but of some of the divine beings also; for which reason they too lie when questioned about many things."

5.2| To this he adds in turn: "And the surrounding air forces the oracles to become false; it is not that those present add the falsehood willingly. At any rate they often announce in advance that they will lie; but the inquirers stay and force them to speak because of their ignorance.

5.3| Apollo, for instance, once said, since the condition of the surrounding air was bad, as we have shown: 'Shut up the force and strength of words; I shall speak lies.' And that what we have said is true, the oracles themselves will show.

5.4| At any rate, one of the gods, when called upon, said: 'Today it is not fitting to speak of the holy path of the stars; for the seat of prophecy is now bound in the stars.' And he adds: "It has become evident, then, from where the falsehood often arises."

6.1| Has the doubt in your mind now ceased, then, that there is nothing divine in the gods' oracles? For how could the divine ever lie, if its nature is most free from falsehood, if the divine is truthful at all? And how could a good spirit ever deceive its inquirers with falsehoods? And how could that which is bound by the course of the stars be better than a man?

6.2| A mortal man, if he has brought even a little zeal for virtue, would never lie, having set before himself to prefer the truth, nor, having lied, would he blame the necessity of fate or the course of the stars; even if someone were to bring fire or iron to his body, forcing him to destroy the true account, he would speak out freely against this too: 'Let fire come, let swords come; cut, burn my flesh, glut yourself drinking my dark blood; for sooner will the stars go beneath the earth and the earth rise to heaven than a flattering word from me meet you.'

6.3| But the deceitful spirit that leads the people astray pretends, tricking the foolish; whenever it falls short in a prediction of the future, it supplies itself fate as a refuge for its irrationality.

6.4| And now that the spirit, through its oracles, has hung everything on fate, and has abolished what is up to us out of the self-determined movement of the will, enslaving even this to necessity, see into what destruction of evil doctrines it has cast those who trust it.

6.5| For if not only external things but also our reasoned inclinations must be assigned to the stars and to fate, and some inescapable necessity forces human judgments, then philosophy is gone for you, and piety is gone too; there would be no praise of virtue for the earnest, no dearness to God, no fitting fruit of labors in training, since necessity and fate would have taken on the cause of everything.

6.6| It would then be wrong to blame those who offend in life, even the impious and the utterly infamous, and equally wrong to admire the earnest; and in this way, as I said, the great glory of philosophy will be gone too, hanging not on a practice and training of one's own choice but on the necessity of the stars.

6.7| See, then, into what a depth of wicked teachings these wonderful gods have cast men, and consider how this doctrine urges and incites men toward debauchery, injustice, and countless other evils, working the overthrow of all of life at once.

6.8| If someone, at any rate, were to believe the wonderful oracles of the gods on their face, that telling the truth and telling lies were not our doing but the work of inescapable fate, as also wanting to set out on a campaign or on any other course of action, and not wanting such things, why would he not choose to be negligent and slack in everything that cannot succeed without toil, labor, and our own zeal?

6.9| For if he supposes that this or that will happen by fate, whether we labor and take pains over it or not, how would anyone not prefer the easier course, letting himself go and neglecting it, as though what is to be done will come about by fate and necessity?

6.10| This is why one can hear many say: "This will be done, if it is fated for me; why should I give myself trouble?"

6.11| For if the man setting out on a campaign was not doing this from his own choice but was being driven by external necessity, it is clear that the same holds for the man who sets out to rob, to violate graves, and to commit other impieties and acts of licentiousness, or else orderly and temperate pursuits; for this would follow from the doctrine of fate.

6.12| How, then, could one who believes that he does not undertake these things of himself, but under external necessity, ever pay heed to the one who admonishes and teaches him not to give himself over to the things mentioned?

6.13| For he would say to the admonisher, as some before us have said: "Why do you admonish me, man? For it is surely not up to me to change my choice; fate has already seized it.

6.14| Why, then, must I strain toward what I will not even be able to desire, unless this too has been fated for me? And if it is fated, I shall desire it, led by fate, even without your teaching. Why, then, do you trouble yourself in vain?"

6.15| "But even if you say that your advising and teaching are accomplished by necessity, so that you advise and persuade me of such things, even then why should one take trouble? For the exhortation is idle and useless. If it is fated for me, I shall work hard; if it is not fated, the zeal of both of us will turn out to be in vain.

6.16| And would not the man who holds this view rather say to himself in slackness, 'Come, I shall not work hard at all, nor trouble myself for nothing; what is fated will come about by necessity'? But the man who takes pains over something, whether teaching, or turning himself or another toward it, and who speaks of obeying and not obeying, of sinning and not sinning, of rebuking sinners and praising the upright, is he not plainly refuted, as one who leaves the actual work to what lies with us and to our own free power, and merely attaches the name of fate to it?

6.17| It is as if someone were to call the nature of the good, by whose presence the living creature is best governed, by the name of the bad. For since we plainly perceive that we are not forced by any other cause when we educate our sons and whip our household slaves who have done wrong, and in willing or not willing this or that, but arrive at such movements wholly of ourselves out of our own power, the man who says these things happen according to fate errs, in that he paralyzes both our own zeal and the encouragements and admonitions directed toward others, by which we see human affairs most of all set right.

6.18| Indeed this argument would overturn the laws too, which were laid down for men for the sake of their advantage. For what need is there to give orders to, or to forbid, those who are held by another necessity? Nor would there be any need to punish wrongdoers, who have not sinned of their own responsibility, nor to assign honors to those who do the finest deeds, though each of these has been a great cause of restraining injustice and promoting readiness to do good.

6.19| Yet this opinion would overturn also reverence toward the divine, if neither God nor these oracle-givers themselves contribute anything to us, whether we pray or show piety, since we are held fast by the necessities of fate.

6.20| To claim that we are moved like lifeless things, pulled this way and that by some external force, as if puppets on strings, so that by necessity we want to do these things and choose others against our will, how would it not be shameless and utterly brazen, when we plainly perceive that we eagerly pursue certain things or neglect them by our own impulse and movement, and again take hold of ourselves, and succeed or fail on this account, forced by nothing else, but choosing some things by willing judgment and avoiding or refusing others out of our own choice?

6.21| Indeed the account of free will is so plain that, just as we are aware of pain and pleasure, and of seeing this and hearing that, not by reasoning but by experience, so we are conscious of ourselves as setting out from ourselves and from our own deliberation, choosing some things and turning away from others, so that the freedom and self-determination of the rational and intelligent nature within us is rightly acknowledged in every way.

6.22| If, however, countless things happen to us against our choice and trouble most men, we must here distinguish the nature of the things in which we exist, and examine the principle by which things not up to us come about. For in this way no irrational fate will take on the cause of these things either, but another principle, depending on the providence of the whole. Let us, then, examine the question carefully.

6.23| The ordinances of true piety declare that all things together are and are governed by the providence of God.

6.24| But in particular, the things that come to be, each after its own kind (some moved by habit, others by nature, others by impulse and imagination, others by reasoning and their own judgment and choice; some happening by primary design, others as consequences of what happened by primary design), have made up the varied and manifold order of the universe, since the cause of the whole has apportioned to each kind of being its own distinct constitution of nature.

6.25| One could go through the account of the other things at leisure; but the account of free will one may more easily grasp as follows.

6.26| Since man is not a creature of a single kind, nor composed of one nature, but has been allotted a union of two opposites, body and soul, the one an instrument bound to the soul by accident, the other an intelligent essence subsisting by primary design; the one irrational, the other rational; the one perishable, the other imperishable; the one mortal, the other immortal; so that we bear a body akin to irrational beasts, but a soul kin to the rational and immortal nature: for this reason it is likely that this two-natured offspring, having a share in a double nature, directs its life in a double and differing manner, at one time enslaved to the body's nature, at another embracing through its more divine portion its own freedom; so that the same being is both slave and free, having been allotted by God, for reasons he himself knows, such a mixture of soul and body.

6.27| If, then, someone uses the name of fate and subjects to the cause of necessity the natural properties of either body or soul, he would miss the proper term. For if fate were some unhindered necessity, but many of the natural properties of body and soul are obstructed, and countless other things meet them from outside, contrary to nature, attending soul and body by accident, how could fate and nature be the same?

6.28| For if they say that fate is unchangeable and that nothing can happen contrary to it (for necessity is inexorable), but, as I said, many things contrary to nature befall soul and body, one could not rightly call fate and nature the same.

6.29| Of the things that are in us, then, some come about by reasoning and choice, which is up to us, such as the natural functions of the soul; others by the nature of the body; and others are accidents attached to these, to soul, I mean, and body, and are brought to completion by other things according to nature. But no one could justly deprive of its cause either what is up to us in the soul, or what is natural to the body, or what happens by accident from outside.

6.30| For God himself has been shown to be the Maker of the whole, of what is up to us, of what is natural, and of what is by accident. For in general we must hear the divine scripture declaring about all things: "He spoke, and they came to be; he commanded, and they were created."

6.31| If, then, things sometimes happen to people contrary to their intention, we must remind them that this is due to that double and diverse nature of the union in us, that is, of soul and body, on account of which the essence of the soul, though by nature intelligent and rational, takes on, contrary to nature, the place of the irrational in a body that, as nature has it, is still in infancy; and the mind, proper to prudence, often loses its wits by some accident, thrown off course, say, by extreme sickness of the body.

6.32| Often too old age, coming upon the body according to nature, deprives the understanding of the achievements of its prime, dulling, contrary to nature, the rational part of the intelligent soul.

6.33| And again, outrages and pains and mutilations that befall the body contrary to nature have overcome the soul's free choice through what has befallen, as the soul yields to pains because of its entanglement with the body; so that, as it appears, an inescapable bond is cast in the way of the soul's freedom, sometimes the nature of the body, sometimes the things that happen from outside.

6.34| Yet the choice that is up to us has attained such virtue and strength that in many cases it dares to resist and speak against both the nature of the body and the things that befall from outside.

6.35| The nature of the body, for example, summons a man to sexual desire, but the soul, throwing the bridle of temperate reason on the passion, proves stronger than the body's nature. And again, nature, compelling hunger, thirst, cold, and the like, calls us to the natural remedies and fillings, but the will, persuaded by temperate arguments and freely embracing certain ascetic exhortations, outwits the nature of the body with fasts of many days and with endurance, having judged this by the virtue of reason and chosen it.

6.36| And once more, nature delights in all pleasures and in the smooth motion of bodies, but the will, out of desire for virtue, has embraced a laborious and rough life.

6.37| And there are those who, turning for the worse, "exchanged natural relations for unnatural, males working shamefulness with males."

6.38| So reason does not yield to nature in everything, but prevails in most things, just as it is also prevailed over; at one time it leads, at another it is led, so that at times one even draws the release from the body to oneself by one's own hands before its season, when life is judged to be of no profit to him.

6.39| If, then, the whole struggle were for him only against the proper nature of his own body, it would be moderate; but since God has placed his civic life and his life among men amid many things, so that he spends his days among wild beasts and venomous reptiles, in the midst of fire, water, the surrounding air, and all the varied and different natures in these, it is natural that his contest and resistance is not only against the nature of the body proper to him and joined with him, but also against countless external accidents, amid which he lives who conducts a mortal life, so that he must stand firm against these too.

6.40| Many natures of such and such foods, and such combinations of the surrounding air, onsets of frost and scorching heats, and very many other things that are moved naturally according to their own principles but fall upon us by accident, have caused no ordinary disturbance to our free will because of its entanglement with the body, since the nature of our bodies does not withstand the assaults from outside, but is overcome and defeated by things outside that work according to their own nature.

6.41| And again, since we spend our time with very many other men, who, having been allotted the same essence as ours, hold what is up to them under their own authority, using their own free choice, so in turn we are naturally subject also to the wills of others, as their free power in this way comes to bear on us in respect of the body or the soul.

6.42| For just as the nature of our body is often overcome by things that fall upon it from outside, so there are times when the will, harassed by countless wills outside it, persuaded by its own free judgment, gives itself over to externals, and becomes now better, now worse. For bad company is able to make men worse, just as, on the contrary, association with the good makes them better. "Bad company corrupts good character," and just so the company of the good, by improving, saves.

6.43| The rational power of the soul is swayed in this direction and that by the arguments that reach it from outside; yet again the proper virtue of the rational essence is strong, and shows a power truly divine and godlike, when it stands firm against all external things, and overcomes everything with free spirit, yielding in nothing of its own virtue, and is prepared to practice philosophy. When, however, it grows careless, it is put in the worst condition by worse things, just as it is also improved when it receives care from outside.

6.44| What need is there to add to this that the abundance and scarcity of such souls and bodies, coming about in some conjunction in keeping with the government of the whole, and being well and rightly ordered for the whole, have produced the greatest possible abundance of every kind of movement for particulars, including what is up to us?

6.45| Over all existing things generally, those that come about through us and through our own causation, those that come upon us from outside by accident, and those that are worked out naturally, one all-powerful and almighty providence of God presides, passing through all; it manages most things by divine reasons beyond our telling, steering the whole with an easy rein, transforming many natural things to suit the occasions, working together with what is up to us, and assigning the due order to what happens from outside.

6.46| Since all these have been divided in such a way into three, into what is up to us, what comes about by nature, and what happens by accident, and since all are summed up under one principle, the counsel of God, the doctrine of fate will have no place anywhere.

6.47| We may also have found the source of evil, which many find puzzling. It has no place in anything natural, neither in bodies nor in essences, and certainly not in what happens by accident from outside. It would be found only in the self-determined movement of the soul, and even there not at the time when it walks the straight road according to nature, but when it leaves the royal road by its own judgment and turns to what is contrary to nature, being master of itself.

6.48| For since it received this choice privilege from God, it is free and self-governing, having taken upon itself the judgment of its own impulse. A divine law, yoked to it by nature, like a lamp and a light, speaks inwardly, whispering to it and saying: "You shall walk by the royal road; you shall not turn aside to the right or to the left," teaching that the royal way is the journey according to right reason.

6.49| For the Maker of the whole established this natural law for every soul as helper and ally in what is to be done; through the law he showed it the straight road, and through the free self-determination he gave it, he declared its choice of better things worthy of praise and acceptance and of greater rewards and prizes for what is done rightly, because it was done not under compulsion but by free judgment, when it was possible to choose the opposite. Conversely, the soul that chose the worst deserves blame and punishment, since by its own movement it neglected the natural law, begot the beginning and source of evil, and misused itself, not from any external necessity but from free judgment and decision.

6.50| The responsibility lies with the one who chooses; God is not responsible. For God made neither a bad nature nor a bad essence of soul; it is not right for the good to make anything but good things. And everything that is according to nature is good. To every rational soul, by nature, belongs the good of free will, and this was given for the choice of good things.

6.51| When it acts badly, the nature is not to be blamed. For the bad does not come to it according to nature but contrary to nature, being a work of choice, not of nature. For one who had the power to choose the good, when he did not choose it but willingly turned away from the better and laid hold of the worse, what place of escape would be left to him, having become the cause of his own disease and having neglected the innate law, his savior and physician?

6.52| The man who takes no account of all this, and makes everything depend on necessity and the motion of the stars, and says that the causes of the misdeeds of men do not lie in us but in the power that moves all things, how would he not introduce an impious and godless reasoning?

6.53| For if he supposes the movement of the whole to be spontaneous and without providence, he would be convicted as plainly an atheist, and moreover as blind to the all-wise harmony and the arrangement of the whole, which revolves through the ages in good order; but if he will agree that the providence of God leads and carries and presides over all and governs it by an all-wise principle, not even so has he escaped the absurdity of impiety, since, as regards the sins that men commit, he acquits the offenders, as though they had done nothing amiss by their own will, and traces the cause of the evils to universal providence, calling it necessity and fate, and declaring it to be the cause of every shameful deed, unspeakable act, cruelty, and murder among men.

6.54| And who could be more impious than he, who introduces the God of all things, who is himself Maker and Creator of this whole, as forcing by necessity one man, unwilling to be impious, to do this, to be godless by compulsion and blasphemous against God himself, and another, whom God himself constituted male in nature, to suffer against nature the things of women, not by choice but compelled by him, and another to become a murderer not by his own judgment but driven by God's necessity; so that there is no reasonable ground for blaming offenders, but one must either hold that these are not sins at all, or declare God the maker of all evils?

6.55| For whether he himself, present to all things, seeing everything and hearing everything, compels these acts, or whether he himself established the movement of the whole and the particular motion of the stars as the maker and compeller of them, he who set up such an instrument and contrived the trap for those to be hunted would himself be the cause of those who are caught.

6.56| Whether, then, he himself directly, or again through some other necessity contrived by him, throws the unwilling into these evils, it would be he, and no other, who is the maker of all evils, and man could no longer justly be said to have sinned, but God, his maker.

6.57| And what other account could be more impious than this? Whoever introduces fate plainly drives out both God and God's providence, just as the one who sets God over all would abolish the doctrine of fate. For either God and fate would be the same, or the one would stand apart from the other. The same they cannot be.

6.58| For if they claim that fate is a chain of causes proceeding from eternity, unalterably and immovably, from the course of the heavenly stars, would not the bodily elements, out of which the heavenly bodies too are constituted, be prior to fate, so that one might reasonably call fate some accident that befalls them?

6.59| And how could what befalls the elements be the same as the God over all, if the elements, considered by their own nature, are lifeless and irrational, while God, beyond bodies, is life itself and wisdom, granting from his own creation the enjoyment of it to the individual elements and to the ordering of the whole? God and fate are not the same.

6.60| But if they are different, which is stronger? Nothing is finer than God, nothing more powerful. He will then prevail over the lesser and be above it; or else, if he yielded to a fate that works evil, he himself would draw the blame, who, able to restrain the evil-working necessity, did not check it, but released it unbound upon the ruin and destruction of all, or rather did this himself, if he is introduced as maker and creator of all things and of fate itself.

6.61| If, however, he takes no account of the ordering of the whole, the voice of the godless would again emerge, one to which we must close our ears, since divine providence and power plainly show themselves both in the all-wise and skillful works of the whole and in the facts concerning us, which undeniably display the free and self-determining power of the rational soul.

6.62| By this power, even though countless external things stand in the way and fall upon the nature of the body and upon our deliberate impulses by accident, nevertheless the freedom of the virtue of the soul stands firm against all, showing the choice of what is noble, which is up to us, to be unconquerable and undefeated.

6.63| The present season of our Savior's teaching has most of all demonstrated this by its very deeds. That these are not noises and empty words you may see by looking at the contest of the godly and observing those who undertook, by free choice, the labors of the contests for piety: countless multitudes of Greeks and barbarians over the whole inhabited world, who eagerly endured every outrage against the body, passed through every kind of torture with cheerful faces, and at last, in many different forms, gladly accepted the soul's release from the body.

6.64| And surely here no argument would allow one to blame fate. For where has the course of the stars, from eternity, brought you such athletes of piety? Or when, before the teaching of our Savior was laid down for all men, did the life of men set forth such a contest over the whole inhabited world?

6.65| And where has the whole of time produced such a school of teaching, overthrowing superstitious error and teaching all men, Greeks and barbarians alike, to know the one God above all?

6.66| And which of the sages celebrated through the ages, barbarian or Greek, was ever granted such a fate that the word he put forth was made manifest to the whole world, known to the ends of the earth, and himself won the reputation of a god among those consecrated to him?

6.67| If, however, these things neither existed from eternity, nor have occurred, nor have been heard of, then there was no chain of causes and no necessity responsible for them. For long ago, through the same revolution and turning of the stars, nothing would have prevented others from obtaining the same birth and fate.

6.68| By what fate, then, has our Savior been proclaimed God, appearing throughout the whole world, while the gods long held as such among Greeks and barbarians have been brought down, and brought down in no other way than through the teaching of the new God?

6.69| And what fate of theirs announced to all men a God who is Maker of all, and compelled them to say that there is no fate? And how did fate compel itself to say and think that it does not exist? And what about those who, because of the pious teaching of our Savior, have contended in every kind of struggle from of old, and are still contending to this day?

6.70| They have, then, obtained one and the same lot, to be subject to one word and one teaching, to show one mind and one choice, one virtue of soul, to take up one and the same life, to love the same word, and to endure lovingly the same sufferings for the sake of their steadfastness in piety.

6.71| And what right reasoning would grant that young and old together, every measure of age, both sexes, men of barbarian nature, slaves and free alike, learned and unlearned, not in a corner of the earth or under certain stars, but over the whole inhabited world, were forced by the necessity of fate to prefer this one doctrine above all their ancestral ones, to embrace death for the piety of the one God over all, to be well taught the doctrines about the soul's immortality, and to choose a philosophy not of words but of deeds?

6.72| These things must be plain even to a blind man: that they belong to no necessity but to learning and teaching, being clear examples of willing judgment and free choice.

6.73| Countless other proofs of the point could be given; passing over most of them, I shall content myself with what has been said, and leave you to examine your own reading of your revered philosophers, so that you may find out how much better and wiser than your oracle-giving gods the man was who refuted their wonderful oracles as false and slapped the Pythian himself for what he declared about fate.

6.74| Listen, then, again to the author of the book he entitled The Exposure of the Charlatans, and see with what quite youthful spirit he corrects the error of the many, and of Apollo himself, writing this word for word:

7.1| "So you, sitting in Delphi, cannot keep silent even if you wished. And Apollo, son of Zeus, wishes now, not because he wishes, but because he has been assigned by necessity to wishing.

7.2| I think that, leaving all the rest aside, since I have been led, I do not know how, into this discussion, I shall inquire into something that is our own and worth seeking. For the freedom of our life, at least as far as the wise are concerned, has perished from human life, whether one is pleased to call it the rudder, the ballast, or the foundation of our life, that freedom which we set up as master of the most necessary things; but Democritus, if I am not mistaken, and Chrysippus devise to show the finest of human things as, the one, a slave, the other, half a slave.

7.3| But so much for these men, as much as a man dealing with human things might think fit; if the divine too is already campaigning against us, alas, what we shall suffer!

7.4| But it is not likely, nor just, judging at least from these things: 'Enemy of the neighbors, friend of the immortal gods, keep your spear drawn in, and sit on your guard.'

7.5| 'What then?' says the Argive. 'If I wish, am I permitted, and am I able, if I so decide, to sit and keep on guard?' 'You may,' you would say, 'and you are able; or how else would I have commanded you this?'

7.6| 'Dear child of Chiron the renowned, Carystus, leaving Pelion, come to the height of Euboea, where it is decreed that you found a sacred place. But go. Delay no longer.'

7.7| "Is it truly up to a man, Apollo, even to wish to leave Pelion? Am I master of that? Yet I have heard from many wise men that, should it be fated for me to reach the height of Euboea and found a sacred place, I shall hold it and settle there, whether you say so or not, and whether I wish it or not. And if I must also wish whatever is necessary for me, even if I did not wish to wish it, then you, Apollo, are more deserving to be believed.

7.8| I seem to be about to pay closer attention to you. 'Tell the Parians, Telesicles, that I command you to found a sunny city on the island of Eëria.' 'I will tell them, by Zeus,' some puffed-up fellow, or someone out to refute you, will perhaps say, 'even if you do not command it; for it is fated.' And Eëria is the island of Thasos; the Parians will come to it, since Archilochus, my son, said that this island used to be called Eëria. You, then, being formidable at taking vengeance, will not, I think, put up with him being so ungrateful and bold, who, if you had not wished to reveal it to him, would never have announced it, nor would his son Archilochus have brought the Parians there, nor would the Parians have settled Thasos.

7.9| I do not know, then, whether you say these things and do not know what you are saying. Yet since we appear to be at leisure and to be talking at length, and the discussion is no side matter, tell me this; perhaps even a few points out of many suffice:

7.10| Are you and I anything? You would say yes. But how do we know this? By what did we judge that we know it? Is there anything else so sufficient as our awareness and apprehension of ourselves?

7.11| What next? That we are living creatures: how do we find that out? And how do we know that among living creatures there are men, and among men one who is a charlatan and another who exposes charlatans (as I would say), or, as you would say, one of them a man, the other a god, and one a prophet, the other an informer? Let it be so for you, so long as I am convicted.

7.12| And how do we know that we are talking at this moment? What do you say? Were we not right to judge by our apprehension of ourselves, the thing nearest to us of all? Clearly. For nothing was higher than it, or older, or more trustworthy.

7.13| For if this is not so, let no one named Alcmaeon any longer come to you at Delphi, having killed his mother, driven from his home and longing for it. For he does not know whether he himself is anything at all, or whether he is driven from home, or whether he longs for home; yet even if Alcmaeon is mad and suspects things that are not, the Pythian at least is not mad. And do not say to him, 'You seek a return to your native land, son of Amphiaraus.' For you do not yet know whether anyone is asking you, 'son of Amphiaraus,' or whether you are the one being asked, or have anything to say about what anyone asks.

7.14| Nor should Chrysippus, who introduces half-slavery, not knowing what this very thing is, come to the Stoa, nor should he suppose that those dolts will come to hear him, 'No-man'; nor should he take any firm position on anything, standing up against Arcesilaus when he is present, and against Epicurus when he is not.

7.15| For what is Arcesilaus, what is Epicurus, what is the Stoa, what are the young men, who is No-man, he neither knows nor is the sort of person to know; for long before that he does not even know whether he himself is anything.

7.16| But neither you nor Democritus will put up with it if someone says these things; for, you say, there is no more trustworthy measure than the one I mean; and even if there seem to be others as well, none could be set equal to it; or if one could be equal, it could not surpass it.

7.17| Therefore, someone might say, Democritus, and you, Chrysippus, and you, prophet, since you are indignant if anyone should want to take away your own apprehension (for there would no longer be those many books), come, let us in our turn be indignant too.

7.18| Why indeed? Where it seems good to you, this will be the most trustworthy and the oldest thing; where it does not, there an unseen fate, a destiny, will hold sway over it, differing for each of you, for one from God, for another from those tiny bodies that are carried down and bounce up and are interwoven and dissolved and separated and set side by side by necessity.

7.19| For look: in the way we apprehend ourselves, so we apprehend what in us is chosen and what is forced. We are not unaware how great is the difference between walking and being led, or between choosing and being compelled.

7.20| And why did I bring this into the discussion? Because it has escaped you, prophet, what we are masters of, and you who know everything would not know these things, whose moorings are fastened to our own will.

7.21| This will appeared to be the origin of not a few things; and he to whom the origin has escaped, which was the cause of what came after it, how could he know what comes after the origin?

7.22| Shameless, evidently, is the one who prophesied to Laius that his begotten son would kill him. For the son was surely going to be the master of his own will, and neither Apollo nor anyone above him is able, by any power, to reach what has neither existence nor necessity of coming to be.

7.23| For this is the most laughable thing of all: the mixture and conjunction of there being something up to men, and a chain of causes none the less. It resembles, as the wiser say, the argument of Euripides:

7.24| that Laius was willing to beget a child, was master of that, and this escaped Apollo's sight; but once he had begotten, an inescapable necessity lay upon him to be killed by the son; so the necessity for the future supplies the prophet with foreknowledge of what will be.

7.25| But the son too was master of his own will, as the father was, and as the one was master of begetting or not, so this one was master of killing or not. Such are all your prophecies. And the Euripidean Apollo meant just this when he said, 'and your whole house will go through blood.'

7.26| That there will be blindness by the hand of the son, through marriage to his mother and the tyranny he received for solving the riddle; and for the children, murderous slaughter of one another, over the flight of one from rule and the greed of the other, the marriage of the exile in Argos, and the expedition of seven ridiculous generals and the clash of battle; as these split off into many origins and powers, how would it be possible for you to know them in advance, or could the chain bind them together?

7.27| For if Oedipus, being master of himself, had not wished to rule as tyrant; or having wished it and done it, had not chosen to marry Jocasta; or having married, had not been swollen with pride, nor been of a gloomy and discontented temper, how would each of these things have been done? How would he have laid hands on his eyes? How would he have cursed his children with the curse of Euripides and your own?

7.28| And how would what followed have happened, unless causes had first come about before you could say anything about the future? And once more, if the sons had come to terms and ruled together, or if they had agreed to rule in turn and abided by the agreement, or if the one driven out had decided to go to Libya or to the Perrhaebians rather than to Argos, or having come to Argos had decided to sell salted fish, and not to take a rich wife,

7.29| but some day-laborer or tavern-keeper, or if Adrastus had refused him his daughter, or if he had granted her, yet the other had not longed for the road home, or if, longing for it, he had mastered himself, or if Adrastus had not paid attention to him when he asked for an alliance, or if neither Amphiaraus nor Tydeus nor any of the other captains had followed Adrastus, or if they had followed but he, on coming, had not fought his brother, but had either come to terms and ruled together with him or, with him unwilling, had withdrawn, persuaded by Euripides when he says, 'Senselessly you too have come to sack your fatherland,'

7.30| Or if this one had not, but the other had, having heard those other sophistries of Euripides: 'Sun and night are slaves to mortals; will you not endure having an equal share of the house?' How would they have joined battle, and how would the whole house of Laius have gone through blood?

7.31| But, you will say, these things did happen. They did; but by what road did you come to know them? Do you not see how often the power in us, who fill out the play, has interrupted the whole drama? In the same way, taking whatever plot you like, I shall cut your chain apart and show it to be impossible.

7.32| But you say you know the end of the plot, while the plot is composed throughout of that power's interruptions of the chain.

7.33| Or do you not understand what I mean? In each plot, prophet, living creatures often make a few beginnings, or many in it. And the beginnings always cut off what extends up to them and lead on other events; these can advance only so far as no other beginning, intervening somewhere, commands what follows it not to follow what came before but itself.

7.34| A donkey, a dog, a flea could be a beginning. For, by Apollo, he will not take away even from the flea its power; the flea will make a private start of its own, which, sometimes becoming entangled with human affairs, will offer itself as the beginning of some course. You, however, who use this kind, do not perceive it.

7.35| 'You destroyed Trachis, city of divine Heracles, Locrian; but Zeus gave you others, and will give still more.' What do you say? Was it not fated that it be destroyed by you? And how are we to blame, rather than your necessity? You do not act justly, Apollo, nor do you rebuke rightly us who do no wrong.

7.36| And this Zeus, the necessity of that necessity of yours, why does he punish us, and not himself, if anyone, for having shown necessity to be of this sort? And why does he threaten us? Or why do we, as though masters of this, go hungry? Besides, either it will be resettled by us or it will not; whichever it is, it is fated.

7.37| Cease, then, Zeus the famine-maker, from your wrath; for what is fated will be, and this is what your chain is appointed to do; we are nothing in relation to it. And you too, Apollo, stop giving vain oracles; for what must be will be, even if you keep silent. But what are we to suffer, Zeus and Apollo, who are in no way responsible for your legislation, that is, your necessity-legislation? What have we to do with your afflictions, which you yourselves rightly should bear for what we were compelled to do?

7.38| 'Men of Oeta, do not hasten in the recklessness of your mind.' But we do not hasten, Apollo, we are driven, and not by recklessness but by your necessity.

7.39| And that Lycurgus there, Apollo, how do you praise him, who was not good either willingly or by choice, but unwillingly, if indeed anyone does become good unwillingly? What you are doing now is like praising and honoring those with beautiful bodies while blaming and punishing the ugly.

7.40| For the wicked could justly say to you, gods: you did not allow us to become good, and not only that, you forced us to be wicked; and as for the good, if they strutted about with arms akimbo, no one would let them, but would say, 'Chrysippus and Cleanthes and all of that chorus, for you have been made good, I praise virtue, but I do not praise you, the virtuous.'

7.41| And as for Epicurus, whom you, Chrysippus, reviled so often, I for my part drop the charges so far as you are concerned. For what could he do about it, if he was soft and unjust, as you so often abused him for being, not by his own will?

7.42| 'The gods are gracious to the life of well-ordered mortals, and receive the holy sacrifices and honors of the pious.' You would not, I think, say this unless you were persuaded that they proceed to what they proceed to not unwillingly but willingly. And what they will, neither god nor man, sophist though he be, once these things have been so argued, will dare to say is subjected; or else we shall no longer reason with him, but take some tough strap, as for an unruly boy, and give his ribs a thorough scraping."

7.43| So much Oenomaus aimed at the oracle-giver. But if you do not delight in such a man, take up and read what the other philosophers say about fate, which overturns not only the oracles set out above but also everything else devised on the doctrine in general.

7.44| For since not only the ignorant and untaught but, by now, many who pride themselves on education and philosophy have been swept along into the same doctrine, I think it necessary to set out the contradictions of the philosophers themselves among themselves, for an exact examination of the question. First, then, I shall read to you from the work of Diogenianus what he says on fate, directed in this way against Chrysippus:

8.1| "It is worth setting beside all this what Chrysippus the Stoic holds on this matter. For in the first book of his work On Fate, wishing to demonstrate that all things are seized by necessity and fate, he uses, among other testimonies, the following lines said in the poet Homer: 'But for me hateful doom gaped, which was allotted to me even as I was born.'

8.2| And later: 'He will suffer whatever Fate spun for him with her thread at his birth, when his mother bore him'; and 'no man, I say, has escaped his portion.' He fails to see that other things said elsewhere by the poet stand in direct opposition to these, which Chrysippus himself uses in his second book when he wants to establish that many things happen through us, such as: 'for they perished by their own recklessness,' and 'Alas, how mortals blame the gods! They say that evils come from us, but they themselves, by their own recklessness, have sorrows beyond what is fated.'

8.3| These and such lines are opposed to the view that all things happen according to fate. Nor was he able to see this, that Homer in those verses does not in the least bear witness to his doctrine. For he will be found suggesting not that all things happen according to fate, but rather that some of them happen according to it.

8.4| For the line 'But for me hateful doom gaped, which was allotted to me even as I was born' cannot be taken to say that all things happen according to doom, but only the dying itself; and truly it is fated for every living creature that is born to die.

8.5| And the later line, 'He will suffer whatever Fate spun for him with her thread at his birth, when his mother bore him,' means the same. For he does not say that everything afterward will happen to him according to fate, but that some things will happen to him of necessity. For what else does the qualification 'whatever' signify but this? Many things lie upon us of necessity, even if not all.

8.6| And the line 'no man, I say, has escaped his portion' is very well said. For who could escape what falls of necessity on every living creature? So Chrysippus not only cannot count Homer as agreeing with him in believing that all things happen by fate, but has him opposed, since Homer has said clearly and often that many things happen through us, while it would never be found that he says expressly that everything happens by necessity.

8.7| And for the poet, who does not promise us the truth about the nature of things but imitates the passions, characters, and all kinds of opinions of men, it would be fitting often to say contrary things; but for a philosopher it is fitting neither to say contrary things nor, for this very reason, to use a poet as witness.

8.8| And after other remarks he says: "Chrysippus considers that he adduces a further strong proof of the rule of fate over all things from the very formation of such names. For he says that 'what is fated' is a certain finished and completed administration, and that 'fate' is a certain chain, whether from the will of God or from whatever cause.

8.9| Moreover the Moirai, he says, were named from being apportioned, a share having been distributed to each of us. So also 'what must be' was named as what falls to us and is fitting in accordance with fate. And the number of the Moirai, three, he takes to indicate the three times in which all things revolve and through which they are accomplished.

8.10| Lachesis is so called from obtaining by lot what is fated for each; Atropos from the unturnable and unchangeable character of the apportionment; Clotho from all things being spun together and strung together, and from there being one appointed course among them. By babbling this and similar things he thinks he demonstrates the necessity in all things.

8.11| I am amazed that in saying such things he did not perceive his own idle talk. For suppose that men, using these notions as he derives them from the names, laid down the names now set before us because they held that fate has seized all things, and that the causes laid down from eternity in everything that is and comes to be are unchangeable.

8.12| Why, then, Chrysippus, do you adopt every opinion of men, and none appears to you mistaken about anything, but all are beholders of the truth?

8.13| How then do you say that no man exists who does not seem to you mad, on a level with Orestes and Alcmaeon, except the wise man? Or do you mean that only one or two have ever been wise, and the rest through folly have been mad just as equally as those mentioned?

8.14| And how do you refute their opinions as mistaken, for example those about wealth, reputation, tyranny, and pleasure in general, which most men have held to be goods? How do you say that all the laws that are in force, and all constitutions, are mistaken? Or why did you write so great a multitude of books, if men held no mistaken opinions about anything?

8.15| For we shall not claim that they think rightly whenever they hold the same opinions as you, and are mad whenever they differ.

8.16| First, because you yourself do not say that you are wise, much less we, so that we should make agreement with your opinion the criterion of their thinking well; and next, even if this were true, why should one have to say that all are equally mad, rather than praising them in so far as they appeared to hold the same views as you, as having grasped something right, and supposing that they err in so far as they disagreed?

8.17| But to consider what seems so to them as sufficient testimony of the truth would not be right even so; but that they are not mad by nature, as you suppose, but are very far from wisdom, everyone would agree.

8.18| So it is ridiculous that you too should use as witnesses, through the setting of names, men whom you would say are no different from yourself in understanding, unless it happens that those who first set these names were wise, which you will in no way be able to show.

8.19| But let it be conceded to you that it is so, and that those names were set with the meanings you wish, and that such a thing did not arise from false opinions; where, then, do these names indicate that absolutely all things are according to fate, and not, at most, only those things of which there is a fate?

8.20| For the number of the Moirai and their names, the spindle of Clotho and the thread laid on it and its spinning, and everything else of this kind said in those accounts, indicate the inviolable and eternally proceeding course of causes, as to whatever is thus compelled to happen, and whatever is prevented from being otherwise.

8.21| There might be many such things; but as for what does not come about in this way, people have given some of them gods as managers and makers, have supposed ourselves to be the causes of some, and nature of others, and chance of others again.

8.22| To show the changeableness and instability of chance, its being now one way, now another, they made an image of this quality of events and depicted Chance standing on a sphere.

8.23| Or have not these things too been held as opinions among men? For if at times they confuse the causes, and think that what happens according to fate or chance comes from divine power, and what happens through us comes by fate, it is nonetheless clear to everyone that they hold all these causes to be among the things that exist.

8.24| So it follows that neither the suppositions of men nor the setting of such names bears witness to the view of Chrysippus."

8.25| After this he adds: "In the first book On Fate, then, he used some such proofs as these, but in the second he undertakes to resolve the absurd consequences that seem to follow from the doctrine that all things are compelled, which we set out at the beginning: for example, that through it our own zeal is abolished in matters of blame, praise, exhortation, and everything that evidently happens through our own causation.

8.26| In the second book, then, he says that it is clear that many things come about from us, but that these too are none the less jointly fated along with the administration of the whole.

8.27| He uses examples of this kind. The cloak's not being lost, he says, was not fated simply, but together with taking care of it; and this man's being saved from the enemy together with his fleeing from them; and children's being born together with wanting to have intercourse with a wife.

8.28| For, he says, if someone said that Hegesarchus the boxer would certainly leave the contest unstruck, it would be absurd for anyone to expect Hegesarchus to let his hands drop and fight on the ground that it was fated for him to go away unstruck, when the speaker made the statement because of the man's exceptional care to avoid being hit; and so it is with other cases.

8.29| For many things cannot come about without our also wishing them, and bringing to them the most intense zeal and effort, since, he says, it was fated that they come about together with this.

8.30| Here again one may wonder at the man's failure to observe and to take account of both the evident facts and the inconsistency of his own arguments. For I think that just as what is called sweet is by nature most opposed to what is called bitter, black to white, and hot to cold, so too is what is up to us to what is according to fate, if indeed he assumed that those things are to be called according to fate which come about in every case whether we will it or not, as distinct from what comes to its end through our taking pains and acting, or is not accomplished through our neglect and slackness.

8.31| If, then, that cloak is saved through my taking care to guard it, and children are born through wanting to approach the wife, and not dying at the enemy's hands comes through wanting to flee them, and leaving the contest unstruck comes from fighting bravely against the opponent and guarding against his hand-blows, how will what is according to fate be preserved here?

8.32| For if these things happen according to fate, they could not be said to happen through us; and if through us, then evidently not according to fate, because these cannot coincide with one another.

8.33| But it will be through us, he says, with what is through us nonetheless comprehended by fate. And how, I would say, comprehended? If both the guarding of the cloak and the not guarding of it came from my own power, then in the same way I should evidently be master of its being saved.

8.34| And from the very distinction Chrysippus makes, it becomes plain that the cause that is through us is released from fate. For it is fated, he says, that the cloak be saved if you guard it, and that children will be born if you too wish it, and otherwise none of these will be. But in the case of things pre-determined by fate we would never use such conditions.

8.35| We do not, then, say that every man will die if this happens, and not die if it does not, but simply that he will die, whatever may be done in general to avoid dying; or that some man will not be capable of pain, even if he does this or that, whereas every man is capable of pain, whether he wishes or not; and so with whatever else is fated to be thus and not otherwise.

8.36| So if this or that must come about on condition that we wish it, and otherwise not, it is plain that our wishing or not wishing was predetermined by no other cause, but was self-determined.

8.37| But if this was not subject to compulsion, then clearly the coming about of this or that was not predetermined from eternity either, unless the very wishing to guard the cloak, or not wishing, itself came about through some fate and an external compelling cause.

8.38| But in this way the authoritative power that is up to us is completely abolished, and the cloak would no longer be saved or lost through my causation; so that, if it were lost, I should reasonably be beyond reproach (for some other cause was destroying it), and if it were saved again, I should in no way be praised, since I was not doing this either. Yet you strained yourself in your argument in this way, as though you could save everything.

8.39| So much for the man mentioned. Let there be joined to this what comes from Alexander of Aphrodisias, a man quite conspicuous in philosophical discourse, who himself, in his writings On Fate, used the following words in refutation of the doctrine:

9.1| "The causes of things that come to be are divided into four kinds of causes, as the divine Aristotle has shown. Some causes are makers, others take the place of matter; among them there is also the cause according to form; and besides these three causes there is among them the cause which is the end, that for the sake of which the thing that comes to be comes to be.

9.2| Such are the differences among causes: whatever is the cause of anything will be found to fall under one of these. For even if not everything that comes to be needs so many causes, yet those that need the most do not exceed the number stated.

9.3| Their difference would become clearer if it were seen in an example of something that comes to be. Let the division of causes be shown for us in a statue. The efficient cause of the statue is the craftsman who made it, whom we call a statue-maker; the matter is the underlying bronze, or stone, or whatever it is that is shaped by the craftsman according to his art; for this too is a cause of the statue's coming to be and being.

9.4| The form, too, which the craftsman brings about in this underlying material, is itself a cause of the statue; hence it is a form of someone throwing a discus, or hurling a javelin, or of some other definite posture.

9.5| Nor are these alone causes of the coming to be of the statue; the purpose for which it came to be is not second to any of the causes of its coming to be, that is, honor to someone, or some act of reverence to a god. For without such a cause the statue would not have come to be in the first place.

9.6| Since there are these causes and their difference from one another is clear, we would rightly count fate among the efficient causes, since it keeps a proportion, in relation to the things that come about according to it, to the craft of the maker of the statue."

9.7| "This being so, it would follow to give an account of efficient causes; for in this way it will be clear whether fate must be held to be the cause of all that comes to be, or whether we should allow others besides it as efficient causes of some things.

9.8| Aristotle, dividing all that comes to be, says that some of it comes to be for the sake of something, the maker having some aim and end set before him for what he makes, and some for the sake of nothing, namely whatever does not come about by any purpose of the maker nor has its reference to a definite end; such, for example, are holding and twirling bits of straw, touching and pulling at one's hair, and whatever comes about in like manner.

9.9| That these things do occur is well known; but they have no cause in the sense of an end or that for the sake of which. Things that come about thus, aimlessly and simply, admit of no reasonable division.

9.10| Of the things that have their reference to something and come about for the sake of something, some come about by nature, some by reason. Those that have nature as the cause of their coming to be advance, according to certain numbers and a fixed order, toward some end, in which, once they have come to be, they cease coming to be, unless something stands in the way of their natural course toward what is set before them.

9.11| But things that come about by reason also have an end. For nothing among the things that come about by reason comes about at random, but they all have their reference to some aim.

9.12| Things that come about by reason are those that are done by their makers, who reckon about them and arrange how they should come about. In this way come about all things made by the arts, and all things done by choice.

9.13| These differ from things that come about by nature in that natural things have in themselves the beginning and the causes of such coming to be (for such is nature), and come about in a certain order, though nature, which makes them, does not use reasoning about them as the arts do.

9.14| But things that come about by art and choice have the beginning of their motion and the cause that makes them from outside, not in themselves, and the reasoning of the maker about them leads their coming to be.

9.15| A third kind among things that come about for the sake of something is what is believed to come about by chance and by the spontaneous. It differs from things that come about primarily for the sake of something in this: in those, what precedes the end comes about for the end's sake, whereas in these, the things that come about before the end come about for the sake of something else, and what is called the spontaneous and the chance occurrence meets them, as an end, while they are coming about for the sake of something else."

9.16| "This being so, and all things that come about being distributed into these modes, it follows to see among which of the efficient causes fate must be placed.

9.17| Is it among the things that come about for the sake of nothing? Or is that altogether irrational? For we always use the name of fate with reference to some end, saying that a thing came about according to fate; so that it is necessary to place fate among the things that come about for the sake of something."

9.18| Having set out these things in these very words, the man mentioned goes on at greater length to establish that fate is nothing other than what comes about by nature, for the necessity of fate is not to be observed in what is accomplished by our reasoning and by art.

9.19| He says that very many natural processes happen to be obstructed, and these too are named "contrary to nature," as in the arts certain things are said to be "contrary to art." But if any things at all come about contrary to what is according to nature, they would also come about contrary to fate, if indeed these natural things are what is according to fate.

9.20| "We see, for example," he says, "that the body, by being of such and such a nature, in diseases and corruptions follows its natural constitution, though not alike in all cases, nor of necessity. For care, changes of way of life, prescriptions of physicians, and counsels of gods are often enough to drive out such a condition.

9.21| Likewise, with regard to the soul, one may find that, contrary to natural constitution, choices, actions, and ways of life differ in each person, being improved by practice and by lessons and better arguments....

9.22| Indeed, when the physiognomist once said certain strange things about Socrates the philosopher, far removed from his choice of life, and was laughed at for them by Socrates' companions, Socrates said that Zopyrus had not erred at all: for he would have been such, so far as nature goes, if he had not, through the training that philosophy gave, risen above his natural disposition."

9.23| Such, then, are natural events, which he says differ in no way from what is according to fate. "And the things from chance are of this kind: when, for someone who has acted for the sake of something else, this does not occur for which he acted, but something else that was not hoped for at all. For example, he says that a man has found treasure by chance when, digging for some other purpose and not to find treasure, he falls upon a treasure; and they say that someone has received money by chance when, having gone to the market for some other reason, he meets a debtor who has money and receives what is owed; and a horse is said to have been saved spontaneously for some people when, hoping for food or for some other reason, it escapes those holding it, and its flight and running meets with its falling in with its owners.

9.24| Since this is so, these things would not be according to fate either. And there are certain causes unclear to human reasoning, which are believed to arise through certain antipathies, the cause through which they arise being unknown. Such are certain amulets which are supposed to produce effects, though they have no reasonable or plausible cause for producing them; and further incantations and such sorceries. Everyone agrees that the cause of these is unclear; hence they call them causeless.

9.25| Besides these there are many things that come about contingently, and whichever way it happens, and these too would not be according to fate.

9.26| "These are said to come about contingently, in cases where not coming about also has room, as the very phrase 'whichever way it happens' makes clear: for example, moving one of one's own parts, any chance turning of the neck, the stretching out of a finger, the raising of the eyelids, a seated man's standing, a moving man's coming to rest, a talking man's falling silent. In countless cases one would find a certain power present that is receptive of the opposites, and these could not come about from fate; for things from fate do not admit the opposite of what is in them."

9.27| "Moreover, a man's deliberating is not present in him in vain; and he would be deliberative in vain if he did what he does from necessity. But it clearly appears that man alone of living creatures has this from nature in addition, that he does not follow his impressions as they do, but has reason as judge of what befalls him; using it, if the things imagined, when examined, are such as they first appeared and are, he assents to the impression and so pursues them; but if they appear otherwise, he no longer stays with his first conception, once reason has tested them, because he has taken counsel about them."

9.28| "We deliberate, at any rate, only about what we can do; and if we ever act without deliberating, we frequently regret it and blame ourselves for lacking counsel; and if we see others acting thoughtlessly, we reproach them as erring, and we think it right that they should use advisers, as though such matters were up to us."

9.29| That their doctrine of fate was false, there is sufficient proof in the fact that even its own champions cannot be persuaded by what they say. For they profess to exhort and teach, they advise others to learn and be educated, and they rebuke and chastise those who do not do what is fitting, as sinning by their own choice.

9.30| They also leave behind very many writings by which they think the young should be educated. They would have given up their ambition in their discourses if they had taken notice that they themselves deem those who err unwillingly worthy of pardon, and those who offend willingly worthy of punishment, evidently as though both sinning and not sinning were up to them.

9.31| So even by their own account the necessity from fate is done away with, and it stands proved that free will belongs to us by nature; along with this, many things are not up to us, such as natural events and those from chance, which are themselves other than the rule of fate, as has been shown above.

9.32| I have cut these passages short from a great many, because the discussion of free will is large among our own doctrines; to this the quoted voices of the philosophers have run together, bearing witness to our divine writings, and refuting as false the opinions on fate held not only by the many but even by the wonderful oracle-giving gods; some were aimed at the noble oracles with more of a Cynic's bite, others were spoken against the admired philosophers by their own acquaintances. It is time also to examine the arguments of those who, from astrology, address themselves to the Chaldaizers, the professors of this ill-contrived sorcery as a branch of learning. I shall set before you the demonstrations against these too, from a Syrian by birth, who reached the summit of Chaldean science. His name is Bardesanes, who is recorded to have said somewhere in his dialogues with his companions:

10.1| "By nature man is born, comes to his prime, begets, eats, drinks, sleeps, grows old, and dies; this holds for every man and every irrational animal.

10.2| The other animals, being creatures of soul and made wholly by combination, are carried along almost entirely by nature. A lion eats flesh and defends itself when wronged, and therefore all lions eat flesh and defend themselves; and ewe-lambs eat grass and do not touch meat, and when wronged do not defend themselves; and the same is true of every ewe-lamb.

10.3| A scorpion eats earth and wrongs those who have not wronged it, striking with its poisonous sting; and the same malice belongs to all scorpions. An ant by nature knows the coming of winter, and, laboring through the whole summer, lays away provisions for itself; and all ants work likewise.

10.4| A bee makes honey, on which it also feeds; and the same labor belongs to all bees. We could set out many kinds of animals which, unable to depart from their nature, might cause you great astonishment,

10.5| but I thought it enough to give the proof from what lies before us: that the other animals, in what is common and in the difference given to each by nature, are carried along willingly by necessity, whereas men alone, having the choice possession of mind and the reason that issues from it, follow nature in what is common, as I said before, but in what is peculiar to them do not live according to nature.

10.6| For the food of all is not one; some men are fed like lions, others like ewe-lambs, not having one fashion of dress, not one custom, not one law of government among them, not one movement of desire for things; rather each man picks out a way of living for himself as his own will directs, not imitating his neighbor, except in what he wishes.

10.7| For his freedom is not subject to slavery, and if he ever serves willingly, this too belongs to his freedom, to be able to serve willingly.

10.8| How many men, especially among the Alans, like wild animals eat flesh and do not taste bread, and not because they lack it but because they do not wish it? Others do not taste flesh, like tame animals; others eat only fish; others do not taste fish even if they are starving. Some drink water, some wine, some strong drink.

10.9| And in short there is great difference of foods and drinks in mankind, extending even to the eating of vegetables and fruits. Further, some, like scorpions and asps, wrong those who have not wronged them; others, like irrational animals, defend themselves when wronged; others, like wolves, plunder, and like weasels, steal; others, like ewes and goats, are harried by their fellow men and do not wrong those who wrong them; and some are called good, others bad, others just.

10.10| From this it can be understood that man is not led wholly by nature; for what nature of his shall we name? Rather he is carried along partly by nature, partly by choice. Hence praise, blame, and condemnation belong to what is by choice, while in what is by nature there is freedom from accusation, not out of pity but by reason."

10.11| And next he says: "Men have established different laws in each land, some written, others unwritten; from these I shall relate what I know and recall, starting at the origin of the world.

10.12| Among the Seres it is law not to kill, not to commit fornication, not to steal, not to worship idols, and in that very large country one cannot see a temple, a woman who is a prostitute, a woman called an adulteress, a thief dragged to trial, a murderer, or a murdered man.

10.13| For the star of fiery Ares in mid-heaven has compelled nobody's free will to slay a man with the sword; nor has Aphrodite, meeting Ares, compelled anyone among them to lie with another man's wife, though Ares stands in mid-heaven on every day, and Seres are born at every hour and day.

10.14| Many thousands of those called Brahmans are found among the Indians and Bactrians, who by tradition of their ancestors and laws neither kill nor worship idols, taste nothing that has life, never get drunk, not tasting wine or strong drink, and have no share in any wickedness, giving their attention to God; while the other Indians kill, consort with prostitutes, get drunk, worship idols, and are carried along almost entirely according to fate.

10.15| In the same region of India there is a tribe of Indians who catch strangers who fall into their hands, sacrifice them, and eat them; and neither have the beneficent stars prevented these from murder and unlawful unions, nor have the maleficent forced the Brahmans to do evil.

10.16| Among the Persians it was the law to marry daughters, sisters, and mothers, and not only in that country and that region did the Persians make these unholy marriages, but also all those of them who emigrated from Persia, who are called Magusaeans, commit the same lawlessness, passing down the same customs and laws to their children in succession.

10.17| Of these there are many to this day in Media, Egypt, Phrygia, and Galatia. And surely Aphrodite was not found, in the confines and house of Cronus, with Ares accompanying Cronus, in the birth of all of them.

10.18| Among the Gelae it is the law that the women farm, build, and do all the work, and that they take up with whomever they please without being accused by their men; no woman is called an adulteress, since all of them are workers and associate with everyone, especially with strangers.

10.19| Gelan women wear no perfume and no dyed garments, and all of them go barefoot, although the Gelan men adorn themselves in soft clothing of varied colors, wear gold, and use perfume, and not out of any other softness, for they are brave, most warlike, and most devoted to hunting.

10.20| Yet not all the women of the Gelae can have drawn Cypris in an unlucky position in Capricorn or Aquarius, nor do all their men have the Paphian goddess in Aries together with Ares, where the Chaldaizers say brave and extravagant men are born.

10.21| Among the Bactrians the women use every distinguished adornment and every perfume, are attended by girls and young men more than their husbands are, and go out with great display on horseback, decking their horses with abundant gold and costly stones. They are not chaste, but consort indiscriminately with slaves and strangers, having such license; and since they are not accused by their husbands, they all but rule them.

10.22| Yet it cannot be that in every nativity of Bactrian women laughter-loving Aphrodite stands at mid-heaven with Zeus and Ares in her own terms. In Arabia and Osroene, on the other hand, adulteresses are not only put to death, but even women who are merely suspected do not go unpunished.

10.23| Among Parthians and Armenians those who commit murder are put to death, at times by the judges and at times by the blood relatives of the slain. And if a man kills his wife, or his childless brother, or his unmarried sister, or his son, or his daughter, no one accuses him, since such is the law in those countries; among the Greeks and Romans, by contrast, those who kill their kin are subject to a greater penalty.

10.24| In Atra a man who steals something worth an obol is stoned; with the Bactrians a man who steals small things is spat on; among the Romans he is beaten with blows. Such are the laws.

10.25| From the river Euphrates all the way to the Ocean, in the direction of the east, a man insulted as a murderer or thief is not greatly angered, but one insulted as a pederast avenges himself even to the point of murder; among the Greeks, however, even the wise are not blamed for having young lovers.

10.26| In that same East, men who suffer such abuse are killed by their brothers, fathers, or relatives if it becomes known, and are not even thought worthy of an open burial.

10.27| Among the Gauls, however, young men are married openly, not regarding this as a disgrace because of the law among them. And it cannot be that all the people in Gaul who are so godlessly abused had the Morning Star setting with Hermes in the houses of Cronus and the terms of Ares at their births.

10.28| In Britain many men have one wife; in Parthia many women have one husband, and all of them are chaste, obeying him according to the law.

10.29| The Amazons all have no husbands, but like the irrational animals, once a year, around the spring equinox, they cross their own borders and consort with their neighbors, who regard this as a kind of festival. They conceive by them and return, and by necessity they all become pregnant at one season, according to the law of nature; the male children they expose, but the females they rear. They are warlike and attentive to physical training.

10.30| Hermes with Aphrodite in the houses of Hermes makes sculptors, painters, and bankers; in the houses of Aphrodite, perfumers, or singers and reciters of poetry.

10.31| Yet among the Taeni and the Saracens, in upper Libya, among the Moors and the Nomads at the Ocean's mouth, in outer Germany and upper Sarmatia, in Scythia, among all the nations in the northern parts of the Pontus, and in the whole of Alania, Albania, Otene, Saunia, and Chrysa, one cannot see a banker, a sculptor, a painter, an architect, a geometer, a singer, or a reciter of poetry; the whole manner of activity belonging to Hermes and Aphrodite is lacking in this entire circle of the inhabited world.

10.32| The Medes all throw their dead, still breathing, to dogs that are carefully raised for the purpose; and it is not the case that all of them have Ares under the earth with the moon, in Cancer, at a daytime birth.

10.33| The Indians burn their dead, and together with them they burn their wives, who go willingly; and surely it is not the case that all the Indian women who are burned alive have, at a night birth, the sun under the earth together with Ares in Leo, in the terms of Ares.

10.34| Most Germans die by hanging, and the multitude of the Germans certainly do not all have the moon and the horoscope between Cronus and Ares.

10.35| Human beings are born in every nation, on every day, and in every manner of nativity; yet in each portion of mankind law and custom prevail, because of man's free will. Nativity does not compel the Seres to kill unwillingly, or the Brahmans to feed on meat, or the Persians to refrain from marrying unlawfully, or the Indians to avoid being burned, or the Medes to avoid being devoured by dogs, or the Parthians to avoid having many wives, or the women of Mesopotamia to avoid chastity, or the Greeks to avoid exercising with naked bodies, or the Romans to avoid ruling, or the Gauls to avoid being married, or the other barbarian nations to avoid sharing in what the Greeks call the Muses. But, as I said earlier, each nation and each man makes use of his own freedom as he wishes and when he wishes, and is a slave to nativity and to the nature of the flesh he wears, in one respect as he wishes, in another not as he wishes.

10.36| For everywhere and in every nation rich and poor exist, rulers and subjects, healthy and sick, each according to the lots of his own nativity." "These things, Bardesanes, have fully convinced us," I said to him. "But the astronomers say this earth is divided into seven climates, and that each climate is ruled by one of the seven stars; and that it is not men who have established their different laws for themselves, but that in each ruler's own country his will prevails, and the law is what those under his power have adopted."

10.37| He answered, "This distinction is not true, Philip. For even if the inhabited world is divided into seven parts, still we find many differences of law within a single part. Nor are there seven laws in accord with the seven stars, nor twelve in accord with the zodiacal figures, nor thirty-six in accord with the decans; there are countless ones.

10.38| You should also remember what I said earlier, that within one climate and one country of the Indians there are Indians who eat men and others who abstain from anything that has life; and that the Magians do not marry their daughters only in Persia, but in every nation wherever they settle, keeping the laws of their ancestors and the rites of their mysteries.

10.39| But we have also listed many barbarian nations, to the south, the west, the east and the north, that is, in various climates, which have no share in Hermetic science.

10.40| How many wise men, do you suppose, have set aside badly established laws? How many laws have been abolished because they proved unworkable? How many kings, after conquering nations, have set aside the laws that preceded them and established their own? And not one of the stars has lost its own climate.

10.41| Only yesterday the Romans, after conquering Arabia, altered the barbarians' laws. For free will follows upon free will, and I will set before you something capable of persuading even unbelievers.

10.42| All the Jews who received the law through Moses cut and circumcise the male children born to them on the eighth day, with no waiting for any star to arrive, not heeding the power of any climate, not led by the law of an alien land; but whether they happen to be in Syria, in Gaul, in Italy, in Greece, or in Parthia, or wherever they are, they do this.

10.43| This cannot be a matter of nativity, for all the Jews cannot have one nativity. Moreover, every seventh day, wherever they are, they all rest from every work; they neither travel nor use fire; nor does nativity compel a Jew not to build a house, not to pull one down, not to work, not to sell, not to buy on the days of the sabbath, even though on that very same day Jews are being born, are giving birth, are falling sick, and are dying.

10.44| For these things are no longer matters of free will. In Syria and in Osroene many used to castrate themselves in honor of Rhea; and at one stroke King Abgar ordered that the hands, along with the genitals, of those who castrated themselves be cut off, and from then on no one castrated himself in Osroene.

10.45| And what shall we say of the sect of the Christians, to which we belong, who are many in number and have arisen in different climates, in every nation and region, and who, though many, are called by a single name?

10.46| The Christians in Parthia do not practice polygamy, though they are Parthians; those in Media do not give their dead to dogs; those in Persia, though they are Persians, do not marry their daughters; among the Bactrians and the Gelae they do not corrupt marriage; those in Egypt do not worship Apis, or the dog, or the goat, or the cat. Wherever they may be, they are neither overcome by badly established laws and customs, nor does the nativity governed by the rulers compel them to practice the evils forbidden by their teacher; yet they are subject to disease, poverty, sufferings, and what are held to be dishonors.

10.47| For just as our free man is not compelled to serve, and if he is compelled resists those who compel him, so too our man who appears to be a slave cannot easily escape subjection.

10.48| For if we could do everything, we would be the whole; and if we could do nothing, we would be, as I said before, the instruments of others, and not our own. But when God gives assent, all things are possible and unhindered, for nothing can stand against his will. Even the things that seem to resist do so because he himself is good and permits each nature to keep its own character and the free choice of its will."

10.49| So much from the Syrian. But I will close the discussion after mentioning one thing more. Since what comes from outside writings has been set out sufficiently, and what comes from the sacred writings is still lacking, which we need most of all for the Preparation for the Demonstration of the Gospel, it would be well to survey the following as well, so that the discussion may fall short in nothing that bears on the question.

10.50| Hence I shall make these matters plain to you as well. Yet you would not be able to understand the sacred oracles in their bare form, since for the most part they are set forth in obscurity. Therefore I shall bring forward to you their interpreter; and you, unless you begrudge your betters, surely know the man, who even to this day dances in the choruses of Christ through the labors he has left behind, and who is not unknown even to outsiders because of the zeal he has shown for their studies as well. Consider, then, how many and what kind of things the admirable Origen set down on the proposed subject in his commentaries on Genesis, and in what way he worked out the discussion of fate.

11.1| "On the point that the luminaries were made for signs, being nothing other than the sun, moon and stars, it is among the most necessary matters to give a thorough account. For not only are nations foreign to faith in Christ led astray on the topic of fate, supposing that everything on earth and everything concerning each human being, and perhaps even irrational animals, comes about through the interweaving of the wandering stars, so called, with those of the zodiac; but many too of those who are supposed to have believed are distracted by the question whether human affairs are compelled and cannot possibly turn out otherwise than as the stars accomplish them in their various configurations.

11.2| For those who lay down this doctrine, it follows that what depends on us is wholly abolished, and with it praise and blame, and actions that are approved and, again, actions that are censured.

11.3| If this is so, then the proclaimed judgment of God is gone, and the threats against sinners that they will be punished, and likewise the honors and blessedness for those who have given themselves to better things; for none of these will reasonably take place any longer.

11.4| And if someone considered for himself the consequences of what he asserts, faith would also be in vain, and the coming of Christ would accomplish nothing, as would the whole dispensation through the law and the prophets, and the labors of the apostles to found the churches of God through Christ;

11.5| unless, indeed, according to those who dare to speak this way, Christ too, having taken birth under the necessity of the movement of the stars, did and suffered all things not because God and Father of the universe granted him his marvelous powers, but because the stars did. Upon these godless and impious arguments there follows also the claim that believers, being led by the stars, are said to believe in God.

11.6| We might ask them what God intended when he made such a world, in which some who are men suffer what women suffer, though they are in no way themselves responsible for their licentiousness, while others, taking on the condition of wild beasts, because the revolution of the universe has made them so (for God, they say, so ordered the whole), give themselves over to the cruelest and most inhuman deeds, murders and piracies?

11.7| And why need we speak of the countless things that happen among men and the sins they commit, men whom the champions of these arguments acquit of every charge, while ascribing to God the cause of everything done badly and blamably?"

11.8| "But if some of them, by way of defending God, say that the good God is a different one, who is the source of none of these things, and attach such things to the Maker of all, then first, even so they will not be able to demonstrate what they want, namely that he is just. For how could the father of so many evils, on their view, reasonably be called just?

11.9| Second, we must examine what they will say about themselves: whether they are subject to the revolution of the stars, or have been set free, and in their lives have nothing exerted on them from that quarter. For if they say they are subject to the stars, then plainly the stars granted them the thought of this, and the Maker, through the motion of the universe, will have prompted the doctrine of the God they have invented above him, which is what they do not want.

11.10| But if they answer that they are outside the laws the Maker has set by means of the stars, then, so that what they say may not be a bare assertion without proof, let them try to bring us to it with more compelling force, by setting out the difference between a mind that is subject to nativity and fate and another that is free of these. For it is clear that, if they are asked for an account, such people will in no way be able to give one.

11.11| Besides what has been said, prayers too are taken up to no purpose and are superfluous. For if it is compelled that certain things happen, and the stars bring them about, and nothing can come about apart from their interweaving with one another, then we ask God, unreasonably, to give us one thing or another.

11.12| And why need I draw out the discussion further, to show the impiety of the topic of fate, so unexamined and so well worn among the many? What has been said is enough for an outline."

11.13| "Let us remind ourselves how we came to these matters in examining the words 'let them be for signs, the luminaries.' People who learn true things about some matters either become eyewitnesses of the events, and so declare them soundly, having seen the suffering and the action of those who suffered or acted; or they hear from people who are in no way responsible for what happened, and so know these things.

11.14| (Let us set aside for the present the point that those who have acted or suffered, by narrating what they did or suffered, can bring someone who was not present to a knowledge of what was done.)

11.15| If, then, the person taught by someone who is in no respect the cause of what happens that such things have happened to certain people or will happen does not distinguish that the one who teaches about something as having happened or being about to happen is not at all necessarily the cause of the thing being of such a kind, he will suppose that the one who established that these things have happened or will happen has done or will do the things he teaches about, and he will obviously be mistaken.

11.16| It is as if someone, coming upon a prophetic book that foretells the things about Judas the betrayer, having learned what would happen and seeing it come to pass, should think that the book was the cause of its later happening, because from the book he had learned what Judas would later do; or else should suppose the cause to be not the book but the one who first wrote it, or, let us say, God who brought it about.

11.17| But just as, in the case of what is prophesied about Judas, the very words, once examined, show that God was not the maker of Judas' betrayal, but only made known, having foreknown, what would be done out of Judas' wickedness through his own responsibility,

11.18| so, if someone went deeply into the account of God's foreknowing everything and the persons in whom he has, as it were, stamped the patterns of his own foreknowledge, he would perceive that neither is the one who foreknows by any means the cause of what is foreknown, nor are the things that have received the patterns of the foreknower's foreknowledge."

11.19| "That God knows long beforehand that each thing to come will happen is clear, even apart from scripture, directly from the conception we have of God, to anyone who understands the dignity of the power of God's mind.

11.20| But if this must also be established from the scriptures, the prophecies are full of such examples, as is the story of Susanna, which shows God knowing all things before they come into being, when she says: 'Eternal God, who knows what is hidden, who knows all things before they come to be, you know that these men have borne false witness against me.'

11.21| Most clearly, in the third book of Kingdoms, both the name of a king and his deeds were written down, prophesied many years before they took place, as follows: 'And Jeroboam kept a festival in the eighth month, on the fifteenth of the month, like the feast in the land of Judah. Then he went up to the altar at Bethel, which he had made, with the heifers which he had made.' Then, a little later: 'And behold, a man of God came from Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel, and Jeroboam was standing at his altar to sacrifice. And he called out upon the altar through the word of the Lord, saying, Altar, altar, thus says the Lord: Behold, a son is born to the house of David, Josiah his name, and he will sacrifice upon you the priests of the high places who sacrifice upon you, and will burn men's bones upon you. And he gave a sign on that day, saying, This is the sign that the Lord has spoken: Behold, the altar is split, and the fat that is on it will be poured out.' And a little later it is made clear that the altar was indeed split and the fat poured out from the altar, in keeping with the sign the man gave by the word of the Lord.

11.22| And in Isaiah, who lived long before the captivity in Babylon, after which captivity Cyrus king of the Persians later came and helped in the building of the temple, which took place in the times of Ezra, these things are prophesied about him by name: 'Thus says the Lord God to my anointed Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, that nations may obey before him; and I will tear apart the might of kings, I will open doors in front of him, and cities will not be closed. I will go before you and level the mountains, I will break bronze doors in pieces and shatter iron bars; and I will give you dark treasures, I will open hidden, unseen ones to you, so that you may know that I am the Lord God, who calls your name, the God of Israel. For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I will call you by my name and receive you.'

11.23| For it is clearly shown from these words as well that, on account of the people he had benefited, the Lord God gave Cyrus, though he did not know the Hebrews' worship of God, the gift of ruling over many nations. One can also learn these things from the Greek writers who recorded the story of the prophesied Cyrus.

11.24| Moreover in Daniel, while Babylonians were then reigning, the kingdoms that would come after him are shown to Nebuchadnezzar. They are shown through the statue, in which the Babylonian empire is named gold, the Persian silver, the Macedonian bronze, and the Roman iron.

11.25| And again, in the same prophet, the events about Darius and Alexander, and the four who succeeded Alexander, king of the Macedonians, and Ptolemy who ruled Egypt, surnamed Lagus, are prophesied thus: 'And behold, a he-goat from the goats was coming from the west across the face of all the earth. And the he-goat had a horn between its eyes. And it came up to the ram possessing the horns, which I saw standing before Ubal, and ran at it in its strength. And I saw it reach the ram, and it was enraged against it and struck the ram and broke both its horns, and the ram had no strength to stand before it, and it threw it to the ground and trampled it, and there was none to rescue the ram from its hand. And the he-goat grew exceedingly great. And when it was strong its great horn was broken, and other horns came up beneath it toward the four winds of heaven, and from one of them there came forth one strong horn, and it grew exceedingly great toward the south and the west.'

11.26| And why need I mention the prophecies about Christ, such as Bethlehem as the place where he was born, Nazareth as the place where he was brought up, and the withdrawal into Egypt, and the wonders he performed, and the manner of his betrayal by Judas, who had been called as an apostle? All these things are signs of God's foreknowledge.

11.27| But the Savior himself says as well: 'When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has drawn near.' For he foretold what later happened, the end of the razing of Jerusalem."

11.28| "Now that we have demonstrated, not out of season, that God is foreknowing, so that we may explain how the stars come to be for signs, we must understand that the stars have been ordered to move in this way, the so-called wandering ones running counter to the fixed ones, so that those who receive signs from the configuration of the stars might know everything that happens to each person and in general. It is not human beings who do so (for it is far beyond what is human to be able to take in truthfully from the motion of the stars the circumstances of each person, whatever they may be doing or suffering), but the powers, which for many reasons must have this knowledge, as we shall demonstrate as far as we are able in what follows.

11.29| People, having understood from certain observations, or even from the instruction of angels who had overstepped their own order, who, to the ruin of our race, taught some of these things, supposed that those from whom they think they receive the signs are the causes of what the account says they signify. About these things, too, we shall presently treat more carefully, in summary, as best we can.

11.30| Let the following problems therefore be set before us. First: how, since God has foreknown from eternity what each is thought to do, what depends on us is preserved. Second: in what way the stars are not producers of what happens among men, but only signifiers. Third: that human beings cannot have exact knowledge of these things, but the signs are set forth for powers superior to men. Fourth: what the reason is that God made the signs for the knowledge of the powers; this will be examined last.

11.31| Let us then look at the first point. Many of the Greeks, wary of it and supposing that things are compelled and that what depends on us is in no way preserved if God foreknows the future, ventured to accept an impious doctrine rather than admit what they say is a glorious view about God, but one which abolishes what depends on us, and with it praise and blame, and the approval of virtues and the censure of vices.

11.32| They argue: if God from eternity knew that so-and-so would commit injustice and do these unjust acts, and God's knowledge does not deceive, then the man foreseen as one who will do these unjust acts will certainly be unjust, and it is impossible for him not to commit injustice; and if he cannot avoid committing injustice, his committing injustice is compelled, and it will be impossible for him to do anything other than what God knew. But if he cannot do otherwise, and no one is blameworthy for failing to do what is impossible, then we accuse the unjust in vain.

11.33| From the unjust man and his unjust acts they proceed to other sins, and then, by the opposite reasoning, to what are thought to be right actions; and they say that it follows from God's foreknowing the future that what depends on us cannot be preserved.

11.34| To them one must say that God, applying himself to the beginning of the making of the world, with nothing coming about without a cause, goes through in his mind each of the things that will be, seeing that since this has happened, this follows; and if this follows, then that comes after it; and when that has come to be, this will be; and so, going through the course of events to their end, he knows what will be, without being at all the cause of each thing known that it should happen.

11.35| For just as, if someone sees a man who is rash through ignorance, and who through his rashness steps heedlessly onto a slippery road, and perceives that he is going to slip and fall, he does not thereby become the cause of the slip for that man, so we must understand that God, foreseeing what each person will be, sees also the causes of his becoming such, and that he will sin in this way or act rightly in that.

11.36| And if we must say that foreknowledge is not the cause of what happens (for God does not touch the one foreknown to sin when he sins), we shall say what is more paradoxical but true: it is the thing that will be that is the cause of the foreknowledge of it being such as it is.

11.37| For it does not happen because it is known; it is known because it was going to happen. But a distinction is needed. If someone interprets 'it will certainly be' to mean that what is foreknown is necessarily bound to happen, we do not grant him that. For we shall not say that, because Judas was foreknown as destined to become a betrayer, it was altogether necessary that Judas become a betrayer.

11.38| In the prophecies about Judas, at any rate, reproaches and accusations against him are written down, showing to everyone his blameworthiness. But no blame would have been attached to him if he had been a betrayer by compulsion and had not been able to become like the other apostles.

11.39| See whether this is not made clear by the words we shall set down, which read as follows: 'Nor let there be anyone to pity his orphans, because he did not remember to show mercy, but persecuted a poor and needy man, one broken in heart, to put him to death; and he loved cursing, and it will come upon him, and he did not desire blessing, and it will be far from him.'"

11.40| "But if someone explains 'it will certainly be' as meaning that it signifies that such-and-such will be, though it might have happened otherwise, we grant this as true. For it is not possible for God to be false, but it is possible, regarding things that can either come about or not, for him to have in mind that they happen and that they do not happen.

11.41| We shall put this more clearly as follows. If Judas can be an apostle like Peter, God can conceive of Judas that he will remain an apostle like Peter; if Judas can become a betrayer, God can conceive of him that he will be a betrayer.

11.42| But if Judas will be a betrayer, then God, in his foreknowledge of the two aforesaid possibilities, with it being possible for one of them to be, foreknowing the truth, will foreknow that Judas becomes a betrayer; yet the matter about which the knowledge is held may also come about otherwise. And God's knowledge would say: this man can do this, and also the opposite; and since both are possible, I know that he will do this.

11.43| For God would not say, concerning some oracle he gives about a man, 'this man cannot be temperate,' in the way he would say 'this man cannot fly.' For there is no power at all in a human being to fly, but there is a power to be temperate and a power to be self-indulgent.

11.44| Since both of these powers exist, the one who pays no attention to words of exhortation and instruction surrenders himself to the worse; but the one who has sought the truth and has wished to live according to it surrenders to the better. The one does not seek the truth, since he inclines toward pleasure; the other examines these things, won over by the common notions and by words of exhortation.

11.45| Again, one chooses pleasure not because he is unable to look it in the face, but because he does not struggle; the other despises it, seeing the ugliness that is so often found in it.

11.46| That God's foreknowledge, moreover, imposes no necessity on those it has comprehended, besides what has been said, this too will be said: God commands the prophets, in many places of the scriptures, to proclaim repentance, without pretending to have known whether those who hear will turn back or remain in their sins. So it is said in Jeremiah: 'Perhaps they will hear and repent.'

11.47| God does not say 'perhaps they will hear and repent' because he is ignorant whether they will hear or not, but as showing, by what is said, that the powers are, as it were, evenly balanced, so that his foreknowledge, if announced in advance, might not cast down the hearers by presenting an appearance of necessity, as though turning back were not in their power, and might not itself become, as it were, a cause of their sins.

11.48| Or again, for those who could live in virtue by struggling against vice, through not knowing the good that has been foreknown, foreknowledge would become a cause of slackness, since they would no longer stand firmly against sin, as though what had been foretold were certain to come to be. In this way too the foreknowledge of a future good would become a sort of hindrance.

11.49| At any rate, God, who orders everything in the world to our benefit, has reasonably blinded us to the future. For knowledge of it would have released us from contending against vice, and, once it seemed to be in our grasp, it would have allowed us, by not wrestling against sin, to fall more quickly into its power.

11.50| At the same time, the knowledge that foreknowledge has come to bear on a certain person, that he will certainly be good, would be at odds with that person's becoming noble and good. Indeed, in addition to what we have, there is need of greater intensity and exertion for becoming noble and good; but knowledge taken in advance that one will certainly be noble and good would slacken the training. For this reason it is to our advantage that we do not know whether we shall be good or wicked."

11.51| "Since we have said that God has blinded us to the future, see whether we can thus clarify a text sought from Exodus: 'Who has made the hard of hearing and the deaf, the seeing and the blind? Is it not I, the Lord God?' The idea is that he has made the same person both blind and seeing: seeing with regard to what is present, blind with regard to what is to come. As for the matter of the hard of hearing and the deaf, this is not the time to explain it.

11.52| We too shall agree, however, that of many of the things that depend on us the causes are very many things that do not depend on us; if these, I mean the things not in our power, had not occurred, certain things that depend on us would not be done. But certain things that depend on us are done as consequences of these antecedents that do not depend on us, while it remains possible, given the same antecedents, to do other things than what we do.

11.53| If someone seeks what depends on us to be released from the whole, so that we do not choose this or that because of things that have befallen us, he has forgotten that he is part of the world and is contained in the fellowship of human beings and of that which surrounds him.

11.54| I think it has been moderately shown, in summary, that God's foreknowledge is not at all necessarily compelling of what is foreknown. Come now, let us argue also that the stars are in no way producers of what happens among men, but only signifiers.

11.55| It is clear that, if a certain configuration of the stars were thought to be the producer of certain things that happen to a person (let us suppose that this is now what the discussion is seeking), the configuration occurring today, say, around one person could not be understood to have produced what is past around another or others; for everything that produces is older than what is produced.

11.56| Yet as far as the doctrines of those who profess such things go, events older than the configuration are thought to be foretold about human beings.

11.57| For they profess, in the following way, that when they have taken the hour of a given person's birth they can grasp where each of the wandering stars stands in relation to the vertical, either in this degree of the zodiacal sign or in the minutes within it, and which zodiacal star was on the eastern horizon, which on the western, which at mid-heaven, and which at the opposite point of mid-heaven.

11.58| And once they have set out the stars, as they believe they have worked out their configuration for themselves, arranged in such a way at the time of the birth of so-and-so, at the time of delivery of the person under examination, they inquire not only about the future but also about the past, and about what happened before the birth and the conception of the person in question: about the father, what sort of man he is, poor or rich, maimed or whole in body, better or worse in character, propertyless or wealthy, engaged in this occupation or that. The same they do about the mother and about older brothers, if there happen to be any.

11.59| For the present let us allow them to grasp what is true on this head, about which we shall show later that it is not so. Let us ask, then, those who suppose that human affairs are compelled by the stars, in what way a configuration of this kind occurring today can have produced things that are earlier.

11.60| For if this is impossible, then, whatever truth is found about events earlier in time, it is plain that the stars, moving thus in heaven, did not produce the things that are past and happened before they were in this arrangement. And if this is so, perhaps the person who admits that they speak truly, having considered what is said about the future, will say that they speak truly not because the stars produce but only because they signify.

11.61| But if someone claims that the stars do not produce the past, that other configurations were the causes of their coming to be, and that the present configuration has only signified them, while the future is disclosed from the present configuration of the birth of so-and-so, let him set out the difference by which it is possible to show from the stars that some things are known truly as from producers, and others as from mere signifiers.

11.62| Since they cannot give the difference, they will candidly agree that nothing among human beings comes about from the stars; rather, as we said before, if anything, is signified; just as if one took the past and future not from the stars but from God's mind, by way of some prophetic word.

11.63| For just as we showed earlier that God's knowing what each person will do does no harm to the doctrine of what depends on us, so the signs which God appointed to signify do not hinder what depends on us; rather, like a book containing the future prophetically, the whole heaven, being as it were God's book, can contain what is to come.

11.64| Therefore in the Prayer of Joseph what Jacob says can be understood this way: 'For I read on the tablets of heaven all that will happen to you and to your sons.' And perhaps the phrase 'heaven will be rolled up like a scroll' shows that the words it contains, signifying what is to come, will be completed and, so to speak, fulfilled, in the way that prophecies are said to be fulfilled when they come to pass.

11.65| And thus the stars will have come to be for signs, in accordance with the voice which says, 'Let them be for signs.' And Jeremiah, turning us back to ourselves and removing the fear of what is thought to be signified, and perhaps supposed to come from there, says: 'Do not be afraid of the signs of heaven.'"

11.66| "Let us see also a second argument, for how the stars cannot be producers but, if anything, signifiers. For one can take the facts about a single person from a great many nativities (we say this by hypothesis, granting that knowledge of them can be acquired by human beings). Let us suppose, for example, that it is said that the fact that so-and-so will suffer this and die, falling among robbers and being killed, can be taken from his own nativity, and if he happens to have several brothers, from that of each of them.

11.67| They suppose that each person's nativity contains the brother who will be killed by robbers, and likewise those of the father and mother and wife and sons and household and dearest friends, and perhaps even of the killers themselves.

11.68| How, then, is it possible, even granting them this, that the man contained in so many nativities should come about from the arrangement of the stars at this nativity instead of at those? For it is implausible to say that the configuration in the nativity of this particular man produced these things, while that in the nativity of the others did not produce them but only signified them.

11.69| It is foolish to say that the nativity of all of them in each case contained a producer of this man's death, so that fifty nativities, say, would contain the killing of one and the same man. And I do not know how they will be able to preserve this: that for nearly all in Judea the configuration at birth is such that they receive circumcision on the eighth day, being maimed and wounded and subject to inflammation and injuries, and needing doctors from the moment of entry into life; while for those among the Ishmaelites in Arabia it is such that all are circumcised at thirteen. For this is recorded about them.

11.70| And again, that for certain of the Ethiopians the kneecaps are removed, and for the Amazons one of the breasts. How do the stars do these things to these nations? I think that if we examined the matter, we could not say anything true about them even so far as to settle the question.

11.71| With so many prognostic ways being practiced, I do not know how people have run aground on saying that augury and divination by sacrifice, and star-gazing, do not contain the producing cause but only signify, and yet do not say this of the casting of nativities.

11.72| For if it is recognized (granting that it is known), and what happens arises from the very place from which the knowledge is drawn, why should events come from the stars rather than from birds, and from birds rather than from the entrails of sacrificial victims? And why rather from the entrails of victims than from shooting stars? These points will suffice for the present to refute the claim that the stars are producers of human affairs."

11.73| "Let us now examine whether it is true, what we conceded (for it did not harm the argument), that human beings can grasp the heavenly configurations, the signs, and the things of which they are signs.

11.74| Those who are clever in these matters say that anyone who is to grasp truly what concerns the casting of nativities needs to know not only in which twelfth-part, that is, which sign, the so-called star is, but also in which degree of the sign and in which sixtieth, and the more exact say in which sixtieth of the sixtieth; and they say this must be done for each of the wandering stars, examining its relation to the fixed ones.

11.75| Again, at the eastern horizon, they say, one must see not only which sign was upon it, but also the degree and the sixtieth of the degree, the first or the second sixtieth.

11.76| How, then, when the hour in broad terms comprises half of a sign, can anyone obtain the sixtieth without having the proportion of the division of the hours, so as, let us say, to know that so-and-so was born in the fourth hour and half, and a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, and a thirty-second of an hour?

11.77| For they say that what is signified varies enormously through ignorance not only of the whole hour but even of a fraction of it. In the case of twins, for example, the interval between their births is often a mere instant of an hour, and many differences in what befalls them and in what they do occur, as those people say, owing to the cause of the relation of the stars and the part of the sign at the horizon, which is not detected by the people who are thought to have observed the hour.

11.78| For no one can say that the interval between this man's birth and that man's is a thirtieth of an hour. But let this be granted them as regards determining the hour. There is a theorem in circulation showing that the zodiacal circle, like the wandering stars, advances from the west toward the east by one degree every hundred years, and that over a long time this changes the position of the signs, the intelligible sign being one thing and the visible figure another. And they say that the effects are found not from the figure but from the intelligible sign, which can hardly be grasped at all.

11.79| Let this too be granted, that the intelligible sign can be grasped, or that the truth can be taken from the visible sign; yet even they will admit that what they call the blending of what lies in these configurations cannot be preserved throughout: for example, that what is signified by a worse star is dimmed by this one because it is regarded by a certain better star, and dimmed to such and such a degree. And often, again, the dimming of the worse by the aspect of the better is prevented, because another star has been configured in a certain way and signifies worse things.

11.80| And I think that anyone who considers these matters will despair of comprehending them, since they are not at all open to human beings but, if anything, reach only as far as being signified.

11.81| If someone has had experience of the facts, he will recognize more the failure in guesswork of those who speak, and of the very authors of the treatises, than the supposed success. And Isaiah, too, on the ground that these things cannot be found out by human beings, speaks to the daughter of the Chaldeans, those who profess this beyond all others: 'Let them stand now and save you, the astrologers of heaven; let them announce to you what is going to come upon you.' For through these words we are taught that even those who are most eager to learn these things cannot foretell what the Lord has willed to bring upon each nation."

11.82| So much, then, from the man I have named. But this whole discussion of ours comes down to two chief points: first, that the beings accepted in city after city as givers of oracles are not gods; and second, that they are not good daemons either, but on the contrary sorcerers of a sort, deceivers and cheats, who have cast their delusion over mankind, about fate as about everything else, for the ruin and perversion of true piety.

11.83| Since no one in all the ages except Jesus our Savior has ransomed the whole race of men from that delusion, it was right that at the very beginning of the Preparation for the Gospel we should give serious attention to all the matters now before us. In this way we learn from the facts themselves from what ancestors we sprang and in what kind of deception they were formerly held fast; and from what depth and from how great a blindness and godlessness both we ourselves and the whole life of mankind have lifted our heads, finding the cure for the long and age-old working of the daemons through the saving teaching of the Gospel alone.

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