DiotimosReading Desk

Will desire and freedom

Contingency

contingentia; contingentes; secundum contingentiam; essendi modos; proximarum causarum

Contingentia and contingens mark a variable or non-necessary created mode.

From the book

Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

Marsilio Ficino · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordContingentia and contingens mark a variable or non-necessary created mode.
  • In the Platonic TheologyContingency describes a created event's variable mode of occurrence, rather than a deficiency that must remove it from providence.
  • In this editionThe qualification quodammodo in II.12.20 makes contingency a specified respect, not absence from every order.
  • A place to readContingency is rejected as the ground of God’s own being and operation.

Meaning

Contingentia and contingens mark a variable or non-necessary created mode. Essendi modus is the manner of a thing’s being; proximate causes supply its particular mode of occurrence.

Use in the book

Contingency describes a created event's variable mode of occurrence, rather than a deficiency that must remove it from providence. Ficino denies that God's own being or activity results from contingency, but later says that exact universal order requires a range of causes: stable causes, mobile causes, and effects varying with those mobile causes. Because effects imitate their proximate causes, variation belongs to the created order itself.

God wills not only things but also their appropriate modes of being. Ficino consequently reports the theologians' formula that God chooses an event to occur contingently. Nothing thereby escapes providence or destroys universal order. This distinction is the important reading aid: an event can be contingent in its own created mode while belonging to an order governed by God. Related arguments concern free human actions, whose known mode remains voluntary. The terminology does not supply a modern probability theory and should not be recast as statistical randomness. Nor should divine contingency be inferred from the legitimate contingency of created effects.

Further passage references. II.12.2–32, 19–21; II.13.25–3023456

Places to read

  1. II.12.3Contingency is rejected as the ground of God’s own being and operation.
  2. II.12.20–212God wills things with their appropriate modes, including contingent effects through mobile causes.
  3. II.13.25Foreknowledge includes causes and free modes rather than merely bare outcomes.

Translation in this edition

The qualification quodammodo in II.12.20 makes contingency a specified respect, not absence from every order. It is distinct from chance as a sufficient first explanation and from a statistical probability calculation.

praevaricari / effugere

praevaricari / effugere. Printed forms: effugiat; praevaricatur.

Transgress or deviate / escape. No contingent event is said to transgress so far as to escape the ordainer’s providence. References: II.12.21. See Contingency.

vagus / variabilis

vagus / variabilis. Printed forms: vagos; variabili.

Wandering or variable. Mobile causes produce less stable effects; this variability is incorporated into providential order rather than excluded from it. References: II.12.20. See Contingency.