just as you cannot avoid the glance of a present eye, though you may by your free will turn yourself to all kinds of different actions." "What?"you will say, " can I by my own action change Page 167divine knowledge, so that if I choose now one thing, now another, Providence too will seem to change its knowledge?" No; divine insight precedes all future things, turning them back and recalling them to the present time of its own peculiar knowledge.It does not change, as you may think, between this and that alternation of foreknowledge.It is constant in preceding and embracing by one glance all your changes.And God does not receive this ever-present grasp of all things and vision of the present at the occurrence of future events, but from His own peculiar directness.Whence also is that difficulty solved which you laid down a little while ago, that it was not worthy to say that our future events were the cause of God's knowledge.For this power of knowledge, ever in the present and embracing all things in its perception, does itself constrain all things, and owes naught to following events from which it has received naught.Thus, therefore, mortal men have their freedom of judgment intact.And since their wills are freed from all binding necessity, laws do not set rewards or punishments unjustly.God is ever the constant foreknowing overseer, and the ever-present eternity of His sight moves in harmony with the future nature of our actions, as it dispenses rewards to the good, and punishments to the bad.Hopes are not vainly put in God, nor prayers in vain offered: if these are right, they cannot but be answered.Turn Page 168therefore from vice: ensue virtue: raise your soul to upright hopes:
send up on high your prayers from this earth.If you would be honest, great is the necessity enjoined upon your goodness, since all you do is done before the eyes of an all-seeing Judge.'
Page 169 A Note on the Translation The present translation of 'THE CONSOLATION OFPHILOSOPHY' is the work of Mr.W.V.COOPER, B.A., King's College, Cambridge, who has thus carried on the tradition of English renderings of Boethius's famous work, the list of translators beginning with the illustrious name of Alfred the Great.The recent Millenary, celebrated at Winchester, has perhaps justified the issue of this first of twentieth-century versions.
The Frontispiece, taken from an Elzevir Sallust printed in 1634, has been chosen by way of illustrating both the fortune of the author and his famous idea of the changeableness of Fortune's Wheel.
I.G.December 19, 1901.Page 170 APPENDIX (See Book 1l., Prose iii.p.32) BOETHIUS'S first wife was Elpis, daughter of Festus.
The following epitaph has been handed down as that of Elpis, and has been said by some to have been written by Boethius himself.
was my name, and Sicily my home, Where I was nursed, until I came from thence An exile for the love I bore my lord:
Apart from him my time was full of tears, Heavy the day, laden with care the night, (But with him all was joy and peace and love) 2And now, my pilgrim's journey o'er, I rest Within this sacred place, and witness bear Before the throne of the Eternal Judge on high.
170:1 -- Elpis is a Greek word meaning hope 170:2 -- This line is lost from the original Latin.Page 171 EDITORIAL NOTETHE incompatibility of the sufferings of good men, the impunity and success of bad men, with the government of the world by a good God, has been a subject of thought alllong men ever since religion and abstract questions have occupied the thoughts of mankind.The poetical books of the Bible are full of it, particularly, of course the book of Job, which is a dramatic poem entirely devoted to the subject.The New Testament contains much teaching on the same question.Among the Greeks the tragedians and later philosophers delighted in working out its problems.But from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries of our era the De Consolatione of Boethius, in its original Latin and in many translations, was in the hands of almost all the educated people of the world.The author's personal history was well known.He was a man whose fortunes had risen to the highest pitch possible under the Roman Empire; who had himself experienced the utter collapse of those fortunes, and was known to have sustained himself through imprisonment and even to torture and an unjust death by the thoughts which he left to mankind in this book.
It is a work which appealed to Pagan and Christian alike.
There is no Christian doctrine relied upon throughout the work, but there is also nothing which could be in conflict with Christianity.Even the personification of Philosophy, though after the form of a pagan goddess, is precisely like the 'Wisdom' of Solomon in the Apocrypha; and the same habit of thought led the Jews to personify the 'Word' of God, and use it as identical with God Himself; and the same led to that identifying of the ' Word with Christ, which we find in the first chapter of St.John's Gospel.Page 172So, if there is nothing distinctly or dogmatically Christian in the work, there is also nothing which can be condemned as pagan, in spite of the strong influence of pagan philosophy, with which Boethius was intimate.
