“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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