. . . “Then nothing need oppose God's
way for its own nature's preservation.”
“No.”
“But if it try to oppose Him, will it
ever have any success at all against One whom we have justly allowed to be
supremely powerful in matters of happiness?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then there is nothing which could have
the will or the power to resist the highest good?”
“I think not.”
“Then it is the highest good which is
guiding with strength and disposing with gentleness?”
Then I said, “How great pleasure these
things give me! Not only those that have been proved by the strongest
arguments, but still more the words in which you prove them, which make me
ashamed that my folly has bragged so loudly.”
“You have heard in mythology how the
giants attacked heaven. It was this kindly strength that overthrew them too, as
was their desert. But would you care to put these arguments at variance? For
perhaps from such a friction, some fair spark of truth may leap forth.”
“As you hold best,” I said.
“Nobody would care to doubt that God is
all-powerful?”
“At any rate, no sane man would doubt
it.”
Being, then, all-powerful, nothing is
beyond His power?”
“Nothing.”
“Can, then, God do evil?”
“No.”
“Then evil is nothing, since it is
beyond His power, and nothing is beyond His power?” . . .
—from
Book 3, Prose 12
The
argument here, or any that points to the ultimate and the transcendent, will
make no sense at all if I am only considering God as some thing, instead of as the
thing.
It isn’t
just that God is somehow bigger, or better, or stronger than anything else, it
is that anything else only is through God. The relative is only possible
through the absolute, the effect through the cause, the part through the whole.
To know
this gives ultimate meaning to the mind, and lasting rest to the heart,
precisely because it leaves nothing out. And thinking along these terms, at the
very bounds of what is and what can be, will also lead to two profound but
startling conclusions:
First,
if God, or the Divine, or the Absolute, is perfect in goodness and power, then totally
nothing is beyond that power.
Second,
if God, the Divine, or the Absolute, is perfect in goodness and power, then
evil is totally nothing.
Yes, the
first one is already hard enough to fathom, but the second one seems downright
absurd; yet it is only a consequence of the arguments we have already seen. I
am simply not used to it, thinking only in the limited terms of a creature, and
convinced that evil itself is some sort of substantial entity.
Like
Boethius at the beginning of the text, I can be quite vain, assuming that my particular
wants are all that is needed, and that it is only evil things happening to me
that are getting in the way of my wants. First, I have to grasp that my
happiness fits into a bigger picture of the good, and then second, I must also
realize that the many events of fortune are hardly evil at all.
See, I
may be locked into a picture of the world where God is “up there”, doing good
things, and the Devil is “down there”, doing bad things, and I am stuck in the
middle, getting bits and pieces of each. I am, however, still giving finite restrictions
to Divine infinity, admitting only some good instead of all good, and adding a
list of conditions to omnipotence.
Anything
that has a limit must necessarily admit of other things, because it is the very
division between them that defines what they are. That won’t be true of
something limitless, however, where supreme existence, goodness, power,
knowledge, beauty, justice, compassion, or any other property at all, can admit
of nothing else.
It won’t
just be a matter of whether God can or cannot “do” evil, but whether such a
thing is able to exist at all within his perfection.
Or, if I
say something is “this big”, I can
still think of something bigger, of what is beyond it. But when something is
the biggest, there is nothing else beyond it. Where there is complete goodness
and power, there evil is nothing at all, because it has no power.
Don’t
think that Boethius is just going to blindly agree with Lady Philosophy here,
to let her off the hook so easily. There is far too much at stake, the very
balance of good and evil itself, and Lady Philosophy is going to challenge
Boethius to the core about how to explain all the things that seem right and
wrong in this life.
Written in 10/2015
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