Studia Paradyskie

The subject of the article is the idea of the soul, its knowledge and the way to God based on the work of De consolatione philosophiae by Boethius – a late antiquity thinker. Reflection on the soul is connected with the concept of the Logos, God’s providence and eternity. Boethius assumes that the connection of soul and body is a bondage to the soul, it constitutes its kind of degradation. The soul is eternally connected with the Source, that is God, and wishes to return to it, because only God is its happiness. The soul was originally pure spirit “before” incarnation into the body, but in this material world it has to contend with the passions of the body. Hence, it is essential to tame sensuality in the process of ascending to God. Living in a physical body, the soul has “forgotten” who it really is. In order to rise to God, the soul must make a considerable effort and go through the anamnesis process that Plato wrote about. The process is based on the fact that the soul „remembers” the knowledge that it has always had within itself. The soul is rooted in the Logos, Divine Rationality and draws its knowledge from it. Hence, the soul always feels the desire to be united with God, although in this material world the sight of the soul has become obscured, and the imperfect cognitive faculties of man do not allow us to fully know reality. Individual creature consciousness actually lives only in the present, and learns reality sequentially from moment to moment. No creation obliterates the whole reality at once, as does the Absolute Being, which as providence governs and assigns to all beings a specific place in the hierarchy of the Universe. Boethius deals with the problem of providence, which is destiny, the regulation of the created world. According to the thinker, providence does not reject the free will of conscious beings who are free to act. Providence is God’s rational plan, the principle of creation, Logos – Rationality, God’s Consciousness.