فصل 7

chapter 7

The Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius

If you were in prison awaiting execution would you spend your last days writing a philosophy book? Boethius did. It turned out to be the most popular book that he wrote.

Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius (475–525), to give him his full name, was one of the last Roman philosophers. He died just twenty years before Rome fell to the barbarians. But in his lifetime Rome was already going downhill. Like his fellow Romans Cicero and Seneca, he thought of philosophy as a kind of self-help, a practical way of making your life go better as well as a discipline of abstract thought. He also provided a link back to the Ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle whose work he translated into Latin, keeping their ideas alive at a time when there was a risk that they might be lost for ever. As a Christian, his writing appealed to the devoutly religious philosophers who read his books in the Middle Ages. His philosophy, then, made a bridge from Greek and Roman thinkers forward to the Christian philosophy that would dominate the West for centuries after his death.

Boethius’ life was a mixture of good and bad luck. King Theodoric, a Goth who ruled Rome at the time, gave him the high office of Consul. He made Boethius’ sons consuls too as a special honour, even though they were too young to have got there by their own merit. Everything seemed to be going right for him. He was rich, from a good family, and showered with praise. Somehow he managed to find time for his philosophical studies alongside his work for the government, and he was a prolific writer and translator. He was having a great time. But then his luck changed. Accused of plotting against Theodoric, he was sent away from Rome to Ravenna where he was held in prison, tortured and then executed by a combination of strangulation and being beaten to death. He always maintained that he was innocent, but his accusers didn’t believe him.

While in prison, knowing that he was soon to die, Boethius wrote a book that, after his death, became a medieval bestseller, The Consolation of Philosophy. It opens with Boethius in his prison cell feeling sorry for himself. Suddenly he realizes that there is a woman looking down at him. Her height seems to change from average to higher than the sky. She is wearing a torn dress embroidered with a ladder that rises from the Greek letter pi at the hem up to the letter theta. In one hand she holds a sceptre, in the other books. This woman turns out to be Philosophy. When she speaks, she tells Boethius what he should believe. She is angry with him for forgetting about her, and has come to remind him how he should be reacting to what has happened to him. The rest of the book is their conversation, which is all about luck and God. It is written partly in prose and partly in poetry. The woman, Philosophy, gives him advice.

She tells Boethius that luck always changes, and that he shouldn’t be surprised by this. That’s the nature of luck. It is fickle. The wheel of Fortune turns. Sometimes you are at the top; sometimes you are at the bottom. A wealthy king can find himself in poverty in a day. Boethius should realize that’s just the way it is. Luck is random. There is no guarantee that because you are lucky today you will be lucky tomorrow.

Mortals, Philosophy explains, are foolish to let their happiness depend on something so changeable. True happiness can only come from inside, from the things that human beings can control, not from anything that bad luck can destroy. This is the Stoic position that we looked at in Chapter 5. When people describe themselves as ‘philosophical’ about bad things happening to them today, this is what they mean; they try not to be affected by things outside their control, like the weather or who their parents are. Nothing, Philosophy tells Boethius, is terrible in itself – it all depends on how you think about it. Happiness is a state of mind, not of the world, an idea Epictetus would have recognized as his own.

Philosophy wants Boethius to turn once again to her. She tells him he can be truly happy despite being in prison waiting to be killed. She is going to cure him of his distress. The message is that riches, power and honour are worthless since they can come and go. No one should base their happiness on such fragile foundations. Happiness has to come from something that is more solid, something that can’t be taken away. As Boethius believed that he would continue to live after death, seeking happiness in trivial worldly things was a mistake. He would lose them all at death anyway.

But where can Boethius find true happiness? Philosophy’s answer is that he will find it in God or goodness (these turn out to be the same thing). Boethius was an early Christian, but doesn’t mention this in The Consolation of Philosophy. The God that Philosophy describes could be Plato’s God, the pure Form of goodness. But later readers would recognize Christian teaching about the worthlessness of honour and riches, and the importance of focusing on pleasing God.

Throughout the book Philosophy reminds Boethius of what he already knows. That is again something that comes from Plato, since Plato believed that all learning is really a kind of recollection of ideas we already have. We never really learn anything new, just have our memories jogged. Life is a struggle to recall what we knew earlier. What Boethius already knows at some level is that he was wrong to worry about his loss of freedom and public respect. Those are largely outside his control. What matters is his attitude to his situation, and that is something he can choose.

But Boethius is puzzled by a genuine problem that has worried many people who believe in God. God, being perfect, must know everything that has happened, but also everything that will happen. That is what we mean when we describe God as ‘all-knowing’. So if God exists, he must know who will win the next World Cup, and what I’m going to write next. He must have foreknowledge of everything that will ever happen. What he foresees must necessarily happen. So at this moment God knows how everything will turn out.

It follows from all this that God must know what I’m going to do next, even if I’m not yet sure what that will be. At the time when I make a decision about what to do, different possible futures seem to lie open to me. If I come to a fork in the road, I can go left or right, or perhaps just sit down. I could at this moment stop writing and go and make myself some coffee. Or else I can choose to carry on typing on my laptop. That feels like my decision, something I can choose to do or not do. No one is forcing me one way or the other. Similarly, you could choose to close your eyes now if you wanted to. How can that be when God knows what we’ll end up doing?

If God already knows what we are both going to do, how can either of us have a genuine choice about what we are going to do? Is choice just an illusion? It seems that I can’t have free will if God knows everything. Ten minutes ago God could have written on a piece of paper, ‘Nigel will carry on writing.’ It was true then, and so I necessarily would carry on writing, whether or not I realized this at the time. But if he could have done that, then surely I didn’t have a choice about what I did, even though it felt as if I did. My life was already mapped out for me in every tiniest detail. And if we don’t have any choice about our actions, how is it fair to punish or reward us for what we do? If we can’t choose what to do, then how can God decide whether or not we shall go to heaven?

This is very perplexing. It is what philosophers call a paradox. It does not seem possible that someone could know what I am going to do and that I would still have free choice about what I do. These two ideas seem to contradict each other. Yet both are plausible if you believe that God is all-knowing.

But Philosophy, the woman in Boethius’ cell, has some answers. We do have free will, she tells him. That isn’t an illusion. Although God knows what we will do, our lives aren’t predestined. Or to put it another way, God’s knowledge of what we will do is different from predestination (the idea that we have no choice about what we will do). We do still have a choice about what to do next. The mistake is to think of God as if he were a human being seeing things unfolding in time. Philosophy tells Boethius that God is timeless, outside time altogether.

What this means is that God grasps everything in an instant. God sees past, present and future as one. We mortals are stuck with one thing happening after another, but that is not how God sees it. The reason why God can know the future without destroying our free will and turning us into some kind of pre-programmed machines with no choice at all is that God observes us at no particular time at all. He sees everything in one go in a timeless sort of way. And, Philosophy tells Boethius, he should not forget that God judges human beings on how they behave, the choices they make, even though he knows in advance what they will do.

If Philosophy is right about this, and if God exists, he knows exactly when I’m going to end this sentence; but it is still my free choice to end with a full stop right here.

You, meanwhile, are still free to decide whether or not to read the next chapter, which looks at two arguments for believing in God’s existence.