Boethius: The Possibility and Scope of Human Free Will
Boethius’ adroit scrutiny of free will in book 5 of his work The Consolation of Philosophy conveys an ancient answer to a perennial philosophical conundrum concerning divine foreknowledge and free will. While Boethius’ own character insists that infallible foreknowledge precludes all free will, the sagacious Lady Philosophy urges that free will is absolute. In this paper, I will evaluate the major portion of Lady Philosophy’s argument in dialogue with the problems they attempt to solve to argue that her conclusion satisfactorily untwines and solves the conundrum of free will posed by Boethius.
First to be addressed is Lady Philosophy’s concept of “freedom” and its relation to human perception of the divine. Lady Philosophy boldly asserts that humans’ rational faculties demand that they be free, but she must logically ascertain and subsequently describe the scope of this freedom before her sickly subject will be convinced (150). Every living being, she says, has methods of perception appropriate to the being’s type: non-moving creatures have sensory perception; moving creatures have sensory perception and imagination; humans have sensory perception, imagination, and reason; and God alone has all of these in addition to intuitive intellect (165). Each type of living being is able to utilize the methods of perception of the class below it, but none can transcend the cognizance of his/her/its own class. Humans, then, are free to act according to reason, physical sense, and imagination or solely according to physical sense and imagination, but they are not free to act according to intuitive intellect, which method of perception belongs to God alone. The freedom of humans, then, is to embrace reason and to “stand with upright bodies” over the “confined / and dull” animals of the earth, while those who eschew reason are “drawn downward by the lures of / of earth” (167–168). To be drawn up into the intuitive intellect of the divine mind is simply beyond human capacity. It is this human inability to attain to God’s method of perception that makes it so that “human reason cannot understand how divine intelligence can see future events except in the same way that humans see them” (166). Put differently, humans cannot perceive through reason a concept—namely, foreknowledge—that is only attainable to the intuitive intellect of God. This first argument forms the foundation of Lady Philosophy’s later argument for foreknowledge without imposed necessity; it is Boethius’ first prescription for his doubt of human free will.
Continuing to administer her medicine, Lady Philosophy argues for God’s eternity. She acutely defines eternity as “the whole, simultaneous, perfect possession of limitless life” (168). That which is eternal, then, “has [at all times] the knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past . . . [it] has an understanding of the entire flow of time” (169). This assertion flows directly from Lady Philosophy’s description of God as perceiving things differently from humans. He perceives time, unlike humans do, as an “eternal present” (169). Thus, God’s eternal nature adroitly addresses Boethius’ dilemma of imposed necessity. According to Boethius, absolute knowledge of a thing is impossible to attain unless either (1) the thing is being experienced in the present, or (2) there is absolute necessity of the thing’s occurring in the future (see 151–158). Understanding God as being subject to time in the same manner that humans are, Boethius deems the latter the only feasible option. In other words, since it is impossible to perceive future events in the present, nothing can be foreknown without being predestined to occur. Addressing this concern, Lady Philosophy’s argument that God perceives all time in an “eternal present” opens the proverbial door for the first option—his experiencing things in the present. That is to say, if God views all things—past, present, and future—as occurring presently, then he can have absolute, present knowledge of things that humans perceive as future events/circumstances without undermining human’s free will. If he perceives things in the present, then his seeing cannot make the things inevitable, just as humans’ perception of present things cannot make the things inevitable (see 171).
One might object to the notion of free will by using Lady Philosophy’s claims about the nature of perception and reality. Such an objection would rely on Lady Philosophy’s claims throughout book 5 that things are not comprehended according to their own nature, but according to the nature of the one perceiving them (see 163–165, 170). If this statement is true—a dissenter might say—then all things perceived by God are perceived according to truth (see 165–167). If the things that God perceives are perceived according to truth, then the things could be no other way than how he sees them. Therefore, nothing—not even human free will—can despoil God’s perception of its absolute correctness, and humans ultimately have no free will. This objection, while perhaps sincere, is merely a restatement of Boethius’ initial dilemma of imposed necessity. Certainly God’s nature is truth, and anything God perceives must be precisely as he perceives it to be, but his perception does not impose necessity on the thing’s being. Lady Philosophy reminds Boethius that all things he sees must really be as he sees them insofar as he perceives rightly. Yet, she asks, “Your seeing them in the present does not confer inevitability, does it?” (171). Despite his prior misgivings about free will, Boethius must reply in the negative. Philosophy concludes, “Just as you [Boethius] see things in the temporal present, [God] must see things in the eternal present. So his divine prescience does not change the nature of things” (171).
Finally, having established that human free will is neither contradicted nor impaired
by God’s foreknowledge, Lady Philosophy describes how human free will can be impaired. The only impediment to a human’s free will is himself or herself. People are enslaved, and thus totally deprived of freedom of will, only “when they give themselves up to vice and no longer exercise their powers of reason” (150). Ironically, many humans use their “innate freedom” to make themselves slaves to “destructive whims” (150–151). This affirmation effectively turns Boethius’ argument on its head, saying “Yes, it is true that humans can lack freedom of will, but it is the perceptive methods of the class below humans, not of the class above them, that instigates this lack.”
In the concluding chapter of The Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy demonstrates that human freedom can only be limited by individuals’ own failure to act in consonance with reason. God’s eternal nature precludes his limiting human free will since his perception of all events in an “eternal present” effects to negate the dilemma of imposed necessity. Although God’s perception of the future is absolutely accurate and even surpasses the capacities human reason, his perception does not make the things he perceives inevitable.
Work Cited
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. David R. Slavitt. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2008. Print.