SOURCE: "Boethian Silence," in Medievalia et Human-istica, No. 12, 1984, pp. 97-125.

[In the following essay, Lerer explores Boethius's notions of communication, dialogue, and rhetoric in the theological tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy.]

Twenty years ago, in a landmark article, Joseph Mazzeo [in Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962)] identified St. Augustine's "rhetoric of silence" as the notable characteristic of his broader "attempt to assimilate classical rhetoric to Christian needs." Readers of Augustine long before Mazzeo recognized the Saint's attempted synthesis of Ciceronian rhetoric and Biblical narrative, and his contrast, expressed in De Doctrina Christiana, between the eloquence of words and the eloquence of things. But Mazzeo showed how the ideal of silence became for Augustine a method of communication between the spirit and Christ. "For Augustine all dialectic, true rhetoric, and thought itself were but attempts to reascend to that silence from which the world fell into the perpetual clamor of life as fallen men know it" (Mazzeo). Augustine also explored the processes of reading and writing as activities that, at their best, transpire in silence. One need only recall those famous moments in the Confessiones when the young Augustine finds Ambrose reading in silence (6.3), and when, at the moment of conversion, he takes up the Scriptures and reads silently to himself (8.12). Writing became a private experience for Augustine as well. He characterized the highest form of writing as "deliberations with myself when I was alone in your [i.e., God's] presence" (Conf. 9.4). The writing of the Confessiones itself becomes a process of turning away from the voices of men toward the inner voice of God and the self. In the great discussion of memory (10.8-21), Augustine shows how, by withdrawing into the self, the confession becomes a document written without the need of verbal or physical companionship.

Few readers of Boethius's "confession"—the De Consolatione Philosophiae—have discovered a similar tension between true and false eloquence, or more precisely, between the virtuous rhetoric of silence and the vacuous inability to speak. The Consolatio's opening books call attention to and explain the prisoner's initial silence and his subsequent efforts at dialogue. The silence in this text is much different from Augustine's. While Augustine saw the fundamental spiritual movement as one of speech to silence, Boethius focuses on the essential propaedeutic to all philosophical speculation: public discussion. In the Consolatio silence can be an evil; it belies an ignorance of the most basic methods of communication and understanding. Reasoned eloquence, the old Ciceronian ideal, becomes the end toward which Philosophy directs the prisoner's voice.

This reading implies a notion of levels of discourse in the Consolatio, and one finds this notion explicitly stated in Boethius's logical writings. Briefly speaking, rhetoric and dialectic, for Boethius, were only preludes to philosophy. Following Aristotle rather than Plato, his dialectician persuaded through opinions rather than demonstrated through proofs. Under the rubric of dialectic, Boethius classed all forms of probable argument, including the topics, which were "the starting point of necessary arguments." Philosophical demonstration, however, was narrowly conceived in the logical writings as syllogistic reasoning. The philosopher employs necessary proofs, and "he differs from the orator and dialectician in their areas of inquiry, namely that for them it consists in ready believability, and for him in truth." The tension between belief and proof Boethius establishes in his logical writings also characterizes much of the dialogue between the prisoner and Philosophy. The following analysis illustrates how the rules of dialectic seldom meet the needs of Philosophy.

The Boethian dialogue, then, may be said to begin at a level lower than the Augustinian confession. Augustine had, by this point, turned away from the public discussions of such early dialogues as De Magistro, and toward a private meditation conducted in silence. Boethius and his prisoner must begin truly at the beginning—with verbal facility, dialectical disputation, and reasonable eloquence—before embarking on philosophical speculation. Boethius's concern with the forms of communication, moreover, extends to a theory of writing, a theory embedded in the imagery of the Consolatio's opening books and stated in the prefaces to the theological tractates De Trinitate and Contra Eutychen. As there are meaningful and meaningless forms of silence, and of speech, so there are comparable forms of writing. Boethius contrasts the vacuity of passive diction—writing down words received from without—with the virtue of active composition— turning into words ideas which come from within. In De Trinitate and Contra Eutychen Boethius presents a defense of silence similar to Augustine's, and he describes a process of philosophical writing which explains the prisoner's problems with his own writing at the Consolatio's opening. These elements in the tractates explain, perhaps better than any historical source, his condition at the dialogue's beginning and his place at the end of the autobiography Boethius fashioned through the prefaces to his other works.

I

Boethius opens De Trinitate with an appeal to private, rather than public judgment. The text he presents is very much a written structured document, "formatam rationibus litterisque mandatam" (set forth in logical order and cast in literary form). The word mandare signifies the formal presentation of a work, and it also appears at the beginning of texts to describe the physical activity of transferring thought into speech and writing. At the opening of the Contra Eutychen and the Consolatio Boethius uses the word to bring to the reader's attention the role played by writing in the formation of a literary argument. Boethius's concern with the linguistic character of his tract— its status as a verbal argument—is also clear in his use of the two components of classical topics theory: invention and judgment. "Offerendam vobis communicandamque curavi tam vestri cupidus iudicii quam nostri studiosus inventi". The text subscribes to the ordering principles of dialectic as outlined, for example, in Cicero's Topica: "Cum omnis ratio diligens disserendi duas habeat partis, unam inveniendi alteram iudicandi" (Top., 6). Discovery is subject to constant appraisal by writer and reader, and Boethius offers the products of his inventio to the public exercise of judgment.

Boethius is apparently uneasy about writing down (stilo commendo) any thoughts, not merely because of the material's difficulty, but because of its fundamentally private nature. He creates a private discourse by successively excluding all possible audiences, including even the work's intended reader, Symmachus. Unlike the earlier, classical examples of the dedicatory trope, Symmachus is brought into the thought and writing of the work only to be dismissed later. If he remains the only possible audience for the work, his presence is imaginary, and it qualifies the kind of writing Boethius proposes. Symmachus becomes less and less the issue; he is no living participant in a dialogue, and Boethius is unsure whether he will read or even look at the words he has written. We see the writing of De Trinitate as a wholly internalized process. The question of the vulgar reader is but one aspect of this hermetically sealed discourse. Preservation of divine truth from the common or uninitiated had become, as is well known, a frequently articulated problem in late Antique thought. It is at the heart of Macrobius's familiar defense of fable and, ultimately, of the medieval term involucrum: the text wrapped in an allegorical cover. Boethius also devotes some time and effort to concealing his truths.

Idcirco stilum brevitate contraho et ex intimis sumpta philosophiae disciplinis novorum verborum significationibus velo, ut haec mihi tantum vobisque, si quando ad ea convertitis oculos, conloquantur.…

But this sentiment differs markedly from the Macrobian ideal of the mysteries of fabulous narrative. Boethius writes not for fame, nor for applause, nor for the elect, but for the inner pleasure of discovery. His text develops from thoughts and long-pondered investigations; in effect, Boethius writes solely for himself. The divine light has informed the spark of his intelligence, and this Platonic image pinpoints the movement from thinking to writing ("Investigatam diutissime quaestionem, quantum nostrae mentis igniculum lux divina dignata est"). For Boethius, this is an image no doubt filtered through Augustine, and it suggests his concept of illumination and the doctrine of recall developed in De Magistro and elsewhere.

We may view the preface to De Trinitate as Augustinian in spirit, and the Saint's name in fact closes this section of the work. Boethius's writing manifests Augustine's idea of the "internal silent words by which the inner teacher, Christ, teaches us the truth" (Mazzeo). By adumbrating a doctrine of illumination within his spiritual autobiography, Boethius also recalls those moments in De Magistro when Augustine calls upon "not the speaker who utters words, but the guardian truth within the mind itself." Boethius chronicles the cognitive life of what Augustine called the "interior man" who deals in public words only to remind him of the truth that teaches privately. Yet, Boethius realizes that as long as he has chosen to communicate to the world of men, his method will be limited.

With human language as his vehicle, he will be unable to express fully the spark of insight granted to him. Writing, like the other artes, is only one step on the ladder toward truth.

Sane tantum a nobis quaeri oportet quantum humanae rationis intuitus ad divinitatis valet celsa conscendere. Nam ceteris quoque artibus idem quasi quidam finis est constitutus, quousque potest via rationis accedere.…

The via rationis is but a formal method which may teach us what to write or say, but not to think. Boethius's phrasing echoes the metaphor of the "way" taken from the theory of dialectic, and the notion of study as an ordered progress through basic stages to a higher goal. The imagery of ars as a via and of the gradus of study will reappear in the Consolatio's opening passages to characterize Philosophy's attempt to develop the prisoner's language skills and her attempt to direct his reason. Suffice it to say here, however, that the preface to De Trinitate brings to the fore Boethius's concern with his method's strengths and limitations, and it reveals his preoccupation with the problems of beginning a written work.

A similar concern opens the preface to Contra Eutychen. Boethius initially notices the absence of an interlocutor with whom he can argue. Alone now, for whatever reasons, he sets down in writing, "mando litteris quae coram loquenda servaveram" (what I had been keeping to say by word of mouth … ). The process of writing is again a private one, but here it becomes a way of filling the space of silence with written words. Boethius's autobiographical explanation of his beliefs in Contra Eutychen also explains the purpose of solitary, silent thought. Now, however, it is the silence of a man trapped in the babble of the ignorant. He reports a story of the Senate, where a letter was read aloud expressing unorthodox belief. This public reading engenders a flurry of vocal opposition, but the words of the mob are without insight into the complexity of the problem. In fact, they deny its obscurity, an act anathema to either Augustine's or Boethius's aesthetic and philosophical commitments to the pleasures of difficulty.

Hic omnes apertam esse differentiam nec quicquam in eo esse caliginis inconditum confusumque strepere nec ullus in tanto tumultu qui leviter attingeret quaestionem nedum qui expediret inventus est.…

The crowd expresses itself in a noisy tumult incapable of investigating truth. Inventio—the process of reasoned, rational discovery—is denied them. They violate the order of argument and appeal to the whim of emotion. For all their clamor, their words are hollow.

Only Boethius, he tells us himself, sat apart from them, far from the man (i.e., Symmachus) he watched. Instead, "I kept silent (conticui)." He meditates to himself on the issue, and when insight comes to him, it is a totally private experience. He finds truth not by listening to the outer voices of others, but to the inner voice of himself.

His metaphor of sudden revelation must recall for us the Biblical statement of the accessibility of truth:

Boethius Tandem igitur patuere pulsanti animo fores, et Veritas inventa quaerenti omnes nebulas Eutychiani reculsit erroris.…

Luke, 11:9 Petite, et dabitur vobis; quaerite, et invenietis; pulsate, et aperietur vobis.

We may read Luke's injunctions as an appeal to forms of intellecutal and spiritual activity. The Bible and Boethius together advocate a diligentia rewarded with sapientia. Seeking, asking, and knocking receive their fulfillment in finding, receiving, and opening. Inventio now becomes a term of more than technical significance; it comes to represent the kind of mental activity missing in the Senatorial mob. The word's meaning transcends the arenas of public discussion to which it once had reference. Unlike the indocti, who fail to understand through debate, Boethius comes to knowledge through silent meditation. His activity in the Contra Eutychen is virtually the same as the Augustinian process of purposeful writing: "deliberations with myself when I was alone in your presence." Such internal disputations deny the need of any human and present companion, and this concept explains Symmachus's absence both from the remembered story of the Senatorial debate and from the written text of the Contra Eutychen itself.

For Augustine, what fills this absence is the eternal presence of God. For Boethius, with more immediate concerns here, what fills the space left by silence is writing: "semel res a conlocutione transfertur ad stilum" (the pen is now to take the place of the living voice). Boethius turns the process of composing back upon itself. As in the preface to De Trinitate and in Augustine, solitude and silence remove the writer in space and time from the noise of the multitude. Boethius turns away (transeo) from these external distractions to savor the eloquence granted by the mind alone. He has little concern for public judgment of his work, and like the author of the Confessiones may ask: "Need it concern me if some people cannot understand this?"

But Boethius differs from Augustine in a fundamental, structural way. Unlike the Saint, Boethius appears preoccupied with the problems of beginning his texts, and his overriding concerns with technique and method, combined with his autobiographical statements, make the problem of recording, rather than recalling, foremost in the reader's mind. Edward Said's remarks [in his Beginnings, 1975] on the relationship between an author's career and his attempts at beginning a new work express the problems implicit in the prefaces to the theological tractates and in the opening of the Consolatio.

[We may] take the author's career as wholly oriented toward and synonymous with the production of a text, especially if the author himself seems obsessively concerned with just that concern over technique or craftsmanship. A further implication is that the author's career is a course whose record is his work and whose goal is the integral text that adequately represents the efforts expended on its behalf.

Boethius creates the image of an author facing either a long gestation period for his work, or of the writer as a frustrated speaker, waiting anxiously for the opportunity to express his thoughts. The writing of De Trinitate can begin only after a long period of investigation: "Investigatam diutissime quaestionem … ". Contra Eutychen similarly begins after a lengthy time of reflection: "Anxie te quidem diuque sustinui … ". Both texts open with the decision to set down in writing (mandare litteris) for the present those thoughts which have occupied the past.

Boethius begins each work by confronting anew the difficulty of writing, and by giving it a place in the implied autobiography which stands behind its composition. Not only does he make reference to the work's place in his life; he also considers the present work's relationship to all his other writings. De Trinitate's preface reviews its author's continual difficulty whenever he attempts to transcribe what he thinks. The preface to Contra Eutychen begs the reader to measure the work against the corpus of Boethius's writings: "Quod si recte se habere pronuntiaveris, peto ut mei nominis hoc quoque inseras chartis".… Boethius's beginnings in the tractates establish what Said calls "relationships of continuity" with works already existing. The opening of the Consolatio, however, breaks with all other beginnings and makes itself something new and different from anything which has gone before. While the author of the tractates values the past, the prisoner of the Consolatio mourns it. Again, the author addresses the present effort to all his previous writings. But now, it is a relationship of contrast, rather than continuity. Here, the writer's silence is the fallen counterpart to the insightful, Augustinian rhetoric of silence. Rather than listening to his inner teacher, the prisoner hears only the Muses. Before he can ascend to that higher silence, he must first find his true voice.

II

From its opening, the Consolatio struggles with words and texts. Foremost in the prisoner's mind is not, as we would expect, his recognizable grief, but a deeper, less recognizable impediment: silence. He is no longer able to compose verses full of meaning and value; now his poem is but a hollow elegy for lost youth. He cannot invent his own words, but must silently take dictation from the Muses.

Carmina qui quondam studio fiorente peregi,
 Flebilis heu maestos cogor inire modos.
Ecce mihi lacerae dictant scribenda camenae
 Et veris elegi fletibus ora rigant.
(1. m. 1. 1-4, … )

Reduced to a scribe, his role is passive, and the prisoner expresses a loss of moral and literary direction. He walks along a lonely iter of life (1. m. 1. 6) and his step falters: "Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu" (1. m. 1. 22).

The prisoner sits in silence, ready to record his lament when Philosophy appears: "Haec dum mecum tacitus ipse reputarem querimoniamque lacrimabilem stili officio signarem, adstitisse mihi supra verticem visa est mulier reverendi admodum vultus" (1. 1., …). Much has been made of the drama of her initial appearance, and even more has been said about the symbolism of her attire. I want to stress the strong and repeated use of imagery taken from linguistic education. Philosophy's dress is certainly a symbol of philosophical learning, but it is more. It is an imaginary book on whose literal margins (margine) are inscribed the Greek letters pi and theta.

Atque inter utrasque litteras in scalarum modum gradus quidam insigniti videbantur quibus ab inferiore ad superius elementum esset ascensus.…

The flat, fallen gradus of the prisoner contrasts with the rising, vertical gradus of philosophical education. The meaningful markings of Philosophy's gown (the word insigniti) echo the meaningless marks Boethius made in silence (the word signarem). Through these verbal echoes Boethius creates a unified structure of imagery which explains the prisoner's initial silence and prepares us for Philosophy's opening words.

The word gradus is, of course, a commonplace metaphor for the struggle through life or education. Here, however, it signifies specifically a progress of verbal argument: the steps toward reason and belief effected through dialectical disputation and the mastery of invention and judgment. Three sources for the word—from Cicero, Augustine, and Boethius himself—illustrate the dialogue's opening concern with language, and they explain one aspect of the prisoner's inability to speak.

In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero summarizes the Socratic habit of inquiry as a method of understanding through discussion. In his review of the Meno (Tusc. Disp. 1. 57) Cicero places the idea of the gradus in a specifically dialogic context. When Socrates decides to question a young boy about geometry, Cicero analyzes the scene:

ad ea sic ille respondet, ut puer, et tamen ita faciles interrogationes sunt, ut gradatim respondens eodem perveniat quo si geometrica didicisset.

The gradus comes to symbolize a path toward knowledge taken not through private speculation, but through public argument. As verbal activity, this movement stands in sharp contrast to the silent passivity of the prisoner's gradus, and it foreshadows the steps by which Philosophy will lead him in her method of question and response.

When Augustine appropriates this imagery in De Magistro he gives a specifically Christian resonance to the epistemological goal. Yet, the terms in which he analyzes his own dialogue with Adeodatus are primarily methodological rather than theological. The path toward a blessed life, he argues, may be directed, "gradibus quibusdam infirmo gressui nostro accomodatis perduci cupiam" (by truth itself through the stages of a degree suited to our weak progress). Here, the gradus represents a preliminary exercise, conducted at the comparatively low level of human discourse. While the force of Augustine's remark is to slight the method of open discussion as a mere praeludo to divine understanding, he nonetheless uses the word gradus, as Cicero had, to describe a uniquely verbal activity.

In his own writings on dialectic, Boethius adopted the word to characterize the study of argumentative forms. At the opening of Book Two of De topicis differentiis Boethius reprimands those students who would skip the necessary, early stages of study and proceed directly to its more advanced levels. To these impatient students he writes:

Nam cum de differentiis topicis librorum titulum legerint omissis doctrinae gradibus statim finem operis attendunt.

Boethius's point throughout De topicis is that the topics are a system of argument rather than thought. They are, like the via rationis described in De Trinitate, a limited set of approaches to problems of judgment and belief. Such a system is bound by the limitations of ambiguity and obscurity found in human language; yet, as a regimen of study, the topics can lead to the threshhold of philosophy. As in Cicero and Augustine, the word gradus is linked with a method of public disputation. For these writers, the term represents a system of the study of language and the progress by which that study leads to understanding. When the word appears in the Consolatio's opening it complements the repeated images of silence, writing and speech; it highlights the failure and points toward the success of verbal expression. This process becomes the search for voice which is the controlling movement of Book One.

When Philosophy herself speaks, however, it is with a loud rhetorical flourish which banishes the Muses and which is designed to rouse the prisoner from his silence and lethargy. She understands his passive relationship to the Muses of poetry, and recognizes his silence for what it truly is:

Quae ubi poeticas Musas vidit nostro adsistentes toro fletibusque meis verba dictantes, commota paulisper ac torvis infiammata luminibus.…

Again, Boethius gives structural unity to the opening passages through a series of verbal echoes. Philosophy recognizes that the Muses are dictating to the prisoner as he himself confessed: verba dictantes echoes dictant scribenda. Her first words boldly fill the empty silence in which the prisoner writes. In this context her banishment of the Muses can be read in a new way. Not only do they represent the vicious, vacuous music of a deranged mind; not only do they espouse, as David Chamberlain has noted, the musica effeminita guiding the prisoner's opening carmen. They are also a positive barrier to Boethius's search for his own voice. They render him passive and put words in his head, if not his mouth. They hinder the expression of his own self, that self he had forgotten. Philosophy's rejection focuses not on their absolute danger—for to a common man they do little harm—but on their effect on one of the learned, "reared on a diet of Eleatic and Academic thought." … Presumably, he was a man gifted with both reason and speech; and yet, he lies here, wasting his time on irrational poetry and staying dumb. Such a man, Philosophy laments in her first poem, sought and understood the workings of Nature, and could give voice to his understanding: "Naturae varías reddere causas" (1. m. 2., … ). Her word reddere literally means the ability to give back in language, to translate or interpret from one language to another, or from symbols into speech. The word suggests that active quality now missing in the prisoner's silent transcription. Moreover, Philosophy sees into the prisoner's mind as he himself could not. She finds him lying effeto mentis (1. m. 2. 24., … ). He had merely considered himself languishing effeto corpore (1. m. 1. 12., … ).

We may pause here to compare the prisoner and Philosophy with the author of the tractates. Boethius showed how the writing of those works moved from inner knowledge to outer expression. The Muses did not dictate to him, and his literary activity, like Philosophy's initial appearance, uses signs and letters to present symbolically hidden truths. Both her gown and his text represent a kind of meaningful, virtuous use of language to ascend to knowledge. Thus, while De Trinitate and Contra Eutychen celebrate silence, the Consolatio condemns it.

The Consolatio's opening moves contrast the listlessness of the prisoner's laments with the power of Philosophy's eloquence. The emptiness of Boethius's opening poem is a foil for Philosophy's richly symbolic appearance. While the Muses have given the prisoner language, it is, strictly speaking, a "literal" language; it points only to human words. Philosophy favors a symbolic language: a language opaque to the uninitiated, one which must be interpreted and which ultimately points away from earth to heaven. The signs on her gown are not the kind of open, literal signs which explain themselves. They are the closed symbols which invite the mind's attention to a dimension of being which is not truly literal, not bound by words and letters. We cannot content ourselves with familiar explanations of Philosophy's symbols and her allegorical persona. Hers is an ostentatious symbolism which alerts us to its status as symbolism.

The tension between speech and silence develops further in the course of Book One. In prosa 2, Philosophy questions the prisoner's silence: "Quid taces?."… He appears stupefied by her appearance. But his silence is neither the dumbfoundedness of the visionary, nor the speechlessness of the awed, as Gruber [Joachim Gruber in his Kommentar zu Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, 1978] would claim. Rather, as Boethius himself tells us, it is a complex state. He is tacitum, elinguem, mutum: stripped of language, he has lost the ability to communicate in any form. When he can speak, through Philosophy's grace, he does not know where he is. The voice which returns to him is the oratory of the Senate: "An ut tu quoque mecum rea falsis criminationibus agiteris?" (1. 3., … ). He considers himself still on trial for his crimes, still "in the dock" (as the Loeb translators put it), rather than in his library. When he finally gives vent to his anguish in 1. 4., it is through a classic, five-part oration defending himself against an imaginary accuser before a jury that is not there. The prisoner momentarily collects his thoughts ("ego collecto in vires animo," … ), only to let out a flurry of thoughtless speech.

Kurt Reichenberger [in his Untersuchungen zur literarischen stellung der Consolatio Philosophiae, 1954] has analyzed in detail the forensic and rhetorical qualities of Boethius's extended speech, and it is not necessary to repeat him here. I do wish to stress the fact that this is pure oratory, replete with rhetorical questions, extended technical displays, and, in Reichenberger's words, "in dem gehobenen, oratorisch gefärbten Stil der Rede." When the prisoner has found a voice, it is like his opening poem transcribed in silence: language without meaning, or more appropriately, eloquence without wisdom. This speech also treats a form of writing similar to the prisoner's opening transcription. Midway through his tirade, Boethius asserts that he has written down the details of his accusation to be remembered by future generations: "Cuius rei seriem atque veritatem ne latere posteros queat, stilo etiam memoriaeque mandavi." … This writing, designed to preserve truth, merely perpetuates a lie. The truths of the affair are simply the facts, or a bill of particulars in a case of law. This is not the veritas of the philosopher, but simply a record of human events. By confusing truth with detail, the prisoner also confuses true memory with mere reportage. Boethius writes for public remembrance, and for vindication in the court of men rather than the eyes of God. This memory contrasts decisively with the proper philosophical or spiritual recollection which is one of the Consolatio's central goals. "You must remember what your native country is," Philosophy enjoins after this speech, "not one like that of the old Athenians," but the patria of the soul.… In his tirade, the prisoner travesties the Platonic relationship between remembering and forgetting which Philosophy addressed in 1. 2. ("Sui paulisper oblitus est; recordabitur facile, si quidem nos ante cognoverit," … ). He reveals his forgetfulness by thinking that truth and memory may be wholly bound in the written letter, and by believing that to commit something to words (stilo mandare) is to commit it to eternity. In his overriding fidelity to verba rather than res, the prisoner admits that his case simply hinges on words. He claims to respond to the forgeries (the falsa littera) he is accused of writing.… While his opening carmen was an act of recording in silence, the prisoner's tirade becomes an act of recording performed through empty rhetoric.

That Philosophy is visibly unmoved by this bluster indicates the prisoner's misjudgment of his audience. After her broad, philosophical remarks on the prisoner's true forgetfulness and the condition of his spiritual exile, she returns to language. She analyzes his speech in terms taken explicitly from the theory of argument embodied in Boethius's own writing on the topics. Before she can engage him in a dialogue, she must descend to his level. The first indication of her shift in diction comes when she describes the library. As a locus, the library signifies the literal and figurative place of argument. She seeks a "storeroom of the mind" in which she has placed not physical books but the opinions they contain. By employing a diction taken from classical mnemonic theory, with its emphases on the loci and sedes of argument, Philosophy moves metaphorically into the prisoner's rhetorical world. She then summarizes his speech, separating and arranging the individual arguments by topic. She lists in order his accusations and comments on his forensic technique. Each statement is rhetorically signaled:

De obiectorum …
De sceleribus fraudibusque …
De nostra etiam criminatione …
Postremus adversum fortunam …
in extremo Musae saevientis .…

Three sentences in a row open with the same de, and taken together with the following signals (postremus, in extremo) these devices call attention to Philosophy's deliberate display of her skill at dispositio. By organizing her remarks in this explicit manner, she offers herself as a model disputant. She is a master of both rhetorical form and psychological calm: "Illa vultu placido nihilque meis questibus mota". Hers is an ordered response which manifests itself through verbal perspicacity and mental tranquility. Philosophy highlights the prisoner's shortcomings and abilities as a debater and, in this way, justifies her cure. Grief has twisted his words, and she must use "milder medicines" to effect her treatment.

To correct his deficiencies as an arguer, Philosophy engages the prisoner in dialogue, and to do so, she begins her arguments in a dialectically technical way. She realizes that to move him away from opinions and toward truths—to effect her cure—she must begin at the level of probable disputation. After announcing the formal plan of question and answer which motivates their argument, the prisoner accepts.

'Primum igitur paterisne me pauculis rogationibus statum tuae men tis attingere atque temptare, ut qui modus sit tuae curationis intellegam?'

'Tu vero arbitratu, tuo quae voles ut responsurum rogato' [1. 6., … ].

Their discussion properly develops from this point, with a commitment to dialogue at its basic level. The contract she proposes suggests that the dialectical method will dictate the form and pattern of their exchange. Echoing Boethius's own remarks in De topicis differentiis, Philosophy had, immediately before (at 1. m. 6), foreshadowed discussion along the correct way. The via here, although a metaphorical usage, implies a methodological rather than a moral way.

Sic quod praecipiti via
Certum deserit ordinem
Laetos non habet exitus
[1. m. 6. 10-22., … ].

This passage embodies the classical view of topical argument as an ordered way or method toward a proper goal. For the ad Herennium, technique (ars) was "praeceptio, quae dat certam viam rationemque dicendi" (1. 3), and this phrasing survives in Quintilian and Seneca. Via and ordo were the key terms in all classical definitions of correct argument. In De topicis, Boethius claimed that the topics point debaters to the path of truth ("viam quodammodo veritatis illustrat"), and he asserted that the study of topics promised "the paths of discovery" (inveniendi vias). In the opening of Book Two of De topicis, moreover, Boethius stressed how adherence to the proper order of study was essential before reaching the end: "Mihi autem necessarium videtur quod, nisi sit praecognitum ad ulteriora discentis animus pervenire non possit." The ordo of question and response, developed by Aristotle and praised by Cicero as the governing gradus of philosophical dialogue, stands behind Philosophy's commitment to dialectical discovery.

But the prisoner still has problems with method. He stubbornly adheres to the attitudes of a dialectician faced with a philosopher. Two examples from 1. 6. stand out. First, when asked about the governance of the universe, the prisoner can only reply: "Vix rogationis tuae sententiam nosco, nedum ad inquisita respondere queam." … Aristotle had permitted an answerer, if he did not understand, to say, "I do not understand." "He is not compelled to reply yes or no to a question which may mean different things." When faced with another, directly philosophical question, however, the prisoner's reliance on dialectical rules becomes his undoing. Philosophy questions his knowledge of himself as a man, and asks: "Quid igitur homo sit, poterisne proferre?" The prisoner replies: "Hocine interrogas an esse me sciam rationale animal atque mortale? Scio et id me esse confiteor." The question "what is man" had become, by Boethius's time, one of the classic examples of definition in dialectic. In his treatise De Dialectica Augustine had quoted the definition as if it were a commonplace, and in, De Magistro Adeodatus voices a confusion similar to the prisoner's over the meaning of homo. Augustine is concerned here with the idea of a noun (nomen) and the concept of signification; his pupil mistakes the word for the object, and describes a man. In Boethius's own De topicis, the definition is held up as a more complete response than "two-legged animal capable of walking," just as, in De Magistro, "animal rationale mortale" is considered the tota definitio. "The question," Boethius writes in De topicis, "has to do with definition."

But Philosophy's question has little to do with definition. As Courcelle [Pierre Courcelle in his La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire, 1967] realized, with great florish, Philosophy does hearken back to an Aristotelian mode of argument: "Voilà donc le prix que Philosophie attache aux definitions logiques, telles que celle d'Aristote!" The point is not merely, as Courcelle would have it, that Philosophy calls attention to the spiritual inadequacy of the prisoner's response, nor that, in this dialogue, the author of the Consolatio reveals himself to be more than "un simple logicien." In failing to develop his answer philosophically (e.g., that man has a soul), the prisoner responds with a textbook answer; the idea of responding as a philosopher does not occur to him, and he remains trapped in a rudimentary habit of thought and expression. The scene has moral and methodological significance. In the context of Philosophy's own preparation for a technically accurate dialogue, the prisoner's response is another example of misdirecting his voice. As in the speech at I, 4, he has misjudged his audience.

From silence, then, the prisoner has progressed through florid rhetoric to a limited dialectic. He offers only examples of speaking and writing gone wrong, where silence is not a virtue but a vice. In the succeeding books, Philosophy will guide his expression through rhetoric and dialectic, but she must also educate him in the ways of writing. As we have seen, writing at its best becomes the natural process of the mind's independent investigation of truth. At its worst, it becomes the unthinking reflex of a man with no words of his own.

III

Book Two begins by commenting on the silence of Book One. About to speak, Philosophy is silent, and as she collects her thoughts, her "quiet modesty" does more to gain the prisoner's attention than any device of classical forensics.

Post haec paulisper obticuit atque ubi attentionem meam modesta taciturnitate collegit, sic exorsa est [II, 1, … ].

Her initial refusal to speak (obticuit) recalls Boethius's silent withdrawal from the noisy Senate in Contra Eutychen (conticui). Both characters meditate in quiet before voicing their knowledge or understanding. Just as Boethius had, in the tractate, abandoned the fruitless oratory of the forum, so Philosophy, for the moment, relinquishes her rhetorical skills. Philosophy also compares favorably against the prisoner in Book One. In his speech at 1. 4., he began by "collecting" his strength of mind (collecto in vires animo, … ). As Gruber observed, Philosophy performs a similar activity as she collegit, or, "'sammelt' and ershlieât damit … die Aufmerksamkeit des Boethius." The similarities of phrasing compare Philosophy's calm with the prisoner's bluster, and contrast the ineffective use of rhetoric with the effective use of silence. Her quiet, unlike his, comes close to the ideal spiritual tranquility which grants the mind insight into itself and others.

The Book's initial concern with forms of expression colors Philosophy's opening remarks. In her first speech she summarizes the prisoner's relationship to fortune in terms of language. Different kinds of fortune, she claims, engendered different kinds of verbal responses. When the prisoner experienced good luck, he would "attack her [i.e., Fortuna] with firm language and chase her with arguments produced from our very sanctuary." … Bad fortune, though, has stripped the prisoner of his command of wisdom and eloquence. Philosophy implies that his inner, mental disturbance creates an outer, verbal incapacity. His present silence comes not from calm tranquility, but from agitated speechlessness.

Philosophy attempts to goad the prisoner into speech by creating an issue to which he must respond. She achieves her purpose by impersonating another character, Fortuna; if the prisoner will not respond to Philosophy's voice, perhaps he will respond to another. In his first words since the aborted dialogue of Book One, the prisoner appears to recognize the sham of Fortuna's rhetoric. After her long speech, Philosophy steps out of her imaginary role and back into the prisoner's forensic world. If Fortuna defended herself in this way, she asks, "you would not know what to reply" (2. 3., … ). She now offers him a chance to speak: "Dabimus dicendi locum." The locus is an opportunity, but it is also a place or topic. The word signals a technical vocabulary at work, and enables the prisoner to reply in what appear to be his own terms.

Speciosa quidem ista sunt, oblitaque Rhetoricae ac Musicae melle dulcedinis.…

Whereas Philosophy's music held an inner sweetness, Fortuna's is sugar coated. The prisoner's word (dulcedinis) echoes lexically and grammatically Philosophy's earlier term (dulcedinis). Once again, Boethius has one speaker repeat the words of another to demonstrate verbal ambiguity. The meaning of this word is bound by context and intention. The prisoner's recognition of the two kinds of sweetness is his first real insight of the Consolatio. When he speaks, then, he initiates a process of discovery; yet, he has little to say throughout the book, save for an occasional assent (e.g., 2. 4., … ), which in fact belies his own misunderstanding.

The prisoner opens 2. 7., however, by apologizing for his apparent pursuit of fame. His weak rejoinder contrasts with the rhetorical afflatus of his earlier defense in Book One, and the force of his latest remarks rests on a notion of unappreciated altruism.

Scis ipsa minimum nobis ambitionem mortalium rerum fuisse dominatam. Sed materiam gerendis rebus optavimus quo ne virtus tacita consenesceret.…

Even in this modest excuse the prisoner belies a rhetorician's fear of silence. Whatever virtues he may have possessed found their expression in the Senate. His failure as a public man can be seen as a failure to move the public. When he voices his fear that his powers would "wither away silently," he expresses a limited, earthly concern with speechlessness. The higher, meditative quiet of Augustine or the tractates is absent from his mind. He thus reveals his own entrapment in a limited, human expression, while at the same time publically arguing for his dismissal of worldly ambition.

In her following arguments, Philosophy gives a broader relevance to the prisoner's condition. Glory cannot be immortal, she argues, for it is bound by reputation, and reputation is bound simply by words. Language and culture present barriers to the world-wide spread of human fame.

Adde quod hoc ipsum brevis habitaculi saeptum plures incolunt nationes lingua, moribus, totius vitae ratione distantes, ad quas turn difficultate itinerum turn loquendi diversitate turn commercii insolentia non modo fama hominum singulorum sed ne urbium quidem pervenire queat.…

Cicero's argument that eloquence wisely used brings people together, fosters social mores, and establishes political unity must, I think, stand behind Philosophy's rebuttal of human fame. The fable of man in the state of nature which opens De Inventione posits a world in which men lived as savages until a great and wise man brought them together into an audience for his rhetoric and, in turn, into a community of civic life. Philosophy points out that language does not bring men together, except in very small groups. Rather it separates them into mutually incomprehending neighbors. As Gruber rightly noted, her phrasing loquendi diversitate echoes Augustine's idea in the City of God: "linguarum diversitas hominem alienat ab homine." Language alienates man from man, and written records, as Philosophy will argue, serve only to alienate man from his past.

While the prisoner had offered to preserve his case for future readers (1. 4.), Philosophy questions, "How many men famous in their own time are now completely forgotten for want of a written record? Though what is the value of such records themselves when they and their writers are lost in the obscurity of long ages".… Written records, like speech itself, have a limited spatial and temporal effect. The inscribed word cannot preserve a name for all eternity, she argues, and the prisoner's earlier claims now appear not only wrongheaded, but vain.

Vos vero inmortalitatem vobis propagare videmini, cum futuri famam temporis cogitatis. Quod si aeternitatis infinita spatia pertractes, quid habes quod de nominis tui diuturnitate laeteris? …

Philosophy's suspicion of the power of the written word again recalls Cicero's view of writing as a social force, and of the written record as a source of knowledge about the past. At the opening of De Inventione Cicero reports how he began "to search in the records of literature for events which occurred before the period which our generation can remember." Historical writing served as a repository of public memory; it substituted for the oral mnemonics of an earlier era. Throughout his later dialogues Cicero repeated a concern for the power of the written word. It recorded historical acts, as in De Inventione. In De Finibus writing preserved Greek and Latin masterpieces for contemporary edification and imitation. In the Tusculan Disputations Plato's philosophical dialogues were themselves written documents. They preserved the structure of Socratic inquiry as well as the ideas embodied in the man's thought.

But it would appear to Philosophy that letters are not a blessing but a curse; they do not preserve the truth for the future, they merely ossify the past in obscurity. In the course of her polemic, Philosophy retells a famous story about philosophical silence to illustrate the limits of the prisoner's understanding and, more important, the difficulties she herself will confront in trying to put thoughts into words. When the bogus philosopher of the story— after quietly enduring his challenger's insults—replies "Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher," his taunter answers, "I should have, had you kept silent." … This ideal philosophical silence is a commonplace of Ancient thought, given a new resonance in Boethius's larger context of speaking and writing. The story serves to highlight the prisoner's early reliance on faulty rhetoric directed at a foolish audience. As Philosophy reminds him, "de alienis praemia sermunculis postulatis" (You ask for the rewards of the common chatter of other men.… ). For now, the alternative to vulgar chatter is philosophical silence. As Boethius illustrated in the preface to Contra Eutychen, the philosopher must remove himself physically and verbally from the crowd.

This imagery reinforces the commonly noticed visions of exile and loneliness throughout the Consolatio. Languages separate man from his neighbors and distance him from his ancestors, and speech, rather than making him part of a community, makes him an exile in his own world and from his own past. In metrum 7 Philosophy restates the transitory quality of human language, and the mutability of writing.

Signat superstes fama tenuis pauculis
 Inane nomen litteris.
Sed quod decora novimus vocabula,
 Num scire consumptos datur?
Iacetis ergo prorsus ignorabiles
 Nec fama notos efficit
[17-22 …]

Unlike Cicero, who would find companionship in Antique writers, Philosophy can only ask: "Do we really know the dead?" It is this characteristic of language to make something limited, or transitory, which hinders Philosophy's own exposition of her doctrine.

In her final prose statement of Book Two she questions the very vehicle of their dialogue. She expresses some trepidation at using a purely philosophical language, a language which makes no concessions to common opinion or to apparent credibility. How can the prisoner understand her thoughts when words constrain her arguments? "Nondum forte quid loquar intellegis" (2. 8.,…). She attempts to convey to him the wonderful paradox of the benefits of bad fortune, and she fears that, argued straightforwardly, her idea will fall beyond the prisoner's grasp: "Mirum est quod dicere gestio, eoque sententiam verbis explicare vix queo." … At issue here is the inability of verba to contain sententia, and of rational argument (explicatio) to express marvels. Up to now she has avoided the problem by relying on "milder medicines"—rhetoric and poetry—whose purpose was to soothe rather than to convince. But at this point she creates in the prisoner the expectation of understanding, and stimulates his reason and his voice.

By the opening of Book Three, still in silence, the prisoner finds a voice which can successfully initiate dialogue. The sweetness of Philosophy's last poem leaves him in expectant, attentive silence. For the first time in the Consolatio it is the prisoner who willingly breaks a silence without waiting for Philosophy's goad. His opening exclamation, "O," set apart from the rest of the sentence by an intrusive inquam, calls attention to the prisoner's vocal ability. He utters at first not a word but a non-verbal exclamation of joy. The long O of Philosophy's concluding verses, "O felix hominum genus" (2. 8. 28), must still ring in his ears as he echoes sound for sound.

But for all his eagerness, the prisoner fails to make an open commitment to participating in the dialogue. He wishes only to be a listener, even though this silence will be more virtuous than that of the previous books. Philosophy herself notices this new quiet ("Sensi cum verba nostra tacitus attentusque rapiebas," … ), and she makes an attempt to describe familiar matters as a kind of propaedeutic to more difficult issues. She will try to point out in words—designare verbis—"a subject better known to you".… Her phrasing recalls her earlier inability to verbis explicare; but now, she will deal not in marvels but in commonplaces, not with goals of their inquiry but rather with its method. By explaining how they will proceed, Philosophy shows how the dialogue will move through human issues toward divine ones. Her remarks embody that sense of the gradus found at the Consolatio's beginning and in Boethius's writing on the topics: a moral and methodological rectitude which guides the via rationis.

From this point onward, the prisoner's silence is no longer that unique Boethian silence of the opening. When he fails to answer Philosophy's questions, or accedes to her authority, he appears simply as an incompetent student or a faltering dialectician rather than as a man stripped of language. Finally, when his own presence disappears from the dialogue altogether at the end of Book Five, we see the prisoner moving closer to the higher form of philosophical silence which demands no company save the self and God. I have argued here, however, that the Consolatio's beginning represents a search for voice; that the prisoner's character is less a physical presence than a verbal one; and that to change his character Philosophy must direct his speech. By using the images and metaphors of writing and speaking developed in his technical and theological works, Boethius gives the Consolatio's beginning a firm place in the development of his thought. By responding to Augustine's notion of a rhetoric of silence and to Cicero's views of oratory, Boethius gives his work a place in the history of ideas. In their meditations on the written word, Cicero and the Saint provide the vocabulary for Boethius's own reflections on language and silence in society. If he has created his personal rhetoric of silence, it is to understand and transcend the rhetoric of man.