Then said she, “This is the old charge concerning Providence, which was so strongly urged to Philosophy by Cicero when treating of Divination, and you yourself have often and at length questioned the same subject.
“But so far, none of you have explained it with enough diligence or certainty. The cause of this obscurity is that the working of human reason cannot approach the directness of divine foreknowledge. If this could be understood at all, there would be no doubt left. And this especially will I try to make plain, if I can first explain your difficulties.”
—from Book 5, Prose 4
The argument Boethius has made can be found in many other places, and it does not merely matter in an academic sense, but it also has very real consequences for how we approach our daily lives. If everything is already determined by fate, what will be the point of trying to do anything differently than it has to turn out? Even all the prophecies in the world will be of no good whatsoever in changing direction.
Cicero said it nicely:
For if all things happen by Fate, it does us no good to be warned to be on our guard, since that which is to happen, will happen regardless of what we do. But if that which is to be can be turned aside, there is no such thing as Fate; so, too, there is no such thing as divination—since divination deals with things that are going to happen. But nothing is “certain to happen” which there is some means of dealing with so as to prevent its happening.
Or, to put it in the simplest of terms, why even bother? I feel like I am about to be transformed into Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
Yet Lady Philosophy points out where our problem lies: it is the term of Providence itself, which we do not understand as clearly and as thoroughly as we might think.
My body, as strong as I might imagine it, is but a small dot of matter, quick to come and go. My senses perceive only through narrow channels, as if they were trying to observe a grand scene through the slats of a fence. My thought, in potency able to embrace such a vastness, is in actuality bound by the limits of my experience, and, I suspect more importantly, by the blindness of my arrogance.
I see the bits and pieces, as through a glass darkly, and yet I think I see everything.
Most restrictive of all, I am a creature in progress, and therefore a creature of change. I am subject to time. God, on the other hand, is a perfect Creator, completely transcending and beyond any change. God is timeless.
And so I will impose my own limitations upon what is by definition limitless. “If God already knows, what’s the point?” Wait a moment. There is no already for Providence, and there is no past or future for Providence. There is only a now.
It isn’t prescience, or prophecy, or divination. It is immediacy.
“But so far, none of you have explained it with enough diligence or certainty. The cause of this obscurity is that the working of human reason cannot approach the directness of divine foreknowledge. If this could be understood at all, there would be no doubt left. And this especially will I try to make plain, if I can first explain your difficulties.”
—from Book 5, Prose 4
The argument Boethius has made can be found in many other places, and it does not merely matter in an academic sense, but it also has very real consequences for how we approach our daily lives. If everything is already determined by fate, what will be the point of trying to do anything differently than it has to turn out? Even all the prophecies in the world will be of no good whatsoever in changing direction.
Cicero said it nicely:
For if all things happen by Fate, it does us no good to be warned to be on our guard, since that which is to happen, will happen regardless of what we do. But if that which is to be can be turned aside, there is no such thing as Fate; so, too, there is no such thing as divination—since divination deals with things that are going to happen. But nothing is “certain to happen” which there is some means of dealing with so as to prevent its happening.
Or, to put it in the simplest of terms, why even bother? I feel like I am about to be transformed into Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
Yet Lady Philosophy points out where our problem lies: it is the term of Providence itself, which we do not understand as clearly and as thoroughly as we might think.
My body, as strong as I might imagine it, is but a small dot of matter, quick to come and go. My senses perceive only through narrow channels, as if they were trying to observe a grand scene through the slats of a fence. My thought, in potency able to embrace such a vastness, is in actuality bound by the limits of my experience, and, I suspect more importantly, by the blindness of my arrogance.
I see the bits and pieces, as through a glass darkly, and yet I think I see everything.
Most restrictive of all, I am a creature in progress, and therefore a creature of change. I am subject to time. God, on the other hand, is a perfect Creator, completely transcending and beyond any change. God is timeless.
And so I will impose my own limitations upon what is by definition limitless. “If God already knows, what’s the point?” Wait a moment. There is no already for Providence, and there is no past or future for Providence. There is only a now.
It isn’t prescience, or prophecy, or divination. It is immediacy.
Written in 1/2016
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