Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

It’s been a long time since I last wrote, and I’ve been busy. Soon after writing my last post, I packed up and moved to Boston, where I started a new (read: real) job after a few arduous weeks of getting settled, which included acquiring furniture over the course of four separate, poorly planned trips to Ikea. My new location and job have both proved to be conducive to reading, and I’ve been lucky to find a few hours every day to read as well as some nice places to do so.

Having finished with Augustine, we now cross the hazy frontier from Antiquity to the beginning of the Middle Ages, and at that border is a Christian philosopher from Rome sitting in a prison cell, waiting for his death. In many ways Boethius’ story is the perfect symbolic way to begin this new era, since the philosopher of the previous period who most informs Consolation of Philosophy, Socrates, was also famously jailed and executed. And just as Socrates found philosophy to be a panacea during his imprisonment, so too does Boethius, who personifies Philosophy as his nurse and interlocutor.

Boethius is not best known for being a philosopher in his own right, but rather earns his fame in two ways. First, he is an envoy, a messenger carrying the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, of Cicero and Plotinus, across five centuries to the Latin-speaking West; he has been called the first Scholastic, and indeed it is through his translations and commentaries on Aristotle that many in England, France, and Germany first came to know of Greek philosophy. Second, he is an interpreter who took the densest Greek philosophy and made it pragmatic; he showed how the great ancient thinkers could provide comfort in difficult times. Though Plato and Aristotle are not impractical per se, Boethius makes them useful and applicable in a way that we have not seen yet; he's like that cool professor who teaches you to count cards as a way of applying probability. 

It is with this understanding that we should read Boethius: he is a man residing firmly in this world as well as a dedicated scholar whose understanding of philosophy finds solutions to some of the most difficult problems that plagued philosophers and theologians: theodicy – the problem of evil – and free will, the latter of which is given an extended treatment and an especially elegant answer.

Wheel! Of! Fortune!

Boethius began his career as consul – something equivalent to a Prime Minister – to the Ostrogoth rulers who overthrew the emperor of Rome and took control of the Western Roman Empire, but through a series of unfortunate events involving the unwise defense of one friend who was on trial for treason and betrayal by another, the once illustrious statesmen ended up in prison awaiting his death. It is not surprising, then, that Boethius is preoccupied with the capricious nature of fortune, a thread that we will follow in the next post on the Thousand and One Nights. “In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind is once to have been happy,” he laments. 

The regrettable passage from happiness to unhappiness is one that other philosophers have studied. We recall in Cicero discussions from Epicureans and Stoics alike that the truly happy can never lose his happiness, and here we see that theory put to the test. But there are still other accounts of reversals of fortune to which we can turn, the most prominent being that of Job. With his family, friends, and possessions torn away from him, he never really passed into unhappiness – which, in turning from the good, would have been akin to losing his faith – although he certainly struggled. We have discussed this elsewhere, so there is no need to belabor the point now, but we can recall that Job, despite some complaining, was ultimately rewarded for his faith – that is, rewarded for placing his happiness in the only true and secure location: with God.

While we may associate ill fortune with the work of a malevolent imp, we can see from the story of Job that fortune is up to the whims of God. After all, though Satan (or some adversarial being) challenges Job’s righteousness, it is God who makes the decision to remove all cause for Job’s piety. And although Job's friends believe in retributive justice, Job was not being punished; he was, to put it tersely, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Boethius, like Job, is certainly unhappy, and he has every reason to be. And in his unhappiness, he searches for comfort – or rather comfort finds him. In the Consolation, he does not call upon Nurse Philosophy; rather, she reveals herself to him. This, I think, is very important. Philosophy is not only a balm that we can apply, but a vaccine that manifests when we require it and without our intervention. For in our unhappiness, how can we be expected to find our own comfort? We must be prepared for it. “The readiness is all,” says Hamlet, and Boethius, the dutiful student, is ready.

"Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens.” Lady Philosophy tells Boethius that he must take the good with the bad, for, just as a farmer entrusts his livelihood to the earth, so must men who depend on worldly events for their happiness entrust their lives to Fortune and her Wheel. As my edition points out, this is not the first personification of the caprices of fortune as the turning of a wheel, but it is the most famous, being the source for later writers like Dante, who was a devotee of Boethius. The metaphor is particularly interesting because later on, God is referred to as the “still point of the turning world.” God, then, is at the center of the wheel, part of all, subject to none.

Goodness: The Re-return

Medieval philosophy, if Consolation is any indication, will be as concerned with the Good as classical philosophy was. So let’s give it another go: please, Boethius, tell us what the Good is. 

In discussing the varied pursuits of men, Philosophy asserts, “the only thing men desire is happiness.” This isn’t new. Happiness has always been seen alongside the Good, and Aristotle said that men wouldn’t do wrong if they were told it was wrong. Men desire, above all, the Good, and only through error do they pursue what is not good. Philosophy continues: “Each man considers whatever he desires above all else to be the supreme good.” So, in agreement with Aristotle, men in their hearts pursue the Good, but the Good which they pursue takes the form of whatever they desire most, just like the taco-alien from South Park.

And now we get something with a bit of Christian and Neoplatonic flavor. Philosophy continues: “Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part – which is nothing – nor the whole, which they are not interested in.” A very nice thought, and one that is no doubt indebted to Plotinus. The Good is Unity, the One, indivisible, and hence our pursuits of money, fame, and the like are, to borrow Augustine’s favorite word, vanity. Though each is a shadow of the Good, they are ultimately only reflections of ourselves, not of any metaphysical truth. Being the good little chronological readers that we are, we should remember Calvino’s essay on Ovid and universal contiguity. The essential one-ness of nature is demonstrable, and it manifests before our eyes every moment of every day (if you don’t believe me, ask Emerson).

Ain't No Rest for the Wicked

Yet after all the dialectic between himself and Philosophy, Boethius is still troubled, and after being pressed by his nurse, he reveals the root of his misery. “But the greatest cause of my sadness is really this,” he says: “The fact that in spite of a good helmsman to guide the world, evil can still exist and even pass unpunished.”

Boethius wants Philosophy to settle for him the question of theodicy, how a just God (or whichever helmsman) can let evil prosper in the world. Philosophy’s answer is uncomplicated, surprisingly. She says that evil is didactic, there for our own personal growth: “It is in your own hands what fortune you wish to shape for yourself, for the only function of adversity apart from discipline and correction, is punishment.” (We would be wise not to forget Iago's speech: "'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.") 

She elaborates: “Now, there are two things on which all the performance of human activity depends, will and power…In the absence of the will, a man is unwilling to do something and therefore does not undertake it; and in the absence of the power to do it, the will is useless... So that if you see someone who wants to get something which he cannot get, you can be sure that what he has been lacking is the power to get what he wanted.” And: “Therefore, men’s power or ability is to be judged by what they can do, and their weakness by what they can’t do.” (We would be wise not to forget the next line of Iago's speech: "Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our will are gardeners.")

I’m with her for most of that, but we should perhaps hearken back to Augustine for contrast: "The mind orders the body, and the body obeys; the mind orders itself and it resists... If the will were a full will, it would not give the order that the will should exist, since it would already exist." When Philosophy asserts that “if you see someone who wants to get something which he cannot get,” he lacks power, we could interpret power to be power over his will and be okay, I suppose, but otherwise, I don’t buy it. Desire and will are fundamentally different, especially in the realm of the mind: if I want an ice cream, I can buy it unless I have am deficient of something (money), but if I try not to think about elephants, I’ll think about elephants no matter what.

Free Will-y

Anyway, back from this sidetrack: Philosophy establishes – more or less – that evil is didactic: to punish, to correct, to lead or lead astray. But Boethius correctly sees a problem with this. God is all-powerful, so shouldn’t he be commanding us? And if he’s commanding us, we don’t have free will, and if we have don’t have free will, we can’t be blamed for being lead astray or not.

Philosophy summarizes Boethius’ position: “You think that the necessity of events is consequent upon their being foreseen, while if there is no necessity, they cannot be foreknown, because you believe that nothing can be comprehended by knowledge unless it is certain.” This is to say that Boethius (and we) believes that if something is said to be foreseen, then it must necessarily happen, i.e. it has been predestined. So if God knows we will do something, then we no longer have the free will to choose to do it, because it has been foreseen. Similarly, if something does not necessarily have to happen, then no one can know it. Philosophy, however, makes a different argument: “Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing.”

Here’s where the elegance of the argument really comes in. Philosophy agrees with him on a superficial level -- that is, he has come up with an apparent contradiction, one that needs fuller consideration. She makes a long argument, which I believe I’ve summed up with the following example (nb: I read this and took notes on it a while ago, so I may have unknowingly stolen some of it from the text – if so, oops, my b):

Imagine a man in a dark room. He puts his hand to the wall and walks, tracing the curve of the wall to determine what shape the room is, and he decides by feeling that it is circular. During his walk, he could not have foreseen that the room would be circular -- it may have seemed to be, but could very well have curved wildly at any moment -- and therefore he declares that anyone who claimed the room was circular before walking the entire circuit was imposing necessity -- the necessity that the room was a perfect circle -- where there was none.

Now, imagine that later, another man enters the room, finds a light switch, and turns it on. He immediately sees that the room is circular without having to make a complete circuit. The room was free to curve as it saw fit – he did not impose his will on the room, nor did he have to follow the room to its end to have foreknowledge. It was free to curve, yet he had no problem immediately apprehending that it was perfectly circular.

We are the man in the dark room; God is the man in the lighted room.

This argument – both Philosophy’s and my example – relies on a Plotinian (I never get tired of that adjective) understanding of time: we humans experience time linearly, but God experiences it eternally, like the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five. Eternity, in that understanding, is the simultaneous experiencing of all time, all at once.

Stray Observations

• The text ends abruptly without Boethius' response to Philosophy, but I think we are to assume that it convinced him. To my mind, this is the only satisfying explanation I’ve heard putting free will together with predestination.
• Boethius has a complex conception of Providence and Fate, which are closely tied to free will. The former is “the simple unchanging plan in the mind of God,” and the latter is “the ever changing distribution in and through time of all the events God has planned in his simplicity.”
• “Perhaps, again, you find pleasure in the beauty of the countryside. Creation is indeed very beautiful, and the countryside a beautiful part of creation. In the same way we are sometimes delighted by the appearance of the sea when it’s very calm and look up with wonder at the sky, the stars, the moon and the sun. However, not one of these has anything to do with you, and you aren’t take credit for the splendor of any of them… They would still have been pleasing by themselves, even if separated from your possessions."
• The distinction is made between “intellect” (intellectus) and “reason” (ratio), which the translator chooses to explain by way of Thomas Aquinas: “Intellect (intelligere) is the simple…grasp of an intelligible truth, whereas reasoning (ratiocinari) ins the progression towards an intelligible truth, by going from one understood (intellecto) point to another. The difference between them is thus like the difference between rest and motion or between possession and acquisition.” CS Lewis is also quoted: “Man’s mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia [truth that can be simply seen] which constitute intellectus."
• Recounting the story of Eurydice and her lover Orpheus, who, after saving her from the underworld, disregarded specific instructions not to look at her, causing her to be pulled back into the Hades: “But who to love can give a law? / Love unto itself is law." Incidentally, I've never thought of the biblical parallels in this story. The most obvious one is that of Lot's wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah and turning into a pillar of salt, but there is also the savior descending from the world above to rescue someone from pain and torment. This is worth thinking about.