Boethius: On Providence and Free Will

Essay for Medieval Philosophy in Spring of 2016

Source

I

Petitionary prayer is predetermined if Providence portrays people’s pleas prior their passing. That is, at least, so worries Boethius in his struggle to reconcile the natures of God’s Providence– complete knowledge of all such that the sequences of the universe are bound as an undeviating chain– and human’s free will– the autonomy of the agent such that their actions are voluntary (ie., not bound by necessity). Though the vanity of prayer is not Boethius’s only (nor major) worry. For if Providence and the incompatibility of Providence and human free will both hold, then ethics is lost entirely and all its social regulating power along with it. A man cannot be praised for a good deed that was not of his own will’s doing just as a man cannot be punished for a crime he was inevitably destined to commit. “Wherefore neither virtues nor vices are anything, but there is rather an indiscriminate confusion of all deserts. And nothing could be more vicious than this; since the whole order of all comes from Providence, and nothing is left to human intention ... the human race must be cut off from its source and ever fall away.” So let’s turn to his argument for compatibilism in hopes that we shall justly praise Boethius for both acknowledging a negatively consequential inconsistency and his resolution.

II

What follows is a succinct form of Boethius's argument for compatibilism, with expansions of the premises following suit:

1. Free will exists.
2. God knows all.
3. God’s foreknowledge/Providence doesn’t necessitate future events.
4. Providence is God’s alone.
5. “God is eternal, but the universe is continual” (Stockton, Boethius PPT).
6. There are two types of necessity: simple and conditional.
   ∴ 7. Ergo, compatibilism is true. (This will become clear upon expansions of premises).

(1): Lady Philosophy asserts there is free will, and does so by way of modus tollens (though I present her assertion in modus ponens). It is given that there be rational beings, for consider the very nature of what it is to be human (eg., “an animal, biped and reasoning”); and that such beings are rational because of their capacity to reason. If “any being can use its reason by nature, [then that being] has a power of judgment by which it can without further aid decide each point.” The being is thereby autonomous, for it alone “without further aid” of any higher being or power is free in its judgements. Ergo, all rational beings, and in particular for Boethius’s case, humans, possess free will as each agent is free to judge, and thereby act according to its own nature.
Note, also, that all rational beings have free will, though not free will of the same nature. For God and divine beings (eg., angels) have free will powerful enough to effect their desires, namely “an imperturbable will” whereas humans may only steer their will in the direction of such steadfast willingness as that of the divine through contemplation of the spiritual. As humans “sink into bodies, and [worse] still when they are bound by their earthly members,” they won’t effect their desires, but rather their desires will effect their judgment such that “their true liberty is lost in captivity.”
(2): Lady Philosophy asserts that God sees all events of the temporal, infinite universe simultaneously through His unique, eternally-present vantage. “With one glance of His intelligence He sees all that has been, that is, and that is to come.” Further clarified by way of contemporary metaphysical theories of time, God observes all not from a linear perspective as if his eyes were passing frame to frame, but from a “B-theorist tapestry” containing the totality of our universe’s events that He sees in full at once.
After these two premises have been presented by Lady Philosophy, Boethius objects (in the spirit of that found in the introduction) that God’s Providence and human’s free will must be incompatible. For he argues that if both exist, then either Providence necessitates the occurrence of future events or an event’s about to occur necessitates Providence accordingly. The true aim, he argues, should “be to prove that, whatever be the shape which this series of causes takes, the fulfillment of God’s foreknowledge is necessary, even if this knowledge may not seem to induce the necessity for the occurrence of future events.” Yet, either side of the apparently exhausted disjunction is problematic, ergo, claims the unpersuaded Boethius, there is no free will. For if the left side is the case, then we are predetermined (and in flow the negative consequences). And the right side cannot be the case because it’s absurd that temporal affairs have effect on the timeless nature of Providence.
(3): Lady Philosophy counters that Providence need not necessitate future occurrences. Recall from (2) that God sees all simultaneously from his eternally-present vantage. Now consider occurrences that develop in our own temporal present. For example, just because I know that the pen will fall if I drop it, at that very instant that I let go of the pen my knowing that it will fall does not necessitate the pen’s falling coming to pass. This is the Humean problem of causation, that there is no manifestation of the cause in the world that brings to pass the pen’s falling. Therefore, my knowing that the pen will fall cannot necessitate the pen falling as this would be a manifestation of the cause, and there is no such manifestation. Further, our temporally present vantage is analogous to God’s eternally-present vantage. Ergo, foreknowledge of future events (viz., Providence) does not necessitate their coming to pass.
Lady Philosophy continues to explain that the inability of humans to reason this concept (viz., that (3)) derives from an error in the understanding of the nature of knowledge. “For every subject, that is known, is comprehended not according to its own force, but rather according to the nature of those who know it.” For example, I do not know that the shirt is red because the shirt onto itself is red, but rather I know that the shirt is red because I, the knower, have the capacity of understanding or realizing the redness. Those base creatures that nevermore than react to their environment only perceive through the senses “the form as set in the matter operated upon by the form” (ie., sense perception alone deals only with matter and every higher mental capacity is impossible). Imagination may observe the form in absence of the matter. Reason may abstract to the universal form of which the particular partakes. And “higher still is the view of the intelligence [Providence], which reaches above the universal, and with the unsullied eye of the mind gazes upon that very form of the kind in its absolute simplicity.”
(4): Lady Philosophy asserts that Providence or Intelligence is of God alone. For just as humans are the only animals to possess reason, God is the only rational being to possess Intelligence. For this reason we cannot discern with reason as accurately those events that are observed by Providence. We cannot, in fact, even begin to know the nature of Providence just as the eyeless beast cannot begin to know the nature of redness.
(5): Lady Philosophy asserts that God is eternal whereas the universe is continual or infinite. For God’s Providence is undermined if there is ever a time that God doesn’t observe. Yet, while the universe is correctly labelled infinite, namely possessing the attributes of unbeginning and unending, so too does God possess these attributes while possessing further the attribute of the eternally-present vantage. It is only a feature of the temporal, infinite universe that the present moment is ever moving from past to future, and because we are located within the temporal universe that our thoughts are constructed accordingly. This passage of time is absent in the mind of God. Ergo, this premise not only buffers (2) but also helps to distinguish the different necessities, namely simple and conditional.
(6): Lady Philosophy asserts that there are two types of necessity: simple “ a necessary fact, ‘all men are mortal’; the other is conditional; for instance, if you know that a man is walking, he must be walking.” Simple necessities hold without any interaction from a voluntary agent, whereas conditional necessities are dependent upon the voluntary actions of free agents. It is only because the man is walking of his own free will that the conditional necessity that he is walking is made true. But it is not because it is a conditional necessity known by Providence that he is walking (for consider (3)), but just the opposite as was previously claimed.
∴ (7): Therefore, all things foreseen by Providence will come to pass by necessity from the point of God’s Providence, and humans maintain their free will from the point of the agents themselves which produce the conditional necessities as observed by Providence. Any error in recognizing this is due to attributing human reason the understanding capacity of Providence.

III

In targeting (2) or (4) one could argue that the attribute of eternity granted to God’s Providence is granted by humans alone, that is, the nature of Providence is attempted to be explained by a lesser capacity that cannot begin to comprehend its nature. If Boethius is going to apply “the chief point [that] the higher power of understanding includes the lower, but the lower never rises to the higher” to resolve the incompatibility of Providence and human free will, then it is just as fair to apply the same point against his argument. Just as the base creature possessing only sense perception, and nothing more, cannot begin to comprehend the nature of higher understandings (viz., imagination, reason), we rational humans cannot begin to comprehend the nature of Providence.
I do not believe this is an ultimately destructive blow to Boethius’s argument. At most it suggests that we cannot know for certain that (2) and (4). Though, even without certainty of (2) and (4), (3) still carries enough weight absent a certain conception of the nature of Providence to suggest compatibilism. Of course, (3) is the really intriguing premise, but I haven’t time today to attempt any Humean epistemology/metaphysics.
Boethius earns his praise.

Footnotes

1. Schoedinger, Andrew B. "The Consolation of Philosophy." Readings in Medieval Philosophy. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 195. Print.
2. Ibid., 197.
3. Ibid., 193.
4. Ibid., 193.
5. Ibid., 194
6. Ibid., 194.
7. Ibid., 197.
8. Ibid., 200.

Thanks for reading :)