The Consolation Of Philosophy V: Divine Foreknowledge

The Consolation of Philosophy (CP)  is Boethius’s most famous and original work. Written while in prison awaiting execution on charges of treason against the Ostrogothic emperor Theoderic, it is a dialogue in five books with the personification of Philosophy on the nature of fate and providence, recalling Socrates’s long examination of immortality in the Phaedo on the day of his execution.

The work is prosimetric – i.e., written in alternating passages of prose and poetry – and has therefore been the subject of divided treatments as a literary and philosophical work. (Our translated selection has omitted the verse sections.) The first four books are in general less philosophical in style, which changes in the final book to a more technical discussion. Although Boethius was undoubtedly a Christian, the CP is notoriously lacking in explicit references to scripture or Christian authors. Boethius himself traces the difficulty of foreknowledge back to Cicero. CP V contains Boethius’s most original philosophical contribution, and it is one that carries influence even today (Cf. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” J. of Phil. 78 [1981] 429-58).

For background, translation, Latin text, and a philosophical and philological commentary, see:
R. W. Sharples, Cicero: On Fate and Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy, IV.5-V.6. (Warminster, 1991). [Should be corrected in certain details by Marenbon, Boethius, chapter 7.]

Outline

Statement of the problem:

1. If God infallibly foreknows our choices, then they necessarily occur as God knows them.
2. If our choices are free and contingent, then God cannot have foreknowledge of them.

Origen’s solution and its rejection

Solution of Origen: God’s foreknowledge does not cause our choices

Boethius’s Reply

1. Causality irrelevant
2. Temporal things cannot cause divine knowledge
3. God cannot know contingent events as certain:
”What is conceived as certain knowledge cannot be otherwise than as conceived” (id quod ab scientia concipitur esse aliter atque concipitur nequit)

Solution

1. Limitation of human reason
2. Solution to 1A
3. Solution to 1B

• Epistemological principle:
“Things are not known according to its own power or nature, but according to the capacity of the knower.” (Omne enim quod cognoscitur non secundum sui vim sed secundum cognoscentium potius comprehenditur facultatem)
• Hierarchy of powers: 
sensus, imaginatio, ratio, intelligentia
• Definition of eternity
”Eternity is endless life possessed all at once in its totality and perfection” (Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio)
• Distinction in necessity
”There are two necessities, one absolute … the other conditional … .” (Duae sunt etenim necessitates, simplex una … altera condicionis)

The Boethian solution (6th  century, from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy):

(Foreknowledge does not equal causality) This solution denies the first premise of the basic argument: (1) Yesterday God infallibly believed T. What is denied according to this solution is not that God believes infallibly, and not that God believes the content of proposition T, but that God believed T yesterday. This solution probably originated with the 6th century philosopher Boethius, who maintained that God is not in time and has no temporal properties, so God does not have beliefs at a time. It is therefore a mistake to say God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs tomorrow. It is also a mistake to say God had a belief on a certain date, such as June 1, 2004. The way Boethius describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality, all temporal events are before the mind of God at once. To say “at once” or “simultaneously” is to use a temporal metaphor, but Boethius is clear that it does not make sense to think of the whole of temporal reality as being before God’s mind in a single temporal present. It is an atemporal present, a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.

Aquinas adopted the Boethian solution as one of his ways out of theological fatalism, using some of the same metaphors as Boethius. One of the metaphors is the circle analogy, in which the way a timeless God is present to each and every moment of time is compared to the way in which the center of a circle is present to each and every point on its circumference (SCG I, 66). In contemporary philosophy probably the most well-known defenders of the idea that God is timeless are Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), who apply it explicitly to the foreknowledge dilemma (1991).

Most objections to the timelessness solution to the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom focus on the idea of timelessness itself, arguing either that it does not make sense or that it is incompatible with other properties of God that are religiously more compelling, such as personhood (e.g., Pike 1970, 121-129; Wolterstorff 1975; Swinburne 1977, 221). I have argued (Zagzebski 1991, chap. 2) that the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument can be formulated for timeless knowledge. If God is not in time, the key issue would not be the necessity of the past, but the necessity of the timeless realm. So the first three steps of the argument would be reformulated as follows:

• (1t) God timelessly knows T.
• (2t) If E is in the timeless realm, then it is now-necessary that E.
• (3t) It is now-necessary that T.

Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that timeless events such as God’s timeless knowing are nownecessary, yet we have no more reason to think we can do anything about God’s timeless knowing than about God’s past knowing. The timeless realm is as much out of our reach as the past. So the point of (3t) is that we cannot now do anything about the fact that God timelessly knows T. The rest of the steps in the timeless dilemma argument are parallel to the basic argument. Step (5t) says that if there is nothing we can do about a timeless state, there is nothing we can do out what such a state entails. It follows that we cannot do anything about the future.