Interest in providence has been largely abandoned in contemporary philosophy and no longer has a place in secular consciousness. Lloyd argues that this is to our detriment. For we have inherited ideas about autonomy and responsibility, together with convictions about our power to roll back the limits of necessity, in the absence of a critical element that was part of their original development. This renders our sense of ourselves more precarious and more vulnerable than it might otherwise be. Lloyd’s concern is to open up the possibility of reconnecting with the past through charting the way in which changes in conceptions of providence have shaped different accounts of freedom and necessity, and different ways of seeking to live a good life.

The discussion is framed by a powerful reading of several of Euripides’ dramas – Alcestis in particular, at the beginning, and Iphigenia at Aulis at the end – concerned in each case with aspects of human mortality in conditions of uncertainty before the gods. In between, the scene turns to Plato’s ingenious story of the purpose-filled creation of the universe, in the Timaeus, then to the early Stoics, their Epicurean critics, the later Stoics, and Augustine, before moving to the modern world of Descartes and Spinoza, in the seventeenth century. The Stoics hold a special place in the story; their world outlook and ethics became especially influential in early modern debates about freedom and necessity. The great Stoic image portrays the universe as a single necessary whole, the cosmic city of gods and men, suffused by mind or reason. Providence as guiding order lies within the world precisely as the course of universal nature. The key to freedom and virtue, in the writings of Seneca, Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, is to adapt our impulses to necessity, not least in coming to terms with death, in a steady life of contented detachment.

The core of the inquiry is built around contrasts between Descartes and Spinoza at the beginning of the modern era. For Descartes, free will is a causal power that ‘renders us in a certain way like God’; for Spinoza, freedom consists in the active acceptance of necessity in understanding ourselves as parts of the whole of nature, which is itself the free and necessary expression of the divine nature. For Descartes, the will has absolute power to control the passions and ensure that we live well, leaving matters beyond our control to God’s providential care; for Spinoza, the remedy for the passions lies in the joyful understanding of necessity. His thought in this regard carries echoes of the ancient Stoic view of providence as immanent in the ordered unity of the cosmos. In time the Cartesian view of freedom prevailed, eventually without the moderating role of providence, whether in relation to the scope of individual responsibility or the path of history.

Whatever their various theoretical interests, the philosophers under discussion in this book all placed great importance on practical philosophy: that is, inquiry concerned with how we should live. Such writing calls on the imagination and the emotions as well as reason, and makes use of images, metaphors and models no less than logical argument. Dialogues, notably in the case of Plato, Cicero, Augustine and Hume, are prominent, as well as essays and treatises – sermons too, in Augustine’s case – and poems by the Stoic Cleanthes and the Epicurean Lucretius, satire on the part of Voltaire, and letters, especially in the exchange between Descartes and the young and highly intelligent Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Providence Lost attends closely to the genre of the writings with which it is concerned, and is itself an exemplar of inquiry in practical philosophy. Lloyd draws out the play of elements in these writings and relates their themes, where possible, to the lives of the philosophers. So readers can join Marcus Aurelius as he reflects on death during the dreary military campaign in which he was to die; or they can find aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy at work in his response to the edict of separation that banished him, as a young man, from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, or in his coping with the religious and political acrimony (and danger) that followed on the publication of A Theologico-Political Treatise.

Genevieve Lloyd has written a wonderfully clear account of the deep connections of providence with central aspects of human life in our cultural history. She is also a perceptive guide to ways of drawing on these sources in responding to current concerns about freedom and necessity in conditions of uncertainty.