Boethius, The Consolation 3.42

. . . “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