Boethius, The Consolation 3.36

. . . “Do you realize that everything remains existent so long as it keeps its unity, but perishes in dissolution as soon as it loses its unity?”

“How so?” I asked.

“In the case of animals,” she said, “so long as mind and body remain united, you have what you call an animal. But as soon as this unity is dissolved by the separation of the two, the animal perishes and can plainly be no longer called an animal.

“In the case of the body, too, so long as it remains in a single form by the union of its members, the human figure is presented. But if the division or separation of the body's parts drags that union asunder, it at once ceases to be what it was.

“In this way one may go through every subject, and it will be quite evident that each thing exists individually, so long as it is one, but perishes so soon as it ceases to be one.”

“Yes, I see the same when I think of other cases.”

“Is there anything,” she then asked, “which, in so far as it acts by Nature, ever loses its desire for self-preservation, and would voluntarily seek to come to death and corruption?”

“No,” I said, “while I think of animals which have volition in their nature, I can find in them no desire to throw away their determination to remain as they are, or to hasten to perish of their own accord, so long as there are no external forces compelling them thereto. Every animal labors for its preservation, shunning death and extinction.”. . .

—from Book 3, Prose 11

Even the most abstract sort of philosophical reflection can be of great help with making sense of daily living. I think of all the ways we seek unity, express unity, and try to preserve unity in our actions. We might not always be fully aware of why we are doing it, but we will nevertheless cling to what joins things together, and resist what breaks them apart.

Unity becomes a necessary aspect of all being, if we remember that things are more complete in their being the more they are one, and less complete in their being the more they are divided. For anything to exist at all is not merely a presence of certain parts, thrown about in any sort of way, but the way those parts are crafted together as a whole, and ordered toward a common purpose.

I once had a teacher who suggested that we should not be so dismissive of the concept of the soul, because it points to the very real difference between something that is alive and something that is dead. If I see a bird flying through the air, or building a nest, or pecking at a worm, what distinguishes it from the bird that is lying motionless on the sidewalk? They both look much the same, and are made of the same sorts of bodies, but yet one is informed with the principle of life, and for the other this has been removed.

And notice how the longer that binding force is absent, the matter that composed them becomes more and more dispersed. When I was about seven or eight years old, there was a rather aggressive cat living in the neighborhood, and it killed many birds in our backyard. I ended up with a sort of bird cemetery by our garage, where I had buried one after another, and covered their graves with little piles of pebbles.

Many years later, that whole plot of ground was dug up to plant some new trees, and I was somehow horrified that I would find dozens of little bird skeletons. But the pebbles had long washed away, and there was not a single trace of my feathered friends to be found in the dirt. All the components, all the elements, had now blended in with other things, and while they were still part of something else, there was nothing “existing” about the birds themselves.

If I see a jigsaw puzzle assembled into a single picture, it is a rather different than having all the separate pieces in a box. If I see the fine functioning of a handmade clock, it is very different than seeing a pile of gears and springs. If I see people joined in friendship, it is very different than seeing them locked in conflict.

A man may be lonely, he may be sick, or he may be hungry, but as long as he lives, he struggles to maintain his own existence, to maintain that unity of himself. While the parts are bound together, he still remains. He may understand that other forces will disperse him, or that he might have to offer his own being for that of another, but he is a distinct creature as long as he is one creature.

Written in 9/2015