INTRODUCTION 301
explains that God is completely outside time. This means that God “sees all things
in his eternal present as you see some things in your temporal present.... This
divine foreknowledge does not change the nature and properties of things; it sim-
ply sees things present before it as they will later turn out to be in what we regard
as the future.” For example, just as I know what my son is doing now even though
his action is free, so God can know what I will do tomorrow though I act freely—
because for God tomorrow isnow.
It may seem odd that a devout Catholic presented his final thoughts in
Neoplatonic and Stoic terms, without any specifically Christian references. Yet
Boethius’s magnum opuswas a source of great comfort to Christians in the
Middle Ages for, as Étienne Gilson points out, “even when he is speaking only as
a philosopher, Boethius thinks as a Christian.”
For background work on Boethius, see Howard Rollin Patch,The Tradition of
Boethius: A Study of His Importance in Medieval Culture(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1935) and Helen Marjorie Barrett,Boethius: Some Aspects of His
Times and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). Henry
Chadwick,Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) and Edmund Reiss,Boethius(Boston: Twayne,
1982) study Boethius’s writings, whereas Ralph M. McInerny,Boethius and
Aquinas(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990) shows his
influence on Thomas Aquinas. For collections of essays, see Michael Masi, ed.,
Boethius and the Liberal Arts: A Collection of Essays(Las Vegas, NV: Peter Lang,
1981), and Margaret Gibson, ed.,Boethius, His Life, Thought, and Influence
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the problems posed by
Boethius’s conception of God’s timelessness and foreknowledge. Paul Helm,
Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), for
example, argues in favor of Boethius’s position, whereas Richard Swinburne,The
Coherence of Theism(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) and Stephen T. Davis,
Logic and the Nature of God(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983) oppose it. For
a summary of positions, see Gregory E. Ganssle,God & Time: 4 Views(Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). Much of the most interesting work in this
area is found only in journals such as the Journal of Philosophyand Faith and
Philosophy.