Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a Roman aristocrat, statesman and philosopher who served the Ostrogothic king Theodoric in Italy in the early sixth century. His translations of Aristotle's logic were for six centuries almost the only Aristotle that Latin Europe could read, and The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison while he awaited execution, became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages.

Boethius was born in Rome around 475–477, at almost the moment when the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476, a turning point described on our fall of Rome page. He belonged to the Anicii, one of the oldest and richest senatorial families. His father, a consul, died when he was young, and he was brought up by the senator Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, whose daughter Rusticiana he married.

Italy was then ruled by Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, who governed from Ravenna. Theodoric, an Arian Christian educated at Constantinople, left the Roman senate and its traditions largely in place and employed Roman nobles in his administration. Boethius, who had learned Greek thoroughly, a rare skill in the Latin West by then, spent much of his life in learned leisure, but he also took on public office. He was consul in 510, and in 522 his two young sons were made joint consuls, an exceptional honour; in the same year he became master of offices, one of the most senior posts at Theodoric's court.

His rise was short. Boethius quickly made enemies at court, apparently by opposing officials he considered corrupt. When the senator Albinus was accused of treasonable correspondence with the emperor Justin I in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, Boethius defended him and declared that if Albinus was guilty, so was the whole senate. He was himself accused of treason and, according to his own account, of sacrilege or magic. Relations between Theodoric and Constantinople were tense at the time, as the eastern and western churches had recently been reconciled and Theodoric, an Arian, feared that Catholic senators were looking to the emperor.

Boethius was condemned without a proper hearing and held near Pavia. He was executed, reportedly after torture, traditionally in 524, though some scholars prefer 525 or 526. His father-in-law Symmachus was executed soon afterwards. He was buried in Pavia, and he was later venerated there as a martyr under the name Saint Severinus, a local cult approved by the Catholic Church in 1883, though most historians see his death as political rather than religious.

Boethius set himself the immense goal of translating into Latin all the works of Aristotle and Plato that he could find, with commentaries, and showing that the two philosophers agreed on most fundamental questions. He completed only part of it. He translated most of Aristotle's logical works, including the Categories and On Interpretation, along with the Isagoge, an introduction to logic by the Neoplatonist Porphyry, and wrote commentaries and textbooks on logic of his own. He also wrote handbooks on arithmetic and music, based on Greek models, which were standard school texts for centuries; he is credited with the term quadrivium for the four mathematical arts.

In his commentary on Porphyry he set out the problem of universals: whether general kinds, such as "human" or "animal", exist in reality or only in the mind, and if they exist, whether they are bodily or not. Boethius offered a cautious answer drawing on Aristotle, but the question itself became one of the great debates of medieval philosophy.

Boethius also wrote short theological works, known as the Opuscula sacra, in which he applied logic to Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the nature of Christ. One of them gave a definition of a person as an individual substance of a rational nature, which theologians used for the rest of the Middle Ages. These works show that he was a Christian, which a few later readers doubted because the Consolation hardly mentions Christianity.

The Consolation, written in prison, alternates prose with verse. It opens with Boethius lamenting his fall, when a woman appears at his bedside: Lady Philosophy, who has come to cure him. She reminds him that Fortune turns her wheel for everyone, and that wealth, office, fame and pleasure are all unstable and cannot bring real happiness. True happiness, she argues, is found only in the highest good, which is God. Philosophy then addresses the problem of evil: if God governs the world, why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer? Her answer is that evil is powerless and ultimately self-destructive, while the good are never truly harmed.

The final book takes up a hard question: if God knows in advance everything that will happen, how can human choices be free? Boethius answered that God does not foresee the future as a series of events in time. God is eternal, possessing all of life at once, and sees all moments as a single present, so that knowing what we do no more forces our actions than watching someone walk forces them to walk. The book draws on Plato, on Neoplatonism and on the Stoic tradition of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and it never appeals to Christian revelation.

Boethius is often called the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics. Until the twelfth century, the logic taught in Latin Europe rested largely on his translations and commentaries, and his ideas on eternity and providence shaped medieval Christian philosophy from Anselm of Canterbury to Thomas Aquinas, alongside the teaching of Augustine. The Consolation was translated into Old English in the circle of King Alfred, into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer, and into English again by Queen Elizabeth I, and Dante placed Boethius among the wise spirits in the heaven of the sun in his Paradiso.