Review of On the Consolation of Philosophy (524)
Boethius (writer).
Read in 2025.
Read in H. R. James’s translation to English.
In prison, the author has a dialogue with a female personification of philosophy.
If you have any interest in the intellectual history of the Early Middle Ages, this is an essential read. Written by a scholar of the first generation after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, it fused ancient philosophy with a form of Christianity that had matured since the writing of The Bible (ca. 110 CE). Boethius never refers to Jesus by name in this book, but to the classical Greeks as well as to Seneca facing Nero (“On Clemency”). He braids their idealism into the state religion of the lost Empire. The result would be extremely influential, but it is weak.
For example, without evidence, Boethius assumes that nature starts from perfection. Being Christian, he thinks of the human body as a disgusting example of decay from the plan of his unnamed gods. In a bravura performance of mental gymnastics, he tries to reconcile his contempt for people with the recent idea of Yahwe having become omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. Among his conclusions are that most people are bad, that bad people do not really exist, and that they cannot succeed. On a tangent of wishful thinking that would undergird the theocratic tyrannies of the Middle Ages, and despite being in prison for a crime that would ultimately see him executed, Boethius toys with the idea of banning all lawyers except prosecutors:
‘And yet,’ says she, ‘the practice of the law-courts is just the opposite: advocates try to arouse the commiseration of the judges for those who have endured some grievous and cruel wrong; whereas pity is rather due to the criminal, who ought to be brought to the judgment-seat by his accusers in a spirit not of anger, but of compassion and kindness, as a sick man to the physician, to have the ulcer of his fault cut away by punishment. Whereby the business of the advocate would either wholly come to a standstill, or, did men prefer to make it serviceable to mankind, would be restricted to the practice of accusation. [...]’
Notice how Philosophy likens punishment to cure. She is for punitive justice, not psychological rehabilitation. In a time when roving bands were plundering Europe, that is how far “compassion and kindness” would go. Still, Jesus is there in the background, demanding a lot.
Without Boethius’s work as a translator, Aristotle might have been forgotten. In the details of his own arguments, Boethius resorts to essentialist Socratic nonsense. Flames, for example, rise because that is their nature. European scholars would crawl out from under his shadow and challenge one another’s basic assumptions, but it took them about a thousand years. I can see why his particular fusion was so attractive for so long. With the decline and fall of the Empire and the money it cycled through urban patronage of the arts, scholars in western Europe would be relegated to the monasteries for centuries. I am sure many of them, and especially those who knew better, would feel as if they had been imprisoned like Boethius, left with no greater source of joy in life than mental gymnastics and dreams of a bygone golden age. The image of the man turning away from self-pity to work out some internally consistent justification is touching, but it would have been more touching if he had been good at it.
References here: Śatakatraya (ca. 530), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), The Ego and Its Own (1844), A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), A Confederacy of Dunces (1980).