SOURCE: “Providence and Human Freedom in Christian Epicureanism: Gassendi on Fortune, Fate, and Divination,” in Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 86-101.

[In the following excerpt, Osler explicates the voluntarism that permeates Gassendi's work, placing his development of a mechanical philosophy in the context of seventeenth-century theological controversies. The critic finds that Gassendi's insistence on human free will, in addition to divine free will, distinguishes him from other materialist thinkers, including Thomas Hobbes.]

Fate is the decree of the divine will, without which nothing at all is done, … [and] Fortune is the concourse of events that, although unforeseen by men, nevertheless were foreseen by God.

Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum¹

Having ensured that divine providence played a major role in his mechanical philosophy, Gassendi turned to the question of human freedom in Book III of the “Ethics,” the last part of the Syntagma philosophicum, entitled “On Liberty, Fortune, Fate, and Divination.”² In this concluding section of his magnum opus, Gassendi cast his discussion in the form of a debate among the major classical philosophies, particularly Stoicism and Epicureanism. The main issue was freedom—human and divine. While questions about fate, fortune, and divination may, at first glance, appear rather remote from the primary concerns of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, in fact they involve metaphysical issues central to the articulation of the mechanical philosophy: the extent of contingency and necessity in the world, the nature of causality, and the role of providence and the extent of human freedom in a mechanical universe.³ Gassendi's treatment of these issues reflects his underlying voluntarism.

Since classical times, natural philosophers had dealt extensively with questions about fate, fortune, and divination. The concept of fate was central to Stoicism, which had explained the world as governed by a deterministic, rational ordering principle, the Logos. According to Stoic doctrine, fate is the expression of the Logos in the causal nexus of a deterministic universe.⁴ This emphasis on causal necessity in the universe had provided foundations for the Stoic belief in astrology and other forms of divination, which were based on the assumption that every part of the universe is connected to every other by the Logos and that events in one realm (say, the heavens) can serve as signs for events taking place elsewhere (say, in human lives).⁵ Stoic fate was directly opposed to chance, which the Epicureans had incorporated into the universe by means of the clinamen or random swerve of atoms that they introduced to account for the collision of atoms and for free will. While Stoicism was compatible with the idea of providence, it was often interpreted as ruling out human freedom. Epicureanism, which allowed for free will, explicitly denied any kind of providential account of the world.

The evident contradictions between both of these classical philosophies, on the one hand, and the Christian doctrines of divine freedom, providence, and human freedom, on the other, stimulated discussions among early Christian thinkers, among the most influential of whom—on these issues—were St. Augustine, who rejected both Epicureanism and Stoicism, and Boethius, who attempted to fuse them with orthodox theology.⁶ These early Christian discussions seemed particularly relevant to the Renaissance humanists as they tried to come to grips with the recently recovered texts of the classical philosophers.⁷ Although the themes of fate, fortune, and human freedom were ubiquitous in Renaissance writing, one context in which they were particularly relevant was the debate over astrology, which gained prominence following Marsilio Ficino's (1433-99) translation and publication of the Hermetic corpus and other magical-mystical literature.⁸ Giovanni Pontano (1427/9-1503) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola both argued against astrology on the grounds that it limits human freedom in unacceptable ways.⁹

Pomponazzi reasserted the legitimacy of astrology, in De fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione, completed in 1520.¹⁰ Favoring Stoic metaphysics and ethics, he gave an account of contingency as it could be understood in a world ruled by deterministic laws. Contingency, according to Pomponazzi, is not an indication of indifference, “the possibility for an effect to be or not to be.” Rather, it refers “only to things which sometimes happen and sometimes do not, such as whether or not it will rain next month. If it does rain, that happens necessarily.” Likewise if it does not.¹¹ Since the human will falls within the “universal hierarchy of natural causes,” our intuition of free will is an illusion based on ignorance of the true causes of our actions.¹² Pomponazzi took great pains to show how this kind of Stoic determinism was compatible with moral responsibility. “Everything is therefore subject to the providential order of fate.”¹³ Given what he construed as a choice between divine providence and human freedom, Pomponazzi opted for the divine.¹⁴ However, in a self-contradiction that reveals the continuing pull of traditional Christian thought, he preserved human freedom by maintaining that “it is in the power of the will to will and to suspend an act—this freedom is preserved.”¹⁵ He noted that knowledge of freedom was the product of faith rather than of natural reason.¹⁶

Human freedom came under further assault at the hands of the Protestant reformers.¹⁷ Luther concluded his debate with Erasmus with the resounding statement that human freedom is incompatible with divine foreknowledge:

If we believe it to be true that God foreknows and predestines all things, that he can neither be mistaken in his foreknowledge nor hindered in his predestination, and that nothing takes place but as he wills it (as reason itself is forced to admit), then on the testimony of reason itself there cannot be any free choice in man or angel or any other creature.¹⁸

Calvin's doctrine of election similarly denied human freedom.¹⁹ In his providential relationship to humanity, God determines how people choose and thereby obviates their free will. “God, whenever he wills to make way for his providence, bends and turns men's wills, even in external things; nor are they free to choose that God's will does not rule over their freedom.”²⁰ In order to ensure God's freedom, Calvin was careful to distinguish his doctrine, “that particular events are generally testimonies of the character of God's singular providence,” from the “Stoics' dogma of fate:”²¹

We do not, with the Stoics, contrive a necessity out of the perpetual connection and intimately related series of causes, which is contained in nature; but we make God the ruler and governor of all things, who in accordance with his wisdom has from the farthest limit of eternity decreed what he was going to do, and now by his might carries out what he has decreed. From this we declare that not only heaven and earth and the inanimate creatures, but also the plans and intentions of men, are so governed by his providence that they are borne by it straight to their appointed end.²²

In the Catholic world, these controversies came to the fore in the aftermath of the Council of Trent (1545-63), which had addressed the question of formulating doctrine in response to the reformers' challenge.²³ Gassendi's discussion of fate and free will falls clearly within this context. By insisting on human freedom as he did, Gassendi placed himself among the followers of the Jesuit Luis de Molina, whose treatise Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione (1588) was adopted by his order in its renowned debate with the Dominicans on the relationship between divine grace and human free will.²⁴ The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez adopted Molina's views, defending and expanding them into a small treatise written in 1594 in response to a request by Pope Clement VIII.²⁵ The Dominicans had emphasized divine omnipotence to such an extent that they considered God's decree as imposing itself on people, determining their future actions. Although the Dominicans argued that this determination does not destroy free will, the Jesuits rejected their argument, adopting instead the views of Molina that attempted to preserve divine omnipotence without sacrificing human freedom.²⁶ Whereas the Dominicans had claimed that God's foreknowledge of human actions makes it impossible for those actions to have any other outcome than what God foresees, Molina's account of God's foreknowledge of future contingents seemed to leave more play for human freedom. Molina described three kinds of knowledge that God has of future contingents: (1) his knowledge of naturally necessary states of affairs; (2) his scientia media, or knowledge of conditional future contingents (i.e., knowledge of what would follow from any given state of affairs); and (3) knowledge of his own causal contribution to any state of affairs.²⁷ It was Molina's concept of scientia media that enabled him to say that God's foreknowledge does not necessarily determine future human actions: God knows that, given certain circumstances, Peter will deny Christ; but that conditional knowledge does not necessitate Peter's denial.

Gassendi's approach to these questions in Book III of the “Ethics” rests on two important principles: that a proper understanding of the world must include divine freedom, creation, and providence and that the possibility of ethics—moral choice and judgment—requires human freedom. His humanist bent led him to consider these issues in the rhetorical context of a debate among the ancient philosophers, especially the Epicureans and the Stoics.

If divine freedom played a central role in Gassendi's philosophy of nature, human freedom was the cornerstone of his ethics.²⁸ Moral choice and judgment depend, he argued, on the possibility of those choices being taken freely and deliberately. Actions taken either by accident or by necessity do not merit praise or blame.²⁹ “Freedom (libertas) consists in indifference.”³⁰ That is, the will and intellect are said to be free if they are equally able to choose one or another of possible options and are not in any way determined to one or the other.³¹ Real freedom, understood as indifference, belongs only to rational beings and differs from what Gassendi called willingness (libentia). Willingness characterizes the actions of boys, brutes, and stones, agents lacking the capacity for rational choice.³² Human freedom is also a concomitant of voluntarist theology; for if any human action were determined necessarily, the universe would contain some element of necessity that would restrict God's power and freedom.

Having articulated his underlying assumptions—namely, a voluntarist theology and a conception of human nature incorporating free will—Gassendi proceeded with his analysis of fortune, fate, and divination. Although he considered them in the context of ancient philosophy, this humanist device was a ploy for discussing some of the most controversial theological and natural philosophical issues of the early seventeenth century. These concepts challenged his Christian, voluntarist, providential view of God, nature, and human nature, by calling for the elimination of either creation, providence, or free will.

Gassendi began his discussion of fortune and chance by adopting a standard, classical definition: Fortune is an unexpected consequence, a cause by accident. To illustrate his meaning, he cited Aristotle's example of a man who discovers treasure while digging in the ground to plant a tree.³³ Finding a treasure is a totally unexpected consequence of his act. While the digging preceded the discovery, it was not the cause of the discovery except accidentally, since the discovery of treasure is not the usual or natural outcome of digging in the ground. Such unexpected consequences are called fortuitous in connection with agents that act freely; they are called chance in connection with inanimate objects.³⁴ An example of chance would be the occurrence of a storm in the west at sunset. Both events—the storm and the sunset—are the outcome of natural causes, but their coincidence in space and time is both unpredictable and unanticipated. According to Gassendi, fortune and chance are both expressions of contingency in the world. Like fortune, chance is the name given to the kind of contingency that describes an event that may or may not happen in the future. An event that is said to be caused by chance or fortune is one that results from the unexpected concourse of several apparently unrelated causes. In the case of the unexpected discovery of the treasure, there is the concourse of the original burial of the treasure with the present digging in the ground.³⁵ Each event is the perfectly natural outcome of a series of causes. The two series are unrelated, however, and so their concourse is unexpected: Therein lies the element of chance or fortune, concepts that reflect our ignorance rather than the state of the world. “Fortune [or chance] is truly nothing in itself … only the negation of foreknowledge and of the intention of the events.”³⁶

Certain misunderstandings render the concept of fortune problematic. Those who reify fortune and call it divine—a position that even Epicurus had rejected—are ignorant of the real causes of the events in question.³⁷ Epicurus had, rather, equated fortune with chance and denied that “there is divine wisdom in the world.”³⁸ He had thus compared life to a game of dice. Here he had erred, according to Gassendi, because he had failed to appreciate that divine providence touches every aspect of nature and of human life.³⁹

Fortune and chance, understood as unanticipated outcomes of unexpected concourses of natural causes, can easily be incorporated into an orthodox philosophy of nature by including divine will and providence among the efficient causes operating in the world.⁴⁰ Opposing Epicurean materialism and emphasizing the limits of human knowledge, Gassendi thus believed he could reinterpret one of the important components of Epicureanism in a theologically suitable fashion. Accordingly, he defined fortune as “the concourse of events which, although unforeseen by man, were foreseen by God; and they are connected by a series of causes.”⁴¹ In other words, events that seem fortuitous to us are nevertheless providential, resulting from God's design, despite our ignorance of the causal sequences producing them.

Whereas fortune and chance raise questions about the nature of contingency, causality, and providence in the world, fate points to the complex problem of free will and determinism. Some interpretations of fate, as Gassendi understood or misunderstood them, seemed to incorporate a kind of natural necessity that would restrict both divine and human freedom. It is this necessitarian interpretation of the notion of fate—whether by ancient philosophers or contemporary theologians—to which Gassendi was primarily opposed.⁴² The question of fate and its relation to free will had special relevance in the context of post-Reformation debates about free will. The reformers, especially the Calvinists, seemed to have denied human as well as divine freedom—at least regarding matters of salvation—with their doctrines of predestination and election. The Dominican approach to predestination and divine foreknowledge suffered from similar problems. In working out his own interpretation of the concept of fate in dialogue with the ancient philosophers, Gassendi participated in one of the most heated theological controversies of his own day.

He observed that there are two chief views about fate: that it is something divine and that it is merely natural. Among those who regarded fate as divine, he counted the Platonists and the Stoics. The former group defined fate as “the eternal God or that reason, which disposes all things from eternal time, and thus binds causes to causes.”⁴³ In this sense, Plato (429-347 B.C.) had sometimes considered fate to be part of the soul of the world, sometimes “the eternal reason and law of the universe.” The Stoics Zeno (366-c. 264 B.C.) and Chrysippus (280-206 B.C.) had defined fate as “the motive force of matter and the spiritual force and governing reason of the order of the universe.” Seneca (c. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) had gone so far as to identify fate with the god Jove.⁴⁴

Despite the apparently theological and providential orientation of the Stoic interpretation of fate, Gassendi found its necessitarianism objectionable: “This necessity seems to be of such a kind that it completely removes the liberty of all human action and leaves nothing within our judgment.”⁴⁵ Such negation of free will would deprive life of meaning. In a world ruled by fate, there would be no place for plans, prudence, or wisdom, since everything would happen according to fate. “All legislators would be either fools or tyrants, since they would command things [to happen] that were either always to be done or that we absolutely cannot do.”⁴⁶ Since there would be no freedom of action, no action would be subject to moral judgment. All contingency in the universe would be eliminated. Consequently, all divination, prayer, and sacrifice would be rendered useless.⁴⁷

Among those who considered fate to be something merely natural, Gassendi distinguished those who thought of fate as absolutely binding and those who did not. As Lisa Sarasohn has shown, Gassendi created a dialogue between Democritus (460-c. 356 B.C.) and Epicurus to represent the views of Hobbes in contrast to his own.⁴⁸ The hard determinism and materialism endorsed by Democritus in this section of the Syntagma philosophicum constitute the nightmare feared by Christian mechanical philosophers. Hobbes in fact held such views. His treatise Of Liberty and Necessity, in which he supported a deterministic position on the free-will controversy, was published without his permission in 1654 by the Anglican Bishop John Bramhall, who argued against Hobbes.⁴⁹ Hobbes then published The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656) which contained both Bramhall's treatise and his own replies.⁵⁰ Although this work was published after Gassendi's death, Gassendi was directly acquainted with Hobbes' views from their interactions in Paris around 1641 or possibly even earlier.⁵¹

In the dialogue between Democritus and Epicurus in Book III of the “Ethics,” Gassendi put Hobbes' opinions in the words of Democritus, the ancient advocate of hard determinism. Democritus had held the view that “every event has a cause and that the same cause is always followed by the same effect” and that the truth of determinism rules out human freedom.⁵² He conceived of fate as natural necessity. In Gassendi's presentation, Democritus' view was similar to that of the Stoics, shorn, however, of any remnant of theology: “Democritus taught … that Necessity is nothing other than … the motion, impact, and rebounding of matter, that is, of atoms, which are the matter of all things. Whence it can be understood that ‘Material Necessity’ is the cause of all things that happen.”⁵³ Democritus claimed that since everything, including the human soul, is composed of atoms, there is no room for real freedom in the universe.⁵⁴ Not only freedom, but also error would be impossible in such a world.⁵⁵ And if everything were necessarily determined by the motions and collisions of atoms, there would be no room for divine providence.⁵⁶

In contrast to Democritus, who maintained absolute necessity since nothing can impede a cause from producing its effect,⁵⁷ Epicurus believed that the necessity in nature is not absolute. Arguing on logical grounds, he claimed that it is impossible simultaneously to hold that all statements are either true or false and that there is absolute necessity in nature, for to do so would entail giving truth-value to statements about future contingents, something Epicurus regarded as impossible. Following Aristotle in his famous discussion of tomorrow's sea battle,⁵⁸ Epicurus “admitted this complex as truth, ‘Either Hermachus will be alive tomorrow or he will not be alive.’” But Epicurus could not accept the possbility that either one of the disjuncts—“It is necessary that Hermachus be alive tomorrow” or “It is necessary that Hermachus not be alive tomorrow”—be true; for “There is no such necessity in nature.”⁵⁹ Epicurus thought that necessity could apply only to statements about the past and present: The events described have already occurred or not occurred, and so statements describing them have a determined truth-value. However, statements about the future have an undetermined truth-value, so we cannot reason about them with necessity.⁶⁰ Since, according to Epicurus, we cannot have knowledge of future contingents, it follows that there is no such necessity in nature.⁶¹

As for events that occur by plan or by fortune, these involve human freedom, which Epicurus had tried to preserve by adding the clinamen, or random swerve, to the otherwise steady downward motion of the Democritean atoms. According to Gassendi, Epicurus had introduced the swerve with the explicit intention “that it shatter the necessity of fate and thus ensure the liberty of souls.”⁶² Despite Epicurus' good intentions, Gassendi did not find his solution to the free-will controversy convincing. Epicurus had thought that the unpredictability of the swerve preserves free will.⁶³ Gassendi did not agree. Events would still always happen by the same chain of necessary consequences. “What always happens by the same necessity would happen by a variety of motions, collisions, rebounds, swerves in a certain external series, like a chain of consequences.”⁶⁴ Since Epicurus had argued that the soul consists of atoms, its choices would simply be determined by the long causal sequence of the material world. Gassendi concluded that the clinamen was therefore not a satisfactory explanation of human freedom.

Gassendi found all the traditional accounts of fate to be wanting, primarily for theological and ethical reasons. The deterministic, reductionist atomism of Democritus left room for neither divine providence nor free will:

Therefore, the opinion of Democritus must be exploded inasmuch as it can by no means stand with the principles of the Sacred Faith (because of having removed from God the care and administration of things), and it is thus manifestly repugnant to the light of nature by which we experience ourselves to be free.⁶⁵

The passion driving Gassendi's attack on Democritus can in part be explained by his identification of “Hobbes as Democritus reincarnated,” for Gassendi found his contemporary's hard determinism entirely unacceptable.⁶⁶ Epicurus deserved criticism as well, despite his good intentions in attempting to preserve free will, for by denying the possibility of knowing future contingents, he had denied God such knowledge. He “thus supposes that there is no creation of things and no divine providence.”⁶⁷

In order to embrace the evident facts of both causal order and contingency within the bounds of his mechanical philosophy, Gassendi undertook a Christian reinterpretation of the concepts of fate, fortune, and chance, providing a providential understanding of these concepts, just as Augustine had done centuries earlier:⁶⁸

To the extent that Fate can be defended, so can Fortune. If we agree that Fate is the decree of the divine will, without which nothing at all is done, truly Fortune is the concourse of events that, although unforeseen by men, nevertheless was foreseen by God; and they are the connected series of causes or Fate.⁶⁹

Thus, fate is nothing more than God's decree, and fortune and chance are expressions of contingency in the world coupled with human ignorance of the causes of fortuitous events. Fortune, chance, and fate are not autonomous principles running the world. Even if all events have causes and even if God can foresee the unrolling of cause and effect—a foresight not available to humans—both the causes and their effects ultimately depend on divine will. The universe remains a contingent place.

Gassendi's reinterpretation of fortune, chance, and fate left plenty of room for the exercise of divine freedom and providence. The fact that certain events appear to be fortuitous in no way impairs divine omniscience. They appear fortuitous only because of the limitations of human knowledge:

The word Fortune … indicates two things, the concourse of causes and the previous ignorance of events; Fortune can thus be admitted afterward with respect to man but not God; and on account of this … nothing stands in the way of our saying that Fortune is a part not only of Fate, but also of divine providence, which foresees for man what he cannot foresee [for himself].⁷⁰

Far from imparting a randomness to life's events, fortune itself is an expression of divine foresight and providence. Fortune is an expression of human limitation, but it in no way impugns divine power and freedom.⁷¹

Reconciling fate with divine providence was not so difficult for Gassendi. A more challenging problem was to reconcile fate with free will. Here again he turned to theology for his solution, and here the connections between Gassendi's discussion and post-Reformation theology become explicit. His discussion was, in effect, a debate with the overly deterministic theologies of Calvin and the Dominicans: “We call Fate, with respect to men, nothing other than that part of Divine Providence that is called Predestination by theologians … in order that predestination and thus Fate can be reconciled with liberty.”⁷² Appealing to the vexatious doctrine of predestination seems an odd way to clarify anything. Indeed, Gassendi acknowledged that the problem of reconciling predestination and divine foreknowledge with human freedom had troubled both philosophers and theologians since antiquity.

God's foreknowledge of Peter's denial had challenged some philosophers and theologians because they had thought that such foreknowledge entailed a kind of fatalism that denies human freedom.⁷³ Peter's free will could be saved, but only at the expense of God's omniscience and veracity:

Either God knew definitely and certainly that Peter would deny Christ, or he did not. It cannot be said that he did not know, because he predicted it and he is not a liar: and unless he knew, he would be neither omniscient nor God. Therefore, he knew it definitely and certainly. Thus, it could not be that Peter would not deny. If God knew and Peter did not deny … it would be argued of God that his foreknowledge was false and that he was a liar. If Peter cannot deny, then he is not free to deny or not deny. Therefore he is without freedom.⁷⁴

In other words, either God's veracity and omniscience or Peter's free will must be denied. Gassendi found both alternatives unacceptable.

In order to resolve this difficulty, Gassendi invoked the Scholastic distinction between absolute necessity and necessity by supposition:

For example, that double two is four or that yesterday comes before today is absolutely necessary, although that you lay the foundations of your house or leave the city is not necessary: nevertheless if you suppose that you will build your house or that you will be in the country, then for you to lay the foundation or leave the city is, I say, necessary from supposition. Truly it is manifest from this distinction, that absolute necessity hinders that by which a certain action is elicited, however that which is from supposition does not hinder (for he who will lay down a foundation absolutely can not lay it, and he who will leave the city can not leave).⁷⁵

Molina's theory of scientia media provided Gassendi with a way of resolving these difficulties by interpreting the necessity of God's foreknowledge as necessity by supposition:⁷⁶

Peter's future denial was seen by God necessarily, but nevertheless by a necessity from supposition, because of which nothing of liberty is taken away. … [T]hus although it was determined from the beginning that [Peter] would deny him, he does it freely in whatever manner he did it; afterward, since he did it, it was necessary.⁷⁷

Gassendi's concept of necessity contains a temporal component. The act of denial does not become necessary, despite being foreseen by God, until Peter commits it. Once the denial has occurred, it is part of the past that cannot be undone:

If indeed when it is said that Peter denied necessarily this necessity is understood, not as something that was truly in Peter antecedently that forced him to act, but only now that it is in this time that is in the past and cannot not be past, thus the thing that is done by him is done … and cannot not be done by him.⁷⁸

Necessity of this kind in no way impinges on divine freedom and omniscience, because God could foresee Peter's free choice. “Thus, it can be said that Peter denied not because God foresaw it, but God foresaw since Peter would deny.”⁷⁹ God's knowledge of future events does not cause those events to happen; but, on account of his omniscience, he has foreknowledge because they will happen. Since some of those events are the acts of free agents, there is no contradiction between God's foreknowledge and human freedom.

Gassendi addressed at some length the question of how to interpret the doctrine of predestination. He rejected the Calvinist view that the members of the elect and the reprobate had been chosen from eternity. He also rejected the Dominican view that God's foreknowledge deprives human agents of their freedom. Instead, he opted for the more liberal, Molinist position. According to Gassendi, God created people with free will as well as the causal order of the world. He knows how an individual will respond in any particular situation, even though that individual will respond freely. In this way, God's foreknowledge in no way restricts the liberty of free agents.⁸⁰ Even if everything is included within the domain of divine decree, that inclusion does not eliminate human freedom, for God created free agents as well as determined ones.

If discussions about fate and fortune really concerned the roles of contingency and necessity in the universe, divination raised questions about the nature of causality. Divination had played a central role in Stoic thought, where it had been invoked to provide evidence for the causal interconnectedness of the universe.⁸¹ For Gassendi, delineating the boundary between the natural and supernatural was an important part of the task of determining the limits of mechanical causality in the world. This problem was not unique to the mechanical philosophers. All natural philosophers in the period—Aristotelians and natural magicians, as well as mechanical philosophers—faced it in the questions raised by witchcraft, demonology, and other occult pursuits.⁸²

The immediate context of Gassendi's concern with divination, as well as that of his contemporaries Mersenne, Naudé, and La Mothe le Vayer, was its notriously naturalistic treatment by Pomponazzi in De naturalium effectum admirandorum causis sive de incantationibus (1556) and De fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione (1520). In order to account for many extraordinary effects without appealing to demons, Pomponazzi had sought to explain both natural and human history as determined by natural, astrological, and various occult causes. In so doing, he affirmed an Averroism far more radical than that condemned in 1277. The strong negative reaction to his books was exacerbated by his role in debates about the immortality of the soul.⁸³

Whether or not Gassendi had actually read Pomponazzi's works himself, he doubtless knew about them from his friend Mersenne, who went to great lengths to refute Renaissance naturalism in Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623) and L'impiété des déistes (1624).⁸⁴ Mersenne rejected the Renaissance naturalists as atheists because they “attribute everything to nature alone” and deny God a causal role in the world.⁸⁵ In particular, he attacked the naturalists' belief in astrology because it is contrary to the teachings of the church fathers, because it is based on an unacceptable mysticism and a false theory of causation founded on the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, and because it is too restrictive of human freedom.⁸⁶ Moreover, “only true science, based on an idea of nature submissive to intelligible laws, would permit him to save religion, morality, and science.”⁸⁷

While Gassendi rejected Stoic fatalism and the more recent naturalism associated with it, he defended certain forms of divination on theological grounds. In the final chapter of Book III of the “Ethics,” entitled “The Meaning of Divination, or the Foreknowledge of Future and Merely Fortuitous Things,” Gassendi supported divination in opposition to Epicurus, whose blanket denial of the possibility that knowledge of future contingents might be compatible with human freedom had led him to reject the possibility of any kind of divination. That Epicurus was wrong, Gassendi argued, can be demonstrated straightaway by the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies.⁸⁸

Gassendi began his discussion of divination with the consideration of demons, which some ancient thinkers had invoked as part of a naturalistic way of explaining how divination works. Demons concerned Gassendi, because the question of their existence bore on the deeper question of the causal order of the world and the boundaries between natural and supernatural causation. He rehearsed and rejected various ancient doctrines about demons—that they are particles of the anima mundi, that they have a corporeal nature, that they are halfway between humans and gods, that they move the heavenly spheres, that they are of some particular number or another.⁸⁹ The problem with all of these views is that they remove divine activity from the ordinary workings of the world. “They judged that it was alien to the divine majesty to care for all particulars himself,”⁹⁰ thereby impugning divine power by implying that God uses ministers to carry out his will because of some defect in his nature. Gassendi countered with a voluntarist argument: “God uses ministers, not because of disgrace, impotence, or need, but because he wished it for the state of things that is the world. He judged it congruous.”⁹¹ Reasserting nature's utter dependence on divine will, he noted that God, “if he had wished to institute another order, he would not have done a disgraceful thing nor would it testify to any impotence or need.”⁹² Unlike the highest prince in his realm, to whom the philosophers had compared him, God is actually present everywhere in the world, not just to his designated ministers. The philosophers had mistakenly substituted the activity of these demons for both God's general and special providence.⁹³ Since demons were generally understood to work by natural means, Gassendi sought to maintain a role for the supernatural by defending God's providential activity in the running of the world.

In fact, he believed that various orders of angels and demons do exist as purely spiritual beings, an opinion he based on “sacred scripture and … [which was] explained by theologians.”⁹⁴ But there are also many false superstitions about the activity of these creatures, exploits that are exaggerated by the poets. There are

many little stories which frequently fill your ears, from which you will often discover something difficult that is true, if you eliminate the fraud of impostors, the tricks of the crafty, the nonsense of old women, the easy credulity of the common people. Something must also be said about this kind of filthy magic, by which the unhappy person thinks himself carried away by he-goats. … [And] afterward, put to sleep by narcotic salves, they dream with a most vivid imagination [that they] were present in a most evil assemblage.⁹⁵

Although these and other temptations and possessions actually exist—scripture, the lives of the saints, and the successful practice of exorcism attest to that fact—the point is to attend to our own spiritual and moral state, our relationship to God by virtue of his special providence, rather than to excuse our sins by blaming evil demons.⁹⁶ A proper understanding of demons had not been available to the ancient philosophers who did not possess either the true faith or sacred Scripture, which teach us both of their existence as spiritual beings and of the limits of their powers.

Gassendi had embarked on this long discussion of demons because some ancient advocates of divination had appealed to them in order to explain their practices.⁹⁷ Since it is sometimes possible to predict the future, as scripture attests, one must consider “whether the prediction was made by the intervention of demons or the craftiness of the soothsayers or the credulity of those who asked for it.”⁹⁸ Although there are genuine cases of prophecy, many predictions are made of things that have natural causes and are “incapable of impediments, such as eclipses, risings of the stars, and other things of this kind, which depend on the determined disposition and constancy of the motions of the heavenly bodies.”⁹⁹ In such cases, there is no need to appeal to anything beyond natural causes.

As for genuine divination, Gassendi repeated the traditional Stoic doctrine that there are two kinds. One, like astrology or the ancient interpretations of signs—such as the flight, songs, and feeding of birds or the casting of lots or the interpretation of dreams—depends on art. The other kind does not¹⁰⁰ In the closest approximation to a joke in the ponderous Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi railed against “geomancers, hydromancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, and others … and last those astromancers or astrologers who … seek it from the stars,” all of them practitioners of “artificial divination.”¹⁰¹ If astrology, which holds the principal place among the arts of divination is “inane and futile, the others ought to be no less inane and futile.”¹⁰² Gassendi thus denied that divination by art, the kind the Stoics valued most, is divination at all because it is nothing but the observation of regular sequences of natural events, whether or not we understand the causes of those sequences.

In fact, Gassendi argued, any genuine divination would presume the existence of events that do not have causes.¹⁰³ Otherwise, nothing more would be involved in divination than the same kinds of conjectures used in any of the sciences that make predictions about future events. In all conjectural knowledge, we attend to the known causes of events and predict what will likely happen. Such predictions are conjectural, based on reasoning about our observed knowledge of the world. Divining is no different from this kind of conjectural science except that it frequently suffers from a deficit “of ratiocination and consultation.”¹⁰⁴ The Stoics had agreed, but in advocating astrology, they had confounded inductive methods with divination by art, which is based on an empirical understanding of the deterministic nexus of the world.¹⁰⁵

Gassendi's discussion of fortune, fate, and divination in Book III of the “Ethics” reveals his position on the major theological and ethical implications of the mechanical philosophy. His opposition to the hard determinism of Hobbes, the modern Democritus, was drawn from his voluntarist theology, which insisted on freedom, both human and divine. His emphasis on human freedom inclined him toward the more liberal, Molinist interpretation of predestination, probably the single most contentious issue in post-Reformation theology. His views on fortune, fate, and divination clearly situate him in the seventeenth-century debates about the philosophy of nature. He unambiguously advocated a baptized version of Epicurean atomism. By the same token, he clearly rejected the naturalistic Aristotelianism of Pomponazzi, the Stoic cosmological underpinnings of astrology, and the materialism of Hobbes. Gassendi's position on all these issues can be understood as reflecting his underlying theological assumptions, which informed his philosophy of nature at every level.

Notes

1. Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Gassendi, Opera omnia, 6 vols. (Lyon, 1658; facsimile reprint, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964), vol. 2, p. 840.

2. He had originally planned to include this section in the “Physics” as the conclusion of his discussion about God's role in the universe. For the dating of the “Ethics” and for the history of this section, see Louise Tunick Sarasohn, “The Influence of Epicurean Philosophy on Seventeenth Century Ethical and Political Thought: The Moral Philosophy of Pierre Gassendi,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979, chap. 5. See also the seventeenth-century English translation of François Bernier's abridgement of Book III of the “Ethics,” Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and, Liberty, collected from the works of the Learn'd Gassendus (London: Awnsham & John Churchil, 1699).

3. See John Sutton, “Religion and the Failures of Determinism,” in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition, edited by Stephen Gaukroger (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), pp. 25-51.

4. “Since the entire universe is governed by the divine logos, since, indeed, the universe is identical with the divine logos, then the universe, by definition, must be reasonable [sic]. The logos organizes all things according to the rational laws of nature, in which all events are bound by strict rules of cause and effect. Chance and accident have no place in the Stoic system. The causal nexus in the universe is identified with both fate and providence; fate, in turn, is rationalized and identified with the good will of the deity.” Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 31-2.

5. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2d edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 163-70; John M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1969), chap. 7; and S. Sambursky, The Physics of the Stoics (New York: Macmillan, 1959), pp. 65-71.

6. Antonio Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence, and Human Freedom,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 642.

7. Ibid., pp. 644-50.

8. Ibid., pp. 650-1. See also Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Vintage, 1969; first published 1964), chaps. 2-4.

9. Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence, and Human Freedom,” pp. 651-2.

10. Ibid., p. 654.

11. Ibid., p. 655.

12. Ibid., p. 656.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., pp. 656-7.

15. Pietro Pomponazzi, Libri quinque de fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione, edited by R. Le May (Lugano, 1957), 3, 8, 10, as translated by Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence, and Human Freedom,” p. 659.

16. Ibid., p. 659. See also Sutton, “Religion and the Failures of Determinism,” pp. 31-3.

17. For background on this controversy see Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 1-58; Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the Concordia), translated with an introduction and notes by Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), Preface; and Dale van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-1765 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), chap. 1.

18. Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio, translated by Philip S. Watson and B. Drewery, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, edited by E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), p. 332.

19. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill and translated by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), bk. III, chap. xxiv, sec. 5-6.

20. Ibid., bk. II, chap. iv, sec. 7.

21. Ibid., bk. I, chap. xvi, sec. 7.

22. Ibid., bk. I, chap. xvi, sec. 8.

23. See Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, translated by Dom Ernest Graf, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson, and St. Louis: Herder, 1957 and 1961; first published in German, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1957), vol. 2, chaps. 5-10. For summaries of the issues considered by the Council of Trent, see Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 407-9; and Hans J. Hillerbrand, Men and Ideas in the Sixteenth Century (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1969), pp. 91-6.

24. Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence, and Human Freedom,” p. 667. Sarasohn discusses Molina's influence on Gassendi at length. See Lisa T. Sarasohn, Freedom in a Deterministic Universe: Gassendi's Ethical Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming), chap. 5.

25. William Lane Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), p. 207; Calvin Normore, “Future Contingents,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 380-1.

26. See Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, Preface. See also Rivka Feldhay, “Knowledge and Salvation in Jesuit Culture,” Science in Context, 1 (1987): 204-5.

27. Paraphrased from Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, p. 23.

28. Lisa T. Sarasohn, “The Ethical and Political Philosophy of Pierre Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 20 (1982): 258-60.

29. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 821.

30. Ibid., p. 823.

31. A distinction of this kind between genuine freedom and necessitated choice has a long history, going back at least to Duns Scotus. See Miel, Pascal and Theology, p. 41. Gassendi's definition of “libertas” is very similar to that of Molina, who wrote: “Just as, in order for an act to be a sin it is not sufficient that it be spontaneous, but is instead necessary that it be free in such a way that, when the faculty of choice consents to it, it has the power not to consent to it, given all the surrounding circumstances obtaining at that time, so too in order for there to be merit or for an act to be morally good—indeed, even in order for there to be a free act that is indifferent to moral good and evil—it is necessary that when the act is elicited by the faculty of choice, it be within the faculty's power not to elicit it, given all the circumstances obtaining at that time.” Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, disputation 53, pt. 2, sec. 17, pp. 224-5.

32. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 822. Lisa T. Sarasohn discusses Gassendi's concepts of libertas and libentia in “Motion and Morality: Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, and the Mechanical World-View,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985): 371-3; and in “The Ethical and Political Philosophy of Pierre Gassendi,” p. 259. See also Sarasohn's extended discussion of these concepts in Freedom in a Deterministic Universe, chaps. 3 and 5.

33. Aristotle's example occurs in Metaphysics, V, 30 (1025a14-29), translated by W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p. 1619. For an extensive discussion of Aristotle's understanding of “coincidence” and “accident,” see Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle's Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980).

34. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 828.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 829.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 830.

39. Ibid., pp. 830-1.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., p. 840.

42. See Josiah B. Gould, “The Stoic Conception of Fate,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974): 17-32.

43. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 830.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., p. 831.

46. Ibid., pp. 831-2.

47. Ibid., p. 832.

48. Sarasohn, Freedom in a Deterministic Universe, chap. 6.

49. Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 110.

50. Thomas Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, Clearly Stated and Debated between Dr. Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, edited by Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London, 1839-45; reprinted Aalen: Scientia, 1962), vol. 5.

51. Sarasohn, Freedom in a Deterministic Universe, chap. 6.

52. Gassendi, Syntagma Philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, pp. 830-2. I take this definition of “hard determinism” from Sutton, “Religion and the Failures of Determinism,” p. 27.

53. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 834.

54. Ibid., p. 835.

55. Ibid., p. 834.

56. Ibid., p. 840.

57. Ibid., p. 837.

58. Aristotle, De interpretatione, translated by J. L. Ackrill, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Barnes, 18b7-25, vol. 1, p. 29.

59. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 837. Cicero discussed Epicurus' ideas about future contingents at some length. See Marcus Tullius Cicero, De fato, translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1953) pp. 233-5.

60. The concept of necessity employed by Epicurus is not the same as that currently in vogue among twentieth-century philosophers. See Normore, “Future Contingents,” pp. 358-81. See also the Introduction in William Ockham, Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, translated by Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 1-33.

61. Similar ideas can be found among some of the Stoics. See Rist, Stoic Philosophy, p. 122.

62. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 837. Gassendi's analysis of the relationship between the swerve of atoms and free will is borne out by modern scholarship, although the main source for this doctrine appears to have been Lucretius, whom Gassendi cited extensively, rather than Epicurus. See Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, pp. 56-61; and Rist, Epicurus, pp. 90-9.

63. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 838.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., p. 840.

66. Sarasohn, “Motion and Morality,” p. 369.

67. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2., p. 840.

68. Vincenzo Cioffari, “Fate, Fortune, and Chance,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, 4 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1973), vol. 2, p. 230; Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence, and Human Freedom,” p. 642.

69. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 840.

70. Ibid.

71. This providential interpretation of chance was shared by Gassendi's English contemporary, the Puritan divine William Ames, who argued in his Medulla theologica (1623), that the appeal to lots is not an appeal to chance, but to providence: “There is no power of rendering judgment in contingent events themselves and no other fortune judging them than the sure providence of God; so it follows that judgment must be expected in a special way from God's providence. Pure contingency itself cannot be a principal cause in deciding any question, nor can the man for whom the event itself is purely contingent direct it to such an end. Therefore, such direction is rightly to be expected from a superior power.” William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, translated by John D. Eudsden (Boston: United Church Press, 1968), II, xi, 10-11 (p. 272). See also Margo Todd, “Providence, Chance and the New Science in Early Stuart Cambridge,” Historical Journal, 29 (1986): 697-711.

72. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 841.

73. Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge, p. 59.

74. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 841.

75. Ibid.; my emphasis. Gassendi's talk about the “absolute necessity” of mathematical truths here should not lead us to conclude that he abandoned his voluntarism. In his debate with Descartes, he defended an empiricist, probabilist account of the epistemological status of mathematics. See Chapter 6. See Pierre Gassendi, Disquisitio metaphysica, seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa, edited and translated into French by Bernard Rochot (Paris: J. Vrin, 1962), pp. 468-73; in Opera omnia, vol. 3, pp. 374-5.

76. Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, p. 23. Sarasohn argues as well that Gassendi adopted the Molinist approach to the problem of predestination and divine foreknowledge. See Sarasohn, Freedom in a Deterministic Universe, chap. 5.

77. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 841.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., pp. 841-2.

80. Ibid., p. 844.

81. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, p. 66.

82. See Stuart Clark, “The Scientific Status of Demonology,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, edited by Brian Vickers (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 351-74.

83. See Brian P. Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic,” p. 273; Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence, and Human Freedom,” pp. 653-60; and Eckhard Kessler, “The Intellective Soul,” pp. 500-7, all in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Schmitt, Skinner, and Kessler. On Pomponazzi's naturalism, see Étienne Gilson, “Autour de Pomponazzi: Problématique de l'immortalité de l'âme en Italie au début du XVIe siècle,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire de Moyen Age, 28 (1961): 163-279. See also Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), chap. 5; Jean Céard, “Matérialisme et théorie de l'âme dans la pensée padouane: Le Traité de l'immortalité de l'âme de Pomponazzi,” Revue philosophique de France et l'étranger, 171 (1981): 25-48; and Olivier René Bloch, La philosophie de Gassendi: nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 310-11.

84. Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme, 2d edition (Paris: J. Vrin, 1971) chap. 3, esp. pp. 112-21.

85. Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim, translated by William L. Hine, in “Marin Mersenne: Renaissance Naturalism and Renaissance Magic,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, edited by Brian Vickers (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 167.

86. Lenoble, Mersenne ol la naissance du mécanisme, pp. 128-33.

87. Ibid., p. 133; my translation. See also Sutton, “Religion and the Failure of Determinism,” pp. 39-41.

88. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 847.

89. Ibid., pp. 849-51.

90. Ibid., p. 851.

91. Ibid.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid., pp. 851-2.

94. Ibid., p. 851.

95. Ibid., pp. 852-3.

96. Ibid., p. 852.

97. It should be noted that the most important philosophical account of divination came from the Stoics, whose account was thoroughly materialistic, owing nothing to the personal agency of demons. See Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, pp. 66-71.

98. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 853.

99. Ibid.

100. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, pp. 66-71. For the Ciceronian roots of this distinction, see De Divinatione, translated by William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1953), I, 12, 24, 72-92; II, 26.

101. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 854. Apparently this list of various sorts of diviners had a long history. Isidore of Seville wrote as follows in his Etymologies: “Varro dicit divinationis quattor esse genera, terram, aquam, aerem et ignem. Hinc geomantiam, hydromantiam, aeromantiam, pyromantiam dictam.” Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, edited by W. M. Lindsay (Oxford University Press, 1911), Lib. VIII, ix, line 13. I am grateful to Haijo Westra for bringing this point to my attention.

102. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 854. For a full account of Gassendi's rejection of astrology, see “Physics,” sec. II, bk. VI, “De effectibus siderum,” in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 713-52. This part of the Syntagma was translated into English in the seventeenth century. See Petrus Gassendus, The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology. Or Divination by the Stars (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1659). For the context of this polemic, see Jacques E. Halbronn, “The Revealing Process of Translation and Criticism,” in Astrology, Science, and Society: Historical Essays, edited by Patrick Curry (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987), pp. 197-217. Sarasohn thoroughly discusses Gassendi's views on astrology and their relationship to his ethical theory in Freedom in a Deterministic Universe, chap. 4.

103. Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 853.

104. Ibid., p. 855.

105. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, p. 67.