Boethius on Knowing Ourselves

We do not assume that we understand the ocean or what moves within its depths, yet we assume we know our hearts and the motivations held within them. As it turns out, that is an awfully big assumption, one which Boethius interrogates in The Consolation of Philosophy. His imagined mentor, the personified Lady Philosophy, laments that her student has lost sight of that answer: “He drowns in the depths, his keen mind/dulled in dark brine, far from shore/and, battered by waves the winds whip,/he thrashes in despair” (1.m2.5). As the oceanographer charts the depths of the seas to make the hidden places of the world better known and easier to navigate, so Boethius strives in his Consolation to offer a philosophical map of the relationship between what our hearts desire and who we are. The Consolation of Philosophy unfolds in a dialogue between Boethius’s confusion-addled self and his higher, philosophical mind, the effort which Mufasa recommended to Simba: “Remember who you are.” We have all forgotten who we are, and Boethius invites us to share in his journey to recollect true self-knowledge. As Lady Philosophy tells him, “He has forgotten who he really is, but he will recover, for he used to know me, and all I have to do is clear the mist that beclouds his vision” (1.p2.6). When the tidal waves of tragedy shattered his life, Boethius responded by charting an odyssey others would follow to find the consolation of self-knowledge contained within his theistic philosophy.

Between Earth and Heaven 

The first book of The Consolation of Philosophy reveals that the loss of Boethius’s self-knowledge stemmed from a poignant tension within his own values: the need to source our identity ultimately in the divine origin of human nature’s design and the need to interface our self-understanding with our social obligations. Boethius himself points out this tension when Lady Philosophy, invoking Homer, invites him to “Speak out, don’t hold it, buried in your heart” (1.p4.10). Boethius asks her to see the tension between his earthly and heavenly identities, between his political self and his intellectual self: 

“Was this the expression on my face when you showed me the paths of the stars and how the order of the universe implied an ethical system for mankind? And is this the reward you had for me, telling me that I should accept Plato’s opinion that governments would be well run if there were philosopher-kings?” (1.p4.11)

Boethius could be compared to someone who wanted to be a university professor but felt compelled to run for office because of an injustice in the political landscape. One identity leads to the other: love for the transcendent pattern of the stars creates a desire to see a transcendent pattern within the political realm. 

But Boethius finds holding onto the inspiration of the stars and the godly harmony they symbolize difficult when wading through the political mud: “I found myself inevitably opposing the plans of selfish and unprincipled men, and in the effort to keep my conscience clear and do what was lawful and right, I offended a lot of people who were more powerful than I was” (1.p4.11). Tutored in the starlight order by which Odysseus could navigate stormy seas, Boethius feels betrayed by the philosophical study of those stars and the God who made them. And he sees a political storm less justifiable than the ones out on a literal sea because, unlike such storms, the social disharmony breaks with the natural order: “Look down from on high and impose your correction / you who bind all the world with your laws / who control the waves and the tides, bring order / to the surging waves of mankind’s follies / and steady us with your hand’s firmness / and whose awesome power we see in the skies” (1.m5.20). Boethius found himself on death row without a trial for the crime of speaking up, as he laments in the fourth prose section of Book 1, for sticking up for his friend, for doing the right thing, and, in short, for acting from what he regarded as authentic self-knowledge. Why does God seem to punish good behavior? And why doesn’t philosophy implemented in a godly way implement proper results? Why construct one’s identity on such flimsy promises?

Losing And Finding Our Real Identity

Yet, as Lady Philosophy leads Boethius to realize, the issue was not that God or the love of wisdom let him down, but that he had forgotten the inherent nature of their promises. In fact, Lady Philosophy’s takeaway from his self-pitying rant is that Boethius has abandoned his true self: “You have been banished from yourself, and one could even say that you are therefore the instrument of your own torments, for no one else could have done this to you. You seem to have forgotten what your native country is” (1.p5.20). Even as there is a stability in our sense of self from our physical home, our minds also have a terrain of thought which provides the stability of home, and Lady Philosophy tells Boethius that to reclaim a personal sense of peace, he must restore his self-knowledge to the proper conceptual place. This teaching means that Lady Philosophy regards as fundamentally inadequate our modern tendency to see self-knowledge as simply a matter of searching our emotional attachments to know what is true about ourselves. That is the inadequate answer provided by the false Muses, the Sirens who want Boethius to simply identify with his subjective responses. Nor are the false philosophers able to help Boethius, tearing at Lady Philosophy’s dress as they do: a true sense of self cannot come from overidentification with an argument. Rather, the self can only be known within a compelling vision of the reality of things and how the self inhabits that reality’s structure.

The self can only be known within a compelling vision of the reality of things and how the self inhabits that reality’s structure. Share on X

Subsequently, in prose 6, Lady Philosophy probes Boethius’s worldview. It must be understood that Lady Philosophy assumes a radical intimacy between an individual’s ability to derive peace in the world with a proper understanding of how the self relates to things. She recites to him in the sixth poem of the work, “Whoever defies the laws of nature / must come to ruin and rue his folly” (1.m6.23). In the context of telling Boethius that he must remember his place in the true country, she begins by asking him, “Is it your view that life is a series of chance events? Or do you think it has an order and a rationale?” (1.p6.23). The response Boethius provides is so shockingly confident that it seems to undercut his own previous rant: “I believe that there is a God and that he watches over his creation. I can’t imagine a time when I could abandon such a belief” (1.p6.23). What is odd about this answer is that that’s exactly what Boethius seemed to be implying in his complaint in Meter 5, as well as near the end of his lamentation in Prose 4. He pronounces unshakable belief in God’s providential ordering of things, yet he seemed to almost indict God for not implementing this order among members of the human race. Philosophia is herself perplexed by this: “But your healthy belief in the order of nature does not seem to enable you to resist your sickness, so let us explore a little more deeply” (1.p6.23). After this first good answer, things go downhill rapidly. When Lady Philosophy asks him how God governs the world, Boethius says, “I don’t even understand the question” (1.p6.23). When Lady Philosophy asks him what all of Nature’s order is directed to, he says, “I used to know that, but in my grief, I can’t remember” (1.p6.24). Notice that Boethius has espoused God’s providential governance, but cannot identify the point of contact between Him and His creation; he also cannot identify the point of God’s creation. God is thus doubly unmoored from His Creation in Boethius’s grief, and of course, the relationship between God and man must be confused in his mind, because both of these questions relate not only to the planet and the environment but also the humans who live on and within them. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when Lady Philosophy asks, “And what is a man?” Boethius replies with a flat-footed Porphyrian taxonomy: “Are you asking me if I believe that man is a mortal, rational animal? Both of those things are certainly true” (1.p6.24). This is a bit like if you asked a man who was to be captain of the ship, “What is a boat?” and he said, “A wooden structure with a curved hull that people can stand in.” Albeit somewhat Aristotelian, Boethius has missed a core part of the Aristotelian vision of taxonomy in the definition of rational, mortal animal: function. What makes a good boat? Its purpose: it sails well. You can’t know if a boat is a good boat by being able to identify its structure: you have to be able to discuss how it can be made seaworthy and be used to navigate choppy waters. Boethius has revealed that he has lost touch with the orientation of human nature within God’s created order, and his sense of self is thus wildly askew.

Lady Philosophy, however, has not lost hope, for the compass of Boethius’s belief in God, she believes, can help Boethius to correct course and reclaim his orientation towards the purpose which defines the fullness of human flourishing. She tells him, “But the author of all health has not yet abandoned you and you have not totally lost your true nature” (1.p6.25). Confusion besets Boethius’s mind like a storm confronting the sailor: “The darkness of clouds / hides the stars. / The clear-glass sea / whipped by the wind / becomes opaque, / a wall of waves / with the mud stirred up / that blackens it further” (1.m7.25-26). Lady Philosophy throughout will use every device at her disposal to help Boethius tame the turbulent chaos in his heart: poetry, logic, personification, myth, and even humor, and the full range of Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic philosophy. But despite her use of pagan sources, her method is at one with James 1:6: “But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” At the very center of this quest for true self-knowledge, Lady Philosophy leads Boethius to the realization that their inquiry must be enveloped within the context of prayer: “What do you then suppose we should do now to make us worthy of discovering where the highest good may dwell?” Boethius answers: “We must call upon God for this too… for if this is omitted, there cannot even be a first step that is proper and correct” (3.p8.84).

The Telos of Our Identity

Each subsequent book of the Consolation of Philosophy elevates Boethius’s nautical skill in this psychological maelstrom. The need to overcome false knowledge in Book 2, from unreflective desire for worldly goods to derive an authentic sense of self, is illustrated by Lady Philosophy through the powerful metaphor of Fortune’s Wheel. A counterfeit deity, Fortune tells us that who we are comes from our desires being met. Yet this is a precarious answer, for two reasons: It makes us dependent upon physically external circumstances, and it is not clear that we’ll ever be satisfied that way. It’s like a sailor expecting to get to his destination by allowing the wind to take him to where he wants to go: “If you spread your sails before the wind, then you must go where the wind takes you and not where you might wish to go” (2.p1.30). This realization is complicated by the fact that one might intellectually know that worldly goods cannot provide full satisfaction nor true self-knowledge (two sides of the same reality, in Boethian philosophy). A point which is illustrated during a conversation on one of Fortune’s specific gifts, Fame: “I answered her, ‘You know perfectly well that ambition played a very small part in my choice of career. What I wanted was a chance to take part in the affairs of state so that those virtues I had might be of some benefit to others’… She pursed her lips slightly and then replied, ‘That would have a certain appeal to minds that are exceptional and able… What you are talking about is still the desire for glory’” (2.p7.52). Like Boethius, we think we have purged our identities of the false friends of worldly goods, but they tend to sneak in through the back door, even of legitimate motives, an undercurrent in choppy waters which we must make sure does not take us off course.

Going beyond the observation that worldly goods such as power, fame, wealth, position, and pleasure cannot in and of themselves provide a notion of self that leads to true satisfaction, Boethius must go further and learn to see how limited goods help man to see the limitless desire for God in Book 3. Each of our desires calls to us not merely because of sin or the circumstances of desire, but because those good gifts give us a glimpse of a good gift-giver: “Earthly creatures that you are,” says Lady Philosophy, “you have some hazy idea of your beginning, some vague dream of it anyway, and you have a similarly unclear notion of that happiness that is your end and goal” (3.p3.65). We learn in fact that the telos of mankind is to participate in God and so obtain godliness , a conditional and creaturely corollary to God’s fullness of Being by being directed towards that fullness; this act of participation is enacted by realizing that the whole created order (animate and inanimate) seeks to glorify God by manifesting the nature He gave it. We also learn here the answer to how God rules this Nature and the human nature within it: “So he orders all things for the good, inasmuch as he orders all things and he is good. This is the tiller and the rudder by which the universe is preserved and kept safe” (3.p12.100). Just as there are human shepherds but only one Good Shepherd, we must all captain the ships of our lives, but there is only one Good Captain.

We learn in the Consolation that the telos of mankind is to participate in God and so obtain godliness. Share on X

As the surface of the water holds within it the danger to drown us or feed us with fish, so the surface of worldly goods holds the threat of distraction from God or the possibility of perceiving splintered light which can lead us straight to Him. Boethius uses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to dramatize this quest: given the command to keep his eyes on the light beyond the Underworld, he loses his wife a second time to the perils of Hades when he looks back and breaks the command of the chthonic deities to lead her always looking ahead. The cautionary tale applies to our friendships and how we must seek the Kingdom first for all other goods to be added to us, but it also tells us within that process how we manage not to lose ourselves: “Happy is he who is able to find the fountain of goodness… This old and familiar tale / is yours, as you make your ascent / leading your mind to the light” (3.m12.103, 105). God’s divine simplicity, His fullness with Himself, means that only he can satiate the soul, because whatever lies we tell ourselves, every other source of identity will eventually prove false. By contrast, Boethius identifies true self-knowledge with orienting our every resource of identity fashioning we find in this world towards their source in God.

God’s divine simplicity, His fullness with Himself, means that only he can satiate the soul, because whatever lies we tell ourselves, every other source of identity will eventually prove false. Share on X

Book 4 refutes the modern tendency we have to be intrigued by evil, to retell the identities of villains as if they were more interesting and more admirable than the good guys.  Even short of this, we may at least think our flaws provide our real individuality. For Boethius, this would be something like saying that our personality can be found in tooth decay or amputation. While such fates do indeed texture our experience, evil empties identity rather than filling it, insofar as evil rejects the “fountain of goodness,” because to reject God is to reject Being and so to reject fullness of self: “For those who do not pursue the end of all things may be said to have abandoned being” (4.p2.113). As that good captain of a ship who has accounted for possible occurrences while out at sea has charted out a successful path works with his crew and his ship to make his plan come to pass, God’s Providence uses the means of grace (what Boethius calls Fate) to ensure that all souls which orient themselves to the transcendent North Star of God’s goodness learn who they are through each life experience, be it smooth sailing or shipwreck.

To Know God is To Know Ourselves

Finally, in Book 5, Boethius realizes that our ability to truly know ourselves comes not from submitting God’s understanding to our assessment, but by submitting our nature to God’s vision of who and what we are. Freedom does not come from being able to do whatever you want out at sea, where sudden changes to the weather can destroy you with its whims, but by dwelling on a ship directed by a captain’s good plan. Just as the sailor does not find safe harbor by knowing the dock but being embraced by its anchoring safety, the soul finds the truest refuge from the raging seas of life’s trials by welcoming the embrace of God’s providential vision of the self: “And the conclusion, then, is clear, that you must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things” (5.p6.175). We know ourselves by being known, and by prayerfully loving the pursuit of wisdom which God’s cosmic love directs. Many have asked of this text, Why does Boethius not make Christianity explicit? I believe the answer is this: by the end of the Consolation, Boethius has given any alternative source of satisfaction for self-knowledge a thorough analysis, and found that none of these competing answers are seaworthy. By the end of the Consolation of Philosophy, the only consolation that remains is that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). Contrasted with every variable shadow of Fortune’s gifts, the argument of Boethius’s Consolation necessitates the conclusion that only eternal light will illuminate the soul with the good and perfect gift of true self-knowledge.

Image credit: Jason Trbovich