Fate and Foreknowledge

We do not say that what happens to people is done or suffered by fate. Each person succeeds or sins by deliberate choice (προαίρεσις), and wicked demons also work against the serious — as they did against Socrates and his like — while a Sardanapalus or an Epicurus seems to prosper.

The Stoics missed this and declared that everything happens by fate’s necessity. But God made both the race of angels and of human beings self-determining (αὐτεξούσιον) from the beginning; therefore they justly receive punishment in eternal fire for whatever they do wrong.

It is the nature of everything that has come to be to be capable of vice and virtue. Nothing of theirs would be praiseworthy if it did not also have the power to turn either way.

Some give the name “atoms” to certain imperishable and most minute bodies, infinite in number, and they put forward a void of unbounded extent. These atoms, they say, are borne about at random in the void, collide of themselves through an irregular rush, and tangle because they are many-shaped and catch hold of one another — and so produce the world and what is in it, or rather worlds without number. Epicurus and Democritus held this view.

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How are we to bear with them when they say that the wise and therefore beautiful works of creation are chance coincidences? Works of which each, as it came into being by itself, and likewise all of them together, were seen to be good by the One who commanded them to be made. For Scripture says: “And God saw all things that he had made, and behold, they were very good.”

They are not even instructed by the small, familiar examples at their feet, from which they could learn that no useful work made for benefit is finished without design or by mere accident, but is crafted by hand for its fitting service — and only when it falls into uselessness is it dissolved and scattered at random, because the wisdom that cared for its standing no longer manages or orders it.

How then do you say he left the qualities of the worthless as they were? Was he able to remove them too, but unwilling — or did he lack the power?

If you say he was able but unwilling, you must call him their cause: able to make them not be bad, he allowed them to remain as they were — especially when he began to craft the matter. If he had no care for matter at all, he would not be cause of what he let remain; but since he crafts one part and leaves another as it is, though able to turn that too toward the better, he seems to me to incur blame for leaving a wicked part of matter to the ruin of what he crafted.