Will Morrisey Reviews

John of Salisbury: The Metalogicon. Daniel D. McGarry translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

 

John of Salisbury’s life spanned most of the twelfth century, and he knew many of the luminaries of that time. Thomas Beckett was a friend and eventual companion in exile. He studied under Peter Abelard in Paris. He is said to have been introduced to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Bernard of Clairvaux. He served as Theobald’s secretary and then under Thomas Beckett. King Henry II exiled him to France, possibly thanks to his association with Beckett. Well respected there, he was eventually appointed to the Episcopate of Chartres by Louis VII, in which office he spent the final four years of his life.

Written during his time at Canterbury in the 1150s, the Metalogicon defends the Trivium against attacks by the “Cornificians.” Cornificius is a name John gives to the leader of this group; his identity no one has figured out. John approves neither of their critique nor of their character, they being among those “who would rather criticize the works of others than look after, order, and reform their own lives.” Proto-Machiavellians, the Cornificians brand “the habit of obedience” as “a stigma of servility,” and “the absence of guilt” as “an admission of impotence.” It might be, then, that they were partisans of the English king against the Catholic clergy, attempting to undermine the moral and intellectual authority of those loyal to the Papacy. John emphasized the connection between the liberal arts and morality, “since I am convinced that all things read or written are useless except so far as they have a good influence on one’s manner of life.” The defense of the liberal arts is in turn a defense of philosophy, which again he carefully associates with morality: “Any pretext of philosophy that does not bear fruit in the cultivation of virtue and the guidance of one’s conduct is futile and false.” Intellectual rectitude is a form of moral rectitude, as there are “three things that cause me to fear”: “ignorance of the truth, misled or wanton statement of falsehood, and the haughty assertion of fact.” Since “humility is guarded when we listen, while pride often insinuates itself when we speak,” he readily confesses himself to be guilty “in all three respects,” asking his readers to pray for him.

He does not ask his readers to pray for “the malicious wrangler,” Cornificius, a man of “inflated arrogance” who, “barring no means in his effort to console himself for his own want of knowledge…has contrived to improve his own reputation by making many others ignoramuses like himself.” Cornificius and his followers are contra natura. Nature has endowed man with reason and speech, while divine grace “fructifies nature.” Love of the good aims at beatitude, perfect happiness, and the Holy Trinity “has so arranged the parts of the universe that each requires the help of the others, and they mutually compensate for their respect deficiencies.” Virtue, strength of character, helps man to acquire beatitude. It is therefore “beyond me” to understand “what is the real aim of one who denies that eloquence should be studied; who asserts that it comes as a natural gift to one who is not mute, just as sight does to one who is not blind, and hearing to one who is not deaf; and who further maintains that although nature’s gift is strengthened by exercise, nothing is to be gained by learning the art [of eloquence], or at least that the benefit accruing is not worth the effort that must be expended.” In this, the Cornificians are decidedly not proto-Machiavellians; Machiavelli did at least demand effort from his followers, if not the kind of effort John of Salisbury has in mind.

How then does eloquence aid philosophy? The love of wisdom that animates philosophy proceeds by reasoning. “Reason would remain utterly barren, or at least would fail to yield a plenteous harvest, if the faculty of speech did not bring to light its feeble conceptions, and communicate the perceptions of the prudent exercise of the human mind.” That is, the effort expended in articulating thoughts, often in argumentation, strengthens thought, clarifies it. Further, thought is not only theoretical but prudential, and prudence is a cardinal moral and political virtue. “It is this delightful and fruitful copulation of reason and speech which has given birth to so many outstanding cities, and has made friends and allies of so many kingdoms, and has unified and knit together in bonds of love so many peoples.” For John, this means preeminently the relations between England and France, unified (if by now somewhat shakily) by the Roman Catholic Church. The traditional Church education in the liberal arts, beginning with the Trivium, must therefore be defended. “One who would eliminate the teaching of eloquence from philosophical studies, begrudges Mercury”—the messenger-god, the god of eloquence—his “possession of Philology”—for John, another word for philosophy—and “wrests from Philology’s arms her beloved Mercury.” Such a man “may seem to attack eloquence alone,” but in fact “he undermines and uproots all liberal studies, assails the whole structure of philosophy, tears to shreds humanity’s social contract, and destroys the means of brotherly charity and reciprocal interchange of services.” Carried much further, this would dehumanize men, who “would degenerate to the condition of brute animals,” their cities seeming “like corrals for livestock rather than communities composed of human beings united by a common bond for the purpose of living in society, serving one another, and cooperating as friends.” By eliminating or severely limiting communication by words, “what instruction could be given in faith and morals, and what agreement and mutual understanding could subsist among men?”

Cornificius himself exhibits what human beings would become, were they to acquiesce his criticisms of rhetoric, a topic to which no less a philosopher than The Philosopher, Aristotle, devoted a substantial book. Cornificius is a man of “bloated gluttony, puffed-up pride, obscene mouth, rapacious greed, irresponsible conduct, loathsome habits (which nauseate all about him), foul lust, dissipated appearance, evil life, and ill repute.” I, John, would reveal his identity, “were it not that I am restrained by reverence for his Christian name,” and so “have thought it better to be lenient with the person, without ceding any quarter to his error.” And while “nothing is more despicable than to attack the character of the proponent of a doctrine simply because his views are not to our liking,” Cornificius evidently gives ample cause to condemn his character quite apart from his views. And those views, it would seem have had a malign effect on this character, if it is not his malign character that has given rise to his views. Ever a man of Aristotelian moderation and Christian charity, John allows that “as far as a Christian may licitly do so, I would despise both the person and his opinion” (emphasis added).

“But let him snore away till midday, become drunk in his daily carousals, and squander his time by wallowing in carnal excesses which would shame even an Epicurean pig, a much as his heart desire.” Taking the higher ground, “I will confine myself to attacking his opinion, which has ruined many, as not a few believe what he says,” namely, the “host of fools” who “follow him,” that “motley crowd, made up mostly of the lazy and dull, who are trying to seem, rather than to become wise.” Before doing so, however, one must note that “verbose, rather than eloquent,” Cornificius “is continually tossing to the winds verbal leaves that lack the fruit of meaning,” a “hodgepodge of verbiage,” boasting “that he has a shortcut whereby he will make his disciples eloquent without the benefit of any art, and philosophers without the need of any work.” For the eros of philosophy and the Holy Spirit, he would substitute “a spirit of intoxication…under the guise of philosophy.” This, John adds, “is a common and well-known fact in all the monastic orders.” Some disciples of Cornificius go on to become “the same sort of physicians that they had previously been philosophers”—sophists of the body rather than the mind, demanding payment for their services and thus refusing to care for the poor while extracting money from patients desperate with pain. Still others engage in “the trifling concerns of court”—again, for the money. “They deem nothing sordid and inane, save the straits of poverty. Wisdom’s only fruit, for them, is wealth.” Since “the secret and hidden resources of nature” cannot “be charted by one who is utterly ignorant of all philosophy,” such men are rightly disqualified from philosophy, medicine, and politics alike. Or, at least, they should be. Regrettably, like Cornus, the crow, Cornificius “set himself to carping on what he despaired of learning.”

“But enough of this.” “Disregarding the personal faults of Cornificius” (relevant though they are, given the link between learning and virtue), “let us refute his erroneous doctrine.” That doctrine consists of two main points: “there is no point in studying the rules of eloquence,” he argues, “which is a gift which is either conceded or denied to each individual by nature”; “the rules of eloquence confer neither wisdom nor love of wisdom” because “philosophy (or wisdom, its object) is concerned not with words, but with facts.” 

It is true, John concedes, that eloquence as often described does not amount to philosophizing. “A man who is a liar in word and spirit will come to believe the falsehood he peddles.” But that is false eloquence. “He alone is eloquent who fittingly and efficaciously expresses himself as he intends”—he “who can with facility and adequacy verbally express his mental perceptions.” That being so, “I am at a loss to see how anything could be more generally useful,” not only useful for those who philosophize but “more helpful in acquiring wealth, more reliable for winning favor, more suited for gaining fame.” In order of moral rank, virtue and wisdom, which “differ in name rather than in substance,” come first, eloquence second, followed by health, “the good will of one’s associates and an abundance of goods,” acquired not only to satisfy physical desires but “to provide the material instruments of action.” Since “one’s fellows…possess the same human nature,” nothing can be “more universally efficacious and more likely to win distinction” than excellence in exhibiting the distinctively human characteristic: logos—reason and speech. 

The natural gifts we receive at birth can be “canceled or hindered by defects” or “restored or helped by aids.” Prudent care of those gifts “assists nature.” Socrates’ eros, initially directed at the bodies of women, “was subdued and controlled,” channeled into an erotic longing for wisdom. In souls whose nature is “propitious,” industrious cultivation will allow “its fruits [to] be readily harvested”; “if nature is unbenign it should be nursed even more carefully, so that, with the aid of virtue, it may more happily and gloriously grow strong.” But the Cornificians would “do away with logic,” the core of genuine eloquence.

Logic, “the science of verbal expression and reasoning,” being able to say what you mean, and meaning something that is rationally sound, in its broader meaning “includes all instruction relative to words.” Like any art, it “is a system that reason has devised in order to expedite…our ability to do things within our natural capabilities,” “an efficient plan, which avoids nature’s wastefulness and straightens our circuitous wanderings.” While “nature is the mother of all the arts,” “she has given reason as their nurse for their improvement and perfection.” It makes natural ability effective. Reason improves all the arts, including itself; logic is the art whereby the capacity for reason improves itself. Bernard of Chartres, the teacher of one of John’s teachers in Paris, identified three natural intellectual capacities: the ability to flit about, “easily learning but just as quickly forgetting”; the ability to creep along, “mired down to earth,” never progressing; and the ability to walk, the mean between these extremes, the ‘Peripatetic’ way of Aristotle, which “has its feet on the ground so it can firmly stand, and because it can climb, provides prospect of progress, and is admirably suited for philosophizing.” This is “a basis for the arts,” enabling the mind to exercise reason, which “examines and investigates things that make an impression on the senses or intellect.”

Eloquence and dialectical reasoning join with grammar in the Trivium. A complete liberal-arts education adds the Quadrivium, which consists of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The liberal arts are “the first to proffer their services to the natural abilities of those who philosophize.” “Our ancestors…studied them diligently,” learning “to comprehend everything they read,” elevating “their understanding of all things,” not only of books, having been “empowered” to “cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution.” The Trivium teaches “the significance of all words,” while the Quadrivium “unveil[s] the secrets of all nature.” The liberally educated person has achieved self-sufficiency. He does “not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions of questions.” The liberal arts are liberal because they liberate human souls from undue dependency upon the opinions of others. 

The first art of the Trivium is grammar. Like all arts, “grammar imitates nature.” And so, for example, a noun (a person, place, or thing) “does not admit of degrees of comparison”; a dog is a dog, not a different sort of cat. There can be different species of dogs and cats, but each species, each subspecies, is what it is. Nouns follow nature, that way. They help us to ‘grasp’ the natural thing they denote.

Further, “since our intellect is, as it were, the soul’s ear, as well as its hand, it derives absolutely no conception from words whose absurdity precludes understanding.” It means nothing to say, “a categorical horse.” But since “not everything false is absurd”—if I tell you I own a square circle, you cannot know what I mean—but if I say that circles are squares, I am either mistaken or lying—we need logic to separate true from false statements. The kind of logic the Trivium features is dialectical logic. Dialectic does not have the rigor of demonstrative (or apodictic) logic, most often seen in mathematics. Demonstrative logic proceeds from incontrovertible premises, self-evident definitions. Dialectic proceeds from probabilities. it does not estimate “utility or goodness,” either; that is the task of political science, which “treats of degrees of justice, utility, and goodness.” Grammar is more modest than logic, since the sentence “Man is rational” is no less grammatical than “Man does not exist.” The logician, whose is out to “determine truth and falsity,” begins with grammar, is limited by grammar, but goes beyond grammar, because as a logician he checks the premises of his argument against what is. If the premise of my argument is, ‘all humans are white,’ and you can produce a non-white human, my argument collapses. If the premise of my argument is, ‘all humans are categorical,’ the grammarian “jumps up to condemn this as absurd,” telling the philosopher that he is positing an unmeaning claim. Poets, too, “must never forsake the footsteps of nature.” It, too, “belongs to grammar, which is its mother and the nurse of its study.” Admittedly, neither poetry nor grammar is entirely natural, and each owes most of its content to man, its author and inventor,” but “nevertheless nature successfully asserts some authority in both.” A poetry that drifts away from grammar “will be dropped from the roll of liberal studies.”

“Nature is rich and bountiful, and liberally provides human indigence with her untold wealth, with the result that the properties of things overflow into words as our reason endeavors to make words cognate to things discussed.” Here is where the conventional, the customary element of language comes in. Custom is “the supreme arbiter of speech” in the sense that when we see a cat we may convey what we see to others and indeed to ourselves by the word ‘cat,’ but not if we are French; then we will say or think ‘chat.‘ Yet custom too needs not to contradict nature. If it does, it cannot endure and, while it endures, it will do human beings no good.

Why? Because in terms of the relation of custom to words, proper “speaking is the articulate and literate verbal expression of our thoughts”; it “shuns the pitfalls of solecisms and barbarisms.” To do so, the student needs to learn the art of grammar, learn to detect grammatical errors, and understand figures of speech. This matters because “the art [of grammar] is, as it were, a public highway, on which all have the right to journey, walk, and act, immune from criticism or molestation. To use faulty grammar always means that one is forsaking the proper thoroughfare.”

The art of grammar and the detection of grammatical errors are fairly straightforward. Figures of speech (“metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, and the like”) can easily confuse the hearer and are “the exclusive privilege of the very learned.” One must always “take care to avoid crude figures that are hard to interpret” because “what is primarily desirable in language is lucid clarity and easy comprehensibility.” Otherwise, sophistry will likely ensue, “envelop[ing] the mind in a fog of fallacies.” Almost always, a speaker should “make straight the way for understanding.” 

“Grammar prepares the mind to understand everything that can be taught in words,” as such great men as Cicero, Quintilian, Caesar, and Martianus affirm. With characteristic sophistry, Cornificius “invokes the authority of Seneca to defend his erroneous contentions.” Seneca teaches, rightly, that “liberal studies do not make a person good.” John remarks “that the same holds true of other studies”; alluding to 1 Corinthians, he writes that “knowledge puffeth up” and that “it is charity alone that makes one good.” Nonetheless, will not alone sufficient to form good character, grammar “contributes” to such formation. Without it, you could not read Homer, and poetry is the cradle of philosophy. “The chief aids to philosophical inquiry and the practice of virtue are reading, learning”—by which he means grasping the doctrinal content of what you read—followed by “meditation and assiduous application,” that is, practicing what good principles have been set forth in the book. Meditation is necessary because it “reaches out farther to what is unknown,” what isn’t in the book, to “the hidden recesses of questions.” With the knowledge gained by reading, learning, and meditation, you can find the right goals of action. “It is accordingly evident that grammar, which is the basis and root of scientific knowledge, implants, as it were, the seed [of virtue] until it becomes solid virtue, and it grows in manifold respects until it fructifies in good works, wherefore men are called and actually are ‘good.'” John hastens to say that grace is still needed to impart “the faculty of writing and speaking correctly to those to whom it is given.” As to the books best read, “of all branches of learning, that which confers the greatest beauty is Ethics, the most excellent part of philosophy, without which the latter would not even deserve its name.”

“Subject both to nature and the will of man,” grammar provides the gateway to both philosophy, especially dialectical logic, and the formation of civil laws, which themselves “derive their force from human constitution while what is deemed expedient for the common welfare is considered equivalent to natural justice.” Yet Cornificius, “beating against a solid wall like a blind man, rashly brings to trial, and still more brazenly accuses logic.” The purpose of logic is “to ascertain the truth,” and in civil life it is indispensable to bringing the mind to prudence, the capacity for practical reasoning. Prudence is the first of the four cardinal classical virtues; while it “consists entirely in insight into the truth, together with a certain skill investigating the latter,” justice “embraces the truth” thus discovered, fortitude “defends it,” and temperance or moderation makes sure that none of these virtues ventures into foolish actions. “Thus it is indubitable that prudence is the root of all the virtues,” and “he who dreams of teaching philosophy without logic, is, in effect, presuming to eliminate the reasons of things from the quest for wisdom, inasmuch as logic presides over these reasons.” 

While Plato founded logic (he puts the first statement of the principle of non-contradiction into the mouth of Socrates in the Republic), Aristotle elaborated its corollary rules. There are several kinds of logic. Demonstrative or apodictic logic deduces conclusions from the fundamental principles of the sciences; “it rejoices in necessity.” Probable logic founds its deductions on opinion, preferably the opinions of the wise. Dialectic and rhetoric are subdivisions of probable logic, and both offer deductions that are likely, not necessarily so. Sophistry, however, “merely wears the disguise of probability or necessity,” having “no care at all for facts” and aiming only at “los[ing] its adversary in a fog of delusions.”

Dialectic being the kind of logic studied as part of the Trivium, John focuses his defense of logic on it. While grammar concerns the right way of saying things, dialectic concerns the substance of what is said. “A word’s force consists in its meaning,” animating the word “as the soul animates the body.” Like all kinds of logic, dialectic issues in judgment—in this case, judgment founded on probable truth. Christianity is right to teach that “the only sure road to truth is humility,” and dialectical logic teaches humility about the truths it discovers, as its practitioner must admit that he has arrived at truths that remain uncertain. Having so arrived, he will not engage in immoderate disputation, oversubtlety, or loquacity. Real eloquence derives from this practical wisdom. “In the hand of a pigmy or dwarf, the sword of Hercules is worthless.” To avoid this, not only must one not be an intellectual pigmy or a moral dwarf, making dialectic an end in itself, “walking ’round about and surveying itself, ransacking its own depths and secrets, limiting itself to things that are of no use whatsoever in a domestic or military, commercial or religion, civil or ecclesiastical way, and that are appropriate only in school.” Glancing again at the Cornificians, he asks (rhetorically) “What moral philosopher does not fairly bubble over with laws of ethics, so long as these remain merely verbal? But it is a far different matter to exemplify these things in his own life.” Without “the other disciplines,” you “cannot possess the riches that are promised and provided by dialectic.” Dialectic originates “as a consequence of other studies,” which “it subsequently organizes and vivifies” if it is not “deterred by the noxious impediments of inertia and ignorance.” It is prior to those studies (e.g., the Quadrivium) in the sense that, having originated in the need those studies have of it, it now must precede them in the course of study itself. It is “the common servant” of all other philosophic studies, whether natural or moral.

Dialectic proceeds by syllogism, aiming at convincing an opponent. The wider the knowledge of probabilities the dialectician possesses, the more convincing his arguments are likely to be. It proceeds to inquire into (for example) “whether one of two contradictory propositions must always be true.” However, one must not trivialize the Trivium: “Those who dispute with each other about whether or not goats have wool are not really discussing dialectal problems.” And avoid the opposite extreme, the tendency to invest very small things with remarkable significance, to “have the impression that every letter of the alphabet is pregnant with the secrets of Minerva.” Many supposed dialecticians “seem to be wrangling over words,” merely. The thesis of a genuinely dialectical argument is “an opinion of some learned authority,” especially if that opinion “is not commonly accepted.” The serious use of dialectical reasoning may be seen in Aristotle, especially in his discussion of genera and species—that is, of classifications requiring the mind to distinguish between what is and what is not a particular kind of thing, the exercise of the principle of non-contradiction regarding things.

Aristotle cautions his readers that “genera and species do not exist, but are only understood.” By this, he means they are abstracted from “particular things”; the particulars actually exist but the genera and species exist as commonalities among the particulars. The “abstracting intellect…simply contemplates the form, without considering the matter, even though in fact the former cannot exist apart from the matter.” The intellect “comes into sharper relief in proportion as it considers simpler things in themselves, namely, apart from composition with other things.” Reason discerns genera and species, “mental representations of actual, natural things, intellectual images of the mutual likenesses of real things.” John is no neo-Platonist. He does not claim that there are ‘ideas’ detached from individual things. Form always exists “through the matter, while conversely the matter is determined,” given shape, “by the form.” He concurs with Aristotle, who argues that “universals are only understood, and there is no actual thing that is universal.” On the other hand, “those who declare that genera and species are merely sounds or word concepts” have “strayed far afield from Aristotle’s teaching.” 

The study of Aristotelian logic predominated in John’s own intellectual formation, and he devotes most of the final two sections of his book to summary of and commentary on Aristotle’s treatises on the various aspects of logic: the Categories, Of Interpretation, the Topics, the Posterior Analytics, and Sophistical Refutations. In so doing, he aims at presenting each treatise “in such a way as to make the comprehension of its contents as easy as possible.” Definitions of “pertinent” terms and “the differences between words, as they occur,” are critical to such presentation. Just as important is the ‘attitude’ of the interpreter to the work he interprets. “That which is written should be studied with sympathetic mildness, and not tortured on the rack, like a helpless prisoner, until it renders what it never received.” Begin with “the evident literal meaning of what is written, until he obtains a fuller and surer grasp of the truth by further reading or by divine revelation.” And if he finds a passage impossible to understand, “let him not be therewith deterred” but instead continue to other books and even other writers, “as authors mutually explain one another, and all things help in turn to explain other things.” “There is little or nothing that lies concealed from one who is well read.”

The Categories teaches elementary logic, focusing on the meaning of words. Aristotle shows how a word can have multiple meanings and so require scrutiny with respect to what a given speaker or writer means by it. This “certainly both helps us to avoid being misled by fallacious reasoning and empowers us to deceive others by the same.” Definitions of words must fit the nature of the things denoted by them, showing “what things are universal and what ones singular, what ones substances and what ones accidents.” To know the truth about any thing, we first need to know if it actually exists, and then know what it is, what kind of thing it is, its size, “its relation to other things, where and when it exists, what it does, and what it undergoes.” And finally, we need to know why it is the way it is, although this knowledge belongs fully only to God. “The great efficacy of the categories with regard to the works of nature melts away when confronted with the divine essence,” since the works of nature are limited and God is not. Still, knowledge of the categories “is very useful,” inasmuch as human beings live among natural objects, and these are knowable. For its part, Of Interpretation investigates how to determine whether a statement is true or false. While the Categories deals with the elements of sentences, whereas Of Interpretation deals with the sentences themselves. 

While those two books introduce logic, the Topics, along with the Posterior Analytics and the Sophistical Refutations, give “the body of the art.” Of these, the Topics is the most important, “especially for those whose aim is probability,” the dialecticians. “The Topics is the first book which explains reasons,” teaching “argumentation from commonplaces,” which is what “topics” are. Clear definitions of words and accurate interpretations of sentences underlie any rational discourse whatsoever, and the Topics “lucidly teaches the art of defining,” which requires no equivocation and no indefiniteness, as “it is an absolute impossibility for anything to exist without its own specific differentiation”—that is, the characteristic or constellation of characteristics that distinguish it from other things. It is true, of course, that “what is substantial is frequently uncertain,” and therefore cannot be defined as precisely as we would like, at least for now. There was a time when “men thought that it was impossible to cut diamonds,” but since the discovery of an effective technique of doing so, we now know it’s easy. Also, individual things cannot so much be defined as described, since each is unique. John concedes that “it is easier to do something than to do it well; and virtue always involves difficulty.” 

The matter of definable genera and species on one side, describable but not definable individuals on the other side, leads to the problem of “identity and diversity,” definitions referring to the first, diversity to the second. “Things are said to be ‘different’ and ‘the same’ in several different senses.” This animal is not only a cat, it is also Felix, an observation involving no logical contradiction. “A knowledge of genus, property, and accident, as well as of definitions, is necessary for both proof and refutation in questions of identity and diversity.” “The determination as to what is necessary and what probable lies concealed in nature’s bosom, and nature alone knows her own forces.” Nature must then be “carefully observed” and “thoroughly examined.” Nothing “helps more to provide a knowledge of topics, to beget fuller understanding of the truth, to teach and to persuade, and to develop a happy faculty of dealing with every kind of subject” than the investigation of nature. In logic as in all areas of knowledge, Aristotle directs his readers to nature. 

To undertake this investigation rationally, one must understand reasoning. “All experts make ready their instruments before they attempt to accomplish anything by means of their art, lest their particular competence by nullified by the lack of suitable implementation.” This is what the several books on logic do. And since “showing off one’s art always invites suspicion,” it is better to discuss controverted topics with “an unassuming manner.” Pace Cornificius, but “excessive verbosity is the greatest wastrel of all,” exceeding even yourself in its profligacy. Here again, prudence should govern, as “we should deal with a learned man in one way, but with an illiterate person in another.” Syllogisms make sense to a learned man, but others need the more down-to-earth argumentation by induction. And waste no time arguing about the inarguable “Many subjects do not admit of disputation,” such as those that “transcend human reasoning, and are consecrated entirely to faith,” as well as those that “appear unworthy of the attention of the questioner and answerer, and serve only to demonstrate that those disputing about them have either lost their minds, or never did have any sense.” Rather, “to grasp the truth as it actually is, belongs to divine and angelic perfection, to which one approaches more closely in proportion as he more earnestly seeks, ardently loves, accurately investigates, and happily contemplates reality.”

His friend Thomas Beckett has “requested” that John next turn to the Posterior Analytics, which “examines reasoning” itself. While it is true that “the principles of all branches of learning are interwoven, and each requires the aid of the others in order to achieve its own perfection,” analysis breaks down topics into components that simplify the task of understanding them. John warns that the Analytics itself, however, is a difficult book to interpret, a “confusing” book, in part “because of its intricately involved examples,” its “meticulous exactness and brevity”—all features bespeaking Aristotle’s intention “to prevent its examples being anywhere subjected to refutation.” Do not read this book too closely, as its “subtle intricacies” will bog you down. 

The Analytics contains discussions of both inductive and deductive reasoning, leading again to a consideration of nature, although John pointedly remarks that “I have never known anyone who became a master at recognizing natures as a consequence of this chapter.” Overall, the book emphasizes demonstrative rather than probabilistic proofs. By John’s time, demonstrative proof, “the most demanding of all forms of reasoning,” has “practically fallen into disuse,” except among mathematicians and, among them, the geometers. It was his excellence in presenting the science of demonstrative proof that Aristotle won the title of “The Philosopher.” He had “forg[ed] a crucible for analysis” that earned him his advancement to “the authoritative position of teacher.” 

“But who is equal to this discipline?” Perhaps the great polymath, Aristotle, but since a demonstrative proof requires unassailable first principles as its premises, and since few men master more than one field in which they know enough “to infer conclusions based on the necessity of incontrovertible truths,” the comprehensive use of demonstration is exceedingly rare, less and less possible as each field of knowledge advances. Still, “it is the inherent nature of science to strive for demonstration,” so the attempt must be made, increasingly within each field and not overall. The promising fact is that there are certain “universal concepts of the mind, and then things that are known per se,” which form the basis for demonstrative logic; every human being at least potentially can comprehend such proofs. “What is more immediate to sense experience is better known to us, whereas what is more remote from it, as with the universal, is better known in itself and of its [own] nature.” That is, since “universal concepts derive their credibility from the fact that they are inductively inferred from particular things,” we “come to know abstractions by induction.” As Aristotle writes, “unless we have sense experience, we cannot make inductions.” It is “bodily sensation,” the “primary power or initial operation of our conscious soul,” that “constitutes the basis for all the arts, and forms the initial knowledge which both clears and makes ready the way for first principles.” Sense experience is an innate power of the soul that perceives things and discriminates among them. “No or very little knowledge can exist independently of it,” memory is a “treasury” of sensations. Sense experience is extrinsic to the mind, which analyzes that experience.

Imagination is “the offspring of sensation…nourished and fostered by memory” and capable of visualizing the future. It is not necessarily a reliable guide to the future, however, or to conduct in the present. “Numbered among imagination’s offspring is carnal lust, a poisonous pest, extremely opposed to the project of philosophizing.” Imagination does not obey the principle of non-contradiction, since our pleasurable expectations run into disappointing realities. The result is Goethe’s Werther, who Aristotle anticipates two millennia in advance: “If the sadness and sorrow grow so violent that they disorder and upset the soul, anger flares from the friction.” Imagination therefore needs to “develop caution, whereby it comes to shun whatever is noxious, such as images that encourage melancholy, anger, and lust, or their daughters, envy, hate, calumny, carnal wantonness, and vanity”—in a word, Cornificianism. But then again, “if our imagination becomes overly cautious, it risks becoming timid, whereas if it grows too incautious, it is in peril of becoming foolhardy.”

Sensation and imagination make “judgments”—e.g., warm/cold, black/white. These opinions may or may not be accurate, reliable, since “often as senses are duped,” as when we see a stick in the water, whose parts seem disconnected. “Sensation deceives the untutored.” The cure for such deception is the experience that leads to prudence, which aims at “the investigation, perception, and skillful utilization of truth,” looking to the future in a rational, not merely imagined way, thereby “form[ing] providence.” Prudence recalls past events, appraises what is present, begetting discernment by “tak[ng] full cognizance of everything” to the degree possible. That is, sensation and imagination yield opinion, which is subject to prudential reasoning that can then lead to scientific knowledge. Extract the stick from the water to see its real shape. Ergo, “sensation is the progenitor of science,” the origin of human knowledge. Notice that Aristotle, with John following, comes close to the modern scientific method. Prudence brings experience, preserved by memory; the word ‘experiment’ means a kind of experience. In modern science, the ‘memories’ are the results of previous experiments/experiences. Memories, John writes, result in “an experimental proof.” 

For a Christian, faith complicates the picture. Aristotle, John reports, defines faith as “exceedingly strong opinion.” It is “most necessary in human affairs, as well as in religion” because “without faith, no contracts could be concluded, nor could any business be transacted.” And, of course, “without faith, where would be the basis of the divine reward of human merit?” Lying “between opinion and science, faith “strongly affirms the certainty of something” without having “arrived at this certainty by science.” If true, religious faith leads to sophia, wisdom in the highest sense originating from a spiritual source, not a temporal-sensible source. The ancients, living before the Christian revelation, “conceived of Prudence and Truth as sisters.” Since prudence born of sense experience alone is fallible, it seeks the “sure and reliable” estimate of reason; “prudence therefore begets Philology” or philosophy. However, “it is easier to love reason than to possess it,” which “is the lot of the few.” Only with “intensified effort” can the soul see “with greater clarity,” hold its opinion “with greater security,” and judge “with greater accuracy.” What is more, “the very things concerning which reason alone judges, and whose essence is distinct from the nature of sensible and individual things, are likewise called ‘reasons.'” Some reasons achieve certainty only through the supreme Logos. “That God is God, that the Father has a Son, and that the Holy Sirit has the same substance as both [Father and Son], are not merely statements” but eternal truths “firmly founded in the divine judgment,” not in the judgment of every human being. There are also humanly accessible “everlasting” if not eternal truths, such as mathematical ratios (the word itself meaning reasons), inhering in the nature of created things and therefore infinite in their perpetuity if not eternal as the God who ordained created things. 

Human beings, alone among created things, partake of some portion of the Logos. They are capable of reason, which is both a power and an activity of that power. “God, breathing life into man, willed that he partake of the divine reason”; only man “contemplates divine truths.” Accordingly, reason “transcends all sense perception, and judges concerning spiritual as well as material realities,” “ris[ing] to the contemplation of heavenly things.” In this, the ‘ancient,’ Seneca concurs with the Hebrew Bible, “although his opinion was not really exactly the same,” since his conception of the “Divine Spirit” was actually naturalistic. This being so, it is nevertheless true that in both the ‘ancient’ and the Hebrew senses, “our reason is ennobled by its divine origin, and powerful with a divine activity.” This is why “philosophy agrees that the cultivation of reason should be our primary concern,” as “reason curbs unruly impulses and brings everything into conformity with the norms of goodness.” Obeying the divine mind, “one will move through his allotted span of life making happy progress,” with reason “watch[ing] out for both our body and soul,” serving “as a moderator to bring them into cooperation” in accordance with their natures. “Reason, although divine, is, as it were, set into motion by the winnowing fan of sensory perceptions and acts of the imagination,” begetting prudence, begetting philosophy.

There is still another feature of the human mind that is indispensable to wisdom. The “intuitive understanding,” for which the Greek word is nous, “actually understands what reason investigates.” Reason, proceeding from the principle of non-contradiction, discards falsehoods, serving as a higher-level winnowing fan, separating not false sensations from true but false thoughts from true. Nous “treasures up the preparatory gains of reason into wisdom.” It is, then, the higher-level equivalent of memory, the treasury of experience. “Besides comprehending what is human,” intuitive understanding “also contemplates the divine causes behind all reasons within the natural powers of its perception,” although there remain divine truths “more or less fully known to us” only “according to the decree of divine dispensation,” divine revelation. Such understanding, “according to Plato, ‘is possessed only by God and a few select individuals,” the philosophers. Wisdom proceeds from intuitive understanding. “I believe that wisdom,” sophia, “derives its name from the fact that good men have a discerning taste for the things of God,” as seen in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, who “associated knowledge with action and wisdom with contemplation.” The Biblical prophets themselves “testify that even fear, which is ‘the beginning of wisdom,’ is a result of the sensory experience or mental image of pain.” Fear of actual or future divine punishment brings human beings to refrain from offending God and to practice piety and to exercise obedience to His commands. Thus, “one acquires knowledge, which relates to action,” and repeated actions bring not fear but courage in ‘this life’ among the things on earth. Such is “rational submission,” in contrast to submission to the passions and to the passionate, the tyrannical. Intuitive understanding “concerns itself with divine truths, and the relish, love and observance of the latter constitutes true wisdom. 

While “certain lesser philosophers,” who reason “from the fact that from sense perceptions our mind proceeds to scientific knowledge, argue that we can have knowledge only of those things that are perceived by our senses,” this claim would be “lethal” to philosophy. The thinking soul is invisible and indivisible, therefore “imperishable.” One should always think and act as an imperishable being, not as one who will evanesce without personal consequence.

From Aristotelian logic, John now turns to Aristotle’s account of the appearance of logic in Sophistical Refutations. “I would be reluctant to say that any other study could be more beneficial to the young,” who are in urgent need of identifying sophistry under its many masks. Further, “if one lacks [a knowledge of] sophistical logic, in vain does he claim to be a philosopher.” Careful study can make sophistry “serve as the handmaid of truth and wisdom”; “otherwise, it will “play the adulteress, who betrays her blinded lovers by exposing them to errors and leading them to the precipice.” He does not mean an intellectual precipice, only. “An erroneous life is more pernicious than faulty speech.” Sad to say, “there is hardly anyone, who, in his actual way of living, does not take after the sophists,” making a show of being better he is. Concealing one’s defects from others “is to become a sophist in one’s way of life.” It is to be a Cornificius.

Predictably, Cornificius disparages Aristotle’s books on logic. John continues to disparage Cornificius, turn, a man “even more contemptible than Bromius, the buffoon of the gods.” Bromius is one of the names of Dionysus, god of wine and madness, the dying-and-rising god who mimics Christ, amounting to an Anti-Christ. “Since logic has such tremendous power, anyone who charges that it is foolish to study this [art] thereby shows himself to be a fool of fools.” Just as Bromius is the buffoon of the gods, Cornificius is “the clown of philosophers”; “he yaps at what he cannot attain.” 

What should a rational person do, when pestered by such a man? If his argument amounts to mere quibbling over words, “refuse to argue any further with him” and tell him he is wasting his time. More impressively, however, sophists will attempt to trap their prey into a self-refutation, a fallacy, a paradox, a solecism, or confusion exhibited verbally by babbling. They often accomplish these things by inducing you to admit a false premise; if so, “bring the discussion back to a reexamination of what was previously conceded.” If you see that the conclusion reached is a mixture of truth and falsehood, then “accept what is intelligible, but reject what cannot be explained.” And “finally, if the mode in given instances utterly defies human comprehension, we should not worry about seeking scientific knowledge of it.” Even sound logic, “by itself,” is “practically useless,” as the modern scientists would remark, centuries later. The young, especially, incline toward “the impudence of sophistry.” “The temerity of adolescence should be restrained,” and it is “the duty of those who have the title and function of teachers to see to this.” “Facetious folly, noisy [volubility], empty loquacity, and puerile silliness, should all be set aside, as soon as the first soft beard begins to appear on one’s face.” Mercury, the god of eloquence, must wed Philology in order for the young man’s soul to attain “three things most desirable”: genuine goodness, unadulterated truth, and sound, trustworthy reasoning. John cautions that human nature at its core wants these things, but cannot acquire them unaided. We need divine grace. Prudence “elicits this affection” for divine things, fear of God being the beginning of wisdom; love of God in turn leads to Wisdom, Sophia, resulting from the contemplation of divine things. 

Previously, John had identified philology with philosophy. He now refines his definition. Philology—literally, love of logos—precedes “its two sisters, philosophy and philocaly, which is love of beauty. “Philology comes first, inasmuch as it discloses the nature, power, and counsels of each of the others,” laboring “to attain certitude” and thus “exercis[ing] great caution to avoid error.” Philosophy and philocaly go beyond this winnowing function by conferring actual virtues on a human soul. That is, by the exercise of logic, of reason, we achieve knowledge that “can be called ratum, established. Ratio yields ratum. It is true that only God possesses “true reason,” but human beings can make progress by considering what a thing is, how it differs from, or is similar to other things, and “whether it has, or can have contraries.” God possesses “original reason,” which “embraces the nature, development, and ultimate end of all things,” but his human creatures partake of this “spiritual force that examines the natures of things and acquires a knowledge, not only of material entities, but also of concepts perceptible by the intellect alone.”

The clear superiority of divine or original reason to human reason raises the question of providence and free will. Aristotle has no place for divine providence, but he does consider the relation of necessity to choice, “maintain[ing] that, although things are, on the one hand, partly necessary, they are also, on the other hand, partly subject to natural changes and to free will.” He does not venture to “presume to state definitely what is true in each and every case, however, and his followers continue to dispute the matter. This is an example of man’s rational imperfection. “Slipping about in a mire of incertitude, man apprehends as much as he can.” For human beings, humility is a virtue, since we have so much to be humble about. The Latin word for truth, verum, derives from the Greek heron, meaning secure, stable, certain, clear. A ‘hero’ should be true, although unfortunately, since wily Odysseus, “the name denotes perfidy.” Rather, we Christians “refer to the transfer of the elect from this world’s inconstancy and emptiness to the glory and security by a catholic word, and call them ‘saints,’ owing to the confirmation they have attained.” To sanction means to confirm, to ‘ratify,’ leading us back to ratum.

The contrary of the security, the stability of truth is emptiness. “What is false is absolutely nothing”; “this both the ancient philosophers and the catholic Fathers have declared.” All is vanity, says the Book of Ecclesiastes, because what is temporal, temporary, is fundamentally empty. Such things “vanish like smoke.” Unlike God, matter, and ideas, although God is eternal, whereas matter and ideas, created things, are only perpetual. As to the speaker of falsehood, the anti-Christ or opposite of God, “something that is false is so called from the fact that only a mind that was empty and void would conceive of such a thing.” “The truth of anything is directly dependent on the degree in which it faithfully reflects the likeness of God.” “In God…reason and truth are one”: “I am the truth.” God’s reason “illuminates itself, and His truth contemplates itself.” But in creation, “truth is one thing, reason another,” since in creation “truth is an image of the divinity, which is sought and found by reason in created things,” aby “a virtue or activity of the mind, whose object is to discern truth.”

Aristotelians intend to “reject all empty illusions, determine objective reality, and seek after, venerate, and live according to the truth of God in every respect.” In so far as they actually do so, “they do not labor in vain.” But they cannot do so, comprehensively. “The many impediments to understanding include invincible ignorance of such things as the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, which reason cannot explain; the frailty of man’s condition; the brevity of human life, the neglect of what is useful and concern with what is unprofitable; the conflict of probable opinions; sin which makes one unworthy of seeing the light; and finally the great multitude and vast expanse of subjects to be investigated.” The “pagan philosophers…suppressed the truth of God by falsehood and became vain in their thoughts through their own fault.” In this, they failed to comply with the command of their own Delphic oracle, who commanded, ‘Know thyself.’ A person who knows himself exhibits not pride but humility. “He is not thrusting himself precipitously and rashly into questions that exceed his comprehension” and takes care to love God and love his neighbors as he loves himself. He who “imagines that he can find God by processes of investigation and argumentative reasoning conducted by the faculties of his own mind…is doubtless making the greatest possible of all mistakes.” If you really know yourself, you will know that “it is absolutely impossible to know what He is.” “Since not only man’s senses, but even his reason frequently err, the law of God has made faith the primary and fundamental prerequisite for understanding of the truth.”

John concludes his book by citing both a secular-political and an ecclesiastical-political illustration of human error. “The present day is more suited to weeping than to writing,” as “what I see about me convinces me that the world is subject to vanity.” Our hopes for peace were ruined in southern France, thanks to a conflict between the French king, Louis VII, and the English king, Henry II. Several years earlier, Louis had annulled his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine on the grounds that she had produced no male heir. She lost no time marrying Henry, then Duke of Normandy, who, upon assuming the English throne, formed the Angevin Empire, with territories on both sides of the Channel. Louis took strong exception to that and war had ensued. “Kings whom we had seen the best of friends have become each other’s implacable enemies.” Now, too, the Catholic Church has lost “our Sovereign Pontiff,” Adrian, whose death “has saddened most our own England, his native country,” and none more than John himself, his close friend. “Even after he became Roman Pontiff, it was his delight to have me eat with him at his very own table.” John had successfully petitioned Adrian to grant Ireland to Henry, arguing that the Donation of Constantine gave authority over all islands to the Church. [1] Quite apart from the sorrow of this loss has been its schismatic consequences, “the worst catastrophe.” The German Emperor Frederick I set up an anti-pope called ‘Victor IV,’ in opposition to the new pope, Alexander III. “Wars have broken out that are worse than civil, for they are sacerdotal and fraternal.” And finally, in these times of misery, John has been appointed to administer the office of Theobold, the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, who is now “gravely ill.” I cannot, he writes, “adequately describe the torments of my crucifixion,” and can only pray to God that He will, in His mercy, deliver Theobold “from all mental and physical infirmity, so far as He foresees this to be expedient for Himself and for us.” He asks his readers to pray for him. “Let them pray that, dispelling the darkness of ignorance, and uprooting love of empty vanity, He may enlighten me with His knowledge, and make me a zealous investigator, lover, and observer of the truth.”

 

Note

1. The editor hastens to note that there is no such grant of authority in the Donation of Constantine, although Pope Urban II had asserted such a right in 1091.

 

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy. Scott Goins and Barbara H. Wyman translation. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012. 

 

Born about four years after Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in 476 AD, Anicius Manlius Seveninus Boethius wrote the Consolation while awaiting execution on the order of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth king who ruled most of what had been the Western Roman Empire. They had been close allies for the previous two decades. An Arian, Ostrogoth tolerated Roman Catholic worship, watching contentedly as Boethius, raised in an aristocratic Catholic home, entered the Roman Senate at age 25 and became a Consul at age 33. Theodoric finally appointing him as magister officiorum in 522, having named his friend’s two sons as consuls. But Boethius had made powerful enemies both in the Senate and at court by investigating the corruption that pervaded both institutions. At the same time, tensions between Rome and Constantinople were rising, with Theodoric becoming increasingly suspicious of possible traitors in his entourage. When correspondence between Boethius and the Eastern emperor, Justin I, was adduced as evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow Theodoric, Boethius was ruined—within a year of having reached his political zenith.

His book begins, understandably, with an elegiac poem. Fortune having “changed her cheating faith,” Boethius had sought consolation from poetry “in old age’s gloom.” As he wrote this “tearful complaint,” however, “it seemed to me that a woman appeared, standing over my head,” gazing at him with “a holy look,” with books in her right hand, a scepter in her left. The hem of her dress has the letter pi sewn on it, at the base of a latter of ascent to a theta. Pi symbolizes practical wisdom, prudence; theta symbolizes sophia, theoretical wisdom, the topics of the scholarly Quadrivium, on which Boethius had written extensively. Boethius is a man of theoria who had seemed to have mastered practice as well—a philosopher-near-king. His sudden fall might suggest a failure of practical wisdom.

The lady sees the Muses of Poetry “standing by my bed” and is not amused. “Who let these whorish stage girls come to see a sick man,” to proffer their “sweet-tasting poison”? “These are the kind of women that choke off a mind’s rich fruit, wrapping it up in sterile thorns of passion”—in this case, melancholy. They are “Sirens, sweet until you bring destruction,” habituating the mind to disease “instead of setting it free from pain.” My Muses will take over from here. The scene recapitulates the expulsion of the poets from Socrates’ City in Speech, along with the philosopher’s suggestion that he might permit them to return, if poetry can be reformed, conforming to political philosophy. Beginning immediately, every section in each of the five books, excepting the final section, will have a short poem summarizing the lesson of that section. The poem or metrum following I.i. alludes to Boethius’s work on mathematics and music, fruits of sophia. He had “pried into hidden nature’s secrets,” rather in the fashion of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers. This again suggests a neglect of prudential wisdom.

“Now is the time for remedies, not for tears,” astringent lady tells him. “Are you the one who was nursed on my milk and ate at my table until you gained manly strength of mind. Did I not give you all the weapons you needed, ones that would have kept your mind safe from harm?” You are confused. You have forgotten who you are, forgotten your knowledge of yourself—the themes of Plato’s Meno. [1] His re-minding begins, as seen in the metrum: “The sun now launched, / shines with sudden light, and / strikes wondering eyes with its rays.” Wonder, not fear, is the beginning of philosophic wisdom, and Boethius must begin again. He recognizes his visitor as Lady Philosophy, whom he addresses as if she were the Madonna, calling her “lady of all virtues.” Alluding to Socrates, Lady Philosophy assures that “it would not be right for Philosophy to let an innocent man walk his path alone”; she is not “afraid to face an accusation or tremble in fear—as if such charges were new to me!… Did I not stand beside [Plato’s] Socrates as he won victory by death, a death he did not deserve?” And she has seen how “the Epicurean and Stoic herds and all the rest tried to snatch [Plato’s] legacy” and me as well, ripping her garment and going off “with some little shreds torn from it.” As the metrum has it, “The virtuous man, / calm in his orderly life, / stares Fortune in the face / and drives proud Fate beneath his feet.” Such a man will “Fear not, hope not,” disarming the “impotent wrath” of “raging tyrants” who have “not true strength.”

He understands all of that ‘theoretically,’ but he has not lived by it. And so, Lady Philosophy demands that he show her his “wound,” so that she can cure him. He recalls that she had “hallowed the words of Plato when he claimed that the Republic would be blessed if lovers of wisdom ruled it or if its rulers happened to love wisdom,” so that the polis will not “fall to wicked and criminal men.” That is what I did, taking part “in public life for the sake of benefiting all good men” and “endur[ing] grim and irreconcilable quarrels from the wicked,” “preserv[ing] the law” while never fearing “to offend the powerful.” “How often I risked myself by using my authority” as a senator, a consul, and as magister officiorum from “countless attacks from the unchecked greed of the barbarians,” the Ostrogoths. “I never strayed by choosing right over wrong.” And as for the backstabbing Roman senators, he exposed corruption amongst them, and “prevent[ed] an informer from introducing documents accusing the Senate of treason” against Theodoric, precisely in order “to preserve the Senate,” not to ruin it. Even though the Senate passed decrees against Boethius, such “foolish self-deception never changes the true worth of anything”; the Senate is worth preserving, even if the majority of senators have deluded themselves. As for the letters he supposedly sent to Justin I, they are forgeries. No, what has plunged Boethius into melancholy is that God has not intervened on his behalf. “I suppose it is a common fault to lean towards evil, but it is almost monstrous that every wicked man accomplishes his plots against the innocent, while God looks on.” He quotes an unnamed philosopher who asked “If God exists, what is the source of evil? And what is the source of good if He does not?” Having been sentenced to death in absentia, without a fair trial, “instead of receiving the rewards of true virtue I suffer the penalty of a crime I didn’t commit.” Moreover, like Socrates, he stands accused of sacrilege, even as you, Lady Philosophy, “endowed me with virtue in order to make me become like God,” rather as theosis in accordance with God’s grace makes Christians gods. [2] This is finally an assault on you. “These wicked men will gain credence for their charge because of my closeness to you”; “you too have to be ripped apart because I am assaulted.” How, he asks in the metrum, could the “Builder of the starry universe,” could permit “twisting Fortune [to] bring ruin” to “the innocent”? He implores the cosmic Ruler to “stead the earth, surround it /with Your law which rules the vast sky” but evidently not men on earth. 

Lady Philosophy refutes this account of ‘the problem of evil.’ On the contrary, “to be led by [God’s] reins and yield to his justice is perfect liberty.” You have not truly suffered exile; you are self-banished. I will prove that this is so, but gently, since your wound “has hardened and grown scarred by the constant pricks of your anxieties.” After all, “God gives the times their tasks,” and this is not yet the time for “stronger remedies.” And so, she begins by questioning him, Socrates-like. Is the world ruled by chance or by reason? Reason, he replies, since that alone can account for its orderliness. In that case, what “rudders” does God use to steer the world’s course? He doesn’t understand the question, so she tries again: What is nature’s telos? He admits that “sorrow has dulled” his memory, as if he has regressed to the condition of unphilosophic young Meno. Well, then, if you don’t recall nature’s telos, what is its origin? God, of course. What is man? “A rational and mortal creature.” Very well then, “Now I know…the greatest cause of your disease: you no longer know what you are.” “Overwhelmed by forgetfulness of your nature, you grieve at being in exile and deprived of your goods,” no longer “aware of the telos of all things” and thus supposing “that base and wicked men are powerful and happy,” having “forgotten with what rudders the world is steered.” Yet there is a possible cure because, as his answers indicate, “your true nature has not totally abandoned you,” since you retain “a true opinion concerning the governance of the universe, a governance you believe to be dependent on divine reason rather than the whims of chance.” That is, it may be that his theoretical inquiries have imbued him not with philosophic knowledge of nature and its “Builder” but at least with a partially right opinion of them, and that right opinion indicates a potential for the correction of his misunderstanding of divine providence. Meanwhile, as the metrum has it, “banish joy, / banish hope, / banish fear. / Put them to flight! / The mind is shackled— / when these rule.” His passions must subside, if reason can be made to rule his soul.

Your error, Lady Philosophy explains, is clear: “You suppose it’s the changes of Fortune that have overthrown your soul.” But consider your soul’s “nature, her ways, and her worth.” If you do, “you would realize that she is not responsible for anything of beauty that you have ever had or lost.” Instead, “You believe that Fortune has changed towards you.” Not at all. She is by nature and by her ways fickle, a “blind spirit.” That being so, if her ways of the moment please you, “make use of them and don’t complain”; if she betrays you, then “reject her and cast her off.” “No one could ever count on her to be loyal, and now she has left you, too”—unlike me, Lady Philosophy kindly refrains from adding. Why do you esteem “a happiness that will pass away”? “Wisdom takes thought for how things will turn out in the end.” Once you have accepted her gifts, you must “endure without complaint whatever happens under her terms,” just as a sailor who follows the winds, neglecting to take the helm and steer the ship by shifting its sails, will never get to where he “choose[s] to go.” You have foolishly expected Fortune to be reliable, but “if Fortune began to be permanent, she would cease to be Fortune.” She amuses herself by “proving her power,” as the philosophically corrected poetry of the metrum intones.

Lady Philosophy now has Fortune speak. She tells Boethius that her gifts are not really his. “When Nature brought you forth from your mother’s womb, when you were without resource or possessions of any kind,” an orphan, “I took you up,” bringing you wealth, authority, the favor of the king. “Now it pleases me to pull back my hand.” What is your complaint? I do not give, I lend. You lived for decades on borrowed gifts. “Wealth, honors, and other things of that sort are mine by right; they are slaves that belong to me and come along with me, and so they depart with me.” Get it straight, man: “if the things you mourning over had been yours in first place, you would never have lost them.” Even nature changes—from day to night, from spring to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter. Neither it nor I am bound by “the insatiable desire of men.” And so, “Rise up, if you wish, but on this condition: don’t consider yourself injured when you descend, as the rules of my game demand.” And as for God, the metrum adds, even if he “answered prayers with gold, / heaped honors on those asking, / still this gain would seem nothing” to men whose “greed only opens new mouths.” 

As for your mouth, Lady Philosophy now observes, “if Fortune were speaking these words to you in her own defense, you would be utterly unable to open [it] in reply.” Would you? The arguments “sound good,” he admits (“smeared as they are with the honey of sweet speech and poetry”) but rhetorical and poetic music, and even plausible reasoning, do not reach “the pain of sorrow” which “lies too deep when someone is miserable.” Very well, but I have not yet attempted a cure, she replies; I have only applied “a sort of poultice for a pain that stubbornly resists a cure.” Having released him from the clutches of the conventional Muses, he can now be reminded of “how many and how great are the sources of your happiness,” the many favors Fortuna did lavish upon him. As for the misfortunes, “it is fixed by eternal law— / nothing created remains.” Among created things, change is the only constant, both Fortuna and nature obeying the dictates of the eternal law. Yes, but: “for all the adversities of Fortune the saddest is this: to have once been happy.”

Sad it may seem, but you forget that even Fortune has not taken everything from you. Your father-in-law, who adopted you when you were orphaned, still lives, as does your wife, his daughter, “modest in her chastity and sense of honor, a daughter worthy of her father. Your sons remain consuls; “even in their youth [they] show evidence of the nature of their father and grandfather.” Admittedly, “staying alive is a natural concern to man,” and your chances of survival are poor, but “even now you have those things that no one can deny are dearer than life.” “Fortune hasn’t brought down her hatred upon everyone you love.”

My life is one thing, my glory another, he protests. I have lost so much of it. True enough, Lady Philosophy replies, but “no one is easily satisfied with the state of his fortune.” “Man’s condition produces anxiety,” since even at its most favorable “it never lasts forever.” Conversely, “every condition is blessed when a man endures it with an untroubled spirit.” Why then do men “seek outside yourselves for the happiness that has been placed within you?” Rule yourself rightly and “you will possess what you would never wish to lose and what Fortune can’t take away from you.” And that being so, how can “present happiness make men blessed, when it doesn’t make them miserable if they lose it?” As the metrum has it, “If it’s permanence you wish— / avoid the quicksand.” 

Lady Philosophy now applies “some cures that are a little stronger.” These descend from generalities to particulars, just as prudential reasoning does. You may suppose that you own your riches, your property, but consider that “avarice makes men hated” while good repute comes when you give your things away. Too often, riches come from “making others poor.” As for physical beauty, seen in jewels, in the fields and the seas, what is it compared to the “true beauty” of human reason and soul? Neither Fortune nor nature allow you to keep such “external goods.” Of course, you need some such things, those that “satisfy your needs, which is all that Nature requires.” Beyond that, what do you need for happiness? “In reality, men who possess very many things need very many things”—guards, servants, high walls, for example—while “men who measure their abundance by the necessities of Nature and not be the excesses of desire need very little.” And you surely are not “so impoverished that you have no innate good that belongs to you.” “You are an animal made godlike by your reason,” so why do you want glory gained “only through the possession of lifeless objects?” They are inferior to you, and in chasing after them you do injury to “your Creator,” who has already endowed you with far more valuable gifts. “If you judge the vilest of things as your goods, you place yourself beneath those very things by your own judgment—and a fair judgment it would be,” because “human nature is such that a man surpasses other things only when he is aware that he does so,” only when he knows himself as human. “That same human nature is reduced to being lower than the beasts if it ceases to know itself.” 

So much for what we now call ‘economics,’ the acquisition of external physical things. But Boethius has never been so much homo economicus as homo politicus. He has lost his “offices and might.” That is the source of the honor he has lost. Lady Philosophy remarks that the honor political men receive does not attach principally to the offices they hold but to the “just use” they make of the power they wield. If evil men can hold office—Boethius knows they can, and do—officeholding itself cannot be intrinsically good. “It isn’t the office that brings honor to virtue, but virtue that brings honor to the office.” And in any event, power itself is quite limited: “Can you command someone whose soul is free?” And consider that the tortures inflicted by tyrants can be inflicted on them. In an inverse statement of the Golden Rule, Lady Philosophy asks, “Would you suppose that a man has any power, when he can’t keep someone from doing to him what he can do to others?” What the possession of power really does is to show the man, giving no honor to evil men but “highlight[ing] their lack of honor.” Power “couldn’t transform / twisted Nero,” the metrum says; it only revealed him for what he was.

But high office has not shown me to be an evil man, Boethius objects. On the contrary, “ambition for earthly things hasn’t held any power over me, but I’ve looked for the opportunity to do the things that would keep my virtue from growing old and stale.” I have taken high office to exercise my virtue, to retain the strength of my character. Yes, but as you have already admitted, you regret the loss of your glory. “Minds that are excellent in their nature but haven’t yet reached the perfection of their virtue can still be enticed by this one thing: the love of glory and the fame of great services done for the state.” Consider, then, the limits of such glory. The earth is tiny compared to the cosmos; land is a small portion of the earth; much land is uninhabitable; languages limit the spread of fame to one’s own people. What, then, is the real scope of fame? Time also limits it, as famous men of one era are often forgotten in a few decades. What counts is eternity. Yet, “leaving aside the superiority of your conscience and virtue, you demand rewards in the words of other men.” But “when death releases the soul from the body, what good does fame do these distinguished men who seek glory from virtue?” And if the soul is not eternal, “there is no glory left, since the one to whom the glory was attributed no longer exists.” Fame dies soon after they do, a “second death.”

These things being so, Fortune’s most valuable service occurs when she turns against you—”when she shows herself, uncovering her ways.” That is when “she instructs” honestly, by “show[ing] herself fickle and unstable.” She “uses her allurements to draw men astray from the true Good,” while using “her claw to drag men back to the things that are good.” So, for example, now that you have lost your wealth, “you have discovered your friends,” those who have remained loyal. They are “the most precious form of riches,” among the external riches. Love, friendship, “weaves people” together, “knotting with sacred law.” It constitutes the best politics because it “dictates justice” when “that Love which rules the heavens” also “rule[s] your hearts.” 

With this, Boethius pronounces himself now “equal to the blows of Fortune.” He has fortified himself with Lady Philosophy’s wisdom, but solid defenses are less than what he might achieve. Lady Philosophy now promises to lead him to “true happiness,” “the happiness your soul dreams of, but which it can’t now see, since you are occupied with the mere shadow of things,” like the inmates in Socrates’ cave. She distinguishes between two kinds of happiness: felicitas, the kind “that is more familiar to you,” and beatitudo, “true blessedness.” The true telos of every human being is beatitudo. Once a soul has achieved that, “a state made perfect by the coming together of all good things,” it desires nothing more. Typically, men mistake this “true Good” for riches, honor, power, or pleasure. They “seek the highest Good, but seek it as if they were drunk and didn’t know the path that led to their home.” This notwithstanding, men’s very errors show “how great is the power of nature, since men agree in choosing the end of the Good, though they differ in their various opinions about how to achieve it,” “dream[ing] of your origin, although only in faint images.” Against Fortuna’s wheel Lady Philosophy sets Nature’s circle—the soul’s desire to return to “the source” of genuine happiness, a return that “mak[es] the circle eternal.” 

Boethius confesses that he was “distressed” by one thing after another, even when he enjoyed wealth and honor. He was not self-sufficient. He readily agrees with Lady Philosophy that “money possesses nothing by its own nature which prevents it from taken against the will of those who possess it,” while human nature “is satisfied with very little, while nothing is enough for avarice.” Money is a base distraction, as “men seek what is buried in the earth and ignore what soars the starry pole.” And, in the central chapter of the Consolation, he goes on to acknowledge that the high public offices that bring honor do not “implant virtue” in one’s mind or remove vices from it; on the contrary, they “tend to bring wickedness to the surface rather than remove it.” It is wisdom that is worthy of respect, whether or not the wise man holds office. What is more, “honor vanishes immediately when it appears before men who don’t consider it honor,” as when a man honored in Rome travels to a foreign country, or when an office once considered honorable loses its good reputation—as has happened to the Roman senate, many of whose members have been exposed as corrupt. Even and perhaps especially the highest offices leave officeholders vulnerable; kingship is like sitting under the sword of Damocles, as the happiness of kings can end in “calamity”; kings live in fear. They, too, depend upon outsiders, their guards to preserve them; their office can ruin friendship (“the most sacred good, since it results from virtue, not chance”) since political friends attach themselves on account of your good fortune, not in virtue. “Even though far away Indian land / shakes beneath your law / and remote Thule serves you, / still you cannot dispel dark worry / nor banish wretched complaint— / this isn’t power!”

Often “stolen” “through the shameful opinion of the crowd,” he who considers glory might well wonder, ‘If you are so high, why do you care about the opinions of the low?’ “Men who are extolled without reason should blush at hearing themselves praised,” and even if you deserve the praise, does glory add to your self-knowledge? That is unlikely, since your glorifiers are often ignoramuses. If the source of your glory is a noble birth, you have borrowed that glory from your ancestors, who at best may be said to oblige you to “live up to [their] virtue.” In reality, all men come from the same truly glorious “Source,” their true Father, “A Father” who has “limited [their] souls with bodies” and thus limited their glory. And speaking of bodies and the bodily pleasures many confuse with happiness, they too are limited, limited by diseases and pain, altogether among “the vilest and most fragile of things.” To seek pleasure is to put yourself on the level of animals. People take you to be handsome? Fools: they can’t see your ugly internal organs, handicapped as they are by their own organs, their eyes. So deceived, some of them may be attracted, but the most intense bodily pleasure, sexual pleasure, produces children, who can be “tormentors.” Or it may be that “some tormentor invented” them.

What, then is true happiness, beatitudo? Lady Philosophy observes that by nature, all things are “simple and indivisible” if left to themselves. The problem is that they can be “broken apart by human error and transferred from the true and perfect to the false and imperfect.” A human being who remained true to his nature would enjoy self-sufficiency and power, deserve reverence and honor, and be “full of joy, too.” Indeed, self-sufficiency, power, reverence, honor, and joy are really “one and the same”—human nature as “the Father of all things” created it. In treating these five attributes as if they were not a unity, by pursuing one or another of them, we act against our own nature. That is why “we should call upon the Father of all things” for guidance. At the physical center of the Consolatio, Boethius has placed that prayer, in which Lady Philosopher sings to the “Governor of the universe, / Ruler with perpetual reason,” the unmoved mover and “highest Good innate” which joins all things together in an emanation of that Good, including human nature, in which Mind, “Soul,” and matter are coordinated in natural union, in harmony with the cosmos itself, wherein the World Soul “moves all things” in accordance with the eternal law. “Permit my spirit to rise— / and grant light to my mind / that I might fix clear sight on You,” a being of “quiet calm,” unmoved while moving all else, ultimately, towards you, as “You are the Leader and the Way— / The First and the Last.”

This movement is the exact opposite of that seen in ancient atomism, in advance of modern evolutionism, which posits a world in which the simplest things are the lowest, which then proceed to greater complexity, to ‘higher’ life-forms. Lady Philosophy replies, “when the perfection has been removed, one can’t imagine what is the source for the thing that is called imperfect. For the world of objects has not taken her origin from lesser, incomplete things but proceeds from the whole and complete objects and slips down into these weak and lowly ones.” As for God, the ultimate source of all, “nothing greater than God is able to be imagined,” so “who can doubt that the thing that is surpassed by nothing is good?” Thus “reason shows that the Good is God.” And since “we have concluded that the perfect Good is true blessedness,” we cannot evade the further conclusion that “true blessedness must reside in the most high God,” the Good. “God is blessedness itself,” the highest unity, inasmuch as the existence of two or more gods would mean that none were perfect, none would “possess the other.” In a naturalist-philosophic parallel to the Biblical teaching on theosis, the final divinization of men by means of human obedience to God’s law indispensably assisted by God’s grace, Lady Philosophy teaches that “men become blessed through the acquisition of divinity” and thereby “become gods” by “participation” in the Good. Self-sufficiency, power, reverence, honor, and joy are the “limbs” of blessedness, “bound to the Good as if it were the ‘head.'” It is not finally these limbs that we desire but “the Good itself.” Because most of us lack self-knowledge, we fail to see that, but “Whoever sees this Light, / will say that even the sun— / is not bright.”

Very well, then, what is the Good? All things perish when they lose their unity. In plants and animals, only “when body and spirit come together” do we call them living things; death is their separation, the dissolution of the unity. “Everything continues while it is one, but perishes when it ceases to be one.” Nothing in nature “wishes” its own destruction; this is one of “the laws of nature,” itself ordained by “Providence.” Oneness is good; “everything seeks the good.” The “very cornerstone of truth”—the natural equivalent of Jesus?—is that “either all things are bound up with no oneness and, being deprived of oneness, they flow without a guide, or if there is anything to which all things universally hurry, it will be the highest of all goods,” the end, the telos, “of all things.” To stay on this journey, or to return to it after having strayed from the right way, to “track the truth, / and resist false paths, / [one] must turn back [to] the light of innermost sight,” reasoning the way back to “the treasury within,” genuine human nature. “For not all mind’s light is captured / by man’s matter and mass. / Inside clings truth’s seed, submerged in the soul.” This is what Plato’s Socrates means by “memory,” in the Meno. The poetic Muses are many; Lady Philosophy, the true Muse, is one. The law of nature is the law of love, easily channeled wrongly, but aiming at the Good, making the cosmos cohere. [3]

Boethius indeed says that he is now “remembering” what he said earlier that he did not know. “The world would not have come together from so many diverse, contrary parts, unless there were one who had joined together such diverse things,” “without someone to hold together what he had joined.” Someone or some ‘one’? “Whatever this thing is through which created things exist and are set in motion, I will call by a name that all men use, God.” Lady Philosophy adds, reinforcing her teaching, “God has been shown to be the Good itself,” and then begins to refer to the Good as a Person: “He orders all things in accordance with the Good, if, in fact, He rules everything through Himself, whom we have concluded to be Good,” as “a kind of helm and rudder with which the mechanism of the universe is preserved stable and incorrupt”—the rudder of the subordinate rudders, the “rudders of goodness,” which Boethius had not known, initially. In terms of morality, “things possessing a will freely direct themselves towards the will of the one ordering them, as if they were agreeable and accommodating to their ruler?” This accords with the teaching of the Book of Wisdom, which tells us that “Wisdom reaches boldly from end to end, an arranges all things pleasantly” (Wisdom 8:1, cited by the editors). God is all-powerful; being good, indeed the Good, God cannot do evil: ergo, “evil is nothing, since the one who can do everything is unable to do it.” And so, Lady Philosophy turns to the problem of evil, which has vexed Boethius. 

Book IV has seven chapters, symbolic of Creation. Is God’s Creation flawed? What is evil, and why doesn’t God put a stop to it? Boethius confesses that it was the pain of his “mistreatment” that “made me forget” the arguments Lady Philosophy has made, and not so much the mistreatment itself but the question, “If the ruler of the universe is in fact good, how can evil exist or go unpunished?” Meanwhile, “virtue lacks reward and is even overthrown and trampled underfoot by wicked men”; “virtue, not vice, is punished.” On the contrary, Lady Philosophy replies: despite appearances, “the good are always powerful and the wicked always abject and helpless,” “never without punishment or virtues without reward.” As in Plato’s Phaedrus, “I’ll give you wings that will lift you upon on high, so your fear can be cast aside, and you can return unhurt to your homeland,” the Good. You will end your Phaedrian journey saying, “I remember! This is my home my source, my end.” 

She argues as follows: if someone has achieved the object of his desire, he must have had the power to do so; insofar as you have an ability, you are strong, and if not, you are weak; “all men desire the Good when they seek blessedness”; “some men become good by attaining the Good,” that is, the acquire what they see; evil men seek the Good but remain evil; ergo, good men are powerful, evil men weak. The good man is like one who walks on his legs, the evil man like one who walks on his hands. That is, the good man proceeds according to nature. The “changeable desires are not natural”; as Socrates puts it in the Republic, the desires are foolish and inconsistent counselors. Evil men are weak because “they can’t even reach the goal to which their natural inclination leads.” By contrast, the good man, the one who “reached the goal of things worthy to seek,” having “nothing else he could strive for,” surely must be judged the more powerful. “What’s weaker than the blindness of ignorance” in an evil man, or his lack of self-rule and of the moderation self-rule enables, or worse still, the perverse will of the one who “knowingly and willingly desert the Good to turn to vice?” To abandon “the common goal of all things” means that he “ceases to exist” as a real human being. He has become almost literally a ‘nihilist.’ Such a man ceases to “exist in a real and essential way,” failing preserve his nature. Their power is in this sense only a seeming, “for if evil is nothing…it is certain that the wicked can do nothing, since evil is all they can do.” And “the ability to do evil is not power,” as Plato’s Socrates argues in the Gorgias. They will never arrive at beatitudo, blessedness. Worst of all, the tyrant is “strangled with inner chains”: libido (desire, but especially greed), ira (anger), maeror (sorrow), and spes (fleeting hope). “Pressured by these malcontent / [he] does not do what he himself wishes.”

This means that “goodness always produces rewards and that wickedness always brings its own punishment.” “However much the tyrant may rage, the wise man will not lose his crown, nor will it wither away.” For the wise man isn’t crowned with laurel by someone else; his crown is within his soul. His reward, blessedness, is “the greatest and most beautiful thing of all,” as he is “blessed through the very fact of [his] goodness” and rightly called a god, the highest honor of all. This is the meaning of the old saying, ‘virtue is its own reward,’ which should be supplemented with the saying, ‘wickedness is its own punishment.’ A woman who had endured a bad marriage once told me, “People like that live in their own Hell on earth.” As Lady Philosophy puts it, they have “lost their human nature,” even if they have retained the physical shape of a human. Echoing Aristotle, she adds, “a man who abandons virtue, since he can’t become godlike, turns into a beast,” even as the sailors with Ulysses were turned into swine when the followed the song of the Sirens and drank the potion of Circe. It is Mercury, the messenger of the gods, who saves Ulysses, who then finds his way home.

To Lady Philosophy’s assurance that evil men who satisfy their desires are even less fortunate than those who fail, not-quite-convinced Boethius replies, “But how I wish they would quickly lose their misfortune and lose the ability to commit their crimes.” But no, in that case they are only prolonging their wicked condition and, therefore, their misery. They would be better off dying young, their desires unfulfilled. A just punishment might correct them; pain would be good for them. “Should we imitate these men, then, when they seem to be like beasts?” Those who suffer the injuries they inflict are unfortunate, but they are even more unfortunate. The one who commits an injury is more pitiable than he who suffers it.” We pity those with bodily illnesses; should we not pity those with mind illnesses, soul illnesses, even more? “Cherish the good; pity the evil.” 

Yes, Boethius concedes, but why do evil men “snatch the rewards of virtue” even as “the punishments due to the wicked are inflicted on the good.” What is the reason “for such unfairness and disorder?” If the universe were governed by “random chance,” this would be explicable, but “the belief that God governs everything increases my amazement.” 

To answer this, Lady Philosophy must turn to a lesson in metaphysics. Accordingly, she announces “a new beginning” of the dialogue. “Here we deal with the simplicity of Providence, with Fate’s course of events, with unexpected occurrences, with divine thought and foreknowledge, and with the freedom of the will.” By simplicitas, she means that God, the source of Providence, is pure being, not a compound. The origin, growth, and form of all things come from, are provided by, “the stability of the Divine Mind.” Providence “is the divine power of Reason itself. What “has been called Fate in the past” is Providence as it works on the motion and arrangement of things; “it allows Providence to connect everything with its proper order.” That is, “Providence encompasses all things equally, not matter how different they are,” whereas “Fate sets in motion individual objects that are distributed according to space, form, and time” (emphases added). “This unfolding of the temporal order, which is unified through the foresight of the Divine Mind, is Providence, but the same union, arranged and set in order in time, is called Fate,” its order “proceed[ing] out of the simplicity of Providence.” By Providence, God “permanently and at one time disposes the things to be done,” sets the overall plan. By Fate, God “tends to those very same things individually throughout time.” Fate may be “carried out” by “divine spirits,” or “the World’s Soul” (a concept borrowed from neo-Platonism), or nature, or by “the heavenly movement of the stars,” or by “the power of angels,” or by “the various skills of spirits”—one notices that nature and the stars constitute the central pair. Providence “is the immovable and simple plan for divine things, and Fate is the movable interlacing and temporal outline for those things that divine simplicity has determined are to be done.” All fated things are “also subject to Providence,” but “some things that are placed under Providence lie above the course of Fate.” This is why those who center their souls on God free themselves from Fate. They have gone ‘above’ it, closer to the central, simple Supreme Mind. Although prone to linger under Fate, human beings, having been infused with the spirit of divinity at their creation, retain the capacity to attend to their true nature and become the ‘gods’ they are said to be capable of becoming by the Bible and by some of the classical philosophers. 

What has this metaphysical framework to do with the problem of evil? Everything: “it happens that the limits imposed on each thing dispose and direct it towards the Good, although to you humans who aren’t able to understand this order everything seems confused and disturbed.” God’s Providence does no evil; evil is not its telos. By their “wicked error” men “stray as they seek the Good.” Providence, including Fate, doesn’t make them do it. God “looks out from the lofty watchtower of His Providence and sees what is best for all and works out what He knows is suitable for them”; “a knowing God works out the things that the ignorant wonder at.” The “lofty watchtower” imagery, which the editors trace to the Aeneid and to Plato’s Timaeus and Statesman, is a classical motif, even as the ‘personalizing’ of God (“He knows”) invokes the Bible. When bad things—immediately bad things, such as those suffered by Boethius—happen to good men, it may tp prevent them from being “spoiled by a long period of happiness,” or because “they can strengthen the virtues of their souls by the use and practice of patience”: strength rejoices in the challenge. Still others live in fear of things they actually can endure, others blithely ignore threats they cannot endure. In these cases, “Providence uses sorrows to teach these men to understand themselves.” Even death itself can purchase “honor in this world” to “some men”; Boethius himself will exemplify that. “Only divine power, to which bad things too are good, can use these bad things and bring about some good effect.” More immediately, as Lady Philosophy has already explained, “the joys of evil men…provide a good example to virtuous men of how they should judge the kind of happiness they often see falling to the wicked.” While bad things inflicted on good men are blessings in disguise, good things bestowed upon evil men are curses in disguise. Meanwhile, “it isn’t right for a mortal to try to understand in his mind or express with his words all the tools of divine workmanship.” The metrum at the end of Book IV, chapter vi cites as an example of “God’s law” the way in which, “in a just treaty with the universe / the stars keep their ancient peace,” and “the sun ignited in red flames / impedes not the moon’s cold rotation.” It is divine Love that “renews the eternal course” of the heavenly objects, a love that causes all things to “seek to hold their end, the Good.” [4]

In the seventh chapter of Book IV, Lady Philosophy ‘rests’ in the conclusion that “every kind of fortune is completely good,” rewarding of testing the good and punishing or correcting the evil. (Hence the Christian prayer, ‘Glory to God in all things.’) A fortune that tests or corrects is useful, and “whatever is useful [is] good.” A courageous man should not complain when “the cry of war breaks out,” since this will be “the means of increasing his glory.” A wise man “shouldn’t be upset when he has to battle with fortune,” since this will be “the means of shaping his wisdom.” That is why “we call it virtue,” which means strength. No one “progress[es] in virtue” by “wallow[ing] in pleasure.” If Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Hercules had not labored and sacrificed, we would not consider them heroes. She advances a bit of Aristotelian advice: “With unyielding strength take the middle road.” 

But given the superintendence of Providence, how can men be said to have free will, to be praised as heroic, damned as vicious? Are the moderation of good men and the immoderation of evil men a mere effect of Fate? Lady Philosophy addresses these questions in Book V.

She begins with a consideration of “chance.” Does it really exist, given the reality of Providence? Strictly speaking, it does not because nothing can come from nothing; everything has a cause. But one can still speak meaningfully about it. In the Physics, Aristotle defined chance or fortune as a circumstance in which something “done for a specific purpose” turns out differently, for better or for worse. We call “chance” a result that occurs when “causes come together unexpectedly and without being hoped for, and so they seem to have produced an accident.” The story of the farmer who discovers gold hidden in his field by a man who hid it there is a good example: two unrelated events occurring because two different men acted for different purposes resulted in an outcome unanticipated by either one. However, the ultimate cause of this sequence of events was providential. The metrum teaches that “even chance wears a bridle, heeds the law,” which was provided, as Lady Providence has explained, by the Supreme Mind. 

Where does this leave free will? “Rational creatures could not exist if there were no freedom of the will” because “anything that by its nature uses reason also possesses judgment, which allows it to make decisions about things.” Reason enables those endowed with it “to want something or not to want it, although I don’t think this freedom is equal in all beings,” as divine beings without bodies to interfere with their reasoning “have within them the power to achieve what they want,” while human beings, “more free when they continue to contemplate the Divine Mind,” are “less free when they fall down to human bodies,” “assenting and yielding” to bodily passions. They can choose, even if “that gaze of Providence, looking forth from eternity, sees all things and, in accordance with men’s merits, arranges everything as it has been predetermined ahead of time.” 

Boethius sees “an even greater difficulty,” however. God knows beforehand “every deed and wish.” This being so, “the outcome of things foreseen is necessary.” True, foreseeing them doesn’t make them happen, but anything foreseen must happen as foreseen, if God is doing the foreseeing; “if we know something will happen, it must happen,” and God’s knowledge is perfect. Unlike us, he has no false beliefs; he does not engage in ‘wishful thinking’ or in fearful thinking. “This alone is enough to do away with freedom of the will.” “The Divine Mind that sees all without error binds and constrains them to one outcome.” This means, among other things, that the ‘justice system’ of rewards and punishments for good and evil men, respectively, makes no sense. Indeed, there can be “neither vices nor virtues.” Prayer, too, is pointless.

Lady Philosophy begins her reply by agreeing that knowledge of an event that will happen does not cause it to happen. But consider a chariot race. As an American sharpie once remarked, the battle may not go to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but that’s the way to bet. If this were not so, Boethius concedes, “then the use of skill would be in vain, if everything were moved by compulsion.” But, Lady Philosophy then argues, “you believe that to think things are different from the way they are is opposed to the integrity of knowledge.” Not so. What is known “is known not according to its ability to be known but rather according to the ability of the knower.” The same person will know the roundness of a ball quite differently if he examines it by sight or by touch. And this is not only true of the physical senses. The senses, imagination, reason, and intelligence (nous) each perceive in its own way, in each human being. [5] Thus, “in understanding, everything uses its own ability rather than the ability of the things to be known”; therefore, “every judgment is the act of someone judging,” judging without the assistant from any “power outside him but through his own power.” Understanding comprehends the other ways of knowing, without erasing them.

This forms the basis of free will. Unlike Locke, for example, Lady Philosophy does not take the human mind to be a passive tabula rasa, collecting the ‘sense impressions’ Locke calls the ‘simple ideas,’ a power limited to putting these together into ‘complex ideas.’ Simplicitas comes not from ‘below,’ from the senses, but from ‘above,’ from God, the ultimate example of simplicitas. “The mind within the body is not engraved upon by the object perceived through sense, but by its own strength makes judgment about the effect occurring to the body. “Human beings can raise their minds to the level of reason.” Only the divine exercises intelligence, “knowing not only its own sphere but what pertains to others,” while “surpass[ing] those others.” The effect of this is that human beings tend to think of divine knowledge as if it were the product of reasoning, analogous to human reasoning. We suppose that divine intelligence sees the future the way we do, as part of a sequence of events. We will either deny that God can know the future, or we will claim that he has foreknowledge because he has already determined what the future will be. 

But “what sort of knowledge” does the Divine Mind possess? Humans live within time, within the course of events, going forward from past events to the present to future events. Our minds do not “grasp tomorrow,” and they have “already lost yesterday.” If our souls are immortal, extending into infinity, they nonetheless are not “eternal” because the human mind “doesn’t comprehend and embrace the entire space of the time it lives,” not yet possessing the future and no longer having a past. The Divine Mind is fundamentally different. “Whatever comprehends and possesses all at once the complete fullness of unlimited time and also possesses all of the future and has lost none of the past…is rightly claimed to be eternal,” “embrac[ing] all at once the complete presence of unlimited life.” As the Timaeus indicates, “God is eternal, but the world is only perpetual.” God’s knowledge “surpasses all movement of time and remains in the simplicitas of its presence,” “understand[ing] all things simply and consider[ing] them as if they were being done now.” God’s so-called foreknowledge is really “never-failing knowledge of the present moment.” “Just as you men see something in this temporary present of yours, so He discerns all things in His eternal present.” If so, then God’s seeing no more makes things happen than our seeing makes things happen; foreknowledge it does not change “the nature or integrity of things.” The Divine Mind readily distinguishes “both the things that will necessarily come about”—e.g., the sunrise—from “those that will come about without necessity”—e.g., a man walking. “It knows what will happen, although it knows that the things themselves lack all necessity of happening.” There are “two necessities”: “simple” necessity (the sun rising, all men are mortal) and “conditional” necessity (“If you know someone is walking, it is necessary that he is walking”). No necessity causes the man who is going forward voluntarily to walk, but if he is walking, he is necessarily going forward (or backward.) “God sees as present those future things that occur through the freedom of the will”; “all things that God foreknows will happen will come about, but some of them proceed from freedom of the will.” Some things that God knows “happen through the necessity of things, while others occur through the power of the things that do them.” Our future actions do not cause God’s knowledge of them. God’s simplicitas causes his knowledge of them. 

Thus “freedom of the will remains unviolated by mortals,” the justice system makes sense, and God’s justice system, ruled by himself, the all-seeing “watchman on high,” makes perfect sense. “So, let us shun vices and cultivate virtues, lifting our minds to proper hopes, and offering humble prayers on high. For, if you wish to speak the truth, a great necessity has been placed upon you men to do good, since you live in front of a judge who sees all things.”

 

Notes

1. On the Meno, see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website under the category “Philosophers.”
2. See “Theosis,” on this website under the category “Bible Notes.”
3. The metrum concluding this chapter invokes the story of Orpheus, beloved by the poetic Muses, the being “whose songs subdued all” but who could not subdue his passion for his wife, Eurydice, and earthly being. Orpheus disobeyed “the merciful arbiter of the shades” in Tartarus—i.e., Tartarus himself, whose underworld has been named for its ruler—who decreed that he might reunite with her so long as he did not look back at her as he left “Tartarus’ darkness.” He did so, anyway, and Erydice was killed. “Whoever, having been weakened, / turns back a gaze to Tartarus’ chasm— / whatever excellence he has gained, / looking back, he loses.” This last point evidently contains a warning to Boethius, preoccupied as he was with the honor and fame attendant to his years in high public office.
4. The editors remark that this poem “is in the same meter and discusses the same them as 1 metrum 5, in which a sorrowing Boethius asks the God who governs the physical universe to show equal concern for man. Here Lady Philosophy is singing and argues that God does indeed do this and that the order in the physical universe mirrors the order in God’s interactions with man.” 
5. Nous, according to Aquinas, following the classics, “perceives the truth without actively working to figure things out, which is the task of reason,” as the editors explain (p.161 n.35). As Lady Philosophy puts it, intelligence “understands the reason’s view of the whole, and the imagination’s view of the figure, and also the matter that is perceived by senses, but not by using reason, imagination, or the senses, but by one stroke of the mind, looking forth at all things according to form, so to speak.”