Who was Boethius?

The Roman who wrote the most consoling book in the Western tradition while waiting to die

In the year 524, in a cell outside Pavia, a man in his mid forties sat waiting for an executioner. He had been Rome's consul. He had watched both his sons hold the consulship in the same year, a distinction almost no father in Roman history could claim. He had served as chief of the civil service under Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Italy after the empire in the West had gone. Then came the accusation of treason, the trial he was never permitted to attend, the confiscation of everything, and the sentence.

His name was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. What he wrote in that cell has never gone out of print.

A scholar who took on public office

Boethius was born into one of Rome's oldest families around 477, into a world that was quietly coming apart. The last Western emperor had been deposed the year before he was born. Educated in Greek at a level almost nobody in the Latin West still possessed, he set himself a project of staggering ambition: to translate the whole of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to show that the two great philosophers agreed at bottom.

He never finished. What he did finish mattered enormously. His translations and commentaries on Aristotle's logic were, for roughly six hundred years, nearly the only Aristotle the Latin West could read. His textbooks on arithmetic and music were still being used in universities a thousand years later. He gave us the word quadrivium, the fourfold path of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy that shaped the liberal arts curriculum for the entire medieval period.

Then, in his forties, he did something scholars are often warned against. He entered public life. He believed, having read Plato, that the good ought to govern, and that a man who could serve and refused had no business philosophising about justice. He defended a fellow senator against a charge he believed to be false. That defence cost him everything.

The book written in prison

The Consolation of Philosophy opens with a man in despair, writing self pitying verses about his misfortunes. A woman appears at his bedside. She is tall, ageless, and her robe is torn where various schools of thought have ripped pieces from it as souvenirs. She is Philosophy herself, and she has come to treat him.

What follows reads as a conversation, and a difficult one, in which she leads him step by step out of the position he has taken. She begins by agreeing with him, then slowly turns him around, the way a doctor gives weaker medicines before stronger ones.

They work through the questions that a man in his situation cannot avoid. If fortune gave you everything you had, what claim did you ever have on it? If wealth, honour, power and fame are the goods people chase, why does everyone who obtains them remain restless? Is happiness something that can be taken from you, and if it can, was it happiness? And the hardest question of all, the one that has occupied philosophers ever since: if God knows what I will do tomorrow, is my choice tomorrow really mine?

Boethius answers that last question by thinking harder about time. God stands outside time altogether, he argues, and so has no future to foresee. Eternity is the whole possession, all at once and complete, of a life without limits. What lies ahead of us lies present to God, and being seen leaves an act entirely free.

He wrote all this knowing the sentence would be carried out. It was, brutally, sometime around 524.

Why he still matters

For the next thousand years, the Consolation was one of the books an educated person simply read. King Alfred translated it into Old English. Chaucer translated it into Middle English and carried it into his own poetry. Elizabeth I translated it, reportedly in under a month. Dante placed Boethius in the heaven of the sun. He has been called the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics, the man who carried the classical inheritance across the gap between the ancient world and the medieval one, and who very nearly carried it alone.

The reason to read him today lies elsewhere. Under maximum pressure, he asked whether the examined life is worth anything once everything else has been stripped away. He had lost his office, his property, his reputation and his freedom. The question came to him as a matter of survival. And his answer was that the one good nobody can confiscate is the one most of us never get around to pursuing.

That is the question Dr Jeffrey Lehman will take up with us on Thursday 24 September at St Bede's College, as a live argument about what we are actually building our lives on.

The Consolations of Philosophy: Boethius and the Recovery of the Examined LifeThursday 24 September, 7:00pm to 9:00pmSt Bede's College Performing Arts Centre$20 per person, includes supper and facilitated small group discussion. Register through our events page.