The Counter-Cultural Wisdom of Lady Philosophy

The late antique Roman statesman, philosopher, theologian, and saint Anicius Manilius Severinus Boethius (c. 480–524/6) spent the early part of his short life translating Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation into Latin at a time when knowledge of Greek was relatively uncommon. His ambitious goal was to translate and write commentaries upon all of Aristotle’s works and Plato’s dialogues to show that these two ancient philosophical schools of thought were really not at odds with each other. He wrote five theological works, the fifth in which he developed a definition of “person” that is considered a major contribution to christology and trinitarian theology. But his most well-known text, The Consolation of Philosophy, is the text that continues to captivate its readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And it is the text he wrote when the comfortable life he was living at the beginning of the sixth century was unexpectedly interrupted. 

The Need for The Consolation Today

The beginning of the twenty-first century is a politically and ideologically inauspicious time to read and teach “old books” in higher education. Still, each semester I try to convince undergraduate students in my classes to keep their copies of The Consolation after the semester is over, as opposed to returning them to the university bookstore for a few dollars. By no fault of their own, they are unaware that this magnificent text has shaped virtually every significant Western theological, philosophical, literary, political, and intellectual figure of note, from King Alfred the Great to Jonathan Haidt. Further, The Consolation has comforted and consoled countless unknown and known men and women who have found themselves in troubling times or forced to endure the serious or slight afflictions of this life – even Dante finds solace in it when his beloved Beatrice dies in the Convivio. My pitch to students is an iteration of C.S. Lewis’ apologia for reading “old books.” I tell students they will have to confront, if they have not already done so, the fragility and contingency of life when the tentative and tragic nature of their existence intrudes upon them by way of an unexpected death of a loved one, an unanticipated terminal cancer diagnosis, an unforeseen betrayal of a spouse, an uncontrollable global pandemic, or perhaps an undeserved loss of a job. When the memento mori visits them in whatever dreadful form it takes, the chatbots, digital diversions, and social sedatives to which they so often escape and unwittingly seek solace will fail to console them. And like Boethius in the sixth century, they too will need to disabuse themselves of the many false goods they will have spent their lives pursuing, and they too will need their souls healed of the pursuit’s deleterious effects. They will need the consolatory wisdom of an old book like The Consolation.

Lewis thought that an old book like The Consolation could serve as a balm to the myopia of the modern mind. Old books are the “clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” We read old books not to provoke some kind of antiquarian obsession with the past. Nor do we read them to conjure nostalgia to assuage our discontent with the present. We read old books, Lewis believed, to “correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period,” whatever they might be, and whatever they might be, they are not the “same mistakes.” I would add, and I like to think Lewis would agree, that we read old books because they contain living voices from the past still speaking to us today. Voices from the past provide fresh perspectives on the problems of the present and edification to approach, endure, and hopefully move beyond them. 

We read old books because they contain living voices from the past still speaking to us today. Share on X

There are a number of ideological, cultural, political, social, and personal forces that impair my students’ ability to hear living voices from the past speaking to them. But the most formidable is the gravitational pull of “presentism,” the present-mindedness of the moment that, in its most insipid, self-righteous form, views its own intellectual ancestry with contempt and disdain. In its common form, it ensnares the student’s mind within the tyranny of the present moment such that it cannot see that its own self-understanding is partly derived from a sense “of having overcome a previous condition,” as the philosopher Charles Taylor suggests. To make matters worse, the collective self-consciousness of my students is in thrall to the “myth of progress,” that comforting modern illusion bequeathed to them by the Enlightenment. It is the pervasive, plausible, simplistic belief that the human condition will always be better in the future than it has ever been in the past. The cultural logic of the myth produces fealty to what Rudyard Kipling called the “wind-borne Gods of the Market Place” and credulity towards the cumulative power of science and technology that make the pre-modern world into which Boethius was born unimaginably strange and naïve to my students. In their minds, it exists as a long nothingness, a scientifically benighted world without the technological wizardry of AI and the material comforts of late modernity, whose cultural obsolescence ended when their grandparents were born, sometime around the end of World War II. They are incredulous that people in antiquity were as wise, smart, brilliant, ingenious, selfless, compassionate, self-righteous, manipulative, foolish, violent, bawdy, licentious, and mistaken as we are today. 

If his life had gone the way he had planned it, Boethius would not have written The Consolation, and had his younger contemporary Cassiodorus not unearthed it, it would have remained unread.  The circumstances surrounding its composition endow its verse with pathos, its hymns with poignancy, and its central argument, that human affairs are governed by an all-encompassing divine providence, with conviction. By all sixth-century measures, Boethius was a favored child of Fortune. Despite losing his father at a young age, he was adopted by an even wealthier Roman Christian family.  As a scion of a powerful and influential Roman family, he benefited from an education in the cultural riches of the classical Greco-Roman world, rhetoric, and training fit for a future imperial official. Like many ancient aristocrats, he was both an intellectual and a public official, and he advanced all the way to “Master of Offices” at Ravenna in the court of Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king and Arian Christian. But his charmed sixth-century life came to an abrupt end in 523 when a political conspiracy landed him in prison on specious charges of treason. It was while he was imprisoned five hundred miles from the comforts of his family and home, most likely enduring torture, and anticipating his impending bloody execution, that Boethius wrote The Consolation. 

The Setting of the Consolation

When Lady Philosophy comes to Boethius in Book I of The Consolation she finds him in a cell in a sad state of self-loathing on account of losing his good fortune, family, reputation, and freedom: “I used to write cheerful poems, happy and life-affirming, but my eyes are wet with tears and the poems are those that only grieving Muses would prompt me to compose, heartbreaking verse from a suffering, heartbroken man.”  One would expect Lady Philosophy to sympathize with Boethius’s predicament and reassure him that God will bring good out of the evil he is suffering. But The Consolation is refreshingly free of unctuous euphemisms, pious platitudes, and spiritual pep-talks.  It offers a peculiar kind of comfort and consolation that stings as much as it soothes Boethius’s troubled soul.  The trouble with Boethius’s soul, at least, as he mistakenly sees it, is that God seems to govern the rest of the world in an orderly way, but appears to allow human affairs to be conducted in a random, haphazard, and unjust way such that the wicked seem to prosper while the good suffer. “Many people have evil ideas and wicked intentions and hatch nefarious schemes, but to carry out one of these plans is, under God’s watchful eye, a truly monstrous thing. And it was in such a circumstance as this that one of your disciples asked how, if there is a God, there can be evil. And if there is not a God, where does good come from?”  Boethius is in a full-blown existential crisis. In the background of his existential crisis lurks a metaphysical malaise that his isolation, indigence, and vulnerability have exposed. His malaise is symptomatic of a spiritual sickness within his soul, activated by Fortune’s fickle nature. 

The Consolation is refreshingly free of unctuous euphemisms, pious platitudes, and spiritual pep-talks. It offers a peculiar kind of comfort and consolation that stings as much as it soothes Boethius’s troubled soul. Share on X

What is the spiritual sickness of Boethius’s soul? It is the age-old ailment: self-deception. He is deceived, and his self-deception prevents him from seeing himself, his life, and reality as God sees them, albeit dimly and partially. The cure requires him to come to terms with himself and his life as they truly are. There is a problem, though. The problem is that Boethius, in his grief, believes that his life has been ordered by faith, structured by hope, and guided by love toward the One, True, and Highest Good in whom his true happiness resides. Instead, his life has been driven by the pursuit of Fortune’s false goods of wealth, fame, prestige, power, reputation, high office, honor, and pleasure. And so, Lady Philosophy’s charge to nurse Boethius back to spiritual health involves the unenviable task of demonstrating to him that he is mourning the loss of things that would not make him happy, anyway. She tells him:

All these paths that we think may lead to happiness are false trails and cannot take us to where we want to go. And I shall demonstrate, they lead in wrong and even wicked directions. Do you want to pile up large sums of money? Where will you get it, if not from those who have it? You want honors? How will you obtain them except by begging for them from those who can bestow them, thereby becoming not the proud man you wanted to be but a suppliant, a mendicant? You want power? You will lie awake at night worrying about your subjects’ treachery. You want glory and fame? You will be the toy of vicissitude, trying to figure out the mood of the people and drawn this way and that by their fickle preferences. You want pleasure? You become the servant of your body, which you know to be both frail and base. There are those who take pride in their bodies, but why?…The human body can be beautiful, but its beauty passes like that of spring flowers. And think of Artistotle’s observation that if we had the keenness of sight of Lynceus the Argonaut and could see through surfaces, the beauty even of an Alcibiades would be a disgusting heap of guts and organs. It isn’t the human body, then, that is attractive, but only the weakness of human vision that makes it seem so. And anyway, however beautiful a human body may be, that beauty can be utterly destroyed in the course of a three-day fever.

Lady Philosophy unfurls the metaphorical map of human desire before Boethius to show him the many misguided routes human longing for beatitude takes in its pursuit of true happiness. He must confess that he has spent his life following many of these misguided routes. This is the first and most difficult step he must take to have his life refashioned. Once done, he will see the meaning of his life, including his untimely and tragic death, renewed within a grand metaphysical vision of a universe governed by a good and gracious God.

Renouncing Self-Deception

It is tempting to dismiss Lady Philosophy’s counsel here as a relic of ancient austerity.  It is true that Lady Philosophy gives Boethius cold comfort. She refuses to concede that the false goods of Fortune, so often pursued in lieu of the One, True Good, provide even the partial happiness they purport to offer. Her unwillingness to yield this point sets Boethius’s argument apart from those who came before him, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, and also those who would come after him. And yet to dismiss Lady Philosophy on this point is to ignore the unflinching spiritual guidance and undomesticated wisdom The Consolation has to offer its twenty-first-century readers. Boethius’s renunciation of the self-deception that besets his soul creates the spiritual condition for him to see properly the world and the gift of his existence in all their splendor and misery and to perceive them truthfully and hopefully illuminated through the light of Love, the force that governs the universe, rather than refracted through power, fear, and resentment. 

The ancient affliction from which Boethius suffers comes to expression in its modern form through what the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “the self’s self-serving presentation of itself to itself, a presentation designed to sustain an image of the self as well-ordered, free from fundamental conflict, troubled perhaps by occasional akratic difficulties, but for the most part entitled to approval both by itself and others.” Is the self-serving story Boethius has told himself the same one we like to tell ourselves? His suffering is undeserved (and it is!) because he has conducted himself in both his private and public lives with exemplary integrity (and he has!). And yet, stripped of Fortune’s false goods around which he had constructed the narrative of his life, he is no longer able to rest content within the shadow of self-deception. Now he must re-learn to see himself in the glaring and initially unsettling light of Truth. In this light he begins to see the universe he inhabits in its most intimate sense. He glimpses it in its infinite beauty and goodness through the eyes of faith, hope, and love. 

O Lord, you govern the universe with your eternal order: you brought time itself into being, and all that marks its changes in the heavens and here on the earth, both moving and also in stillness. Nothing but your love could have prompted you to bring forth the matter and forms that together make up the world. From within yourself, ungrudging, you brought out the pattern of all that is good, inasmuch as it partakes of your own goodness. Its beauty is your beauty; your mind is the source of its grandeur.

There is much more I could say about the theological and philosophical vision of The Consolation and the moral and spiritual wisdom it contains for those of us living in the late-modern world. There is the role that the natural desire for the good plays in God’s providential activity in the world. Something also could be said about the doctrine of divine simplicity and the metaphysical function it plays in humanity’s participation and deification in the divine life of God. Something could be said too about the text’s influential argument for the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge, its understanding of God’s eternal knowledge, and its conceptually clever distinction between conditional and simple necessity. There are extraneous issues, too. The Consolation’s effusive references to classical Greco-Roman literature and dearth of explicit references to scripture and Christian faith baffle contemporary readers. In his time of need, why doesn’t Boethius explicitly turn to his Christian faith? I could go on, but Voltaire warned that “if you want to bore the reader, tell him everything.” 

In the final lines of The Consolation, as Boethius moves from deception to recognition of truth, he begins to bear the eternal weight of glory in his current affliction. “Lift up your mind in virtue and hope,” Lady Philosophy urges him. And “[d]o not be deceived…remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things.” The Consolation’s readers should listen for the living voice of Boethius speaking to them. If they hear it, it should stir within their souls a renewed vision that prompts them to see their particular lives as embodying universal truth and eternal life within the unfolding of a much greater reality.

Image credit: Piotr Krawiec