D. BOETHIUS
Boethius (480–524) is, after Plotinus, the greatest author of the seminal period, and his De Consolatione Philosophiae was for centuries one of the most influential books ever written in Latin. It was translated into Old High German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek; into French by Jean de Meung; into English by Alfred, Chaucer, Elizabeth I, and others. Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.
Boethius, scholar and aristocrat, was a minister to Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the first barbarian king in Italy and an Arian by religion, though no persecutor. As always, the word ‘barbarian’ might mislead. Though Theodoric was illiterate, he had passed his youth in high Byzantine society. He was in some ways a better ruler than many Roman emperors had been. His reign in Italy was not a sheer monstrosity as, say, the rule of Chaka or Dingaan in nineteenth-century England would have been. It was more as if a (popish) highland chieftain (who had acquired a little polish and a taste for claret in the French service) had reigned over the partly Protestant and partly sceptical England of Johnson and Lord Chesterfield. It is not, however, surprising that the Roman aristocracy were soon caught intriguing with the Eastern Emperor in the hope of delivering themselves from this alien. Boethius, whether justly or not, fell under suspicion. He was imprisoned at Pavia. Presently they twisted ropes round his head till his eyes dropped out and finished him off with a bludgeon.
Now Boethius was undoubtedly a Christian and even a theologian; his other works bear titles like De Trinitate and De Fide Catholica. But the ‘philosophy’ to which he turned for ‘consolation’ in the face of death contains few explicitly Christian elements and even its compatibility with Christian doctrine might be questioned.
Such a paradox has provoked many hypotheses. As:
(1) That his Christianity was superficial and failed him when brought to the test, so that he had to fall back on what neo-Platonism could do for him.
(2) That his Christianity was solid as a rock and his neo-Platonism a mere game with which he distracted himself in his dungeon—as other prisoners in like case have tamed a spider or a rat.
(3) That the theological essays were not really written by the same man.
None of these theories seems to me necessary.
Though the De Consolatione was certainly written after his fall, in exile and perhaps under arrest, I do not think it was written in a dungeon nor in daily expectation of the executioner. Once, indeed, he speaks of terror;63 once he describes himself as doomed to ‘death and proscription’;64 once Philosophia accuses him of ‘fearing the bludgeon and the axe’.65 But the general tone of the book does not match these momentary outbursts. It is not that of a prisoner awaiting death but that of a noble and a statesman lamenting his fall—exiled,66 financially damaged,67 parted from his beautiful library,68 stripped of his official dignities, his name scandalously traduced.69 This is no language of the condemned cell. And some of the ‘consolations’ which Philosophia addresses to him would be comically cruel mockeries to a man in that situation—as when she reminds him that the place which is exile to him is home to others,70 or that many would regard as wealth even those remains of his property which he has managed to save.71 The Consolation Boethius seeks is not for death but for ruin. When he wrote the book he may have known that his life was in some danger. I do not think he despaired of it. Indeed he complains at the outset that death cruelly neglects wretches who would gladly die.72
If we had asked Boethius why his book contained philosophical rather than religious consolations, I do not doubt that he would have answered, ‘But did you not read my title? I wrote philosophically, not religiously, because I had chosen the consolations of philosophy, not those of religion, as my subject. You might as well ask why a book on arithmetic does not use geometrical methods.’ Aristotle had impressed on all who followed him the distinction between disciplines and the propriety of following in each its appropriate method.73 We have seen this at work in Chalcidius; and Boethius draws our attention to it in his argument. He compliments Philosophia on having used ‘inborn and domestical proofs’, not ‘reasons fetched from without’.74 That is, he congratulates himself on having reached conclusions acceptable to Christianity from purely philosophical premises—as the rules of art demanded. When, on the other hand, she draws near the doctrines of Hell and Purgatory, he makes her check herself—‘for it is not now our business to discuss such matters’.75
But why, we may ask, did a Christian author impose upon himself this limitation? Partly, no doubt, because he knew where his true talent lay. But we can suggest another, and probably less conscious, motive. The distinction between Christian and Pagan can hardly, at that moment, have been more vividly present to his emotions than that between Roman and barbarian; especially since the barbarian was also a heretic. Catholic Christendom and that high Pagan past to which he felt so deep a loyalty were united in his outlook by their common contrast to Theodoric and his huge, fair-skinned, beer-drinking, boasting thanes. This was no time for stressing whatever divided him from Virgil, Seneca, Plato, and the old Republican heroes. He would have been robbed of half his comfort if he had chosen a theme which forced him to point out where the great ancient masters had been wrong; he preferred one that enabled him to feel how nearly they had been right, to think of them not as ‘they’ but as ‘we’.
As a result, the specifically Christian passages in the book are few. The martyrs are clearly referred to.76 In contradiction to the Platonic view that the Divine and the human cannot meet except through a tertium quid, prayer is a direct commercium between God and Man.77 When Philosophia, speaking of Providence, uses the words ‘strongly and sweetly’, from Wisdom viii. I Boethius replies, ‘I am delighted with your argument, but much more by the very language you use’.78 But far more often Boethius is saying what Plato or the neo-Platonists would have confirmed. Man, by his reason, is a divine animal;79 the soul is fetched from heaven,80 and her ascent thither is a return.81 In his account of creation82 Boethius is much closer to the Timaeus than to Scripture.
Apart from its contributions to the Model De Consolatione had some formal influence. It belongs to the kind called Satira Menippea in which prose sections alternate with (shorter) sections in verse. From Boethius this descends to Bernardus and Alanus and even into Sannazaro’s Arcadia. (I have often wondered that it has never been revived. One would have thought that a Landor, a Newman, or an Arnold might have turned it to good account.)
In Book I the appearance of Philosophia as a woman both old and young83 is borrowed from Claudian’s Natura in the Consulship of Stilicho (II, 424 sq.). It will re-appear in the Natura of the French poem which Lydgate translated as Reason and Sensuality (line 334). She tells him, among other things, that we—we philosophers—must anticipate calumny, for it is our express purpose (maxime propositum) to displease the rabble.84 This towering vaunt, this philosophic panache which goes beyond mere indifference to mud-flinging and actually courts it, is of Cynic origin. Milton’s Christ is infected with it, when he describes the common herd as people ‘of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise’ in Paradise Regained (III, 54). But poor Boethius is not yet ready for so high a strain; he is as deaf to it as a donkey to the harp—an image Chaucer appropriated in Troilus, I, 730. Everyone is now slandering him, though in reality his conduct while in office had been of flawless purity. He adds with almost comic inconsistency—Boethius the author here ruthlessly exposing Boethius the natural man—that his virtue was all the more admirable because he practised it with no thought of being admired. For, he adds, virtue is tarnished if a man displays it so as to get credit for it.85
This modest maxim cuts right across the ideals of the Dark Ages and of the Renaissance. Roland unashamedly desires los as Beowulf desires dom or the heroes in French tragedy desire la gloire. It was often discussed in the later Middle Ages. Alanus knows
it but agrees with it only up to a point. The good man should not make fame his object, but to reject it altogether is too austere (Anti-claudian, VII, iv, 26). Gower, on the other hand, applies it in its full rigour, even to knightly deeds,
In armes lith non avantance
To him that thenkth his name avance
And be renomed of his dede.86
(Confessio Amantis, I, 2651.)
Boethius then passionately demands an explanation of the contrast between the regularity with which God governs the rest of Nature and the irregularity He permits in human affairs.87 This is made a central theme of Nature’s ‘complaint’ in Alanus and of her ‘confession’ in Jean de Meung. Later still Milton is recalling, and no doubt expects us to recognise that he is recalling, this place from Boethius in one of the choruses of Samson, (667 sq.). The whole concept will seem less remote to some modern readers if they relate it to the Existentialist position that Man is a passion inutile and compares very unfavourably with the irrational or even the inorganic world.
With Book II we embark on that great apologia for Fortune which impressed her figure so firmly on the imagination of succeeding ages. Comments on good and bad luck and their obvious failure to correspond with good and ill desert may be expected in any period; but the medieval allusions to Fortune and her wheel are exceptional in their frequency and seriousness. The grandeur which this image takes on in the Inferno (VII, 73 sq.) is a reminder how entirely it depends on individual genius whether a locus communis shall or shall not be what we call ‘commonplace’. And this, like a thousand inferior passages, is part of the Boethian legacy. No one who had read of Fortuna as he treats her could forget her for long. His work, here Stoical and Christian alike, in full harmony with the Book of Job and with certain Dominical sayings,88 is one of the most vigorous defences ever written against the view, common to vulgar Pagans and vulgar Christians alike, which ‘comforts cruel men’ by interpreting variations of human prosperity as divine rewards and punishments, or at least wishing that they were. It is an enemy hard to kill; latent in what has been called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ and rampant in the historical philosophy of Carlyle.
At every point in this discussion we meet ‘old friends’—that is, images and phrases which first became our friends when they had grown very much older.
Thus from Book II: ‘The most miserable misfortune is to have been happy once.’89 Dante’s nessun maggior dolore (Inferno, V, 121) and Tennyson’s ‘sorrow’s crown of sorrows’ leap to mind. ‘Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.’90 We remember Chaucer’s ‘no man is wreched but himself it wene’ in the Ballade of Fortune and Hamlet’s ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’. We are told that we cannot lose external goods because we never really had them. The beauty of fields or gems is a real good, but it is theirs, not ours; the beauty of clothes is either theirs (the richness of the stuff) or the skill of the tailor—nothing will make it ours.91 The idea will turn up again unexpectedly in Joseph Andrewes (III, 6). Soon after this we hear the praises of the prior aetas,92 the primeval innocence pictured by the Stoics. Readers of Milton will here notice the pretiosa pericula which became his ‘precious bane’. From this prior aetas came both the ‘Former Age’ of Chaucer’s ballade and ‘the old age’ mentioned by Orsino (Twelfth Night, II, iv, 46). We are told that nothing so much beguiles those who have some natural excellence but are not yet perfected in virtue as the desire for fame. It is a maxim from the Agricola of Tacitus; it will later blossom into Milton’s line about ‘that last infirmity of noble mind’.
Philosophia proceeds to mortify this desire, as Africanus had done in the Somnium, by pointing out how provincial all earthly fame is since this globe, by cosmic standards, is admittedly to be regarded as a mathematical point—puncti habere rationem.93 But Boethius deepens this stock argument by stressing the diversity of moral standards even within this tiny area. What is fame in one nation can be infamy in another.94 And anyway how short-lived all reputations are! Books, like their author, are mortal. No one now knows where the bones of Fabricius lie.95 (Here, for the benefit of his English readers, Alfred happily substituted ‘the bones of Weland’.)
Adversity has the merit of opening our eyes by showing which of our friends are true and which are feigned.96 Combine this with Vincent of Beauvais’ statement that hyena’s gall restores the sight (Speculum Naturale, XIX, 62), and you have the key to Chaucer’s cryptic line ‘Thee nedeth nat the gall of noon hyene’ (Fortune, 35).
From Book III: All men know that the true good is Happiness, and all men seek it, but, for the most part, by wrong routes—like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home.97 Chaucer reproduces the simile in the Knight’s Tale (A 1261 sq.).
Yet even the false routes, such as wealth or glory, show that men have some inkling of the truth; for the true good is glorious like fame and, like wealth, self-sufficient. So strong is the bent of nature that we thus struggle towards our native place, as the caged bird struggles to return to the woods. Chaucer borrows this image for his Squire’s Tale (F 621 sq.).
One of the false images of the good is Nobility. But Nobility is only the fame (and we have already exploded fame) of our ancestors’ virtue, which was a good of theirs, not ours.98 This doctrine had a flourishing progeny in the Middle Ages, and became a popular subject for school debates. It underlies Dante’s canzone at the opening of Convivio, IV, and the other place in De Monarchia (II, 3). The Roman de la Rose (18,615 sq.) goes beyond Boethius and boldly equates gentilesse with virtue. The English version at this point (2185–202) further expands its French original. The Wife of Bath reproduces Boethius more exactly (D 1154). Gower, like the Roman, identifies nobility with ‘vertu set in the corage’ (IV, 2261 sq.). One may be forgiven a smile when a (not otherwise very ignorant) author finds in this passage a proof that Gower expresses the feelings of the middle class which in his day was (as usual) ‘rising into new importance’.
The argument now climbs to the position that the whole and perfect good, of which we usually chase only fragments or shadows, is God. In the course of proving this—though it needed no new proof either for Platonists or Christians—Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things.99 It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans.100 I have already101 stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.
Those who have once risen to contemplate ‘the admirable circle of the divine simplicity’102 must be careful not to look back again to worldly objects. The moral is enforced by the story of Orpheus and his fatal backward glance at Eurydice, and this telling of that story was as widely influential as Virgil’s. It is also of great structural importance in the De Consolatione, for Boethius himself, when Philosophia visited him in Book I, was indulging in just such a retrospection. Here, too, he reaches his highest point as a poet in the famous lines
Orpheus Eurydicen suam
Vidit, perdidit, occidit.103
From Book IV: The doctrine of divine Providence, Boethius complains, rather aggravates than solves the real problem: why is justice—certainly ‘poetic justice’—so unapparent in the course of events? Philosophia makes two replies.
(1) It is all justice. The good are always rewarded and the wicked always punished, by the mere fact of being what they are. Evil power and evil performance are the punishment of evil will,104 and it will be infinite since the soul is immortal (as philosophy, no less than Theology, asserts). The passage looks back to Virgil’s hell whose inhabitants ausi omnes immane nefas ausoque potiti, ‘all purposed dreadful deeds and got their way’ (Aeneid, VI, 624). It looks forward to Milton who says of the wiser Pagans that ‘to banish forever into a local hell . . . they thought not a punishment so proper and proportionate for God to inflict as
to punish sin with sin’ (Doctrine and Discipline, II, 3). And yet, pleads Boethius, it is very strange to see the wicked flourishing and the virtuous afflicted. Why, yes, replies Philosophia; everything is strange until you know the cause.105 Compare the Squire’s Tale (F 258).
(2) That which ‘in the citadel of the divine simplicity’ is Providence, when seen from below, mirrored in the multiplicity of time and space, is Destiny.106 And as in a wheel the nearer we get to the centre the less motion we find, so every finite being, in proportion as he comes nearer to participating in the Divine (unmoving) Nature, becomes less subject to Destiny, which is merely a moving image of eternal Providence. That Providence is wholly good. We say that the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer. But we do not know who are the wicked and who are the innocent; still less what either need. All luck, seen from the centre, is good and medicinal. The sort we call ‘bad’ exercises good men and curbs bad ones—if they will take it so. Thus, if only you are near the hub, if you participate in Providence more and suffer Destiny less, ‘it lies in your own hands to make your fortune what you please’.107 Or, as Spenser turns this passage, ‘each unto himself his life may fortunize’ (F.Q. VI, ix, 30).
The noblest descendant of this passage, however, is not in words. At Rome in Santa Maria del Popolo the cupola above Chigi’s tomb sets the whole Boethian image of the wheel and the hub, of Destiny and Providence, before our eyes. On the utmost circumference the planets, the dispensers of fate, are depicted. On a smaller circle, within and above them, are the Intelligences that move them. At the centre, with hands upraised in guidance, sits the Unmoved Mover.108