Against Fate

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1. 1Writing to a friend after the conversion of an old unbeliever, Eusebius, Gregory begins his account of a debate in Constantinople with a philosopher who held that every human life, choice, virtue, and vice is fixed by fate, which he defined astrologically as the necessary sequence produced by the interweaving of the stars.
2. 2Gregory asks whether fate is a God ruling all or the servant of a higher cause; since fate follows the movement of the stars and would not exist if they stood still, it cannot be master of all; the philosopher replies that fate is not a being but the result of the universe's sympathy, the stars' powers mixing like drugs.
3. 3The philosopher explains that the stellar outflow changes every instant and stamps each newborn like a seal in wax; Gregory ridicules the idea that a lifeless, partless instant could rule living, choosing beings, and argues that neither the star nor the child can be said to lead, since both are already in motion.
4. 4If births followed the ever-moving stars, births would never cease; Gregory reduces to absurdity the astrologers' fine divisions of the hour, each a supposed all-powerful portion, and contrasts the man who lives a happy century with the infant strangled at birth.
5. 5The inequality of human lots shows fate to be weak more often than strong; if it chooses happiness for one and misery for another born moments later, it is unjust; if it cares for neither, it is lifeless and without subsistence and cannot rule the living; at most it is the passing instant of time, which accompanies every motion alike.
6. 6If the motion of rivers, ships, or travellers makes no fates, neither does that of the stars; Gregory mocks the astrologers' signs (the servile Bull, the beneficent Ram) and argues that if the stars' properties are themselves fated, an infinite regress of fates follows.
7. 7The philosopher appeals to the success of horoscopes; Gregory replies that predictions of lifespan from bodily constitution are the physicians' conjectures, not fate, and that medicine can reverse them, as with Herodicus in Plato, and that a prediction of what may go either way is no proof of necessity.
8. 8Mass disasters, biblical (the flood, Sodom, the Red Sea, the Assyrians) and recent (the destruction of Nicomedia and of Thrace), kill people of every age and rank together, which refutes fate by birth; and fate cannot be assigned to a ship, whose building happens in many stages at different times.
9. 9Neither cities nor nations have a moment of birth to which fate could be tied, and conquerors like Hannibal, Caesar, and Alexander brought one fate on all; earthquakes strike uninhabited places as well, and since Moses says the earth was made with, indeed before, the stars, its local disasters have other causes than the stars.
10. 10Customs prove the power of free choice: the incestuous marriages of the Persians occur only where their laws are followed, and Jews everywhere, under every configuration of stars, are circumcised on the appointed day; Gregory then begins to explain predictions as the work of a power hostile to humanity, the opposite of God's goodness.
11. 11Demons sweeten their deceit with predictions and cures, as poisoners use honey; every kind of divination, from livers, birds, dreams, the prophetic water and the Pythian vapour, comes from the same demonic source and none proves fate; astrologers hedge their predictions, as when a usurper under Valens was encouraged by a horoscope and ruined; the whole aim is to turn people from God.