Abstract
Medieval philosophers may all have agreed that the gifts of fortune ultimately come as the just dispensation of a benevolent God. Such divine benefaction is provident and orderly, as Augustine put it, “because He is God, not fortune.”3 As I will elaborate in this chapter, however, when philosophers subsumed fortune within the higher order of providential causation and care, they made important discriminations about fortuitous phenomena and acknowledged the residual importance of eventfulness even when at pains to deny the immanent connection. Here we should already see why it is necessary to have recourse to something like the modern theory of event, insofar as the old term “fortune” threatens to foreclose debate over issues that were so obviously fraught for medieval thinkers. Anachronism, as this chapter will argue, indeed has its advantages. Given Augustine’s quarrel with the pagans whom he witnessed worshipping a goddess called Fortune, we can hardly expect him to have conceded much authority to fortune. Yet in disavowing fortune, he did not reject its given phenomena and ethical consequences. He comes to terms with the issue belatedly. In his Retractationes Augustine confesses his error in previous works that employed the word “fortune” too readily, inadvertently conferring credibility on pagan notions: But I regret that, in these three books of mine [viz., De Academicis libri tres], I mention fortune so often, although I did not intend that any goddess be understood by this term, but a fortuitous outcome of events in good and evil circumstances, either in our bodies or extraneous to them.
… all fortune is good. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy1 For you may be as practical as is predicable but you must have the proper sort of accident to meet that kind of a being with a difference. Joyce, Finnegans Wake2
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Notes
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), 2.9 [p. 269].
Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984)
Jorge J. E. Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1984), p. 108.
Boethius, De Trinitate 1.24–31 in H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, eds. and trans., Boethius: The Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 6–8.
See Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger, Library of Living Catholic Thought (Chicago: Regnery, 1964).
P. Mercken, “Transformations of the Ethics of Aristotle in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” Tommaso d’Aquino nel suo settimo centenario: Atti del Congr esso Internaziononale (Naples: Edizioni Domenicane Italiane, 1977), pp. 160–61
R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, Aristote: L’Éthique à Nicomaque (Louvain: Publicationes Universitaires, 1970).
Where the Nicomachean Ethics gets cited more than any other of Aristotle’s works, according to Mark D. Jordan, “Aquinas Reading Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers, ed. Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery, Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 229–49.
Cited in Jeffrey R. DiLeo, “Pierce’s Haecceitism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 27.1 (1991), p. 91.
See S. J. McGrath’s The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006)
John Caputo’s Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982)
Sonya Sikka’s Forms of Transcendence: Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 97
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), pp. 260–72.
Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 12.
For Derrida this is true of democracy l’a venir, arrivant, perhaps, and destinerrance, all concepts that instantiate something of the futurity of ethics. On friendship as a paradigm case of being able to identify contingent conditions of possibility only when it is too late to generate or regulate them, see Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994)
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 85.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 3.
John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900
L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 123.
Studies include Alan Gaylord, “Uncle Pandarus as Lady Philosophy,” Papers of the Michigan A cademy of Science, Arts, and Letters 46 (1961), pp. 571–95
D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962)
John P. McCall, “Five-Book Structure in Chaucer’s Troilus,” MLQ 23 (1962), pp. 297–308
Cf. Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 181
John Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 79–102.
H. A. Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 99
Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 3: Purgatory, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996)
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 11.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 111.
John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 7.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 38.
See Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 48.
Cf. David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 129–31.
Cf. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 57.
Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s Women: Nuns Wives, and Amazons (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 188.
Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 123–24.
Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 146
Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 84–85.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xxii.
Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1970), p. 5.
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© 2009 J. Allan Mitchell
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Mitchell, J.A. (2009). On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event. In: Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620728_2
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