Paul Does Not Teach Fate

… in the rank of a household slave.

“For what I am doing, I do not understand” (Romans 7:15).

Some of the more ignorant Greeks, as one might expect, suppose that he means to confirm a myth, one which, I do not know how, they have decided to champion, deceiving and being deceived (2 Timothy 3:13). For they invent a Fate and a Fortune to suit their own opinion, then hand control of our affairs to things that do not exist, and so they rob man of what most befits him: I mean that he should live freely, with an unhindered and voluntary inclination toward whatever course of action he chooses.

By subjecting him, as it were, to necessity and to the limits and decrees laid down by those powers, they do no small wrong to those who live this life. For if, on their view, someone goes on to do what is unlawful, since he cannot escape the nod of Fate even if he should wish to, no one in his right mind would blame him at all, even if he were seen doing wrong. What he had to do by necessity and not by choice would surely leave him beyond blame and punishment, if he were caught having done it. And it would not be very sensible to praise the gentle and well-ordered man either. For what if he became such a man not by his own will, but carried into it by another’s nod, or rather because Fortune rose up against him with a necessity he could not fight?

It is therefore wholly out of tune to say that the teacher of the noblest things is swept along with the quibbles of the Greeks, or to think that the one who became steward of the divine mysteries for us trails behind their folly, if he says, “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I do not practice what I want, but I do what I hate” (Romans 7:15).

If someone should insist on it, and choose to think that Paul has assigned to Fate and Fortune the authority over our affairs, how could one not rightly put this question to the apostle: “If we are caught in harsh and unyielding necessities and are in no way masters of what we do or leave undone, but rather yield to others as our rulers and are kept from acting by our own judgment, how did you yourself write to us, ‘Or do you not know, brothers (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a person for as long as he lives?’ (Romans 7:1)”

So the law has dominion over the living in a certain way. For it will surely be idle among the dead; it does not set its bounds for them (how could it?), but for those who still spend their life in the body. It crowns with praise the one who habitually does well, and it votes punishment against the profane. How then will the Lawgiver be a holy judge, if he punishes as sinners those whom Fortune compelled to fall into sin against their will? Or rather, why did he lay down the law at all?

For those who have it in their power to do whatever they wish, the law sets a holy penalty if, when they could have won approval by giving their mind to good deeds, they have themselves preferred the more shameful things and exchanged the better for what the law condemns. But for those who have the yoke of necessity hanging over them, and who always turn whichever way their rulers please, the decree is, I think, superfluous. And yet how is it not true to say that not even …