SOURCE: An introduction to Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, edited by Margaret Gibson, Basil Blackwell, 1981, pp. 1-12.

[In the following essay, Chadwick surveys Boethius's career and achievement, maintaining that "he taught the Latin West to judge the validity of an inference, to be aware of the foundations of mathematics, and to envisage reason and revelation as related but very distinct ways of apprehending the mystery of God."]

By writing the Consolation of Philosophy Boethius provided all educated people of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with one of their principal classics, a work of both intellectual profundity and literary delight to be read not only in Latin by clerks in their study but also by laymen at leisure, and therefore often in the vernacular. The author, it is true, wrote some pages on Christian theology which are of the greatest consequence. But he did not write them as a theologian in the ordinary sense of the word; he is addressing himself only indirectly to a pastoral or 'political' situation in the Church, as a logician who thought there was some tidying up to be done in the ecclesiastical garden. He writes as a layman and has been loved by laymen. In its philosophical content the Consolation attracted commentaries from several medieval authors, not as momentous as the commentaries called forth by his theological tractates, but a significant sign of the seriousness with which men took his philosophical reflections on the dealings of providence with a world beset by so much evil. But the common experience of apparently purposeless evil has attracted all thoughtful readers to Boethius' pages. His stylistic grace and above all his radical analysis of the true sources of human happiness contribute to making the book one that still retains its place among the masterpieces and jewels of western literature. Boethius' English translators alone include King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I, which is not a weak list of admirers.

Nevertheless, there is a certain isolation about Boethius. This isolation has perhaps become akin to neglect since the Renaissance. His world is the old world of antiquity with an intellectual framework dominated by Ptolemaic ideas about the world, by Aristotle's doctrines of substance and accidents, by a Platonic metaphysic setting asunder mind and matter, by Pythagorean ideas of mathematics and of musical proportion as the key to the structure of the cosmos. A sense of isolation is felt even during his lifetime. He had his intimate circle of friends: his father-in-law Symmachus to whom he felt himself to owe a profound intellectual debt; a Roman advocate named Patricius for whom he composed, late in his career, a commentary on Cicero's Topics; a learned deacon of the Roman church named John (probably, not quite certainly, to be identified with Pope John I, 523-6), who shared his enthusiasm for questions of logic; a Roman senator in the bureaucracy at Ravenna named Renatus, like Boethius fluent in Greek, who seems first to have collected a corpus of Boethius' dialectical treatises a year or two after his death. But it is a small circle, and the treatises on logic did not make him new friends. They contain a large number of unhappy references to contemporary critics who were altogether failing to see any value in his labours on Aristotle and suspected him of writing for ostentation rather than for use. These critics are evidently not barbarian Goths, but fellow senators. His writing was caviare to the general and pleased not the million.

Boethius was by temperament a man who liked to strike out on his own. In all the fields that he touched he had some Latin predecessors. Apuleius anticipated him in writing a short guide to Aristotle's difficult treatise on Interpretation. It is likely that Boethius knew Apuleius' work, but he never mentions it by name. Apuleius also anticipated him in making an adaptation of the Arithmetic of Nicomachus of Gerasa, but Boethius sets about his own version of Nicomachus as if he had no predecessor. Marius Victorinus, the African rhetor of the mid-fourth century whose conversion to Christianity astonished high Roman society about 355, directly covered some of the ground that Boethius was to claim as his own. He made a translation of Porphyry's Isagoge or introduction (Porphyry did not explain what he was introducing, but in the sixth century it was assumed to be an introduction to Aristotle's Categories); a version, with eight books of commentary, of Aristotle's Categories; a version of Aristotle on Interpretation; a tract on the hypothetical syllogism; and a commentary on Cicero's Topics. Boethius acknowledges that Victorinus was the most eminent orator of his time, but loses no opportunity of drawing attention to Victorinus' blunders either in logic or in translation from the Greek. Nevertheless, it can hardly be accidental that the portion of Boethius' dialectical work which became most widely known covers much the same area as that laid down as the standard curriculum by Victorinus in the fourth century. Although Boethius succeeded in making careful translations, which were then given a further meticulous revision, of both Analytics, Topics, and Sophistic Refutations, the transmission of these last treatises is a thin line. Until the twelfth century they were little known or not at all.

Neither in his dialectical studies nor in his works on mathematics did Boethius claim to be original. For arithmetic he closely follows his Greek model in the Pythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa. This study is intended as a preparation for the introduction to music, a much longer work dependent on Nicomachus and on Ptolemy. The Institutio Musica is transmitted incomplete in the manuscript tradition, which breaks off in the middle of a sentence half way through the fifth book. Originally the work must have run to six or seven books. The matter preserved follows the Platonic/Pythagorean tradition in preferring theory to practice and in discounting the potent criticisms of the Pythagorean tradition from Aristoxenus of Tarentum in the fourth century B.C. Aristoxenus insisted on the primacy of the ear over abstract mathematical theory. Boethius has to concede to Aristoxenus that the judgement of the ear has some claim to consideration. In making these concessions he follows Ptolemy's extant Harmonics. Ptolemy's book is likely to have been the model for his discussion (in the lost books at the end) of cosmic and human music; that is of the way in which harmonic ratios and exact proportionality are exemplified in the structure of the cosmos (e.g. the distance of the planets from the earth) and in the fitting together of the human soul and body. Boethius' introduction to music is not intended to assist in the practice of the art, and has been held to have done disservice to music by instilling into generations of readers the doctrine that the true 'musicus' is master exclusively of the theory, and that practical skills can be left to the inferior orders of society. That prejudice, however, is virtually universal among ancient writers on the subject. We need not put all the blame on Boethius. In the Consolation he tells us that listening to music meant much to him. He felt that music should not merely be used to express one's feelings when one is either sad or glad, and attributed to it the dignity of being a clue to the providential ordering of things.

In his logical treatises there stands one monograph which had special interest for him, namely, that on the hypothetical syllogism of the conditional form: 'if A, then B; but A, therefore B', or 'if A, then B; but not B, therefore not A.' The school of Aristotle had begun the investigation of the logic of conditional statements of this kind. The Stoics had taken the matter considerably further, treating the variables AB as symbols not (as in Aristotle) for terms but for entire propositions. Cicero took some notice of this Stoic logic, so that it was not bringing out matter of which the Latin world knew nothing. But Boethius' monograph is the most careful and detailed study in logic to come from his pen, and without it our knowledge of ancient propositional logic would be thin. To medieval logicians this treatise was not perhaps of the greatest interest. John of Salisbury regarded it without enthusiasm, but conceded that it was at least clearer than anything that Aristotle would have written on the subject, had he done so. In recent times modern logicians have shown a more benevolent interest in Boethius' work in this complex field.

John of Salisbury felt that some of Boethius' logical studies were too abstract to be of any use. There is no doubt that his expositions of Aristotle are academic and detached, but written with the conviction that they train the mind to detect fallacies. In his second commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge he utters the warning: 'Those who reject logic are bound to make mistakes. Unless reason shows the right path, the incorrupt truth of reality cannot be found'.

In the commentary on Aristotle's Categories he writes in pain of the threat to the survival of culture in his own time, and speaks of the imminent collapse of liberal studies unless drastic action is taken to preserve the values of the classical past. Knowledge is not only gained in the process of historical change; it is even more easily lost. Human culture can suffer impoverishment more readily than it can achieve enrichment. Hence Boethius' sweat and toil in his study to make available to the Latin world those works which the best philosophers of his age regarded as the proper ladder of true education. They were Neoplatonists and set action far below contemplation. Their educational ideal was relatively little concerned with politics or economics or even ethics (though Boethius' contemporary Simplicius wrote a commentary on the Enchiridion of Epictetus which must be reckoned a treatise on the moral life), but was directed towards what they called 'theoria', rendered by Boethius 'speculatio'. Under the heading of speculative philosophy they wrote of physics, i.e. the scientific study of the natural order; or of mathematics; or of metaphysics and 'theology'.

The late Platonists are schoolmen in the sense that they approach Plato and Aristotle not simply as acute thinkers whose arguments could and should provoke continued independent thinking on the part of their readers, but as authoritative figures, masters of philosophical truth, whose metaphysical beliefs deserve to be received with respect and awe by their pigmy successors. It followed that distress would be caused if these authorities seemed at important points to be speaking with divergent or even contradictory voices. Plotinus' biographer Porphyry accepted Plotinus' view that in Peripatetic logic there is much of the highest value, but it concerns truth in this world of time and space. The ten categories, according to Plotinus, have a limited applicability to the realm of the Ideas in the intelligible world beyond time and space. So Porphyry set out to prove Plato and Aristotle to be concordant on fundamental questions and to be in disagreement only in secondary matters. This scheme was facilitated by treating Plato as the master guide to the mathematical and metaphysical world of unchanging truth, and Aristotle as the master scientist, moralist and political theorist who best understood terrestrial matters. It followed that Aristotle's Metaphysics needed a certain amount of careful exegesis to bring the doctrines of the book into a Platonic line. On one major point of confrontation, namely the kind of reality to be ascribed to universals such as genera and species, Porphyry was able to keep his authorities from discord simply by not making up his mind. In his second commentary on Porphyry Boethius follows a decisively Peripatetic line, in agreement with the Aristotelian master of A.D. 200, Alexander of Aphrodisias, viz. that universals can have a reality only in so far as there actually exist concrete particulars, independent of our minds, for which universal terms such as genera and species serve as a convenient classification system. Admittedly Boethius juxtaposes this with a much more Platonising statement, that the reality of universals can be discovered not by collecting and putting together a large number of instances, but rather by a negative way of abstraction from matter.

An analogous procedure appears in the treatment of the problem of 'future contingents', in Boethius' commentary on the ninth chapter of Aristotle's De Interpretatione and then in the last book of the Consolation of Philosophy. The commentary deals with divine foreknowledge of events that might or might not occur in a wholly Peripatetic framework. Foreknowledge makes nothing to happen, even if it is God's. If the cosmos has in its structure a certain indeterminacy, then God knows indeterminate things as indeterminate. If he believed them to be certainly predictable, he would hold false beliefs (which is incompatible with the concept of God). God's knowledge of future contingents is therefore a true knowledge that the possibilities are open, and that while a great deal in the world may take place by necessary causation, this is not true of everything. So the commentary. But in the Consolation the profound influence on Boethius of Proclus of Athens is directly felt, and the answer to the same questions is now found in a Platonic framework: what is an open and uncertain future to us is certain to God who foreknows all things and in whose world an element of indeterminacy would appear to a Neoplatonist to be some kind of defect in the order of things. Therefore Boethius has to embark on his argument that in God there is no before and after, but everything is known in the simultaneity of eternity: 'interminabilis uitae tota simul et perfecta possessio' (V pr. vi. 4).

Both the mathematical treatises and the studies in Aristotelian logic are concerned with knowledge for its own sake, not because it may lead to some enlargement of the wealth of Italy. No doubt Boethius was not displeased when Theoderic invited him to design for the Burgundian king a sundial and a waterclock, or invited him to express a view about the proper exchange rate between the gold solidus and the absurdly devalued copper denarius, out of compliment to his mathematical distinction. His Institutio Musica won him an invitation to select a harpist to be sent to Clovis, in the simple hope that music might tame his dangerous aggressiveness on Theoderic's borders. No special public service was expected of consuls in the sixth century, and his service as sole consul for the year 510 (for which office he must have been appointed by the Eastern emperor Anastasius on the nomination of Theoderic) did not lay heavy governmental burdens on his shoulders. Consuls had to be rich and dispense vast munificence in donatives and in the provision of public spectacles. Even so, Boethius used the dignity of his office to oppose the prefect Faustus when, at a time of famine and high food prices, he proposed compulsory purchase of food from farmers in Campania at prices that would have left them destitute. Otherwise his consulship did not much bring him out of his study; he tells us that the duties of the office have done something to delay his commentary on the Categories, a work which he sees as a civic duty.

Paradoxically it seems to have been an interest in theology and in the logic of the ecclesiastical usus loquendi, or 'tradition of talking', which did more than anything else to bring him out of his library.

Until the last three years of his long reign, Theoderic's regime in Italy was distinguished for its rare liberality. His toleration was extraordinary. It did not extend to sorcerers, Manichees, and those who offered pagan sacrifices. His dealings with the Jewish communities in Italy were marked by justice rather than by acts of positive encouragement. As a Goth he was an Arian king presiding over a self-consciously separate race whom he wished to keep apart from the Romans especially by enforcing a religious apartheid of Arian and Catholic. He cordially disliked conversions from Catholic to Arian or vice versa. The Catholic churches of Italy he treated with liberality and fairmindedness. When in 500 he visited Rome, he came to St Peter's 'as if he were a Catholic'. It was easy for the churches in Italy to look to him for protection, though an Arian, because from 484 until 519 there was a breach of communion between Rome and the Greek patriarchates, the Acacian schism, caused by Rome's indignation when the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople established communion with the patriarch of Alexandria on a basis other than that of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and without reference to Rome. The new basis for communion was the emperor Zeno's Henoticon, or 'reunion formula' which, without expressly censuring the Council of Chalcedon referred to it in very cool terms. After Zeno his successor Anastasius (491-518) upheld the Henoticon as the standard of orthodoxy in his dominions, and sought to remain 'above parties'. His toleration of the Monophysite critics of Chalcedon seemed unendurable to Rome, and various endeavours from either side to reestablish understanding and communion ended in abrasive exchanges, especially with Pope Symmachus (498-514) who had a schism on his hands at Rome and was very uncertain of himself. Symmachus' successor Hormisdas (513-23) reopened negotiations with Theoderic's consent, but no progress was made until suddenly in 518 Anastasius died and was succeeded by Justin I. Assisted by his nephew Justinian, Justin's policy was to reestablish unity with the West on any terms the Pope cared to specify, the ultimate objective being to encourage the church in Italy to look to Constantinople rather than to the Gothic king at Ravenna, and so to make possible the ultimate overthrow of the Gothic kingdom.

Theology, however, lay at the heart of the ecclesiastical controversy, the terms of which were bewildering to the Latin West. When about 513 a Greek bishop wrote to Pope Symmachus begging him to adopt a less anti-Greek attitude and to take initiatives to heal the schism, the Roman clergy and senators were filled with alarm to learn that this professedly Chalcedonian and pro-Roman bishop wished to affirm as orthodox not only the Chalcedonian formula that Christ, God and man, is known as one person in two natures, but also that he is of two natures. Boethius was present at the resulting tumult and felt that a logician had something to contribute to the clarification of the issue. After some long pondering (which may have lasted five years rather than five weeks), Boethius wrote the earliest of his theological tractates, the fifth, 'against Eutyches and Nestorius', the most original work on any subject that came from his pen. Its content manifests affinity with the positions advocated both at Constantinople and at Rome by a group of Gothic ('Scythian', because they came from the Dobrudja) monks led by Maxentius and Leontius. Maxentius was firm for the Chalcedonian 'in two natures', but wished to meet its critics by adding that there is 'one nature of the divine Word incarnate', that Christ is both of and in two natures, and that the incarnate, crucified Lord is 'one of the Trinity'. He explained that this last formula implies neither that God can suffer nor that there is plurality in the divine being. However, at Rome Pope Hormisdas was alarmed by such doctrines, perhaps especially for any hint of an implication that Chalcedon needed supplementation or qualification. The Pope's advisers were suspicious of any concession to Byzantine compromise. Boethius' fifth tractate shows that he thought otherwise. In essentials he supports Maxentius, whose formulae were also congenial to Justinian, though he would not be so imprudent as to say so before he had won the Pope's approval.

Boethius' classic definition of person as 'the individual substance of rational nature' is formulated with the eastern Christological controversy in mind. It had its sixth century critics as well as adverse comment from Richard of St Victor (De Trinitate iv. 21f.). Boethius was aware that the term 'persona' may be obscure, but is easier to use of human kind than of God, in which context its meaning becomes unclear.

The first tractate, De Trinitate, written for his father-in-law Symmachus, displays an Augustinian reserve towards the word 'persona' in the exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity. Father, Son and Spirit are one God, not three. Yet these three biblical terms are not describing accidental qualities of the one divine substance, since it is axiomatic that what God is, he has; there are no accidents in God. But Neoplatonic logic can help with its analysis of the relationship of identity and difference. When we say that x and y are 'the same', some distinction between them is necessary if the assertion is to be of interest. The language of Father and Son is that of relation, a word which implies otherness. But within the Christian Trinity, relation is that between equals and identicals, a kind of relation not to be found among perishable, finite things. The second tractate, for John the deacon, pursues the question further. The term 'Trinitas' is not a term of substance, but of relation. For John Boethius also composed his third tractate, in which there is no discussion of any point of Christian dogma, but exclusively of a problem in Platonic metaphysics: Plato teaches that the good transcends being. All that exists derives from the good, and its existence as such is a good. If an existent entity is good, is it good in the same way as the supreme Good is good, or is goodness something it has rather than something it is? Boethius follows Proclus in proceeding on a mathematical analogy. First establish the axioms and definitions, and then, like Euclid, ask what must necessarily follow.

Boethius' role as a 'boffin' in the discussions at Rome will not have passed unnoticed at Constantinople. In the year 522 Boethius' two young sons were nominated as consuls for the year, which can hardly have happened unless Boethius' name was being spoken of at Constantinople as a personage carrying weight in the pro-Byzantine interest at Rome. From 1 September, probably of 522, Boethius took up a major administrative post at Ravenna as Master of the Offices. He used his position to protect his friends and to frustrate the corruption of court officials. In short, he made many enemies. The storm broke when he was accused of suppressing damning evidence that the senator Albinus had engaged in treasonable correspondence with Constantinople to the danger of Theoderic's kingdom. For the harsh realities of political life Boethius was too much of an academic to survive.

But his long imprisonment at Pavia gave him the opportunity to write his greatest book, The Consolation of Philosophy. From an apologia protesting his innocence of the charge he goes on to an analysis of human misery and happiness. In serious trouble one quickly discovers by pain and disillusionment who are one's real friends (I pr. viii. 6). How bitter is the sadness of remembering one's past happiness (II pr. iv. 1); perhaps an echo of Augustine's 'tristis gaudium pristinum recolo' in the Confessions (X xxi. 30). But Boethius reproaches himself, through the lady Philosophy who represents his better self, for his self-pity. Nothing is miserable unless thinking makes it so (II pr. iv. 18). Those who trust to the deceitful lady Fortuna have no right to complain when her proverbial wheel turns (II pr. viii). But from the middle of the third book, with its literary climax in the poem 'O qui perpetua', the vindication of providence moves into a Platonic key, and owes much to the writings of Proclus. In the first book Proclus' authority is recognised in passing in the quotation, taken from his commentary on the Parmenides (1056 Cousin): 'If there is a God, whence comes evil? But whence comes good, if there is not?' (I pr. iv. 30). Boethius tells his readers that for some time past he has been studying the arguments about providence and evil, and the many parallels with Proclus' three opuscula on this subject illustrate his reading there.

At the beginning of his monograph on the hypothetical syllogism he remarks that the study of philosophy has been the solamen of his life. Now in prison, perhaps with a few books brought by Symmachus or his wife Rusticiana, he must compose his confession of philosophical faith. It is a profoundly religious view of the nature and destiny of man, but it is notoriously not a Christian book. There is nothing of the remission of sins or eternal life or redemption. There are a number of tantalising, near-echoes of biblical texts; it is characteristic of the style of the book that they can be otherwise interpreted, except one, the citation of a phrase from the Wisdom of Solomon 8:1 in III pr. xii. 22-23 to the effect that God 'rules everything firmly and gently disposes them', where Boethius expresses delight not only at the content of the lady Philosophy's statement but also at the very words she uses ('haec ipsa verba'). It is, however, to be emphasised that the truth conveyed by this biblical citation is a matter of natural theology, not of revealed.

The Consolation does not read like crypto-paganism; that is to say, like a manifesto of the inner pagan religion of a man who now has nothing to lose and has torn the Christian façade aside. But nor does it read like crypto-Christianity; that is to say, expressing thoughts that are inwardly Christian but, by way of literary conceit, adopt the outward dress of a Platonic metaphysic. The essential shape of the Consolation is a Neoplatonic thesis that the imperfections of this world are allowed to facilitate the return of the soul to its origin in God. But it is not very easy to specify themes admitted by Boethius which are frankly inconceivable within a Christian scheme of thought. There is one emphatic assertion of agreement with the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul: 'Platoni vehementer assentior' (III pr. xii. 1; cf. m. xi) in the context of Boethius' forgetfulness of his true destiny. But the transmigration of souls merely becomes an innocuous description of the different beasts that various types of wicked men come to resemble (IV pr. iii. 16-21, where the final clause 'uertatur in beluam' is quoted from Cicero, De Officiis iii. 20, 82). Porphyry would have said the same. But the point is that in this form a Christian vigilante would have found nothing to object to. There are no Platonisms in the Consolation that one cannot also find somewhere in Augustine, notably in the Cassiciacum dialogues written between his conversion and his baptism where Augustine experiments with a juxtaposition of Christianity and Neoplatonism. It is possible to draw up a considerable list of anticipations in Augustine's writings, though none where one can establish a verbal echo or the probability of a literary dependence. Perhaps the closest analogies occur in Augustine's Soliloquies which, like Boethius, speak of the wings of the soul; of the need to know your own self to be immortal, simple and uncompounded; above all, of the embodied soul's need to recover gradually its sense of true identity by a process of 'remembering' (Solil. i. 14, 24; ii. 1, 1; 20, 34f.).

This is not to say that Augustine is a source for Boethius' Platonism, but rather that the early dialogues may have offered him a model that he was glad to accept.

Nineteenth-century scholars used to contrast the Christian author of the Opuscula with the pagan author of the Consolation, and wove fantastic hypotheses that they were two different authors. Obsessions blinded them to the paradox of Boethius' most serious works: there is even more Neoplatonism in the Opuscula (except for the very different fourth, De Fide Catholica, whose diction is nevertheless wholly Boethian) than in the Consolation. And the Consolation, though it contains nothing either specifically pagan or specifically Christian, is composed by a man who is throughout aware of Christianity, and is therefore adopting no philosophical positions that he has good reason to think incompatible with an Augustinian version of the faith.

Boethius' mind is restrospective, so far as its content is concerned, soaked in Plato and Aristotle and in their Neoplatonic exegetes of his own time. Yet the opuscula and dialectical treatises injected an essential ingredient into the formation of scholastic theology and philosophy, and the music and arithmetic long remained to educate medieval men in matters of which they would otherwise have been remarkably ignorant. If tragedy had never overtaken him and if he had never written the Consolation of Philosophy, charged from start to finish with intellectual and moral passion, no doubt his influence on posterity would have been greatly reduced, but it would still have been far from negligible. He set the feet of western men on the ladder that ascends from practical philosophy (morality, politics, economics) to contemplative questions of pure and abstract truth, transcending objects of sense-perception. He taught the Latin West to judge the validity of an inference, to be aware of the foundations of mathematics, and to envisage reason and revelation as related but very distinct ways of apprehending the mystery of God.