1
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
1
See Aristotle, Physics 8,10 for this.
2
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
2
3
Cf. Sorabji (2004), 69.
Sorabji (2004), 70.
3
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
4
Sorabji (2004), 80.
4
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
5
6
Sorabji (2004), 73.
Sorabji (2004), 73-4.
5
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
7
Sorabji (2004), 84.
6
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 nonsuccessive 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
7
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…