Book 3 Section 11 of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy begins with Boethius'
eager cooperation with Lady Philosophy.
He understands what's happening now and he's anxious to help
her complete the cure that she began back in Book 1.
Lady Philosophy makes five important points in this section I want to call your attention to.
The first is the identification of goodness with unity.
She says on page 95, after reviewing what they've discussed in the previous section,
"When we consider that these things that are not good because they differ become good when they
merge into one, does it not seem that they become good because they approach unity?"
Boethius agrees and she says, "We can infer from this that the One and Good are the same."
So the next step in this process, getting toward the end now, is that oneness or unity, ultimately unity with God,
and goodness are the same. Things are chaotic or evil or fallen as they are multiple or divided.
As they approach greater unity with all things, they become better.
This takes her to her second point on the next page.
She says on page 94 that existence and unity also go together.
She says at the top of 94: "You also know that everything that exists endures and perseveres as
long as it is a unity, but is destroyed as soon as it ceases to be a unity.
So when we cut something up or break something up into little pieces,
it stops being one thing, it stops existing at all. If we cut an animal or a plant in half,
with rare exceptions it stops being what it is and become something else, something lesser.
So we're finding that unity and goodness and existence all go together.
She develops this thought further down the page when she says:
"Is there any living thing that, if it is acting naturally, abandons its appetite for existence and survival,
and wants its own destruction and corruption?" It's obvious that the answer to this is no.
No animal seeks to destroy itself, it's also true of plants, and it's also true,
she says at the bottom of the next page, of inanimate objects.
So let's take a look at this very briefly. We can think about animals seeking to continue living;
every animal wishes to continue to survive. Plants as well. I think we should maybe mark this page,
page 95 in this book, to come back to when we're discussing Darwin.
Because on page 95 I think is a very good articulation of this pre-Darwinian approach to the natural world,
which finds the order and majesty and harmony in nature as evidence of a kind of divine plan.
She says on page 95: "Nature gives each plant what is appropriate for it and keeps it alive as long as possible."
So she refers to the hard outer bark and the soft inner parts of trees.
Later on she says: "Think how well Nature tends to the plants, propagating them by means
of their seeds, which are the mechanism for their survival."
There's definitely an idea that there's this built-in order that we can observe, built into plants,
that by their nature they are designed to contiue existing.
She says this is even the case with inanimate objects,
and her examples from premodern physics will not impress us too terribly much.
Flame that tends to go upward, rocks that tend to resist being broken into pieces.
We'll come back to this and discuss this in more detail later on.
This takes us though to her next point, on the following page:
that the survival of things is not a matter of their willing to survive. It's a matter of their inner nature.
She says on page 96: "Even in living things, then, the love of survival is not
something that is willed, but is the consequence of natural principles."
The point here being that for animals, for plants, she thinks even for inanimate objects,
the principle of unity is built into their very nature.
By their nature they tend to try to persevere as a single thing, rather than as multiple things.
And at the bottom of page 96: "So there is nothing that could cause you to doubt
that things naturally desire to survive and to avoid destruction.
This brings us to her next point, that all things ultimately desire unity.
She says this at the top of 97:
Therefore... and she says we've also agreed that unity and goodness are the same.
And so all things, in seeking unity, seek the good.
This, she says, is the key insight that Boethius needs to have, this is the key that unlocks his consolation.
That all things, including himself, desire the Good by their own inner nature,
by their own principle and constitution.
That if he can align his emotions and his thoughts with that truth, he'll have his consolation,
even while he remains in prison, waiting to executed. So she says at the end of this prose part:
"For all things desire the good and the good is the goal and end of everything."
The poem at the end of this section brings up the idea of Platonic memory again.
That things that we learn are ultimately acts of recollection, that we are rediscovering things that we
used to know. So she talks about "one who seeks the truth and wants to avoid misleading
paths must turn his vision inward," a very Platonic idea. On the next page: "The light of the mind was
never altogether dimmed by the heavy flesh." And then at the end of the poem:
"Plato's Muse tells us the secret: those things men once knew, and thought that they had lost,
can be remembered." And this is what is happening to Boethius as he recovers his philosophical identity,
as he learns to think correctly again, he is remembering that the Good is the goal and the end of all things.
This will be the key to his consolation, as we'll see later in the book.
This brings us to the end of Section 11 of Book 3 of the Consolation of Philosophy.
I hope you've found this helpful. Thanks for watching today; goodbye.