The Consolation of Philosophy

by Boethius

ANICIUS BOETHIUS (c. A.D. 480–524), the Roman philosopher, has been called one of the last authentic representatives of the classical world, in both his life and writings.

VICTOR WATTS was born in 1938 and read classics and English at Merton College, Oxford, and did a year of postgraduate work at University College, London.

The issue of a revised edition of the translation of The Consolation of Philosophy has enabled me to correct mistakes, improve the wording of one or two passages and take account of recent work on Boethius and his age.

Our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the pagan cultural background of the sixth century has become clearer since Henry Chadwick drew attention to the long tradition of Christian humanism which lies behind the Consolation.

The link between the great senatorial families and the higher clergy in Rome was close, and so far from conversion entailing the rejection of pagan antiquity and custom it seems to have brought with it a positive attitude to the literature and thought of antiquity.

Luper-calia

There is further a personal circumstance pointed out by Anna Crabbe which seems to go far to account for the absence of overt Christian reference in the Consolation.

In contrast to Augustine, to whom it is now clear Boethius’s indebtedness was profound,2 the son of a pagan father, who came to conversion only as the result of passionate intellectual searching and painful emotional struggle, and whose work as a result shows a deep personal relationship with the God he discovered, Boethius was born into a Christian family, faced no such emotional turmoil or intellectual challenge and was able to devote his powers not to the discovery of a new religion but to the logical exposition of the theology that underpinned it.

The Consolation of Philosoph has been many things to many men. In a much quoted phrase Gibbon described it as ‘a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully’, though he found its philosophy ineffectual.

The Middle Ages did not find it so, and provided the Consolation with a long series of translators, commentators and imitators.

King Alfred turned it into Old English for the education and enjoyment of his Anglo-Saxon subjects, and Chaucer and John the Chaplain into Middle English; Notker Labeo and Peter von Kastl turned it into medieval German, and...

Boethius stands at the crossroads of the Classical and Medieval worlds.

‘No philosopher,’ wrote Richard Morris, ‘was so bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of Middle-Age writers as Boethius. Take up what writer you will, and you find not only the sentiments, but the very words of the distinguished old Roman.’

In the case of the Consolatio it was due, no doubt, to the fact that here Boethius was attempting something other than a formal philosophical treatise.

In the confines of prison he was no longer concerned with the minute details and technicalities of argument, but with the consolation to be gained from a broad and general philosophical meditation.

In retrospect, though I do not think this aspect of his work would have occurred to Boethius himself, it is perhaps justified to rega...

This popular quality was doubly important. Firstly, along with the fact that Boethius was no mean poet, it made the C...