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...