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SPECIAL PROVIDENCE When Hamlet claims, "This is I, / Hamlet the Dane," he not only lays claim to Claudius's throne. He also proclaims himself magistrate, instrument of the law, and accepts the sword that God entrusts to the prince and magistrate to enforce the law. Thus, Hamlet, entrusted with the sword of justice, no longer merely prosecutes a private vengeance; instead he is God's scourge, the instrument of divine vengeance. His speech to Horatio (5.2) Does it not, think'st thee, stand me now upon— begins with his private grievances but expands to include the moral imperative, "perfect conscience," to take constructive action to check the spread of "this canker in our nature," the inner corruption or imposthume with which Claudius has infected the state. Questioning the morality of revenge and the state of his conscience, Hamlet now sees that not to act is to court damnation. |
"Perfect conscience
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The Hamlet who returns from exile is a changed man. Taken prisoner by pirates, he finds them "thieves of mercy," instruments of divine grace. Breaking the seal on Claudius's "grand commission" to his English tributaries, he uncovers Claudius's plot against his life. Finding the royal seal to forge a new commission in his purse, Hamlet recognizes "even in that was heaven ordinant"; God was ordaining and directing his life's course. With the beginning of the last scene Hamlet now announces that his melancholy brooding has come to an end: "In my heart there was a kind of fighting" / That would not let me sleep" (5.2.4-5). He has found a kind of peace in the idea of divine providence: There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
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Special Providence, "that universal overruling Providence from which nothing flows that is not right, though the reasons thereof may be concealed" (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.17.2) was a central tenet in the Reformed theology of John Calvin, whose beliefs were the foundation of the Church of England. God, Calvin believed, did not merely ordain a general Providence, a grand scheme that determined the broad outlines of history. He also ordained a special providence that oversaw even the smallest, most mundane events in our daily lives. The point was one to which Calvin returned again and again in his theological writings. |
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1.16.1 But faith must penetrate deeper. After learning that there is a Creator, it must forthwith infer that he is also a Governor and Preserver, and that, not by producing a kind of general motion in the machine of the globe as well as in each of its parts, but by a special providence sustaining, cherishing, superintending, all the things which he has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow. Thus David, after briefly premising that the world was created by God, immediately descends to the continual course of Providence, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens framed, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth;" immediately adding, "The Lord looketh from heaven, he beholdeth the children of men," (Ps. 33:6, 13, &c). |
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2. That this distinction may be the more manifest, we must consider that the Providence of God, as taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune and fortuitous causes. By an erroneous opinion prevailing in all ages, an opinion almost universally prevailing in our own day—viz. that all things happen fortuitously, the true doctrine of Providence has not only been obscured, but almost buried. If one falls among robbers, or ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes shipwreck; if one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, when wandering through desert paths, meets with deliverance; or, after being tossed by the waves, arrives in port, and makes some wondrous hair-breadth escape from death—all these occurrences, prosperous as well as adverse, carnal sense will attribute to fortune. But whose has learned from the mouth of Christ that all the hairs of his head are numbered (Mt. 10:30), will look farther for the cause, and hold that all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God. |
"All the hairs
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3. God is deemed omnipotent, not because he can act though he may cease or be idle, or because by a general instinct he continues the order of nature previously appointed; but because, governing heaven and earth by his providence, he so overrules all things that nothing happens without his counsel. |
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4. The providence we mean is not one by which the Deity, sitting idly in heaven, looks on at what is taking place in the world, but one by which he, as it were, holds the helms and overrules all events. Hence his providence extends not less to the hand than to the eye. . . But some, under pretext of the general, hide and obscure the special providence: . . . single events are so regulated by God, and all events so proceed from his determinate counsel, that nothing happens fortuitously. |
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5. It is childish, as I have already said, to confine this to particular acts, when Christ says, without reservation, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of his Father (Mt. 10:29). Surely, if the flight of birds is regulated by the counsel of God, we must acknowledge with the prophet, that while he "dwelleth on high," he "humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth," (Ps. 113:5, 6). |
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7. Nay, I affirm in general, that particular events are evidences of the special providence of God. |
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8. We hold that God is the disposer and ruler of all things,—that from the remotest eternity, according to his own wisdom, he decreed what he was to do, and now by his power executes what he decreed. Hence we maintain, that by his providence, not heaven and earth and inanimate creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which he has destined. What, then, you will say, does nothing happen fortuitously, nothing contingently? I answer, it was a true saying of Basil the Great, that Fortune and Chance are heathen terms; the meaning of which ought not to occupy pious minds. For if all success is blessing from God, and calamity and adversity are his curse, there is no place left in human affairs for fortune and chance. |
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1.17.6. A special providence is awake for his preservation, and will not suffer anything to happen that will not turn to his good and safety . . . Hence, our Saviour, after declaring that even a sparrow falls not to the ground without the will of his Father, immediately makes the application, that being more valuable than many sparrows, we ought to consider that God provides more carefully for us. He even extends this so far, as to assure us that the hairs of our head are all numbered. What more can we wish, if not even a hair of our head can fall, save in accordance with his will? |
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8. If there is no more effectual remedy for anger and impatience, he assuredly has not made little progress who has learned so to meditate on Divine Providence, as to be able always to bring his mind to this, The Lord willed it, it must therefore be borne; not only because it is unlawful to strive with him, but because he wills nothing that is not just and befitting. |
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9. If he is not left destitute of human aid, which he can employ for his safety, he will set it down as a divine blessing; but he will not, therefore, be remiss in taking measures, or slow in employing the help of those whom he sees possessed of the means of assisting him. Regarding all the aids which the creatures can lend him, as hands offered him by the Lord, he will avail himself of them as the legitimate instruments of Divine Providence. And as he is uncertain what the result of any business in which he engages is to be (save that he knows, that in all things the Lord will provide for his good), he will zealously aim at what he deems for the best, so far as his abilities enable him. In adopting his measures, he will not be carried away by his own impressions, but will commit and resign himself to the wisdom of God, that under his guidance he may be led into the right path. |
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Far less where, in the case of theft or murder, fraud and preconceived malice have existed, will he palliate it under the pretext of Divine Providence, but in the same crime will distinctly recognize the justice of God, and the iniquity of man, as each is separately manifested.
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11. But when once the light of Divine Providence has illumined the believer's soul, he is relieved and set free, not only from the extreme fear and anxiety which formerly oppressed him, but from all care. For as he justly shudders at the idea of chance, so he can confidently commit himself to God. "he justly shudders
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By specifically invoking this central element of Calvinist theology, the doctrine of Special Providence, Shakespeare invokes the claim that God oversees Hamlet's revenge and that God's hand should be visible in even the most apparently fortuitous acts. By giving himself over to the Calvinist belief in special providence, Hamlet gains the faith that justifies him.
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And Hamlet, the scholar from Martin Luther's Wittenburg, carefully follows Calvin, the codifier of Reformation theology, in linking the creed of special providence to "the fall of a sparrow," from a key passage from Jesus's commissioning of his apostles in the Gospel of Matthew.
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29 Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father? 30 Yea, and all the hairs of your head are numbered. 31 Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value then many sparrows.
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Are not two sparrows, etc. Now Christ goes on to declare, as I have already hinted, that no matter how mad the tyrants may be, they have no power even over the body. Therefore, those who fear the cruelty of men, as though they were without God's protection, are fools. In the midst of perils, we have this second comfort that, since God is the keeper of our lives, we may safely rely upon his providence. It is really an insult to God, not to place our lives at the disposal of him who has honored us with his protection. Christ extends the providence of God to all creatures in common, and so argues by way of synecdoche (from the whole to the part), that God exercises a particular care over us. There is nothing cheaper than a sparrow (two were sold for a penny; or as Luke has it, five for two pennies), and yet God's eye is upon it, and nothing happens to it by chance. Will he then who looks after sparrows neglect to watch over the lives of men?
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Moreover, we must notice two things. Christ defines the providence of God very differently from those who, not unlike the philosophers, admit that somehow the world is under divine government, and yet imagine the workings of providence in a confused way, as though God paid no attention to individual creatures. Christ, on the other hand, declares that every single one of God's creatures is under his hand and care, and that nothing happens by chance. In this way, he firmly opposes the will of God to chance . . . . nothing occurs merely by the wheels of blind fortune, because the will of God reigns over all that happens. . . . When Christ tells us that even the hairs of our heads are numbered, he does it not to arouse us to empty speculation, but to teach us to rest in God's Fatherly care, which he exercises in behalf of these frail bodies of ours. "nothing
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Calvin invoked the Protestant theory of resistance to civil authority specifically when it impinged upon the operation of conscience. And the passage about the fall of the sparrow had the same application as well for the translators of the Geneva Bible, whose side note on Matthew 10:28—"Though tyrants be never so raging and cruel, yet we may not fear them"—invoked the same belief that magistrates (like Hamlet the Dane) were justified in resisting monarchs who practiced tyranny. By citing "the fall of a sparrow," Shakespeare's Hamlet brands Claudius as the kind of tyrant whom the godly could dispatch "In perfect conscience," secure in the knowledge that they acted as God's instrument of vengeance, "scourge and minister," and that they could, in Calvin's own words, "safely rely upon his providence."
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