Boethius

Boethius a Roman senator, statesman and philosopher of the sixth century (c. 477-524), whose translations and commentaries on Greek philosophy transmitted the learning of antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages. He is best known for the Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison while awaiting execution, a work that combines prose and verse in a meditation on fortune, free will and the highest good.

Life and Public Career

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born into an ancient and wealthy Roman family, the Anicii, at a time when Italy was ruled by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. He was orphaned young and educated under the care of Symmachus, whose daughter he later married. He acquired a command of Greek learning rare in the Latin West of his day, and he devoted himself to making it accessible to readers who knew no Greek.

He entered public life and rose to high office, becoming consul in 510 and later master of the offices, a senior administrative post at the Gothic court at Ravenna. He served Theodoric loyally, undertaking difficult diplomatic missions and defending the interests of the Roman senate. His career shows a statesman who believed that a philosopher could and should take part in the government of his city.

His fortunes turned when he was accused of treason, probably because he had defended a fellow senator and because his orthodox Catholic faith made him suspect to an Arian king. He was imprisoned at Pavia, and after a period of confinement he was put to death, according to tradition by execution, around the year 524. The injustice of his fall became the occasion of his most famous work.

The Consolation of Philosophy

The Consolation of Philosophy was written while Boethius was in prison awaiting death, and it takes the form of a dialogue between the author and the figure of Philosophy, who appears to him as a woman of majestic bearing. In alternating passages of prose and verse the two discuss his misfortune and rise from lament to a philosophical understanding of his situation. It is one of the last great works of classical Latin literature.

Philosophy first consoles the prisoner by reminding him that the goods he has lost were never truly his own and that fortune is by nature changeable. She then argues that the apparent success of the wicked and the suffering of the good are not what they seem, since virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment. Happiness lies not in external fortune but in the possession of the highest good, which she identifies with God.

The dialogue rises to a consideration of providence and fate, of the reconciliation of human freedom with divine foreknowledge, and of the nature of eternity as the simultaneous possession of endless life. These arguments, drawn chiefly from Plato and the Neoplatonists, gave medieval readers a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about fortune, evil and divine government.

Translator and Teacher of the Liberal Arts

Boethius set himself the ambitious task of translating into Latin the whole of Plato and Aristotle and of showing that their philosophies were in harmony. He completed only a part of this programme, including translations of and commentaries on Aristotle's logical works and an introduction to the Categories, but even this fragment preserved the instruments of Greek reasoning for the medieval schools.

His textbooks on the liberal arts shaped education for centuries. He wrote a treatise on arithmetic and one on music, and he is credited by tradition with works on geometry and astronomy. These manuals formed the basis of the quadrivium, the mathematical part of the medieval curriculum, and his discussion of musical proportion influenced both theory and composition until the Renaissance.

He also wrote theological treatises on the Trinity and on the nature of Christ, works that deployed the techniques of logic in the service of Christian doctrine. Their combination of philosophical precision with religious orthodoxy made him a model for the scholastics, who found in him a bridge between pagan learning and the faith of the church.

Philosophy, Logic and the Problem of Universals

Boethius transmitted to the Middle Ages the logical works of Aristotle together with the commentary of Porphyry, and in doing so he posed the question that dominated scholastic thought for centuries: whether genera and species exist in reality or only in the mind. His careful statement of the alternatives, without a final resolution, set the terms of the debate over universals that engaged Abelard, Aquinas and Ockham.

His own position, as far as it can be reconstructed, was broadly Aristotelian. He held that abstract concepts correspond to real features of things while not existing as separate substances, a view that later writers developed in different directions. The vocabulary he established, distinguishing things, concepts and words, became the common property of medieval philosophy.

Beyond logic, his theological method showed how reason could be applied to revealed truth, and his conception of philosophy as the handmaid of theology anticipated the synthesis later achieved by Thomas Aquinas. By preserving the tools of ancient thought he made possible the achievements of the medieval schools.

Influence and Legacy

The Consolation of Philosophy was among the most widely read books of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. It was translated into Old English by King Alfred, into English by Chaucer and later by Queen Elizabeth I, and it was rendered into many other vernaculars. Its image of Philosophy as a consoling guide shaped the medieval sense of the philosophical life.

Because the Consolation appeals to reason rather than to revelation, it has been read by Christians and by secular readers alike. Dante placed Boethius among the wise in the Paradiso, and his definition of eternity as the perfect possession of endless life passed into the theology of Aquinas and the schools. His authority stood second only to that of the Church Fathers.

He is remembered as the last of the Roman philosophers and the first of the medieval schoolmen, a man who stands at the hinge of two ages. His translations preserved Greek learning, his textbooks shaped the curriculum, and his prison dialogue gave the West one of its most enduring reflections on fortune, freedom and the good. Few writers have done so much to carry a civilisation across a rupture.

See also

• Consolation of Philosophy
• Theodoric the Great
• Neoplatonism
• Problem of universals