The Consolation of Philosophy

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.”