Now and then I will randomly come across something of which I knew nothing about or at least had forgotten about. For example, the other day I picked up a book off our shelves and stared reading a summary of Boethius’ work known as The Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius lived from around 477 to 524 in the area Roman Empire and what was left of it in the west. He came from an important family and was a philosopher and worked as a sort of high-level bureaucrat. One of the things that he worked on was improving the relationship between the two big churches of the day, the one based in Rome and the other based in Constantinople. Somewhere in this process Boethius was accused of treason and was sentenced to death. It was while waiting in prison that he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy.
The book is basically a conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy. They talk about a number of things but the one that struck me was a conversation about luck. The quick version is that Lady Philosophy says that how well or how poorly you do in life can often come down to chance – you may be up one day and down the next. Now certainly we can have debates on this, the person whose favorite activity is to randomly run across the freeway, may be inviting a little more bad luck on themselves. But I do think there is something of chance in life. You do not get to pick your parents, your amount of intelligence or where you are born. Things that can all greatly influence how your life will turn out. Just think of the differences between being born in South Korea versus being born in North Korea, but back to Boethius.
The conversation continues and Lady Philosophy makes the point that because circumstances can be so fickle they are not good things on which to base your happiness. She says instead that you must base your happiness on something more solid, something that will be the same tomorrow as it is today (which should sound a lot like God). Interestingly in this book Boethius does not mention God in a way that points directly to God as Christians understand God, even though he was a Christian. That is not to say that the God he points to is a God who is un-Christian, but is probably more comparable to God as described by Plato, a God of pure goodness. And so the argument is basically that we must not base our happiness on things temporal but things eternal.
And the thing is most of us know this. Most of us know that the things of this world are not stable – “The grass withers and the flowers fade” as Isaiah tells us. But we continue to put our trust in those things that are ephemeral. We believe that if we could just have a little more money, or a few weeks vacation then we would be happy. But when those things come they do not provide lasting happiness. I read about a study, which looked at people who had won the lottery and they found something very interesting. Six months after a person had won the lottery they were less happy than the day before they won the lottery. How many people have you known or you may be one of those people who have thought that if you could just win the lottery than all would be taken care of. That our lives would be perfect. But because money is ultimately not transcendent it will ultimately disappoint. So today I would say let’s remember what Boethius and Lady Philosophy remind us of, that happiness needs to come from some place deeper.