Fatalism is in general the view which holds that all events in the history of the
world, and, in particular, the actions and incidents which make up the story of
each individual life, are determined by fate.
The theory takes many forms, or, rather, its essential feature of an antecedent
force rigidly predetermining all occurrences enters in one shape or another into
many theories of the universe. Sometimes in the ancient world fate was
conceived as an iron necessity in the nature of things, overruling and controlling
the will and power of the gods themselves. Sometimes it was explained as the
inexorable decree of the gods directing the course of the universe; sometimes it
was personified as a particular divinity, the goddess or goddesses of destiny.
Their function was to secure that each man's lot, "share", or part should infallibly
come to him.
Ancient Classical Fatalism
The Greek tragedians frequently depict man as a helpless creature borne along
by destiny. At times this destiny is a Nemesis which pursues him on account of
some crime committed by his ancestors or himself; at other times it is to
compensate for his excessive good fortune in order to educate and humble him.
With Æschylus it is of the nature of an unpitying destiny; with Sophocles, that of
an overruling personal will. Still, the most important feature is that the future life
of each individual is so rigorously predetermined in all its details by an
antecedent external agency that his own volitions or desires have no power to
alter the course of events. The action of fate is blind, arbitrary, relentless. It
moves inexorably onwards, effecting the most terrible catastrophes, 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 antecedents and to dwell rather upon remote and external
causes as the agency which somehow moulds the course of events. Socrates
and Plato held that the human will was necessarily determined by the intellect.
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 volition. The clinamen, or aptitude for fortuitous deviation
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 fatalism. For them the course of the universe is an
iron-bound necessity. There is no room anywhere for chance or contingency. All
changes are but the expression of unchanging law. There is an eternally
established providence overruling the world, but it is in every respect immutable.
Nature is an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Providence is the hidden
reason contained in the chain. Destiny or fate is the external expression of this
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 written 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
included 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 Aphrodisias, and sundry
Christian writers down to the Middle Ages.
Fatalism and Christianity
With the rise of Christianity the question of fatalism necessarily adopted a new
form. The pagan view of an external, inevitable force coercing and controlling all
action, whether human or divine, found itself in conflict with the conception of a
free, personal, infinite God. Consequently several of the early Christian writers
were 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 omnipotence regulating all events of the universe intensified some
phases of the difficulty. A main feature, moreover, 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 desirable good to be sought. It comes to
us in an imperative form as a code of laws proceeding from the Sovereign 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. Moreover, sin
cannot be ascribed to an all-holy God. Consequently, free will is a central fact in
the Christian conception of human life; and whatever seems to conflict 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.)
Moslem Fatalism
The Moslem conception of God and His government of the world, the insistence
on His unity and the absoluteness of the method of this rule as well as the
Oriental tendency to belittle the individuality of man, were all favourable to the
development of a theory of predestination approximating towards fatalism.
Consequently, though there have been defenders of free will among Moslem
teachers, yet the orthodox view which has prevailed 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 approved. Some of the Moslem doctors sought to
harmonize this fatalistic theory with man's responsibility, but the Oriental temper
generally accepted with facility the fatalistic presentation of the creed; and some
of their writers have appealed to this long past predestination and privation of free
choice as a justification 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 recklessness 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 Moslem fatalism. (See CALVIN; LUTHER; FREE WILL.)
With the new departure 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 succeeded by or transformed into the theory of Necessarianism.
The study of physics, the increasing knowledge 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 eighteenth 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
Malebranche and Geulinex developed, confining all real action to Gods obviously
tend towards a fatalistic view of the universe.
Modern Pantheistic Fatalism
Spinoza's pantheistic 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 substance must be infinite. It evolves necessarily through an
infinite number of attributes 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
necessary 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, however, he holds, is as objectionable as pain
or physical corruption. The same fatalistic consequences to morality are logically
involved in the various forms of recent pantheistic monism.
Modern Materialistic Fatalism
Modern materialism, starting from the notion of matter as the sole original cause
of all things, endeavours to elaborate a purely mechanical theory of the universe,
in which its contents and the course of its evolution are all the necessary
outcome of the original collocation of the material particles together with their
chemical and physical properties and the laws of their action. The more
thoroughgoing advocates of the mechanical theory, such as Clifford and Huxley,
frankly accept the logical consequences of this doctrine that mind cannot act
upon matter, and teach that man is "a conscious automaton", and that thoughts
and volitions exercise no real influence on the movements of material objects in
the present world. Mental states are merely by-products of material changes, but
in no way modify the latter. They are also described as subjective aspects of
nervous processes, and as epiphenomena, but however conceived they are
necessarily held by the disciples of the materialistic school to be incapable of
interfering with the movements of matter or of entering in any way as efficient
causes into the chain of events which constitute the physical history of the world.
The position is in some ways more extreme than the ancient pagan fatalism. For,
while the earlier writers taught that the incidents of man's life and fortune were
inexorably regulated by an overwhelming power against which it was useless as
well as impossible to strive, they generally held the common-sense view that our
volitions do direct our immediate actions, though our destiny would in any case
be realized. But the materialistic scientist is logically committed to the
conclusion that while the whole series of our mental states are rigidly bound up
with the nervous changes of the organism, which were all inexorably
predetermined in the original collocation of the material particles of the universe,
these mental states themselves can in no way alter the course of events or affect
the movements of a single molecule of matter.
The Refutation of Fatalism of all types lies in the absurd and incredible
consequences which they all entail.
(1) Ancient fatalism implied that events were determined independently of their
immediate causes. It denied free will, or that free will could affect the course of
our lives. Logically it destroyed the basis of morality.
(2) The fatalism resting on the Divine decrees (a) made man irresponsible for his
acts, and (b) made God the author of sin.
(3) The fatalism of materialistic science not only annihilates morality but, logically reasoned out, it demands belief in the incredible proposition that the thoughts and feelings of mankind have had no real influence on human history Mill distinguished: (a) Pure or Oriental fatalism which, he says, holds that our actions are not dependent on our desires, but are overruled by a superior power; (b) modified fatalism, which teaches that our actions are determined by our will, and our will by our character and the motives acting on us--our character, however, having been given to us, (c) finally determinism, which, according to him, maintains that not only our conduct, but our character, is amenable to our will: and that we can improve our character. In both forms of fatalism, he
concludes, man is not responsible for his actions. But logically, in the determinist theory, if we reason the matter out, we are driven to precisely the same conclusion. For the volition to improve our character cannot arise unless as the necessary outcome of previous character and present motives. Practically there may be a difference between the conduct of the professed fatalist who will be inclined to say that as his future is always inflexibly predetermined there is no use in trying to alter it, and the determinist, who may advocate the strengthening of good motives. In strict consistency, however, since determinism denies real initiative causality to the individual human mind, the consistent view of life and morality should be precisely the same for the determinist and the most extreme fatalist (see DETERMINISM).
Rev. Michael Maher
Transcribed by Rick McCarty
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume V
Copyright © 1909 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, May 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor
Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York