Postscript

Did I actually leave out Kant? Also Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Presuppositional in my apologetics, and holding to the bondage of the will and to total depravity, Kuhn made me respond as I read it, "Yeah, that's what I thought before I picked up the book.

A preliminary plan

Before looking at some of the issues that will need attention, I would first like to record a few of the authors and books of the past that have sparked my interest further in this subject.  Augustine, in his City of God, attributes the putative deeds of pagan gods to demons.  A couple of other ancient Christian authors I have read (the apologists perhaps?) have done the same, but I do not recall who.  He even assigns to those demons the same names as the pagans gave their gods.  Although the influence of the spirit world upon historical events may be completely outside the domain of historical writing, it is not outside the field of the philosopher of history.  Augustine also spills copious ink maligning individual deities and daemons, including Fate and Fortune. 

In the opening chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes presents his view of the constitution of man and prepares the way for his epistemology to follow.  Although this source will probably not be very fruitful in further study, it did open my eyes to some ways that epistemology and anthropology bear on my subject.

Boethius provides an excellent bridge between the pagan and the Christian way of thinking.  The pagan worldview was being displaced in his day by the Christian worldview.  His treatment of fate and fortune give him the guise of a pagan, but the work was conceived in the heart of a Christian.

I need to go back and read Book 2 of Aristotle's Politics.  At the time I read it, I recognized something important to my subject, but I cannot remember what it was.  I need a place to record ideas like this as they come to me.  Likewise, there I have lost memory of pertinent passages in Descartes, Pascal, and even Hume. 

An investigation of the relationship between cause and effect will inevitably lead along the trail begun by Aristotle and continued through Lucretius, Augustine, Aquinas (whom I have not yet read) and Berkely.  Long ago I purposed the work through the index entries "Fate," "Cause," and "Chance" in Great Books of the Western World for other old authors whom I have missed.

Second, I will need to collect the issues that will need to be addressed in one place.  Since this investigation could easily become the starting point for a rambling discourse into almost any field of study, there must be some kind of boundary to mark off its territory.  Rather than using a definition as a boundary marker, perhaps I can just list similar fields which bear upon the subject, being careful as I feel my way through not to go too far afield.  Such a method would not suit a dissertation prospectus, but here, I can set my own rules.  A simple list will have to do. It is getting late.

Epistemology. There are several points of contact here.
Historiography.  What is the historian's role in interpreting and recording history?  What are his methods?
Ontology.  This is at the heart of the relation between cause and effect.
Theology.  The real starting point for this study.
Sociology.  How does each worldview affect the way we live in this world?  This is the field which I know least.
History of the philosophy of history.  What others have thought and written through time.  I need a less unwieldy name for this.

I will update this list as I think of more.

Next blog . . .
I would like to disclose my burden for Christian historians who will employ a historical method derived from a distinctively Christian philosophy of history to reinterpret history.  We believers have been following conservative mainstream historians too long.  I want to know what God was doing  in the history of eighteenth century France, for example, without my having to strain my imagination to perceive it as a world in which the God I know was active.

Next next blog . . .
Imagine a world in which God is . . .

The Story

Herodotus, that clever old storyteller, recounts one of his most colorful tales as the correspondence written between Polycrates, the ever-victorious tyrant of Samos, and his friend Amasis, Pharaoh of Egypt.  Amasis found the persistent success of Polycrates' exploits disconcerting.  How could any man go through life with only good luck, unbalanced by any measure of bad luck?  If you want to avoid the inevitable turn of fortune's wheel, advised Amasis, bring it upon yourself first.  Discard your most valuable possession into the sea, and discharge your debt to bad luck with it.   Polycrates agreed, chose to part with an expensive ring, and threw it to the waves.  Later that day a fisherman  caught an enormous fish worthy of a king's table, and presented it to Polycrates.  When his cook gutted the fish, he discovered the very same ring inside, and returned it to the king.  Herodotus puts the moral of the story in the response of Amasis, who breaks off his friendship for fear lest he also be dragged down with Polycrates when his inevitable ruin came (Hdt. 3.39-43).

When I first read this story I began wondering how someone would do such a reckless act as to throw away something dear to him just to avoid something worse, when nothing worse was yet foreseen.  Why did Polycrates think he was facing a dilemma between assured future disaster and self-imposed loss?  The answer was simple, although it took me a while to understand it.  Herodotus and I have different worldviews; different ways of seeing the relation between cause and effect.  To him, the course of events is guided by a force personified as Fortune, whose method of distributing welfare and calamity were arbitrary, unplanned, and inconstant.  Fortune has no ultimate destination toward which she is driving history forward, only a pair of scales with which she apportions good and evil to all men in roughly equal measure.  Hence, Judgment Day to Polycrates was not a remote escahological event before the throne of a god, but a time in this life when Fortune would balance the scales.

I believe in the God of the Bible, who dispenses justice in this life, but leaves the ledgers unbalanced until He rectifies the imbalance at the Great White Throne judgment.  Today, there are still other views.  I propose that yesterday's mighty duo of Fate and Fortune has been replaced by today's Chance and Choice as the predominant forces.

From the day I first read this story, I have been looking for a name for the category of ways of perceiving the relation between cause and effect.  Perhaps we can call this "the philosophy of cause and effect," or "causality,"or "eventuality," or more pedantically, "the telic nature of history."  I have still not decided on a name.  Since then I have done some reading on the philosophy of history, specifically, the speculative philosophy of history, and discovered that my quest had brought me to other related issues, which I hope to record here in the future. Not much has been written in this area since Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History.  I have not yet found a Christian treatment of this subject.  Perhaps it is time that someone write a Christian philosophy of history (not a Christian theology of history, about which much has been written).

This blog will become my notepad of ideas as I try to develop  my own Christian philosophy of history from a Protestant Calvinist perspective.  It will also provide for me a chance to exercise my rusty writing skills.  I do not expect that anyone will read or comment on this blog, but all are welcome to do so.