FATE. - It is the lot, the destiny that hangs over something or someone according to a process of causes whose unfolding is necessary and whose final result is inevitable. The Greek term εἰμαρμένη means the conjunction and connection that the series of causes have in their unfolding through time (Psellus, De omnifaria doctrina, ch. 78: PG 122, 736 B). The Latin term ("... let us understand fatum as spoken from fari": St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, V, 9, 3) refers back to the original decrees pronounced by the divinity.
In Greek classical thought the εἰμαρμένη had predominantly a cosmological meaning. In the Presocratics, and especially in Heraclitus, it is cosmic necessity (ἀνάγκη), the universal law that pervades the essence of the whole, the energy of the "ethereal body" (fire) as demiurge of things (Heraclitus, Fragments, ed. R. Walzer, fr. A 8, p. 23). In Plato the separation between the intelligible world and sensible appearance placed the former under the rational government of providence (πρόνοια) and abandoned the latter in its totality to fate, the irrational and the absence of law. The cosmological meaning gained the upper hand fully with the Stoics. Stobaeus informs us that Chrysippus, in agreement with Plato, distinguished providence from fate (Ecl., I, 5, 15; H. Diels, Dox. cit., 2nd ed., 322 a). Indeed in the Stoic school a fourfold mode of becoming was attributed to things: according to necessity, according to fate, according to choice (freedom) and according to fortune (Stobaeus, loc. cit., Diels, op. cit., 326 ab). A multiplicity of causes which, however, was more apparent than real because, in this philosophy, which took up with greater awareness the universal "physicalism" of the Presocratics, the only reality was body and the force operating everywhere, the energy of cosmic heat (δύναμις πνευματική). There is therefore a perfect equivalence on the metaphysical plane between nature-necessity-providence-Jove-fate, explicitly affirmed in the Stoic compilation De mundo (7, 401 b 9 ff.) of Ps. Aristotle and by Seneca many times (De benef., IV, 8, 3; De prov., V, 7).
The effort of the Aristotelians, of Epicurus himself and of the Neoplatonists aimed at freeing the problem of human existence from the dead end in which previous philosophy had left it: hence the rich flowering in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of treatises on fate. The most notable is that of Alexander of Aphrodisias (v.) who, attacking the Stoic theory directly, first of all withdraws from fate free actions and those of the physical world that occur by art or by chance; moreover he admits that even the physical phenomena believed necessary (nature) can in their unfolding be impeded by supervening causes, so that natural phenomena are all at bottom of a contingent nature (ἐνδεχόμενα). Plotinus criticized both the Stoic solution and the Aristotelian solution of Alexander (Enn., III, 1, 8-9) and founded human freedom on the independence of individual souls. In the late Neoplatonism of Proclus the aim is to accentuate the recovery of primitive Platonism filtered through Orphic doctrines. Three are the causes of order: nemesis (Ἀδράστεια), necessity (Ἀνάγκη) and fate (Εἱμαρμένη); the first intelligible, the second supra-cosmic and the third intra-cosmic. The demiurge feeds on the first, subsists in the second and generates the third: "as nemesis is the plexus of the laws in the world of divine things, so fate forms the plexus of the laws of the material world which the demiurge writes in souls and first of all in the 'Anima mundi'" (Proclus, In Timaeum, 41 E, ed. E. Diehl, III, p. 274).
In any case, after the apparent serenity of the Stoic theory, the Neoplatonic solution was the one that best expressed the Greek spirit which, although it knew that for the individual there was no salvation, nonetheless held its aspirations high by magnifying the ideal, the fullness and the happiness of universal causes. But for the individual fate is inexorable. Hector, before the attack with Achilles in which he will find death, tries to console Andromache by begging her not to grieve since no one can escape fate (Iliad, VI, 487). Above all death is fatal for all and it is useless to supplicate the gods, as Euripides has the chorus sing to Admetus who was weeping for his beloved Alcestis (985-87). The gods themselves do not escape fate nor can they act against it: "Sunt fata deum, sunt fata locorum" (Statius, Silvae, III, 1, 11); "Fata irrevocabiliter ius suum peragunt nec ulla commoventur prece" (Seneca, Quaest. nat., II, 35). The poets, the panegyrists of the Empire wanted the gods, the princes and the most excellent men and even the philosophers themselves to escape the iron grip of fate (Bidez-F. Cumont, Magas hellenistic, II, Paris 1958, p. 244); but these are pleonastic voices that could not dispel the dark horizon that envelops the whole of Greek-Roman paganism. From the philosophers the people had taken the representation of the Fates (Μοῖραι), daughters of Necessity appointed to distribute the time of human life: Atropos to the past, Clotho to the present and Lachesis to the future (Ps. Aristotle, De mundo, 7, 401 b 18 ff.). To the background of fatalism, from which pagan civilization never definitively detached itself, are due the practice of oracles and the enormous development of the mystery religions into which the decadent Greek-Roman civilization threw itself with desperate frenzy, at the appearance of Christianity.
For Christians, the fate of the pagans is an "empty name" invented by the devil to deceive men and to cover the manifest errors of the false oracles, and it was combated even by a pagan philosopher (Alexander of Aphrodisias) as Eusebius of Caesarea demonstrates with satisfaction (Praep. ev., VI, 9: PG 21), who makes wide use of pagan and Christian sources. In particular the doctrine of fate goes directly against the cornerstones of Christian life such as divine Providence, human freedom and the efficacy of prayer to God and of correction for the formation of the individual conscience (cf. St. Augustine, Epist. 256 to Langadius and Nemesius, De natura hominis, ch. 55 ff.: PG 40, 741 ff.). Therefore, having rejected the doctrine, some Fathers wish that the term too be rejected (St. Gregory the Great). Those who retain it, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas, intend by it to signify the series of finite causes according as it is preordained by God for the attainment of a given effect, and in which is included the possibility that God can act when He wills in every sector of being and at the moment that in His wisdom He judges opportune (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 116, n. 1-4).
It is in the nature of Hegelian philosophy to identify fate with the historicity of the Idea and therefore to interpret it as the "unity of necessity or rationality and of causality or irrationality in becoming" once "logic becomes nature and nature spirit" (Hegel, Encyclopedia, III, § 575). The "amor fati" and the theory of the "eternal return" which Nietzsche took as the formula of his Heracliteanism is the product of the radical aestheticism to which his turbid and anti-Christian genius abandoned itself (Also sprach Zarathustra, part 3: Of the Vision and the Enigma, ed. A. Baeumler [Die Unschuld des Werdens], II, Leipzig 1931, p. 447).
BIBLI: H. Diels, Doxagophi proci, 2ª ed., Berlino 1929; Eracito, Frammenti, raccolti e tradotti da R. Walzer, Firenze 1930; H. v. Armin, Veterum stoicorum fragmenta, Lipsia 1905 sg.; Alessandro di Afrodisia, De audus cum montium, ed. I. Bruns (Suppl. Arist., II, 1), Berlino 1887 (v. sez. sul f.: pp. 25-186); id., De f., ed. I. Bruns (Suppl. Arist., II, 2), ivi 1892; Plotino, Eunendes, ed. Brühler, Parigi 1924 sgg.; Procio, In Timaeum Platonis, ed. E. Diehl, Lipsia 1903 sgg.; id., De Providentia et f. et eo quod est in nobis (conservato soltanto nella trad. latina di G. de Moerbeke), ed. V. Cousin, 2ª ed., Parigi 1864. Sulla teoria del f. in Plutarco, Calciolo e Nemesio, v.: Überweg, III, p. 555 sgg. Sulla reazione alla tesi stoica (difesa anche da Cicerone nel De f.) da parte di aristotelici e scettici, testi importanti di Enomao, Diogeniano, Berdezone e Origene oltre che di Alessandro di Afrodisia, presso Eusebio (Praep. Evang., VI, cap. 7 sgg.). Per lo sviluppo della dottrina stoica del f.: D. Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l'antiquité grecque, Lovanto-Parigi 1945. Importante per il significato classico e quello cristiano primitivo, è il cap. sulla «Eimarmène» di A. J. Festugière, L'idéal religieux des Grecs et l'Évangile, Parigi 1932, cap. 2ª. Per un'interpretazione di Hegel cf. M. B. Forster, Die Gesch. als Schicksal des Geistes in der hegelischen Philosophie, Tubinga 1920.