Just Finished Reading: The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius [161pp] 

I’ve had this on my shelves for years – if not over a decade – and thought it was about time I actually read it, especially as I ‘recently’ acquired a companion read (up next) which would make a nice contrast. I think I bought this just prior to my Philosophy degree as it was on the recommended reading list. I ended up choosing an Aristotle related question for my Ancient Philosophy unit, so didn’t ‘need’ to read this so ended up missing it.  

I’d heard of it before (it’s hard to avoid in some circles!) so had some idea of the subject matter and the history of how it came to be written. The author was an early Christian in a position of some power around the end of the Western Roman Empire or shortly after(ish). For a variety of reasons, he ended up annoying other people in power and he ended up in prison where he wrote Consolation. This was essentially a dialogue between the author and the personification of Philosophy about a variety of subjects including why he, as a Good Man, was in prison in the first place. Most of this conversation revolved around ideas of the Good (which was all very Greek, indeed Platonic, in nature) so didn’t float my boat overly much. What I’ve read of Plato (only excerpts so far) hasn’t impressed me much and I’m far more a fanboy of Aristotle. Fortunately, things became more interesting as the author became a bit less self-focused. 

One of the things that did interest me, and made me smile more than once, was the fact that perennial questions, still mentioned today, came up during their conversation – specifically why bad things happen to good people (and why good things happen to bad people!) - and included a very well argued look at Free Will in contrast to God’s omniscience. I have sometimes pondered about the apparent conflict with the idea that if God already knows exactly what we’re going to do in the future how can we possibly have Free Will which HE gave us? I now understand how that particular circle can be squared and it no longer ‘bothers’ me. It’s all about perspective. We, being the limited creatures that we are, live in Linear Time. God, of course, does not and can see Past, Present AND Future simultaneously. Therefore, he can see what we’re doing, see what happens because of that and see the end result. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still have Free Will. I thought about it like this: Imagine you’re reading a non-fiction History book. In it you have people making decisions, and you can see the outcomes of those decisions, maybe even with possible other outcomes (if they’d made different choices) and how things eventually worked out – or not. Did those people have Free Will, even if you KNOW what their future entailed? Of course, they did. Same thing... The debate about the Nature of God kind of went over my head and I honestly skimmed a bit of that, but I did find a brief discussion about the relationship between Providence (AKA God’s Plan) and Fate (the action of said Plan in the world) instructive and interesting.  

Overall, I could see why this work has been so highly praised for so long. Although the God/Christianity aspects didn’t really hold my attention very much, I did manage to clear up a few questions that had been floating in the back of my mind for many years. If you’re interested in how Greek thought especially impacted early Christian philosophy and haven’t read this yet I can certainly recommend it to you.       

Translated from the Latin by Victor Watts  

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