The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Friday, June 5, 2020

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 4.36


“Wherefore high Providence has thus often shown her strange wonder, namely, that bad men should make other bad men good.

“For some find themselves suffering injustice at the hands of evil men, and, burning with hatred of those who have injured them, they have returned to cultivate the fruits of virtue, because their aim is to be unlike those whom they hate.

“To divine power, and to that alone, are evil things good, when it uses them suitably so as to draw good results from them.

“For a definite order embraces all things, so that even when some subject leaves the true place assigned to it in the order, it returns to an order, though another, it may be, lest anything in the realm of Providence be left to random chance.”

—from Book 4, Prose 6

This remains one of my favorite passages in the Consolation, and I have pretty much learned it by heart, not because I am any good at memorizing anything, but because I have turned to it so many times when I feel beaten down by circumstances.

It encapsulates so much of what this wonderful text is about, and so much of what life is ultimately about.

I repeatedly make the mistake of judging what is “good” or “bad” by incomplete measures. I look only to the immediate presence of pleasure or pain, of prosperity or poverty, of honor or dishonor. It feels this way right here and now, and so I take that to be all that there is.

I fail to see that such states do not constitute the goods of human nature, and that their presence or absence are in turn only beneficial or harmful in relation to the cultivation of my own moral worth.

I also fail to see that my own good is necessarily bound up with the workings of the whole, with the order of Providence. This hardly makes my own happiness irrelevant, but it does mean that I should only consider such a happiness in the context of everything else around me, with and through the fulfillment of all other creatures.

And so what can happen, quite remarkably, is that I will begin to discern how even the most painful situations can become the means to something far better, that Providence transforms every suffering or loss into the opportunity for a more profound blessing or gain.

Has my neighbor acted poorly? At first it appears to be a grave injustice, quite unforgivable, and I may blame not only his actions, but even God himself for allowing it all to occur.

But what has actually been taken away, and what else has accordingly been given? A decrease on the outside is now the chance for an increase on the inside. The goods of the body come and go, and in each and every case those variations are calling for the greater cultivation of the goods of the soul. There is absolutely no “losing” here at all, if only I perceive it rightly.

One man uses his freedom to practice vice, and Providence turns it upon itself, allowing another man to use his freedom to practice virtue. I see the evil in it, and I struggle with it, and I may boil with resentment over it, and then I stumble across something I did not at first expect; how might I improve upon it, instead of merely suffering from it? Isn’t that the very reason we are given freedom to begin with, to discover the good of our own accord?

What of that poor fellow who did me wrong, who first slipped into ignorance? Is he just cast aside? Not at all; that exact same moment of epiphany is open to him from his end, to correct his wrong, and to become better. Nothing is wasted at all, since everyone is granted the option of redemption.

Providence has already taken into account the path of our choices, and even as the whole pattern appears to deviate from the way things should be, it inevitably comes right back around again to the same place, though by a different route. 

Written in 12/2015 

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