Christianity and free will--A lesson for our time

A most interesting entry over at Brussels Journal by Thomas F. Bertanneau. An excerpt:

Determinism or Fatalism is, however, hardly a modern innovation. The idea appears to ripen with a certain stage of civilization and to go in tandem with a lapse in family integrity and a general abeyance of customs and forms. Whatever we call it, the same sophistic teaching also shows itself to be in a relation with the scale of the civic environment, belonging not to the eras of the city-state or of the feudal market town but rather to the ages of empire, cosmopolitanism, and the universal bureaucratization of life. As we moderns invoke biological and sociological mechanisms to absolve people of their infractions, either of omission or commission, so the ancients invoked Heimarmene or Fortuna or Sors, implacable, superhuman agencies that play with human beings, as gamblers play with dice. Fate, sometimes also Chance, explains wealth or poverty, success or failure, as an accident, which might have fallen out otherwise; it simultaneously dulls pity for the afflicted and suggests that industriousness never really deserves the fruits of its labor. What real virtue, then, attaches to the putatively virtuous? Why imitate frugality, chastity, or prudence? Fatalism would persuade the subject that to moralize about behaviors or conditions is to protest uselessly against forces beyond his conscious control.

Like all hypocrisy, Fatalism pays stealthy tribute to that which it aims to avoid or denounce or suspend. It utters a perpetual cry of “I can’t help myself,” thereby confessing to secret cognizance of its own self-forfeiting wretchedness. In acknowledging and denying morality, the doctrine of individual will-less-ness blurs moral clarity. It likewise disorients those in its gray aura who would seek the independent way and who would best be served in their quest for moral self-control by a pellucid, rather than by an occluded, description of good and evil. The doctrine of individual will-less-ness abets libido by dissimulating rhetorically the actual presence of any effective, morally responsible volition. As Gilbert Murray narrates in The Five Stages of Greek Religion (1925), the idea of implacable Fate as the supreme cosmic power arose as belief in the old Olympian deities shrank away and as rival imperial powers fought for dominance in the world of Mediterranean Antiquity.

Referring to Alexander’s conquests, the wars between his successors, and the civil wars that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire, Murray writes: “In a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which is habitually the seat of war between alien armies, the ordinary virtues of diligence, honesty, and kindliness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape destruction is to win the favor of the prevailing powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter the despot, placate the Fate or Fortune or angry god that is sending the earthquake or pestilence.” Murray quotes Juvenal on the ubiquity of destiny-worship: “Throughout the whole world, at every place and hour, by every voice Fortune alone is invoked and her name spoken… we are so much at the mercy of chance that Chance is our god.” Murray writes, “So much for the result in superstitious minds of the denial, or rather the removal, of the Olympian gods,” which “landed men in the worship of Fortune or Fate.” Finally, there is a dangerous “denial of the value of human endeavor” that has the “quality of poison when believed.”

In this light consider three stories from the period Late Antiquity. Petronius Arbiter composed Satyricon around 60 AD while acting as Emperor Nero’s master of ceremonies. Lucius Apuleius, a Platonist, wrote The Golden Ass around 160, during the long reign of Marcus Aurelius. Augustine of Hippo, latterly St. Augustine, wrote his autobiographical Confessions in the last decade of the Fourth Century. We will discover, among other things, that the explicitly Christian civilization, against which modernity characteristically defines itself, emerged in part as a response to ancient fatalism, and that every one of the self-made moral snares that trap modern people – from Mammon-worship and ego-inflation to satyriasis and nymphomania – has its counterpart in the teeming, avaricious, flesh-obsessed Mediterranean world of the Imperial centuries. Those remote centuries begin to look a good deal like our own contemporary moment.

Read it all, it is very interesting.