Boethius, The Consolation 4.1

Thus gently sang the Lady Philosophy with dignified mien and grave countenance; and when she ceased, I, who had not thoroughly forgotten the grief within me, interrupted her, as she was about to speak further.

“Herald of true light,” I said, “right clear have been the outpourings of your speech until now, seeming inspired as one contemplates them, and invincible through your reasonings. And though through grief for the injustices I suffer, I had forgotten them, yet you have not spoken of what I knew not at all before.

“But this one thing is the chief cause of my grief, namely that, when there exists a good governor of the world, evils should exist at all, or, existing, should go unpunished. I would have you think how strange is this fact alone.

“But there is something even stranger attached thereto: ill-doing reigns and flourishes, while virtue not only lacks its reward, but is even trampled underfoot by wicked doers, and pays the penalties instead of crime.

“Who can wonder and complain enough that such things should happen under the rule of One who, while all-knowing and all-powerful, wills good alone?” . . .

—from Book 4, Prose 1

It all seems to have come full circle. Isn’t this exactly where we started?

Not exactly. Boethius has suddenly recalled his despair, though he is now equipped with tools he did not have at his disposal in the beginning. He is back to the same problem, though his perspective has also spiraled upwards.

He has come to understand that happiness is never in shallow, passing, or incomplete things, but rather in fundamental, lasting, and complete things.

He has also come to understand that all of existence is merely an emanation of that which is Absolute and Perfect.

He has also come to understand that the object of his own happiness and this Divinity are really one and the same, that nothing is ever fulfilled without participating in what is One.

He has also come to understand that nothing escapes the power of God, the sum of all that is Good, and that nothing wrong can ever be permitted by the might of what is right.

Yet how does this knowledge make the suffering in life any better? Doesn’t it, in fact, make it all the worse? If God is love, how does the darkest hatred make sense? If God is justice, how does the constant injustice fit into the plan? If God is truth, how can there be so many crippling lies?

Wicked people do wrong, yet they never seem to be punished for their wrongs. They get away with it, time and time again, and they laugh at the rest of us for being so foolish and naïve.

It seems even worse than that. Not only do the vicious escape any penalty, but they also seem to be rewarded for it, to receive even greater and greater benefits for their crimes. This makes their ridicule feel all the worse. In the meantime, virtuous people seem to pay the price for their convictions. They wish to do what is good, and all they get in return is greater and greater loss and pain.

Having carefully followed along with the text, I now felt angrier and more depressed than I had before. Maybe God is just mean-spirited, like so may other bosses, or maybe I’ve been tricked, and He doesn’t exist at all?

This is, I have found from my own experience, one of the greatest of problems, if not the greatest, that we must all face. So many people I have known have been crippled by this worry, that the purpose and design in things is deeply broken, or that perhaps there is no purpose and design at all.

And then so many of us will just give up. We watch the clever poseurs and players, milking everyone else for their own gain, and we just lower our heads, we lie down, we are sure there is no hope for us. We bear with it for whatever time we still have to, crying when no one else is looking, or we opt out of the game entirely, told at the end that we are cowards for being the losers.

Yikes. Put it that way, and you might wonder why most of the world even bothers to get out of bed in the morning.

But I should look again. Yes, my emotions may run away from me. Yes, it often feels like there is no way out of the daily grind. Why should I fear Hell, when I already seem to live in one?

Still, I am missing something. Everything Lady Philosophy has to this point explained, and carefully argued through sound reason, already contains my answer. I just have not yet put the pieces together in the right way.

As I first came to this this passage, I did indeed feel despair. I also saw something I may not have seen before, thanks to the previous three books of the Consolation. Notice how my very definition of what is good and bad in life, the one by which I assume the world is unfair, might not actually be the correct sense of what is good and bad in life? What are the vicious actually gaining, and what are the virtuous actually losing? 

Written in 10/2015