Here she made an end and was for turning the course of her speaking to the handling and explaining of other subjects.
Then I
said: “Your encouragement is right and most worthy in truth of your name and
weight. But I am learning by experience what you just now said of Providence;
that the question is bound up in others. I would ask you whether you think that
Chance exists at all, and what you think it is?”
Then
she answered: “I am eager to fulfil my promised debt, and to show you the path
by which you may seek your home. But these things, though all-expedient for knowledge,
are none the less rather apart from our path, and we must be careful lest you
become wearied by our turnings aside, and so be not strong enough to complete the
straight journey.”
“Have
no fear at all of this,” I said. “It will be restful to know these things in which
I have so great a pleasure; and when every view of your reasoning has stood firm
with unshaken credit, so let there be no doubt of what shall follow.”
—from
Book 5, Prose 1
I too
have a tendency to get sidetracked, to become distracted by the trees at the expense
of the forest, to jump down every intriguing rabbit hole I stumble across.
Part of
that comes from spending too much time in academia, where the details are what
offer the greatest appearance of authority, but it also comes from a very
immediate human temptation. I am prone to focusing in on one thing, that one
thing only that puzzles me the most, to the point where an attention to a
single aspect blots out the context of the whole.
It is
something like that nagging feeling I can get when I enter a beautifully furnished
room, but that lone crooked picture keeps me from appreciating any of it.
So it is
with good reason that Lady Philosophy worries about Boethius getting diverted
from the path he has been trying to follow. I think of how many times I became
obsessed with the precise meaning of a Latin word, and before I knew it, I had
lost track of the sentence, and the entire passage along with it.
Perhaps
she also sees the danger of making something more difficult that it has to be. Sometimes
the solution is not found in looking more narrowly, but in understanding how
the parts work together. The irony is that I wouldn’t even be having the
problem to begin with, if I had only bothered to place it within the context of
what lies around it.
Boethius
here asks a tangential question, certainly an important one, yet one that I can’t
help but think has somehow been answered, at least indirectly, by everything
that came before.
What
have we already learned about the way the Universe works, about how Providence
acts, about how human freedom exists within such design, as opposed to being in
conflict with it? Would Boethius still be asking the question if he had put two
and two together for himself?
Yet he
interrupts to ask it in any event, as I would surely have done as well. It
can hover over everything else, that uncertainty as to whether anything is
really certain at all.
Is there
really such a thing as chance, or luck, or randomness? If there is, won’t that
topple what sense of order we have, and if there isn’t, won’t that reduce the
whole world to a pre-programmed machine?
I have learned
about whole philosophies built on the absolute rejection of contingency, and I
have seen entire systems of thought that require it to make anything work at
all. I have never been satisfied with either extreme, since each will end up
denying a basic fact of my experience. The lower causes will suffer at the
expense of the higher causes, or the higher causes will suffer at the expense
of the lower causes.
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