History of Medieval Philosophy: Boethius

hello and welcome to the history of medieval philosophy my name is Mark Thorstein in this video we're gonna be taking a look at really one of the treasures of the medieval world in terms of philosophy and that is we're going to take a look at boethius boethius's frequently referred to as the last of the Roman philosophers or maybe you might say the first of the Scholastic theologians but ultimately what you could say is that Bowie theist really is this in-between figure in between the Roman classical world and in-between the rise in the medieval age the the age of medieval scholastic philosophy see his he had a number of great contributions in philosophy probably his most lasting contribution to be honest is this translation of Aristotle and elements of Plato into Latin in particularly his translation of the logical treatises of Aristotle or what's referred to as Aristotle's organ on he also did also have a whole range of commentaries on Aristotle and Plato unlike many of the people in his own day and he lived for about 475 to roughly 526 so therefore into his 40s and 50s he was really unlike most people of his day he was extraordinarily gifted in terms of the fact that he knew Greek well he not only knew Greek but he knew her very well most people did not and so he spent a lot of his time translating Greek text into Latin text so that people could read these Latin texts in particular he originally envisioned that he would translate all of Plato and all of Aristotle and then also write commentaries on all of the work he that actually unfortunately never came to fruition but the work that he did translate and the commentaries he did write were extremely important and would continue to be used really for over well over 1500 years so he had an enormous impact in terms of the scholarship of philosophy in European philosophy into the Middle Ages his in terms of his theology he was also one of these early philosophers similar to Agustin who began to articulate technical philosophical argumentation and to address you know very difficult theological problems such as the Trinity now so he wrote many texts but probably the text proaches most well-known his own original text is the consolations of philosophy and this is quote a noble vision of the philosophical life here's a sort of picture of it and we'll talk a little bit about it because that's something to do with this biography and I'll mention that in a minute so ultimately the question is how can we little it have live happy lives when our lives appear to be random or given to chance or a fortune you can see on the one hand of this Wheel of Fortune is you have people who are Knightly and who are doing well and benefiting on the other side you have people who have been turned upside down and lives have been ruined and so given the fact that we can't control what happens in our world and ultimately we can't control our faiths how can we be happy and this is actually a really important question for all of us but it rise arise it propels boëthius to offer defensive philosophy I should say it's also a personal problem because Boethius himself is actually writing this in prison awaiting execution himself so it's in very much a piece of literature that was you know very much close to his own biography he himself is the character in it so we're gonna talk about that here in a moment some of the other key ideas that boethius introduces or furthers along yeah include the basic distinction between faith and reason and the dichotomy between these two things frequently a faith and reason in these early medieval years was not well distinguished and so and so then and that's actually quite important because that seems to be one of the demarcating features between philosophy on the one hand and theology on the other another really important distinction that believe these introduces because the distinction between being and that which is so in other words he distinguishes the idea that it the idea that on the one hand things have existence but on the other hand things have a conceptual essence of them this wouldn't actually essentially lay the groundwork for an important distinction that would later be argued by Aquinas and others is the distance between essence and existence and so this first sort of early version of the distinction we've seen boethius's work some of the key problems then in questions that Boethius raises is particularly the problem of universals and we already introduced a general question about universals in some of our previous videos because it's an important problem that really takes up a lot of the work in the Middle Ages and the problem of universals is what kind of being do universals have and so the example here I always give this the Pythagorean theorem a squared plus B squared equals C squared is universal right so it doesn't matter where on earth or really where in the universe you are that theorem will always be true so that fear is universally true so the question is what kind of existence do is does a universal have such that it's true everywhere and so this sort of question of universals is a problem that's constantly coming up throughout the entire Middle Ages but even with this very very early figure in the history of medieval philosophy boy atheist we see its initial version the the initial framework for talking about this problem is laid out by boethius in fact later medieval philosophers would continue to essentially utilize the same language and distinctions though boëthius himself introduces another important question here that's related is whether or not genera and species subsist in themselves or do they exist only in the mind so for instance there's the distinction between the genus and the species of something right so if I say if I take the genus and business and then one of the species of that business might be lets say Home Depot or REM or any other kind of store a particular store that's a species of a greater genus and so the question is the distinction between genera and species is this a distinction that simply in the mind or does it a distinction has real bearing in the world so there's a whole range of questions that's similar to these the boy theists introduces that are important now let's talk a little bit about biography and I put from top to bottom because what we see is that Boethius seems to be born in fortune and yet he dies in misfortune so for instance he was born in 475 - actually a senatorial family within the late Roman Empire he became one of the most well-educated people in the world right translating Greek into Latin but after doing these translations after a number of years he entered politics and he came to the attention of Theodoric the Ostrogoth who was in charge of the larger Holy Roman Empire which was ruled at the end of his life by Justin the Emperor Emperor Justin and Constantinople now he was appointed him as consul in 510 which is a very important position and then he eventually was appointed master of offices in 522 so he was living high on the hog as it were and doing quite well for himself becoming extremely successful both as a philosopher as an academic if you will as well as in terms of his political life as a statesman but unfortunately he was accused of treason and imprisoned we know very little about what he was accused of and why he was imprisoned but we do know there was a sort of plot against Emperor Justine Justin and so king king theodoric seems to have arrested him while he was in prison awaiting execution he wrote the consolation of philosophy and then he was executed in 526 or somewhere along those lines so that's generally without in his life and so his life essentially mirrors the problem there were men taking a look at in the consolations of philosophy which isn't really a problem isn't really a surprise I don't think now given refer to this as a golden volume it that it was not unworthy of the leisure of Plato so this text is very very important in fact during the Middle Ages it was probably the most well read text so anyone who was anyone who had any education in the European world during the Middle Ages would have known this text so it became extremely well known it's too bad that it's off there of course they could not have seen that sort of success now one of the things that's interesting is the form of texts the forum alternates between prose and verse so it alternates between a dialogue that boethius is having with lady philosophy and then and then it jumps into poetry that sort of synthesizes the discussion that was laid out by Lady philosophies now what's the basic sab we're not going to overview the entire work here we're gonna look at books three and two the end of the end of the work but essentially Boethius is sitting in his prison cell awaiting awaiting death essentially and he's in grief you know wondering feeling bad for himself how could this had happened to him and so on and so forth and then suddenly lo and behold Lady philosophy a sort of mythical goddess if you will visits boëthius in a Cell and offers him a consolation for his grief she says quote be not overcome by your misfortunes for the gifts of fortune are fleeting and happiness is not to be found in temporal Goods only by being like God who is the highest good can lasting happiness come to man end quote so lady philosophy basically says listen the reason you're unhappy is because you think that your life is about as about obtaining fortunes and the misfortunes of bad thing but she argues that having fortune good or ill is not is not the goal and that's not what happiness is rather happiness is found in God and so ultimately you have to move in that direction and but in particular it's not just the idea that happiness is found in God so she should go pray and feel but in you know pray to God it's not that at all instead lady philosophy says we can use our reason to understand the happiness is not to be found in temporal Goods we can use our reason to understand that fortune and misfortune alike are actually both good things and then we can also learn that happiness comes to that person who's good regardless of what it may appear to be it's a philosophy essentially reason offers us counsel in terms of the griefs and the tragedies we bear now believe this is of course writing this very very long time right 1600 years ago or something like that but the problems he's addressing are quite pertinent to our own problems some of the key topics that boo theist discusses here in the text is for instance the problem of evil how could there be evil in the world if there's a good god and and why is there evil another problem that gets discusses the pall of fate or Providence if there's a God and God knows all things that were going to happen then how is it that we can actually be free right and why would there be evil in the world if God's actually in charge of how things occur and then of course the question is freedom in human will and knowledge that is can we really be freaked and the human will really choose something if God already has foreknowledge of all things and finally one of the things we see in general is interestingly now is a defense of stoicism now I should say clearly that believe these does not address the stoic philosophers so he's not quoting the Stoics here but what we do see is that the line of argumentation that he develops essentially follows in the footsteps of the stoic philosophers of the philosophers the Buddhists primarily discusses it would be Plato and in many ways he offers a defense of Plato's own views of things in particularly the notion that God the notion that God must be all good and then that's at the top of the hierarchy of being as it were so he's in he's in favor of those sorts of things he's also in favor of the idea that knowledge is more important than I'm sorry that our knowledge rest upon reason rather than our senses in our experience so there's in many ways that both is is a Neoplatonic philosopher but really I think interestingly enough he really develops a sort of Christian version of system stoicism in this text in particular it's particularly important because you'll remember in our last lecture on agustin City of God we saw that Agustin was particularly aggressive toward stoicism in terms of denouncing stoicism so we see a sort of pushback here in the Christian world whether a bit of a defensive stoicism so that might be something worth thinking about or any of your papers you're writing okay so what's the basic structure of the book I'm not it basically we're gonna be looking today it really just books three pros nine through twelve and then book for book five that's kind of what we're going to be taking a look at in this text it's a short text actually so you're welcome to go read it it's quite beautiful because again it's a dialogue between boëthius and Lady philosophy were Boethius is essentially questioning why things are the way they are why is there evil and so forth the lady floss is providing the answers and so on and so forth so it reads very much like a platonic dialogue but then it's interrupted with poetry so after a prose nine you get verse you get I'm sorry meter night and then you get prose ten meter ten and so on and so forth I'm principally just gonna follow the prose I there is I'm gonna be one of the meters and one of the poems to you but I'm not gonna focus on that but it's quite a beautiful text and I think that as you read it you understand why so many people love this text for so many years but just give you a sense of the structure of the writing so let's sort of jump into book three and if you wanted to say what is the basic discussion going on or we're jumping in at its the question of what is true happiness what does it mean that happiness so here you can ask yourself you can pause the video and you can ask yourself what do I think happiness is and you'll find that you may have many answers for happiness but what is true happiness such that it's always available and it's and it's it's real so for instance I am perhaps is a young man I might think that happiness resides in having a strong body and looking good for instance you know when I go to the beach I'm sure you could probably tell I'm not the most I don't have the most luxurious figure as you might say but when I go to the beach there's these young men who are just built and they're you know they're just you know they're doll muscles and they're gorgeous right I'm always see not one of those people but here's the thing is happiness is that if happiness is having a certain physique or looking a certain way then that means happiness is always fleeting because as we get older our bodies degrade so even the you know the muscle man on the beach at some point if he lives long enough or if she lives long enough will become a sad droopy impoverished and weak person eventually right because the body decays so if happiness can't be true happiness can't be the body so what is true happiness maybe it's happiness is pleasure but then there is another problem right because if true happiness is pleasure one of the things we notice is that everytime we gain a pleasure right that pleasure is also fleeting it's gone as soon as we attain it right so for instance another example since we're talking about the body is think about sexuality and sexual intercourse when people have sex there's pleasure that they gain from that but as soon as they attain that pleasure that pleasure is almost gone as soon as it's experienced and this is true for all pleasures so for instance I'm drinking a Starbucks coffee or I love coffee but as soon as i satisfy that and have the pleasure of the taste it's gone it's fleeting so it can't be the case the taste and in pleasure is simply as true happiness because we want to know is what is happiness in a persistent and in a self-sufficient manner and this is actually the key point that we're going to begin on here and if we're jumping into the text at is where lady philosophy has been arguing with boethius that ultimately true happiness must be self sufficient such that when you attain happiness it maintains itself it's good enough on its own so that means that happiness we don't just want happiness for something else I don't want to be happy so I could make a lot of money rather I want to make a lot of money so I can be happy I don't think that formula is a real formula or a valid formula but most people live that way so but notice here that happiness is something which is sought for its own sake we don't want happiness to do something else we want it because it's good enough on its own in other words happiness is self sufficient so this brings us to this question so if happiness is self sufficiency then that means that happiness cannot be wealth it can't be simple resources political power property having high office having glory or fame or even these physical pleasures right because and the second point here is going to be that self sufficiency and true power are ultimately the same and here we have to be a bit careful we happiness isn't about having power over others but we could say is that if happiness is self sufficient then that means it has the power for its own regeneration all right which means that to have happiness ultimately means to have sort of power so self sufficiency and power are really the same thing and notice here that one of the things that's occurring in boethius's text here is he's tea we'll take our ordinary concepts and as lady philosophy offers her her arguments that are the language and our understanding of these concepts develops so for instance happiness isn't having power over others but happiness is power in a different sort of way it's a self sufficiency of power right the other thing here is that he's going to claim is that happiness is preeminent because it's worthy of our esteem so what we have here is that happiness is one self sufficient it's a type of power but three it's preeminent it's the the key thing we're after right quote therefore a thing that needs nothing that is outside of itself which is capable of all things by its owner's strength which is renowned and preeminent surely it is degree it is agreed that this is most full of delight right so first is happiness is something that's self sufficient has a certain sort of power and it's that it's the highest it's preeminent which means that all of these things together and happiness is something that we delight in and here delight may be as a type of pleasure you might say but he just wants us to recognize here that this is something that we naturally agreed to now it's true that we delight in each thing differently but they are all the same in their substance so for instance I delight in the different forms of happiness in different ways but ultimately all of these things have the same substance this is do you is the happiness is what these things really are so we get this quote here he says they it is human perversity that has divided this thing up which is one and simple by nature so the notion here is that instead of thinking of happiness is something that's complex and by complex I mean compounded happiness is this a little bit of this a little bit of that and so on and so forth it's a sort of a salad bowl mixture of different things that we think are good this is not his view of happiness rather happiness is something that is simple in its own it is something that is self-sufficient and separate from all of these parts right notice here this humans though because in their perversity is what maybe philosophers say humans seek the parts of happiness because they think they're different there are a whole bunch of different goods to be had but instead the idea is that true happiness is not a consequence of obtaining the parts of happiness in a one by one measure right it's not that we just pull these parts together and create sort of pie chart of happiness no it's not that at all right he says true happiness is not to be tracked down in these things that are believed to offer one at a time all the objects must be sought right and that this he thinks or this is the argument of where some of the causes of these quote-unquote false happiness come from so if you think that happiness is pleasure think about it if you think that happiness this pleasure within that me and you know that pleasure is fleeting then that means so what you have to do is you have to try to compound your pleasures have one pleasure followed by another followed by another right which means that for instance if your let's go back to if you're in a relationship with someone and you're looking for happiness with that other person right you want them to act in such a way and then when you say a certain joke you want them to laugh in a certain way and then when you're together you want to cuddle in a certain way or whatever the case is you're trying to compound happiness together you're trying to take the parts of things that are good and it essentially weld them into happiness and he thinks this is false because happiness is not a compound at all rather it's something simple it's either had or it's not had it's not an admixture of a bunch of different things and then all of these false conceptions have happened this is ultimately the error of reasoning there of reasoning being that we're also trying to compound things so what it looks like here lady philosophy suggests that when we look at happiness most human beings actually seek after the images of happiness rather than true happiness right so in many many of us we recognize an image of happiness when we when we experience pleasure and so we mistake the pleasure as being true happiness Boethius or lady philosophy contends that quote these things seem to give to mortal the images of the true good perhaps of some imperfect goods but the true and the perfect good that cannot bestow and so in other words what we have here is we have to recognize the difference between the the symptoms of happiness true happiness and the causes of true happiness what causes or enables us to attain true happiness is not the same thing as the good things that come out of a happy life and this seems to be the sort of mistake it's kind of like this imagine if you are a young child and you knew you know different you had a neighbor who was extremely wealthy and successful but kind and they did all these things they always looked happy right you might think that well if I can only just get a good job and get a nice car and get a good husband or a good wife and and take time to be happy and make sure I exercise if I just do all of those things then I'll have true happiness when what lady philosophers argue here is don't you misunderstand the people who have true happiness exhibit these symptoms these goods right but don't take the goods for the cause it's interesting even boethius even mentions directly by name Plato's Timaeus and where in that text Plato discusses the idea that ultimately we'll wait to come to the question these sorts of questions we need some sort of divine assistance this is important because remember even though both his does distinguish between faith and reason he's ultimately a medieval scholastic philosopher so he's always doing theology is always integrated into the philosophical project in some way another some way or another now for most of the text here you can see I'm skipping the verses that were read and just sticking with the prose here just so you can keep track of where I'm at in the text and as always keep in mind that I can't articulate everything about these texts so I'm just pulling in the things that I found to be particularly important there's no substitute for doing the reading and the study on your own because there's a lot in here that gets discussed there we just don't have time to talk about okay now the good one of the things we see here is oops I think that was supposed to say existence down here is that when we talk about whatever the good is if this good is self sufficient and that means it's simple because things which are imperfect are not simple and things which are perfect are simple no here we have to just really mean by simple simple there way means is the notion of self sufficiency something which is good in and of itself rather than good because it has these combined parts to it so there's a return at the language of holes and parts hey remember he returned at the essence of the good so the essence of the good if it's perfect must be simple but the question is does that universal essence exist notice here the way in which the problem of universals comes back into the foreground this should say existence right because we want to ask what does this essence actually exist now one of one of the things here is we have to distinguish the imperfect and the perfect now things which are in perth ings are imperfect ultimately he says because of their distance from the perfect it's really this interesting caught the interesting concept his notion here is that things are imperfect ultimately lacks some sort of existence the things which are perfect have more existence which means that even things that are imperfect have some relationship to the perfect so for instance take this coffee cup this coffee tastes pretty good is it the perfect cup of coffee I'm I don't think it's the perfect cup of coffee for instance I think they put too much cream cream in it but it's not the perfect cup of coffee but it is but the only way I could know it's an imperfect cup of coffee is by recognizing that it does have by degrees some element sir characteristics of the perfect I will try to pretend to know at a perfect cup of coffee is right but get the idea here as things are imperfect because of the distance they have from the true absolute article perfection right so think if you draw a circle all right like I have a circle drawn up here on the thing if you try to draw a circle by hand it's not going to be perfect but it will but the only way you can understand here the idea that it's imperfect is by recognizes the features of it which conform to the perfect circle right quote if there seems to be anything imperfect in any class of objects there must necessarily be something perfect in them as well now this is going to lead us to this interesting idea that that means that things which are imperfect participate in perfection in some manner notice that if you're not familiar with Plato this sounds very very similar to Plato's theory of the forms so therefore since imperfect options of happiness exist right like pleasures and imperfect object of happiness the perfect happiness must also exist quote for the nature of the universe has not taken its starting point from diminished and incomplete things but in procession from what is whole in absolute it disintegrates into these exhausted things or the farthest removed therefore it as we have shown is just a little while ago there does exist some imperfect happiness and some fragile good it cannot be doubted that there also exists a steadfast and perfect God so lady philosophes argument here is that because there's imperfection and we recognize this imperfection that must means that perfection also exists but in a different way potentially now but where is this perfect true happiness where exactly does it dwell well the first answer is God right because God is all-knowing and all good and another thing is going to argue is that God ultimately is simple and since God is all good and simple and Happiness is all simple good that means that happiness must be in God so the perfect good must also do well in God as well and here's a quotation from from the tab lady philosopher says and for this reason we must decree to keep this line of reasoning from regressing to infinity that God is the highest and is most full of the good that is the highest of perfect but we have established the true happiness as the highest good therefore it is necessary that true happiness is located in this highest God so you can see here this is where the theology begins to melt with the philosophy oh that doesn't look right so there's nothing other so the goodness of God is equal to the goodness of happiness so it's sort of three points right one there's nothing higher than God - happiness is the highest good so 3 therefore God is happiness itself or happiness God is true happiness itself so therefore God is the subtotal of and the cause of all things that are to be pursued and for that which has within itself no good at all either in reality or in likeness Canon no it be pursued conversely even those things that are not good by nature are nevertheless craved as if they truly were good even if they only seem to be so and so it happens that goodness is rightly believed to be the sum total the center point and the cause of all things that are to be pursued so his notion here is that let's take pleasure again is that God is true happiness but the pleasure is an imperfect type of happiness or imperfect good and so in some way pleasure participates in God right but ultimately it's not synonymous with God and so pleasure isn't to be pursuit but there is a reason in which we pursue pleasures being good so you were trying to sort of square a circle here run down a fine line now this takes us to the 11th Pro the pros which this point in this discussion we see that the important we see an emphasis on the importance of reasoning and solid argumentation it begins really with this idea that all I believe it's a boy theists has this - ladie philosophy all these points are woven together from the most solid lines of argument so it goes on from there it starts with laying down his question but I wanted to emphasize this small little phrase - to show you that for Boethius its argumentation woven together his ultimate which should be our guide not simply our opinion it's not simply our intuitions of things but rather we should let our reasoning guide us and this is important because lady philosophies arguing this not a priest not God not an angel but rather philosophies arguing this and this is believe theses commitment to philosophy the courage of philosophy is that we proceed along arguments we proceed along the lines of reasoning rather than along the lines of our passions now this means that we're moving from premises to conclusions throughout the text and what you're gonna find is that this text the consolations of philosophy there's an extraordinary document in terms of its precision of logical argumentation you may not agree with all the arguments but they're valid arguments whether or not you like it or not now one of the questions I want you to go on is what do you believe mostly in your life do you believe arguments or opinions so for instance all of us have opinions but when you're confronted with rational argumentation that you think is valid and you even think that is sound you agree with the the claims and the arguments being made but the question is will you change your opinions many of us most philosophers contend actually live by our opinions and this may be the cause of why so much angst occurs and this world today what we're gonna see throughout the text is that but we this has the opinion that his life is bad because he has been charged with treason is going to be executed but the arguments will show otherwise so the question is what do you believe it's difficult road for with this and it's a difficult road for you as well no what are some of the things we do Scotty number two so let me take you through some of the propositions that are laid down in this text to is when things unify they're good so we get this notion here that the things which are good unify and things which are bad separate or disintegrate or degrade in some way so everything that is good is good because it participates in the good right sorry I didn't really right right everything that is good is goodbye because of its participation in the good so the one and the good are the same thing so existence since it now I think about existence existence is a unity or as the destruction of existence is a disintegration for instance examined the human body and what do you see don't you see that the disintegration of the body is what we consider to be evil or bad and the unity of the body is considered to be good so here for instance is a picture of one of the exhibitions from the body's exhibit where people who who died donated their bodies too so that they could go on display so you could see the anatomy it's pretty shocking and disturbing on the one hand pretty mesmerizing on the other but notice here that our bodies are compounds they were made of things and then when we die our bodies disintegrate they're split apart but then when we're born things come together and so is it true this seems to be his claim is that what's good operates according to unity and what's bad is a disintegration so that's an important claim that's gonna be part of it because ultimately what he's gonna say here is that always gonna link it in to the whole question of happiness here right so ever six hear those premise six and these premises are numbered I've just numbered them here right things exist in parish in accordance with their nature and this is important so you take a tree for instance right at Reed acidic grows only in some way it exists it won't say but it also perishes in a wood way so for instance notice that a tree when it dies it'll drop it limbs and so on it's or maybe will get catch fire and they'll burn but what is it a tree not - a tree doesn't float up away and go trees don't die and then get buried right we trees only die according to the type of thing that they are so things exist in Paris accordingly so notice here I have a coffee cup here right the coffee cup also in his view is something it's a natural object now I know it's artificial but it's natural and so far as it has existence but think this coffee cup can only could only exist or perish in a way it which is functional to the type of plastic that it is right so for instance this cup can melt but this cup can't do is it can't just disintegrate when it gets wet the way paper paper cups will disintegrate over time when they get wet that's because everything which exists or perishes does so in accordance with their nature I'm gonna skip reading that for now so we can keep going here now receving is that which is fitting for each and everything is what preserves it shows us things which are opposed to them and I like them so for instance you have an entity there's beings that exist the coffee cup or myself or you and we each have our own nature we have a certain way in which we exist right in the unity of that nature right is is good and what poor what preserves that unity is what we would say is good but what there's a disintegration of that nature its annihilation so for instance if I'm eating of eating a hard candy and I break my tooth then that means that my teeth are disintegrating and that's an annihilation of my own nature it's analyzation of my own being and this is what we would consider to be sort of evil so if you want this is sort of an early picture of natural sort of natural law theory maybe perhaps you might say it's not articulated in those grounds and it's not really formulated like that but it is important to recognize here that the notion here is that the preservation of unity or the annihilation in disintegration ultimately conforms to the distinction between what we consider to be good and bad at least in a naturalistic says now Providence and now here we are going to assume that God exists and this is a question at some point in the course we will address point blank which is what are the arguments that we can have for God's existence or what arguments doing not have for existence the notion here is that God has given all living entities a desire for self-preservation so all of the seek unity not disintegration by nature right and I have a picture here of people who are fleeing in the hurricane from North Carolina that's occurring just recently here it's still occurring actually writing this as I record in this video so you see people who are fleeing for their lives why are they fleeing because they desire self-preservation the desired unity in the face of disunity right as the the water waves in and their houses are disintegrated and destroyed right they have to seek self-preservation a new type of unity so notice here what this means is that the principle of self-preservation then means that really well all things desire to be one all things desire some sort of unity and this Allah to me means that the type of unity rolls me after is the same unity that we call it true happiness because God is the goal of all things right what is the goal of all things lady philosophy says for make no mistake she says this goal is what is longed for by all things and because we've deduced that this thing is the good we must admit that the good is the goal of all things right the good is the goal of all things and God is the good which means that God is the goal of all things so this takes us to the pros 12 right and so here we see right from the beginning Boethius who is a lover of Plato if you will he's he says straightforwardly I'm an agreement with Plato here because remember if you'll recall Plato has a theory of the forms in the highest of all the forms is the form of the good the goods at the top and so boëthius is saying yeah this is the same argument the play-doh sets out and it makes the most sense but believe this says but what are the rudders by which the world is governed that is how is why is the world governed in the way it is such that we're seeking true happiness but it seems like we're unable to attain it it also seems that there's a lot evil in the world it will get to evil and more in the next book here but what are the rudders by which the world is governed right so let's refine the question here first off in order to understand what is booth is really asking and let's take a look at the text he says this world could hardly have come together into a single form out of the components so different and so opposed to each other if there were not one who could join together such different things further this very difference of nature's mutually there in our mo Dias would decompose and tear apart would have been joined together if there wasn't one who could somehow constrain would have been bound together so we noticed that the world is composite is since we say that unity is good and disunion is bad the world is tight as a series of unities all of the beings in the world are compounded so the question then becomes what is it that guides things what principle exist such that things are able to unify that are different from each other right so notice that the world is a diversity of entities so what's what's what's maintaining the world such that we don't just see decomposition right in other words if God is the unity and God is unchanging is God also in motion among the particulars and here we have a very particular acute question which begs of a potential paradox which is daily if God is simple and God is totally unified and God is unchanging then how has God actually related to all of the particulars in the world the imperfect beings that are doing all this stuff right we said that happiness is a that when people participate in something which is imperfect they recognize the perfect which is ultimately somehow a part of God the question that because if God is unchanging but how is this actually related right how do we bridge the changing world that I'm sorry the unchanging essence of things to the changing particularity of the world how do we make sense of this problem now lady flosses response is okay well a God's simple and so if be if God is simple then God needs no external instruments right there's nothing to you have to add to God for God to do God's stuff so see that means that God has to arrange everything by means of himself or itself I put itself there the text has to say himself but itself is better because clearly if God is simple then God is not a gender right guy is not neither male or female because God is simple God is just God right well we can't say is that God is Allgood so therefore all things must be arranged by the good if we just follow through the reasoning so what is the rudder of the world the rudder appears to be the good which governs the world take a look at this text he says he got arranges all thing I'm sorry therefore he arranges all things by means of the good in as much as he who we concur is the good governs all things by means of himself this is as a word of the tiller and the rudder by which the world machine is kept fixed secure and undie composed so the notion here is the true happiness if it's about that which is truly good ultimately is related to this to something which is unchanging ok sorry about that ok someone knocked to the door while I was talking okay so the rudder of the world is the good right now this raises the question of why are things bad but we'll get to that a little bit later the other thing I want to emphasize here is that that means that buoy theseare is endorsing what we would call a teleological worldview now the greek term Tilos means end or goal towards which things aim and this comes really from Aristotle but Plato also had the same view which is ultimately that all things are organized towards a certain end toward a certain function that they're seeking to fulfill and ultimately the idea here is that the end towards which all things are aiming is ultimately the good and the good is what binds things together now we see another argument also being pronounced here and this is the idea that if God has all power and if God is not able to do that which is evil then that means the evil must be nothing and so this is the first major argument regarding the problem of evil now briefly said we can say that the problem of evil is simply this why is there evil in the world why things go wrong in a very simplistic sense now it's more it's an even more and acute problem in this discussion for boethius because if the good is the thing by which all things are are aiming in this teleological sentence then the question is well there's a lot of evil in the world and laws are things that go wrong right so if God is all power though and gods not able to do that what's evil then that means the evil must be nothing because God can't do evil and so lady Flossie says therefore evil is nothing since he cannot do what is evil and there is nothing that he cannot do now Agustin had a similar line of argument right a gustin's line of argue knows the evil is a privation evil is a negation of your nature of what's naturally good now believe this essentially is the same view which is that here you are your human being let's say you're watching this video lecture right now your human be you got fingers you got lays you have a tongue you have eyes of yours your reason you have all these component parts and these parts are good insofar as they unable you to fulfill the function of gaining happiness or overtime through reason and so forth right but we also know that there's parts of you that are wrong right so for instance maybe I I have home you can see my answer so I have all five fingers but maybe what if I was missing a finger maybe you're missing a finger right then what you could say that that's a privation of what you should be naturally by nature human beings have ten fingers but we don't all have ten fingers and that's a privation of our natural form of being of what we should be by nature and that is considered something bad now it doesn't it's not evil in the strict sense of the term but it's a sort of natural evil because it's not good it's a disintegration of your function of your natural Telos right so evil here is the idea that it's not that evils in the world but it's rather than we recognize the deficiencies of the world as evil so this raises an important question for us which I don't think pytheas answers but which I want you to think about which is namely do you think boëthius actually conflates power with evil here such that he takes evil to be the negation of God's power it seems to me quite plausible that if God has all power to loving God that must mean that God also has the power not to act but if God has the power not to act then that means that God has the ability to negate power so I'm not convinced of this argument myself but nevertheless it is the argument so I watch it it's worth thinking about a little bit now between Thea's response to I love this and there's a lot of passages in this text I really love from boethius but he says he asked lady Fuzzy's are you just playing with me leaving your arguments into a labyrinth from which I cannot find the path that leads out and sometimes it's true philosophy feels a lot like this it feels like just like a maze that we get lost in a hole we just get our heads mixed all and turned all around in terms of which direction to go which is the right path and so boëthius says the same thing as it philosophy students I'm sure you also feel the same things at times when you feel like maybe you're watching these video lectures and you're thinking man it sounds interesting but I've sort of lost my way well believe this who's much more brilliant than really certainly myself and probably you right also feels the same thing that we do now here's what lady philosophy says and I love this she says number one this is hardly a game that we're playing and I wanted to pause there for you because I want to emphasize to you that even though we're using arguments to discuss this question of what's good and what's bad what's evil what's not notice that it's not a game because all of us have to live life and all of us will undergo suffering and ultimately all of us will be like boethius to some degree we may know it's true we may not all end up in a prison cell or all facing execution or something of that nature but all of us will face trial and will face tribulation it will experience hardship and pain and suffering so it's not a game that we're talking about here it's not just a series of arguments a labyrinth we're actually talking about the essence of things and ladye philosophy says that I apologize for the spelling errors I'm noticing she says for such as the essence of the divine substance for it never disintegrates into the things that are far removed from it nor is it does it take up four take up into itself anything external to it but just as Parmenides says about it it's ever resembling the shape of the sphere well rounded on all sides it spins the moving circle the universe while it keeps itself unmoving so the notion here is that the divine senses what is God God is both that which is not changing but is responsible for all motion in the universe he's the unmoved mover and there's a reference to Aristotle there but but God is simple the simplicity as we saw in the work of Parmenides you can take a look at one of my videos on Parmenides to learn more about it right where parmenas thought that all of existence must just be one monetary one mono being just one thing that's simple with no difference no component parts well-rounded like a sphere and ultimately lady philosophy suggests if we're to give an image to what God is God must be something like this now this takes us into book 4 and I put wheel fortune here not because this book is about the wheel of fortune but because the wheel fortune is an important role Fortuna is the god of fortune in the Roman world and I got a fortune would spin a wheel and if you were locked out you get the wheel of fortune and you get you're fortunate but most of the time when you spin the wheel you get misfortune and it's funny because we think of the wheel for it says yay happy thing but in the Middle Ages in particularly the consolations of philosophy in that first two first one or two books first and second books the wheel of fortune is actually a nightmarish thing because it means that when you're on the wheel of fortune when you enjoy getting good fortune things go well yes and then when things go wrong you get upset what Fortuna would say the god of fortune would say why are you upset you were you're happy to get fortune when you was in your favor but now that it's in your disfavor you don't like it you can't take one without the other so here we're addressing sort of the Wheel of Fortune particularly the problem suffering now begins prose what here begins with this quotation right philosophy had some these words softly and sweetly never losing the dignity of her appearance or the impressiveness of her speech but I had not yet forgotten the sorrow that was planted within me and so I interrupted her train of thought then just as she was getting ready to say something else so it starts off here and Lady philosophy is saying all these beautiful things and singing her songs and she's about to go into some other great truth and of course boethius interrupts her right he wants to know about the problem of evil in particular right we I know that we had a sort of argument regarding the proviso in the last book but it doesn't seem sufficient for Boethius in other words he thinks the problem runs a bit deeper right why does evil exist at all why is it that evil people live unpunished right it looks like evil people frequently survive and so for instance I don't want to say evil necessarily but I'm thinking of there was recently a gentleman by the name of Scott Pruett who was in charge of the EPA the Environmental Protection Agency the United States and he came to light that he was using you know tens of thousands of dollars to take trips vacations and all this guys have corruption essentially but you can ask yourself but look at him even though maybe he's not the EPA director anymore he's still wealthy he's still is famous he still has lots of opportunity it looks like people who do the wrong thing oftentimes don't get punished and oftentimes look like it oftentimes looks like that when people commit evil to actually benefit so wait what you're telling me that their evil is just nothingness how can that be right how can the helmsman of this ship God allow all of this because if the rudder of the ship is the good and we've got all these people hacking each other up topside how can this happen so the problem of evil is a bit deeper than that right think about the gross wickedness that thrives it has dominion in the world the wicked prosper while the good suffer and here I put an old picture it's sort of pixelated so you can't see well of the Nazis after they took France and here's Hitler with all his top come home and aunts marching right next to the Eiffel Tower why is it the evil people prosper and good people suffer now lady philosophy responds right she says since you've seen the essence of true happiness through my previous demonstrations right that it's simple it's elves efficient and so forth and even come to recognize where it's to be found in God lady philosophy says I will show to you the way that can carry you back home I love this sort of imagery is that the quality Ville has taken us somehow away from our the central thesis here the good is self-sufficient in God ultimately so how do we get home well and here's where we get to the second prose right lady philosophy number one it's going to reject the idea that good people suffer the evil prosper so if we go back to here what we'd say is that the way you get out of this is by denying the claim that the good suffer and the the wicked prosper right how are we to do that well ultimately the argument that she's going to give is laid out in the idea that ultimately we have to identify what the good is what what it means to prosper and what it means to suffer and what we're gonna see is the evil itself as a type of suffering and the goodness itself is a type of prospering and such that when the evil person commits evil that isn't there that is suffering itself and when a good person acts justly that is prospering itself so let's let's take a look at the article actually alone there's the premises right number what powers of the possession of the good and evil lacks strength right what she wants to argue is that when people are good they have power when people are evil they lack strength now you may not think this is the case but remember good and evil are opposites and if evil is unable to sustain itself because evil is a type of disintegration then that means the evil is fragile where the good is stable now if the good is stable it's only the things which are stable to have power so now so you can see her that that the good has to by its own reason our own reasoning must have strength over evil which lacks strength because of the notion of unity and disintegration cease building or Lady philosophies building her argument now I can also consider both the will and power because we have a will to do things and we are certain compat and capacities to do them as well so for instance you have human capacity right human capacity from human capacity we see that people seek that which is good and all he would being sharing the good and what this means is that means the evil can't be a strength so take a look at the passages right number one he says each person must be thought to be powerful in regards to that what you can do but must be thought to be incapable in regards to that she cannot make sense and that she goes on all mortals so us you and I right all Borel is the good and the evil right the the Hitler's as well as the Mother Teresa's all of them he lady philosophy it's are you strive to reach the good by their indiscriminate striving so here don't worry about who's evil and who's bad but all people are striving to do what's good they're all seeking the good now we know that evil people are not good or they don't do good things so there's must be the ideas that evil people strive to do what's good but they somehow fail whereas good people strive to do it's good and they somehow succeed right and then a little bit later on site on line 14 but if the evil secure for themselves what they crave which is the good then they cannot they could be evil right since both the good and the evil seek the good but the forward do secure while the latter don't at all it's not a doubtful is is it not a doubtful proposition is it that the good are powerful while the evil are incapable right which seems to make sense now he gives the examples consider a human walking and look compare a person who walks on two legs versus people who try to walk on their hands which one of these are easier now notice that human beings he or he actually uses plato's definition play this definition of hubie was a rational animal that has two legs that's us right but notice here is that you have legs but if you try to use something else than your legs are made for walking your feet good for walking right you might even say and this is salty illogical you might say that our feet evolved evolutionarily to let us walk our hands to dunt so you can see here is what is it better is it easier to walk on two feet or is it easier to walk on your hands the answer is obvious it's easier to walk with two feet now what this means and why is this important means that what we can say is that maybe this is analogous to the difference between good people and evil people where all of us are seeking to go so and we're all seeking the goods we're all trying to walk but some of us walk on our feet correctly and others of us walk on our hands who has more power who can walk quicker clearly the person who walks correctly right so that means that where is evil coming from it comes from our ignorance now here's two quotes just to observe how great is the weakness of corrupt men who cannot even reach the goal towards which they're striving leads them and practically forces them just look at great what great powerlessness has lawless men in it script soyou're I had an example of Richard Nixon so here's a former president United States that committed crimes in order so that he gained an election right because he wanted to win office and so he hired people to break in to the Democratic National Committee's office and steal their documents and so forth and guess what he won election but then he got caught for doing it and he lost the presidency so notice here that Richard Nixon was trying to gain something which he thought was good but he went about it the wrong way and it actually created just revealed how well how much weakness he actually had that his corruption was the weakness that he was actually how his lawlessness made him powerless so ignorant is the problem in the root of evil in men and in human beings it's not the evil or people now evil men are evil so he boy this doesn't want to deny that people who commit evil don't are evil but what he means is but what he doesn't mean the evil exist and it's pure in a simple sense evil is nothingness right what we see in a corrupt person is a diminishment of who they are the person of the evil derives the upside the power of the evil derives itself from the inked capability of a person not their strength right so the what looks like power to us when evil and wicked people act is actually powerlessness now the wicked have therefore a false type of power he says and this false power proves even more clearly that they have no real power for is for if as we deduce just a little while ago evil is nothing then since they only have the power to do evil things it's clear that the unrighteous have no power at all so that means that we have to recognize that one mortal power is limited and that only a madman would believe otherwise and think that they have the power of God or something and number two is that God has all the power and is not evil God has all power and is not evil and number three evil persons clearly have less power than God so we get this quotation only the wise have the power to do what they longed to do while the unrighteous though they may keep themselves busy or whatever they please do not have the power to accomplish what they longed to do and here notice it does seem to be the case a person who commits evil is never satisfied even when they accomplish what they what they seek out to do why because they're longing for something that their evil can never get them to ultimately it's God now here's this beautiful poem that I thought I'd read at least one of these poems do this is the second meter for both for it's about the idea that of he's basically talking about the fact that it seems clear that there are evil people in the world he writes high exhaust high exalted tyrants sitting on their raised Thrones can you see them brilliant in the blaze of purple through the high fence of their grim spears glare and threatened without pity and the hot breath of their mad hearts could you strip away the trappings from the pride of their adore underneath you'd see these masters in the tight chains of their shackles here is lust with acid poisons discomposing all the lifeblood anger whips the mind to present frenzy on the high seas of the passions sorrow here exhaust exhaust her captives or in constant hope torments them when you see one single person thus enduring all these tyrants he does not do what he wants to overwhelmed by cruel masters so this is sort of a beautiful phrase but sort of the idea there is that evil people whoever you imagine them they may look great underneath them then their minds they're soulless shackles right so let's keep going in Pro Street right is it the case that good people are rewarded and the crimes of the people are actually punished now the good itself is the goal for all human actions we've already shown that so that means that no matter how brutal evil people may be the crown shall never fall from the head of the wise man and shall never wither so in other words the good itself is the goal of human actions and to acts well and act justly is the reward of the good the punishment of the evil is actually the acting out of evil so just as righteousness itself becomes the reward of the righteous so too is gross wickedness itself the punishment of the unrighteous now some of you may be thinking okay mark wait a second hold on you're telling me that if a person commits a murder and gets away with it that their action of the murder is itself the punishment and that would be right that is what he's arguing because even because ultimate if the goal is good itself and you've instead pursued that which is evil you've actually destroyed yourself he says God is the one God is one and the one itself is good that was the notion we talked about from the beginning and before and whatever falls away from the good ceases to be that's the notion of disintegration so that means that the evil fall in terms of disintegrating their own he manatee and so I found this picture I don't know who this person is but I imagine this person's there's a criminal some time and they've scratched a swastika in their head right and so this is a good example of someone who it appears has lost evil and insofar as they've they've committed evil acts potentially allegedly they are disintegrating their own humanity right they are d unifying themselves he says or lady philosophy says end quote so it happens the evil people cease to be what they once were but the very appearance of a human by that remains shows them up as having been human before and for this reason because they have turned towards evil conduct have lost their human nature as well so the idea here is that evil distorts our humanity he says here the evil metamorphosizes us and so it comes about the anyone whom you see metamorphosized by vices you can no longer judge to be a human being right one man a savage thief pants after it is ravenous for the goods of other people you can say that he's like a wolf another man this is never resting as his tongue always in motion in lawsuits you can compare him to a dog always barking one man hid the hidden plotter lying in wait glad to steal by his deceptions he could be said to do the same as a fox another Wars giving free rein to his anger he may be believed to be to have within him the spirit of a lion one man a coward is quick to turn tail afraid of things that he's not that it is not that he need not fear he is thought to be like a deer another indolent and slack John is simply inert he lived life of an ass one man Ficklin flighty changes his interest constantly he is not at all different from the birds another wall is in foul and unclean lust he is held under by the physical light to lie it's like a filthy sow and so it is that anyone who has ceased to be a human being by deserting righteousness since he has not the power to cross over to the divine condition is turned into a beast so in other words when we commit evil we dehumanize ourselves we become like animals and notice what do we do with evil people in our society we house them like animals right we cage them like animals notice right so that means that we could say is that a person is evil they're going to be less happy and if they're less happy then that means the evil brings desolation and desolation is disintegration quote the righteous are more happy when they suffer their punishments when no penalty derive from justice represses them so here the notion is that it's not just the idea that evil destroys us but the idea that when we're punished some good is brought back to us a unity is brought back into formation which means that we should actually seek punishment we can kind of commit evil because the punishment of the wicked adds good to the evil person so take back that picture I had of the neo-nazi there who had swastika on his forehead right now assuming that person was a criminal what we could see is that to punish that person actually makes that person better that's actually his notion he's gonna say that the evil are overwhelmed by weightier punishments precisely when they believe that they're unpunished so to not punish the person who's committed evil is actually to allow a greater evil still to occur Leidy philosophy says quote what's their eyes have been accustomed to the darkness people are not able to rise them up to the penetrating light of truth they're like the birds whose vision the nighttime illuminate illumines through the daytime blinds them so long as they do not look closely at their place in nature but only our own passions they think that the license for their crimes or the impunity for their crimes is a happy thing so here you can imagine you can go and see what a criminals think about when they don't get caught they think that they've done a good thing and they've survived because they didn't get caught but the problem is they've actually dehumanized themselves and they're actually lost in the darkness they're lost in foolishness so this means that the in just that is done to someone is the death now I'm the one who receives it but for the one who does it so the greater the victim of evil is the one who commits the evil I'm not saying that if someone commits evil on someone else there's not a victim and that's not a terrible thing but it's work but the greatest victim is the person who actually commits the evil themself in some ways I can imagine some of you will strike back and think that diminish is the the severity of the victim suffering and I can maybe understand that argument but on the other hand I think there's something right about it a book I encourage you to take a look at is Dostoyevsky's crime and punishment where it's about the main character who commits a murder and it's about what it does to him psychologically and that really mirrors this same inside of boethius's which is that the person who commits evil is actually a greater victim of the evil than the person who suffers the injury right nothing either good right now what does this mean how should we treat evil people then the thing is meant to realize that an evil person is therefore a dehumanized individual they're broke they're of damaged goods so we need to treat the evil person as a patient who needs to be led to the physician right so that means me anything of punishment is something that's medicinal right it's in its we it's never okay to hate an evil person lady philosophy says because to hate an evil person is to do evil yourself so we see here that the notion of punishment the boethius is introducing here his punishment in the form of to help a person become just again it's medicinal it's for their soul it's not just to get back at them as it were so this brings us to the question okay what about evil and God's providence and chance how can we make sense of those and here we see a cousin saying in fact I'd be less amazed a boy is I'm sorry and in fact I would be less amazed at this were I to to believe that all things are confused together by chance occurrences happening at random but as it as it is now the God who is the helmsman right who uses the goodness as the rudder makes my incomprehension that much greater you the site he assigns delightful things to good people and calamitous things to evil people but on the other hand assigns harsh things to good people while granting to evil people the things that they desire if a reason for this can't be discovered what is there here the differs from chance occurrences happening at random so here boethius is saying okay if you're saying that when a evil person commits evil that is their punishment then well what's different than that about chance because it seems like that means that everything goes well here's the first thing is it all changes all all changing things happen according to God's divine mind so nothing happens that is left to chance chance is itself an illusion or in other words chance is actually really a lack of our own anticipation of things because all things that come to pass change in their causes and order according to one good thing and fade is really just the arrangement in here's in things that have motion and he and the arrangement through which Providence weaves together all things in their proper order Providence embraces all things equally despite the fact that they are different and despite the fact that they're infinite so believe this is viewers that listen from God's perspective the things what you call evil are really just a part of the organization of God's ultimate plan which is good right and so you have to separate if you will the threads from the tapestry right and that there is nothing quote that happens for the sake of the evil not even what the unrighteous themselves do end quote so all things happen for goodness and according to God's desires right and in this regard therefore whatever you see happening that falls short of your hopes though - your opinion is it is a topsy-turvy confusion for the things themselves it is in the right order so the notion here is that listen the problem is you you misunderstand why things occur with you because you do not recognize the larger picture and they ultimately all things are happening are happening according to God's providence and according to God's goodness so Providence produces the remarkable supernatural occurrence that evil people make evil people good so in other words the idea here is that it looks like in history is that God uses what we might call evil people or evil actions in order to make other people learn so in other words the suffering that occurs can be used for the instruction and the betterment of other people it's the advantage of later people now this sort of leads I think to a problem which is nearly that means that the Holocaust was evil was really a good thing because it allowed us to learn from the mistakes of the Jewish nation that seems to me to downplay the problem of evil and many thinkers have looked at this a book you might want to take a look at is Richard Bernstein friend of mine and teacher of mine but he writes a book called radical you will take a look at that which takes on some of these problems but in a secularized way but this is the basic notion that boëthius sets out so this means that divine providence means all fortunes go to bat are good so no matter what happens it must actually be a good fortune right that means they absolutely every fortune is good and it's to whether it's a delight or a calamity it's handed down sometimes the sake of rewarding or training the good sometimes for the sake of punishing and correcting the unrighteous then every fortune is good since we've agreed that it is either just or advantageous so we get this sort of interesting for they where the good is to our advantage Plus that idea that fortune trains and corrects plus the opinions about fortune or not to be trusted and for this reason the wise men booth who says ought not to take it with annoyance whenever he's drawn into a struggle with fortune just as it's shameful for a strong man to take offense whatever the war the roar of the clash battle is heard I'm some great imagery going on here this will take us to our final book here in the last book of the consolations of philosophy and here we really are going to continue to follow up the question of divine providence and divine foreknowledge and whether or not we really have free will the first thing here is let's recognize the chance is not a cause right and that because chance is merely about our anticipation of things and when that purpose is unknown and we don't know why things happen that's what we call chance so for instance the example he gives as a farmer goes out to plow their fields they accidentally discover that there's a pot of gold buried in there and they're in their fields they say that they've discovered it by chance why because they didn't intend to discover it that wasn't the purpose of digging the hole that doesn't mean that it just occurred randomly that means someone there buried a pot of gold right so chance is not the same thing as a cause chance is really just our lack of anticipation of something now does the next question those does divine providence indicate human freedom right and here we get the probably the most interesting and I think the most sophisticated argument of the constellations which is also not going to be the idea that it doesn't negate human freedom but they the problem is that the question goes awry itself okay so let's add to the problem the problem gets tougher even in prose three right we're boëthius says here for if God sees all things in advance and cannot be mistaken in any way that things must necessarily happen that Providence foresees will happen right if God knows all things that God knows what's gonna happen tomorrow then what's gonna happen tomorrow must happen because God knows it and for this reason if Providence has four dollars from eternity not only of the actions of moral men but if their deliberations and in their wills then there would be no freedom of independent judgment so there could exist no action no will of any sort other than what divine providence which does not know how to be mistaken perceives beforehand so the question that becomes is does divine foreknowledge actually preclude freedom now it's very interesting and important here because even though this is medieval philosophy this entire discussion mirrors the very same discussion about freedom and determinism that modern philosophers have today where modern philosophers look at it more in terms of the causal Nexus of things right there's a causal history and a causal order to everything so how can we really be free right there is a sort of Keillor version of the same question but slightly different it's not the question of four dollars but it is a question of determinism you know here's what lady philosophy says respond she says for number one this is an old complaint about Providence so this isn't nothing new right and I understand why you're complaining about this right but here's the basic argument to counter the objection first we have to recognize that human knowledge cannot be conflated with divine knowledge right human knowledge comes from our senses and our senses are temporal so when I talk about what's gonna happen tomorrow did I talk about let's say I'm drinking this and by I'm debating in my mind should I drink now or should I drink after the video and then I make a choice you can see there is that the only way that I understand that that I can make a choice that's going to take place in the future is because I have sensation that things are changing through time so my senses are temporal and that means that my knowledge is organized according to this framework of temporality of time dimension whereas divine knowledge because if God stands out sign of time and God knows all things this means that divine knowledge is something different now it really comes in prose v but he's gonna say that divine knowledge really treats every moment as the now because God is everywhere and in all times all at once it's not the idea that God knows what we're gonna do it's rather than God knows right now what we are doing right now but in the future our future but his present or its present right so in other words the problem divine foreknowledge is not of the same quality as human knowledge right whoops Leona whoa let me go back here and those are quite a 100 you right here we read quote naeli that the higher power of comprehension embraces the lower but in no way does the lower rise to the level of the higher now there the argument that oops the booth is a saying is that we have these capacities as some are higher than others so for instance like think about animal intelligence versus human intelligence we have the ability to understand why for it's a cat is startled when you drop a pan on the floor right we recognize that but a cat does not have the same ability to recognize why we reason about how much our tax bracket should be for instance so it looks like that the higher orders of reasoning in nature can understand the lower orders but the lower orders are incapable of understanding the higher orders it's clear that God has a higher order of rationality and knowledge than we do since we cannot understand what God says now this means that remember importantly in prose 5 is that when we talk about a Delvian for knowledge that is not the same thing as talking about a necessity of causes right Boethius writes for your discourses as follows if there are some things that are not seen to have definite and necessary outcomes then there can be no definite foreknowledge of them as outcomes consequently there is no foreknowledge of these events were we to believe that there is foreknowledge in these things as well there will be then nothing that does not come to pass through necessity and yet consequently were we able to possess the judgment of divine mind in just the same way as we are partakers of reason then we would think it is most just the human reason surrender to the divine mind so here you have to give up on the idea that you can fully comprehend it and that importantly in this what I mentioned forecast earlier is that we have to recognize that for God eternity is now right and I quote since every judgment grasp the things that are subject to it in accordance with its own nature and since God has an ever eternal and ever present moment condition his knowledge as well has passed beyond all the motion of time it is stable in the simplicity of its own present it embraces the infinite reaches of what has passed and what is he to come and in its own simple perception it looks and all things as if they are being carried out now which means that God really is in a different dimension than we are because God is a temporal and this will be an important discussion we'll talk about later so this means that God's foreknowledge doesn't clewd our freedom that is that were free but that God is that all is with us in all moments in which our freedom emerges right so it's necessary that a thing exists if Providence sees it as a present thing even if it has no necessity in nature it's that too here is that that means that we are free even though God knows all things quote for the divine gaze runs on ahead of everything that will come to pass and twist it back and calls it back to the present of its own proper perception it does not as you growl reckon switch back and forth in an alteration of foreknowledge now this thing and now another now it's stable now unstable and so on and so forth rather the divine knowledge embraces all of your changes in a single stroke which means that ultimately God does know all things and even though in in the means we're also equally free to act right so this is sort of where we come to the conclusion and this is the last section of the whole book where ultimately what we're told is that that we should pursue God and that's what happiness is and that it's not misfortune that fortune is your relevant ultimately and then if we're to say anything at the end it means that we should avoid these vices we should avoid our vices we should cherish our virtues raise up our minds to the blameless hopes extend our humble prayers into lofty heights unless you want to hide the truth there's a great necessity imposed upon you the necessity of righteousness since you act before the eyes of a judge who beholds all things at all times so we're left here with lady philosophy saying listen if you trust your reason then you'll realize that the good are actually rewarded and the punished are always by necessity punished and then this and that God is ultimately at the center of it all and that's what goodness is and that this is something that's ever-present in all moments and so this is the sort of consolation of philosophy the Boethius is able to gain and as a consequence Boethius I think faces death with great and courage and sadly he was himself executed but notice here that despite his execution we don't even know anything really about why he was executed that tells you how a worthy it was but notice that the things he's written the consolation of philosophy is dead that's have stayed the test of time okay now that concludes our discussion of the consolations of philosophy next time we're gonna be taking a look at pseudo-dionysius in particular we'd be looking at the problem of religious and philosophical mysticism within the Middle Ages thank you very much for watching the history of medieval philosophy I'm Marc Torres babe and I look forward to seeing you guys online next time

Channel: Mark Thorsby

Views: 2,400

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Boethius, God, the Good, the problem of Evil, Consolations of Philosophy

Id: wUFsySyckHg

Length: 84min 19sec (5059 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 17 2018