On Providence

One of the three short theological essays of Proclus — with On the Existence of Evils and Ten Doubts concerning Providence — surviving largely in the Latin of William of Moerbeke, the treatise asks how a wholly good and unchanging providence can govern a world of fate and free choice.

Proclus distinguishes providence (pronoia), which belongs to the gods and acts above being, from fate (heimarmenē), which binds the bodily order — and argues that the soul, by ascending toward the divine, may rise above the chain of fate into the freedom of the providential. The work is a compact statement of the Neoplatonic theology of the One and its care for all things.