Introducing Boethius Thursday

Starting tomorrow, A Stoic Breviary will also offer a weekly entry on The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. The book is a timeless account that draws from many philosophical schools, including the Stoic tradition.

Why Thursday? It was on a bleak Thursday, many years ago, that a very much younger Liam Milburn saw his life slipping away, and the Consolation came to his rescue.

Please find below an attempt at an introduction. All the informal commentary that will hopefully follow over the next few months was written from early 2015 to late 2016.

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Choosing my favorite book, or my favorite piece of music, seems like an impossible task, much like being asked to choose a favorite child. I have discovered so many different kinds of insight and appreciation from so many texts, that I find it difficult to speak of most of them as being “better” or “worse”. Each has played a crucial part, at different times and in different ways, so what speaks to me the most on a Monday will not always be what speaks to me the most on a Thursday.

Yet if I ask myself not which book I prefer the most, but which book has helped me most often over all the years, my answer is immediately clear. It is The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.

Most people will not be familiar with this book, and they should hardly be blamed for that. Though it was the equivalent of a best seller in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, it has faded from popularity in modern times. Despite this change of fashions, I have found that whenever I run across someone who knows it well, or whenever I have introduced it to a new reader, I am also struck by the almost universal acclaim for its profound wisdom. Not everyone knows about Boethius these days, but most everyone who does know about him shares in a deep enthusiasm for the power of the Consolation to change lives to the core.

I was given a copy while I was still in high school, and I read through most of the text on my own time whenever I had the patience to ponder. In college, the medievalists I increasingly admired all reminded me that there was nothing quite like it, and one of my old professors suggested only half in jest that I would be well served to commit it to memory.

I was in awe of the beauty of the language and the structure of the arguments, but I was still considering it from afar, as a sublime work of theory. It took very real events in my own life to bring the Consolation down to earth, and to convince me that this wasn’t just a brilliant exercise in thinking, but also a practical tool for living. I could turn to it not only when I wanted to contemplate grand ideas, but also for comfort when my heart was breaking.

I expected that kind of solace from poetry, novels, and pieces of music, but I did not expect it from a work of philosophy. I suspect its effect comes from the fact that it considers the place of everything under the heavens, while also being a deeply personal work. It begins in a moment of terrible sorrow, and the author finds himself completely adrift. As Boethius engages in a symbolic conversation with Lady Philosophy, he not only learns about the sweeping nature of happiness and misery, of good and evil, of Nature and Fortune, and of freedom and Providence, but he also comes to terms with the struggle of his own situation.

The Consolation crossed into my daily life when I could no longer make sense of why good people seemed to suffer, while bad people seemed to thrive. When I personally began to experience all the selfishness and deceit in those I had thought I could trust, and I felt myself to be spiraling downwards while they appeared to go from strength to strength, I began to gradually break inside.

I opened a copy of this text on a Thursday morning, while sitting on a hill behind the college library, and it started bringing some sense to my confusion. What Boethius had been telling me all along now began to offer meaning in my own living, and I will always remain grateful to him, and for the epiphany of that Thursday morning. I hardly managed to fix everything then and there, of course, but anything I have fixed over the years owes itself largely to that moment.

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Boethius (c. 480-524 AD) was from an old Roman patrician family, though the glory of old Rome had now passed. He was by all accounts a man of great means and talents, and he rose in power and position in the court of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, as a senator, a consul, and as the master of offices.

He was also a deeply learned man, well versed in both Greek and Latin, and a devoted student of philosophy. The story has it that Boethius intended to not only translate all the major works of Plato and Aristotle from Greek into Latin, but to further demonstrate how these two great systems of Classical philosophy could be understood as being in ultimate harmony with one another.

Boethius was also a Christian, and he wrote a number of theological texts. Quite unlike the common tension between faith and reason of our own day, and much more in line with their complementarity in the Middle Ages, Boethius saw theology and philosophy as both serving the same truth, and he sought to find what was shared between his Christian and pagan heritage.

Yet despite all of his achievements, Boethius found himself caught up in the intrigue of court politics. When he discovered that a fellow senator, Albinus, was being falsely accused of treason, Boethius stood up in his defense. It would seem that his character matched his influence and learning, but such integrity would bring about his worldly downfall. Charges were brought against Boethius as well, and he was awaiting his execution while under house arrest.

The Consolation was written at this time, hardly a work of fiction, but the reflections of a man who had lost all he had built up, who must have felt betrayed at every turn, and who would soon have even his life taken from him. It is one thing to ponder philosophy from the comfort of the academy, and quite another to face philosophy at such an hour of grave loss. The conversation he has with himself, through the personification of Lady Philosophy, comes not from luxury, but from need.

The text is far from being a collection of truisms, or easy answers to difficult questions. Boethius fights tooth and nail against Philosophy’s insistence that life can truly be fair, and struggles with the realization that he has been deluding himself. He even jumps from the fat into the fire, at first bemoaning that all is disordered, and then swinging to despair about the loss of freedom. I have now read it more times than I can count, and each time I feel like I am following along with his every train of thought.

The Consolation is not the expression of a single school of philosophy, but ties together many different traditions, especially that of Plato’s Academy, but also that of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and that of the Stoics. Though Boethius was not a Stoic in the narrow sense, I have long argued that his central argument about the relationship between Nature and Fortune, and between what we do and what happens to us, is thematically about as Stoic as one can get. The influence of Stoicism would have been just as strong with him as it would have been for any other educated Roman, and I owe my own interest in the practice of Stoic philosophy to the first influence of the Consolation.

Boethius never directly mentions his Christian faith in the text, and some have found this odd. At times, it has been suggested that this couldn’t possibly be the same author who wrote the theological treatises, or perhaps that he had actually abandoned his faith in this time of trial.

I do not know if Boethius questioned the faith in his own heart, but his title should certainly tell us something. This is a Consolation of Philosophy, not a Consolation of Theology. He is trying to make sense of his own situation, and to offer comfort and guidance to his readers, not by starting with what God reveals to us, but by what we can discover through our own power of reason. If my belief is in doubt, it seems only right to find reasons to support what I believe. Again, reason need not be in conflict with faith, but can be its supporter and defender.

As a rationalist myself, and often to my detriment quite the Doubting Thomas, I think I can understand exactly what Boethius is doing here. If you have lost everything you hold dear, rebuild from the bottom up. Start with what you know, which in turn can then tell you what you can really trust. If you read all the way to end, you will see how the last few lines of the text confirm this profound relationship between reason and faith.

There are many books, from writers like Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas, from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius to Pascal and Lewis, from Dostoyevsky and Joyce to Twain and O’Connor, that strike deep to the bottom of my soul. Yet in the odd little journey that has been my life, it was always a beaten up copy of The Consolation of Philosophy that became my best literary friend.

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The collection I have put together is not a work of scholarship on Boethius, or any sort of attempt to claim special insight on his thought. As with my previous Stoic Breviary, the intent is never to tell you what you should think, or to reveal any hidden meaning. I have simply provided the text of the Consolation, in small bits that can hopefully be read easily at any time during the day, and then added my own informal reflections on what they have meant to me. Your own interpretations and applications may well vary, as they most certainly should. Consider this as a sort of jumping off point, and never as a final say.

None of my writing has ever been intended for financial or professional profit, but only to share what little I might have with others. Accordingly, I have chosen to make use of an older but venerable translation of the text, by W.V. Cooper. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the newer versions, but I believe it gets the job done with more than enough accuracy, and with quite a bit of dignity. I have only made a few minor changes where the choice or order of words may confuse the modern reader.

Each Book of the Consolation alternates between verse and prose sections, and my only regret is that Cooper’s version loses the meter of the original Latin poetry. For public domain purposes, however, this seemed the best route to follow, and I would encourage the reader to seek out different versions, or even, heaven forbid, to learn Latin just for the sake of this brilliant text! If I had the skill and time available to me, I would venture my own translation, but sadly I have neither.

I will think myself a happy man if someone picks up a copy of this humble collection, and then finds comfort in the truths that Boethius has offered to all of us.