Consolation of Philosophy 5 part 1/2

She had spoken, and was turning the course of her discourse to treat and unfold certain other matters. Then I said: Your exhortation is indeed right and altogether most worthy of your authority; but, as you said a while ago that the question of providence is entangled with many others, I find it so by experience. For I ask whether you think that chance is anything at all, and what indeed it is. Then she said: I am hastening to discharge the debt of my promise and to open to you the way by which you may be carried back to your homeland. But these things, although most useful to know, are nonetheless turned aside a little from the path of our purpose, and it is to be feared that, wearied by detours, you may not be able to suffice for completing the straight journey. Have no fear of that at all, I said. For it will be as good as rest to me to come to know those things in which I most delight, and at the same time, once every side of your argument has stood firm with undoubted faith, nothing in what follows will be left in doubt. Then she said:

I will indulge you, she said, and at once she began thus: If indeed anyone should define chance to be an event produced by random motion and by no connection of causes, I affirm that chance is nothing whatsoever, and I judge it to be, beyond signifying the matter at hand, an utterly empty word. For when God constrains all things into order, what place can be left for randomness? For "nothing comes to be from nothing" is a true saying, which none of the ancients ever contradicted, although they laid it down not concerning the operating principle but concerning the material substratum, as a kind of foundation of all their reasonings about nature. But if anything should arise from no causes, it would seem to have arisen out of nothing. But if this cannot happen, then neither is it possible for chance to be of the sort we defined a little before. What then, I said—is there nothing that can rightly be called chance or fortuitous?

Is there something to which those words rightly apply, even though it escapes the common crowd? My own Aristotle, she said, defined it in the Physics with a brief reasoning that comes close to the truth. In what way, I said? Whenever, she said, something is done for the sake of some end, and something else befalls, owing to certain causes, than what was intended, it is called chance—as if someone, digging the ground for the sake of cultivating a field, should find a weight of buried gold. This, then, is believed to have happened by chance; yet it is not from nothing, for it has its own proper causes, whose unforeseen and unexpected concurrence seems to have produced the chance event. For unless the cultivator of the field had dug the ground, and unless the one who deposited his money had buried it in that place, the gold would not have been found. These, therefore, are the causes of that fortuitous windfall, which arises from causes meeting and flowing together, not from the intention of the one acting.

For neither did the one who buried the gold, nor the one who tilled the field, intend that the money should be found; but, as I said, it came about and concurred that this man dug where that man had buried. It is therefore permissible to define chance as an unforeseen event arising from causes flowing together in things that are done for some purpose; and what makes these causes to meet and flow together is that order proceeding by an inevitable connection, which, descending from the fount of providence, disposes all things in their own places and times. Where, upon the crags of the Achaemenian cliff, the fleeing battle fixes its arrows in the breasts of pursuers, the Tigris and Euphrates are released from one source and soon are parted, separated by their divided waters. If they should come together and again be recalled into one course, all that the wave draws from either channel would flow together;

the ships would come together, and the trunks torn loose by the river, and the mingled wave would entangle their fortuitous courses; yet these wanderings the sloping of the earth and the downward order of the gliding flood themselves govern as chance. Thus that which seems to float with reins let loose—Fortune—suffers the bridle and itself moves by law. I observe this, I said, and I agree that it is so, just as you say. But in this series of causes clinging to one another, is there any freedom of our will, or does the fatal chain bind even the very motions of human minds? There is, she said; for there could be no rational nature in which the freedom of the will were not present in that same nature. For whatever can naturally use reason has a judgment by which it discerns each thing; therefore by itself it distinguishes things to be fled from and things to be chosen. But what one judges to be choiceworthy, one seeks; what one reckons to be fled from, one shuns. Wherefore, in those very beings in which there is reason, there is also the freedom of willing and not willing.

But I lay down that this freedom is not equal in all. For to the supernal and divine substances there belong a keen-sighted judgment, an incorruptible will, and a power efficacious for what they desire. But human souls must of necessity be more free when they preserve themselves in the contemplation of the divine mind, less free when they slip down toward bodies, and even less when they are bound together by earthly limbs. But the utmost servitude is when, given over to vices, they have fallen from the possession of their own reason. For when they have cast down their eyes from the light of the highest truth to lower and shadowy things, they are soon darkened with a cloud of ignorance, troubled by ruinous passions; and by approaching and consenting to these they aid the servitude which they have brought upon themselves, and are in a certain manner captives by their own liberty.

Yet all these things the gaze of providence, foreseeing all from eternity, discerns, and disposes each thing predestined according to its own merits. "To behold all things and to hear all things"—with pure radiant light Homer of the honey-flowing mouth sings of Phoebus; yet Phoebus cannot pierce the inmost bowels of the earth or of the sea with the weak light of his rays. Not so the maker of the great world; to him, beholding all things from on high, no mass of earth resists, no night with its black clouds stands in his way. What things are, what have been, and what shall come, he discerns in a single stroke of mind; and since he alone looks upon all things, you might call him the true Sun. Then I said: Behold, I am thrown again into confusion by a harder ambiguity. What, she said, is that? For I already conjecture by what things you are troubled. It seems, I said, too much at odds and in conflict that God should foreknow all things and that there should be any freedom of the will.

For if God foresees all things and can in no way be deceived, then what providence has foreseen will come to pass must of necessity come to pass. Wherefore, if from eternity he foreknows not only the deeds of men but also their counsels and wills, there will be no freedom of the will; for no deed at all, nor any will whatsoever, will be able to exist except such as the divine providence, which cannot be deceived, has foreseen. For if they could be wrested aside into something other than was foreseen, there would no longer be a firm foreknowledge of the future, but rather an uncertain opinion—which I judge it impious to believe concerning God. Nor do I approve that reasoning by which certain people believe they can untie this knot of the question.

For they say that a thing is going to come to pass not because providence has foreseen it as future, but rather, on the contrary, that because something is going to be, it cannot escape the divine providence; and in this way the necessity passes over into the opposite side, for (they say) it is not necessary that the things foreseen should happen, but it is necessary that the things which are to be should be foreseen—as though, forsooth, the question were over which is the cause of which: whether the foreknowledge of future things is the cause of necessity, or the necessity of future things the cause of providence; and as though we were not striving to demonstrate that, in whatever way the order of causes may stand, the event of things foreknown is necessary, even if foreknowledge does not seem to impose upon future things the necessity of happening. For if anyone is sitting, the opinion which conjectures that he is sitting must of necessity be true; and conversely again, if the opinion about someone is true because he is sitting, he must of necessity be sitting.

In both, therefore, there is necessity: in the one indeed the necessity of sitting, but in the other the necessity of truth. But it is not for that reason that anyone sits because the opinion is true; rather this opinion is true because his sitting came first. Thus, although the cause of the truth proceeds from the one side, there is nonetheless a common necessity in both. It is plain that one may reason in like manner about providence and future things. For even though they are foreseen because they are future, and not on the contrary do they come to pass because they are foreseen, nevertheless it is no less necessary that either things to come be foreseen by God, or things foreseen come to pass—which alone is enough for destroying the freedom of the will. But how preposterous it is to say that the event of temporal things is the cause of the eternal foreknowledge! And what else is it to think that God foresees future things because they are going to come to pass, than to suppose that the things which once happened are the cause of that supreme providence?

Besides this, just as when I know that something is, that very thing must of necessity be, so when I know that something will be, that very thing must of necessity be in the future. It comes about, therefore, that the event of a thing foreknown cannot be avoided. Finally, if anyone should suppose a thing to be otherwise than it actually is, that is not only not knowledge, but is a deceptive opinion far different from the truth of knowledge. Wherefore, if anything is to be future in such a way that its event is not certain and necessary, how could it be foreknown that it will come to pass? For just as knowledge itself is unmingled with falsity, so that which is conceived by it cannot be otherwise than it is conceived. For this is the reason why knowledge is free of falsehood: that each thing must necessarily be just as knowledge comprehends it to be. What then? In what manner does God foreknow these uncertain future things?

For if he judges that those things will inevitably come to pass which it is also possible may not come to pass, he is deceived—which it is impious not only to think but even to utter aloud. But if he determines that they will be in the future just as they are, so that he knows them to be equally capable of happening or not happening, what is this foreknowledge which comprehends nothing certain, nothing stable? Or how does this differ from that ridiculous oracle of Tiresias: "Whatever I shall say, either will be or will not be"? In what too would divine providence excel human opinion, if, like men, it judges as uncertain those things whose event is uncertain? But if with him, that most certain fount of all things, nothing can be uncertain, then the event of those things is certain which he firmly foreknew to be future. Wherefore there is no freedom in human counsels and actions, which the divine mind, foreseeing all things without error of falsehood, binds and constrains to a single event.

Once this is granted, it is clear how great a downfall of human affairs follows. For in vain are rewards and punishments set before the good and the wicked, which no free and voluntary motion of minds has deserved. And that will seem most unjust of all which is now judged most just—either that the wicked be punished or the good rewarded—seeing that it is not their own will that sends them to either course, but a fixed necessity of the future that compels them. Therefore neither vices nor virtues will be anything at all, but rather a mixed and undistinguished confusion of all deserts. And—than which nothing more wicked can be devised—since the whole order of things is drawn from providence, and nothing is allowed to human counsels, it comes about that our vices too are referred to the Author of all good things. Therefore there is no reason for hoping anything or for praying anything away. For what would anyone hope, or even pray away, when an inflexible series binds together all things desirable?

There will therefore be taken away that one unique commerce between men and God—namely, of hoping and of praying. If indeed by the price of righteous humility we earn the inestimable recompense of divine grace, which is the only way by which men seem able to converse with God and, by the very manner of supplication, to be joined to that inaccessible light even before they obtain their requests—if these things, once the necessity of future events is accepted, are believed to have no power at all, what will there be by which we may be connected and may cling to that highest Principle of things? Wherefore it will be necessary that the human race, as you sang a little while ago, severed and disjoined, should grow weary apart from its source. What discordant cause has loosed the covenants of things? What god has set such great wars between two truths, that things which, taken separately, each stand fast, refuse, when mingled, to be yoked together? Or is there no discord in truths, and do they always cohere, certain of themselves?

But the mind, overwhelmed by blind members, cannot, by the fire of its oppressed light, know the subtle bonds of things. Yet why does it burn with so great a love to discover the hidden marks of truth? Does it know, in its anxiety, what it longs to know? But who labors to know what is already known? Yet if it does not know, what does it blindly seek? For who would desire anything in ignorance, or who could pursue things unknown? Or how would anyone find them, or, being ignorant, be able to recognize the form once found? When it beheld the lofty Mind, did it know at once both the sum and the particulars? Now, hidden in the cloud of the members, it has not wholly forgotten itself, and retains the sum while losing the particulars. Therefore whoever seeks the truth is in neither state; for he neither knows, nor yet is wholly ignorant of all things, but, retaining the sum which he remembers, he takes counsel, deeply reconsidering the things once seen, that to what is preserved he may add the forgotten parts. Then she said:

This, she said, is the old complaint about providence, vehemently agitated by Marcus Tullius too when he treated of divination, and long and much investigated by you yourself, yet by no means hitherto unfolded with sufficient diligence and firmness by any of you. The cause of this obscurity is that the motion of human reasoning cannot be applied to the simplicity of divine foreknowledge; which, if it could in any way be conceived, would leave nothing whatever in doubt. This I shall at length attempt to make clear and to unfold, if first I have weighed the things by which you are moved. For I ask: why do you think that reasoning of those who solve the difficulty less effective, which, because it judges that foreknowledge is not the cause of necessity to future things, thinks that the freedom of the will is in no way impeded by foreknowledge? For surely you draw the argument for the necessity of future things from no other source than that the things which are foreknown cannot fail to happen?

If, therefore, foreknowledge adds no necessity to future things—which you yourself admitted a little while ago—what is there that the voluntary outcomes of things should be compelled to a certain event? For the sake of supposition, that you may observe what follows, let us lay down that there is no foreknowledge. Surely then, so far as this is concerned, the things that come from free will would not be compelled to necessity? By no means. Let us again lay down that there is foreknowledge, but that it imposes no necessity on things; there will remain, I think, the same liberty of the will, whole and absolute. But foreknowledge, you will say, even though it is not a necessity of future things' happening, is nonetheless a sign that they will necessarily come to pass. In this way, therefore, even if there had been no foreknowledge, the outcomes of future things would be established as necessary. For every sign only shows what a thing is; it does not bring about what it designates.

Wherefore it must first be demonstrated that nothing happens save by necessity, in order that foreknowledge may appear to be a sign of this necessity. Otherwise, if this necessity does not exist, then neither could foreknowledge be the sign of a thing which does not exist. But it is settled that a proof supported by firm reasoning must be drawn not from signs nor from arguments sought from outside, but from fitting and necessary causes. But how can it come about that those things do not come to pass which are foreseen as future? As though, forsooth, we believed that those things which providence foreknows as future do not come to pass, and did not rather judge that, though they happen, they nonetheless had in their own nature no necessity of happening; which you will easily be able to weigh from this. For we behold many things, while they are being done, set before our eyes, as those things which charioteers are seen to do in driving and turning their teams, and others in this manner.

Surely, then, does any necessity compel any of those things to be done in this way? By no means. For the effect of art would be in vain if all things moved under compulsion. Therefore the things which, when they are being done, lack the necessity of existing, those same things, before they are done, are future without necessity. Wherefore there are certain things going to come to pass whose outcome is absolved from all necessity. For that, indeed, I think no one will be going to say—that the things which now are being done, before they came to be, were not going to come to pass. These things, therefore, even though foreknown, have free outcomes. For just as the knowledge of present things imports no necessity to those things which are being done, so the foreknowledge of future things imports none to those things which are going to come. But this very thing, you say, is doubted: whether there can be any foreknowledge of those things which do not have necessary outcomes.

For they seem to be dissonant, and you think that if things are foreseen, necessity follows; if necessity is lacking, they cannot be foreknown at all; and that nothing can be comprehended by knowledge except what is certain; and that, if things whose outcomes are uncertain are foreseen as though certain, this is the obscurity of opinion, not the truth of knowledge. For you believe it to be at variance with the integrity of knowledge to judge a thing otherwise than it actually is. The cause of this error is that you reckon that all things which anyone knows are known only from their own force and nature—the things which are known; which is wholly the contrary. For everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own force, but rather according to the faculty of those who know it. For, that this may be made clear by a brief example, the very same roundness of a body is recognized in one way by sight, in another by touch.

Sight, remaining at a distance, beholds the whole at once by the rays it casts; but touch, clinging to the sphere and joined to it, moving around the very circuit of it, comprehends the roundness part by part. Man himself, too, sense beholds in one way, imagination in another, reason in another, intelligence in yet another. For sense judges the figure as constituted in its underlying matter; imagination, however, judges the figure alone without matter. But reason transcends even this, and weighs by a universal consideration the very species which is present in particulars. The eye of intelligence is yet loftier; for, having gone beyond the circuit of universality, it beholds that simple form itself by the pure keenness of the mind. In which this is especially to be considered: that the higher power of comprehending embraces the lower, but the lower in no way rises up to the higher.

For neither has sense any power beyond matter, nor does imagination behold universal species, nor does reason grasp the simple form; but intelligence, as if looking down from above, having conceived the form, judges also all the things that lie beneath, yet in that manner in which it comprehends the form itself, which could be known to nothing else. For it knows both the universal of reason and the figure of imagination and the material sensible thing, neither using reason, nor imagination, nor the senses, but, by that single stroke of the mind, beholding all things formally, so to speak. Reason too, when it regards something universal, comprehends the imaginable and the sensible without using either imagination or the senses. For this is reason which thus defined the universal of its own conception: "man is a two-footed rational animal."

Although this is a universal notion, yet no one is ignorant that the thing is imaginable and sensible—a thing which reason considers not by imagination or by sense, but in a rational conception. Imagination too, although it took its starting point from the senses for seeing and forming figures, nonetheless, in the absence of sense, surveys all sensible things by a power of judging that is not sensible but imaginary. Do you see, then, how in knowing they all use rather their own faculty than that of the things which are known? Nor is this without justice; for since every judgment is an act of the one judging, it is necessary that each accomplish its own work not from another's power but from its own. Long ago the Porch brought forth all-too-obscure old men who believed that the senses and images are imprinted upon minds from outward bodies, as once the custom is, with swift stylus, upon the surface of a page which has no marks, to fix pressed-in letters.

But if the mind, mighty by its own motions, unfolds nothing, but lies merely passive, subjected to the marks of bodies, and, in the manner of a mirror, gives back empty images of things—whence does there flourish in souls this notion which discerns all things? What power perceives the particulars, or what divides the things known? What gathers up again the things divided, and, choosing an alternating path, now thrusts its head into the heights, now sinks down into the depths, then, returning to itself, refutes the false by the true? This is a cause far more powerful and efficient than that which merely suffers, in the manner of matter, the marks impressed upon it. Yet a passion in the living body precedes, rousing and stirring the powers of the mind. When either light strikes the eyes or a voice sounds in the ears, then the roused vigor of the mind, calling forth to like motions the species which it holds within, applies them to the marks received from outside, and mingles the images with the forms stored within.

But if in the perceiving of bodies, although qualities presented from outside affect the instruments of the senses, and a passion of the body precedes the vigor of the acting mind—a passion which provokes in itself the act of the mind and rouses the forms within, which were meanwhile at rest—if, I say, in perceiving bodies the mind is not stamped by passion, but from its own power judges the passion subjected to the body, how much more do those things which are released from all bodily affections, in discerning, not follow objects presented from outside, but accomplish the act of their own mind? By this reasoning, therefore, manifold cognitions have fallen to diverse and differing substances.

For sense alone, destitute of all other cognitions, fell to immovable living things, such as the sea-shells and other creatures that are nourished clinging to rocks; but imagination fell to mobile beasts, in which there already seems to be some impulse of fleeing or of seeking; reason, however, belongs to the human race alone, just as intelligence belongs to the divine alone. Whence it comes about that that knowledge excels the rest which by its own nature knows as its subject not only its proper object but the objects of the other knowledges as well. What then, if sense and imagination should oppose reasoning, saying that the universal which reason thinks it beholds is nothing at all?

For (they say) that which is sensible or imaginable cannot be universal; therefore either the judgment of reason is true and nothing is sensible, or—since it is known to itself that many things are subject to the senses and to imagination—the conception of reason is empty, which considers as if a kind of universal that which is sensible and singular. To this, if reason should answer in turn that it indeed beholds both that which is sensible and that which is imaginable under the aspect of universality, but that they cannot aspire to the cognition of universality, since their notion cannot exceed corporeal figures, and that concerning the cognition of things one ought rather to put trust in the firmer and more perfect judgment—in a dispute of this kind, then, we in whom there is the power both of reasoning and of imagining and also of sensing, should we not rather approve the cause of reason?

It is similar that human reason supposes the divine intelligence cannot behold future things except as it itself knows them. For thus you argue: If certain things seem not to have certain and necessary outcomes, they cannot be foreknown as certainly going to come to pass. Therefore there is no foreknowledge of these things; and if we should believe there to be foreknowledge even of them, there will be nothing that does not come to pass from necessity. If, therefore, just as we are partakers of reason, so we could possess the judgment of the divine mind, then, just as we judged that imagination and sense ought to yield to reason, so we should reckon it most just that human reason should submit itself to the divine mind.

Wherefore let us, if we can, raise ourselves to the summit of that highest intelligence; for there reason will see what in itself it cannot behold—namely, in what manner even those things which do not have certain outcomes are nonetheless seen by a certain and definite foreknowledge, and this is not opinion but rather the simplicity of the highest knowledge, enclosed within no bounds. In how many varied shapes do living creatures traverse the lands! For some are of extended body and sweep the dust and, driven on by the force of the breast, draw a continuous furrow; some there are whose lightness of wings roves and lashes the winds and swims out through the long spaces of the liquid air in lofty flight; these delight to press their footprints upon the ground and with their steps either to cross the green fields or to pass beneath the woods. Though you may see them all differing in their varied forms, yet their downturned face has power to dull their sluggish senses.

The race of men alone lifts its head higher aloft, and, light, stands with upright body and looks down upon the earth. This figure admonishes you—unless, earthbound, you are foolishly besotted—you who with upright face seek the heaven and lift up your brow, to bear your mind also into the heights, lest, weighed down, your mind, lower than your body raised on high, sink down to the depths. Since therefore, as was shown a little before, everything that is known is known not from its own but from the comprehending nature, let us now behold, as far as is lawful, what the state of the divine substance is, that we may be able to recognize what too its knowledge is. That God is eternal is the common judgment of all who live by reason. Let us therefore consider what eternity is; for this lays open to us alike the divine nature and the divine knowledge. Eternity, then, is the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unending life, which becomes clearer by comparison with temporal things.

For whatever lives in time, that, present, proceeds from past things into future things, and nothing constituted in time is able to embrace at once the whole span of its life. But it has not yet grasped tomorrow, and has already lost yesterday; and even in today's life you live no more than in that mobile and transitory moment. That which therefore suffers the condition of time, although—as Aristotle thought concerning the world—it never began to be nor will cease to be, and although its life is extended with the infinity of time, is nonetheless not yet such that it may rightly be believed to be eternal. For it does not comprehend and embrace the whole span of its life all at once, even though that life be infinite, but it has the future not yet, the past no longer.