Boethius, The Consolation 3.43

. . . “Are you playing with me,” I asked, “weaving arguments as a labyrinth out of which I shall find no way? You may enter a labyrinth by the way by which you may come forth; come now forth by the way you have gone in. Or are you folding your reason in some wondrous circle of divine simplicity?

“A little while ago you started from happiness, and said that happiness was the highest good; and you showed how that rested in the highest Deity.

“And you reasoned that God too was the highest good, and the fullest happiness; and you allowed, as though granting a slight gift, that none could be happy except such as were similarly divine.

“Again, you said that the essence of God and of happiness was identical with the very form of good; and that this alone was good which was sought by all nature.

“And you argued, too, that God guided this universe by the helm of goodness; and that all creatures with free will obeyed this guidance, and that there was no such thing as natural evil; and all these things you developed by no help from without, but by homely and internal proofs, each gaining its credence from that which went before it.”

Then she answered, “I was not mocking you. We have worked out the greatest of all matters by the grace of God, to whom we prayed. For the form of the divine essence is such that it is not diffused without, nor receives anything into itself from without.

“But as Parmenides says of it, ‘It is a mass well rounded upon all sides.’ But if you examine it with reasoning, sought for not externally but by lying within the sphere of the very thing we are handling, you will not wonder at what you have learnt on Plato's authority, that our language must be akin to the subjects of which we speak.”

—from Book 3, Prose 12

It has surely happened to all of us, that sense that we though we knew exactly where we were going, but somehow ended up in quite a different place. I have often found myself pointed in an unexpected direction, whether I am trying to make my way through a new town, or whether I am trying to find the meaning in something that baffles me.

Boethius offers quite a handy summation of Lady Philosophy’s argument, and how it has proceeded, step by step, appealing not to any fantastical imaginings but to sound reason. It all started with a deep concern that life was quite unfair, a desperate question about why good people seem to suffer, and bad people seem to triumph.

We will only be able to make some sense of misery if we first understand the true nature of happiness, and we will only approach happiness if we understand the greatest good, that which leaves nothing else to be desired.

We turn to all sorts of incomplete goods, and we then find ourselves quite dissatisfied, because we have not looked to the Divine source of all things, that which is itself perfect Being, as that which is the ultimate measure of happiness.

We then begin to see that all things move and change by participation with this Absolute, and that nothing can be beyond its power. If God is complete being, and therefore complete goodness, then evil is as nothing to it.

And here is where Boethius must feel that he has been spun around, that he has found himself somewhere he never expected to be. I feel it myself, because my first reaction to hearing that nothing in nature is really evil is to do a double take. You must be joking! What am I now to make of all that pain, all the suffering, and all that injustice I have faced throughout my life? Are you now telling me it isn’t even real?

If I am to fall back only into an emotional response, then I might well just wave my hand, shake my head, and walk away. After all those careful rational stages, this now seems absurd.

But no, it is not a joke, it is not a trick, it is not a dismissal of how our lives so often feel. Just as before, we must understand precisely how we are using certain terms, and how we can build connections between seemingly separate things. The language of philosophy here may confuse us at first, but it begins to come together when we learn how all things work together, as part of a seamless and balanced whole, the purpose of one thing becoming clear through its relationship to the purpose of all things.

After all, it is much easier to navigate the way though a labyrinth, if one can look at it from above.

Lady Philosophy has asked us precisely what we mean by happiness, and precisely what we mean by good, and precisely what we mean by God. Now she is also asking us precisely what we mean by evil.

Earlier, we did not understand why created things were only relative goods, because we were not looking to the absolute good from which they flow. Earlier, we did not understand that the Divine was not subject to the limitations and divisions, because we were only looking at the effects instead of the cause. Now we need to work on uncovering the relationship between our own feelings of loss and the problem of evil.

Is evil ever a “thing” at all, and are we giving to it some sort of positive existence that it can never possess? What could it possible mean to say that evil is a “no thing”? 

Written in 10/2015