The Consolation of Philosophy

Why did I take so long to get around to reading this? Now I need to buy a copy of my own so I can re-read it, mark it, inwardly digest it.

Boethius has so much to say through the person of Lady Philosophy. I will comment on two of his points.

1. Philosophy urges the reader to let go of fear and hope. Fear is fairly obvious, but hope? It might even seem to be a contradiction, since in the last paragraph of the work she says that “hope is not placed in God in vain.” Having spent several years of my life struggling with the word “hope,” trying to figure out just what it means–it is, after all, a virtue, so it must mean more than just an expectation of a desired outcome–her injunction to dispense with it was a call to meditation. It seems obvious to me that the “hope” to let go of is the aforementioned anticipation of a desired outcome. Hope defined as confidence in God or–and here is the definition which really changed my views when I ran across it–the firm conviction that there is meaning underneath all that happens, is the hope which is not in vain, if it is placed in God.

2. Boethius asks Philosophy about God's foreknowledge of the future, and whether that destroys free will. She gives a good explanation of the difference between eternity and perpetuity. A living being is of necessity only in the present moment. It's future has not arrived; it's past is gone. Only the moment is present to it. But for an eternal being, there is no past or future in the sense of time gone past or time not yet arrived. Everywhen is fully realized as NOW. And so there is no “seeing into the future,” or predicting (even with an absolute degree of certainty) what will happen next. Everything to God is Now. So God sees all the times which to us are “future.” It's just that for him they are not future, but Now. So what he sees is the working out of our free will, not constrained by his “already having witnessed it,” but simply events working themselves out in God's eternal Now moment.