SOURCE: "Evil, Freedom, and Providence," in Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and philosophy, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 223-53.

[In the following essay, Chadwick provides a detailed analysis of the Consolation of Philosophy, exploring such features of the work as its combination of Platonic and Stoic philosophies and its treatment of the problem of evil and free will.]

Since the Renaissance, and especially since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century altered our understanding of the nature and structure of our environment, Boethius has come to seem a rather lonely and forgotten foreigner in a world grown strange. Yet something of that isolation belongs to him even during his lifetime, and never more so than in the near dereliction of the imprisonment during which he wrote the Consolation of philosophy. By common consent this remains one of the high masterpieces of European literature, translated since early mediaeval times into many languages; a work whose English translators alone include King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I; a dominant force (with Thomas Aquinas) in the making of Dante's mind. The Consolation is the work of a refined humanist scholar with a richly stocked memory, delighting in lyrical poetry and elegant prose, fascinated by logical problems almost to the point of obsession. In Theoderic's prison at Pavia he knew that his time was limited (iv, 6, 5), but he evidently had more than sufficient leisure to produce polished composition and a sophisticated structure. The work has a Virgilian quality in being almost a mosaic of subtle literary allusions. Joachim Gruber's commentary (1978) marks a signal advance in the identification of his literary echoes, but also makes it clear that he is not transcribing sources. This is not a man composing with a library of books open before him, but a very well-read mind which can recall a phrase from here or from there at will. His Latin is densely packed with concentrated argument; and the argument is carried on from the prose sections into the poems which he inserts, he says (iv, 6, 57), with the intention of lightening the reader's task with a difficult subject. The poems normally have subtle links with the prose sections that precede or follow them.

The method of mixing prose and verse had been practised by Martianus Capella and by Ennodius. The style was associated with the Greek, Menippos of Gadara in the third century BC, whose work is lost. But something of its nature can be deduced from Lucian of Samosata and from remnants of Varro's 'Menippean Satires'. A light touch is deliberately employed with a deeply serious purpose. Jerome (Vir. ill. III) mentions an otherwise unknown Christian named Acilius Severus who composed an autobiography, with the Greek title hodoiporikon or 'travel-book', cast in both prose and verse. Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris composed letters in the prosimetric form. It is probable that on Boethius the greatest influence is that of Martianus Capella, since his work also describes a kind of intellectual pilgrimage ending in heaven.

Among the writings that have been produced by men and women in prison awaiting the execution of a death sentence under tyranny, the Consolation holds a place of lasting preeminence, partly because of the two grand problems of innocent suffering and the reconciliation of divine providence with human freedom with which it deals, and partly because in this profoundly religious book there is an evidently conscious refusal to say anything distinctively Christian. The book is a work of natural, not of revealed, theology, and strives after a universal appeal to every man. Boethius' subject is the consolation not of theology but of philosophy. Throughout his life philosophy, and especially dialectic, has been the ruling passion of his mind. Now at the supreme crisis he asks what it may have to say to him, especially concerning providence and evil. The question of providence was a topic much discussed in the late Platonic schools. Boethius declares that he had studied the subject deeply (v, 4, I), a statement which answers the query of many rapid readers who wonder whether so elaborate and sophisticated a book could really have been composed in custody. We have already seen that his family had the resources to persuade his guardians to allow him a few books and papers should he have needed anything. The ground for his labours had already been prepared. The Alexandrian Platonist Hierocles had written at some length on the subject, while Proclus addresses himself to the issue both in his commentary on the Republic and in his three opuscula concerning providence. There is good reason to think these works familiar to Boethius. He will also have known Plotinus' two not wholly self-consistent treatises on the subject (ii, 2-3).

The Consolation of Philosophy begins in a low minor key with a sad poem echoing Ovid's Tristia and Letters from Pontus. A writer who recalls having once written cheerful verses (an allusion perhaps to the bucolic poem recorded among Boethius' works by Cassiodorus in the Anecdoton Holderi) is now compelled at the bidding of the Muses to embark on tearful songs of self-pity. But then a dreamlike vision follows in the ensuing prose section (a dream which is the ancestor of many mediaeval dream-poems). The lady Philosophy appears to comfort him. She has burning eyes; a face old yet fresh and young; her height, too, varying in appearance, at one moment of normal human size, but then reaching up to and passing through the very heavens. Moreover, her dress woven with her own hands (like Athene's peplos in Iliad 5, 734, a text on whose symbolism late Platonists liked to meditate) is of fine thread and decorated with two Greek letters, Pi below, Theta above, linked by ascending steps. This dress has been roughly torn by violent hands.

The Theta on Philosophy's dress may have been suggested to Boethius by a Theta on his own. The Carolingian theologian Prudentius of Troyes, in an attack on John the Scot's dangerous treatise on divine predestination, prefixes to each censured excerpt from John a Greek Theta 'because some have used this letter to mark those condemned to death' (PL 115, 1012AB). Accordingly a prisoner on whom the death sentence had been decreed was required to wear regulation prison clothing marked with the initial letter of thanatos, intended either to increase his sense of humiliation or to safeguard the executioners from mistaken identity in their victim. An early allusion to the practice occurs in one of the epigrams of Martial (vii, 37, 2) which establishes the certainty that this was Roman custom with condemned criminals. It seems to follow, then, that if Boethius was in the 'condemned cell' and wearing some old torn sacking inscribed with a fateful Theta, he is likely to have been enduring more severe custody than the mild house arrest sometimes claimed for him on the presupposition that so elegant and urbane a work as the Consolation can hardly have emerged from a dank subterranean gaol. Certainly Boethius' freedom to write shows that he was not (or not yet) consigned to the worst of dungeons at Pavia. A text in Augustine's Tractates on St. John's Gospel (49, 9) attests the variety of treatment accorded to prisoners, not all being confined in rat-infested cellars. (For a modern analogy one might think of the gradually deteriorating conditions, through many months of imprisonment, inflicted by the Pakistan government on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, culminating in his execution under sordid circumstances.) Boethius' father-in-law Symmachus was still caput senatus, though no doubt treading delicately, and had more than enough resources to provide the prison officers with douceurs to persuade them to allow the poor convict a few books and writing materials. The mere survival of the text of the Consolation (where the embittered scorn for Theoderic's government is unconcealed) proves that members of Boethius' family were allowed some access to him, or the work would no doubt have perished in the gruesome fires of the torturechamber to which Boethius was to be compelled to make his way. The impression which the text is intended to convey is that he is writing under physical conditions of some discomfort. He is far from his beautifully furnished library with its ivory and glass décor, but his mind is filled with its contents (i, 5, 6, cf. i, 4, 3). He is encumbered with a heavy chain round his neck (i m. 2, 24-7). This, however, is primarily a symbol of his earth-bound condition. It may be literal as well as symbolic; one cannot be sure, for his physical prison is simultaneously the counterpart of the Platonic prison of his soul from which he seeks liberation.

Philosophy's alphabetical symbols would be no mystery to an ancient reader. They represent practical and theoretical studies, that is the hierarchy of sciences already set out in Boethius' exegesis of Porphyry and again in scholastic form in his De trinitate, ascending through the inferior disciplines of moral philosophy, politics, and economics, up to the less practical, purer disciplines of natural sciences, mathematics, and theology. In a gesture strikingly paralleled in Augustine the lady Philosophy dismisses the Muses as lighthearted meretricious entertainers whose song and dance, as it were of the commedia dell'arte, are wholly lacking in sufficient seriousness to speak to the sick patient's condition. Let him look to Philosophy who has been his gentle nurse since his youth and who, through the books in his library, has taught him both human and divine things, the mysteries of the stars and the secrets of nature. With her he suffers in good company. For Philosophy has had its martyrs: Socrates, Anaxagoras, and Zeno of Elea among the Greeks; Canius, Seneca, and Soranus among the Latins. Indeed Boethius' philosophical studies have been made the ground for the accusation against him of maleficium, sorcery, or sacrilegium, in the pursuit of his ambitions.

Most of the first book consists of Boethius' political apologia; a long protestation of innocence written with contempt both for Theoderic's barbarism and for the cowardice of his fellow senators. But once he has all that off his chest, the lady Philosophy has stern rebuke to offer him. He has forgotten his true self altogether. His citizenship is not in the realm of the many, subject to the changes and chances of political life, but in that of the One, the single ruler and king of a famous Homeric line which Aristotle cites in a theological context in the Metaphysics. Obedience to his justice is liberty. (Seneca says that 'obeying God is liberty', Beata vita 15, 7; and Augustine coins the phrase 'in his service is perfect freedom', Quant. An. 34, 78.) Nothing can exile Boethius from the kingdom of God except his own choice. But the emotional misery he is enduring suggests to Philosophy that his physical exile mirrors his spiritual exile. He has forgotten the nature and destiny of man. Merely to answer the question 'What is man?' with the Aristotelian definition 'a rational, mortal animal', is to disclose a loss of awareness of one's higher self and of the guiding hand of providence in ordering the world. To know oneself in this sense is to be free from all the peaks and troughs of emotion, to drive out both joy and fear, hope and grief, and to see the path of truth in a clear light. Philosophy wants to recall him to what he has learnt from Plato's Parmenides about abstract being (i, 1, 10), to liberate him from his attachment to this world, and to make possible his return to God who is true being and goodness. But his present 'lethargic' condition means that the healing drugs have to be applied gradually. He cannot take too much medication all at once; a principle familiar to ancient medicine (as in Galen XII, 590 Kühn) which had long been applied by moralists to the therapy of the soul, as in Seneca, Consolatio ad Helviam 1, 2, or in the excerpt from Origen's Exodus commentary in Philocalia 27, 4-5.

The first book of the Consolation is limited, then, to diagnosis by his gentle physician. Consolation proper begins with the second book. The argument, however, stands less in the tradition of ancient consolation literature than in that of the Protrepticus or exhortation to philosophical conversion. It gradually ascends from a Stoic moralism to a Platonic metaphysical vision of the divine ordering of an apparently chaotic world. Book ii is almost wholly Stoic in its inspiration, with many parallels in Seneca and in the Consolation to Apollonius among the works of Plutarch. Cicero's Tusculans are also much used.

The Platonists and the Stoics were the two philosophical schools of ancient Greece in which there was a serious defence of belief in providence, though the two schools undertook their defences from very different premisses. For the Stoics there is no real distinction between providence and fate and the inexorable chain of causation. The cosmos rolls on its everlasting way as an interlocking, ineluctable pattern of cause and effect. Human freedom is largely an illusion of grandeur, for in principle it is scarcely distinguishable from animal instinct, though the Stoics vigorously (and to their critics unconvincingly) protested their belief in the freedom of the will. What they meant by this is an inward process of personal psychotherapy, in which each individual's task is to learn to bear himself nobly before the blows of outrageous fortune, to conduct himself with a strong sense of public duty however adverse the circumstances, and to accept the benefits of nature with gratitude. In a world of complex diversity everything has its place. Even bedbugs may have the beneficial effect of preventing one from the enervating effects of oversleeping.

The Platonists, on the other hand, began quite at the opposite end of the cosmic scale, namely with the transcendence of the divine realm. God must be exempted from the least responsibility for evil. Since the cosmos is held to mirror the ideal noetic realm above, some explanation is required for the fact that human experience of this cosmos produces pain and dissatisfaction. The Platonists offered a series of explanations: (a) evil is rooted in a misuse of free choice; (b) 'evil' is merely a relative term for a defect of goodness, for as one descends the hierarchy of being, one also descends in degrees of the good; (c) evil inheres in matter, the very principle of multiplicity and so also of flux and change. Under different forms and variations Platonic philosophers expanded on these themes, and all three explanations find a place somewhere in Boethius' theodicy.

Accordingly, the second book and the first sections of the third operate with Stoic themes in which comfort is discovered by reconciling onself to a world of determined inevitability 'Do not try to change things, but adapt yourself to the way things are', said the moralist Teles (p. 9, 8 f. Hense). 'If our free wills could change the world, each of us would need his own private world; we all desire different things, so the only power we possess is to adapt ourselves', says the Platonist Hierocles (de Providentia, in Photius, Bibliotheca 251, 465a 4 ff.). We have to take the rough with the smooth. Farmers have bad as well as good years, sailors stormy as well as calm seas. One cannot reasonably complain if that deceitful and fickle lady Fortune turns her wheel with her well-known caprice, and suddenly removes power and affluence (a reflection much like Seneca, ep. 107, 7 f.).

In the past Boethius has done pretty well with Fortune: taken into Symmachus' household when he lost his father, married to a chaste wife, nobly honoured by the nomination of his young sons to be consuls, able to display his munificence to the populace at the circus. He has been a remarkably lucky man. And is he not tempted to exaggerate the awfulness of his situation? Hitherto his family remains untouched. Symmachus himself, most precious glory of the human race, is unmolested so far. (Boethius is evidently aware that a threat is very possible.) Inverting a damnatory Ciceronian phrase from Pro Cluentio 72, Boethius praises his father-in-law as 'a man wholly made of wisdom and virtue'. He has been taken far from home, but his place of exile is home to those who normally live there (perhaps echoing Seneca, ep. 24, 17). But then Boethius turns upon himself with the realization that there is no crumb of comfort in looking back on a distinguished past that is now for ever lost. Echoing a phrase from Augustine's Confessions (x, 21, 30 'tristis gaudium pristinum recolo'), he laments that the worst of all miseries is to remember past happiness now irrecoverable (ii, 4, 1). Alas, the human condition is that all such benefits hang by a thin thread. The very best of good fortune cannot be free of anxiety. No man is so content as to be without some cause of irritation or worry. Those who have most end up by desiring the satisfaction of ever more insatiable needs. The truth is that nothing is miserable unless thinking makes it so. Happiness should not be sought in any external circumstances. One must learn to be self-possessed ('sui iuris', i m. 4, 16 from Cicero, ep. ad Brut. 24, 4), self-contained ('sui compos', ii, 4, 23; used of God in v, 6, 8). The comfort of one's body is a gift of chance. Only the soul is immortal, as those have known who have sought their happiness through sufferings and pain (ii, 4, 29; possibly but in no way necessarily, a reference to Christian martyrs). One has to build one's house upon the rock (ii, m. 4). This world's values are merely relative. What is prized by one nation is censured by others. Life is brief but dignity is even more shortlived. High office confers no moral virtue on the holder and is extremely dangerous to society when united with vice. The praetorship was once an office of high standing, but is now empty and is felt to be a heavy burden by the senators who have to hold it, while the 'prefect of the annona', once of supreme distinction but now fallen to be a mere distributor of food in the capital (Cassiodorus, Variae vi, 18, 1), has become the lowest form of senatorial life. Nothing is more precarious than posts of high honour. To hold them is like living under the suspended sword of Damocles (so already Cicero, Tusc. v, 21, 61-2). Remember Seneca offered a choice of suicides by Nero; or Papinian, prince of jurists, butchered by Caracalla (iii, 5). When the time comes for you to fall they cannot even allow you quietly to resign and retire and to surrender your wealth. Both past and very recent history offer many instances of kings whose felicity has changed to calamity (iii, 5, 2 'plena exemplorum vetustas' echoing Cicero, Pro Archia 14).

Moreover, honour's relative status is proved by its local character. A grandee of one place is a nobody somewhere else. Boethius refers to his study in Ptolemy and the astronomical geography of Macrobius' commentary on Scipio's Dream, which has taught him what diversity there is in the regions of the inhabited world. Great officers of state are of no account at all once they step outside the Roman world.

And what appalling indignities have to be endured by the seeker after office! If he is to gain support, he must cultivate people he dislikes or even despises, knowing they will be ready to betray him whenever it suits them. None can hurt more than someone who was once your familiar friend. At least by falling into serious trouble Boethius has the advantage of having quickly discovered who his real friends are. They are remarkably few.

When one is suffering innocently, it is a discipline teaching one how independent one has to be of the opinion of the multitude. If one's praise is merited, popular estimation is no true guide to one's value and adds nothing to a wise man who is a better judge of his own merits. (The remark recalls Aristotle's dry observation that the pleasure given to a wise man by an honour is to see that others have reached a conclusion long apparent to himself.) The moral virtue in innocent suffering is even greater if other people do not realize one is innocent (i, 4, 33). Under insults a true philosopher should remain silent. He may even forfeit his title to be a true philosopher if he speaks about his patience under abuse (ii, 7, 20); a Boethian dictum whence has sprung the proverbial saying 'had you kept silent, you would have remained a philosopher', si tacuisses, philosophas mansisses. Boethius' words may call to mind not only a saying of Epictetus (iv, 8, 15 ff.) but also the preface to the Contra Celsum where Origen thinks the silence of Jesus before mocking accusers a model for wise Christians to follow.

In any event the frailties of life apply to all. Rich men too feel the cold and will bleed if pricked. Death is the great equalizer (ii m. 7).

Adversity is paradoxically better for one's character than prosperity (ii, 8, 3). The supreme duty is to keep a clear conscience. That is to be liberated from the bonds of this earthly prison. The sentiment strikingly combines Stoic and Platonic themes (ii, 7, 23).

The concluding poem of the second book (ii m. 8) is a fine hymn of praise to the love that binds together the cosmos to prevent its disintegration. The various races, married couples, all manner of incompatibilities are held together by this cosmic force. How happy men would be if only the love by which the stars are ruled could reign in their hearts:

O felix hominum genus
Si vestros animos amor
Quo caelum regitur regat.

The providential equilibrium of the diverse elements of the world, the pugnantia semina (which Boethius probably borrows from Martianus Capella i, 1, 3), is a characteristic Stoic theme which recurs elsewhere in other verse sections of the Consolation (iii, m. 2, 1-5; iv m. 6, 4-5). Latin poets before Boethius had rhapsodized on the subject of the love manifest in the bonds averting cosmic catastrophe (Lucan iv, 191 'sacer orbis amor'). In Paulinus of Nola (poem 27) the ties of intimate friendship reflect those which cement the entire universe together. From Posidonius onwards in the first century BC, this defence of providential order had ceased to be distinctively Stoic property, and was absorbed by Platonists. It can be seen in Apuleius. Accordingly the concluding poem of the second book is initiating the 'change of gear' which in the third book begins to move outside the Stoic conventions into the sketching of a Platonic metaphysic.

The first prose section of book iii announces Boethius' readiness for stronger medicines, bitter to taste, sweet once swallowed. But the shift is not explicit until the poem O qui perpetua (iii m. 9) which is both the literary climax of the Consolation and a major turning point in its argument. The first sections of the third book recapitulate Stoic arguments of the type predominant in the second book. Men seek happiness in external things: in riches, power, fame, pleasure, family ties, above all in friendship, which is a matter not of luck but of moral virtue. In this variety of goals all men agree in seeking what they believe to be their good. Even though we human beings are so earthbound, we nevertheless have some dim vision of our origin and therefore of our true end. But we mistake where happiness lies. Riches can never satisfy the avaricious; and the wealthy are miserable surrounded by envious people wishing to relieve them of their money so that they are less, not more independent. He who needs a bodyguard is hardly a free man (iii, 5). 'Nobility' means being praised not for your own merits but for those of your ancestors. Its one moral value is to impress you with a sense of obligation to live up to their ancient virtue (iii, 6, 9, echoing Aristotle, Rhet. ii, 15, 1390b 16 ff., and frg. 92). There is a proper pleasure in family life. But children can inflict such torment as to rob you of all happiness. It is impossible to locate the good in physical pleasures or in athleticism or in a beautiful body. Boethius cites a saying of Aristotle that to one gifted with second sight like Lynceus the beauty of Alcibiades would only contrast with the vileness within. A close parallel in Iamblichus' Protrepticus proves that directly or indirectly Boethius is drawing on Aristotle's Protrepticus, an exhortation to the study of philosophy extant only in fragmentary quotations. The correspondence between Boethius and Iamblichus does not extend further, and therefore can be no basis for flimsy hypotheses about a wider indebtedness to Aristotle's lost work.

Boethius now begins to perceive 'through a narrow crack' (cf. iv, 4, 40) where the lady Philosophy is leading him. 'But I would prefer to learn more plainly from you' (reminiscent of Phaedrus 263a). In seeking happiness man wants sufficiency, power, fame, respect, pleasure; he discovers that these goods cannot be had separately, but only as a single package, as one substance (cf. Plato, Protagoras 329cd) which is extremely rare. The actual happiness men know is marked by acute imperfections and beset by transitoriness and mortality. The prose section (iii, 9) concludes with a direct reference to Plato's Timaeus which teaches (27c) that in even the least matter we do well to ask for God's help. This explicit mention of the Timaeus prepares the way for the masterly poem summarizing the doctrines of the first part of this Platonic dialogue. Nothing in it has a correspondence with the second half, but that was not available to the West in Latin. Proclus' commentary on the Timaeus, which he had certainly read, is also incomplete; it is uncertain that Proclus' exegesis covered much of the second half.

In the 38 hexameters of O qui perpetua Boethius fashioned an exquisite poem of petition to the Creator. It is a nodal point in the work as a whole, and Boethius knew it. An acute observation in the recent commentary by Joachim Gruber (1978) has noted that the various metres of the poems in the Consolation are grouped in an ordered and symmetrical structure round O qui perpetua which occupies a central position. This shows, in passing, that there is no good reason to embrace speculations that something is likely to have been lost at the end of the last book.

Boethius' ecstatic hymn is reminiscent of the Neoplatonic hymns on cosmic theology characteristic of Synesius and Proclus. The ideas of the hymn are derived both from Plato and from Proclus' commentary. This was established by Klingner (1921). The Creator, himself at rest, is cause of motion to everything (Proclus, In Tim. i, 396, 24 f., a theme going back to Aristotle's Metaphysics). Boethius will repeat this in prose at iii, 12, 37. God is moved to create by his own goodness (Tim. 29e), not by any external cause. In creating he realized a heavenly pattern, forming the cosmos in beauty and perfection (30b). Taking a theme also expounded in his Institutio musica (i, 2) Boethius says that God binds the world's elements together on mathematical principles, 'by numbers' (Tim. 31c 'analogia', or proportion). Thus he keeps the equilibrium of cold and hot, dry and wet (31bc). So also he binds the world-soul in its harmonious parts (per consona membra) and gives it a threefold structure (35ab; 37a), set in the middle of the cosmos (36e) to move all things (as Plato's Laws 896e, Phaedrus 245c). Proclus (In Tim. ii, 197, 16) says that the Creator 'divides the Soul among the various parts, fits together the diverse elements and makes them consonant with one another'.

This divided Soul is split into two, each part to move in a circle (Tim. 36bc) so as to return upon itself—a theme very dear to Proclus (e.g. In Tim. ii, 247-9). The Soul encircles a yet deeper mind (much as Proclus, In Tim. i, 403, 3 'soul dances round mind'), and so moves the heaven in a similar circle. From the mixture of the world-soul Plato's Creator brings forth (human) souls and inferior living beings (Tim. 41d expounded by Proclus iii, 246, 29 ff.). These souls are provided with 'light chariots' (41e), i.e. the astral vehicles of Neoplatonic speculation as stimulated by the Chaldean Oracles and perhaps also by Aristotle, Gen. anim. 736b 27 ff., which linked soul and body through a semi-material, semi-immaterial, starry pneuma.

Distributed like seed in heaven and earth (42d), the souls are then turned back by God towards himself (Proclus iii, 289, 29 ff.), like creatures attracted by fire.

The last seven lines of the poem sum up Boethius' petition.

Da pater augustam menti conscendere sedem. His language echoes the fourth-century poet Tiberianus (da pater augustas ut possim noscere causas, iv, 28) and perhaps Martianus Capella ii, 193 (da pater aetherios mentis conscendere coetus,) but modified by a Vergilian reminiscence from Georgic iv, 228, 'sedem augustam'.

So he may discern the source of the Good if he now fixes his gaze on God and if the heavy cloudiness of the earthly body is dispelled. God is the clear heaven, a haven of rest to the devout. 'To see you is our end. You are our beginning, charioteer, leader, pathway, goal' (Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem). The accumulation of substantives, which recalls the closing lines of De fide catholica (delectatio, cibus, opus, laus), is a characteristic mark of ancient hymns of praise, which finds echoes in the New Testament itself (e.g. John xiv, 6; xxii, 13). 'Deus unus et idem' is Augustinian (City of God vii, 9). Tiberianus iv, 7 f. has 'tu primus et idem postremus mediusque simul.'

A fragment of Aristotle's lost work 'On Philosophy' quoted by Simplicius (In de Caelo 288, 28-289, 15 = frg. 16) argues from the degrees of perfection in things up to God as the highest being we can think. A similar 'Anselmian' argument was deployed by Platonists known to Augustine (City of God viii, 6). So Boethius goes on to argue that the awareness of imperfection demonstrates the existence of an absolute perfection in comparison with which it is seen to be imperfect. The imperfections of the world can be arranged in a graded hierarchy of goodness and power, and this ascent presupposes an ultimate goal. All men share the notion that the first principle of all things is good (so Boethius, Perih, ii, 42, 3-6; opusc. iii, 93). Nothing better than God can be conceived (nihil deo melius excogitari queat), a definition going back ultimately to Aristotle in the piece cited by Simplicius, first found in Latin in Seneca, and common in Augustine (e.g. De moribus ii, 11, 24). Only the perfect good can be at the summit of the hierarchy of goods. By 'God', therefore, we mean the perfection of both goodness and happiness, and goodness is of the essence of happiness (iii, 10). The argument works with the same axioms as those of the third tractate.

For Boethius' Platonic ontology this is a demonstration with mathematical force, carrying a corollary that a perfectly happy man participates in the being of God and in this sense can be said to become a god. Augustine would not have regarded such language as intolerable.

Plotinus (i, 4, 6) says that happiness is found not in a piecemeal amassing of individually desired ends but in a unity. Boethius lays down that individual goods confer happiness only when experienced as a unity (iii, 11). This points to the truth that the supreme God is also the One. Hence a principal good desired by humans, animals, and even plants (for they flourish in the right habitat) is a wish to avert destruction and disintegration, that is the loss of unity. The will to subsist is the desire not to fall apart but to remain one. The argument appears in Proclus' commentary on the Parmenides (1199, 20 f.): 'Everything has an instinctive urge towards the One, and everything is what it is by a desire for the One.' A comparable point has been made by Boethius in his Arithmetica (i, 7). Accordingly we look for an infinite first cause which is a simple undivided whole, free of the limitation resulting from division.

The next poem (iii m. 11) is highly Platonic. The mind (mens profunda as in O qui perpetua) in its quest for truth has to turn back on itself. The doctrine appears in Augustine, Conf. vii, 10, 16. The body weighing down the mind does not altogether obliterate all light or the seed of the truth. Hence Plato's inspired Muse taught that knowing is recovering the memory of what was once known but has become forgotten because of the mists of corporeal existence. On passing into prose once more, Boethius emphatically endorses the doctrine of reminiscence, a belief accepted by the young Augustine (Solil. ii, 20, 35) also; for the lady Philosophy has been recalling him to truths that his mind once knew: 'Platoni vehementer assentior' (iii, 12, 1). But instead of a development of the Platonic doctrine of the soul, the argument turns away to the central problem of divine providence. The diversity of the different elements in the world threatens disintegration. Somehow providence checks the centrifugal forces of destruction. 'Whatever holds everything together is what I mean by God' (iii, 12, 25). Accordingly by 'God' we mean not only the supreme good but also the supreme power, a power so great that it is irresistible and yet is gently exercised by an infinitely good wisdom. With a turn of phrase Boethius thinks singularly felicitous, the lady Philosophy declares that 'There is a highest good which rules all things firmly and gently disposes them' (est igitur summum, inquit, bonum, quod regit cuncta fortiter suaviterque disponit). Boethius at once tells the lady how delighted he is not only by her conclusion but by the very words she has found to express it—'haec ipsa verba quibus uteris'. Now at long last he is ashamed of the folly that had so exquisitely tortured him.

Why should Boethius take such pleasure in 'haec ipsa verba'? The only natural answer is that the words come from the eighth chapter of the Wisdom of Solomon (adtingit enim a fine usque ad finem fortiter et disponit omnia suaviter), a text that Augustine had occasionally found congenial, and which was to mould the words of the great Advent Antiphon O Sapientia, of whose liturgical use our earliest evidence comes from Amalarius of Metz in the ninth century, but as a text taken for granted as long established in western churches. In the context of the Consolation the effect of Boethius' cry of pleasure at the very words is as if he were saying to Philosophy: 'Fancy you, of all people, knowing the Bible'. The point has an evidently direct bearing on the interpretation of the religious standpoint of the Consolation and on Boethius' disposition towards the Christian faith at the time of its composition in prison.

There are a number of other places in the Consolation where an allusion to a biblical text is possible. Only in the case just considered does it seem the one natural interpretation of Boethius' prose. The others are curiously tantalising possibilities. The poem iii m. 10 begins 'Huc omnes pariter venite capti/Quos fallax ligat improbis catenis … (libido)'—'Come all you who are bound captive by the wicked chains of earthly desire … ' It is more than a little reminiscent of Matt. xi, 28 f. 'Come to me, all you who are heavy laden … ' At iv, 1, 6 Philosophy likens good and evil men to precious and worthless vessels in a great house; this is distantly reminiscent of Rom. iv, 21 ff. and 2 Tim. ii, 20. According to i, 1, 9 the meretricious Muses choke the good harvest of reason with the thorns of passion. A reference to the parable of the sower looks possible (Matt. xiii, 22). In v, 3, 34 Boethius writes of God as inaccessa lux. Is it recalling the 'inaccessible light' of 1 Tim. vi, 16? Other allusions could be catalogued, but are less likely than those here cited. It is no doubt the case that if one reference is virtually certain, the probability of other conscious or unconscious reminiscences is much enhanced. Nevertheless, even if these allusions are correctly identified as recalling his reading of the Bible, it is significant that each is presented in so ambiguous a way that the allusion could be picked up only by a reader well acquainted with the New Testament. Moreover, the reference to the Wisdom of Solomon enforces a doctrine of natural theology, not revealed. There is nothing specifically Christian about the content of what is being maintained, even at the point where a citation of the Bible seems as good as certain.

The argument of Philosophy continues that if God is supremely good and powerful, he is the ultimate source of being. Indeed he is being (esse), and the imperfections of the graded hierarchy of being leading down from him are also, as one descends the continuum, the successive deprivation both of being and of goodness. Evil is deficiency of being, and therefore strictly nothingness. At this point Boethius betrays a little anxiety that the lady Philosophy begins to play a verbal game with him, when she says that 'Evil is nothing, since God cannot do it, and there is nothing he cannot do' (iii, 12, 29). The doctrine of the non-being of evil is language closer to Augustine (e.g. Confessions vii, 12, 18) than to Plotinus or Proclus, for whom evil has nothing absolute about it, yet has some relative existence. The lady Philosophy vigorously denies that she is playing a verbal game. Her argument appeals to no external authority, but is a deduction from positions which are granted. It rests on the affirmation of the perfect self-sufficiency of God, expressed in a quotation from Parmenides (8, 43 Diels), important to the Neoplatonists because of its citation in Plato's Sophist 244e. This self-sufficient perfection, like a sphere, turns the moving circle of things while remaining unmoved itself. Despite the lady Philosophy's overmuch protesting, the ordinary reader will sympathise with Boethius' feeling that the argument has suddenly begun to become a little esoteric. Philosophy, however, is here announcing for the first time a theme which will soon be orchestrated more richly and fully. And Boethius should not wonder that the argument rests not on authority but on reasoned inferences from the nature of divine perfection. Plato's Timaeus 29b teaches that words ought to have an affinity for the objects to which they refer; a Platonic text which played a prominent part in the discussions designed to reconcile Aristotle's opinion that names are a matter of convention with Plato's that there is that in them which corresponds to reality and is therefore 'nature'. Boethius' second commentary on Interpretation (ii, 246, 21 ff.) refers to this debate, and there is also an echo in Ammonius (CAG IV, 5 p. 154, 16 ff.).

Perhaps because he is conscious that the argument has grown heavy, Boethius lightens the reader's burden by a poem on Orpheus and Eurydice (iii m. 12). Like Orpheus Boethius has found that sad songs fail to assuage his grief. But unlike Orpheus he is determined not to look back in his upward ascent towards the supreme good. The verses move lightly from a phase of Vergil's to another of Horace's or Seneca's, and the unphilosophical reader is grateful for the relief of Boethius' touching fabula. At the end he finds that the underworld visited by Orpheus has become merged with the cave of Plato's myth in the Republic.

The fourth book opens with a very respectful protest by Boethius. This insubstantial evil may be demonstrated by pure intellect, but it is experienced as a painful actuality and outrage by the sufferings of humanity. If providence is good and powerful, how can evil go unchecked and unpunished?

The answer is a mixture of Aristotelian and Platonic themes. All men seek whatever they believe to be good. What evil men seek is what they imagine to be good. But it is the mark of evil men that they cannot succeed in their aim of achieving happiness for which true goodness is an indispensable constituent. They suffer a diminution of their humanity, and fall to the level of beasts (iv, 3).

A poem on the tormented heart of a tyrant (iv m. 2) looks as if Theoderic is in mind. The passage developing the idea that evil men are like wild animals is as near as Boethius approaches to the Platonic notion of transmigration into animal bodies, a notion which was accepted by Plotinus, but rejected by Porphyry and Proclus. Proclus' commentary on the Timaeus (iii, 295, 30) has language close to that of Boethius here.

The poem iv m. 2 pictures a dreamlike flight of the soul, borne by Platonic wings, to a circuit of the heavens, from the height of which petty tyrants seem remarkably trivial.

Much of the philosophical argument in the first sections of the fourth book hangs on Plato's Gorgias, especially 466b ff. Plato reasoned that wicked men must be of all men most miserable if they succeed in their endeavours. For them punishment is a source of purgation and therefore of happiness (472e). The justice of their penalty confers a good upon them. So hereafter there will be a judgement of souls with harsh penalties for some, purifying mercy for others. The allusion could be Christian, but in the context is most unlikely to be looking beyond Plato's Gorgias 525b. Hierocles has an exposition of the doctrine in his commentary on the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans (xi, 39-40 cf. xiv, 6; also Proclus, In Tim. iii, 236, 27; In rem pub. ii, 339-40).

So far as the moral problem of evil is concerned, the argument of the Consolation reaches its climax with the exegesis of the Gorgias. But from the poem of iv m. 4 onwards a subtle shift in the language takes place. Words like 'fate' and 'chance' begin to occur, and with the prose section iv, 6 there is an explicit switch from the moral scandal of apparently unpunished wickedness to the tangled problem of destiny and free will.

The shift is expressly and emphatically marked by Boethius as beginning a fresh approach to his problem. This is an echo of Cicero, De divin. ii, 101. (Hermann Usener, of all people, was responsible for the suggestion that at this point Boethius simply switches from one Neoplatonic source to copying out another.) Reflection shows that in altering his ground Boethius is not evading issues. He has first argued, with the Stoics, that we are given the opportunity of deriving profound moral benefit to ourselves and to society from having to live out our lives under adverse and precarious conditions. He has then argued that evil as such is a negative thing, a privation of perfection, a frustrating failure to fulfil powers; but evil can never exist on its own apart from the good, or the pain and the frustration could not be present. Boethius is in effect saying that many of the evils which hurt are unavoidable because the world in which we live, a world of natural incompatibilities and limitations and imperfections, could not be what it is without them. But is there even a small area where evils result from the misuse of free choice? He has followed the Gorgias in the paradox that evil men can find the happiness they too seek not by achieving their wicked ends but only by accepting just punishment which for some is purgation. The notion of an acceptance of responsibility is thereby inserted by implication. But there remains the burning question of misused freedom as a cause of evil, and therefore of the reconciliation of freedom with belief in an omnipotent providence. Boethius is surely right to see that unless he can disentangle the problems of freedom and determinism he will have left many loose ends in his argument.

The Neoplatonists from Plotinus onwards (Enn. iii, 3, 5, 14) distinguish between providence, which concerns the higher realm, and fate which is another name for the unalterable chain of cause and effect in this inferior and determined world. The theme is prominent in Calcidius' commentary on the Timaeus and in several other late Platonic philosophers. Accordingly Boethius proposes to make this distinction: to our inferior mind 'fate' describes that nexus of causation in the cosmos which operates immutably in indifference to our wills. How it works we do not exactly know. Perhaps, as some think, it operates through ministering divine spirits i.e. Platonic daemons; but Boethius avoids the word which Christian ears found offensive. The ministrations of 'daemons or angels' (either word being equally acceptable to a Neoplatonist) are mentioned by Proclus in his Commentary on the Republic (ii, 255, 19 ff. Kroll) and in his 'Ten Doubts concerning Providence' x, 62. Boethius also thinks fate may perhaps be the action of the world-soul or of the entire natural order or the consequence of control by the stars, a possibility countenanced in his second commentary on Interpretation. Augustine has comparable reviews of the possible ways in which the order of the world is maintained (City of God v, 9; De trinitate iii, 4, 9).

Fate, therefore, is subordinate to providence. But some things under providence are above fate. Boethius compares this to a number of spheres which move round the same centre, where the inmost sphere is most nearly stationary, the outermost fast moving. So also that which is closest to the first divinity (primae propinqua divinitati) is most free from fate. The further the distance from the first mind (prima mens), the tighter the grip of fate.

Augustine speaks of God as 'the supreme hub of causes' (summus causarum cardo: De trin. iii, 9, 16). The simile of the circle or sphere appears in several writers, e.g. Pseudo-Plutarch, De fato 569C, Plotinus (ii, 2, 1; iii, 2, 3; vi, 8, 18, 23), and Proclus, Decem Dubit. i, 5.

Boethius suggests, therefore, that as time is to eternity, so the circle is to its centre, and so is the moving interconnection of events in fate in relation to the unmoving simplicity of providence. This chain of events controls the stars, the constant equilibrium of the elements, the birth and death of living things, and the acts and fortunes of men (cf. Boethius, Perih ii, 231). The constancy of causation depends on the immobility of the first cause. But from his high watchtower (specula alta, a Virgilian phrase for a Platonic idea) God looks out on the world and arranges what is best for each individual. Plotinus (iii, 2, 9) emphasises that great as the power of providence is, it is not so overwhelming that it reduces the individual to nothingness. Boethius' doctrine that there is a care even for the individual would be congenial to a Christian reader. But his sentence is set in a Platonic context.

To take providence seriously is to become aware that things do not happen as we expect or think right. 'Our Lucan' wrote that the conquering cause pleased the gods, the vanquished's cause pleased Cato (Pharsalia i, 128). So even things that seem perverse and wrong to us are nevertheless right. It seems monstrous to us when a man of holiness and virtue, deo proximus, is afflicted. In some cases providence protects such a person even from bodily sickness. Indeed, the lady Philosophy adds that 'someone more excellent than myself has said, 'The heavens built the body of a holy man'.' The hexameter is cited in Greek, and since Philosophy thinks its author superior even to herself, the conclusion that it is a quotation from the Chaldean Oracles, held in profound awe as the highest revelation by Proclus and other late Platonists, seems irresistible. (Thomas Taylor first made this observation as long ago as 1806 in his Collectanea p. 102, but his book has been disregarded by the learned. The line is accepted by Edouard des Places as fragment 98 in his recent edition of the Oracles.)

Often providence brings good men to the summit of power to beat back evil. But lest prosperity bring excess, felicity does not last long. Providence's most ingenious achievement is to use evil men to force other evil men to be good, if only from a desire to be unlike their vile oppressors. And God uses the natural course of events, or fate, to get rid of evil; a proposition which looks like a variant of 'while there is death, there is hope'.

The prose section iv, 6 is the longest in the work. It is followed by a poem of praise for the good order of the world in the heavenly bodies, the beauty of the ordered seasons, the love that holds everything together. Philosophy then teaches Boethius that all fortune is beneficent, whether pleasant or painful, either rewarding or exercising the good, punishing or correcting the bad. The correspondence between these words and Simplicius' commentary on the Physics ii, 6 (CAG IX, 361, 1 ff.) has been acutely noted by Courcelle. Similarly Hierocles, In carmen aureum 11. The book concludes with a poem, full of echoes of Seneca's tragedies, concerning the struggles of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Hercules.

The fifth and last book contains Boethius' most intricate discussion of the logic of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, in which he resumes many of the themes of his second commentary on Interpretation.… It is not certain that the book is constructed from Ammonius' commentaries on Interpretation and Physics. But it goes without saying that the exegetical tradition of the Peripatetic and then Neoplatonic schools in expounding these two books by Aristotle is lying behind Boethius throughout the book.

In the first prose section, there is an express reference by the lady Philosophy to the teachings on chance of 'my Aristotle'. Chance cannot mean a random event as opposed to a process of causation, or it becomes a meaningless word. It is axiomatic that 'nothing comes from nothing' (Aristotle, Metaphysics Z 7), though it applies not to the originating cause but to the material ordered by it. A causeless event is a nonsense and a nothing. Aristotle defines chance as a coincidence which happens without being intended; that is, because of the coincidence of different processes of causation. (Boethius has already mentioned this understanding of chance in his commentary on Cicero's Topics.) Aristotle's views are expressed not only in the Physics (B 4-5) but also in the Metaphysics 1025a 14 ff. whence Boethius or the school tradition derived the illustration of a man digging in a field for another purpose and finding a treasure.

Both the Neoplatonists and the Christian Augustinian tradition treat freedom as a moral quality. No one is less free than the person dominated by vice. Freedom is attained by continual contemplation of the divine mind, lost when one slips down into the corporeal. The upward look is full of light, the downward of darkness. It follows that there are degrees of freedom (Proclus, De Providentia et fato 48). Complete surrender to vice means a loss of capacity for rational deliberation (cf. Proclus, In rem pub. ii, 276, 8), lost in the fog of the cloud of unknowing (inscitiae nubes), alienated from God who is the true Sun (v, 2 and m. 2) who is, who has been, and who is to come (echoing Vergil, Georgic iv, 392 rather than Apoc. i, 8).

In the next section (v, 3) Boethius takes up the simple proposition of popular assumption: if God knows everything including all future events, then no human act is voluntary, and free will is an illusion. This proposition is rejected on the good ground that, from a doctrine of what God knows, nothing necessarily follows about the voluntariness of human action. What determines events is the nexus of cause and effect, not knowledge even in an omniscient power that can hold no mistaken beliefs without ceasing to be omniscient and therefore ceasing to be what we mean by God. The confusion here is seen by Boethius to lie in our all too human interpretation of divine foreknowledge as holding beliefs about acts in advance of their occurrence.

We think of the future as consisting of uncertain, contingent events: contingent in the sense that there are a number of possibilities, and for us they are open; it is not the case that any of them can be seen to be necessary. And 'necessary' itself is a slippery word; for some necessities are absolute, whereas others are conditional. That a man will die is absolutely necessary because man is a mortal animal. If you know someone is walking, then, if your belief is correct, it is necessary that he is walking; and if he is walking, he is going. Here necessity is conditional. We see how for Boethius necessity is being contrasted both with voluntary action and with the contingent event which happens but does not have to happen. Our wills are in the order of causes known to God.

The problem of God's foreknowledge of future contingents becomes criss-crossed with another difficulty; the relation of time to eternity. Boethius rejects the favoured solution of Alexander of Aphrodisias (De fato 30) and Calcidius (In Tim. 162) that God knows the uncertain future as uncertain, just as we do. He is not happy to think that temporal events can be the cause of an eternal knowledge. With Iamblichus and Proclus he affirms that the knowledge possessed by God operates on a different plane from human knowledge. For us events fall into past, present, and future time. God is outside time. For him the knowledge of temporal events is an eternal knowledge in the sense that all is a simultaneous present. Therefore to affirm God is omniscient does not entail that he holds beliefs about acts in advance of their being done; the temporality involved in the phrase 'in advance of' must be abstracted from the discussion. Without the abstraction of the temporality in saying 'in advance of', the logical circle leaves no escape. Eternity does not mean perpetuity (such as may be affirmed of the physical world), but the simultaneous and perfect possession of limitless life (v, 6, 4). Time, as Plato defined it (Timaeus 38a), is a moving image of eternity and because it is a moving image fails to attain to the nature of eternity; the present is a kind of likeness of the eternal, but differs in that it cannot be possessed permanently (v, 6, 12).

The last book of the Consolation is a remarkable discussion of an intricate problem. The moral problem of innocent suffering is set aside in favour of the logical analysis of the difficulties inherent in any belief in providence and human freedom. The third verse section of the fifth book reflects on the necessity of holding together two truths that appear in tension with one another (v m. 3). The hierarchical Platonist theory of levels of knowledge and apprehension leads Boethius to suggest that some of the logical difficulty is caused by the limitation of our minds, bounded by the experiences of time and successiveness. In this life we can live only each passing moment, and cannot grasp past, present and future together (v, 6, 2).

But even in our minds there are four levels: (a) of sense which we share with animate creatures unable to move like limpets; (b) of imaginatio, the power to form corporeal images shared with animals that have powers of movement; (c) ratio, possessed by man alone on earth; (d) intelligentia which is God's (v, 5). An individual object taken by itself is singular; but reason has the power to discern the universal of which the particular object is a specimen (v, 6, 36).

The last sentences of the Consolation reaffirm that belief in free will is compatible with belief in providence and in a transcendent divine knowledge in which there is neither before nor after. Therefore prayers and the practice of virtue are not vain. To act out your life before a Judge who sees all things is to know that there lies upon you a great necessity of integrity (magna necessitas probitatis). There Boethius' pen fell from his hand. The rest is silence. The work shows no signs of being incomplete. There is no discussion, admittedly, of the soul's immortality except for one observation (ii, 4, 28) that it is established by many proofs, and underlies the conviction of many whose happiness has been found through and in spite of pain and martyrdom. On the other hand, the theme of immortality is little discussed in the surviving Neoplatonic tracts on providence in Plotinus, Hierocles of Athens, and Proclus.

From 900 to 916 the abbot of the Saxon monastery of Corvey (daughter house of Corbie near Amiens) was Bovo II, a man of wide culture. We have from his pen a commentary on the verse section 'O qui perpetua' (iii m. 9), and his prologue warns his monks against the dangers of Boethius. It is astonishing (he says) that a man who wrote such correct doctrine on the Trinity and on the person of Christ, works which Bovo studied in adolescence, should also have written the Consolation of Philosophy in which he is not only silent about the teaching of the Church but also wide open to philosophical and especially Platonic doctrines. That both the theological tractates and the Consolation come from the same pen Bovo regards as certain on ground of style.

Bovo was evidently right in observing the unity of style shared by the opuscula and the Consolation. We have already seen the tractates other than the fourth to be even fuller of Neoplatonic logic than the last three books of the Consolation; because of their dry logical character they have less personal religious feeling than the later work. To this last description the fourth tractate De fide catholica is an exception, with its emotionally charged confession of faith cast in terms of high Augustinianism, offering neither logical elucidation nor apologetic defence, but simply setting down what Boethius believes the content of the revealed religion of Christ to be. But here as in the other opuscula Boethius shows the same sharp clarity and brevity, and the same eye for what is salient. The nontheological diction is very characteristic of Boethius. Moreover, the disjunction between faith and reason, revelation and natural religion, is presupposed by De fide catholica. It is sometimes suggested that there is anachronism in attributing such a notion to a man of the sixth century. In fact Boethius' master Proclus operates with much the same disjunction in treating the Chaldean Oracles as a transcendent source of divine revelation in verbally inspired form, towards which philosophy may aspire but which human reasoning could never have found unaided.

To affirm the authenticity of De fide catholica as the evidence of the language requires us to do is greatly to sharpen the question, Why does he exclude anything specifically Christian from the Consolation of Philosophy? Although the answer that the Consolation is an expression of deep inward disillusion with Christianity has been given by distinguished Boethian scholars, I think reflection shows the evidence is against this view. No doubt it is possible to speculate that at the crisis of his life Boethius may not have received from the higher clergy at Rome or northern Italy the support that he might have felt entitled to expect. Certainly there would have been great danger in submitting intercession to the angry Theoderic on behalf of a man against whom there was a political charge of treason. If Boethius' friend John the deacon is rightly identified with the John who became Pope in the summer of 523, his feelings would have been intelligible if this trusted friend, with whom (as the third tractate shows) he had enjoyed many metaphysical discussions in the more advanced flights of Neoplatonic philosophy, found it impracticable or for the sake of the good of the Church impolitic to offer any effective plea for Boethius. But the presence of subtle biblical and perhaps even liturgical allusions in the language of the Consolation makes the apostasy interpretation unlikely. If the Consolation contains nothing distinctively Christian, it is also relevant that it contains nothing specifically pagan either. Its character recalls Andromachus' defence of the Lupercalia before Pope Gelasius that its ceremonies are 'neither pagan nor Christian'. Unlike Proclus whose Platonic Theology weaves an elaborate pattern to integrate the gods of polytheism into the structure of his metaphysical system, Boethius puts a distance between himself and polytheism. The sun, he says, gives light much inferior to the light of God's truth (iii m. 6, 3; cf. iii m. 10, 15 ff.; v m. 2, 1 ff.; iii m. 11, 8). To speak with Boethius of Socrates as having won a 'victory over unjust death' (i, 3, 6) evidently echoes Christian language, consciously or unconsciously. But the Consolation contains no sentence that looks like a confession of faith either in the gods of paganism or in Christian redemption. Not a word hints at the forgiveness of sins or the conquest of death through resurrection. Everything specific is absent, and probably consciously avoided. The ambiguity seems clearly to be deliberate. The work's intention is given by its title. Boethius is not in quest of consolation from divine grace in the remission of sins and the promise of eternal life to those redeemed through Christ. His doctrine of salvation is humanist, a soteriology of the inward purification of the soul. The Consolation is a work written by a Platonist who is also a Christian, but is not a Christian work.

Nevertheless, I think it a work written with the consciousness of Augustine standing behind the author's shoulder, so to speak. The argument that Boethius intended a Platonic confession of faith which he knew to be incompatible with Christianity fails against the observation that there is nothing in the Platonic themes admitted to the Consolation which one cannot also find accepted in the philosophical dialogues and the Confessions of the young Augustine. Even the mature works of Augustine, the City of God, the Trinity, and that neglected masterpiece the Literal Commentary on Genesis, offer many anticipations of Boethius' Platonism, especially as expounded in the last book of the Consolation.

For Augustine also God is absolute Being, from whom descends the great chain or continuum of derived entities, each grade having slightly less being and therefore less goodness than the grade above, until one finally reaches the absence of being which is the negativity of pure evil. To ask the cause of evil is for Augustine to ask to see darkness or to hear silence (Confessions iii, 7, 12; City of God, xi, 9; xii, 7). For him the good is unity, evil multiplicity and disruption (Conf. iv, 15, 24). Providence calls the rational creation to return to its true being and goodness which are one and the same (City of God xi, 28). Augustine confesses in the City of God (v, 5) that 'no philosophers are so close to us as the Platonists'. His discussion of divine foreknowledge and human free will (v, 9) begins with a reference to Cicero 'On divination', a reference which is evidently from memory since it is wrong, but which may well explain why in the Consolation Boethius also makes a similar reference in his own discussion of the subject (v, 4, 1). In what then follows Augustine mentions other matters familiar to the reader of Boethius: e.g. the interpretation of 'fate', heimarmene, as a name for the connected series of events that composes destiny outside the direction of human wills. Augustine differs from Boethius in thinking 'fate' a term with inappropriate associations. He knows about but is unsympathetic to the notion that fate rules lower things, providence higher. He is familiar with the Platonic view that our wills, to us creatures contingent and uncertain, are included among the causes whose outcome is certain to God; or with the view that chance is merely a name for an event whose causes are unknown.

Moreover, between the Consolation and Augustine's early philosophical dialogues there are a number of similarities: for example, the personification of philosophy (Solil. i, 1), though this is common enough and can also be found in Martianus Capella; the ejection of the Muses from a serious discussion (C. Acad. iii, 7; De ordine i, 24); the recognition that only a privileged few can attain the contemplative discernment of the divine order (De ordine ii, 24 f.; C. Acad. i, 1); the diagnosis of unphilosophical sensual life as a disease or a sleep (De ordine i, 24; C. Acad. ii, 16). All these points are no doubt common conventions, and do not add up to a demonstration of literary dependence. Nevertheless they help to show that in his Platonism Boethius is not necessarily turning away from Augustine.

Christine Mohrmann has drawn attention to the fact that much of the vocabulary in Boethius' two passages about prayer in the Consolation (v, 3, 34; 6, 47-48), with 'commercium, deprecari, supplicandi ratione, praesidium, mereor, porrigere', can also be found in early Latin collects of the ancient sacramentaries. We have too little pagan Latin liturgy to be able to assert that such language is distinctively Christian. One would expect such vocabulary to be neutral in itself. Nevertheless, so far as it goes, her observation gives a marginal reinforcement to the view that there is a latent awareness of Christianity beneath the surface of Boethius' text. Boethius writes with such artistry and 'artificiality' that we may be confident he does nothing accidentally.

Between Boethius and Augustine there are also many notable differences. Most important of these is the difference in the ways in which the two men speak of the relation between faith and reason: for Augustine, parallel and reconcilable ways of knowing the truth; for Boethius parallel ways which only meet at certain points where logic may help to clarify the confusions of popular or common usage. Boethius' vision of the cosmos is of a single great whole kept from disintegration by the goodness and power of providence, and one might expect him to affirm an optimistic view of the concord of faith and reason. In actuality there is much more of this kind of optimism in Augustine than in Boethius.

Nevertheless it must be a correct conclusion which calls Boethius a humanist in the classical sense of that word: a man positive to the values of great literature and philosophy wherever found, and especially in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. There is a certain sadness in the fact that because his fascination with logical problems so gripped the mediaeval schoolmen, the reaction against the schoolmen at the time of the Renaissance ended by making him unfashionable as well. Moreover, his picture of the world belongs to that 'Discarded Image' of which C. S. Lewis wrote. Nevertheless, this last Roman, whose gaze is so profoundly retrospective, transmitted a whole cultural world to his mediaeval successors. The finesse with which he composed his Consolation of Philosophy made it possible for Alcuin and many others to read the book as a Christian work. The book is an essay in natural theology apart from revelation; and the very possibility of that rests on Christian assumptions. The Christianizing readers have not been absolutely wrong.

Among all Boethius' writings the Consolation of Philosophy is rightly esteemed the climax of his achievement. The substructure that made it possible is seen in his other works on logic, mathematics, and theology, and it is only in relation to these other writings, and to his Neoplatonic masters, that the nature of his originality can be seen in clear outline. These other treatises came to be profoundly influential in mediaeval times. Alcuin and, after him, a thin line of Carolingian and later scholars found in Boethius' studies of the liberal arts and of dialectic a strength and resource which they badly needed. Without him their educational programme would not have made much headway. From the ninth-century commentaries were written to explain the obscurities of the theological tractates and of the Consolation. From his dialectical and mathematical treatises Boethius' readers learnt precision and order. He taught mediaeval thinkers to examine first principles, to be careful in the use of words, to try to trace an argument back to its basic axioms and presuppositions. The principles of axiomatization in the third of the opuscula sacra created a foundation on which in the twelfth-century Alan of Lille would set about the task of constructing the whole of theology as a deduction from a single selfevident truth. Although cut off in his prime so that his grand ambitions to translate all Aristotle and Plato were never realized, he nevertheless succeeded to a remarkable degree in his prime endeavour to salvage major parts of Greek philosophical learning for future generations.

In the twelfth-century schools his influence reached its peak. His works became central to the syllabus of instruction, and strongly stimulated that thoroughgoing study of logic for its own sake which becomes so prominent a hallmark of the mediaeval schools. The opuscula sacra taught the theologians that they did not necessarily need to fear the application of rigorous logic to the traditional language of the Church. He made his readers hungry for even more Aristotle, and prepared the welcome given to the new twelfth century translations of the Analytics and the Topics, although his own versions were scarcely known at all. From the first of the opuscula sacra mediaeval philosophers learnt how to draw up a hierarchy of the sciences and to see the different departments of Knowledge, now being pursued together in community as the newly founded universities set themselves to their common task, as an organized and coherent scheme in which the various parts could be seen to be rationally related to each other.

But the humanists of the Renaissance found themselves constricted by the number-games of his Arithmetic, by the Pythagorean indifference to musical practice of his Music, above all by the obsessive concern with logical niceties which came to give the mediaeval schoolmen an unhappy reputation. As the reputation of Aristotle declined, so also that of Boethius was bound to fall with him.

Only the Consolation of Philosophy came through with remarkably little of its power diminished. The work of a layman, it remained the loved reading of laymen, especially if (like Thomas More) they held high office and suddenly found themselves deprived of their sovereign's protection and favour. The masterpiece of Boethius still speaks in the twentieth century to those who grapple with the perennial problems of evil, freedom, and providence. His solution to the problems of divine foreknowledge, exploiting Iamblichus' idea that divine knowledge wholly transcends the successiveness of the temporal process, though retaining its modern advocates, raises difficulties of its own. But no one can read the last book of the Consolation without having a clarified vision of the nature of the question needing to be answered. The ideas with which Boethius was working already lay to hand in the discussions of the Neoplatonists. To lay his work side by side with theirs is to realize the independence of his critical judgement as he formulates his personal synthesis. Boethius permanently marked the western philosophical tradition by his doctrine that 'personality' has something to do with the unique quality of the individual. In the Consolation of Philosophy, as in no other among his writings, his own individuality stands out for all to see.