Better not to be Born?
Homer says that humanity is weak and worried. Theognis, the Sicilian, cries out: ‘The best fate for a person would be not to be born, not to see the rays of the sun.’
Euripides is fully in agreement with them: when someone is born, everyone ought to join together in weeping for him. How much misery he has come to suffer! On the other hand, the one who dies is freed from care. We ought to accompany him to the grave with songs of joy and of congratulation!
Herodotus recalls that the Athenian Solon asserted: ‘The life of human beings is all a game of chance.’
Pythagoras and Plato maintain that there exists a population of souls without bodies. Some souls, they say, which have fallen into sin in some way, are sent for punishment into bodies. That is why Plato in his Cratilus says that ‘soma’ is ‘sema’, that is, the body is a tomb in which the soul must remain buried for a certain period.
However, Plato goes on to say the opposite in the third book of his Republic: there he maintains that we need to take care of the body so that it may be in harmony with the soul.
So it is clear that the philosophers contradict themselves. We, on the other hand, can demonstrate the strength of the teachings given by the Prophets and the Apostles.
Theodoret, The Cure of Pagan Diseases, 5, II (SC57, 229)
Free Will, not Fate
We are directed by free will and not, as some say, subjected to the compulsion of inescapable fate.
That is why God has given us the promise of his kingdom but also threatened us with punishment. He would not have done that to people in the toils of necessity. He would not have laid down laws, he would not have given us exhortations if we had been prisoners of destiny.
We are free and the masters of our fate. Just because we can grow evil from lack of effort or virtuous by striving, he uses the medicine of the fear of punishment to correct our course and the attraction of the hope of heaven to steer us towards wisdom.
Not only from this argument but from the way we normally behave, it is clear that our lives are not directed by fate.
For if fate were the cause of our actions rather than our free will, what justification have you for whipping the slave who is a thief? Why, if your wife has committed adultery, do you take her to court? When you do stupid things, why are you ashamed? Why are you intolerant of accusations and regard it as an insult if anyone calls you an adulterer or a fornicator or a drunkard or suchlike?
The myth of a compelling destiny is nonsense. Our lives are subject to no unavoidable fate. Everything, as I have argued, points to the beauty of free will.
John Chrysostom, Homily on Divine Love, 3 (PG56, 282)
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
