FATO. – 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 outcome is inevitable. The Greek term εἱμαρμένη signifies the conjunction and connection possessed by the series of causes in their unfolding through time (Paello, De omnifaria doctrina, chap. 78: PG 122, 736 B). The Latin term (“... fatum a fando dictum intelligamus”: s. Agostino, De Civitate Dei, V, 9, 3) refers to the primordial decrees pronounced by the divinity.
In Greek classical antiquity, εἱμαρμένη had predominantly a cosmological meaning. Among the Presocratics, especially in Eracito, it is cosmic necessity (ἀνάγκη), the universal law that penetrates the essence of the whole, the energy of the “ethereal body” (fire), the demiurge of things (Eracito, Frammenti, 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 entirety to f., the irrational and the absence of law. The cosmological meaning regained full ascendancy with the Stoics. Stobco informs us that Chrysippus, in agreement with Plato, distinguished providence from f. (Ecl., I, 5, 15; H. Diels, Doc. cit., 2nd ed., 322 a). Indeed, in the Stoic school things were held to come into being in four different ways: according to necessity, according to f., according to choice (freedom), and according to fortune (Stobco, loc. cit., Diels, op. cit., 326 ab). This multiplicity of causes, however, was more apparent than real, because in this philosophy, which resumed 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 πνευματικός). Thus there was perfect equivalence on the metaphysical plane among nature, necessity, providence, Jupiter, and f., explicitly affirmed in the Stoic compilation De mundo (7, 401 b 9 ff.) of Ps. Aristotelo and many times by Seneca (De benef., IV, 8, 3; De proc., V, 7).
The effort of the Aristotelians, of Epicurus himself, and of the Neoplatonists was directed toward freeing the problem of human existence from the shoal on which earlier philosophy had left II. Hence the rich flowering, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, of treatises on f. The most noteworthy AFRODITE (v.), who, directly confronting Stoic theory, first removes free actions and those of the physical world that occur through art or by chance from the domain of f.; moreover, he admits that even physical phenomena believed to be necessary (nature) can, in their unfolding, be impeded by intervening causes, so that natural phenomena are all, at their foundation, contingent by nature (ἐνάργεια). Plotino criticized, along with the Stoic position, Alessandro’s Aristotelian solution (Eun., III, 1, 8–9) and based human freedom on the independence of individual souls. In the later Neoplatonism of Procio, an effort was made to accentuate the revival of primitive Platonism filtered through Orphic doctrines. There are three causes of order: nemesis (Ἀδράστεια), necessity (Ἀνάγκη), and f. (Εἱμαρμένη); the first intelligible, the second supercosmic, and the third intracosmic. The demiurge draws nourishment from the first, subsists in the second, and generates the third: “just as nemesis is the nexus of laws in the world of divine things, so f. forms the nexus of laws of the material world, which the demiurge writes in souls and first of all in the ‘Anima mundi’” (Procio, In Timaeum, 41 E, ed. E. Diehl, III, p. 274).
In any event, after the apparent serenity of Stoic theory, the Neoplatonic solution was the one that best expressed the Greek spirit: although it knew that there was no salvation for the individual, it nevertheless held his aspirations high by glorifying the ideal, the fullness, and the happiness of the universal causes. For the individual, however, f. is inexorable. Hector, before the attack on Achilles in which he will meet his death, seeks to console Andromache by begging her not to grieve, since no one can escape f. (Hinde, VI, 487). Above all, death is fatal to everyone, and it is useless to implore the gods, as Euripides has the chorus sing to Admeto, who was lamenting his beloved Alessi (985–87). The gods themselves do not escape f. and cannot act against it: “Sunt fata deum, sunt fata locorum” (Stazio, Sylune, III, 1, 11); “Fata irrevocabiliter ius suum peragunt nec ulla commoventur prece” (Seneca, Quant nat., II, 35). The poets and panegyrists of the Empire wanted the gods, the princes, the most excellent men, and the philosophers themselves to escape the iron claws of f. (Bidez-F. Cumont, Magas hellenistic, II, Paris 1958, p. 244); but these are redundant voices that have been unable to disperse the dark horizon enveloping the whole of Greco-Roman paganism. From the philosophers the people had taken the representation of the Parcae (Μοῖραι), daughters of Necessity charged with distributing the time of human life: Atropo for the past, Cloto for the present, and Lachesi for the future (Ps. Aristotelo, De mundo, 7, 401 b 18 ff.). The practice of oracles and the enormous development of the mystery religions, into which decadent Greco-Roman civilization plunged with desperate frenzy at the appearance of Christianity, are attributable to the background of fatalism from which pagan civilization never definitively detached itself.
For Christians, the f. of the pagans is an “empty name,” invented by the demon to deceive human beings and conceal the glaring errors of false oracles; it was even combated by a pagan philosopher (Alessandro di Afrodisia), as Eusebio di Cesarea demonstrates with satisfaction (Praep. ev., VI, 9: PG 21), making extensive use of pagan and Christian sources. In particular, the doctrine of f. directly contradicts the foundations of Christian life, namely divine Providence, human freedom, and the efficacy of prayer to God and of correction in the formation of individual conscience (cf. s. Agostino, Epist. 256 and Langadio and Nemesio, De natura hominis, chap. 55 ff.: PG 40, 741 ff.). Therefore, having rejected the doctrine, some Fathers also wished to reject the term (s. Gregorio Magno). Those who retained it, such as s. Agostino and s. Tommaso, understood it to signify the series of finite causes insofar as it is preordained by God for the attainment of a given effect, and in which the possibility is included that God may act whenever he wills, in every sphere of being and at the moment that in his wisdom he judges appropriate (Sum. Theol., 1st, q. 116, nn. 1–4).
It belongs to the character of Hegelian philosophy to identify f. with the historicity of the Idea and thus to interpret it as the “unity of necessity or rationality and of causality or irrationality in becoming,” once “logicality becomes nature and nature spirit” (Hegel, Enciclopedia, III, § 575). The “amor fati” and the theory of the “eternal return,” which Nietzsche took as the formula of his Heracliteanism, are the product of the radical aestheticism to which his troubled and anti-Christian intellect abandoned itself (Also sprach Zarathustra, part 3: Della visione e dell’enigma, ed. A. Baeuncler [Die Umschuld 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.