What we have is not who we are.
What we have is not who we are.
523. Pavia, Italy. A saddened man slouched in his cell. Convicted of trumped up charges of treason, it was his devotion to truth and refusal to let the other members of the Roman Senate use a lie to convict an innocent man that landed him in this dank dungeon.
Recalling the days of his not-so-distant past where he held both prestige and wealth, dark clouds of despair drenched his spirit. Stripped of everything, Boethius wept.
Until a wisp (Lady Philosophy) walked through the walls to still the storm and steer Boethius, like a lost ship, back to himself.
She begins by diagnosing Boethius with a classic case of mistaken identity. How he deserted himself—his soul—when he went off chasing the shiny objects of the world, thinking he could fill God-shaped desires with earth-shaped objects.
Boethius had fallen victim to the human tendency to find identity in the things and titles he’d accumulated. And now that they were gone, he wondered whether anything good was left.
That, says Lady Philosophy, is the cause of his sickness: “You are confused,” she says, “because you have forgotten what you are… upset because you are in exile and stripped of all your possessions.”
But perhaps, she suggests, Fortune actually did him a favor by forcefully severing him from the things he would not willingly let go of. No more distracting decorations rendering the soul unseen. No more ornaments to attract praise and block true love. Finally, his soul might breathe.
Like removing thick layers of dust around a lantern, what was hidden could once again supply light.
Such are the words of Lady Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. A character with a message for us all.
To converge like the hourglass to our narrowest point, because only there are we light enough to pass through the gate. To let go of the camels keeping us from threading the needle’s eye.
And to occasionally descend into the painful process of removal because on the other side of that shedding, what awaits us is a reunion with our highest Self—the one that remembers it needs nothing outside of itself for validation. In seeing itself, it sees its maker.