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PHILOSOPHER OF THE WEEK

BOETHIOUS.

 

Who was he?

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (usually known simply as Boethius) (c. 480 - 525) was a 6th Century Roman Christian philosopher of the late Roman period. He is sometimes called the last of the Roman philosophers and the first of the Scholastics, and his final work, the "Consolation of Philosophy", assured his legacy in the Middle Ages and beyond. His Latin translations of some of the works of Aristotle were the only ones available in Europe until the 12th Century.

Anicius Manliu
s Severinus Boethius came from the family of Anicii who had been Christians for around 100 years. He became an orphan when he was about seven years old when his father, who became consul in 487, died soon afterwards. Boethius was brought up in the house of the aristocratic family of Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus. In fact Symmachus himself had been consul in 485 just before Boethius's father.

Boethius was extremely well educated, being fluent in Greek and very familiar with the works of the Greek philosophers. Although there is no firm evidence to prove that Boethius ever studied in Athens or Alexandria, many historians believe that this must have been the case for him to have achieved a unique level of scholarship among his countrymen.

He married Symmachus's daughter Rusticiana and they had two sons who would follow their father in being appointed to high public office. Boethius served a term as consul in 510 while in 522 his two sons held the office of consul simultaneously.

 

What were his works?

 

Boethius' lifelong project was a deliberate attempt to preserve ancient classical knowledge, particularly philosophy. He intended to translate all the works of Aristotle and Plato from the original Greek into Latin, and his completed translations of Aristotle's works on Logic were the only significant portions of Aristotle available in Europe until the 12th Century. However, some of his translations were mixed with his own commentary, which reflected both Aristotelian and Platonic concepts.

The Consolation of Philosophy was composed by Boethius during the last year of his life while he was imprisoned in Pavia. This work is a dialogue in prose and verse between the author and Philosophia, the personification of philosophy. In it Boethius maintains that happiness can be found in the most adverse of conditions. The underpinning for such an optimistic outlook is the contrast of providence and fate. A world created by a providential God contains no possibility of evil as a reality. In achieving a cosmic order, God uses the instrument of fate, which necessitates each individual occurrence. However unfortunate a fated event may seem to a person from his limited and peripheral point of view, he still has the freedom to turn his mind to a providential God at the center of things. A man will thereby rise above the apparent misery of his circumstances and find consolation.

Boethius also produced texts on mathematics and the theory of music. His loose translation of Nicomachus' treatise on arithmetic (and his translations of Euclid on geometry and Ptolemy on astronomy, if they were in fact completed, although they no longer survive) contributed to medieval education, and his mathematical texts were used in the early medieval universities. He also introduced the threefold classification of music: music of the spheres/world, harmony of human body/spirit and instrumental music (including the human voice).

The Consolation had many medieval commentaries—mostly on the whole text, although some just examined Book III, m. 9. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the commentary written by Remigius of Auxerre was the most widely read (and often adapted). William of Conches’s commentary, written in the 1120s, became standard in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the commentary by the English Dominican, Nicholas Trivet, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, was the most popular in the late Middle Ages. One of the central problems which faced any commentator was the relation of the text to Christian teaching. Remigius and, in a subtler way, William both took Boethius, whom they knew to be a Christian, to be putting forward Christian doctrine without seeming to do so; Trivet’s approach is less syncretistic, although he finds nothing unacceptable for Christians in the Consolation.

The preceding paragraphs in this section might seem to indicate that there is no doubt about Boethius’s importance as a philosopher. Yet the very size of his medieval influence has led to an attitude, widespread among historians of philosophy (see especially Courcelle (1967)), which makes Boethius almost disappear as a figure in his own right. He is seen, rather, as a conduit through which Greek philosophical ideas were transmitted to the Latin tradition. Of course, one aspect of Boethius’s influence is indeed that he made available ideas and arguments deriving from Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry and Iamblichus. But he was also an individual thinker, with pronounced tastes and views, no less (if no more) original than his Greek contemporaries.