In the first chapter I show that, although Dante himself tells us in his Convivio (I, i, 16) that Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae was the first book he read. De hypotheticis syllogismis. Brescia: Paideia. For the De consolatione philosophiae I give only the main editions and translations. The reader needs to know only that the stress marks are intended to have their Latin force: That is, they show where the syllables should be dragged out a bit, pronounced more.
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Results 1 – 23 of 23 De consolatione philosophiae. by Boezio,Severino. and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at. Download Citation on ResearchGate | Quello non conosciuto da molti libro di Boezio: De Consolatione Philosophiae and Its Role in the Making of the Vita Nova. Consolatio Philosophiae as a textbook.3 In so doing, they have cleared the field of volgarizzamento della Consolatio Philosophiae di Boezio attribuito al.
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Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (born: circa 475–7 C.E.,died: 526? C.E.) has long been recognized as one of the most importantintermediaries between ancient philosophy and the Latin Middle Agesand, through his Consolation of Philosophy, as a talentedliterary writer, with a gift for making philosophical ideas dramaticand accessible to a wider public. He had previously translatedAristotle’s logical works into Latin, written commentaries on them aswell as logical textbooks, and used his logical training to contributeto the theological discussions of the time. All these writings, whichwould be enormously influential in the Middle Ages, drew extensivelyon the thinking of Greek Neoplatonists such as Porphyry andIamblichus. Recent work has also tried to identify and evaluateBoethius’s own contribution, as an independent thinker, though oneworking within a tradition which put little obvious weight onphilosophical originality. Both aspects of Boethius will be consideredin the sections which follow.
- Bibliography
1. Life and Works
Anicius Severinus Manlius Boethius was born into the Roman aristocracyc. 475–7 C.E.—about the same time as the last RomanEmperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed (August 476). Boethius livedmost of his life under the rule of Theoderic, an Ostrogoth educated atConstantinople, who was happy to let the old families keep up theirtraditions in Rome, while he wielded power in Ravenna. Boethius’sprivileged social position ensured that he was taught Greek thoroughlyand, though it is unlikely that he travelled to Athens or Alexandria,the sites of the two remaining (Platonic) philosophical schools, hewas certainly acquainted with a good deal of the work which had beengoing on there. He was able to spend most of his life in learnedleisure, pursuing his vast project of translating and commentingphilosophical texts. The Roman aristocracy was, by his day, thoroughlyChristianized, and Boethius also became involved in some of theecclesiastical disputes of his time, centring mainly around a schismbetween the Latin and the Greek Churches which was resolved shortlybefore his death.
Boethius’s final years are well known to anyone who has read his mostpopular work, the Consolation of Philosophy. He agreed tobecome Theoderic’s ‘Master of Offices’, one of the mostsenior officials, but he quickly fell out with many others at court,probably because he attacked their corruption. Accused of treason andof engaging in magic, he was imprisoned and (probably in 526)executed, but not before he had the chance to write his literarymasterpiece.
The Consolation of Philosophy, a prosimetrum (a prose workwith verse interludes) which recounts, in polished literary language,an imagined dialogue between the prisoner Boethius and a lady whopersonifies Philosophy, contrasts with the rest of Boethius’soeuvre. Besides writing text-books on arithmetic andgeometry, closely based on Greek models, Boethius devoted himself totranslating Aristotle’s logic and commenting on it; he produced acommentary on the Categories and two each on OnInterpretation and on the Isagoge(‘Introduction’) by Porphyry, which had become a standardpart of the logical curriculum. He also composed logical text-books ondivision, categorical syllogisms, and on two branches of logic whichwill require further explanation (see below, Section 3): hypothetical syllogisms and topical reasoning (along with acommentary on Cicero’s Topics). In three of his fourTheological Treatises (often known as the Opusculasacra), I, II and V, Boethius uses his logical equipment totackle problems of Christian doctrine; IV, however, is astraightforward statement of Christian doctrine, a sort of confessionof faith; whilst III is a brief, not specifically Christianphilosophical treatise.
2. The Logical Project and the Logical Commentaries
Boethius’s work as a translator and commentator of Aristotelian logicmight appear to be just the beginning of a wider project, announced inthe second commentary on On Interpretation (c. 516), and cutshort by his execution, to translate and comment on all the writingsof Plato and Aristotle. Yet Boethius seems to have become so engrossedin his role as an expositor of logic, not limiting himself to a singlecommentary on each work, and writing extra textbooks, that it is hard notto see it as having diverted him, in any case, from his more grandiosescheme. Indeed, Boethius seems to have pursued a rather speciallogical project.
The particular, deliberate nature of this project is not cast intodoubt by the fact that Boethius’s logical commentaries, althoughalmost certainly not merely servile translations of marginalia from aGreek manuscript (as James Shiel (1990) has argued), are not at alloriginal in their logical doctrines. For what is important isBoethius’s choice of Porphyry as his main authority in logic. It wasPorphyry who, two centuries or so earlier, had been responsible formaking Aristotelian logic an important subject within the Neoplatoniccurriculum. He held that it did not conflict with Platonic doctrine,as his teacher Plotinus had believed, because its area of applicationwas limited to the sensible world, to which everyday languagerefers. Later Neoplatonists accepted the importance of Aristotelianlogic, and the harmony between Platonic and Aristotelian teaching, butthey tended to try and discover Neoplatonic doctrines even in theAristotelian logical texts. In the case of the Categories,they even imagined that Aristotle had taken his doctrine from aPythagorean writer, Archytas, and that there was an underlying andwildly metaphysical strand to the text which it was the commentator’sduty to uncover. Boethius, however, although making occasional use oflater commentaries, usually followed Porphyry: on the Categories he stayed close to Porphyry’s surviving (and quite simple)question-and-answer commentary, whilst the long, second commentary onOn Interpretation is commonly accepted as the best guide toPorphyry’s exegesis, since his own commentary does notsurvive. Boethius’s commentaries were, therefore, because morePorphyrian, so more Aristotelian than what was being written in Greekin his period.
Boethius’s Porphyrian approach is evident even in the two commentarieson Porphyry’s own Isagoge (an introduction to theCategories which had become accepted as a standard part ofthe logical curriculum)—one text on which, obviously, Porphyryhimself had never commented. Near the beginning of theIsagoge, Porphyry mentions, but declines in an introductorywork to discuss, three questions about universals. Do they exist orare they mere concepts? If they exist are they bodily or not, and, ifthey are not, are they separated from sensible things or do they existin them? By Boethius’s time, the Greek commentators had developed astandard way of glossing this passage. They explained that universalscould be considered as concepts (universals postrem—‘following the thing’), as intrinsic tobodily things (universals in re—‘in thething’) and as really existing and separate from bodies(universals ante rem—‘before thething’). Rather than proffer an explanation on these lines,Boethius turns to a train of thought (1906, 161:14 ff.) which goesback in part to Porphyry himself and, through him, to the greatAristotelian, Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Boethius begins with an argument against universals as an object ofenquiry. Everything that really exists is one in number, but nothingthat is common to many at the same time can be one in number. Butuniversals are common to many at the same time. And souniversals do not exist in reality, but in thought alone. Thoughts,Boethius continues, are of two sorts: those which derive from theirobject in the way it is (call them ‘correspondingthoughts’) and those which do not. If the thoughts that areuniversals were corresponding thoughts, then universals would alsoexist in reality. Since they do not, universals are non-correspondingthoughts, and non-corresponding thoughts are empty. Enquiry intouniversals (and therefore into the five predicables studied in theIsagoge) should therefore be abandoned. Boethius’s way oftackling this objection is to challenge just the very finalstage. Non-corresponding thoughts, he argues, are not empty if theyare abstractions. Consider a mathematical object such as a line or apoint, which the mathematician contemplates by abstracting from thematerial body of which it is part. No such thing exists in reality asan immaterial line or point, and yet the mathematician’s thought isnot empty or misleading. The case is similar if we disregard theaccidental features of some particular thing (John Marenbon, forinstance) and are left just with his nature of man. This line ofreply, as Alain de Libera (1999, 159–280) has shown, goes back toAlexander of Aphrodisias or his followers. Boethius, however, goes onto give it his own particular twist, by suggesting that the universalsproduced by abstraction are not merely the constructions of the mind,but do grasp reality as it is. Although this line fits oddly with theargument from which Boethius set out, he may already be anticipatingthe Principle of Modes of Cognition, which he proposes in theConsolation (see Section 6 below).
The long, second commentary on On Interpretation is veryprobably based, as explained above, on Porphyry’s lost commentary. Itthus provides a full account of Porphyry’s semantics—a semanticsbased on Aristotle, because he takes ordinary language to be concernedwith material things rather than with the intelligible world. There isalso an extended discussion of the sea-battle passage in Chapter9. According to the principle of bivalence, ‘There will be asea-battle tomorrow’ is either true or false. But, if it istrue, then there will be a sea-battle tomorrow; if false,there will not be one. Either way, is it not therefore amatter of necessity? Boethius’s strategy is to say that ‘Therewill be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is indeed either true or false,but, because the sea-battle is a contingent event, its truth orfalsehood is only indefinite. What does this position amount to? Thereare various interpretations of how it should be understood. Perhapsthe most plausible is that Boethius holds that, if an event e is contingent, then the sentence ‘e will takeplace’ is false, even if it turns out that e does infact happen, because ‘e will take place’ impliesthat e will take place necessarily. But a qualified sentencesuch as ‘e will take place contingently’ is truejust in case it is not necessary that e happens, ande actually happens.
3. The Logical Text-Books
The two most interesting of Boethius’s logical text-books are thetreatises on topical differentiae (c. 522–3) and onhypothetical syllogisms (516–22), since each gives an insightinto an area of late ancient logic for which there are otherwise few,if any, sources.
From Aristotle’s Topics, logicians of late antiquity hadelaborated a system of topical argument, which had been considerablyinfluenced by the needs of Roman lawyers. The focus of topical theoryis on discovering arguments, and these arguments are notusually formally valid, but merely plausible. The topicaldifferentiae are the classifications of types of sucharguments; knowing the differentiae gives the arguer a readymeans to hit upon a persuasive line of reasoning. Suppose, forexample, I want to argue that we should praise Cicero. I start tryingto think what information I have which might help me to argue thispoint, and I remember that everyone is full of praises for anotherorator, Demosthenes. Then I turn over in my mind the list of topicaldifferentiae and I see that the differentia‘from equals’ will provide me with the argument Ineed:
- Everyone praises Demosthenes as an orator.
- Cicero is Demosthenes’s equal as an orator.
Therefore
- Everyone should praise Cicero.
Associated with this, as with every differentia, is a‘maximal sentence’ (maxima propositio), in thiscase: ‘equal things are to be judged equally.’ The maximalsentence can be taken as an indication of how to put together theargument; it might also be added to the argument in order to make itformally valid, but Boethius did not envisage maximal sentences beingused in this way. Rather, the topical arguer produces arguments ofdiffering strength, depending on how close to being a logical truth isthe maximal sentence associated with the differentia he isusing. Some maximal sentences do indeed state fundamental laws ofreasoning (including modus ponens and modustollens); others state what are at best rules of thumb and, in thecase of the topic ‘from authority’—the injunction toaccept as true what the wise, or experts or the majoritybelieve—not even that.
Boethius’s two main authorities, Cicero and Themistius, give ratherdifferent lists of the topical differentiae, and one of thetasks of his text-book is to show that their schemes do reallycoincide. In his commentary on Cicero’s Topics, writtenshortly before, Boethius expounds the same theory, but leaves himselfplenty of room for digressions on such subjects as universals,causation, free will and Stoic logic.
It is Stoic logic and Boethius’s relations to it which give histreatise On hypothetical syllogisms its special interest. Asyllogism is ‘hypothetical’ when one of its premisses is amolecular sentence which uses ‘if’ or ‘or’(understood as exclusive disjunction) as a connective. So, forexample, the following syllogism is hypothetical:
- If it is day, it is light.
- It is not light.
Therefore
- It is not day.
A modern reader will be inclined to see (4–6) as a piece ofsimple sentence logic: p→q; ¬q; therefore¬p. Since it was the Stoics who, in antiquity, developeda sentence logic, by contrast with Aristotle’s term logic, it wouldappear that Boethius’s treatise on hypothetical syllogisms is thetributary of Stoic logic. This conclusion is true to the extent thatthe tradition Boethius inherited goes back in part to Stoic roots. Bythe time it had reached Boethius, however, Stoic and Peripateticelements had become hopelessly confused. As C.J. Martin (1991) hasshown, Boethius himself lacked the conceptual apparatus to think interms of sentence logic. For him, (4–6) is to be understood asterm logic, in which the predicates ‘is light’ and‘is day’ are attributed to or denied of a vague subject‘it’. The treatise itself is mainly devoted to a laboriouscalculation of the various different possible forms of hypotheticalsyllogism involving two, three (with a first premise such as ‘Ifit is A, then if it is B, it is C’)and four terms (with a first premise such as ‘If, if it isA then it is B, then, if it is C then it isD’).
4. The Theological Treatises
The three opuscula sacra written to analyse points ofChristian doctrine seem to have been occasioned by events of thetime. Treatise V, against Eutyches and Nestorius, was apparentlyinspired by a letter (c. 513) from a group of Greek bishops, proposinga Christological formula which, they hoped, would unite the Westernand Eastern Churches. The two treatises on the Trinity (II is apartial sketch for I) are probably related to the intervention in 519 by agroup of Scythian monks, also designed to heal the schism. The workshave, however, an interest far beyond their contributions to theimmediate doctrinal debate. They pioneer a method of using logicalanalysis in a theological context which Augustine had anticipated butnot developed. Both heretical positions (for examples, the views aboutChrist and human nature held by Eutyches and Nestorius) and orthodoxChristian doctrine are subjected to rigorous scrutiny, using thetechniques of Aristotelian logic and, where necessary, ideas fromAristotelian physics. The heretical ideas are shown to contain logicalcontradictions. As for the orthodox understanding of God, it does notfit within the classifications of Aristotelian logic and naturalscience, but Boethius tries to chart exactly how far thesedistinctions, which are accommodated to the created world, also applyto the deity, and at what point they break down and provide us merelywith an analogy.
This way of thinking about God is made especially clear in the longertreatise on the Trinity (I). When God is said to have an attribute,how is this predication to be understood? For created things, on theAristotelian scheme, a predication is either substantial (when thegenus, species or differentia is predicated of something:‘Socrates is an animal/man/rational’) or accidental, whenthe predicate is any accident in any of the nine Aristoteliancategories of accident. Augustine had already acknowledged thatnothing is predicated of God accidentally. Predications about him maybe relative, as when he is called ‘Father’ or‘Son’, or substantial. Even when a quality or quantity isattributed to him, the predication is substantial. When we say of acreated thing that it is great or good, we are affirming that itparticipates in greatness or goodness: it is one thing for the thingto exist, another for it to be great or good. But God is greatnessitself and goodness itself, and so, when we say, ‘God isgood’ or ‘God is great’, we are not affirming anyattribute of him beyond what he is as a substance. This Augustinianview is faithfully set out in the brief Treatise II.
In Treatise I, Boethius develops this scheme. In especial, hedistinguishes between predications in the categories of Substance,Quantity and Quality, which are proper and intrinsic, and those in theother six categories, excluding Relation, which he calls improper andextrinsic. The intuitive idea behind the distinction seems to be thatpredications in these other categories concern only how the subjectrelates to other things; only substantial, quantitative andqualitative attributes characterize the thing itself. Boethiusgoes on to say that, whereas all proper, intrinsic predications aboutGod are substantial, extrinsic, improper predications about him arenot: they do not concern what either God or his creaturesare, but are rather about exterior things.
The discussion of Relation shows particularly clearly how Boethiusapplies logic to analysing God as far as he can, and then shows whereand how the logic fails. He needs to explain how it can be true thatthe same, one God is both the Father and the Son. He does so byclaiming that a predication of Relation, such as ‘is theFather’, does not concern the substance of the things related:that a is related to b in no way changes aor b. Moreover, there are some relationships which a thingcan have to itself—for example, that of equality. Being-a-fatherand being-a-son are not, among created things, such relations: no onecan be his own father or his own son. But it is here, says Boethius,that creaturely logic breaks down when it tries to comprehend theTrinity: we have in some way to try to grasp the idea of a relation offatherhood or filiation which is reflexive.
Another philosophical question Boethius explores in his discussionsof the Trinity is individuation (as well as more widely the topic ofparts and wholes). Unfortunately, it is not completely clear to whattheory of individuation he subscribes. A quick reading of somepassages would suggest that substances are indviduated by a bundle ofaccidents, but there are indications that Boethius may have preferreda theory of individuation by spatio-temporal position, or onedifferent from either of these (cf. Arlig, 2009).
Treatise III is also concerned with predication and God. But itdiffers sharply from the other treatises, in that it contains nothingspecifically Christian. The question it addresses is how allsubstances are good in that they are, and yet are not substantialgoods. Boethius takes it as a fundamental truth that all things tendto the good, and also that things are by nature like what theydesire. Everything, therefore, is by nature good. But if so, thenthings must be good either by participation, or substantially (or‘essentially’ as a modern philosopher would say). If theywere merely good by participation, they would be good by accident, notby nature. But if they are good substantially, then their substance isgoodness itself, and so nothing can be distinguished from the firstgood, God. In giving his answer, Boethius makes use of a set of axiomshe states at the beginning of the piece, and undertakes athought-experiment in which it is supposed per impossibilethat God does not exist. The key to his solution lies in finding aprincipled way to distinguish between a thing a beingF in that it exists, and a thing a beingsubstantially F. For a to be substantiallyF means, Boethius’s discussion implies, that‘a is not-F’ is inconceivable (we mightsay ‘logically impossible’). For a to beF in that it exists means just that ‘a isnot-F’ is impossible (we might say ‘impossiblegiven the way the world is set up’). Whereas it is inconceivablethat God is not good, it is merely impossible that everything is notgood.
5. The Consolation of Philosophy: The Argument of Books I–V.2
The Consolation of Philosophy presents interpretativedifficulties of a different order from the logical works or thetheological treatises. Unlike them, it is written in an elaborateliterary form: it consists of a dialogue between Boethius, sitting inhis prison-cell awaiting execution, and a lady who personifiesPhilosophy, and its often highly rhetorical prose is interspersed withverse passages. Moreover, although it is true that elsewhere Boethiusdoes not write in a way which identifies him as a Christian except inthe Theological Treatises I, II, IV and V, the absence of any explicitreference to Christianity in the Consolation poses a specialproblem, when it is recalled that it is the work of a man about toface death and so very literally composing his philosophical andliterary testament. These questions will appear in sharper focus (Section 7) when the argument of the Consolation has been examined.
Boethius’s real predicament sets the scene for the argument of theConsolation. He represents himself as utterly confused anddejected by his sudden change of fortune. Philosophy’s firstjob—true to the generic aim of a consolatio—is toconsole, not by offering sympathy, but by showing that Boethius has nogood reason to complain: true happiness, she wishes to argue, is notdamaged even by the sort of disaster he has experienced. She alsoidentifies in Book I a wider objective: to show that it is not thecase, as Boethius the character claims, that the wicked prosper andthe good are oppressed.
Philosophy seems to have two different lines of argument to showBoethius that his predicament does not exclude him from truehappiness. The first train of argument rests on a complexview of the highest good. The first (which is put forward in Book IIand the first part of Book III) distinguishes between the ornamentalgoods of fortune, which are of very limited value—riches,status, power and sensual pleasure—and the true goods: thevirtues and also sufficiency, which is what those who seek riches,status and power really desire. It also recognizes some non-ornamentalgoods of fortune, such as a person’s friends and family, as havingconsiderable genuine value. On the basis of these distinctions,Philosophy can argue that Boethius has not lost any true goods, andthat he still even retains those goods of fortune—hisfamily—which carry much real worth. She does not maintain that,in his fall from being powerful, rich and respected to the status of acondemned prisoner, Boethius has lost nothing of any worth at all. Buthis loss need not cut him off from true happiness, which is attainedprimarily by an austere life based on sufficiency, virtue andwisdom.
Philosophy’s second line of argument is based on a simpleview of the highest good. She begins to put it forward in III.10, aturning-point in the discussion, which is preceded by the most solemnpoem of the whole work (III m. 9), an invocation to God in termsborrowed from Plato’s Timaeus. Through a number of argumentswhich draw out the consequences of the Neoplatonic assumptions whichBoethius accepts, Philosophy shows that the perfect good and perfecthappiness are not merely in God: they are God. Perfecthappiness is therefore completely untouched by changes in earthlyfortune, however drastic. But what this second approach fails toexplain is how the individual human, such as Boethius, is supposed torelate to the perfect happiness which is God. Philosophy seems tospeak as if, merely by knowing that God is perfect happiness,Boethius himself will be rendered happy, although in the next sectionit seems that it is by acting well that a person can attain thegood.
Philosophy now goes on (III.11–12) to explain how God rules theuniverse. He does so by acting as a final cause. He is the good whichall things desire, and so he functions as ‘a helm and rudder, bywhich the fabric of the world is kept stable and without decay.’Philosophy thus pictures an entirely non-interventionist God,presiding over a universe which is well-ordered simply because heexists. But how does this account fit with the apparent oppression ofthe good and triumph of the wicked, about which Boethius had begun bycomplaining? In Book IV.1–4, Philosophy shows, drawing onPlato’s Gorgias, that the evil do not really prosper and theyare in fact powerless. Her central argument is that what everyonewants is happiness, and happiness is identical with the good. The goodhave therefore gained happiness, whereas the wicked have not; andsince people have power in so far as they can gain or bring about whatthey want, the wicked are powerless. She also argues that the goodgain their reward automatically, since by being good, they attain thegood, which is happiness. By contrast, since evil is not a thing but aprivation of existence, by being wicked people punish themselves,because they cease even to exist—that is to say, they stopbeing the sort of things they were, humans, and become other, loweranimals. Philosophy is therefore able to put forward emphatically twoof the most counter-intuitive claims of the Gorgias: that thewicked are happier when they are prevented from their evil andpunished for it, than when they carry it out with impunity, and thatthose who do injustice are unhappier than those who suffer it.
At the beginning of IV.5, however, there is another change ofdirection. Boethius the character is allowed to put forward theobvious, common-sense objections to the position Philosophy has beentaking: ‘which wise man’, he asks, ‘would prefer tobe a penniless, disgraced exile rather than stay in his own city andlead there a flourishing life, mighty in wealth, revered in honour andstrong in power?’ Philosophy answers by abandoning completelythe explanation developed from III.11 onwards, which presented God asa non-intervening final cause, and offers instead a view of God as theefficient cause of all things. Divine providence is the unified viewin God’s mind of the course of events which, unfolded in time, iscalled ‘fate’, and everything which takes place on earthis part of God’s providence. Philosophy’s change of direction mightseem at first to make Boethius’s common-sense objection even harder toanswer, but in fact it is easy enough for her to explain thatapparently unjust rewards and punishments on earth always serve agood, though to us hidden, purpose: for instance, exercising goodpeople to increase their virtue, helping the wicked to repent or,alternatively, letting them bring themselves to ruin. A less tractableproblem raised by Philosophy’s new approach is that it seems to implythat the human will is causally determined. Unlike many modernphilosophers, Boethius did not believe that the will can remain free,in the sense needed for attribution of moral responsibility, if it isdetermined causally. Moreover, Philosophy insists that the causalchain of providence, as worked out in fate, embraces all thathappens. In V.1, when Boethius asks about chance, Philosophy explainsthat events are said to happen by chance when they are the result of achain of causes which is unintended or unexpected, as when someone isdigging in a field for vegetables and finds a buriedtreasure. Philosophy’s solution is to argue (V.2) that rational actsof volition, unlike all external events, do not themselves belong tothe causal chain of fate. This freedom, however, is enjoyed only by‘the divine and supernal substances’ and by human beingsengaged in the contemplation of God. It is reduced and lost as humansgive their attentions to worldly things and allow themselves to beswayed by the passions.
6. Divine Prescience, Contingency and Eternity
In V.3, however, the character Boethius puts forward an argument,based on God’s foreknowledge of future events, which threatens to showthat even mental acts of willing are necessary and so (as Boethiusthe author believed) unfree. He argues that:
[7] If God foresees all things and cannot be mistaken inany way, what providence has foreseen will be, will necessarilyhappen. [8] So, if God foreknows from eternity not just what humanswill do but also their plans and volitions, there will be no freedomof choice, for there will not be able to be any deed, or any sort ofvolition that infallible divine providence has not foreseen. For ifvolitions are capable of turning out differently from how they havebeen foreseen, then there will not be firm foreknowlede of the future,but rather uncertain opinion, and I judge it wicked to believe thatabout God.
Since it is accepted that God is omniscient, and that this impliesthat he knows what every future event—includingmental events such as volitions—will be, (7) and (8) each seemto rule out any sort of freedom of the will requisite for attributingmoral responsibility: a consequence the disastrous implications ofwhich Boethius the character vividly describes.
Philosophy’s answer to this difficulty is the most philosophicallyintricate and interesting section of the Consolation. It isone part of Boethius’s work (perhaps the only one) which remains ofinterest in contemporary philosophy (of religion) and, for thatreason, it has often been interpreted according to a frameworkprovided by more recent thinking about the problem of divineprescience (see, for example, Leftow 1991, Zagzebski 1991). Thefollowing is, rather, an attempt to present the discussion as itactually proceeds in the Consolation.
The first point which needs to be settled is what, precisely, is theproblem which Boethius the character proposes? One way of reading thisdiscussion is that the argument here is in fact fallacious. Accordingto this interpretation, the reasoning behind (7) seems to be of thefollowing form:
- God knows every event, including all future ones.
- When someone knows that an event will happen, then theevent will happen.
- (10) is true as a matter of necessity, because it is impossibleto know that which is not the case.
- If someone knows an event will happen, it will happennecessarily. (10, 11)
- Every event, including future ones, happens necessarily. (9, 12)
The pattern behind (8) will be similar, but in reverse: from anegation of (13), the negation of (9) will be seen to follow. But, asit is easy to observe, (9–13) is a fallacious argument: (10) and(11) imply, not (12), but
- Necessarily, if someone knows an event will happen, it willhappen.
The fallacy in question concerns the scope of the necessityoperator. Boethius, the claim would be, has mistakenly inferred the (narrow-scope)necessity of the consequent (‘the event will happen’),when he is entitled only to infer the (wide-scope) necessity of thewhole conditional (‘if someone knows an event will happen, itwill happen’). Boethius the character is clearly taken in bythis fallacious argument, and there is no good reason to think thatBoethius the author ever became aware of the fallacy (despite apassage later on which some modern commentators have interpreted inthis sense). None the less, the discussion which follows does not, asthe danger seems to be, address itself to a non-problem. Intuitively,Boethius sees that the threat which divine prescience poses to thecontingency of future events arises not just from the claim that God’sbeliefs about the future constitute knowledge, but also fromthe fact that they are beliefs about the future. There is areal problem here, because if God knows now what I shall do tomorrow,then it seems that either what I shall do is already determined, orelse that I shall have the power tomorrow to convert God’s knowledgetoday into a false belief. Although his logical formulation does notcapture this problem, the solution Boethius gives to Philosophy isclearly designed to tackle it.
It is also possible to read the way that the question is posed byBoethius the character as not involving a fallacy (Marenbon2013). Boethius the character is, on this reading, putting forward asort of transcendental argument. Boethius considers that when a knowerknows a future event, as opposed to merely having opinion about it,the knower is judging that the event is fixed, since if it were anevent that could be otherwise, it could be the object of opinion butnot knowledge. If future events could be otherwise, then God, inknowing them, would in fact be holding a false belief, since he wouldbe judging that they could not be otherwise. But God has no falsebeliefs, and so the world must be such that his beliefs about futureevents are not false, and so all future events must be fixed.
Philosophy identifies (V.4) the character Boethius’s centraldifficulty as lying in the apparent incompatibility between an event’snot having a necessary outcome and yet its being foreknown. To foreseesomething ‘as if it were certain’ when it is uncertain howit will turn out is ‘foreign to the integrity ofknowledge’, since it involves ‘judging a thing as beingother than it is.’ Philosophy counters these doubts with theprinciple that ‘everything that is known is grasped, notaccording to its own power, but rather according to the capacity ofthose who know it.’ Her view, as she develops it (in V.5 andV.6), is based on what might be called the Principle of Modes ofCognition: the idea that knowledge is always relativized to differentlevels of knowers, who have different sorts of objects ofknowledge. This relativization is, however, limited. The same item isnot true for one knower and false for another, but the way in which agiven item is known differs according to the powers of theknower. Philosophy develops this scheme in relation to the differentlevels of the soul (intelligence, reason, imagination and the senses)and their different objects (pure Form, abstract universals, images,particular bodily things).
Philosophy does not at this point follow the most obvious path thatthe Modes of Cognition Principle would suggest and declare that itjust depends on the knower whether something is known as certain ornot. Perhaps she accepted that there is something intrinsicallyuncertain about future contingents, whoever it is that knowsthem. Rather, she reaches her conclusion through a more complex twistof the argument. Philosophy argues that the temporal relation of thethink known to the knower—whether it is known as a past, present orfuture event—depends on the nature and cognitive power of theknower. God’s way of being and knowing, she argues, is eternal, anddivine eternity, she says, is not the same as just lacking a beginningand end, but it is rather (V.6) ‘the whole, simultaneous andperfect possession of unbounded life.’
A being who is eternal in this way, Philosophy argues, knows allthings—past, present and future—in the same way as we, wholive in time and not eternity, know what is present. Since, therefore,contingent events that are future to us are present in relation toGod, there is no reason why God should not know them as certain. But,if they can be known as certain, are they really contingent? The lastpart of Philosophy’s argument deals with this problem by acceptingthat, as known by God in his eternal present, events are notcontingent, but necessary in a special way that does not involve anyconstraint or limitation of freedom. There are, she explains, twosorts of necessity: simple and conditional. Simple necessities arewhat would now be called physical or nomic necessities: that the sunrises, or that a man will sometime die. By contrast, it isconditionally necessary that, for instance, I amwalking, when I am walking (or when someone sees that I amwalking); but from this conditional necessity it does not follow thatit is simply necessary that I am walking. Although a number of moderncommentators interpret this passage as Philosophy’s way of noticingthe scope-distinction fallacy in the original way Boethius thecharacter presents the problem, she really seems to be making a ratherdifferent point. On an Aristotelian understanding of modality, whichBoethius the author accepted, the present is necessary: ‘whatis, necessarily is, when it is’ (On Interpretation19a23). Philosophy is arguing that, since God knows all things as ifthey were present, future events are necessary, in relation to theirbeing known by God, in just the way that anything which is presentlythe case is necessary. And this necessity of the present is anunconstraining necessity—those who accepted Aristotelianmodalities did not think that because, when I am sitting, I am sittingnecessarily, my freedom to stand has been at all curtailed. Indeed, asPhilosophy stresses, in themselves the future events remain completelyfree. Philosophy is thus able to explain how, as known by God, futurecontingent events have the certainty which make them proper objects ofknowledge, rather than opinion, whilst nevertheless retaining theirindeterminacy.
It is important to add, however, that most contemporary interpretersdo not read the argument of V.3–6 in quite this way. (For abalanced assessment of various interpretations, including the oneoffered here, see Sharples 2009). They hold that Philosophy is arguingthat God is atemporal, so eliminating the problems about determinism,which arise when God’s knowing future contingents is seen an event inthe past, and therefore, fixed.
However it is interpreted, Philosophy’s argument takes a surprisingturn at the very end of the book. When he gave his initial statementof the problem, Boethius the character had distinguished the problemat issue—that of divine prescience—from that of divinepredetermination. He had explained (V.3) that, for the purposes oftheir discussion, he was assuming that God does not cause the eventshe foreknows: he knows them because they happen, rather than theirhappening because he foreknows them. He added, though, in passing,that he did not really accept this view: it is ‘back tofront’ to think that ‘the outcome of things in time shouldbe the cause of eternal prescience.’ Philosophy now returns tothis point, conceding that God’s act of knowing ‘sets themeasure for all things and owes nothing to things which follow on fromit.’ Although Philosophy considers that she has successfullyresolved the character Boethius’s problems, the reader is left askingwhether this final concession, which makes God the determiner of allevents, does not ruin the elaborate defence of the contingency ofhuman volitions she has just been mounting.
7. Interpreting the Consolation
One, perfectly plausible, way of reading the Consolation is totake it, as most philosophical works are taken, at face value. On thisreading, Philosophy is recognized as a clearly authoritative figure,whose teaching should not be doubted and whose success in consolingthe character Boethius must be assumed to be complete. The apparentchanges of direction noted in Section 5 will be taken either as stages in Boethius’s re-education or asunintended effects of the author’s wish to make this work into acompendium of a syncretistic philosophical system, and Philosophy’sown view that she has resolved the problem of prescience will beaccepted as that of Boethius the author.
Yet there are a number of reasons which suggest that Boethius’sintention as an author was more complex. First, it would have beenhard for his intended audience of educated Christians to ignore thefact that in this dialogue a Christian, Boethius, is being instructedby a figure who clearly represents the tradition of pagan Philosophy,and who proposes some positions (on the World Soul in III m.9, and onthe sempiternity of the world in V.6) which most Christians would havefound dubious. Boethius the character says nothing which is explicitlyChristian, but when in III.12 Philosophy says, echoing the words ofWisdom viii, 1 that ‘it is the highest good that rules allthings strongly and disposes them sweetly’, he expresses hisdelight not just in what she has said but much more ‘in thosevery words’ that she uses—a broad hint to the reader thathe remembers his Christian identity even in the midst of hisphilosophical instruction.
Second, the genre Boethius chose for the Consolation, thatof the prosimetrum or Menippean satire, was associated with workswhich ridicule the pretensions of authoritative claims towisdom. Elements of satire on the claims of learning are present evenin the vast, encyclopaedic Marriage of Mercury and Philologyby the fifth-century author Martianus Capella, which Boethius clearlyknew. Ancient authors thought carefully about genres, and it is hardto think that Boethius’s choice was not a hint that Philosophy’sauthority is not to be taken as complete. And, third, in the light ofthese two considerations, the changes of direction, incoherencies andultimate failure of the long argument about prescience, when thequestion is suddenly recast as one about predestination, all suggestthemselves as intentional features, for which the interpreter mustaccount.
Some recent interpreters, such as Joel Relihan (1993, 187–194;2007), have gone so far as to suggest that the Consolation should be understood ironically as an account of the insufficiency ofPhilosophy (and philosophy) to provide consolation, by contrast withChristian faith. Such a view seems too extreme, because Boethius theauthor has clearly taken great pains with the philosophical argumentsproposed in the text, and the main lines of Philosophy’s thinking fitwell with the metaphysics glimpsed in the theological tractates andeven, at moments, in the logical commentaries. It is plausible,however, to hold that Boethius wished, whilst acknowledging the valueof philosophy—to which he had devoted his life, and for which hepresented himself as being about to die—to point itslimitations: limitations which Philosophy herself, who is keen toemphasize that she is not divine, accepts. Philosophy, he might besuggesting, provides arguments and solutions to problems which shouldbe accepted and it teaches a way of living that should be followed,but it falls short of providing a coherent and comprehensiveunderstanding of God and his relation to creatures. Boethius thecharacter should be satisfied, but not completely satisfied, byPhilosophy’s argument. And if this is Boethius the author’s positionin the Consolation, then it fits closely with the theologicalmethod he pioneered in the opuscula sacra.
8. Boethius’s Influence and Importance
The influence of each area of Boethius’s philosophical writing wasvast in the Middle Ages. Along with Augustine and Aristotle, he isthe fundamental philosophical and theological author in theLatin tradition.
In logic, Boethius’s translations of Aristotle and Porphyry (exceptfor that of the Posterior Analytics, which was lost) remainedstandard throughout the Middle Ages. His commentaries—especiallythat on the Categories, the second commentary on theIsagoge and the second, more advanced commentary on OnInterpretation—were the main instruments by which logiciansfrom the ninth to the twelfth centuries came to understand theAristotelian texts he had translated, and to grapple with theirproblems and the wider range of related philosophical issues raised bythe late ancient tradition. Even twelfth-century philosophers asindependently-minded as Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers were deeplyindebted to these commentaries. The logical text-books were equallyimportant. Before the Prior Analytics became generallyavailable in the later twelfth century, students learned syllogisticfrom Boethius’s monographs on it. The theory of topical argument,acquired especially from On Topical Differentiae, provided aframework for twelfth-century philosophers in propounding andanalysing arguments, and from the combination of studying topicalargument and the theory of hypothetical syllogisms as Boethiuspresented it, Abelard was led towards his rediscovery of propositionallogic (cf. Martin (1987)). From the thirteenth century, onwards,however, both Boethius’s commentaries and his treatises became lessinfluential. On Topical Differentiae, and OnDivision, continued to be studied, but not the treatises oncategorical and hypothetical syllogisms. Users of the commentarieswere infrequent, but they include Thomas Aquinas.
The theological treatises were probably already known by the pupils ofAlcuin at the court of Charlemagne around 800, and a tradition ofglosses to the text probably goes back to the School of Auxerre in thelater ninth century. The opuscula sacra provided a model forearly medieval thinkers who wanted to use their logical training inthinking about Christian doctrine. Anselm was certainly aware of them,though he looked more closely to Augustine; Abelard’s firsttheological work, the Theologia Summi Boni, despite itsoriginality, is clearly inspired by Boethius’s first treatise (on theTrinity). In the 1140s, Gilbert of Poitiers expounded his metaphysicsand his view of theology in a detailed exegesis of the opusculasacra, which came to be the standard commentary, although thetreatises were also commented on by other, more Platonically-mindedtwelfth-century scholars. Although the opuscula sacra werenot formally a part of the theology curriculum in most later medievaluniversities, they continued to be studied, and Aquinas wrotecommentaries on Treatises I and III.
Though the influence of these other works was great, the popularity andimportance of the Consolation far exceeded it. The textalready echoes in what must be one of the earliest pieces of genuinelymedieval Latin philosophy, the little treatise ‘On TruePhilosophy’ with which Alcuin prefaced his De grammatica, andit remained a favourite through the later Middle Ages and into theRenaissance. Not until the time of Gibbon had it been reduced to anobject of the historian’s condescending admiration. One measure of theextent and character of its readership is the translations, not merelyinto almost every medieval vernacular, but also into Greek and evenHebrew. Among the translators were two of the greatest vernacularwriters of the whole epoch: Jean de Meun, who put the Consolation into Old French in the later thirteenth century, and Chaucer,who translated it into Middle English about a century later. As theirinvolvement suggests, Boethius’s dialogue was a text which popularizedphilosophy outside the universities, and its literary features, aswell as its arguments, inspired imitations and creative adaptations,from Alain of Lille’s De planctu Naturae (‘Nature’sLament’) to, more distantly, Dante’s Convivio and evenChaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Philosophers and theologians,too, used the work; it was part of the school syllabus from the ninthto the twelfth centuries, and although Aristotle’s treatises left noroom for it in the university curriculum, it continued to be studiedby students and teachers there. For example, Aquinas’s account of thehighest good in his Summa Theologiae IaIIe builds on theConsolation, and the definition of eternity given byPhilosophy in Book V became the starting-point for almost every latermedieval discussion of God and time.
The Consolation had many medieval commentaries—mostlyon the whole text, although some just examined Book III, m. 9. In thetenth and eleventh centuries, the commentary written by Remigius ofAuxerre was the most widely read (and often adapted). William ofConches’s commentary, written in the 1120s, became standard in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries and the commentary by the EnglishDominican, Nicholas Trivet, from the beginning of the fourteenthcentury, was the most popular in the late Middle Ages. One of thecentral problems which faced any commentator was the relation of thetext to Christian teaching. Remigius and, in a subtler way, Williamboth took Boethius, whom they knew to be a Christian, to be puttingforward Christian doctrine without seeming to do so; Trivet’s approachis less syncretistic, although he finds nothing unacceptable forChristians in the Consolation.
The preceding paragraphs in this section might seem to indicate thatthere is no doubt about Boethius’s importance as a philosopher. Yetthe 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 ownright. He is seen, rather, as a conduit through which Greekphilosophical ideas were transmitted to the Latin tradition. Ofcourse, one aspect of Boethius’s influence is indeed that he madeavailable ideas and arguments deriving from Plato, Aristotle,Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry and Iamblichus. But he was also anindividual thinker, with pronounced tastes and views, no less (if nomore) original than his Greek contemporaries; and also, in theConsolation, one of the rare philosophers whose thought, likePlato’s, cannot be neatly separated from the complex literary form inwhich it is expressed.
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Other Internet Resources
- Boethius, maintained by James J. O’Donnell, Georgetown University (includes a line-by-line commentary on the Consolation).
- Spade, P.V. (1996) ‘Boethius against Universals: The Arguments in the Second Commentary on Porphyry’ (in PDF). See also Mediaeval Logic and Philosophy website, maintained by Paul Spade, Indiana University.
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