Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/874

 FATALISM

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FATALISM

catastroplies, impressing us with a feeling of helpless consternation, and harrowing our moral sense, if we venture upon a moral judgment at all. Fatalism in general has been inclined to overlook immediate ante- cedents and to dwell rather upon remote and exter- nal causes as the agency which somehow moulds the course of events. Socrates and Plato held that the human will was necessarily determined by the intel- lect. Though this view seems incompatible with the doctrine of free will, it is not necessarily fatalism. The mechanical theory of Democritus, which explains the universe as the outcome of the collision of material atoms, logically imposes a fatalism upon human voli- tion. The clinamen, or aptitude for fortuitous devia- tion which Epicurus introduced into the atomic theory, though essentially a chance factor, seems to have been conceived by some as acting not unlike a form of fate. The Stoics, who were both pantheists and materialists, present us with a very thorough-going form of fatal- ism. For them the course of the universe is an iron- bound necessity. There is no room anywhere for chance or contingency. -■Ml changes are but the ex- pression of unchanging law. There is an eternally established providence overruling the world, but it is in every respect immutalile. Nature is an unbreaka- ble chain of cause and effect. Providence is the hid- den reason contained in the chain. Destiny or fate is the external expression of tlus providence, or the instrumentality by which it is carried out. It is owing to this that the prevision of the future is possible to the gods. Cicero, who had WTitten at length on the art of divining the future, insists that if there are gods there must be beings who can foresee the future. Therefore the future must be certain, and, if certain, necessary. But the difficulty then presents itself: what is the use of divination if expiatory sacrifices and prayers cannot prevent the predestined evils? The full force of the logical difficulty was felt by Cicero, and although he observes that the prayers and sacrifices might also have been foreseen by the gods and in- cluded as essential conditions of their decrees, he is not quite decided as to the true solution. The importance ascribed to this problem of fatalism in the ancient world is evinced by the large number of authors who wrote treatises "De Fato", e. g. Chrysippus, Cicero, Plutarch, Alexander of .\phrodisias, and sundry Chris- tian WTiters down to the Middle Ages.

Fatalism and Christianity. — With the rise of Chris- tianity the question of fatalism necessarily adopted a new form. The pagan view of an external, inevita- ble force coercing and controlling all action, whether human or divine, found itself in conflict with the con- ception of a free, personal, infinite God. Consequently several of the early Christian writers 7,'ere concerned to oppose and refute the theory of fate. But, on the other hand, the doctrine of a personal God possessing an infallible foreknowledge of the future and an omnip- otence regidating all events of the universe intensified some phases of the difficulty. A main feature, more- over, of the new religion was the importance of the principle of man's moral freedom and responsibility. Morality is no longer presented to us merely as a desir- able good to be sought. It comes to us in an impera- tive form as a code of laws proceeding from the Sover- eign of the universe and exacting obedience under the most serious sanctions. Sin is the gravest of all evils. Man is bound to obey the moral law; and he will receive merited punishment or reward according as he violates or observes that law. But if so, man must have it in his power to break or keep the law. More- over, sin cannot be ascribed to an all-holy God. Con- seciucntly, free will is a central fact in the Christian conception of human life; and whatever seems to con- flict with this must be somehow reconciled to it. The pagan problem of fatalism thus becomes in Christian theology the problem of Divine predestination and the harmonizing of Divine prescience and providence with

human liberty. (See Free Will; Predestination; Providence.)

Mohammedan Fatalism. — The Mohammedan con- ception of God and His government of the world, the insistence on His unity and the absoluteness of the method of His rule, as well as the Oriental tendency to belittle the individuality of man, were all favourable to the development of a theory of predestination ap- proximating towards fatalism. Consequently, though there have been defenders of free will among Moham- medan teachers, yet the orthodox view which has pre- vailed most widely among the followers of the Prophet has been that all good and evil actions and events take place by the eternal decrees of God, which have been written from all eternity on the prescribed table. The faith of the believer and all his good actions have all been decreed and approved, whilst the bad actions of the wicked though similarly decreed have not been ap- proved. Some of the Moslem doctors sought to har- monize this fatalistic theory with man's responsibil- ity, but the Oriental temper generally accepted with facility the fatalistic presentation of the creed; and some of their WTiters have appealed to this long past predestination and privation of free choice as a justifi- cation for the denial of personal responsibility. Whilst the belief in predestined lot has tended to make the Moslem nations lethargic and indolent in respect to the ordinary industries of life, it has developed a reck- lessness in danger which has proved a valuable element in the military character of the people.

Modern. Fatalism. — The reformers of the sixteenth century taught a doctrine of predestination little, if at all, less rigid than the Jlohammedan fatalism. (See Calvin; Luther; Free Will.) With the new de- parture in philosophy and its separation from theology since the time of Descartes, the ancient pagan notion of an external fate, which had grown obsolete, was suc- ceeded by or transformed into the theory of Necessa- rianism. The study of physics, the increasing knowl- edge of the reign of uniform law in the world, as well as the reversion to naturalism initiated by the extreme representatives of the Renaissance, stimulated the growth of rationalism in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries and resulted in the popularization of the old objections to free will. Certain elements in the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and in the occasionalism of his system, which his followers Male- branche and Geulincx developed, confining all real action to God, obviously tend towards a fatalistic view of the universe.

Modern Pantheistic Fatalism. — Spinoza's pantheis- tic necessarianism is, however, perhaps the frankest and most rigid form of fatalism advocated by any leading modern philosopher. Starting from the idea of substance, which he so defines that there can be but one, he deduces in geometrical fashion all forms of being in the universe from this notion. This sub- stance must be infinite. It evolves necessarily through an infinite number of atfriljutes into an infinity of modes. The seemingly individual and independent beings of the world, minds and bodies, are merely these modes of the infinite substance. The whole world-process of actions and events is rigidly neces- sary in every detail; the notions of contingence, of possible beings other than those which exist, are purely illusory. Nothing is possible except what actually is. There is free will in neither God nor man. Human volitions and decisions flow with the same inexorable necessity from man's nature as geometrical properties from the concept of a triangle. Spinoza's critics were quick to point out that in this view man is no longer responsible if he commits a crime nor deserving of praise in recompense for his good deeds, and that God is the author of sin. Spinoza's only answer was that rewards and punishments still have their use as motives, that evil is merely limitation and therefore not real, and that whatever is real is good. Vice,