[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.04]

敛寒影UID: 2613052

Comment

As I comprehend,philosophy is a subject telling us what the substances are and how the world makes up.It uses refined words to point out the rule in the life,or the relationship between objects.Athough so simple the rule is and the accustomed habbit,it would give us abstruse apocalypse.

It seems that I have catch the idea but when considering explicitly,it is equavical again,maybe the philosophy is something we should understand on the situatoin that it is slur.

What the world is that people considered differenciate from each other because of the difference of knowledge system they have comprehended.In the firt paragraph,the author talked about what the eternity is and this is the first meaning I learned.We should consider thing from the positive aspect because put it in the perpetual

world,anything difficulty or failiur is nigligible.So we should looking forward.

In the long river of history,the world is proceed by the specific law,no matter who dose anything in the history.The heros that must necessarily be,but not the certain person,even though the one we recognized as a hero did not exist,there should be another one take the place of him,promoting the development of scocial progress.

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

“As we have agreed, I think, things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them. Let us consider, then, insofar as we can, what the nature of divine substance must be so that we can have some inkling of（对…略有所知）the kind of knowledge the divine mind has. All who live by reason agree that God is eternal, and we must therefore think about what eternity means. This will clarify what the divine nature is and also what divine knowledge must be. Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, perfect possession of limitless life, which we can better understand perhaps by comparing it to temporal things. One who lives in time progresses in the present from the past and into the future. There is nothing in time that can embrace the entirety of his existence. He has no idea about tomorrow and has already lost his hold on the past. In this day-to-day life, he lives only in the transitory moment. 【Whatever is in time—even though, as Aristotle says, time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity—is still not what may correctly be called ‘eternal.’】 Its life may be infinitely long, but still it does not comprehend its entire extent simultaneously. It is still waiting for the future to reveal itself and it has let go of （释放，放开）much of the past. What may properly be called eternal is quite different, in that it has knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past. It is in an eternal present and has an understanding of the entire flow of time.

“Those philosophers are wrong, then, who took Plato’s dictum that the world had no beginning and had no end and inferred from that that the created world is co-eternal with the Creator. It is one thing to proceed through infinite time, as Plato posits, but quite another to embrace the whole of time in one simultaneous present. This is obviously a property of the mind of God. 【God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of （在…掌握中）time in the immediacy of his being.（这个怎么理解？）】
The endless and infinite changing of things in time is an attempt to imitate eternity, but it cannot equal its immobility and it fails to achieve the eternal present, producing only an infinite number of future and past moments. It never ceases to be（不再是） and therefore is an imitation of eternity, but it is balanced on the knifeedge of the present, the brief and fleeting instant, which we may call a kind of costume of eternity. But since it is not equal to that eternal state, it falls from immobility to change, from the immediacy of a continuing present to the infinite extent of past and future moments, and it confers on whatever possesses it the appearance of what it imitates.

“Now, since every judgment is able to comprehend things only according to the nature of the mind making that judgment, and since God has an eternal and omnipresent nature, his knowledge surpasses time’s movements and is made in the simplicity of a continual present, which embraces all the vistas of the future and the past, and he considers all this in the act of knowing as though all things were going on at once. This means that what you think of as his foreknowledge is really a knowledge of the instant, which is never-passing and never-coming-to-be. It is not pre-vision (praevidentia) but providence (providentia), because, from that high vantage point（有利位置，优越地位，优势）, he sees at once all things that were and are and are to come. You insist that those things of the future are inevitable if God can see them, but you must admit that not even men can make inevitable those things that they see. Your seeing them in the present does not confer any inevitability, does it?”

“Now, if you were to say that what God sees as going to occur cannot not occur and that what cannot not occur happens of necessity, and make a problem of the word ‘necessity,’ I will answer that it is absolutely true but is, indeed, a problem, not so much for logicians as for theologians（神学家，空头理论家）. All I can tell you is that this future event from the point of view of divine knowledge is necessary, but from its own nature is utterly and entirely free. There are actually two necessities, one of them simple—as that all men are mortal—and the other conditional—as that when you see a man walking it is necessary that he be walking. Whatever you know cannot be otherwise than（与…不同的，除…之外） as you know it.

be bound to（一定要..）
So are things that you look at with the senses singular, but if you look at them from the point of view of reason, they are universal.

“And now you may perhaps object that it lies in your power to change your intention and thereby to frustrate providence and turn it into nonsense, because whatever providence may have foreseen, you can do something else. …It is in this light that we can answer the question you posed a while back about our providing a part of God’s knowledge. The power of his knowledge includes everything in an eternal present and does not at all rely on the unfolding of later events. In this way, man’s freedom is maintained in its integrity, and therefore God’s rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and appropriately, because free will is operating and men are not compelled by necessity. God has prescience and is a spectator from on high, and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. In this way, our hopes and our
prayers are not at all in vain. Our prayers, if they are of the right kind and are pleasing to God, are not without effect. And the conclusion, then, is clear, that you must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things.”


Comments:

This article is a bit abstract and obscure to me, though I have read several times.

Anyhow, the author, from my point of view, the author’s opinion is extraordinarily insightful on the consolation of philosophy. I receive a purety ablution from the passage, which tells us that what the real eternal is, which is so different from our previous comprehension, and convinces us that the God who has divine prescience is eternal and omnipresent. If only are we pious and pleasing to God, do we pursue the good and abstain wickedness, “our hopes and prayers are not at all in vain.”

What’s more, one of the most compelling points in the passage, as I reckon, is the example, the author has proposed in the passage, of the rising sun and the walking man. Though the example is so simple and common, the speaker is capable to use and analyse it vividly and logiacally to express his view clearly and explicitly. Bruntly put, I could understand, to some extent, the passage, mostly attributing to this example.

miki7catUID: 2533330

The Consolation of Philosophy（节选）
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
Translated by David R. Slavitt

1. “As we have agreed, I think, things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them. Let us consider, then, insofar as we can, what the nature of divine【a.神的，神授的，天赐的】 substance must be so that we can have some inkling of the kind of knowledge the divine mind has. All who live by reason agree that God is eternal, and we must therefore think about what eternity means. This will clarify what the divine nature is and also what divine knowledge must be. Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, perfect possession of limitless life, which we can better understand perhaps by comparing it to temporal things. One who lives in time progresses in the present from the past and into the future. There is nothing in time that can embrace the entirety of his existence. He has no idea about tomorrow and has already lost his hold on the past. In this day-to-day life, he lives only in the transitory moment. Whatever is in time—even though, as Aristotle says, time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity—is still not what may correctly be called ‘eternal.’ Its life may be infinitely long, but still it does not comprehend its entire extent simultaneously. It is still waiting for the future to reveal itself and it has let go of much of the past. What may properly be called eternal is quite different, in that it has knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past. It is in an eternal present and has an understanding of the entire flow of time.

2. “Those philosophers are wrong, then, who took Plato’s dictum that the world had no beginning and had no end and inferred from that that the created world is co-eternal with the Creator. It is one thing to proceed through infinite time, as Plato posits, but quite another to embrace the whole of time in one simultaneous present. This is obviously a property of the mind of God. God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of time in the immediacy of his being. The endless and infinite changing of things in time is an attempt to imitate eternity, but it cannot equal its immobility and it fails to achieve the eternal present, producing only an infinite number of future and past moments. It never ceases to be and therefore is an imitation of eternity, but it is balanced on the knifeedge of the present, the brief and fleeting instant, which we may call a kind of costume of eternity. But since it is not equal to that eternal state, it falls from immobility to change, from the immediacy of a continuing present to the infinite extent of past and future moments, and it confers on whatever possesses it the appearance of what it imitates. And since it could not abide in permanence, it seized instead on the infinite flow of time, an endless succession of moments, and in that way could appear to have a continuity, which is not the same as permanence. All this is to say that if we use proper terms, then, following Plato, we should say that God is eternal but the world is perpetual.

3. “Now, since every judgment is able to comprehend things only according to the nature of the mind making that judgment, and since God has an eternal and omnipresent nature, his knowledge surpasses time’s movements and is made in the simplicity of a continual present, which embraces all the vistas of the future and the past, and he considers all this in the act of knowing as though all things were going on at once. This means that what you think of as his foreknowledge is really a knowledge of the instant, which is never-passing and never-coming-to-be. It is not pre-vision (praevidentia) but providence (providentia), because, from that high vantage point, he sees at once all things that were and are and are to come. You insist that those things of the future are inevitable if God can see them, but you must admit that not even men can make inevitable those things that they see. Your seeing them in the present does not confer any inevitability, does it?”

“No, not at all.”

4. “And if you accept the distinction between the human and the divine present, then it would follow that, just as you see things in the temporal present, he must see things in the eternal present. So his divine prescience does not change the nature of things, but he sees them in his present time just as they will come to be in what we think of as the future. And he cannot be confused but sees and understands immediately all things that will come to pass whether they are necessitated or not—just as you can see at the same time a man walking on the ground and the sun rising in the sky, and, although the two sights coincide, you understand immediately that the man’s walking is willed and the sun’s rising is necessitated. And it is similarly true that his observation does not affect the things he sees that are present to him but future in terms of the flow of time. And this means that his foresight is not opinion but knowledge based on truth and that he can know something is going to happen and at the same time be aware that it lacks necessity.

5. “Now, if you were to say that what God sees as going to occur cannot not occur and that what cannot not occur happens of necessity, and make a problem of the word ‘necessity,’ I will answer that it is absolutely true but is, indeed, a problem, not so much for logicians as for theologians. All I can tell you is that this future event from the point of view of divine knowledge is necessary, but from its own nature is utterly and entirely free. There are actually two necessities, one of them simple—as that all men are mortal—and the other conditional—as that when you see a man walking it is necessary that he be walking. Whatever you know cannot be otherwise than as you know it. But this conditional necessity is different from the simple kind in that it is not caused by the thing’s nature but by the addition of the condition. It is not necessary that a man go for a walk, even though it is necessary, when he is walking, that he is walking. It is in the same way that if divine providence sees anything in its eternal present, that must necessarily be, even though there is no necessity in its nature. God can see as present future events that happen as a result of free will. Thus, they are, from God’s point of view, necessary, although in themselves they do not lose the freedom that is in their nature. All those things, then, that God knows will come to be will, indeed, come to be, some of them proceeding from free will, so that when they come to be they will not have lost the freedom of their nature, according to which, until the time that they happened, they might not have happened. So why is it important that they are not necessary if, from the aspect of divine knowledge, it turns out that they are tantamount to【adj [pred 作表语] ~ to sth equal in effect to sth; as good as sth 与某事物效果相等; 与某事物相同】 being necessary? It is like the examples I proposed to you a moment ago of the rising sun and the walking man. While these things are happening, they cannot not be happening, but of the two, only one was bound to【adj [pred 作表语] ~ to do sth 1 certain to do sth 一定做某事；2 obliged by law or duty to do sth 有法律责任或有义务做某事的】 happen while the other was not. In the same way, the things God sees in his eternal present will certainly happen, but some will happen because of the necessity of things and others will happen because of those who are doing those actions. From the aspect of divine knowledge, then, they are necessary, but considered in themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. So are things that you look at with the senses singular, but if you look at them from the point of view of reason, they are universal.

6. “And now you may perhaps object that it lies in your power to change your intention and thereby to frustrate providence and turn it into nonsense, because whatever providence may have foreseen, you can do something else. And my answer is that you can decide to do something else, but the truth of providence will have seen that as well in its eternal present, and whatever you may try to do that is different or unpredictable will have been understood and predicted, whichever way you turn, so that you cannot avoid or evade divine foreknowledge, just as you cannot escape being seen by an eye that is focused on you, even though you decide to dart one way when you had been going in another direction. And what would you reply? That it is within your power to alter divine knowledge, since you were going to do this but abruptly changed your mind and chose instead to do that, and therefore divine knowledge must have changed just as quickly? It is not at all the case. Divine prescience runs ahead of everything and recollects it to the eternal present of its own knowledge. It does not change because it does not need to, having already foreseen the change you made at the last moment. God has this complete knowledge and understanding and vision of all things not from the unfolding of the events themselves but from the simplicity of his own perfect knowledge. It is in this light that we can answer the question you posed a while back about our providing a part of God’s knowledge. The power of his knowledge includes everything in an eternal present and does not at all rely on the unfolding of later events. In this way, man’s freedom is maintained in its integrity, and therefore God’s rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and appropriately, because free will is operating and men are not compelled by necessity. God has prescience and is a spectator from on high, and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. In this way, our hopes and our prayers are not at all in vain. Our prayers, if they are of the right kind and are pleasing to God, are not without effect. And the conclusion, then, is clear, that you must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things.”

My comment
According to this article, I naturally consider the God, or called the Creator, as a excellent program. One part of the created world which is bound to happen, as the sun rise everyday,
is an established execution of the program. The other part of the created world which consist of those holding self-consciousness, such as a man, is a subprogram with "switch" statement, which will automatically change the results according to the different cases offered by the man's wills. So, unbelieving the presence of an entity God though, I have the faith that the law of nature is fair to everyone, and the good will be reward while the bad must be punished.

番茄斗斗UID: 2720914

Comment:
Philosophy would be the last topic for me to reach, especially in english version.Mixed with endless hypothesis and following explanation, and mostly beyond life, philosophy to me, is more likely a tedium, a boundless circle. Admittedly, i do get lost  while browsing through this article. As a result ,i can hardly utter the essence of it, and compain instead. Even though, I will try to figure out what the author want to tell us and sum-up:

1.Eternity doesn't equal infinitely long life, since"There is nothing in time that can embrace the entirety of his existence."
2.God sees things were and are and are to come.
3.divine prescience does not change the nature of things

中原527UID: 2707367

不懂句子
God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of time in the immediacy of his being.(????后半句看不懂….)

we should say that God is eternal but the world is perpetual.
好句子

He has no idea about tomorrow and has already lost his hold on the past.

as Aristotle（亚里斯多德） says, time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity

the brief and fleeting instant

he sees at once all things that were and are and are to come.

all men are mortal

vision of all things not from the unfolding of the events themselves but from the simplicity of his own perfect knowledge.

God has prescience and is a spectator from on high, and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked.

. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord.

WORDS
insofar as 至于，就
inkling n.想法，暗示，迹象
divine a.神的，天赐的；极好的
eternal a.永久的，似乎不停的ßàtemporal a.时间的，短暂的=transitory a.不持续的，短暂的，转瞬即逝的
Simultaneous a.同时发生的，同时存在的
immobility n.固定性，静止
cease v.停止，终止，结束
perpetual a.永久的
surpass v.超过，优于
omnipresent a.无所不在的，同时遍在的
providence n.天意，远见
inevitable a.不可避免的
willed a.有某种意志的
theologians n.神宗学家
utterly adv.完全地，彻底地
tantamount a.等于，相似
Be met out 被判刑
In vain 白费地，徒劳无益地
错词
dicision->decision
Comments:
Tell the truth, I didn’t absolutely understand this article about the philosophy. Maybe the goal of article is that we should lift up our mind in virtue and hope and in humility. In order to improve the final purpose of the essay, author said that even though time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity, god can predict that everything happens in the future, and can not changes his decision. It only explain that god has prescience and is a spectator from on high ,and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked.