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Chapter 10: Providence
The Greek word pronoia, which we translate as providence, means something like perceiving beforehand, foresight. It is a term we use to denote the property of the gods of caring for the world. However, such care takes different forms and comprises different levels of the cosmos depending on the character of the theology of the particular system. The topic of providence immediately involves one in a closely related major philosophical issue in Late Antiquity, viz. the problem of evil. The scope of providence, which for each system of thought is bound up with the understanding of divine power and knowledge, differs from school to school. We shall soon see that there are certain tensions between the different ideas of divine care, power, and knowledge. We shall start with some ideas of divine power and knowledge as such, before we move on to providenc.
It is a quite common idea of pagan philosophies that God’s knowledge and power are limited. The God of Aristotle is a thinking activity that thinks itself, and is not directed out of itself to include any conception of cosmic beings. Even if we make the concession that the Aristotelian God while thinking itself may think itself as the good source of cosmic being, the unmoved mover would still not know anything but itself as such a source. When it comes to the divine power, things may at a first glance look different. As we know, the Aristotelian cosmos lasts forever. It is eternal. But if that is the case, an infinite power is required in order to get the universe going eternally.[1] It is, however, impossible for a finite body, like the body of the cosmos, to hold an infinite power. Aristotle says that the prime mover causes this eternal motion and for an infinite time. But since nothing that is finite can cause motion for an infinite time; therefore God possesses an infinite power since he causes motion for an infinite time. — Is God’s power, therefore without any limits? Is the Aristotelian God omnipotent? The answer is negative. Infinite power is not the same as all power. In the Nicomachean Ethics (6.2, 1139b10-11) Aristotle says: ‘Of this alone even God is deprived, making what has been done not to have happened.’ This is a quotation from Agathon, which sum up Aristotle’s opinion that it is impossible for God to undo the past.
The Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias denies that God may know everything.[2] Let us distinguish between on the one hand divine foreknowledge, and on the other hand the nature of things in themselves. According to Alexander, if the gods know what will happen tomorrow, we cannot for this reason hold that all things that happen tomorrow happen of necessity. It is, of course, tempting to think it will happen of necessity, since the gods knows the nature of things, and the nature of things is such that what happens tomorrow happens because of some causal development. But if the event that actually happens tomorrow is of such a nature today that it may or may not happen, i.e. is contingent, then even the gods cannot know this. Further Alexander denies that the gods may know or have power over what is impossible. The gods cannot make twice two to be five or make any of the things that have happened not to have happened.
According to Alexander, God does not know individuals, since individuals are constantly reproduced in an unending way. As a matter of fact it is below the dignity of God to attend to individuals.[3] It seems that Alexander in this way also absolves God from the responsibility for the evils that happen to individuals, because if God determines the fate of the individual, he determines the evils that happen to him as well. Alexander’s view could seem to echo Plato’s thought from the Laws (book 10, 903b-905b) which states that God is concerned with the whole rather than for the parts of the cosmos. Plato says that God ‘who provides for the world has disposed all things with a view to the preservation and perfection of the whole’. This general arrangement is to the advantage of particulars as well, even if they are not directly cared for. This point of view may be tempting for a theist, of course, since one might always claim that what looks evil from one point of view, is perhaps to the general advantage of the whole if seen from the perspective of God maintaining the overall arrangement. Plato, further, may even explain evils by pointing to the fact that when the cosmos was made, God took over a disordered material substance which he adapted to his plans. But God did not make matter, nor could he defeat its inherent nature of movement completely, but he could discipline it within the orderly arrangement he imposed on it. Evils may occur since he could not defeat the original nature of matter thoroughly.
God then has a limited power and a limited knowledge. Even if he is responsible for the general arrangement of cosmic order and movement, one cannot for that matter make him responsible for all that happens.
Alexander of Aphrodisias is more specific about the workings of divine providence. The divine activity that maintains the world is evenly distributed by the orderly arrangement and movement of the heavenly bodies, in such a way that particulars are generated successively in the sublunary world.[4] According to the scheme of horizontal causation particulars are reproduced with the same form so that things down here lasts forever. What, one might ask, is the purpose of the everlasting reproduction of particulars? Alexander is quite explicit: It serves the preservation of the species. Individuals exist for the sake of the keeping up, not of itself or its relatives, but the species. One gets the impression that Alexander’s species are not some Platonic Forms, but the universal essential features present in the nature of particular things: ‘Universals have their subsistence in singularities.’ Even so, the purpose of individuals is, obviously, to sustain the common end in their species.
God cares for universals and not for particulars. One may appreciate this idea for some reasons. On the one hand, it could be claimed that it is more dignified for God to care for the general arrangement of the world than to care for the particulars in it. This might even be in accordance with modern taste, which seems to cherish the idea of a divinity that is somehow identified with the grand cosmic structures of movement and order than with the cares of individual human beings. Further, the idea could seem to be in accordance with the understanding of the divine intellect as eternal and therefore as transcending the temporal succession and spatial distribution of a plurality of individuals. Finally, such a doctrine could make it easier to live with the notion of a perfect divinity and a earthly experience of countless evils: God simply does not care for the happiness or unhappiness of created individuals, there is no divine love of man nor any divine consciousness of the trivialities of our lives.
How could God know particulars? Proclus says the gods ‘know what is generated without generation, and what is extended without extension, and what is in time eternally, and what is contingent necessarily’.[5] Proclus’ student Ammonius says ‘the gods knows all that has happened, or is, or will be, in the way that is appropriate to gods, that is, with a single definite and unchanging knowledge’. He goes further:
For they must know divisible tings in a way which is indivisible and unextended, and pluralized things unitarily, and temporal things eternally and generated things ungeneratedly.
The last view is also found in St Augustine.[6] Foreknowledge, he says, is knowledge of the future. But God is beyond time, and therefore nothing is future to Him. He must know future things in His own eternal present. Therefore it is not appropriate to speak of God’s foreknowledge, only of His knowledge.
It is obvious that God cannot know time and temporal things in a way that is temporal. If we hold unto the idea that God knows particulars that exist in time and space, we have to admit that He knows them in a way that is in accordance with His own being. Of course, this gives rise to all sorts of philosophical questions and problems, some of them rather hard to figure out an answer to.
Despite the doctrine of Alexander on divine providence, in the further philosophical development the Neoplatonists try to extend the field of divine care for what is created. Plotinus thinks providence extends to individuals, and Proclus thinks it extends to everything.[7] Simplicius even thinks it extends to crops, and St Augustine thinks providence extends to domestic animals. [Read the quotation from Simplicius page 84-5 in Sorabji. Cf. Philoponus, Sorabji 85, who disagrees.]
The idea that providence concerns the universal species only, could be likened to the idea of some modern environmentalists that it is the kinds rather than the individuals that are important. Like Proclus and Augustine, St Maximus the Confessor thinks providence extends to particulars as well as to universals. In Ambiguum 10 (1193a-c) he develops an interesting sequence of thoughts. [Handout. Read the text and comment on it.]
I shall end this chapter with some reflections on the Christian concept of God. From a religious point of view one could claim that the Christian concept of God is rather more satisfactory than the non-Christian conceptions we have met with. First, according to the theologians of Late Antiquity, the world of particular being is made because God wanted to make it, and the purpose of God concerns not only the general structure of being, but rather individual persons. God made the world out of His goodness, with the purpose of bringing human beings and, according to St Maximus the Confessor, the whole of being, into communion with Himself. God knows, obviously, since His purpose is such, every being He has made, and He cares for them. Even if this teaching is rather satisfactory from a religious point of view, it contains a lot of philosophical challenges. On the one hand, one meets with the problem of divine knowledge. St Augustine obviously is right that God cannot know future things as future, but has to know them as present to His eternal ‘now’. I should think one has to agree with Proclus and Ammonius as well, that God knows all features of created being as such in accordance with the mode of His own knowledge and being. This means that God knows diastematic and successive being in a non-diastematic and non-successive way. — One question that pops up in this connection is, of course, what this implies for the nature of events, do they have to be given in a necessary sequence or is it still possible that accidents may occur? I suppose Christian thinkers generally would hold that there is room for accidents, and they would at least claim that human volition is not subject to any determinism. That God knows the sequence does not need to imply that He willed all events to happen the way they in fact did and do happen, since there may be factors at work in the world that is due to the personal agency of other minds than God’s. In short, God’s knowing the whole sequence does not mean that the sequence was determined to happen just that particular way. — This is a major issue, but I think this is how the major theologians would have answered such questions.
One further problem that originates in this connection is, of course, the problem of evil. If God is good, and if He knows the whole sequence of events, why do things turn out so badly for a lot of individual human persons? If one works on the premise that God is good, and that He does not intend suffering without any purpose or higher meaning, I suppose one could appreciate that Maximus says individual providence is infinite and unknowable to us. The whole complex of personal volitions, the dialectic between virtue and vice, the pedagogic of improvement etc., all this contribute to the almost impossible task of deciding whether or not suffering is deserved. In short, we are not in the position to know why individual human beings suffer within the dialectic of the divine scheme of things. One may, of course, always stick to global ways of putting the problem and to global answers, but it might be that such procedures do not hit the essence of the problem. Just to say, for example, that the Christian divinity Himself chooses to be exposed to suffering as a human being, may be a scandal to philosophers, but it may still be relevant for the religious consciousness.
We have seen that according to most pagan thinkers, God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Both properties are relevant for the kinds of problems I have just mentioned. One might say it is easier for Plato and some Platonists to rid themselves of a problem of evil than it is for Christian thinkers who claim such attributes for their God. First I think it is correct to assert that the Christian thinkers of Late Antiquity make no claim that their God may do what is outright impossible. I am quite sure they would agree with Aristotle and Alexander, for instance, that God cannot undo the past, nor can he make twice two to be five, nor, for that matter, may He violate the Aristotelian principle of contradiction. To claim that God is pantokrator, that He rules all things, means that He has an immense power, a power that we are not able to imagine in the full sense. I see no reason why one should claim anything beyond this, since divine power or might is the limit of what is possible. However, one should, perhaps, take into notice that there might be something that is possible from the divine point of view, even if it would not be considered possible by us.
I just want to open up for one last thought, which is nothing more than a speculation: could it be that Philoponus’ and Maximus’ teaching on time and eternity could give a clue to another way of considering the relation of divine consciousness to temporal succession than the Augustinian way? I think I would give that possibility a try…
[1] See Aristotle, Physics 8,10 for this.
[2] Cf. Sorabji (2004), 69.
[3] Sorabji (2004), 70.
[4] Sorabji (2004), 80.
[5] Sorabji (2004), 73.
[6] Sorabji (2004), 73-4.
[7] Sorabji (2004), 84.