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  I propose that yesterday's mighty duo of Fate and Fortune has been replaced by today's Chance and Choice as the predominant forces.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.