by CCW | 26 July 2026 10:00
The year was 524. The place was Pavia, a northern Italian town. The person, a scholar and public official, named Boethius, languishing in prison falsely accused of treason against the Arian king, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. He would be brutally killed. But not before writing one of the great intellectual and spiritual classics of the West, The Consolation of Philosophy. Along with his theological works, it would have an enormous influence upon the development of European culture and thought.
The word “person”, much invoked in the contemporary discourse of natural rights and identity politics, has its roots in the definition that Boethius provided in his treatise about the humanity and the divinity of Christ, Contra Eutyches. Distinguishing between nature and person is essential for understanding the unity of God and man in Christ and for thinking about the unity and difference of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Boethius’ argument serves to illuminate an understanding of the names of God revealed in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From such language and terminology for God, there followed the application of the term to our humanity. For Boethius, following Augustine, man is imago dei which in the Christian understanding is imago Christi, imago Trinitatis. Being made in the image of God means being made in the image of the Trinity through the image of Christ in us. Such are some of the fruits of his labours by which he is known and through which we begin to know ourselves as selves; in short, as persons.
The word person derives from the Greek προσοπον and the Latin persona, originally in the context of ancient Greek tragedies. The terms refer to the masks worn by actors through which they spoke, as in sounding through, but as such conveying meaning and understanding of character. What is Boethius’s definition? “Person is an individual substance of a rational nature.” Compact, precise, and comprehensive, it highlights the spiritual and intellectual features of our humanity that embrace and contain the various aspects of human individuality. The theological context suggests that the language we use about ourselves has its roots in language about God, emphasizing that our humanity is radically incomplete apart from God. Even our language of political and social discourse is grounded in theology.
Alright, you might allow in your patient ways for the pretensions of scholarship on a Sunday morning, but how does this relate to this morning’s readings which, as the Collect suggests, are about providence? “O God, whose never-failing Providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth.” Actually, everything is the answer, and in suggestive ways. The Consolatio is mainly about providence in the Christian understanding. It may seem, for instance, to be an ‘accident’ of history, the realm of the contingent which historians endeavour to explain, which is to say, they seek for what is intelligible in the vagaries of human affairs, that the bodies of Boethius and Augustine are interred together in the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia. An interesting conjunction, which Dante picks up on in his Paradiso. But apart from such ‘providential’ considerations, we have these readings.
Romans argues for the nature of our spiritual identity in Christ as “children” and “heirs of God, and fellow-heirs with Christ,” adding “if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Providence in this sense does not mean that “everything’s goin’ my way” as in the musical Oklahoma or The Queers. The Gospel warns us about the discrepancies between the outward and the inward, wolves in sheep’s clothing, for instance, while exhorting us to beand do what we say and believe. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” As Paul says, “ye have received a spirit of sonship” from which flows the true meaning of our actions. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” know ourselves. Actions often reveal intentions. Good fruit and bad fruit from good and bad trees respectively. We are at once our actions and yet more than our actions.
The question of Providence comes into play precisely at this point about good and evil. They seem so black and white. So absolute. And they are, but with this qualification, that one may change from one to the other, from good to evil and vice versa. How? Either by grace or by sin. By grace means through our wills in concert with God’s will; by sin, simply on our own. Such is the dynamic of the morality of rational persons as distinct from mere nature. Evil cannot bring forth anything good but, as Augustine says, “it can happen that he who was evil is not now evil, but it cannot happen that he who is evil does good.” Yet by the grace of God, good can come out of evil and this is an aspect of Providence. “And though at times what the evil person does is useful, this is not due to him, but to the providence of God that makes use of him ”(Augustine).
God rules but in and through our actions. This is seen in the story of Saul and David in the readings from 1st Samuelthis week. Saul even in his evil intent towards David is moved to say to him that “you are more righteous than I; for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil” (1 Sam. 24.17). This looks back more profoundly to Joseph’s words to his brothers who had sought his harm and who feared his revenge. Joseph says to them, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God?’ (though of course he is!). “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good”(Gen. 50.19,20).
God alone makes good out of evil. Such is the nature of God which acts as a check upon our presumptions and follies. God’s Providence teaches that Creation is not a static event, a once-off, as it were, but a continuing activity. God sustains and upholds the being of all things. They have their truth and meaning in him, in his will and purpose; an ethical counter to our rather mechanical and utilitarian way of thinking and doing.
Far from a denial or denigration of free will, God’s Providence is presupposed in the freedom of all our actions. The world is more than a chaotic mess of random events out of which, somehow, an intelligible order emerges. How can something intelligible arise out of what is, in principle, non-intelligbile? It can’t unless there is something intelligible that is prior, the active reason of God at work in all things.
The reason and the will of God moves in and through the events of our lives. We are often blind to the movements of God’s Providence, seeing “in a glass darkly,” for as Lady Philosophy notes “the movement of human reasoning cannot approach the simplicity of divine foreknowledge.” Yet this is precisely what has been written out for us to read in the Scriptures and especially in the story of Christ. In him, the mind of Providence is writ large; the Logos, the Word or Reason, of God has entered full bodily into the mess and morass of human sin and evil. In him we see the utter nothingness of evil. In every way, evil is privative, that is to say, it depends entirely upon what truly is. Think of a lie. It has no power apart from the truth which it betrays.
One of the few biblical references in Boethius’ treatise is from The Wisdom of Solomon. “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily and sweetly doth she order all things,” fortiter et suaviter, strongly and sweetly. More than a millennium later, it informed George Herbert’s poem, Providence. We may not always see this, such are the limitations of our finite minds, let alone our sinful wills, yet it shapes the very meaning of the prayer to God “to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things that be profitable for us,” as always, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason,” Lady Philosophy sings to console and strengthen Boethius. Everlasting reason – “for providence is the divine reason itself.” The rule of God’s reason is always more and greater; in the wonder of Providence we are privileged to participate in the reason of God at work so strongly and sweetly in our lives. C.S. Lewis, in a much neglected work, one of his finest, The Discarded Image, provides one of the most cogent and concise summaries of the argument of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. God, he says, commenting on Boethius’ treatise, does not foreknow things, for that is to read temporal categories of past, present, and future into God, and thus to confuse them with eternity. God simply knows all and everything in the embrace of his eternal knowing and loving: “What is, what has been, and what is to come,/ In one swift mental stab he sees,” Lady Philosophy sings. That, I think, helps us to think more carefully and deeply about providence as God’s care towards us, not in deterministic and material ways that pretend that either the contingent is necessary (collapsing the one into the other, famously satirized in Voltaire’s Candide) or that there is no purpose, no meaning, no understanding, and thus negating the very dignity of our humanity as persons, as made imago dei, imago Christi, imago Trinitatis.
Thus in this providential view, the lesson from Romans reminds us of our essential identity as the sons of God even as the Gospel recalls us to the freedom that belongs to our actions. We are meant to bring forth the good fruit, the fruit that arises from our awareness of the Providence of God in the constancy of our seeking the mind and will of God so that we may be “in him and he in us.” Such is the Providence of God at work in our lives and all because “you have received a spirit of sonship.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 7, 2026
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