Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy

The issue of a revised edition of the translation of The Consolation of Philosophy has enabled me to correct mistakes, improve the wording of one or two passages and take account of recent work on Boethius and his age. Since the first edition several important books have appeared. The commemoration of the fifteenth centenary of his birth in 1980 saw the appearance of two major contributions, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy by Henry Chadwick, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1981, and Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, a collection of studies edited by Margaret Gibson, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1981, including a fine literary analysis of the Consolation by Anna Crabbe. Boethiuss literary structure and methods have also been exhaustively examined in J. Grubers Kommentar zu Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, Texte und Kommentare 9, Berlin 1978, Seth Lerers Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy, Princeton, New Jersey 1985, and Gerard ODalys The Poetry of Boethius, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1991, and his antecedents and influence by Pierre Courcelle in La consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littraire, Paris 1976, in his article on Boethius in the Dictionnaire de Lettres francaises, Le moyen ge, Paris 1964, and in Jamie Scotts Christians and Tyrants: the prison testimonies of Boethius, Thomas More, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New York 1995. Notable also are the entries on Boethius by L. Minio-Paluello in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1968) and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography II, New York 1970 and the articles by S. F. Wiltshire, Boethius and the Summum Bonum in The Classical Journal 67, 1972, and C. J. De Vogel The problem of philosophy and Christian faith in Boethius in Romanitas et Christianitas: Studia J. H. Waszink, Amsterdam 1973.

This absence of tension between pagan and Christian tradition was able to foster a milieu in which the concept of the twofold approach to truth, one via the exercise of the reason, one via revelation, was natural and easy to maintain. The study of natural theology was in this context as valid as the study of revealed theology and it was to the former that throughout his life Boethius had devoted his formidable intellectual powers.

There is further a personal circumstance pointed out by Anna Crabbe which seems to go far to account for the absence of overt Christian reference in the Consolation. In contrast to God he discovered, Boethius was born into a Christian family, faced no such emotional turmoil or intellectual challenge and was able to devote his powers not to the discovery of a new religion but to the logical exposition of the theology that underpinned it. In the prison house during the last months of his life, so far from disillusion or apostasy, what he achieved was a brilliant summation of the moral and protreptic lessons of his lifes intellectual work, in argument largely non-technical, adorned by literary and philosophical allusion drawn from a mind over many years immersed in the great writers of the classical past.

Grey College, Durham
February 1999.