For a classics major, my experience with classical works, whether in Latin or Greek or in translation, is fairly thin – varied, but thin. Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy had been sitting on my shelves since Christmas of 2008, when my mother gave it to me as a present, and it looked quite promising for winter-break reading, at 170 pages. I took it up and finished it about a week and a half later, thanks to my realization that filling the book with underlining and notes and comments in the margin was not, in fact, an act of sacrilege.
Its length, or lack thereof, isn’t the only reason why Boethius caught my eye. There was also the fact that the book jacket and the introduction repeatedly proclaimed Consolation to be a “seminal work of Christian philosophy,” and Boethius himself a “devout Christian” as well as a skilled and equally devoted translator of philosophical and educational works – right now recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church – and, rather morbidly, I found it fascinating that he wrote the book while awaiting execution, which may or may not have consisted of several men beating his brains out with clubs. I suppose Theodoric the Great didn’t screw around when it came to killing off political opponents.
After reading the book, though, I’m not sure Boethius was very Christian at all. He was certainly born into a Christian family, and one could make a case that the God of Consolation is quite close to the Christian God – but at best, Boethius is monotheistic. It is particularly telling that, though Boethius mentions God many, many times, he never mentions Christ or the Holy Spirit, and his allusions are almost entirely to classical sources, rather than the Bible or other Christian sources.
I see two major possibilities here. The first is that Theodoric, as well as his predecessors as Roman Emperors, were Arian Christians – Boethius may have subscribed to this belief, or he may well have hoped that Theodoric would notice his orthodoxy and grant him a reprieve, since the offense that had supposedly landed him in jail had been to conspire with the non-Arian Byzantine emperor.
The other possibility is that Boethius believed something approaching Christianity – a belief system that incorporated similar concepts such as a single, omniscient higher power, the concept of human free will, and the idea of postmortem rewards for good and punishments for evil – without quite making it there. Neoplatonism seems the natural choice, given its chronological proximity and many of the ideas Philosophy expounds upon in the book to help Boethius come to terms with his situation.
This quibble – which is really more with the editor and publisher than with the author – does not, of course, detract from the work itself. The dialogue is beautifully done, through careful analysis of each premise and the extensive use of argumentative logic. Philosophy first explains to the condemned man that he would be wrong to blame his situation on Fortune, since she has only acted as is in her nature (and appears herself to say as much), and that though Boethius sees his condemnation as an injustice, his good works and good life should be consolation enough for him in the afterlife. The rest – offices, honors, wealth – are all transitory, and so do not matter.
Assuming you accept the book’s theistic premise, for the first four books or so, Philosophy’s argument is certainly sound enough, if only because she belabors points until Boethius can fully comprehend them, and through him the reader. Unfortunately, the fifth book, which attempts to reconcile the ideas of predestination, an omniscient God, and free will, causes this carefully calibrated system to break under the opposing pressures. The resulting hodgepodge of arguments was unsalvageable, despite Philosophy’s efforts to explain it in clearer terms each time, and relied excessively on a vague concept of the “necessity” of events, which was never fully explained. It certainly seems to have satisfied Boethius himself, since, as mentioned above, he certainly did not mind repeating his arguments until some permutation of them made sense, but to my eyes and ears, the two ideas are irreconcilable on a very nuclear level, and Boethius did not do a good enough job of convincing me otherwise, though I can imagine a few arguments he could’ve made to do so.
In the end, Consolation is a good read. I particularly recommend it if you’re looking for a bit of intellectual exercise and perhaps to stimulate reflection on the role of a higher power in your life, if you believe in one, or perhaps on the concepts of destiny versus free will. I still get the idea, however, that Boethius, like a lot of other writers, could’ve used a couple reams of paper to draft his work before committing it to more permanent form.
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