Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 4.29

"As, therefore, reasoning is to understanding; as that which becomes is to that which is; as time is to eternity; as the circumference is to the center: so is the changing course of Fate to the immovable directness of Providence.

"That course of Fate moves the heavens and the stars, moderates the first principles in their turns, and alters their forms by balanced interchangings. The same course renews all things that are born and wither away by like advances of offspring and seed.

"It constrains, too, the actions and fortunes of men by an unbreakable chain of causes, and these causes must be unchangeable, as they proceed from the beginnings of an unchanging Providence."

—from Book 4, Prose 6

As fancy as my abstract reflections might get, I will still make two critical mistakes about the way of the world in my daily thinking; those old habits of action don’t change overnight.

First, I will view things in separation, this object as independent of that, one occurrence unconnected to the other. I must regularly remind myself that all things are inexorably joined together.

Second, I will view events as haphazard, taking the comings and goings as if they had arisen out of nothing, and were heading nowhere. I forget that no effect proceeds without a cause, however hidden it may seem at the moment.

It is no wonder, then, that my living is out of balance, because it depends on incomplete thinking. I fail to see a unity, and so I think only of myself. I fail to see a purpose, and so I slip into aimlessness. I am not connecting the proximate with the ultimate.

Things are always coming into being, and then passing out of it. My own mind operates in precisely this way, by the act of reasoning, working by stages from what is more evident to me to what is more evident in itself. As fantastic as it may seem to me, the Divine Mind is already itself the act of perfect understanding, the presence of complete self-evidence.

I am made to do a lot of growing, even as I must relate that growth to a measure of universal and unchanging meaning. Without such a standard, change is without direction.

For the aspects of the world that change, I take time as if it were a constant. Yet time is relative, and it means nothing outside the context of an absolute. Recall Boethius’ image of the concentric spheres, where the motion on the outside spins around the immovable axis at the center. It is all joined together, and it all works together.

So, whenever something happens, however mundane it may seem, I should be thinking about it in a larger context. Whenever I act, in however ordinary a way, I should be placing myself within the whole. It is all significant, it is all intended, and it is all part of a greater design.

My reasoning has, of course, not risen to a state of total understanding, but I don’t need to follow every thread to know that there is a woven pattern, or comprehend every individual cause to know that there is a why. This awareness is as necessary in practice as it is in theory, if I ever hope to live in peace.

One lesson the Ancients and the Medievals have to offer us is a profound appreciation for the purpose and harmony that pervades Nature. We may like to smugly mock them for their myths being unscientific, or their astronomy being naïve in perceiving the Earth as stationary, but the best of them had an insight that went deeper than all of that, to something we too often neglect: they respected Providence.

Their stories and legends operated from a perspective of moral design, and they hardly thought this little Earth was ultimately the center of the Universe, but they knew that God was the true center of the Universe.

Their God was not a slick C.E.O., or a glorified bank manager, or even an old man with a white beard somewhere up there in the sky. Their God was Being itself, without which there is nothing.

Providence can only make sense by placing the many within the One. 

Written in 11/2015