In Book V of his Consolation, Boethius raises a classic philosophical problem: how can people freely choose their actions if God knows everything that will happen beforehand? If there is no free will, then everything Boethius believes in crumbles: God’s rewards and punishments are meaningless, because people do not choose the behaviors that merit them; God is responsible for the evil in the world; and “hope and prayer” lose their power. Philosophy solves this problem by explaining that there is no contradiction between God having perfect foreknowledge of the world and humans having free will. Technically, her argument is that God’s foreknowledge relies on what she calls conditional necessity, and human free will is violated only if human actions are determined by what she calls simple necessity. In practice, what she means is that, because God exists on a higher plane of the cosmos, with a greater capacity for knowledge and a different relationship to time, human distinctions among past, present, and future don’t exist for God—everything is part of the present. Therefore, He can know things that humans consider to not have happened yet, and He can do so without causing those things to happen.
Because God is a superior being, Philosophy argues, He has a greater capacity for knowledge than human beings, which means He can know about human action in a way that would not be knowable to people. First, Philosophy argues that knowledge depends on the knowing agent, not the thing that is to be known. She separates out four kinds of knowledge: sense-perception, imagination, reason, and intelligence. Sense-perception (knowledge through senses like sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing) tells the knower about the material form of the thing they are investigating. Imagination can tell them about the “shape [of a thing] alone without [reference to physical] matter,” and reason looks at the universal characteristics of a type of thing. Intelligence, which only God has completely, is “pure vision of the mind,” which gives Him complete insight into everything. Since only God has intelligence and humans do not, He can know things—including things about the future—that humans cannot know through their reason, imagination, or sense-perception. The apparent problem with foreknowledge is that, if God already knows what someone will do, then that person is not truly free to do it, because they could not choose the opposite. However, this problem only exists if knowledge is rational—meaning that one can only know things that are certainly true (since anything else would be opinion). Since God’s knowledge is through intelligence, he can know things that “ha[ve] no certain occurrence.”
God also has a different relationship to time, which allows Him to see things that have not yet happened according to the human perception of time. By definition, Philosophy explains, God created the universe, which means he “is eternal”—something Philosophy defines as “the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life.” He is not just old, but lives outside the dimension of time entirely. This contrasts with temporal things like humans and the physical world, which experience time in terms of the past, present, and future. Following Plato, Philosophy suggests that God is “eternal,” while the world—which extends infinitely into the future—is “perpetual.” Because of God’s “eternal presence,” He can see “all the infinite recesses of past and future […] as though they are happening in the present.” So what looks like the future to humans is already visible to God, and what looks like foreknowledge to humans is really just God looking at (what is to him) the present. Therefore, because God exists outside of time, he can know what humans have freely decided to do, but not infringe on humans’ free will by having this knowledge.
In technical terms, Philosophy concludes, God’s foreknowledge does not infringe on human free will because this knowledge is about conditional necessity, not simple necessity. Simple necessity refers to something that must be true because of the very nature of what something is. For instance, it is simply necessary that any human body is mortal, and will not exist forever. Nobody can ever choose to deny simple necessity through free will (i.e., a human cannot simply decide to be immortal, because this would go against their nature). On the other hand, conditional necessity refers to something that is necessarily true, but only because of “a condition which is added.” For instance, “if you know someone is walking, it is necessary that [they are] walking.” But the person could freely choose to stop walking, which means conditional necessity can be changed through free will. The kind of free human actions that God knows about are instances of conditional necessity. It is not necessary that they will happen, but once they have happened, it is necessary that they did happen. God does not force people to choose, but rather sees all the choices people have made and will ever make. This is how He knows what humans see as the future. His foreknowledge is like “an eye that is present to watch” from outside the bounds of time, which is capable of knowing in ways not accessible to human beings.
The history of philosophy after Boethius has seen a wide variety of often-conflicting answers to this common problem of free will, but Lady Philosophy’s argument clearly explains how this free will is compatible with God’s foreknowledge of human events. Most importantly, it follows directly from the picture Boethius paints of the cosmos: the universe has been created by God, who directs everything from a stance outside of time through Providence, and then watches as Fate runs its course. Although it might be difficult for contemporary readers to accept notions of God existing outside of time or knowing things in unfathomable ways as a result, at the very least, this argument should challenge readers’ preconceptions about the apparent contradiction between determinism and human free will.
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Human Free Will and God’s Foreknowledge Quotes in The Consolation of Philosophy
You should not wear yourself out by setting your heart on living according to a law of your own in a world that is shared by everyone.
You creatures of earth, don’t you stop to consider the people over whom you think you exercise authority? You would laugh if you saw a community of mice and one mouse arrogating to himself power and jurisdiction over the others. Again, think of the human body: could you discover anything more feeble than man, when often even a tiny fly can kill him either by its bite or by creeping into some inward part of him? The only way one man can exercise power over another is over his body and what is inferior to it, his possessions. You cannot impose anything on a free mind, and you cannot move from its state of inner tranquillity a mind at peace with itself and firmly founded on reason.
The sun into the western waves descends,
Where underground a hidden way he wends;
Then to his rising in the east he comes:
All things seek the place that best becomes.
Each thing rejoices when this is retrieved:
For nothing keeps the order it received
Except its rising to its fall it bend
And make itself a circle without end.
O Thou who dost by everlasting reason rule,
Creator of the planets and the sky, who time
From timelessness dost bring, unchanging Mover,
No cause drove Thee to mould unstable matter, but
The form benign of highest good within Thee set.
All things Thou bringest forth from Thy high archetype:
Thou, height of beauty, in Thy mind the beauteous world
Dost bear, and in that ideal likeness shaping it,
Dost order perfect parts a perfect whole to frame.
[…]
Grant, Father, that our minds Thy august seat may scan,
Grant us the sight of true good’s source, and grant us light
That we may fix on Thee our mind’s unblinded eye.
Disperse the clouds of earthly matter’s cloying weight;
Shine out in all Thy glory; for Thou art rest and peace
To those who worship Thee; to see Thee is our end,
Who art our source and maker, lord and path and goal.
Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is. I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn’t simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence. A thing exists when it keeps its proper place and preserves its own nature. Anything which departs from this ceases to exist, because its existence depends on the preservation of its nature.
The relationship between the ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of Providence is like that between reasoning and understanding, between that which is coming into being and that which is, between time and eternity, or between the moving circle and the still point in the middle.
The question is, therefore, how can God foreknow that these things will happen, if they are uncertain?
We all agree that we cannot deduce a proof firmly founded upon reason from signs or arguments imported from without: it must come from arguments that fit together and lead from one to the next.
Therefore, all those things which happen without happening of necessity are, before they happen, future events about to happen, but not about to happen of necessity. For just as the knowledge of present things imposes no necessity on what is happening, so foreknowledge imposes no necessity on what is going to happen.
In the same way, human reason refuses to believe that divine intelligence can see the future in any other way except that in which human reason has knowledge. This is how the argument runs: if anything does not seem to have any certain and predestined occurrence, it cannot be foreknown as a future event. Of such, therefore, there is no foreknowledge: and if we believe that even in this case there is foreknowledge, there will be nothing which does not happen of necessity. If, therefore, as beings who have a share of reason, we can judge of the mind of God, we should consider it most fitting for human reason to bow before divine wisdom, just as we judged it right for the senses and the imagination to yield to reason.
Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time. Whatever lives in time exists in the present and progresses from the past to the future, and there is nothing set in time which can embrace simultaneously the whole extent of its life: it is in the position of not yet possessing tomorrow when it has already lost yesterday.
God has foreknowledge and rests a spectator from on high of all things; and as the ever present eternity of His vision dispenses reward to the good and punishment to the bad, it adapts itself to the future quality of our actions. Hope is not placed in God in vain and prayers are not made in vain, for if they are the right kind they cannot but be efficacious. Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things.
