Boethius, The Consolation 1.20

“Founder of the star-studded Universe,

resting on Your eternal throne

from where You turn the swiftly rolling sky,

and bind the stars to keep Your law.

At Your word the moon now shines brightly with full face,

ever turned to her brother's light,

and so she dims the lesser lights.

Or now she is herself obscured,

for nearer to the sun her beams show her pale horns alone.

Cool rises the evening star at night's first drawing near.

The same is the morning star

who casts off the harness that she bore before,

and paling meets the rising sun.

When winter's cold does strip the trees,

You set a shorter span to day.

And You, when summer comes to warm,

do change the short divisions of the night.

Your power does order the seasons of the year,

so that the western breeze of spring

brings back the leaves which winter's north wind tore away.

So that the dog-star's heat

makes ripe the cars of corn whose seed Arcturus watched.

Nothing breaks that ancient law.

Nothing leaves undone the work appointed to its place.

Thus all things You rule with limits fixed.

The lives of men alone You scorn to restrain,

as a guardian, within bounds”. . . .

—from Book 1, Poem 5

In this first part of the verse passage, Boethius reflects on the power of God. In the second part, he will wonder why there if still injustice under the rule of such power, and he will appeal to God to make things right.

An appeal to God can make people rather uncomfortable, especially in our post-modern age, where the very concept is often frowned upon. I always suggest to new readers of the Consolation that they neither dismiss the idea off-hand, nor assume it means something narrow or dogmatic. Though what Boethius has to say can be understood very much in harmony with various forms of faith and theology, remember that he is concerned here with looking at the world in the light of reason and philosophy.

At this point in the text, one could even choose to look at the existence of God as a hypothesis, and then question how God’s existence can possibly be compatible with the existence of evil and suffering in the world. This is hardly a new question, and it has been asked time and time again, both by venerated philosophers and by everyday people. It is a problem that must be addressed, not only in theory, but also in practice. I can hardly make sense of what happens to me, and why it may happen, if I do not have an absolute measure of what is good, and how the world is ultimately ordered.

Here Boethius suggests that God is the source and Creator of all things, and thereby also the ruler of all things. Whatever may happen, up in the heavens or here on earth, is subject to Divine power. This can surely elicit awe, wonder, and reverence from us.

The idea is grand, but it is hardly beyond the scope of reason to consider. Perhaps lay aside, for the moment, any questions of different religious doctrines, and consider only the aspect of the Divine, by whatever name we may wish to call it, as being omnipotent, or all-powerful.

We are all familiar in our experience with someone or something having greater or lesser strength, but the idea of God proposes a power that is absolute, and from which all other degrees of action must proceed. It is the difference between what finite and what is infinite, between what is limited and what has no limit.

A child will try to avoid the power of his parents by waiting until they aren’t looking, or a thief can try to take what isn’t his by breaking a lock. If God has no bounds to his power, however, there is no hiding from it, and there is no overpowering it. Boethius uses a range of wonderful poetic images to express this unfettered might.

I was always raised with such an idea, and thankfully in such a way that I was not merely asked to accept it, but always encouraged to understand it. When I started asking how it all worked, I didn’t think I was being disrespectful, and when, Like Boethius, I wanted to figure out why God did or did not allow certain things, I felt that question came from a real need. 

Written in 6/2015

 The star-studded Universe. . .