Out of Nothing, Nothing Comes | The Consolation of Philosophy Book 5 Essay

The Atemporal God Sees All...

Aug 29, 2025

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Welcome to the Parker’s Ponderings read-along of The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.

This is the 5th and final companion essay for the book. Read essay 1 here, essay 2 here, essay 3 here, watch our first Book Club recording on books I-III here and read essay 4 here.

Again, our second Book Club Zoom call will be tomorrow, Saturday August 30th at 2pm central! I hope to see you there to talk all about the book.

Boethius and Lady Philosophy commissioned for this read-along by me from Volodymyr Yanovskyi

Book V. Ch. I - Is There Such Thing as ‘Chance’?

Lady Philosophy has been consoling Boethius and disabusing him of misconceptions about God, the Good, true happiness, and providence up to this point in our reading. But in Book V, Boethius interrupts her reasoning and asks Lady Philosophy if she thinks there is such a thing as ‘chance’.

Lady Philosophy replies by saying “no” there is no such thing as chance, if by ‘chance’ we mean “an event produced by random motion without any causal nexus” (116). For “If God imposes order upon all things, there is no opportunity for random events” (116). She goes on to say that “It is a true maxim [vera sententia] that nothing comes out of nothing [nam nihil ex nihilo existere].”

Now this sentence set me off. I’ve been hyper-fixating on ‘sententiae’ for a while now and especially recently as I work on my book, Journal Like a Philosopher. So when I saw the “true maxim” translation I had to go check the Latin. Turns out it’s vera sententia. So, I ended up writing a whole diatribe on why the Oxford World’s Classic translation of the Consolation—which is “true saying”—is more accurate and then recounting Aristotle’s philosophy of maxims. But that became way too unruly and way too long and nerdy, so I’m just going to turn it into a bonus post for paid subscribers I think. So be looking for that.

For now, I’ll just say, the following is a wise saying, a sententia, and probably closer to an aphorism than a maxim: “nothing comes forth from nothing”; or “from nothing, nothing arises.” Lady Philosophy explains that none of the ancient philosophers denied this principle and they even applied it in their natural philosophizing, especially in reference to material object—no material objects come from nothing, because nothing begets nothing, so material objects must come from something not nothing.

But Lady Philosophy then applies the aphorism to efficient causation as well, claiming that “If something does happen for no cause, it obviously arises out of nothing; but if this is impossible, it is impossible, too, for there to be chance of the kind we have just defined.”(117).

So, all that to say, if chance is an event produced by random motion without any causal nexus, then there is no such thing as chance. She does go on to give a different definition of chance, however, this time citing a definition from “her” Aristotle in his book Physics. She says that “whenever something is done for some purpose, and for certain reasons something other than what was intended happens, it is called chance…We may therefore define chance as an unexpected event due to the conjunction of its causes with action which is done for some purpose” (117).

So chance is unintended consequences but even the coincidental events of chance are still connected to the “inescapable nexus of causation” (117). Chance events don’t happen for no reason or cause and none escape God’s providential “ordering of all things in their own time and place” (117).

Book V. Ch. II - Is There Freedom of the Will?

In chapter II, Boethius says he’s tracking with Lady Philosophy’s arguments but they make him wonder if there is any room for the freedom of the will in all this talk of God’s providence and the inescapable nexus of causation.

Lady Philosophy basically says “of course there’s freedom, no rational creature could exist without freedom of the will—though not all rational creatures have an equal freedom of the will and free creatures choose that which they desire.” She claims that Human souls are most free when contemplating the things of the divine mind, less free when focused on bodies, and still less free when “imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” (118). But freedom can be lost, like when a rational creature pursues vices and wickedness and hence loses the use of its proper reason. They become “prisoners of their own freedom” (119), but even so, God looks out through his providential eye, so to speak, and “arranges predestined rewards according to each man’s merit” (119).

Book V. Ch. III - Human Freedom & Divine Foreknowledge?

Boethius speaks for the entirety of Book V as he emphasizes the problem of divine foreknowledge and human free will. The problem goes like this:

(i) If God is omniscient, then He knows everything that will happen in the future.
(ii) If God knows everything that will happen in the future, then the future is fixed and I can’t do anything other than what God already knows I will do.
(iii) If I can’t do anything other than what I’m already predetermined to do, then I’m not actually free.
(iv) God is omniscient.
therefore,
conclusion: I’m not actually free.

Boethius preempts a potential response that says “oh no, the necessity doesn’t flow from God to the choices you will make in the future, the necessity flows the opposite direction: it’s because you will make those choices in the future that necessitates what God knows here in the present.” But Boethius says he doesn’t care about the flow of necessity, but rather that there is necessity at all. So even if God’s knowledge that Boethius will choose A instead of B tomorrow doesn’t cause Boethius to choose A instead of B, it’s still the case that God knows it today, which means Boethius will choose A tomorrow and cannot choose B, and hence is not free to choose B.

So it still seems like Boethius is not free, for if he were free then it seems like he should be able to choose B tomorrow, but he can’t because God already knows, today, that Boethius will choose B tomorrow. Also, Boethius thinks it’s absurd to think that God’s eternal prescience would depend on temporal events—He’s God, after all (121).

So then, if man is not free, then all rewards and punishments are a joke, for just dessert is out the window. It would appear to follow that “our wickeness, too, is derived from the Author of all good.” (122). We’ve excused sinners and blamed God.

Book V. Ch. IV&V - Reason is Good, But Intellect Can See Further

Lady Philosophy then responds to Boethius’s freedom/foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that so long as the foreknowledge is not doing any predestinating, then human freedom remains absolute and uninfringed upon (124). So why think that knowledge of the future doesn’t predestinate the future? Well, God sees future events, sure. And if He has knowledge of future events, they must come to pass, or else He wouldn’t know them. But “just as the knowledge of present things imposes no necessity on what is happening, so foreknowledge imposes no necessity on what i going to happen.” (125).

She then moves to distinguish 4 kinds of capacities which help knowers know. She says “Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing.” (126). Now, I’m not sure this is quite right—it almost sounds like a sort of proto-transcendental idealism à la Immanuel Kant: we don’t know things in and of themselves, but only according to our own capacities, our own categories of understanding. But that’s probably too hasty and anachronistic. I will just say that I think it’s both. I think things are comprehended, when they are comprehended, according to their natures and the abilities of the knower.

Lady Philosophy gives 4 kinds of capacities of knowers:

the senses (sensus) - can perceive matter but nothing beyond matter.
imagination (imaginatio) - can consider more than matter but cannot consider universal species (dog-ness, humanness, universals like ‘triangle’)
reason (ratio) - can consider universals through discursive thought, reasoning from one thought to another, perhaps by abstracting out from individuals to abstract concepts or ideas, but cannot perceive simple form itself (which may be the mind of God, or maybe he is referring to Augustine’s view that Plato’s forms are in the mind of God and aren’t accessible to us without Divine Illumination?)
intelligence (intelligentia) - perceives simple form first and then all else under it. Maybe he means Husserl’s eidetic intuition? The direct, intuitive grasp of a form or an objects essential nature? Unmediated by the reasoning process, the imagination, or senses—direct grasp of a form in the mind of God?

I have to admit I’m a bit confused here because Lady Philosophy appears to give humans the capacity of intelligentia but then in the next chapter she claims that man has reason but only God has intelligentia. Maybe she means that man has intelligentia through divine illumination, that is, God implants knowledge of the forms in our minds, giving us intelligentia, but only He has it essentially? Or maybe she means that man has reason (discursive thought) and intellect (direct grasp of the forms) but that these differ from God’s intelligence, which is comprised of entirely occurrent thoughts and omniscient archetypal knowledge? Again, this is not clear to me.

But what is more clear is that some animals, like mussels and other shellfish, have mere sensation. Other animals, which appear to have some form of will power, have the power of imagination along with sensation. Human beings are biped rational animals (a nice little blend of the definition of man attributed to Plato (featherless biped) and Aristotle’s ‘rational animal’) and as such we have the powers of imagination and sensation as well. But “intelligence belongs only to divinity.”(130).

So, it makes sense for us to know much more than a dog, and for a dog to know much more than a mussel, so why not think that God, who possesses perfect intelligence.

Anyways, whatever Lady Philosophy means, she at least means that there is a hierarchy of knowing, such that the lower forms cannot comprehend what the higher forms of knowing can, and that’s exactly what we’d expect. So then, God, who has perfect knowledge, would know much more than us, and what seems impossible to us, like the apparently intractable problem of freedom and foreknowledge, could actually make perfect sense to Him who occupies the higher level of knowing that we do. This is similar to the flatland analogy which C.S. Lewis appropriated from Edwin Abbott. A sphere steps into a 2-dimensional world and is transposes as a circle and tries to explain to the 2-dimensional beings that it comes from a world of 3-dimensions and that it is in fact a sphere. It’s form a higher dimension. So too, God’s intellect is from a higher plane of knowing than our reason can reach.

Book V. Ch. VI - God’s Eternal Position

Here we see one of the biggest payoffs in the Western canon. Lady Philosophy’s reasoning brings us to new heights. God is eternal. Eternity is “the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life” (132).

Anything that is temporal exists in time. Anything that lives in time progresses from the past to the future and nothing in time can embrace the whole extent of its own life simultaneously. A temporal being, even if everlasting, has lost yesterday and is not yet in possession of tomorrow. That’s not God then. God is eternal, not just everlasting, for He “possess simultaneously the whole fullness of everlasting life, which lacks nothing of the future and has lost nothing of the past” (133).

God is eternal, outside of time, other things are enduring or at best, perpetual. As such, God sees all of the created order at once, past, present and future—in addition to Him having the capacity of intelligence, which is a higher form of knowing that we have at our disposal. He sees the block universe from the outside. So things which are future to us who live in the block are all present to Him. So His knowing the future is more like us seeing a bird flying right now. Our seeing and knowing that the bird is flying doesn’t necessitate that it is flying. Similarly, God seeing your choices tomorrow from outside of time doesn’t necessitate that you will choose A instead of B. God sees all things in “His eternal present” (134).

Here’s an analogy that might help: YouTube videos. You’re watching a YouTube video that’s already been uploaded in it’s entirety (so not a live video). You can play it at different speeds, you can jump back and forth, moving the little circle to pick different spots on the video, and you can even play the video at different speeds than it was recorded in. You exist in a time outside of the video’s time and you can (sort of) view the video in its entirety in a way that the one who made it coudn’t while they were recording it. Maybe you’re watching a reply of a football game. Does the fact that it’s been recorded mean that the players didn’t freely act during the game? It’s a recording, so they can’t act differently than they did act. Does that mean that when you start the playback that the players aren’t free? No. The players freely acted during the game. You watching a playback from the outside doesn’t impact their free choices in the slightest. So too, as the argument goes, God viewing creation from an eternal present moment, outside of time and space, doesn’t impact the free choices of rational beings.

Lady Philosophy, who’s just been arguing at great lengths for the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, then uses a great turn of phrase, saying “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.” (137). That’s really brilliant. There’s no necessity collapsing your free choices because God is outside of time in an eternal moment, but God sees all at once, for He is outside of time in an eternal present moment… so you MUST be good, for He sees all, because He is outside of time! I love that.

Now these ideas are contentious. Is God really outside of time? Aren’t there philosophical problems with that idea? Did Lady Philosophy really get God off the hook here? I mean even if her solution to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge works, didn’t she just convince us in Book IV that God is actually in control of all things through His providence? So then isn’t God’s knowledge also wrapped up in predestination and vice versa? I think we’re still left with the harder problem of predestination and free will, even if the eternalist answer solves the foreknowledge problem. If God has an immutable plan, can we act contrary to that plan?

Here I think the Authorial Analogy for the God-World Relation is a big help to Boethius. Is God outside of time? Yes, He is the author of the world, analogous to an author of a novel. Even if He has His own time—maybe as an aspect of His own trinitarian being—He is still outside of ours and can see the full story at once. Likewise, God has natural knowledge and free knowledge of the story because He knows what He can write and what He has chosen to write in the story of reality. How can He allow for evil? Because He has a morally sufficient reason for allowing the evil that He does—there’s a greater, overriding good, even if we can’t see it from our own narratival situatedness. So I think Boethius got us most of the way there, but he didn’t yet have the idea of the author as creative genius because the modern novel hadn’t been invented yet. But I’ve written about all of this elsewhere in my Master’s thesis, you can read all five chapters of that here: Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.