Between God and Fate
Boethius
(Just a short one today)
Well, this last teaching term I’ve been leading two students through the wonders of Planudes’ translation of Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy. It realised a long-held dream of mine to teach a Latin-authored text in Ancient Greek translation.
We mostly read through portions from Book IV, which deal with the problem of bad things happening to good people, and good things happening to bad people. There’s some great stuff in there, and some really bad stuff. I think it’s laughable when Lady Philosophy tells Boethius that people who walk on their feet and stronger than those who walk on their hands. Has she never seen handstand walking? It’s also deeply disturbing when the argument is made that ‘the wicked’ are in fact sub-human.
But today as we finished up our course, we came to the end of a section where Boethius simply complains that it feels hard to accept that good things happen to the bad, and bad things to the good, and that actually that’s all fine because those are just externals and true happiness and wretchedness are internal states and rewards of being good and bad. It just keeps rubbing him the wrong way. And so he says as much: it would be easier to accept this if it were, in some measure at least, the result of chance.
The problem, as Philosophy replies, is that
The world looks like chance, when you don’t know the principle of its ordering
You don’t know the principle of its ordering
So you ‘just have to believe’ that a good ruler has ordered it well.
That’s a whole lot of trust for a philosopher. But it leads into a discussion of providence vs fate. Fate is Luck by another name, is it not? And a world governed by luck may as well be governed by fate. But Fate has no governing principle, has no plan, has no purpose. That’s where it differs from Providence. Providence foresees and so pro-vides. It orders the world according to a purpose, an end, and if God is good and his purpose is good, then his ordering is good, even if it isn’t known.
And it’s almost never known, in its particulars, in the moment, by us creatures. It does have to be taken on trust. Boethius writes as a curious kind of theistic philosopher with deeply Christian roots to his theology, but he doesn’t write in a Christian mode, he writes in a very Philosophical one. And I think that undermines his case here, or at least it leaves unwritten what I think is a key part of the practical application of this idea. The Bible does its part in telling the narrative story of God’s interactions with people, and in doing so shows you over and over (i) God’s goodness, (ii) God’s plan, (iii) God’s faithfulness to his goodness and his good plan. Precisely so that even when you don’t know his secret will in any particular thing, you can trust his character and his goodness. That’s how you come to trust that a good ruler has ordered the universe well, even when you don’t see the principle of its ordering, and even when you don’t like how its been ordered.
