Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is Book 5 of *Boece*, Chaucer's Middle English translation of Boethius's late-antique philosophical dialogue *The Consolation of Philosophy* (early 6th century). In it, the narrator questions Lady Philosophy on three interlocking problems: the nature of chance, the existence of free will, and the apparent conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom. Philosophy first dispatches "hap" (chance) as not a real independent force but rather the convergence of causal chains unforeseen by the parties involved — illustrated by the famous example of a farmer who digs up buried gold while tilling a field. Both the burying and the digging had their own causes; their unintended intersection only *seems* random. She then affirms that free will is real for any rational being, though it exists on a spectrum: divine intelligences possess it most fully, while humans progressively lose it as they sink into bodily appetite and vice. The text's most philosophically charged section confronts the paradox of divine prescience: if God foreknows all human choices, does necessity collapse free will entirely? The narrator rejects the easy answer (that foreknowledge merely *follows* future events rather than causing them), arguing that mutual necessity is established either way. The passage ends mid-argument, with the tension between eternal divine knowledge and temporal human freedom unresolved — the central knot the full book works to untie through a theory of God's "eternal present."

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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