[Rand was an eminent American classical scholar who, in addition to writing works on such authors as Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, provided one of the most influential twentieth-century accounts of Boethius, which appears below. Originally delivered as a lecture and reprinted later with minor alterations, Rand's overview of Boethius 's life and career is placed within the political context of sixth-century A.D. Italy.]

A century of barbarism had swept like a wave over Roman civilization, or dashed against its coasts, when there suddenly appeared the most thoroughgoing philosopher, and, with the exception of St. Augustine, the most original philosopher, that Rome had ever produced. Boethius must not be considered an altogether isolated phenomenon. He lived under an Ostrogothic king, whose capital was at Ravenna, or Verona, or Pavia; and yet Theodoric, like Odovaker before him, had brought law and order into Italy; he was far more true to the Roman ideal than various of his Roman predecessors had been. After his initial deed of treachery, the base murder of his rival, for which he had abundant sanction in the acts of various emperors before him,—in fact this sort of homicidal house-cleaning had become a species of Imperial good form,—Theodoric ruled wisely and well. He was a worthy precursor of Charlemagne, who admired him. Boethius, then, was not fighting single-handed. His philosophical endeavors were in keeping with the spirit of the age, that general movement toward peace and consolidation which set in after the confusions of the fifth century, and prevailed as long as Theodoric reigned. Theodoric was an Arian, but he had the support of the Catholic clergy in his contest with Odovaker; and, though we shall note that divergence on this theological issue had unpleasant political consequences, the beginning of Theodoric's reign saw all factions of the church and the state well united.

Once on a time, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy was one of the hundred best books—one of those books that no educated man left unread. That was still the case in the eighteenth century, and had been so since the Middle Ages, in which period his influence was sovereign. As Morris puts it in the preface of his edition of Chaucer's translation of Boethius [Richard Morris (1868)], "No philosopher was so bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of Middle-Age writers as Boethius. Take up what writer you will, and you find not only the sentiments, but the very words of the distinguished old Roman." This is true in general, and it is true in great and special cases, as is testified by the names of his royal translator King Alfred, Jean de Meung, Chaucer, and Dante. Boethius was a name with which everybody had to reckon. He is one of the Founders.

The mind of Boethius presents a problem. Was he Christian or Pagan? It is rather late, in the days of Boethius, for a Pagan to have a prominent political career. How many times must the historian record the "final triumph" of Christianity? In Boethius's last utterance, his Consolation of Philosophy, the name of Christ is not mentioned, and the Holy Bible is not cited. At the same time, Boethius is apparently the author of certain theological tractates. Are these little works spurious? Or, as a Renaissance editor suggested [Glareanus], is the Consolation of Philosophy spurious? And if both are genuine, how interpret the latter work? Did Boethius in his dungeon throw over the petty complexities of theology and lapse back to Plato and Aristotle, the masters of ancient thought?

Answers have been numerous and diverse. First of all, we should take account of the political situation, and in particular, of the code of laws promulgated by Theodoric. This code is exceedingly severe. For instance, capital punishment was decreed for perjury and for the bribing of false witnesses in case the guilty party was of noble birth; if he was of low birth, the penalty was the confiscation of all his property. Here is the law against public informers, who had been a curse of the state ever since the days of Tiberius. "He who assumes the function of an informer as an ostensibly necessary act of public utility, … even so, in our opinion, ought to be thoroughly discountenanced and … in case his accusations cannot be corroborated he shall suffer death by burning." This ferocious law gave cold consolation to Boethius, as we shall see. As for Pagans, "If anyone be detected in offering sacrifice according to the Pagan rite, or if anyone be found practising the arts of a soothsayer or diviner, he shall suffer capital punishment. Anyone who is an accomplice in magic arts shall suffer confiscation of all his property, and if of high birth, be sentenced to perpetual exile, or if of low birth, suffer capital punishment." Not much inducement to be a Pagan in the days of Theodoric.

I have cited only one or two specimens, but they indicate the character of this remarkable piece of legislation. The only code more stringent that has come to my notice is one proclaimed by an undergraduate publication of Yale University not many years ago, which provided inter alia that cutting chapel should be punishable with death. I imagine that Theodoric before he got through was reminded of the wise Horace's maxim, "What profit vain laws without morals?" To put through a Constitutional amendment you must have the sentiment of the country behind you. Yet Theodoric meant to have his code enforced. At the end of it there is a vigorous statement that the laws apply to high and low, Romans and barbarians alike; the nobility is warned that there will be no respecting of persons. It is also stated that judges who cannot enforce the law shall at once report to the Emperor; "for provisions in the interest of each section of the empire," it is declared, "should be maintained by the central power."

Obviously Boethius, as man and office-holder, could not have been a professing Pagan in the days of Theodoric. But while outwardly conforming to the new faith, he might have mentally accepted something quite different, particularly after the orders of his royal master had landed him in jail. The standard historian of Greek philosophy, Zeller, can call "the noble Boethius the last representative of the ancient philosophy; for though he may have associated himself externally with the Christian Church, his real religion is philosophy." Even a Roman Catholic theologian, who presumably accepts Boethius's Christianity, assigns him a lowly place in the history of thought, as one of those who labored "merely to preserve what the past had bequeathed and to transmit the legacy to times more favorable for the development of Christian speculation." This is true so far as it goes; but it does not go very far.

The first thing that we note about Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius is his noble lineage. The Anicii were an extremely important family in the fourth century and still earlier. The first Roman senator to be converted to the new faith was an Anicius; he is celebrated in Prudentius's poem against Symmachus. The Manlii take us back to the very earliest days of Rome, while the Severini are a branch of the Severi, who rose to imperial heights. From first to last, Boethius is an aristocrat, with a sense of noblesse oblige. He was born about 480 A.D., and must have attained distinction early in both scholarship and politics. Left an orphan at an early age, he became a protégé of certain eminent men, particularly of Symmachus, and he married the latter's daughter. The mention of that name takes us back to the fourth century and the leader of the Pagans. Boethius's father-in-law was a lineal descendant of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus the opponent of Ambrose, and bore his very names. The family had renounced Paganism; in fact Symmachus and certain friends of his, members of the most exclusive circle of the nobility, were now pillars of orthodoxy and foes not only of Paganism but of the Arian heresy; the importance of this fact will become clearer as we proceed. It is a natural state of affairs; in one age as in the other, the nobles upheld the tradition, whatever that happened to be.

We think of Boethius as primarily a philosopher, snatching the moments of contemplation from a busy life devoted to the state; but his youth may have been as sentimental and poetic as that of any youth. We know that pastoral verse was among his early efforts, and he also probably wrote elegies; not elegies in a country churchyard—elegies outside his lady's window. One feels a repressed emotion in Boethius. He has absorbed poetry, as Plato had done, only in a more sombre fashion; his prevailing mood is nearer to Dante's than to Plato's. He has not Plato's divine gift of comedy.

Boethius's political relations with Theodoric start at least as early as 506—possibly 504, the date of Theodoric's entry into Rome. The monarch found his advice useful on the most varied subjects. As mechanical expert, Boethius gave directions for the construction of a water-clock for Theodoric's brother-in-law Gundobad, king of the Burgundian . As musical expert, he selected a harper for the court of Clovis the Frank. As financial expert, he helped to convict the paymaster of the Guards of an attempt to cheat the men with light coin; some writers have inferred, with no real evidence at their disposal, that Boethius was in charge of the public mint. He had an eye out for financial affairs, at any rate, for on one occasion he prevented a cornering of the wheat market. In 510, he was elevated to the consulship. The year 522 was, in external pomp, the most distinguished of his life, for his two sons were the consuls, attaining that office, like him, at an extremely early age; it was natural that the panegyric on their inauguration should be pronounced by their illustrious father. In the following year, if not before, Boethius was created magister officiorum, a high position involving constant attendance upon the king. In the next to the last year of his life, Boethius received a quite unexpected honor, conviction for high treason. He was exiled to confinement in a dungeon at Pavia, and the next year, whether 524 or 525 is uncertain, he was put to death. The execution of his father-in-law, Symmachus, took place one year later. The exact place of the philosopher's confinement was the ager Calventianus (Calvenzano) between Milan and Pavia. Tradition has it that the Lombard King Luitprand transferred his bones, and those of St. Augustine, to the cathedral at Pavia. They can be seen there at the present time. I saw them on one eventful day at five o'clock in the afternoon, having visited the birth-place of Virgil at five o'clock in the morning.

Boethius's great plan was to translate both Plato and Aristotle for the benefit of the philosophically minded of his times, when the readers of the original Greek were getting fewer and fewer. Probably he had the same dismal feelings about the future that some Classical scholars have to-day. His fears were justified, for a period of about eight centuries came on, in which virtually nobody in the western world read the works of Greek literature in the original. But let us take heart. Perhaps eight centuries from now there will be another Renaissance of Greek.

Boethius's undertaking was a large one. Jowett had quite enough of an order with Plato alone. Boethius meant to translate all Plato and all Aristotle. Furthermore, his work was not to be a mere translation. In his day, and in all ages since, Plato and Aristotle have stood for opposite types of idealism, Plato for the transcendence of the ideal and Aristotle for its immanence. This is a rough and general statement, one which many would wish to refine, but if not quite true for Plato and Aristotle, it describes well enough what the Middle Ages regarded as Platonism and Aristotelianism. Now Boethius was one of those who were dissatisfied with the tendency to divide Platonists and Aristotelians. His ultimate purpose was to show that there is no essential difference between the two schools. His idea was not, as is sometimes set forth to-day, that Aristotle was a second-rate thinker who developed into ponderous systems what Plato preferred to leave as hints, patiently dogging his thoughts, a sort of metaphysical Boswell. Boethius would rather have accepted the memorable title that Dante conferred on Aristotle, "the master of those that know."

Boethius began his great plan with a comment on a work of Porphyry's, entitled Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle. This is a natural starting-point, a consideration of the nature of reasoning, of the problem of cognition or "epistemology," and of the method of reasoning. The text used by Boethius was a translation made by Marius Victorinus, which eventually proved so unsatisfactory that he threw it away, prepared a new one of his own, and wrote a fresh commentary. He was working out his plan on a large and leisurely scale. There is a striking difference between the two commentaries. The former is put in the form of a Ciceronian dialogue. Boethius and a friend called Fabius meet at a villa out of town on the Aurelian road, and hold their very abstract conversation, on a winter's night. Never had a dialogue been given such a setting; it suggests that the passion of these friends for the eternal verities was such that they forgot that it was night and winter. But the second commentary drops this conventional device, which Boethius had found difficult to maintain, and gives straight science without palliatives. His scheme of translation is something new, and exceedingly scientific. He fears, he tells us, that Horace would not relish his method, which is to render the most trivial phrases and particles ad verbum; thus there is something even for μὲν—δὲ (quidem—vero, or quidem—autem), while the Greek ὅτιis responsible for dico—quoniam in indirect discourse.

This carefulness on the part of Boethius led to the creation of a new vocabulary for philosophy, worked out step by step in the Middle Ages and appearing in something like a final form in St. Thomas Aquinas. It is a novel and elaborate diction, admirably suited for the need. Its history has never been adequately discussed, nor has Boethius's contribution to it received the attention that it deserves. The humanists of the Renaissance understood it, in their way. "Boethius was the first," remarks Georgius Valla, "to teach us to speak barbarian." Strange to say, I think Cicero would have approved the whole business. For Cicero was also concerned in creating new philosophical terms for new ideas, and he too declared that his method was to render those terms ad verbum in language that must have shocked the purists of his day and almost shocked St. Jerome. At least Jerome cites Cicero's authority for his own inventions in his rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures, and declares that the latter were far less numerous than the "monstrosities" that the master of eloquence had devised in writings of far less compass. Time has condoned these novelties. Who to-day would think of the words quality and specific as barbarisms? But nobody was audacious enough to say qualitas before Cicero or specificus before Boethius.

By helping to create a new philosophical idiom, Boethius performed a valuable service to the development of thought in the Middle Ages. There is also a passage in his commentary on Porphyry that has often been cited as the starting-point for the most important discussion that agitated the earlier period of scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages. Boethius, after Porphyry, is speaking of the nature of universals and asks whether genera and species have a real existence? Do they subsist? And if subsisting, are they corporeal or incorporeal? If they are incorporeal, are they separate from sensible objects? He asks these questions in such a way that we can at least see that he is not a materialist. He implies his belief in the actual existence of abstract ideas. But on the issue that would enable us to class him as either Platonist or Aristotelian, he suddenly becomes silent. "'T is a lofty topic," he declares, "and one that requires further investigation." Of course, that was precisely the question with which philosophers in the early period of scholasticism started their disputations; the schools of realism and nominalism derive from the different answers given to it. Boethius's attitude of reserve—ἐποχή, or metaphysical neutrality—seemed rather cold-blooded to the fighting logicians of the twelfth century, and one of them, Godfrey of St. Victor, wrote a little poem about it.

Assidet Boetius stupens de hac lite,
Audiens quid hic et hic asserat perite,
Et quid cui faveat non discernit rite,
Nec praesumit solvere litem definite,

(Sits Boethius quite stunned by this disputation,
Listening to this and that subtle explanation,
But to side with this or that shows no
 inclination,
Nor presumes to give the case sure adjudication.)

As a matter of fact, Boethius's commentary on Porphyry was not the place to go into the matter, for the writer's immediate concern was logic and not metaphysics. Nor is it doubtful, I believe, when one looks at all the works of Boethius, that he did definitely take sides on this issue.

After the two expositions of Porphyry, Boethius changed, or enlarged, or perhaps really first formed, his great plan. We must not imagine that he had settled all the details before he started on his first work, any more than that Plato's philosophy sprang from his mind full-armed, like Athene from the head of Zeus. Boethius now turned aside, or apparently turned aside, to write a book on Arithmetic. It is, I say, only an apparent deviation. He had come to the conclusion, it would seem, that to present Greek philosophy to his countrymen effectively, he had better lay the foundations by treatises on the liberal arts. For the work on arithmetic did not stand alone; it was followed by one on geometry, of which only portions remain, one on music, which we have almost complete, and probably one on astronomy. There was also a mechanical treatise after Archimedes, and something or other besides from Plato and Aristotle.

Just how much else he accomplished, we do not know. His purpose, once more, was to lead up to philosophical studies, and he had a great predecessor in this very undertaking—St. Augustine, who likewise, as we shall see, wrote treatises on the liberal arts. Those of Boethius became firmly embedded in the curriculum. The De Musica was a text-book at Oxford way down into the eighteenth century. Modern critics are dubious as to its usefulness for the study of music to-day. One of them remarks [R. H. Bosanquet] that "the very eminence of Boethius makes it a matter of regret that he ever wrote upon music," and an Oxford professor [Sir F. A. Gore Ouseley] declares that Boethius is "no more useful to a modern musician than Newton's 'Principia' to a dancer." We can only the more admire that stalwart Oxonian conservatism which prescribed "Boethius on Music" for so many centuries.

Those of my readers who are musicians may be interested to know what, according to Boethius, a real musician is. There are three classes of people, he explains at the end of his first book, who have to do with music—performers, composers, and critics. Those of the first class, like harp-players, flute-players, and organists, must be excluded from the number of real musicians, since they are merely slaves. Their function is concerned with mere action, production, and is as subordinate and slavish as is the material body compared to the mind. Even a good performer is nothing more than a good slave. Then there is the second class, the composers, who are impelled to music not by reason or philosophy, but by a certain instinct, or inspiration. The Muses are responsible for what they do, not they themselves. They too, therefore, must be counted out. There remains the third class, the critics. "They alone," he declares, "are the real musicians, since their function consists entirely in reason and philosophy, in a knowledge of modes and rhythms, of the varieties of melodies and their combinations, in short, of all the matters that I shall treat in Volume II, as well as of the achievements of the composers." I once asked a friend of mine, a musical critic of some note, what he thought of this doctrine. He replied that he thought that Boethius was considerably in advance of his time and of our own. I did not venture to submit Boethius's ideas to a performer or a composer.

Boethius did more with the Aristotelian part of his programme than with anything else; he finished his translations of the Organon, the works on Logic. When about halfway through this undertaking, he also busied himself with Cicero, perhaps because Cicero, no less than Aristotle, had written on the subject of Topica; Boethius, at any rate, wrote a work De Differentiis Topicarum, in which he compared his two authorities. This is the same leisurely method that we noted before. It is a method not incompatible with the development of side-interests.

The final act of comparing and reconciling Plato and Aristotle, he never lived to accomplish. This is sometimes called a Neoplatonic undertaking, because certain Neoplatonists had felt that the breach between Plato and Aristotle could be healed. As I am concerned to prove that Boethius was not a Neoplatonist, I would point out that the idea is as old as Cicero. Cicero, no less than Plato and Aristotle, had a remarkable influence on Boethius, and doubtless helped him to his conclusion in this important affair. For with both Cicero and Boethius, it is Aristotle that is harmonized with Plato and not vice versa.

It was in the last dozen years of his life that Boethius wrote on a vastly different topic, or what one might imagine a vastly different topic, namely, theology. There are preserved under his name four brief but pithy letters, addressed, one to Symmachus and the rest to a mutual friend, John the Deacon, dealing with theological subjects of great contemporary importance. That to Symmachus is entitled "How that the Trinity is one God and not three Gods" (Quomodo Trinitas unus Deus ae non tres dii), and presents a specially vigorous criticism of the Arian heresy. No. II, addressed to John, continues this topic; it is entitled, "Whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit may be substantially predicated of Divinity" (Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de divinitate substantialiter praedicentur). The last in the series, "A Treatise against Eutyches and Nestorius" (Liber contra Eutychen et Nestorium), takes up one of the great controversies of the age, the doctrine of the Person of Christ. Boethius upholds the orthodox view against the divergent heresies of Eutyches, who discarded the human element in our Lord's nature, and of Nestorius, who discarded the divine element. The little work, which was written most probably in 512, is one of the best contributions to the subject ever made. The definitions of nature and of person given by the author became classical and were constantly appealed to by the Schoolmen; "Nature," according to Boethius, is the specific difference that gives form to anything; "Person" is the individual substance of a rational nature. One eminent Oxford authority [C. C. J. Webb, God and Personality, 1919,] regards the latter definition as "still, perhaps, take it all in all, the best that we have." Among the mediaeval thinkers, I would call particular attention to John the Scot, who wrote a commentary on the theological Opuscula of Boethius, and had the latter's categories in mind in a way not yet explained when he composed his masterpiece on the Division of Nature.

In short, the character of this treatise is fully as philosophical as theological. The author's report of the council that received the letters of the Eastern Bishops on the two heresies does not read like the work of an ecclesiastic. The ecclesiastics present talked most glibly, he declares, but nobody knew what the talk was about. Boethius himself preserved a haughty silence. He looked about him like Ferinata in Dante's Inferno, "as if he had Hell in great despite." He feared, he says, quoting Horace, "lest I should be rightly set down as insane if I held out for being sane among those madmen." Methinks I hear the lashing of a humanistic tongue.

The philosopher is also evident in the title of the third letter—Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona ("How Substantives can be good in virtue of their existence without being Absolute Goods"). If this piece had been separately transmitted as the work of the author of the Consolation of Philosophy, and the other theological tractates had been all lost, nobody would have thought of questioning the authorship. As it is, it is part and parcel of this little collection, the genuineness of which has the best possible attestation in the manuscripts. To anybody who has read through, or read in sufficient extracts, Boethius's works on logic, the theological tractates seem altogether of a piece. It is the same mind here as there, only exercising itself in a different field, with the result that Boethius has started a new method in theology, the application of Aristotelian logic to Christian problems.

This was a fatal step to take, according to Dr. Paul Elmer More, who, in his admirable volumes … , is not altogether courteous to the scholastics, St. Anselm in particular, whose ontological argument for the existence of God he calls a nightmare of logic. He attributes the bad invention of scholasticism, not to Boethius, to whom he makes no reference at all, possibly including him in the general condemnation that he visits on the legalistic Romans, but to Boethius's eastern contemporary, Leontios of Byzantium. I would relieve the latter of the odium, for, so far as I can gather, Boethius published first. And I would invite the attention of Dr. More, and others of his way of thinking, to the results obtained by Boethius in his treatise on Eutyches and Nestorius, results that I am confident Dr. More would accept. I would also suggest that a better guide to the scholastics will be found in two works, one on "Natural Theology" (1915), one on "God and Personality" (1918), by the Oxford scholar Clement C. J. Webb, well known as an editor of John of Salisbury, and also—this is something to say—as profound a student of Plato at first hand as Dr. More himself.

Of course Boethius was not the first of the Christian thinkers to resort to Greek philosophy. This resort had been made ever since Christians had begun seriously to connect their faith with the great systems of the past. "As certain also of your own poets have said"—the beginning was made by St. Paul. "As certain also of your own philosophers have said"—this was the next step to take; it was taken, not only by St. Clement of Alexandria among the Greeks and Minucius Felix among the Romans, but by the Gnostic heretics before them, and, earliest of all, it would seem, by whoever wrote the prologue of the Gospel according to St. John. In St. Augustine, we have a thinker who had gone through all the schools and had formed his powers of thought by training in the ancient method. In one way, Christian theology is no different in kind from any thought that had preceded it. It is just as free and just as human. It works with the same categories. But it reckons with a new historical fact, the person of our Lord, and on the basis of that fact proceeds to revolutionize previous conceptions of the nature of God and of man. There have been similar epochs in the natural sciences, created by the discovery of new facts, like that of radium in chemistry, and that of the moving and decentralized earth in astronomy. After such an event, the mind of man works on in its former way, adjusting the new condition to the old.

Now, in this sense, Boethius's procedure was nothing novel. St. Augustine had resorted to Plato and Aristotle quite as frequently as he. In his tractate on the nature of the Trinity, Boethius modestly states that he is but following in the steps of his great precursor, St. Augustine. What is new is the creation of a system, the reduction of the terms of thought to Aristotelian logic, and the application of them to theological problems. Thus the problem of the Holy Trinity must come under Aristotle's ten categories, and the meaning of person and nature must be settled in accordance with Aristotle's treatment of definition and division. A whole new science of theological procedure has been worked out. Axioms are established to control the processes of thought. At the beginning of the treatise on the substantiality of good things, Boethius lays down certain axioms,—he adds that he is proceeding like a geometrician,—which shall govern the course of his reasoning. In brief, so far as method is concerned, the relation of Boethius to St. Augustine is not unlike that of Aristotle to Plato.

Another feature of the method introduced by Boethius is its recognition of a body of revealed truth which exists by its own right and does not absolutely need the help of the philosopher. But he can help; he uses the free power of reason to substantiate, or rather to corroborate, the doctrine of the Church. He is aware that he may fall into error in this attempt, and is willing to suffer correction from those who are more intimate with the implications of the revealed truth. Thus, at the end of his discourse on the Holy Trinity addressed to John the Deacon, Boethius says, "If I am right and speak in accordance with the Faith, I pray you confirm me. But if you are in any point of another opinion, examine carefully what I have said, and if possible, reconcile faith and reason." St. Thomas Aquinas could not have put it more clearly. The whole programme of scholasticism is already in Boethius. Everybody recognizes that he furnished the Schoolmen, in his translations of Aristotle's logical works, with the chief corpus of philosophical material that prompted thought in the first half of the Middle Ages. He also, as we saw, broached a problem that led to the formation of important schools of mediaeval thought. He likewise invented a new philosophic vocabulary, a development ever on the increase in the Middle Ages. But, most important of all, he illustrated, in these brief tractates, the application of logical method, as well as the new vocabulary, to theological problems, on the understanding that fides, the ultimate truth, may be supported by the free effort of the human reason. To this conclusion we are forced by the acceptance of the Opuscula Sacra as the genuine productions of Boethius. Prantl, in his well-known book of the history of logic, rightly caught the spirit of these works, and declared them the output of the incipient scholasticism of the ninth century. That was in the days when a scholar who valued his scientific reputation would not dream of attributing the Opuscula Sacra to Boethius. Now that we must attribute them to him, former accounts of the development of thought in the early Middle Ages must be extensively revised and the influence of Boethius be more carefully followed, not only in the works of John the Scot, but in various unpublished commentaries of the ninth century. The history of the great movement known as scholastic philosophy begins, not with the contemporaries of Abelard, but with Boethius. From one point of view, Boethius is the last of the Romans; from another, he is the first of the scholastics.

Among the theological tractates is one that I have not yet discussed, no. IV in the series, called by editors De Fide Catholica, but in the best manuscripts not called anything at all. The title De Fide Catholica defines its nature. It is a kind of expanded creed, with a glance at Old Testament history, the progress of the Church, and the most important heresies. These are the doctrines of Eutyches and Nestorius, of the Manichees, of Sabellius and of Arius, that is, the very issues that were exceedingly urgent in Boethius's day; the author calls all these false views the work of those who think "in carnal terms." I once wrote a doctor's thesis to prove that Tractate no. IV was not the work of Boethius; but as even doctors' theses are sometimes not infallible, I have deemed it expedient to recant. The style of the little work is different from that of the other tractates—but so is that of the Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius, like Aristotle and St. Jerome, as we saw, and like many scholars and scientists to-day, cultivated an esoteric or technical style, intended for the inner circle of specialists, and an exoteric or popular style, intended for the general public. Distinguishing between faith and reason, Boethius applied the principles of the latter to confirm the doctrines of the former. He accepted, therefore, certain articles of the faith. Well then, why should he not have stated them? The fourth tractate gives us such a statement. He drew it up, I should imagine, to clarify his thought and to provide a basis for further procedure. He did not intend to publish it, and had not given it a title. But it might have been found with his papers after his death, and, very sensibly, added to his works; for it is a clear and admirably ordered account, not without touches of poetic intensity, and a dramatic scope which in the compass of a few pages takes the reader from the creation of the world through human history to the last judgment. The work is a little masterpiece.

We have seen enough, I believe, to put Boethius in his historical setting and to determine his intellectual attitude.

He is a Christian humanist and, indeed, one of the most satisfactory representatives of Christian humanism that we have examined thus far. In temperament he is more equable and urbane than Augustine or Jerome, though he can exercise a humanistic tongue, and he is far more profound than Lactantius. In his day, the stirring conflicts of the fourth century with Paganism were over, and the church was more at liberty to assimilate the best of the past. Boethius was not only a philosopher but a man of letters, as we might not have known so well had it not been for his imprisonment, which occasioned the Consolation of Philosophy. It is an ill wind that blows nobody good luck. In his philosophy, one may apply to him what Sidonius said of Claudian Mamertus: "He was a man of wisdom, prudence and learning; he was a philosopher all his days without prejudice to his faith." The mind of Boethius, like that of St. Augustine, was impassioned for the philosophic quest, in which he engaged without let or ceasing. It was his chief solace in life—summum vitae solamen; I am quoting, not from the Consolation of Philosophy, but from one of the logical works, "On Hypothetical Syllogisms," written a dozen or more years before.

Philosophy is also for Boethius, as for Lucretius and Cicero and Lactantius, a patriotic act. In the busy year of his consulate, 510, he remarks, as he writes his work on the Categories,

Although the cares of my consular office prevent me from devoting my entire attention to these studies, yet it seems to me a sort of public service to instruct my fellow-citizens in the products of reasoned investigation. Nor shall I deserve ill of my country in this attempt. In far-distant ages, other cities transferred to our state alone the lordship and sovereignty of the world; I am glad to assume the remaining task of educating our present society in the spirit of Greek philosophy. Wherefore this is verily a part of my consular duty, since it has always been a Roman habit to take whatever was beautiful or praiseworthy throughout the world and to add to its lustre by imitation. So then, to my task.

One might imagine that the speaker is Cicero. Boethius virtually declares that he is continuing the programme of his illustrious predecessor in the consular office, as the latter had announced it at the beginning of the Tusculan Disputations. Cicero had already introduced Greek philosophy into Rome, but much remained to do. Nor did Boethius live to achieve all, or half, of his impressive plan. He worked in a different way. His interests were more immediately philosophical; his method was more scientific. And yet in this passage, and in the style and in some of the substance of the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius declares himself the successor of Cicero. We must add him to the list of Christian Ciceros of which we found the fourth century to be full. And we must conclude that Boethius, while the first of the scholastics, is also the last of the Romans. His worship of the eternal Rome is as devout as that of Cicero himself.

Such was his career,—and it is all of a piece,—up to the last year of his life. Then came the peripeteia of his fortune —his imprisonment in the dungeon at Calvenzano, and his death by execution. The reasons for his sudden downfall may never be accurately ascertained. He denied the charge of the informers that he was guilty of secret negotiations with the court of Byzantium. He indicates that he was also accused of the malevolent practice of the black arts. We may waive both indictments, the latter on the ground of common sense, the former from our belief in the integrity of Boethius. Why had Theodoric, then, come to regard him, after all his services to his monarch and the state, as a public enemy? I shall try to answer this question after we have taken a fleeting look at the Consolation of Philosophy.

The Consolation of Philosophy is prison-literature, and prison-literature often takes the form of a theodicy. The solitary thinker, beginning with the sense of his own wrongs,—unless he is aware that his punishment is well deserved,—seeks justification somewhere. If the world does not give it, heaven will. The tyrant may win for a time, but the righteous knows that his own purpose is attuned to the everlasting purposes, which ultimately know no defeat. This is the way that proud spirits think the matter out; for them, the mind is its own place. It is not for them to weep and wail, to pine away or to end their lives in despair, but rather to justify the ways of God to men, and to know that they share in His victory. Besides Boethius, we may cite as examples Dracontius and Bunyan and Sir Thomas More. There is something of this fine despite of the present moment even in Ovid—little, I fear, in those other eminent exiles, Cicero and Seneca. But the blind Milton belongs in the company; his latter life was in a cell, though not one built of iron bars. I have recently come across an instance in the literature of our own ancestors. Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who in 1676 was dragged from her burning house by the Indians and kept in captivity for twelve weeks, wrote a narrative of her experiences bearing the title, "The Soveraignty and Goodness of God."

This, then, is Boethius's starting-point. To whom should he look for help but to Philosophy, the guide and solace of his life from earliest youth? He thinks of her in personal terms. She is an allegorical symbol, and by the power of his imagination becomes something more. As Natura spoke to Lucretius, Patria to Cicero, and the divine Roma to Symmachus, Claudian, and, none the less commandingly, to Prudentius, so Philosophia visits the exile's dungeon, chases away the singing Muses from whom her favorite was seeking an ineffective consolation, and administers her own remedies.

Viewed simply as literature, this is a great work, "a golden volume," as Gibbon remarked, "not unworthy of the leisure of Tully or Plato." First of all, its simple and Ciceronian style is well nigh a miracle in view of the tendency of deliberate rhetoric toward that distorted ornateness that we note in Sidonius and other writers of the times. Further, in its composition, it represents an exceedingly skilful combination of several literary types. It is dialogue, of the kind that Plato and Cicero had made popular in philosophical treatises. It is a talk between Boethius and Philosophy from beginning to end. Philosophy is at first the good physician; she hardly expects her patient to answer back—but before long he gathers strength and takes his share in the argument. The work is also an allegory, so far as the person of Philosophy is concerned, and suggestive also of the allegories found in certain apocalypses, like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus. This is not a mere device; Boethius's passion for the dry light of reason makes it natural for him to speak in personal terms. Philosophy steps into the scene by her own good right, and plays her part convincingly to the end. The work also belongs, as the title indicates, to ancient consolation-literature, of which Boethius knew abundant examples in Cicero, Seneca, and the poets. But it is also a kind of introduction or incentive to Philosophy, a πρτρϵπτικὸς ϵἰπ τήν ΦιλοσοΦἰᾳ̑ν, like Aristotle's work by this title, and Cicero's Hortensius. As one reads on, however, the value of Philosophy needs no demonstration; nor do the nature and efficacy of her consolation. Both these elements are caught up in a higher purpose, which is, as I have explained, a theodicy of great power and scope.… To assert the eternal justice, it becomes necessary to solve the mysteries of divine unity and goodness, of fate and human freedom. The writer is setting forth all that he can see of life and time and eternity.

Finally, the structure of the work suggests yet another literary variety; for to vary the presentation, to break the flow of dialogue, a number of little poems are interspersed,—thirty-nine in all,—which now sum up the argument of the preceding prose section, and now themselves carry it on. They vary in poetical quality. Some are exceedingly good, some are only moderate, and a few are insignificant—that being the only way, according to the poet Martial, in which one can write a book. The metres of the poems are varied and skilfully wrought out. Boethius tries almost every metre going, and invents two or three new ones. This mixture of prose and verse at once classes the work as a satura, a literary form that has no equal for its Protean changes of contents throughout its lengthy history. Our English satire is only one moment in its career.

The circumstances in which the Consolation of Philosophy was written make the study of the writer's sources peculiarly interesting. We are given a clue, I believe, to the right way to examine the sources of any ancient author. Sometimes, after reading dissertations, let us say, on the plagiarisms of Virgil, one pictures the poet at a large desk on which ten or a dozen volumes of his more worthy predecessors are displayed, from whom he filches a line here, a half-line there, a quarter-line there, an epithet there, constructing in this way a painful mosaic or picture-puzzle. Virgil himself had answered this kind of criticism, if one would only hear him; when somebody charged him with stealing the verses of Homer, he replied that it was easier to steal the club of Hercules than a verse from Homer. He implied that the process of making great and Classical poetry which, like a liturgy, pays homage to tradition, is other than an act of petty larceny, or if conceived in the spirit of petty larceny, it inevitably pays the penalty of detection. Now in the case of Boethius,—and likewise in that of the exiled Ovid,—the thieving author had no wares from which to pilfer. Boethius laments, in tones too sincere to allow us to suspect a literary device, that his library had not been shipped to his prison. I will not deny that a few books might have come to him, but not so many as the patient investigators of his sources have tracked in the text of the Consolation of Philosophy. For me the conclusion remains that this great work is not a thing of shreds and patches, of clippings and pilferings, of translatings and extractings, but springs from two main sources, ingenium and memoria. For the ancients had not lost the faculty of remembering. When a Virgil or a Boethius composed, he thought out a plan, wrote from the fulness of his own knowledge and his own inspiration, which depended in part on wide reading in the best of literature. His mind was mature and well stocked. He had something to say. He spoke as a prophet of the great tradition, but he added to its richness. He translated or half-quoted or borrowed a phrase to make his meaning clearer, to lend it distinction, or to summon the reader to inspect the past; and his product is more and not less original for this trait.

I am dwelling on this point, not only to save Boethius's reputation in general, but to refute a charge brought against him, I am sorry to say, by that great scholar Hermann Usener, whose golden little book, Anecdoton Holderi, is in other respects the best that has been done for Boethius in our times—or was until Klingner's recent work appeared. Usener pronounces unfavorably on the orginality of the Consolation of Philosophy, declaring it a tissue of two main sources of entirely different nature—one an Aristotelian passage, translated straight out of Aristotle's Protreptikos, the other a lengthy extract from a Neoplatonic work. These two sections were tacked together by Boethius, despite their incongruous nature,—and possibly Boethius was not original enough even to tack them together, but found them so united in some source, which he proceeded to translate. He then prefixed an introduction and interspersed throughout the work, as thus conglutinated, a number of sorry poems, which make a startling contrast to their context; for there one hears the voice of the ancients, but in them, that of a child of the sixth century.

I cannot attempt here a full refutation of Usener's hypothesis, but I should like you to bear it in mind as I sketch the contents of the Consolatio; knowing how unoriginal it is thought to be, you may be better able to appreciate how original it is.

The writer begins with a disconsolate poem, in elegiacs— for it is a real elegy, unlike those of his young manhood; he now has some cause for lamentation. The Muses are sitting sadly about his couch, keeping his sorrow alive by their sympathy. Of a sudden, My Lady Philosophy enters, drives the false comforters from the cell and clears the air of sentimentality. At her bidding, Boethius describes the miseries which have befallen him, and thereby starts the question with which the metaphysical plot of this treatise begins—the nature of fortune, that ultimate principle which permits a good man to suffer. Philosophy declares that her fosterling is a pretty sick man; he is sadly in need of her remedy. In answer to his reproaches for her desertion in the hour of his need, she reminds him that he is not the first to suffer for the truth. Socrates, whose heritage the Epicurean and Stoic pretenders so sorely mistreated, Anaxagoras and Zeno among Greeks, Canius, Seneca and Soranus among Romans, were martyrs for philosophy— why should Boethius shrink from such a fate? There follows a fine and thoroughly characteristic passage on the contempt of evil, a kind of translation into metaphysics of the Horatian despite of the profanum vulgus, a sentiment to which Boethius was no stranger.

Wherefore thou hast no cause to marvel, if in the sea of this life we be tossed with boisterous storms, whose chiefest purpose is to displease the wicked; of which though there be an huge army, yet it is to be despised, because it is not governed by any captain, but is carried up and down by fantastical error without any order at all. And if at any time they assail us with great force, our captain retireth her band into a castle, leaving them occupied in sacking unprofitable baggage. And from above we laugh them to scorn for seeking so greedily after most vile things, being safe from all their furious assault, and fortified with that defence against which aspiring folly cannot prevail.

If this is the voice of a child of the sixth century, it is either a pretty good century or a precocious child. And possibly both. He is not too young a child to have learned of the inorganic character of evil, and he knows how to transfer this metaphysical notion into poetical imagery in a dignified style. He has also read deeply enough in the history of philosophy to have selected as his favorite period the best of all periods, when metaphysics was the prime interest and thought had not slumped into ethics. Plato and Aristotle form a kind of philosophical orthodoxy, of which the later schools had preserved only broken lights. As Boethius expresses it, the mob of Epicureans, Stoics, and the rest usurped the inheritance of Socrates and Plato and tore fragments from the robe of Philosophy, each imagining that he possessed the entire garment. Here, as in other points to which I have called attention, Boethius is following the lead of Cicero. For Cicero is, in the best sense of the term, the first of the Neoplatonists.

Boethius then proceeds to enumerate his services to the state and to dwell on the injustice of his degradation; it is a brief apologia pro vita sua. How can the good fall so low, he ponders, while wicked men flourish like the green bay-tree; there is a great contrast between the world of nature, which obeys a just and unalterable law, and the world of man, which tosses in the perpetual and irrational changes of Fortune. This arraignment of the universal order starts the whole problem, for which, however, Philosophy has a solution ready. Her method, first of all, is to arouse in her patient a better mind, a spirit capable of receiving the cure which she can impart. She speaks of a "gentler remedy" which she will first apply, and catches at his persisting belief in Providence,—whose ways, to be sure, seem very dark,—as the one last spark from which his former ardor may be revived. The closing poem of the book pictures the clouded mind, from which the light of reason should drive all the passions away.

The first book is the opening act in a metaphysical drama; it presents, in a pictorial form, and with a truer sense of the dramatic than Cicero shows in any of his philosophical dialogues, a speculative problem which the following books are to solve. The poems have something of the effect of the choruses in a Greek tragedy or the meditative passages in Lucretius. They give the reader an outlook, and a downward look from the height to which he has climbed by the steep path of the argument.

With the second book begins the "gentler remedy." It consists of an exposition of the essentially fickle nature of Fortune, whose only law is that of constant mutability. What was he to expect? Fortune's slave must follow Fortune's will; in fact, her very mutability is cause for hoping now. But this specious reasoning—which Philosophy herself had characterized as "Rhetoric's sweet persuasion"—fails to satisfy. She adds thereto the suggestion that the memory of past success should be a solace, and that, if Boethius will but lump his experience, he will find in the total more good than bad. The philosopher replies sadly with a sentiment that Dante and many others have echoed, that the memory of happier things is of miseries most miserable. But Philosophy enumerates the blessings that remian,—his wife, his sons, and Symmachus,—and by this simple appeal to human affection draws from Boethius the admission that some anchors still hold despite the storm.

Thus far Philosophy has treated the gifts of Fortune as absolute entities, absolute goods or ills. Encouraged by the symptoms of convalescence in her patient, she now advances a point in the argument; examining the so-called goods in turn, she proves that felicity is merely relative. This is part of the "stronger remedy"—and just here, according to Usener, begins the passage that Boethius translates from Aristotle's Protreptikos. But the preceding part is far more than an introduction; it is an important part of the whole argument, and, in my opinion, altogether of a piece with what follows.

Philosophy now analyzes various of the goods in turn,— riches, aesthetic enjoyment, fame,—with the result that all these are relative, depending for their significance on the personality with which they are connected. Indeed, Fortune is kind only when her fickleness shows the true nature of temporal gifts, discloses false friends, and thus, negatively at least, points the way to abiding human friendship and to the universal principle of love, the only source of absolute good. The finest part of this discussion is a passage on the evanescence of fame. Usener may well be right in believing that Aristotle had made similar remarks in his Protreptikos, but Cicero, whom Boethius quotes, is surely a direct model, and a reference to Ptolemy shows that Boethius did not confine himself to either Aristotle or Cicero. He sums up the idea in a sombre poem which various scholars who have forgotten their Classics think a harbinger of the mediaeval brooding over the transitory glories of earth.

Who knows where faithful Fabrice' bones are
 pressed,
Where Brutus and strict Cato rest?
A slender fame consigns their titles vain
In some few letters to remain.
Because their famous names in books we read,
Come we by them to know the dead?
You dying, then, remembered are by none,
Nor any fame can make you known.
But if you think that life outstrippeth death,
Your names borne up with mortal breath,
When length of time takes this away likewise,
A second death shall you surprise.

This, true enough, is in the spirit of Villon's Ballade des Dames du Temps Fadis, but it is also in the spirit of Cicero and Juvenal, of Ovid and Ausonius, and of the author of the Book of Kings: "Where is the king of Hamath and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvain, of Hena, and Ivah?" Melancholy meditation on the passing of the beautiful or the great is not confined to the Middle Ages.

The third book develops in positive form the reasoning which the second has negatively suggested. The opening sections, however, merely repeat the method previously employed. The various goods are again examined, with more detail, to be sure, than in the second book. They are first discussed in general, and then each is considered in turn—wealth, office, kingship, glory, nobility, carnal pleasures. The conclusion follows that the understanding of the false goods will lead us to the true. There certainly are traces of Aristotle apparent, but Epicurus is also mentioned and his doctrine of the summum bonum is briefly treated; Catullus is quoted; Decoratus serves as an illustration from Boethius's own times; the Roman praetorship is discussed; Nero, Seneca, Papinianus, and Antoninus are passed in review; and the argument is colored with personal touches, including a delicate compliment to the philosopher's wife and sons. In this section, therefore, while the writer is dependent on various thinkers of the past—here Aristotle notably—for some of his conceptions, he has combined diverse elements in an original fashion and fused the whole with his own personality.

The positive part of the "stronger remedy" appears in the latter portion of the book. The goods are subjected to a fresh analysis, this time to show their essential unity and their dependence on the ultimate principle of the good: sufficientia, potentia, claritudo, reverentia, laetitia have value and are worthy objects of human ambition, but only because they present different aspects of the summum bonum, the goal to which they lead. Man, therefore, should strive directly for this final idea of good, and not for the broken lights of it. But this source of all goods may be approached only by the way of prayer; so Philosophy prays to the Highest Good. The argument then turns to an analysis of the summum bonum and demonstrates its existence, its perfection, its unity, its inherence in God. Thus the idea of Good is identified with God, though the converse proposition, that God is nothing more than the idea of Goodness, does not follow; for the underlying conception of the divine nature is not idealism but personal theism—a step that neither Aristotle nor Plato (except for pictorial purposes in the mythological Timaeus) could quite take. But this God, though omnipotent, is incapable of one thing, evil, which is thereby pronounced non-existent. Dropping this utterance as a seed of further inquiry, Philosophy closes the book with a song on the "lucid source of good," illustrating her theme by a somewhat perverted application of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that no lover, Browing, for instance, would approve.

The treatment has been most impressive in these last chapters; the argument moves with a majestic sweep to the conclusion, which, like that of the first book, may fairly be called dramatic. In this entire passage, Plato is much more prominent than Aristotle. He is quoted several times, and the poetic prayer is a kind of summary of the Timaeus. But Boethius goes beyond both Plato and Aristotle, as I have pointed out, in his acceptance of a personal theism. He invokes the authority of Plato for the need of asking divine aid before undertaking a great metaphysical quest, but while Plato calls on θϵύς ;τϵ καὶ θϵάς, Boethius prays to the very Being that he is attempting to prove, assuming, it would seem, that faith in deity must precede the endeavor to demonstrate its existence—credo ut intellegam. This proof, therefore, to quote again from the treatise on the Trinity, the philosopher does not discover, but corroborates something that "stands by itself on the firm foundation of Faith."

Philosophy's stronger remedy has now been administered; she has shown her patient that the source of all goods, and hence of the best fortune, is still at his disposal. There are some difficulties, however, still untouched—one in especial at which Philosophy has hinted at the end of the third book. How can evil exist in the presence of a Personal Good that is at once benevolent and omnipotent? At the opening of the fourth book, Boethius at once attacks this problem, which has been his chief perplexity all along, and the discussion of the nature of evil occupies the greater part of this book. Philosophy demonstrates that the good are always rewarded and the wicked always punished; in fact, the latter virtually cease to exist. It is, finally, the presence of mere brute chance, which intrudes after moral evil has been comfortably explained, that leads to larger issues, and, necessarily, to a new turning-point in the argument. The new question is hydra-headed, Philosophy declares: the proper answer to it involves the discussion of five distinct problems—the simplicity of providence, the chain of fate, chance, divine cognition and predestination, and freedom of the will. With the words, "Leading off, as it were, from a new starting-point," she approaches the first of these matters; precisely at this point, Usener sets the beginning of the Neoplatonic text. Surely the last part of the supposedly Aristotelian portion has been getting rather ethereal for Aristotle—and a bit too theological for Plato. Boethius is resorting to Plato and Aristotle as ever,—to the Stoics as well,—but he is thinking the thing out for himself in his own way.

"Leading off, as it were, from a new starting-point"— these words might indicate, as Usener thinks, that Boethius here takes up a fresh source; they might, however, simply mean that at this important turn in the reasoning a new method or line of thought is approached. Philosophy has been discoursing on human and physical evil; now, neglecting this aspect for the moment, she starts at the other end, at the divine simplicity where the thought of evil is out of question. Indeed, when we find Cicero [in De Divinatione] using the same words at a similar division of the argument, it becomes clear that Boethius is merely following his example.

Philosophy takes up the first two of the problems above mentioned, devoting to them the remainder of the fourth book. It is, after all, one problem, for the "simplicity of the divine providence" is but the inner aspect of which the "chain of fate" is the outer expression. Providence conceives, fate executes. Providence is simple, stable, eternal; fate is composed of multifold agencies, acts and shifts constantly, and is subject to time. Fate includes weather and the fortunes of men, which are thus indirectly of divine appointment. All, therefore, is done well, even by the apparently wicked, of whose moral temper only the all-seeing judge can be certain. Boethius reinforces his point by a witty quotation from Lucan, who, so far as I am aware, was not often read by Neoplatonists. God gives to each, Philosophy continues, good and bad alike, exactly the medicine that his cure demands; perhaps the prison, she intimates, is exactly what Boethius needed. Nor is there any escape from the Divine dispensation. One may leave the order in which one is set, but only to fall into another order. Love rules all, and nothing can exist unless it return to this love that gave it being. Thus all fortune is good, and the sage should be as eager for his trial as the soldier is for battle. Every Hercules has his labors, but if he endures, heaven is his reward.

Throughout this discussion, Boethius is reckoning with certain ideas of the Neoplatonists. They, too, distinguished between providence and fate, but went much more minutely into the sorts and kinds of fate and of the different entities that led in a definite hierarchy from the one omnipotent essence, which was too holy and abstract even to name, down to that evil substance, matter. Boethius, however, is not afraid to name the supreme essence; he calls it God, he remarks, in the good old-fashioned way. But he does not bridge the gap between God and his world by any elaborate series of graded abstractions— mind, soul, nature, and the rest. Fate is directly under the control of Providence, which is of the very heart of divinity itself, not a principle depending on it at third or fourth remove. And the Neoplatonic agencies of fate, including angels and demons and the influences of the stars, are all lumped together as possible manifestations of the fatalis series, the order of fate. Any contemporary Christian theologian would not have put it otherwise. That is to say, the intimate association of fate with the providence of the Deity, as well as the wholesale levelling of the Neoplatonic hierarchy, is tantamount to an attack on a cardinal feature of that system. And so, more significant still, is the assumption of a personal Deity in place of the ineffably transcendent Being, or rather Super-being, of the Neoplatonists.

At the beginning of the fifth book, we find Philosophy rather coquettishly changing the subject. The stronger remedy is now administered. Boethius has turned from the false goods to the true good, has seen that moral evil does not exist, and that even the shifts of fortune are part of the divinely appointed order of fate. What need of further argument? Still, though morally cured, the philosopher is not yet mentally illuminated as to the remaining questions bound up in the problem of fate, and insists now on the answers to these. With the discussion of chance, predestination, and freedom, the theodicy, and with it the full consolation, is brought to a close. I shall attempt to guide you no farther into Boethius's well-ordered thought. If he has not quite solved the problem of freedom, we may pertinently ask who has? His solution, at any rate, is in accord with Christian theology in its insistence on the two opposing and logically contradictory principles of human freedom and divine omniscience. Deity is personal and prayer is a vital act. "Wherefore fly vices, embrace virtues, possess your minds with worthy hopes, offer up humble prayers to your highest Prince. There is, if you will not dissemble, a great necessity of doing well imposed upon you, since you live in the sight of a Judge who beholdeth all things."

These stately words, with which the Consolation ends, are anti-Pagan in general and anti-Neoplatonic in particular. I need not further labor either of these points. The Pagans are constantly used; both method and material come from Plato, Aristotle, and the "plebeian" philosophers. The thinker reasons solely with his own powers, without any revelation, save that of Philosophy, who is naught but the idealization of his own intellect. But the result fits in neatly with the revealed truth of Christian theology. The latter is in the background of the thinker's consciousness. He is proving as much of fides as ratio will allow him. That explains why there is not a trace of anything specifically Christian or Biblical in the entire work; the assumption of any portion of faith in an endeavor of the unaided reason would defeat its very purpose. In similar fashion, though with a different goal in view, Minucius Felix … carefully excluded Biblical quotations and the very name of Christ from his Christian apologetic. On the other hand, there must be nothing in such a Consolation of Philosophy that contravenes the principles of the faith. One or two points—particularly Boethius's theory of creation—call for comment, but, in brief, there is nothing in this work for which a good case might not have been made by any contemporary Christian theologian, who knew his Augustine. Had Theodoric suddenly repented of his decision and the life of Boethius been spared, I can readily conceive that, after reconciling Plato and Aristotle, he might have gone on to harmonize the result with the doctrine of the Church, and thus have saved St. Thomas Aquinas his gigantic task, or, rather, have performed it in a different way.

But Theodoric did not repent. Boethius met his death. And not long after, so did Symmachus and John the Deacon, if he is the Johannes who had been elevated to the Papacy. The explanation of this volte-face on the part of Theodoric, I believe, is that the circle of Boethius, in particular, and the Senate, in general, formed the core of the Catholic conservatives who were bitterly opposed to his Arianism. This issue also had its political significance, for the Catholic conservatives were also the old Roman conservatives, and whether or not they were actually in communication with the Eastern Empire, they were only biding their time. Theodoric saw it all and struck suddenly,—and wisely for his own interests,—before the danger should come to a head. His ostensible charge against the accused was treasonable negotiation with the Eastern Empire; the actual reason could hardly be stated.

One of the mediaeval lives of Boethius states that he was called St. Severinus by the provincials. Those provincials were wise persons. So was Abelard, who stated that the noble Roman senator had fallen with Symmachus in that persecution in which Theodoric raged against the Christians. So was Dante, who placed the anima santa of the philosopher in the Paradiso, and spoke of his coming from martyrdom and exile unto that peace. The learned Bollandists of the eighteenth century in their Acta Sanctorum call Boethius catholicissimus, give him the title of saint,—St. Severinus Boethius,—and record his life with that of his friend Pope John on May 27. But no more recent publication, authoritative or unauthoritative, on the saints of the Church, so far as I know, ventures to include his name. I wish that someone influential with the Holy See would present a petition in favor of St. Severinus or St. Boethius, for, if I have stated the facts about him, the logic of the case seems inexorable. If he was put to death partly because of his defence of the Catholic faith against an Arian monarch, he suffered martyrdom; and if so important a person suffered martyrdom, he deserves canonization. Indeed, the honor might be given anyway to the first of the scholastics; or—a point that may appeal to His present Holiness, once prefect of the Biblioteca Vaticana—a certain saintliness attends a scholar who lost so fine a library and who yet could transport so much of it, inside him, to his dungeon-cell.