The Idea of Divine Providence in Ancient Thought

Abbreviations

ACW – Ancient Christian Writers

ANF – Ante Nicene Fathers

BSGRT – Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana

CCL – Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CQNS – Classical Quarterly, New Series

FV – Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Diels)

GCS – Die Griechischen Christlischen Schrifteslteller

GNO – Gregorii Nysseni Opera

HThR – Harvard Theological Review

LCL – Loeb Classical Library

PAOQS – Philoni Alexandrini Operae Quae Supersunt

PG – Patrologiae cursus completus (series Graeca), ed. J. P. Migne

PTS – Patristische Texte und Studien

SC – Sources Chrétiennes

STACh – Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum

SThV – Studia Theologica Varsaviensia

SVF – Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta

VCh – Vigiliae Christianae

WST – Warszawskie Studia Teologiczne (Warsaw Theological Studies)

Introduction

The most fundamental question that man asks himself, no matter what era he happens to live in, is the question as to the meaning and purpose of human life. This question is closely related to the one that follows, namely whether any purpose exists and whether life leads towards that purpose in an orderly manner. In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that do not form any regular whole? Or are these events ordered in some way, because they could not be leading anywhere if they did not form a single route? Were we to accept also this, then another question arises as to who gives the life of man this order, that is, who directs him towards the purpose. It is clear that a person can make various decisions about his life and try to put them in order, but, after all, many events happen that are beyond his control. Many of them just happen to us rather than being a result of our actions and decisions. The elementary experience of man is a conviction that certain things become arranged in a sequence of events, even though we did not plan them. Hence, is there anyone who controls man’s life and provides it with meaning ‘from the outside’? Again, we may ask whether this external organisation of human life is merely an individual occurrence, or whether it also happens to groups, nations and the whole world in general. Therefore, is man a part of a larger organised whole, or even a part of a world organised in such a way that human nature, just like the nature of everything, may be considered as a result of a deeper design?¹

As we can see, all these questions naturally proceed towards the issue of providence, which generally means that the world and human lives are controlled by deities, or in the Christian version – by God. Many authors believe that the issue of providence may seem archaic and outdated today. This is not only because of the phenomenon of atheism, basically unknown to ancient people, but also because of a change in our perception of the world, which, on the one hand, has become much more comprehensible to us, while on the other hand, it seems much more chaotic. We can explain physical phenomena incomparably more precisely, though at the same time we are no longer able to recognise a place in the universe that would be specifically ‘human’. These changes in the understanding of the world have made man feel ‘thrown’ into a reality that is chaotic by its very nature, and it seems that only his own efforts can bring about some order here. The problem of providence is closely related to how we understand reality, whether it is chaos or cosmos for us and whether the world is simply something that exists or something created by God. If we believe that in explaining the world and the fate of man it is sufficient to point out the natural causes studied by the natural sciences, this concept of providence can only be a subject of research in the field of the history of ideas and can only show us how the people of past eras used to think.

However, this issue continues to arouse great interest of not only researchers but also ordinary people, who wonder whether the incidents happening in their lives do have any meaning and order. In the preface to the second edition of his book on providence, John E. Sanders notes that its earlier edition has drawn a wide response among thousands of readers.² Sanders believes that their reaction is to a large extent associated with another issue that is closely connected with the problem of providence, namely the question of evil. For the authors whose thoughts I ponder below, this is quite obvious. For if providence exists and human destinies are controlled by good deities or the good God, then a question naturally arises as to why man encounters evil, whose existence is an undeniable fact. This question, in turn, is connected with another concerning the fact that many people who do wrong do not meet the deserved punishment, and those who do well do not receive any reward. Thus, is it worth doing right, or should one rather act wrong? Moreover, what really motivates one to do good? For ancient authors, the problem of justice and reasonableness is very closely related to the order of the world, and it can be said that in seeking an answer to this question, they always reflect on the order of justice in the context of the world order.

This is where the fundamental difference between the ancient and present view of the place of man in the universe becomes highlighted. For today, the foundations of the order of human life and conduct are not sought in the order of the cosmos. Although such a state of affairs may seem closely related to the modern era’s development of the natural sciences, similar discussions occur already in ancient philosophy. The best example of this is Plato, who sharply opposes the atomistic vision of the world as a non-cosmos, in which no purpose can be found. It may even be said that were Plato alive today, he would feel an even greater need to write a new Timaeus, because the world seen through the eyes of the natural sciences would appear to him as totally ungodly. He believes that justice and moral order are so fundamental that their foundations should be sought in the very structure of the cosmos. This is all the more important as the order of justice does not only concern the lives of individuals, but is also the foundation of the state. And perhaps that is why Plato places so much emphasis on the moral dimension of the order of the universe, as in his late dialogues he notes that it is not enough to base morality and state on ‘pure’ logos. For this reason, it is in the Laws that he proposes the second-best model of state, whose laws are based on the conviction that good gods take care of human affairs. However, these are completely different gods than those known to Greek religiosity. The gods of Homer’s poems are immoral, whimsical and driven by the lust for power and pleasure. The new gods, who in their care of human affairs would act as a link between the order of the cosmos and the order of justice, must be morally perfect themselves. Here we see the importance of the interrelationship between seeing the cosmos as an order, morality, the state and the nature of deity. Thus, by analysing the views of Plato and other ancient authors, we can spot certain germs and even archetypes of contemporary dilemmas. This will certainly become evident in the more detailed analyses contained in this book.

I hope that the examination of ancient concepts of providence will also show that perhaps today we are too easily convinced that our world is devoid of order and purpose, and that man must not seek the sense of his life and conduct in it. Perhaps a return to the issue of providence will show that one can seek this order on a more profound level. Here we can, somewhat perversely, cite the example of the probability calculus, which shows that one can find some pattern and order even in what seems completely chaotic, that is, what Michał Heller calls ‘the incorporation of the concept of chance into the logic of Design’.³

Thus, as Genevieve Lloyd seeks to demonstrate, the concept of providence is ‘a concept lost’. In the conclusion to her work, she shows how much we have in common with experiencing the inevitability of fate by the characters of Euripides’s dramas.⁴ The term ‘loss’ is much better than ‘oblivion’ here, as it indicates that although not much is said about providence today, a certain deficit has remained, an unfulfilled gap in the image of one’s own life and the fate of the world. Meanwhile, as Lloyd claims, although she does not desire to revive this concept, reflecting on the history of providence can help understand why we are currently dealing with a dysfunction of the idea of free will, autonomy and responsibility, which has shaped the entire culture of the West.⁵ One cannot but agree that the question of providence so widely pondered by ancient authors can shed some light also on the problem of determinism. Although today we are not afraid of being puppets in the hands of gods, we feel vulnerable when facing inevitability encoded in nature as such. This is very reminiscent of the concepts of the Stoics and the fierce reaction of the Middle Platonists to their views. Moreover, the conviction of the existence and operation of divine providence is characteristic not only of Greek philosophy and Christianity. It is fundamental in all monotheistic religions.⁶

Therefore, a reflection on the history of providence seems an important and topical task. However, the extensive work of Lloyd, which is probably the only such project so far, has serious gaps. Although she devotes a lot of space to ancient authors, both pagan and Christian, her reflections omit some very important issues. First of all, it seems problematic that the examination of the Church Fathers has been limited in principle only to St Augustine. In addition, her reflections on the Greek philosophers themselves reveal numerous omissions and deficiencies, which is certainly due to the calibre of this great work.

In my opinion, in order to understand how the idea of providence appeared in Western culture, it is crucial to analyse not only how it had formed within Greek philosophy, but also how it was taken over by Christian authors. Therefore, first of all, we need a deeper study of the very origin and development of the concept of providence, which is not an easy task, because, as Peter Adamson notes, it is hard to find a problem that would interest the philosophers of late Antiquity more than providence.⁷ The gap in the literature is partially filled by an excellent work of Gretchen Reydams-Schils, which, however, focuses on Plato’s Timaeus and the transformations of its ideas by the Stoics and Middle Platonists.⁸ Providence, however, was of equal or perhaps even greater interest to the Neoplatonic philosophers and finds a particularly interesting form in the texts of Iamblichus and Proclus.

Only in the context of a more complete presentation of the development of the idea of providence can one realise how it was modified by Christian authors. This is a particularly interesting research task, because – as Yvan Azéma notes in his introduction to On Divine Providence by Theodoret of Cyrrhus – for the Church Fathers, from Justin the Martyr to the Bishop of Cyrrhus himself, the issue of providence is a typical ‘apologetic place’.⁹ However, as we can note with surprise, this apology rarely takes the form of defending the Christian concept of providence; it is rather a position in a philosophical dispute, in which the Church Fathers defend the position of the Stoics and thoroughly criticise the Epicureans who reject this concept. The key question, therefore, is whether Christian authors simply took over the concept of providence as completely in line with the biblical understanding of God’s relationship to the world, or whether they transformed it in some way. This question becomes even more interesting when we recall the above-mentioned treatment of Plato’s, which shows that the concept of providence calls for a concept of deity that is contrary to the Greek folk religion.

To some extent, research on this subject has already been undertaken by Silke-Petra Bergjan in her excellent work Der fuersorgende Gott. Der Begriff der ΠΡΟΝΟΙΑ Gottes in der apologetischen Literatur der Alten Kirche. She first focuses on the various meanings of the term pronoia, which leads her to limit her inquiries to Christian apologetics up to the fourth century. However, in my opinion, it was in the fourth and fifth centuries that the Christian characteristic of the concept of pronoia was expressed precisely by showing that this is not only the intention of the deity that organises the universe and cares for the order given in the creative act, but that the accent is clearly shifted to the care of God over man, the main motif of which is love. This love is already expressed in the act of creation of man, but, above all, in the deed of salvation: the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Christ. Thus, although one might concur with the claim that Christological threads are present to a small extent in early apologetic texts on providence,¹⁰ this accent is made significantly clearer in later texts. In addition, the research aspect chosen by Bergjan also makes it difficult to perceive the emergence of the concept of the order of fate and the order of the world in earlier Greek literature, where the term pronoia does not yet appear. When discussing apologetic literature, she focuses on the understanding of pronoia as the exercise of God’s justice, and especially on the pedagogical aspect of providence, first noted by Hal Koch.¹¹

An undoubted achievement of Koch’s work is showing that the concept of providence in the context of upbringing by God’s justice has its sources in Neoplatonic philosophy. This allows him to show even more clearly by what the concept of Origen differs from the deliberations of Hierocles.¹² The work, nonetheless, perfectly shows that this term had already aroused numerous controversies and disputes in philosophical schools, which to some extent moved to apologetic literature. This especially applies to the importance of providence in the personal life of the individual and God’s concern for man. The above findings were developed by Koch thanks to a very important distinction of three major semantic fields of the word pronoia. The term was first used in legal terminology to denote an intended and planned action.¹³ Then, it denoted the concern of the craftsman, God, for what he had created. In this sense, there is also a political context, namely the concern of the ruler for the state and the citizens.¹⁴ Eventually, the word has acquired the meaning associated with the order of the world, that is, it has been used to define the principle organising the world and its nature.¹⁵ It is this, one might say, most philosophical and final meaning of this term that forms the subject of this study. In my opinion, it can most clearly show the difference between the philosophical pagan and Christian understanding of the term.

The key motif of these reflections is the understanding of providence in the context of the world order understood as the cosmos, because it is in this context that this issue appeared in Greek thought, although it was not yet called πρόνοια. As mentioned above, the concept of cosmic harmony is closely linked with the order of justice, and only against the background of these two dimensions do I discuss the issues closely related to providence, such as the problem of free will of man or the problem of evil.

The above-mentioned aim of the work determines its structure. Chapter 1 shows how, at the beginning of ancient thought, the Greek authors sought order first in human life, and then in the cosmos. In that first period, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod as well as the dramas, especially those of Euripides, which address the question of fate and destiny, intertwine with the nascent philosophical thought that finds the order of nature. These two currents meet only in the Memorabilia of Xenophon and the dialogues of Plato, the most important of which are his late works: Laws and Timaeus. It is here that we can observe the first statements of how the care of the gods over the world results from the belief in the deliberate formation of the whole cosmos and the human body.

However, in that first period, as I try to demonstrate, the very concept of providence was not yet formulated. Chapter 2 begins with a reflection on the understanding of the world by the Stoics, who would for the first time use the term πρόνοια to denominate the direction of all things by Logos. The image of the world as an organism and ‘city of gods and people’, proposed by the Stoics, would affect all the later development of the concept of providence. Their radical identification of providence with destiny and fate would be criticised by the Peripatetics and Middle Platonists, though it would also affect the search for deeper explanations and reconciliation of the possible coexistence of divine leadership with the fate of man and his free will. This would ultimately lead to the synthesis of Greek thought, which would be done by the last Neoplatonists in the context of connecting providence with theurgical practices.

I begin the examination of the Christian adaptation in Chapter 3 with the challenging issue of the comprehension of providence in the Holy Scripture. Next, I show how, in the context of the teachings of philosophers, Christian apologists were trying to take a stand on their understanding of the care of the gods over the world. During that period, which lasted until the end of the third century, the main Christian aspects of understanding divine providence would be developed. As I try to show, the Christian authors of that period would take over the Greek idea in the form that they found in the writings of the Middle Platonists, adding to it only what followed from the relation of God to the world and man described in the Holy Scripture.

If we can indicate a turning point in the history of ancient Christianity, it was undoubtedly the beginning of the fourth century. At that time Christians began to profess and preach their faith freely; we also need to remember that the heresies that cropped up at that time forced the Church Fathers to formulate more precisely the concept of the Holy Trinity. Therefore, the Christian concept of God and, consequently, of his relation to the world, or providence took shape during that period. For this reason, in Chapter 4 – the last chapter of this work – I discuss the Church Fathers from the early fourth to the beginning of the fifth century.

As the cut-off date of my deliberations, I adopt the beginning of the sixth century. Certainly, the tradition of Christian understanding of providence had its very ample continuation. However, since in this work I am primarily interested in the dialogue between philosophy and the crystallising Christian doctrine, the date conventionally assumed as the end of pagan philosophy, namely the year 529, when the Neoplatonic school in Athens closed, is the natural boundary.¹⁶ Still, we can say that the last Christian authors whose works clearly refer to that tradition, proposing their own comprehension of providence, were Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the East and Boethius in the West. For this reason, my reflections conclude with an analysis of the views of these two authors, who – as we shall see – in highly interesting yet completely different ways refer to the doctrine of divine providence, which they found in the works of the last Neoplatonic philosophers.