Reading group: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Book V on foreknowledge, in three sittings
Its coordinates: 1.7 Free Will and Determinism
I read The Consolation of Philosophy mostly on the Cork to Dublin train, and Book V is the part I keep going back to. Would anyone like to read it slowly with me?
Boethius, in prison awaiting execution, asks Lady Philosophy the hardest question in the book: if God knows in advance everything I will do, how can I do otherwise, and how can I be justly rewarded or punished? Her answer takes the whole of Book V and has been borrowed by theologians ever since.
Plan:
- Sitting 1: prose 1–3. Chance, and the problem stated at full strength. Boethius makes the case against himself very well.
- Sitting 2: prose 4–5. Philosophy's key move: what is known is grasped according to the capacity of the knower, not the nature of the thing known. Sense, imagination, reason and intelligence know the same object in different ways.
- Sitting 3: prose 6. Eternity as the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life. God does not foresee; he sees, as from a present that holds all times. And the distinction between simple and conditional necessity.
Each sitting is short, perhaps fifteen pages including the poems. The old H. R. James translation is free online; Victor Watts's Penguin translation is good too.
A question to bring: does seeing something happen ever make it happen? And if not, does Boethius need eternity at all?