Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a Roman senator, consul and philosopher at the court of Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, in the early sixth century. He set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to show their agreement; though he completed only part of the plan, his translations and commentaries on Aristotle’s logic, and his textbooks of arithmetic and music, were the main channel by which Greek philosophy reached the Latin West for six hundred years. Accused of treason, he was imprisoned and executed around 524; in prison he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue in prose and verse between himself and the personified Lady Philosophy on fortune, happiness, evil, providence and free will — one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. He has been called “the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics” (Scholasticism).

Life

Boethius was born around 477 into the ancient Roman family of the Anicii, shortly after the deposition of the last Western emperor. Orphaned young, he was raised by the senator Symmachus, whose daughter Rusticiana he married. Rome was then ruled by Theodoric the Great, an Ostrogoth and an Arian Christian, who governed Italy from Ravenna with the cooperation of the Roman senatorial class. Boethius, a master of Greek — rare by then in the West — devoted himself to scholarship, and rose in public life: he was consul in 510, and in 522 his two young sons were made joint consuls, a great honour. He became magister officiorum, head of the civil service, at Theodoric’s court.

In 523, when a senator named Albinus was accused of treasonable correspondence with the Eastern emperor Justin in Constantinople, Boethius defended him, declaring “if Albinus is guilty, so am I and the whole Senate”. He was himself accused of treason and of sacrilege (practising magic), condemned without a proper hearing, and imprisoned at or near Pavia. There he wrote the Consolation. He was executed around 524, by some accounts after torture; Symmachus was executed soon after. Later tradition honoured him as a Catholic martyr killed by an Arian king, and he is venerated in Pavia.

Logic and the liberal arts

Boethius translated Porphyry’s Isagoge (Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories), Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations, and wrote commentaries on several. Until the twelfth century, these works — the “old logic” — were almost all of Aristotle that Latin scholars knew. His commentary on the Isagoge raised the question that Porphyry had set aside: do genera and species (like “animal” and “man”) exist in reality, or only in thought? If they exist, are they bodies or incorporeal, and do they exist apart from sensible things? Boethius’s cautious, Aristotelian answer — universals exist in sensible things, but are understood apart from them — started the medieval problem of universals, which divided realists and nominalists for centuries.

His textbooks on arithmetic and music (adapted from Nicomachus and Ptolemy) made the quadrivium — arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, a word he may have coined — the basis of the medieval curriculum. His short theological tractates, on the Trinity and the nature of Christ, applied Aristotelian logic to Christian doctrine and gave the Middle Ages definitions such as “person is an individual substance of a rational nature”.

The Consolation of Philosophy

Written in prison as he awaited death, the Consolation contains no explicit Christian reference, but draws on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Neoplatonism. Lady Philosophy appears to the despairing prisoner, drives away the Muses of poetry who were feeding his grief, and leads him, through five books of alternating prose and verse, from complaint against Fortune to an understanding of true happiness, the powerlessness of evil, divine providence, and the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge with human freedom. Its account of God’s eternity — “the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life” — in which all times are present at once, became the classical solution to the problem of foreknowledge.

Legacy

The Consolation was translated into Old English by King Alfred, into Middle English by Chaucer (Boece), into French by Jean de Meun, and into English again by Queen Elizabeth I. Dante, who read it after the death of Beatrice, placed Boethius among the wise souls in the Heaven of the Sun. Its image of Fortune’s wheel became one of the commonest motifs of medieval art and literature, from the Carmina Burana to Shakespeare.

In conversation

• Lady Philosophy — the consoler in the prison cell.
• Fortune’s wheel — why it is folly to complain of her turning.
• The eternal present — how God can know the future without causing it.