We have a general idea when the Roman philosopher Boethius was born, but think we know more precisely when and where he died: in or near the Italian city of Pavia, in Lombardy, in the autumn of 524. There is enough authority behind that date to allow a group of my learned colleagues to have organized a small conference for next week commemorating the 1500th anniversary of his death. I am eagerly looking forward to it. The name of Boethius is no longer universally recognized even by college graduates, and more’s the pity. His great masterpiece, the Consolation of Philosophy, is, well, a masterpiece, and for more than a millennium among the small number of extra-biblical texts any educated European person was likely to know well. That is because it deals seriously with very Big Issues such as the freedom of the human will and the essential nature of the human species.
Boethius was a patrician in the Ciceronian tradition, a man who combined extraordinary mental prowess and political capacity. But he lived in a political atmosphere very different from Cicero’s. His world was that of the regime of Theodoric the Ostrogoth in an officially Christian Rome where politics and religion were entangled in complicated ways. He got on the wrong side of the king rather as Thomas More many centuries later got on the wrong side of Henry VIII. He was imprisoned, tortured, and brutally executed. He was not a churchman, but an active secular functionary who wrote several rather abstruse theological works. His great Consolation is a classical philosophical dialogue set within a minimal narrative. The narrator (Boethius) is imprisoned under capital judgment, where he finds no solace from the muses of poetry, in whose company he has long delighted. Instead, a commanding, epiphanic woman of great authority suddenly appears in his cell, banishes the muses, and diagnoses Boethius’s problem as one of acute lethargy or mental torpor which has sapped him of his moral clarity and stamina.
The woman is Lady Philosophy. In five beautifully shaped books (chapters) she acts as a philosophical physician dealing with a hard case. What is Boethius so upset about? After all, he has only lost his fortune, his social station, his family, his liberty, and is about to lose his life in an ignominious and brutal manner. That is roughly Lady Philosophy’s take from the get-go, and that of the “character” Boethius’s by the end of her several tutorials. By implication, it should be the view of the reader as well.
The Consolation of Philosophy is essentially a dialogue of the mind with itself, a form of which there are numerous other examples. The most obvious proximate model is the book that Augustine called his Soliloquies, or internal conversation, in which an “Augustine” seeks illumination from “Ratio” (female personification of Reason) concerning God and the soul. Some eminent classicists have been slow—perversely slow, in my view--to admit even the Christian substructure of the Consolation. But that is a testimony to the secular rigor with which Boethius is dealing in philosophy, not theology—reason, not revelation. The principal meaning of the word theology at that time was “study in the sacred text,” that is, biblical study or exposition. The moral education of the narrator “Boethius” is gradual but dramatic. He begins in a state of moral and psychological despair and also of nearly comic moral obtuseness. A major theme is that of a sick man slowly being cured not by supernatural revelation but by his ability to reclaim an intellectual and moral clarity present in his human nature. That is, the pretense is that the propositions posited and “proved” by Lady Philosophy can be arrived at by deductive reasoning and are not dependent upon supernatural revelation. An eminent scholar has shown that two apparent biblical allusions are there by authorial carelessness, probably having been imported from unrecognized allusive passages in Augustine or elsewhere. (Boethius’s lifespan was approximately a century after Augustine’s.) The genius of the Consolation lies not in any extraordinary originality of argument, though the argument is impressive, but in its literary features, its beautiful prose and poetry. For it is a prosimetrum, that is, a work composed both in prose and verse, with careful artistic relation between the two. Some of the finest poems of the Silver Age of Latinity are to be found in it. It is a prototype of later humanism, which habitually uses ancient pagan literary materials for Christian doctrinal purposes.
Quite
apart from its moral doctrines, the book’s purely literary influence in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance is nearly incalculable. There are only two
“characters” in the dialogue—Boethius and Lady Philosophy. Yet it greatly advanced the popularity of a
third. That is the personification of
Fortune. Fortuna was the Latin name of
the goddess of luck, chance—fortuity, in short.
This abstract concept of the random, unpredictable, capricious events of
history and indeed of every individual human life became a major literary
character on her own. Though Boethius is
instructed that there is no such thing as random chance as popularly
understood, malign happenstance is rife in world literature. When Shakespeare’s Romeo cries out in dismay
after killing Tybalt “I am Fortune’s fool” he is bewailing his victimhood
before a capricious and indifferent malignity.
Francis Bacon famously opined that “He that hath wife and children hath
given hostages to Fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises,
either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit
for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.” One small detail in Lady Philosophy’s account
of Fortuna—that the goddess has a wheel that in its random rotations can
raise those who attach themselves to it to the heights of prosperity (good
fortune) or crush them beneath its weight (ill fortune)--had a huge success in
later literature, learned and popular alike.
The television give-away program “Wheel of Fortune” has enjoyed an
almost mind-boggling longevity of success.
One recent headline: “Wheel of Fortune contestant’s boyfriend proposes
on set in middle of filming leaving host Ryan Seacrest nearly in tears.”
It is impossible to think of the great emergent poetries of France, England, or Italy without an awareness of Boethius looming in the background. Both Jean de Meun in France and Chaucer in England translated the work into their vernaculars as well as using its ideas and themes extensively in their own work. The prosimetric form of Dante’s New Life (Vita Nuova), not to mention much of that work’s content, are homages to Boethius. Literary originality in earlier centuries generally began in a generous imitation. The trick was to find a new and engaging way of expressing generally approved truths: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,” as Alexander Pope puts it in the eighteenth century.
The only popular work of modern literature I know of that brings Boethius to the attention of general readers is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. This somewhat capricious romp was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981—its author having committed suicide in 1969. Though this macabre biographical circumstance suggests to me that his own allegiance to Boethius must have been somewhat qualified, his book did introduce the Roman philosopher for a brief moment into the chatter of New York literary cocktail parties. A Confederacy of Dunces is one of those novels, of which there are several in modern publishing history, which was repeatedly rejected by editors or supposed literary experts, before finally being published to acclaim. The novel’s picaresque hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, frequently alludes to or quotes the Consolation of Philosophy—not entirely coherently, in my view—along with other evidences of a conflicted Catholic culture, of which there is a strain in Southern letters. (Toole was an admirer of Carson McCullers.)
Habent sua fata libelli. This phrase, part of a slightly longer and frequently quoted Latin saying, has a rather banal translation—“Books have each their own destiny” or something like that. It has been the fate or destiny of the Consolation of Philosophy of old Severinus Boethius to fade, after many centuries of intellectual centrality, into the kind of learned oblivion that could make it a prop, an emblem of obscurantist eccentricity, in a comic novel about a Minever Cheevy with a southern accent. They say that what goes around comes around, but I doubt that there will be a popular Boethian revival in my lifetime. It is all the more important, therefore, that his name be kept alive and his ideas analyzed and debated in those centers of learning that have the honor and also the responsibility of preserving the best that has been thought and written by our ancestors, however remote. Those who would understand the present—I say nothing of the future—have as a preliminary obligation to attain some understanding of the past. That is why I am looking forward to next week’s miniconference.
