Boethius: Spacetime in the Dark Ages

At the cusp between the ancient and medieval worlds stands the aristocratic Roman writer Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was until fairly recently a generally known classic. (C.S. Lewis cites it as formative in his own thinking, for example.) Boethius wrote it during a prison term that would end with his execution on the instructions of a barbarian Roman Emperor, though it is not clear that he was aware of this at the time. He is thought to have been a Christian, but it would be difficult to tell this from this book, written just before the disappearance of classical civilization in the West, in which much of the Roman spirit from pre-Christian times is still evident.

What I found most interesting in this work was Boethius's marvellous argument reconciling predestination and free will, in the final few chapters. . . . CONTINUE (Apparently Aristotle gave a similar demonstration several centuries earlier, as well.) The key to the argument is that an omniscient God can be conceived as viewing everything that happens everywhere and at all times—past and future as well as the present. Everything that will ever happen is to God part of an eternal Now; God sees the world as a single picture extending over all space and time, rather than as a sequence of events which appear and disappear, as human beings see things. In other words, time is a dimension much like space, from the point of view of God. It follows that those events that happen at some point in the future are analogous, as far as God is concerned, to those that happen now, but at some distance away from us, from the point of view of ordinary human perception. Now, the mere fact that I can tell what another person is now doing at some distance away from me is irrelevant to the freedom of that other person to choose whether to do it or not. Similarly, then, the fact that God can already see what some person is doing in the future is irrelevant to the question of whether that person is acting freely. Predestination does not abolish free will.

This model of the universe as a single snapshot covering all space and time is also widely adopted in modern (relativity) physics, with its concept of "spacetime", in which space can also be interchanged with time under certain extreme conditions. The modern familiarity with "spacetime" makes Boethius's argument accessible to everyone who knows anything about modern science, or even just reads some intelligent science fiction. I wonder if this is a much wider audience than the one which would have been capable of appreciating Boethius's argument when he wrote. If so, it would show how a progressing knowledge of the natural world can progressively extend our spiritual perception.