32. Helen M. Barrett, Boethius: Some Aspects of his Times and Work
This is a welcome book, and no one but a fool will dispute Miss Barrett's view that Boethius is ‘a man who ought not to be forgotten’. Fortunately, as the present writer knows by experience, a respectable minority of modern undergraduates in every year can be awakened to a more than historical interest in him, and it may be hoped that Miss Barrett's book, which translates all its Latin, and is within the grasp of the ordinary student, will increase the number. It includes a short sketch of Theodoric, a life of Boethius, a chapter on the obscure subject of his fall, and three chapters on the De Consolatione which, very wisely, pass beyond the merely historical estimate and treat its thought as something of living concern. Miss Barrett upholds tradition, rejecting Usener's theory that it is based on an abridgment of the lost Aristotelian Protrepticus, and believing that it is an original work and that it was really composed in prison. She accepts the theological tracts, largely on the evidence of the Anedoton Holderi, with the exception of the De Fide Catholica, about which she is doubtful.
In the historical sections, Miss Barrett's favourable view of Theodoric may, of course, be questioned. That he could show himself, on occasion, a bloody and treacherous scoundrel, no one denies. The success in establishing a modus vivendi between the Romans and barbarians with which Miss Barrett credits him (p. 26), receives grim comment from Boethius himself: ‘impunita barbarorum semper avaritia’ (De Cons. I. Pr. iv) he writes of the invaders, and of their king, ‘avidus exitii communis’ (ibid.) I could wish, too, that Miss Barrett had been more consistent in her sceptical attitude towards evidence drawn from Cassiodorus. Thus on p. 72 she rejects Dr Hodgkin's naïf view that the informers Cyprian and Opilio are to be estimated in the light of the ‘high praise’ which Cassiodorus gives them; and rightly. In what age, and under what government, has a newly appointed functionary ever appeared in the official announcements as less than a blend of Solomon and Aristides? Yet on p. 25 Miss Barrett seems to accept the authority of Cassiodorus for a statement whereof the intrinsic improbability appears to me overwhelming.
In the philosophical part of her work I think Miss Barrett does very well. She is lucid and represents the argument of the original, on the whole, accurately. Some disagreements are only to be expected. On p. 96 I think that the words ‘a double method’, used of Providence and Fate, will prove puzzling to some readers. They might suggest that Providence and Fate were two distinct and concurrent divine instruments. But the real distinction (as Miss Barrett well understands) is more like that between the static score of a symphony and the actual playing out of it, in time, by the orchestra. That very same pattern which, in itself (‘ipsa illa divina ratio’) is Providence, becomes, or appears as, or is called, Fate, when executed in the temporal series (‘inhaerens rebus mobilibus’). On p. 120, I question whether Miss Barrett has given the doctrine that ‘evil is nothing’ a fair run for its money. Boethius certainly tells us in so many words ‘malum igitur nihil est’ (III, Pr. xii). But he does not mean that malum = zero, that it is a word with no meaning.
One clue has been given a few lines above: ‘nihil est quod naturam servans deo contraire conetur’ (where the operative words are naturam servans), and another follows a few lines below, ‘Nec ullam mali esse naturam’. He means that no nature is evil, using natura in the Augustinian sense and in the last of the four senses enumerated in his own contra Eutychen et Nestorium, where natura is defined as unamquamque rem informans specifica differentia. In other words, the statement ‘malum nihil est’, means that evil is not a thing, like grass or virtue, has no nature of its own, was not created, but consists always in the depravation of some thing, which, in being so depraved, departs from its true nature (from ‘what it is’) and therefore, in a sense, tends towards nothingness.
Evil consists not in being, but in failing to be; it is privative, defective, parasitic. In this form the doctrine is not only not ridiculous but, as some of us think, the only sound basis for any metaphysic of value. Indeed, the opposite theology that evil is as substantial as good and has a natura of its own, invites a desperate dualism and makes the choice between good and evil, in the long run, something like an arbitrary allegiance to one of two parties.
My third philosophical disagreement with Miss Barrett arises out of her statement that ‘strictly speaking the word present can only be employed where there has been a past and will be a future’ (p. 137). But most fortunately present is the opposite, not only of past and future, but also of absent; nor is it a mere pun to remind ourselves that we also call a gift a ‘present’. To come between the past and the future is not the sole characteristic of the present, as to come between 7 and 9 is the sole characteristic of 8. The present has another – a qualitative and not a merely serial – differentia; in it alone reality is present or presented to us, in it alone we perceive, will, enjoy, and suffer. From this point of view the Boethian doctrine of God's eternal present becomes more intelligible; it means ‘having to all reality that direct access which we have to some realities, to those, namely, which we meet in the temporary present’.
But these questions must be left to the philosopher; for the medievalist the great problems raised by Boethius are two. (1) Why does a man waiting in a dungeon for death and torture treat loss of fame, wealth, and office, as the typical misfortunes for which Philosophy is needed to console the human spirit? Is it not rather as if a man who has just seen his wife and children blown to pieces by a bomb, sat down to compose a consolatio for losing the golf championship? (2) Why should a Christian in such circumstances confine himself so rigidly to those consolations which he shares with any kind of civilized theist whatever?
As regards the first problem, we must note that there is no trace in the De Consolatione of the dungeon where it was traditionally composed. The catenis of I. M. ii seems to be metaphorical, and the ipsa loci facies of I. Pr. iv is answered not, as we might expect, with some philosophical proof that all mortal habitations are in the long run prisons, but with the statement that the place which Boethius regards as exilium is to others patria (II. Pr. iv). It is true that a conceit is based on the idea of exile – for Boethius means exile from Rome and Philosophia means exile from his spiritual country; but then an almost identical play upon material and spiritual ‘prison’ would have done just as well. There is also very little in the book to suggest the imminence of More's Dialogue of Comfort; indeed if we take contum gladiumque (II. Pr. v) to be merely general and typical (as the quotation from Juvenal suggests), I believe we are reduced to a single reference ‘morti proscriptionique damnamur’. (I. Pr. iv.)
If, in the face of all this, we wish to retain the tradition, we must make a distinction. What is written in prison while awaiting death need not be written about prison and about death. In other words, either the De Consolatione was composed (as Fortescue maintained) before the author was imprisoned and before he knew that his case was hopeless, or else it does not directly bear on his own situation (except for the self-defence in Book I) so closely as we have imagined. This would not mean that it was any the less sincere. The author meant every word he wrote, but he was not writing directly about himself. The problem of Fortune was offered him by his own experience, but he generalized it and wrote a Consolation for all her victims in all ages, not an autobiography. Even in the condemned cell so great a man would be more interested in making a good book than in self-expression. If this view were accepted, the second Metre of Book I would gain a new pathos; he had not meant to write about his own imprisonment but when he seeks metaphors for spiritual desolation his longings for free air and sky, and the burden of the fetters, all find their way in.
As to the second problem – that of the absence from the De Consolatione of all specifically Christian elements – I think the drastic solution of saying that Boethius had never really held or had lost the Faith, is now pretty generally abandoned. There is, in my opinion, a curious indication of Christianity within the book itself. In Pr. xii of Book III the author tells Philosophia that her last remark pleased him not only by its content but also, and much more, by the very words in which it was expressed. Now those words were ‘regit cuncta fortiter suaviterque disponit’, an obvious reminiscence of Wisdom viii I, and if the author's reply does not mean ‘How pleasant in this merely philosophical discussion to catch an echo of Holy Scripture’, I can find no meaning for them.
Yet it remains true that the Consolation is as empty of theology as the Tractates are full of it. I cannot accept the remark of Dr H. F. Stewart and Professor E. K. Rand (Loeb Boethius, p. xi) that ‘the answer is simple. In the Consolation he is writing philosophy; in the Tractates he is writing theology’. Of course. But surely what we wanted to know was why he chose, at such a time, to devote himself to pure philosophy. Granted the scope of the Consolation, the exclusion of theology follows: but why that limitation of scope? I find much more help in Miss Barrett's conclusion that Boethius had, after all, devoted his life to pre-Christian philosophy and turned to it at the end because ‘this was the work nearest his heart, the work in which he was happiest, most himself’ (p. 160).
I would not accept this in any sense which involves Dr Stewart's earlier view that the composition of the Consolation was a mere distraction for unquiet thoughts; nor again in any sense that threw doubt on the author's Christianity. Its philosophy is a profoundly religious philosophy. It might be described as ‘prolegomena to any of the great religions’; it teaches the insufficiency of the world and points on to the Eternal – after that the various religions can have their say as to the nature of the Eternal and the means of approaching it. We need not doubt that Boethius had passed through this philosophical preliminary and reached that particular religion described in his De Fide.
If, in the Consolation he returned to write about the preliminary and not about the Faith, I suggest that there were two reasons. Firstly, as Miss Barrett says, this was what he did best – his job, his vocation – and no man wants to make a book simply, but a good book. Nor would it surprise or shock us to find that his intellect was obstinately inclined to dwell on that preliminary. There are many pious Christians whose minds always dwell on apologetics and protreptics, who are always describing the foundation and never proceed to describe the building. Secondly, those who have tried to live the Christian life will tell us (I suspect) that though these spiritual preliminaries are logically the mere presupposition of Christianity, yet in real life the point never comes at which we can say they have been got over once and for all. If I remember aright, Thomas More in prison made a resolution to woo his mind ‘little by little’ from the world. In logic each step of argument is finished before the next is taken; but in life everything is always beginning over again. There is nothing really irrelevant in discussing things preparatory to conversion twenty years after you have been converted; for continual re-conversion is, perhaps, the nearest most mortals come to stability.
I suggest, as a hypothesis which covers all the facts, the following account of the composition of the De Consolatione. Boethius’ mind had long been occupied on the general philosophical case for the religious life, which he may have designed either for a work on its own, or as the introduction to a larger work on Christian theology. He began to execute it after his disgrace, and perhaps in prison. His motive was neither to distract his mind nor primarily to console himself, but to edify and instruct the human race – to deliver his message. Under the pressure of strong emotion he allowed himself to include a section on his own particular wrongs and even to avail himself of an imaginative version of his own plight for the sake of the dramatic emphasis it lent to the argument. In the main, however, the calamities referred to are general, typical instances of ‘fortune’ and the personal element is properly subordinated. The fact that it decreases as we proceed may mean that only the earlier parts were conceived after his disgrace and that in the later he is simply reproducing what had been already composed or giving final literary form to what already existed in rough draught or in notes.
I have included the De Fide, above, among the genuine works. Its peculiarities – including the peculiarity which, I confess, I notice most readily, of being in unusually easy Latin – can all be explained on the assumption that it is written for school use. It is not easy to see for what other purpose such an author would compose such a jejune summary of such very elementary matters.