Boécio

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (c.480–525/6)

Boethius was a principal transmitter of classical Greek logic from Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists to the schoolmen of the medieval Latin West. His contemporaries were largely unimpressed by his learned activities, and his writings show him to have been a lonely, rather isolated figure in a world where the old Roman aristocrats were struggling to maintain high literary culture in an Italy controlled by barbarous and bibulous Goths, whose taste in music and hairgrease Boethius found painful.

Boethius himself was born into a patrician family in Rome, but was orphaned and raised instead by Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, a rich Christian heir to a distinguished pagan line; Boethius later married the latter’s daughter, Rusticiana. As well as Symmachus, Boethius had a small circle of educated friends, including the Roman deacon John (who probably became Pope John I, 523–6), who shared his enthusiasm for logical problems. The Gothic king of Italy at Ravenna, Theoderic, had met high culture during his education at Constantinople and made use of experienced Roman aristocrats as administrators. He employed Boethius to design a sundial for the Burgundian king and also a waterclock, specimens of advanced technology intended to impress a barbarian; he also sent a harpist to Clovis, the Frankish king, no doubt intended to soften the latter’s bellicose spirit.

By 507 Boethius had gained the title ‘patrician’ and received letters addressed to ‘your magnitude’. Symmachus was in a position to promote his public career. He was nominated consul for the year 510, a position without political power but of high standing and requiring large disbursements of private wealth; it also carried the perquisite that the consul’s name stood on all dated documents for that year. In 522 his two sons were installed as consuls, a promotion that gave their father intense pride and pleasure, and he took up seriously the political post of Master of the Offices. In this capacity, his determination to eliminate corruption earned him numerous enemies among both Goths and his fellow Roman aristocrats. His relations with the courtiers at Ravenna became disastrous.

Boethius’ fall came when he rashly defended a senator who had been delated to King Theoderic for conducting treasonable correspondence with persons high in the court of the emperor at Constantinople. There is no improbability in the notion that, along with other Roman aristocrats, Boethius would have preferred to be rid of the crude Goths and to see Theoderic replaced by a ruler congenial to the emperor. His great erudition had aroused fears that he was engaged in occult practices dangerous to the Ravenna dynasty. In 524 or early 525, Boethius was imprisoned at Pavia (Ticinum). Here, while awaiting the execution already decreed against him, he composed his masterpiece, De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) .

De consolatione philosophiae, a bitterly hostile attack on Theoderic prefacing a philosophical discussion of innocent suffering and the problem of evil, must have been smuggled out of prison, no doubt with the aid of gold coins from Rusticiana or Symmachus. In the ninth century, the work captured the imagination of Alcuin at the court of Charlemagne, became a standard textbook in schools and was set on the way to being one of the greatest books of medieval culture, especially popular among laymen.

Boethius’ earlier works have been the preserve of more specialized readers, especially concerned with the history of ancient philosophy. His stated original intention was to educate the West by translating all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to supply explanatory commentaries on many of their writings. That was too ambitious. He did not proceed beyond some of the logical works (Organon) of Aristotle, prefaced by a commentary on a Latin translation of Porphyry’s Isagōgē(Introduction) made in the fourth century by Marius Victorinus, an African teaching in Rome, and then by a second commentary on a translation of the same text made by himself. This commentary underlay the medieval debates on universals. He also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories and two commentaries on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. In addition, Boethius adapted Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Arithmetic for Latin readers, Nicomachus’ introduction to music as a liberal art, a commentary on Cicero’s Topics, a short treatise ‘On Division’, important treatises on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms and a further tract on different kinds of ‘topic’.

Intricate theological debates between Rome and Constantinople convinced him that a trained logician could contribute clarification, and he composed four theological tractates on the doctrines of the Trinity and the person of Christ, concentrating on logical problems. In addition, a fifth tract became a statement of orthodox belief without much reference to logical implications. The five pieces, or Opuscula sacra, became hardly less influential than De consolatione philosophiae, especially from the twelfth century onwards. We hear of critics who thought contemporary theologians knew more about Boethius than about the Bible.

1 Life

Boethius was born in Rome into a wealthy Christian family of senatorial standing, in an age when barbarian soldiers ruled and the old aristocratic families had yielded power to them, yet remained indispensable to their Gothic masters for the good order of civil administration. Under the rule of the Ostrogoth king Theoderic, the old Roman families continued to assert their Roman-ness by the study and re-editing of classics of Latin literature – Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca and so on – but also by retaining a politically hazardous contact with the eastern Roman emperor in Constantinople. Boethius’ father died when Boethius himself was young, and he was taken in by Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, whose daughter Rusticiana he later married.

The best-educated person of his time in the West, he could read Greek, even if not quite fluently, and his works are rich in literary allusions and reminiscences. He was well read in the Neoplatonic commentators on the logical and other writings of Aristotle, especially Porphyry and Proclus. He was also familiar with at least some of the major writings of Augustine of Hippo, and wrote five theological tractates (Opuscula sacra), four of which are devoted to clarifying logical problems in orthodox Catholic doctrine, especially in regard to the doctrines of the person of Christ and the divine Trinity. The quest for acceptable language to express Christian belief on these themes had a bearing on the break in communion between the papacy and the patriarchate of Constantinople from 484 to 518. Boethius and his circle of aristocratic friends in Italy were concerned to heal this breach, and this aspiration led him to attempt to use his dialectical skills to define the terms more closely than had been done previously. The set of five tracts on theology provided influential themes for exegesis by commentators in medieval times, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including Thomas Aquinas . However, the contacts with Constantinople and the religious disagreements between the Arian Theoderic and the Orthodox Emperor Justin also played a part in bringing about Boethius’ death. To Dante, he was a martyr and hero, and on 23 October 1883 his veneration as a saint was authorized at Pavia.

In his twenties, Boethius embarked on a programme of translation, commentary and adaptation to make available to the Latin West the logic of Aristotle and the standard Greek texts on the four mathematical ‘arts’, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, for which he coined the term ‘quadrivium’, parallel to the ‘trivium’ of grammar (that is, literature), rhetoric and dialectic. Soon, King Theoderic was inviting him to revise the coinage system, to design a waterclock and sundial to send to the Burgundian king Gundobald and to review the system of weights and measures. He was asked to select a harpist to send to Clovis the Frankish king. His intellectual powers and the patronage of his powerful father-in-law Symmachus launched him on a meteoric career in the civil administration. He was nominated consul for 510; his young sons were consuls for 522, when he also delivered a panegyric on Theoderic (a text now lost but known to Cassiodorus). In the same year he became Master of the Offices, a post of considerable power, from which he tried to root out bribery and corruption in the bureaucracy, thereby ensuring that he made many enemies. He understood himself to be following Plato’s principle that philosophers must accept government posts since, if they do not do so, wicked gangsters take over.

In 519 Theoderic’s heir presumptive died, and speculation about his successor was rife. Boethius rashly defended another senator suspected of a correspondence with Constantinople, an act regarded by King Theoderic as treasonable. In the Eastern empire the new emperor Justin, guided by his nephew Justinian, had a programme of suppressing heresy to give social cohesion, and the sects being harassed included the Arians. However, Theoderic and his Gothic soldiers had received their faith from Arian missionaries. The eastern Roman imperial policy of intolerance therefore appeared to Theoderic at Ravenna as an ambition to eliminate both heresy and Goths in Italy. Tension became high, and Boethius was accused by other Roman aristocrats, keen perhaps to dissociate themselves from someone suspected of dangerously pro- Byzantine sentiment, and was imprisoned at Pavia (Ticinum) and sentenced to death. During his many months awaiting execution he wrote De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) . The scorn and hatred for Theoderic and other powerful Goths shown in the first book of this work, which was probably smuggled out of prison by his wife and other influential friends, proves that he was not writing an ingratiating work to submit to Theoderic in hope of a reprieve.

In effect, Boethius in his prison was a hostage under deteriorating conditions, being used by Theoderic in an unsuccessful attempt to restrain Byzantine political and religious aspirations. Late in 525 or possibly early in 526 he was subjected to vile tortures and battered to death. Under Theoderic’s anger his father-in-law Symmachus and his intimate friend Pope John I also lost their lives. A Ravenna chronicler, the so- called Anonymus Valesianus, thought that Arian heresy had addled the king’s brain and deprived him of his wits. The Byzantine historian Procopius reports a story that Theoderic was haunted by guilt and died in bitter remorse (on 30 August 526). The king may well have come to perceive that the killing of Boethius and others had played into Constantinople’s hands, enabling the Byzantine emperor to undermine the general admiration hitherto felt in Italy for Gothic government in cooperation with the old Roman families. Boethius’ tomb is in the church of Ciel d’Oro at Pavia.

2 Works

De consolatione philosophiae (in late Latin consolatio came to mean help or support) owes its survival to being discovered in the ninth century, probably by Alcuin (see Carolingian renaissance), and was to become Boethius’ most widely read work. Pervaded by passionate feeling, composed in a sophisticated Latin in alternating passages of verse and prose and in the last two books handling complex philosophical ideas such as, for example, divine providence, human freedom, eternity and time, the work became a major classic of western literature. The emergence of the De consolatione philosophiae and of the Opuscula sacra in the ninth century, followed soon after by the logical works, made Boethius’ writings important in medieval education. Boethius taught good morality and fine Latinity in an age when both were hard to get. From this time onwards there survive a number of commentaries on the De consolatione philosophiae, as much concerned with style and metre as with the content of the argument. That initially the primary function of the work was educational is illustrated by manuscripts of the Latin text with marginal notes in vernacular languages. De consolatione also attracted vernacular translators; in England these included King Alfred in the ninth century and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth. The earliest of several German translations is by Notker of St Gallen circa 1010; Jean de Meun translated the work into medieval French in the late thirteenth century, and Jacob Vilt of Bruges translated it into Dutch in 1462. Queen Elizabeth I was among the later translators in England. In the Byzantine world, a Greek translation of De consolatione philosophiae was produced by Maximos Planudes (1260–1310), the humanist and monk who also produced a Greek version of Augustine on the Trinity. His translations reflected his support for the contemporary effort by Emperor Michael VIII to avert further military aggression from the West by ending the schism between Constantinople and Rome.

De consolatione philosophiae’s first book protests that its author was innocent of the charges brought against him based on forged letters. Then, in contemplation of his hopeless position, the work moves on to a philosophical vindication of the goodness of providence, even in a world where the just are not rewarded with prosperity and the wicked are allowed power. De consolatione is a clearly religious work written by a Christian, and yet it is not a Christian work in the sense that it contains nothing about the forgiveness of sins or redemption. Nevertheless, while turns of phrase are much more Neoplatonic than Christian, there is one clear quotation from the Bible (III pr.12. 23–4). There Boethius expresses special pleasure at the fact that the lady Philosophy uses some words from the Wisdom of Solomon, admittedly to reinforce a truth of natural, not revealed, theology. As the title indicates, the work sets out to present the philosophical arguments for a Platonic theodicy, a subject to which all Platonists needed to give some attention and which in late antiquity was specially studied not only by Proclus but also by Hierocles of Alexandria (see Neoplatonism ).

The Opuscula sacra regard faith and reason as independent but parallel and compatible ways of attaining to higher metaphysical truths, and the independent validity of logical reasoning is also an underlying presupposition throughout De consolatione. The apparently conscious reticence of De consolatione about Christianity led to conjectures, beginning in the eighteenth century, that perhaps the Opuscula sacra were by a different author. More recently it has been proposed that, under the stress of his misfortunes and perhaps in disappointment that the Pope and bishops were impotent to help him, Boethius abandoned Christianity and in his last work wrote as a pagan apostate. The manner of the citation from the Wisdom of Solomon makes the last conjecture inherently unlikely, and the old assumption that De consolatione presents Neoplatonic philosophy while the Opuscula sacra do not fails to withstand critical examination. In any event a fragment of Cassiodorus records subjects on which Boethius had written, and these include ‘a book on the Holy Spirit and some dogmatic chapters and a book against Nestorius’. Cassiodorus, who succeeded Boethius immediately as Master of the Offices, clearly understood him to be a believer. The intention of the De consolatione philosophiae is to explore the philosophical arguments in defence of belief in providence, where, if there is authority, it is located in Plato. Boethius had certainly read the three studies of providence written by Proclus, and in De consolatione I pr.4.30 cites loosely from Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Parmenides: ‘If there is a god, whence comes evil? Whence comes good, if there is not?’ There are also themes from Proclus in the Opuscula sacra. In writing on the Trinity, Boethius uses the analysis of the relation between identity and difference discussed by Plato (§§15–16) in the Sophist and the Parmenides and thereafter by Proclus in his commentary on the Parmenides. The face that meets us in the Consolatione is identical with that of the Opuscula sacra .

Of the five opuscula on Christian theology, the fourth ‘on Catholic Faith’ stands apart and, as early as Reginbert of Reichenau in the ninth century, has been thought by some to belong to a different author. However, the manuscript tradition shows that it formed part of the corpus from a very early stage, and its diction is demonstrably Boethian. It states what believers accept on authority, succinctly summarizing Augustinian doctrine, and contains no allusion to the logical problems which mark the other four opuscula. The tractate ‘Against Eutyches and Nestorius’ is among Boethius’ most original pieces, addressed to the confusions of thought and language in the debate about the unity of the person of Christ which, since the council of Chalcedon in 451, had split the Greek churches. Successive attempts at formulas of reconciliation angered the popes by implications that the controversy had not been fully settled by Pope Leo the Great. Boethius discerned confusion over the terms ‘nature’ and ‘person’, defining the latter as ‘the individual substance of a rational nature’. In his second commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione , ‘person’ is the incommunicable quality of a human individual. The third tractate answers questions put by John (probably the future Pope John I) arising out of another paper entitled Hebdomads (Groups of Seven) . A highly Neoplatonic piece, without theology, it inquires ‘how substances are good in that they exist, yet are not substantial goods’. The influence of Proclus is pervasive. The second tractate on the Trinity illuminates the belief that God is one, yet three (in a way that Augustine thought hard to define in the traditional terms such as person or substance) by using the observation that to say two entities are ‘the same’ implies some distinction between them. Identity and difference are mutually related concepts.

De consolatione philosophiae reflects a mind soaked not only in classical Latin poetry but also in the arguments and philosophical methods of Aristotle and his Neoplatonic commentators. Boethius’ declared programme was to translate all the works of Plato and Aristotle. He was persuaded by the contention of Porphyry (mirrored also in Augustine’s Contra academicos (Against the Academicians) ) that in the basic essentials Plato and Aristotle were not in disagreement. Dialectic had long shared with grammar (that is, the study of literature) and rhetoric an important place in the trivium of elementary education. However, dialectic could claim more, even that it was an indispensable instrument in all mental skills. The ‘liberal arts’ (the skills necessary for the education of a gentleman) included not only the trivium but also the four mathematical ‘arts’, arithmetic, music, geometry and (theoretical) astronomy. For these four, Boethius coined the term ‘quadrivium’. In Platonic and Pythagorean education these were skills which trained the mind to cope with immaterial realities.

Boethius’ intention to translate Plato came to nothing, but from 504 onwards he did serious work on Aristotelian logic. Porphyry’s Isagōgē(Introduction) to this subject had been translated into Latin by Marius Victorinus, an African who taught in Rome in the middle years of the fourth century and who had also translated Aristotle’s Categories and some other works of Porphyry and Plotinus. The Isagōgē, written in the late third century (see Porphyry), was the standard preface to the study of Aristotelian logic and was generally used in the Neoplatonic schools; Greek Neoplatonists wrote commentaries on it. Boethius used Victorinus’ version as his basis for a commentary but, as he wrote, became increasingly and justifiably critical of it; so, for a second commentary, he produced his own version. He also produced his own translations of Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, and provided them with commentaries. In the case of De interpretatione there were two commentaries, one short and simple and the other full-length. He also translated the Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations, and his notes on the Prior Analytics have been preserved. Porphyry’s first commentary on the Categories largely served as his model for this; Boethius does not appear to have known Porphyry’s second exposition, but he had access to the commentary by his own contemporary Simplicius . Much labour has been expended on the determination of Boethius’ sources, and here it must suffice to say that numerous parallels of thought and language show his intellectual milieu to be identical with that of the eastern Neoplatonists and their commentaries on the logical works of Porphyry and Aristotle. A constant feature of his translations was the desire to be meticulously accurate.

Boethius’ treatises on logic overlapped in some degree with his commentaries. He wrote De divisione (On Division) (that is, on the classification of ideas), De syllogismo categorico (On Categorical Syllogisms) expounding the Prior Analytics, De hypotheticis syllogismis (On Hypothetical Syllogisms) harmonizing Aristotle and the Stoics, De topicis differentiis (On Topical Differences) and a commentary on Cicero’s Topics , transmitted incomplete. Boethius also mentions some scholia of his on Aristotle’s Physics , which have not survived. In these he probably drew on Simplicius’ huge commentary.

Boethius’ commentaries amass the opinions of numerous previous exegetes of Aristotle, often borrowing such matter from Porphyry who, as far as the earlier authors are concerned, had done most of the work already. One cannot assume that Boethius had himself read every author he cites, but it is probable that he had access to manuscripts of others beside Porphyry and Proclus. J. Shiel ( 1958) ingeniously but controversially suggested that he may have worked from a single codex of Aristotle’s Organon with wide margins filled with summaries of the opinions of commentators, in the manner of the contemporary biblical catenae. It is in any event non-controversial that as a logician, Boethius did not set out to be original or independent of the Greek authorities, whose work he was ‘sweating’ to make available to the Latin world. At the same time he was something more than a simple transcriber of others, and wrote as a man personally engaged by the logical problems on which he was writing. The historian of ancient logic has good reason to be grateful for all that he preserves of which otherwise there would be insufficient or even no record. The treatise De hypotheticis syllogismis is more informative than any other ancient source about this part of Aristotelian dialectic. His contemporaries did not manifest much gratitude for his educational labours, and he often had occasion to refer to unkind critics. In his commentary on the Categories , he remarked candidly that with the general neglect of the liberal arts, much of the knowledge acquired by past generations would soon be lost. Nevertheless, we hear also of a small circle of influential admirers.

The curriculum of Neoplatonic education influenced him to produce adaptations of the Arithmetic of the second-century Pythagorean Nicomachus of Geras (Iamblichus’ exegesis of which is extant), and of Nicomachus’ treatise on music, the latter with some additional dependence on the Harmonics of Ptolemy (extant also). In both cases, Boethius’ Greek models survive. The Neoplatonists accepted the traditional view that the study of the mathematical arts prepares the mind for the contemplation of immaterial realities. They followed Plato’s Timaeus in seeing harmonic ratios and exact proportionality located in the very structure of the cosmos: for them, the distance of the planets from the earth was determined by musical theory (see Plato §16 ). One does not go to Boethius’ work on music to learn anything of the practice of making ordered sound. His latent theme is the providential harmony of the heavens and the seasons, the mathematical principles that operate in music and hold the diverse elements together in the grand consonance of the world-soul, and that are therefore a clue to the secret concord of God and nature in a world where the only source of discord is the evil in the human heart.

Cassiodorus records an introduction to geometry by Boethius, but the work has not survived. Medieval writers filled the gap in his name. The early sections of De consolatione philosophiae imply some serious study of astronomy, perhaps even that his expert knowledge in this field had been brought into the accusations against him, as if he had been using astrological almanacs to predict the future succession after Theoderic. A sentence in a letter drafted by Cassiodorus may mean that Boethius had made some adaptation of Ptolemy on astronomy, but there is no trace of the work surviving.

3 Logic

In presenting Aristotelian logic to the Latin world, Boethius’ first task was to explicate the Isagōgē of Porphyry , who was interested in showing the compatibility of Aristotle’s dialectic with Platonic metaphysics. The book Porphyry wrote on that agreement is lost, but its influence is apparent in Augustine and in the Greek Neoplatonic commentators (see Neoplatonism). He was concerned to rebut Christian polemic against the disagreements of the philosophical schools and to establish agreement among his own authorities. A subject on which Platonists and Aristotelians differed was that of universals. Are they prior to particulars, or is it the other way round? If nothing exists beyond particulars, must not the mind find knowledge impossible? At least the mind needs to have the capacity to see together things that are somehow linked, and to hold related particulars together under a common species or genus (see Particulars; Universals). The issue required some treatment, especially in Boethius’ second commentary on Porphyry; but he declined to give any verdict between Plato and Aristotle, saying that this question was one for more advanced inquiries. At least he was able to follow the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias , who was ready to grant that if the universal has no existence, there can be no particulars.

Boethius’ commentary on the Categories has a preface to Book II which firmly dates the work in 510, Boethius’ consular year. He expresses regret that his public social duties have interfered with his educational task. He takes Aristotle’s intention to be the examination of verbal distinctions and the provision of an elementary introduction to lead on to the higher truths of his metaphysics. Here and throughout, dependence on the extant but incompletely transmitted commentary by Porphyry is evident. There is also, however, an explicit use of material taken directly or indirectly from the lost commentary by Iamblichus, whose work was also drawn upon in the surviving exegesis by Proclus’ pupil Simplicius .

Aristotle’s De interpretatione was regarded in antiquity as an exceptionally opaque work. From a mass of ancient commentaries, the two by Boethius and that of Ammonius of Alexandria are the principal survivors. The work of Porphyry is once again a dominant guide. A substantial part of Boethius’ second commentary concerns the tracing of interconnections between an object (res), thinking about that object (intellectus), talking about it (vox) and then putting the spoken thought into writing (litterae). The second commentary also discusses a range of questions that had long presented difficulty. For instance, people can have the same general conceptions of justice and goodness; but if they then differ on what in particular is just and good, does that establish moral relativism or merely human fallibility? Aristotle’s ninth chapter (the sea-fight tomorrow) provoked a large debate on future contingents and modal logic. In using the terms ‘contingens’ and ‘contingentia’, Boethius was anticipated by Marius Victorinus . The words were needed for matters which might be other than they are, especially where the chances are even either way.

Boethius shared the Peripetatic aversion to the Stoics’ surrender to determinism (see Stoicism). Necessity controls the heavenly bodies; but in this world, human wills are capable of acting after rational deliberation. In Aristotle’s vocabulary, ‘necessity’ is a term to use for what is invariably the case, and therefore not for individual historical events. The debate about determinism, partly paralleled in Alexander of Aphrodisias (in On Fate), has a theological bearing, partly because of belief in oracles and prophecy. Do inspired prophets make predictions of future events, or do they foresee trouble coming and, like a physician’s prognosis or a weather forecast, utter sage warnings advising on actions to avoid? And if what they foresee is correctly discerned, is it their inspired knowing which in any sense makes the event fated to occur, or can it be said that the gods’ knowledge of contingent things is itself contingent? Boethius’ second commentary on De interpretatione therefore anticipates some of the material in the last book of the De consolatione philosophiae , where divine foreknowledge is a sign of future things but not in itself a cause, just as human beings can see what is going to happen without making it occur.

The treatise De hypotheticis syllogismis has attracted much attention, in part because of Boethius’ awareness of the ambiguity surrounding conditional statements of the form ‘If…, then… ’. The characteristic account distinguishes hypothetical syllogisms which are affirmative (in the form, ‘if A is, B is; if A is not, B is’) from those which are negative (in the form, ‘if A is, B is not; if A is not, B is not’). The consequent is the decider whether the hypothetical syllogism is affirmative or negative. Porphyry wrote on this subject, and perhaps Boethius made use of his work, which is not extant. The detail with which the subject is treated is significant of the strength of his commitment to the labour of convincing a society in cultural decline of the necessity of logic for clear statement: ‘Those who reject logic are bound to make mistakes.’ His Greek Neoplatonic masters had already taught him that in this field Aristotle was the supreme guide: ‘Aristotelica auctoritas’, he writes in the second commentary on De interpretatione (218.26). This could readily be fitted into a Neoplatonic conception of the cosmos or even more readily into a Platonism from which Christian convictions had purged away some of the more mythological elements, such as reincarnation (see Logic, medieval ).

4 Opuscula sacra

Debate in the Church from about ad 370 had revolved around the correct and adequate way to express (a) that Christ is both divine and human, and therefore combines ‘two natures’, and (b) that nevertheless Christ is one person and the union of divine and human in him is necessary to his work of redemption. How could the singleness of person be affirmed if a determination to safeguard the reality and spontaneity of Christ’s humanity imposed an inextinguishable duality of natures? Boethius was not the first writer to try the use of Porphyry’s logical terminology in the attempt to alleviate this formidable conundrum. Cyril of Alexandria, a prominent fifth-century critic of those who held an unmitigated duality of natures, had already employed Porphyrian terms. However, there was still much defining and clarifying to be done. There remained thorny problems of inconsistency, for example between the meaning of terms expressing the doctrine of the Trinity and the meaning of the same terms of Christology. In both, the words ‘nature’ and ‘hypostasis’ were current, but not always in the same sense in the two contexts. Pietistic fideists who liked to pride themselves on the supernatural faith of Galilean fishermen could look down on the clever logicians who seemed to think Aristotle could better express their religious beliefs. In the West, the stress on the use of papal authority to determine controversies produced a comparable insistence both on submissive adherence to what had been canonically defined by the ecumenical council of Chalcedon (451) and confirmed (after some hesitations) by Pope Leo I, and on resistance to any further explanations or compromises made to placate the Monophysite critics of Chalcedon’s language. However, the logicians saw correctly that the methods and terms of the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle could do a little to clarify some obscurities and muddles (see Patristic philosophy ).

Augustine (§3) had proclaimed that theologians could not safely neglect dialectic. The fifth tract in Boethius’ Opuscula , dedicated to John, a Roman deacon (probably the future Pope John I), was evoked by a critical moment in the debate at Rome with an immediate bearing on East–West relations in the Church and society. The then Pope, Symmachus (498–514), had execrable relations with the Byzantine emperor Anastasius, who found papal insults hard to bear, and with the patriarchs of Constantinople. Probably in 513 a Greek bishop, no doubt in the name of a group of bishops, had written to Symmachus affirming acceptance of Chalcedon’s language and approval of Pope Leo I, but in the qualified formula ‘in two natures and of two natures’, and rejecting the dissenting Monophysite formula ‘one nature after the union’. The Greek letter provoked consternation and a storm at Rome in a meeting attended by Boethius and other senators. Reflection on the incapacity of those present to define their terms led him to write the fifth tractate, entitled ‘Against Eutyches and Nestorius’ (Eutyches being for one nature, Nestorius for two, both in extreme and radical forms). The ‘in and of’ formula had been used by Pope Gelasius (492–6), but in 512–13 was unwelcome to the advisers of Pope Symmachus.

It is instructive that Boethius unreservedly welcomed the two prepositions. Close parallels to his language and method appear in Greek writers a few years after his time. Four definitions of ‘nature’ are given:

(a) ‘Nature consists of those things which, since in some way they exist, can be grasped by the mind’. (This language is found in Ammonius’ exegesis of Porphyry’s Isagōgē, 2.22.)

(b) ‘Nature is either that which can act or that which can be acted upon’. (Plato, Phaedrus 270d; Sophist 247d–e; Aristotle, Topics VI 10.148a18.)

(c) ‘Nature is the principle of motion per se and not as an accident’. (Aristotle, Physics II 1.192b20; VIII 4.255a32–; Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus I 2.20.)

(d) ‘Nature is the specific difference imparting form to each individual thing’. (Aristotle, Physics II 1.193a28–31; Alexander of Aphrodisias, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics p.357. 25–.)

A definition of ‘person’ is more difficult. Person is subordinate to nature, as particular to general. ‘Person’ can be used only of a substance, and then only of a being endowed with mind and reason. Christian usage applies the term persona to God, human beings and angels. Therefore the definition of person is ‘the individual substance of rational nature’. This is the equivalent of the Greek term hypostasis. The Greek ousia (being), on the other hand, is used of the universal, with hypostasis used of the particular. The main thrust of Boethius’ argument is to show that ‘nature’ and ‘person’ are very distinct terms, and therefore that ‘two natures’ does not imply two persons and ‘one person’ does not imply one nature (in other words, denying the propositions associated with Nestorius and Eutyches, respectively). In connection with the Incarnation, it is impious absurdity to think either that the immutable God can be transformed into humanity or that the reverse is possible (see Incarnation and Christology §1). Change is possible only to entities which share a common substrate of matter (Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption 226a10). Nothing corporeal in genus can fall under an incorporeal species. Nevertheless, Boethius concedes a place to some of the language of devotion invoked by the critics of Chalcedon’s ‘two natures’, who wanted to proclaim the worship of the one person of Christ; so, he can say Christ is ‘one of the Trinity’, ‘God suffered’, and therefore it is acceptable to say ‘both in and of two natures’. The effect of Boethius’ argument, (which must have been unwelcome to Pope Symmachus and perhaps to his successor Hormisdas (514–523)), is to justify a middle path between the extremes, defending Chalcedon’s preposition in, yet also conceding the of designed to reconcile its more moderate critics. Thus, Boethius was advocating a position congenial to a powerful group at Constantinople and anticipating the policies of Justinian, who became Byzantine emperor a year or two after Boethius’ death but who was highly influential before his accession.

The first of the Opuscula, ‘How the Trinity is one God not three’, juxtaposes Catholic orthodoxy with Aristotle’s map of ascending human knowledge (Metaphysics 1026a18), also set out early in Boethius’ first commentary on Porphyry’s Isagōgē. The study of nature deals with concrete physical entities. Mathematics is a half-way house towards the immaterial abstract realm of theology, where God is form without matter, one substance, indeed Being itself. In God there is no number, no multiplicity; and if ‘substance’ is a term applied to God, that must imply no substrate to accidents. Following Marius Victorinus, Boethius affirms God, Father, Son and Spirit to be et ipse et idem (the same, not identical). The sameness does not exclude differentiation in terms. The ten categories of Aristotle apply only to the realm of sense, not to that of divine forms. God transcends time and space; the everlastingness of the cosmos is other than the eternity of God. The one category which helps the speculative theologian is relation, since ‘father’ and ‘son’ are relational terms. The conventional term ‘person’ is in this context a source of confusion (as Augustine had already said). However, the language about sameness and differentiation within identity found in the Parmenides and in Proclus’ commentary on it can offer more illumination. Sentences about the contrast between divine eternality and the everlasting temporal duration of the cosmos anticipate the section on the same subject in the De consolatione (V pr.6 ) and are closely related to the propositions in Plotinus III 7.

5 De consolatione philosophiae

By using the form of alternate verse and prose, Boethius was able to deploy all his intellectual resources, literary and philosophical. The work takes the form of a dialogue between Boethius, in a prison which is symbolic of his spiritual condition, and a visionary lady who is a personification of Philosophy and addresses her sick patient in discourse designed to give him fortitude in the indignity and injustice that have befallen him. The setting owes a conscious debt to the Phaedo of Plato, where Socrates’ prison discourse (I pr.3) contrasts the immortality of the soul with the trivialities of life in a mortal material body and enables him to face the death sentence with total serenity. The dank cell and chains are symbolic of Boethius’ all too earthbound mind. The lady Philosophy has a robe embroidered with a ladder connecting the initials Ξ and Π (for ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’, or contemplative), and she will lead him upwards on a gradual ascent. The Π is also the letter on his prison dress standing for Thanatos: he is to die. Gradualism is essential to good medical treatment, and she cannot apply all her remedies at once. The verse passages ease the reader’s path but are not presented as light entertainment; the Muses of amusement and love (in his youth Boethius wrote some erotic poems) are sharply dismissed. The poetic sections are in content integrated with the prose argument. In the first four books all the verse is uttered by Boethius; from V.3, Philosophy becomes the poetic speaker, adopting this form of address as a concession to his still weak and frail spiritual condition. However, the verses given to Boethius are also an ascent of the soul. At the central hinge-point of the whole work the famous poem O qui perpetua (‘You who govern the world by perpetual reason… ’) versifies the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus interpreted with the help of Proclus’ commentary on that dialogue (III m.9).

Book I states Boethius’ problem; an innocent person is suffering gross injustice. He complains of the way in which, as in the case of Seneca, a brilliantly successful career at the summit of the administration of government has been shattered by treacherous colleagues among his fellow Roman aristocrats and by the cruel tyranny of Theoderic. However, as the work proceeds Boethius himself fades to become a secondary and background figure, while the real exposition is that of Philosophy. She has to remind him of what he has forgotten, namely that power, wealth and honour are secondary matters at best, useful if they enable the possessor to do good to others but otherwise irrelevant to spiritual wisdom.

The second book uses mainly Stoic themes which had already been domesticated with the Neoplatonic scheme of things in writers such as Hierocles and Proclus. The pain of loss is made endurable by a psychological process of adjusting oneself to accept with resignation what cannot be changed. Those in exile must tell themselves that the wretched place to which they have been sent is home to the people who normally live there. To brood nostalgically for a lost past happiness is a peculiarly awful form of misery. Worldly secular honours are precarious and transient, dependent on others and wholly relative to the limited society in which they happen to be held. A holder of high office becomes a nobody beyond the imperial frontier. A philosopher when insulted should remain silent and not answer back. A wise person knows that in death all human beings are equal. Book 2 ends with a poem in praise of the love which binds together the diverse elements in the cosmos and averts disintegration. Human beings would be happy if only the love by which the stars are ruled could reign in their minds. The poem is a bridge to the third book, which moves from Stoic to Platonic vindications of providence.

The third book, after O qui perpetua, seeks to establish the identity of the supreme Good with Good ‘than whom nothing better can be thought’, employing an Aristotelian argument from the imperfection of every individual good. The ladder of goods, which cannot have an infinite number of steps, has its end in the perfect Good which is also complete happiness. A good person participates in that goodness, which justifies the language of a deification synonymous with salvation. Individual goods give happiness not piecemeal but as a single totality. Boethius sees this principle as pointing to the truth that the supreme good is the One, and from this derives the universal experience of all living things seeking to avert disintegration and to survive by maintaining unity. In the cosmos the forces for disintegration are kept in check by providence; ‘whatever holds everything together is what I mean by God’ (III 12.25). God is Being itself (esse), and evil is a deficiency of being, a nothingness, a privation belonging to an inferiority in the hierarchy of being (see God, concepts of ).

The fourth book depends on Plato’s Gorgias (470–6): the wicked are the most miserable, and punishment benefits them by purification. Goodness is an essential element in true happiness. To the question as to why providence does not reward the virtuous with good and the wicked with evil, the classic Platonic answer is that virtue is the only really good fortune and is its own reward (see Good, theories of the §1 ). That presupposes some freedom of choice, and that in turn raises the question of providence and fate. From Plotinus onwards, the Neoplatonists held that providence controls the higher celestial order of things, while fate is the inexorable chain of cause and effect in this lower world. Like Proclus, Boethius thinks this fate may be controlled by ‘angels’ (a term as much as home in pagan Neoplatonists as in Christian writers) or by the world-soul or by the stars. The lower one’s position in the great chain of being, the more tightly one is bound by fate. Providence is like the unmoved centre of a great wheel or sphere (a simile also in Plotinus and Proclus). Behind all change is the unmoved mover.

The fifth and last book takes Boethius to higher flights in the discussion of providence (see Providence). He begins from Aristotle’s description of chance (Physics II 4–5) as an event with a traceable cause, yet an event falling outside the intention of human wills whose purposes are otherwise. As in the unexpected discovery of buried treasure, the action of digging had different intentions but another chain of causation intervened. For the Neoplatonists and for Boethius, such meetings of independent lines of causation are ultimately under the care of divine providence, not of a blind determinism. ‘Luck’ or ‘fortune’ is a way of talking about this hidden power of providence to surprise us. But if that were to mean that every event occurs within a closed system of causes, where is there room for determination by free choice and deliberation? Nature does nothing in vain, and human beings are not for nothing endowed with powers of deliberation enabling them to make choices between different options. This is inherent in being a rational being. Admittedly, Boethius does not think all members of the human race possess equal powers of exercising free choice. Moreover, a Platonist who had also read some Augustine, as Boethius demonstrably had, would not think freedom of choice neutral between truth and error, right and wrong; real freedom is to be liberated from the body’s downward pull into error and mistaken judgements. So there are degrees of freedom, higher to those who are contemplating the divine mind, lower to those who slide down to the world of physical senses, reaching complete loss of freedom when vice has damaged the power of reason.

Free choice implies that not all events are wholly predictable. Some are contingent; they might turn out otherwise, and that is difficult to reconcile with perfect foreknowledge. At the initial stage of discussion it seems to Boethius more implausible than it appears to the lady Philosophy to hold that human wills do not make their choices because divine foreknowledge has foreseen them and cannot err, but rather that an omniscient divine foreknowledge foresees what choices human beings will make. After all, to know somebody’s character intimately is to predict very accurately how they will react to a situation. A fortiori this must be true of the divine being who knows all hearts. Nevertheless, if there is contingency in the choices made, divine foreknowledge will, unthinkably, be in error if the choices are taken to be certain when they are inherently uncertain. To maintain that divine foreknowledge, which by definition cannot err, excludes indeterminacy seems to abolish distinctions of moral value between virtue and vice and undermines any sense in either hope or prayer for the avoidance of disaster. (The reference here to prayer does not step outside the conventions of Neoplatonic language, and does not have to be Christian.) The problem, long ago discussed by Cicero in his book on divination, is declared to be one on which Boethius has bestowed much study. The difficulty is alleviated by recalling that to foresee an event is not causative of its occurrence, that the finite mind is out of its depth when the foreknowledge in question is divine and, crucially, that everything which is known is grasped not according to its inherent nature or power but relative to the capacity of the knowing mind (V 4.25). Foreknowledge of an event is not a sign that an event is absolutely necessary unless there are other causes that bring it about, and to say God knows contingent events to be contingent does not have to mean that because many outcomes are possible even God cannot really know which is will be (see Determinism and indeterminism; Omniscience; Free will ).

On fate and destiny, Boethius had probably read the tract by Alexander of Aphrodisias where the correctness of divine foreknowledge is safeguarded by the proposition that the divine knows the contingent to be contingent and this knowing does not make the uncertain certain. Boethius, however, preferred the argument found in Iamblichus and Proclus that divine knowledge is qualitatively quite distinct from human. Events in the temporal process are indeed known to God, but divine knowledge transcends all the successiveness of past, present, and future. Divine knowing is eternal in its mode, and embraces all things and events in simultaneity without the transience inherent in this realm of sense and becoming. To speak of a divine foreknowledge suggests to our finite minds knowing beforehand, in advance. The temporal word ‘before’ is inapplicable in the case of a time-transcending divine perfection. What is before or after for limited minds is an absolute present (but not a frozen instant) for an eternal knower whose duration is paradoxically both infinite and atemporal. Both in his De trinitate and in the last section of the De consolatione philosophiae , Boethius stresses that eternality is more than mere perpetuity or everlastingness, but is ‘the simultaneous and complete possession of life without limits’ (Interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio). The definition, as Boethius himself says, derives its force from contrast with temporal and finite life. It is not presented as an original reflection, and in fact closely echoes Plotinus and Augustine (see Eternity ).

Aristotle, therefore, was not mistaken to think that the world had no beginning or end ( On the Heavens I 12.283b 26), but that does not mean it is eternal. The cosmos can be dependent for its existence on the Creator without thereby being transcendent in relation to the temporal process. This created world is not coeternal with the Creator, as Plato observed in the Timaeus (37d). Accordingly, God’s knowledge is ‘in the simplicity of his present’ and imposes no necessity on choices and events in time. Moreover, as Aristotle pointed out in the Physics (II 9), ‘necessity’ is a term with more than one meaning. There is absolute necessity, for example, that all human beings are mortal, or that the sun rises, and there is also conditional necessity: it is necessary that if a man is walking, then he are walking. For Boethius, the kind of necessity attaching to events in the foreknowledge of God is conditional, not absolute. Certain future events which are to occur by the free choice of human wills and which might occur otherwise are, in divine foreknowledge, conditionally necessary. If you change your mind and intention, you do not empty providence; divine prescience knew that that was what you were going to do. (Augustine in De civitate Dei (The City of God) makes the same point: our human wills are included in the causes known to God (V 9)).

6 Influence

Boethius was born into an aristocratic senatorial society concerned to see that the past achievements of Roman culture would not be lost now that the West was controlled by barbarians. He was not the only author to speak the language of Neoplatonism in a way that the medieval world would absorb; that he shared with Calcidius, Martianus Capella, and Macrobius (see Encyclopedists, medieval). Among that company, however, he was distinctive in belonging to a Christian family and in writing influential tractates on controverted theological questions. His masterpiece, De consolatione philosophiae , presented the theodicy of Proclus as a flying buttress to a religious statement compatible with Christian belief. This work, taken together with his translations and commentaries, taught the medieval West its first steps in logic and the meaning of inference.

In the ninth century, the Carolingian educational programme gave special prominence to De consolatione philosophiae as a medium for the teaching of prose and poetry, and this drew attention to the Opuscula sacra as well. The surviving manuscripts of Boethius written in the Carolingian age are reasonably numerous (see Carolingian renaissance). Remigius of Auxerre was first to write a commentary on the tract on the Trinity, the first of the five Opuscula. However, it was in the twelfth century that these theological tractates rose to a rank of authority. They also came to stimulate controversy. This was largely because of Gilbert de la Porrée, who became bishop of Poitiers and caused alarm both by his catechetical teaching and his commentaries on four of the Opuscula (omitting De fide catholica) (see Gilbert of Poitiers ). Conservatively minded critics were frightened when a clever logician began applying Boethian methods of argument to such transcendent subjects as the Trinity and the person of Christ. It made them anxious to be told that without qualification the divine essence is not to be called God, or that it was muddled to say that the divine nature was made flesh and assumed our human nature.

In the same century, Thierry of Chartres more cautiously commented only on the first of the Opuscula (De trinitate) and on the highly Neoplatonic third which the medievals called De hebdomadibus. Clarembald of Arras joined the critics of Gilbert, also commenting on the two tractates chosen by Thierry. The consequence of these debates, in which Thomas Aquinas was to participate in the next century, was to insert into the consciousness of the Latin West a sharper awareness of some problems inherent in the logic of traditional Christian language about God, and at the same time to arouse among the less dialectical faithful a sense of disapprobation of theologians who knew more about Boethius than about the apostles.