D - Boethius
And oute of olde feldes as men seith
Cometh at this newe corn.
CHAUCER
All the texts we have hitherto looked at belong unambiguously to the old world, to Pagan antiquity. We now turn to the transitional period, which can be regarded as beginning, very roughly, with the birth of Plotinus in 205, and ending with the first datable reference to pseudo-Dionysius in 533. This was the age which brought the characteristically medieval frame of mind into being. It also witnessed the last stand of Paganism and the final triumph of the Church. Cardinal dates in that story are: 324, when Constantine urged his subjects to embrace Christianity; 331–3, the reign of Julian and his attempted Pagan revival; 384, when the elder Symmachus pleaded in vain that the altar of Victory should be restored to the Senate House; and 390, when Theodosius forbade all Pagan worship.
In a prolonged war the troops on both sides may imitate one another’s methods and catch one another’s epidemics; they may even occasionally fraternise. So in this period. The conflict between the old and the new religion was often bitter, and both sides were ready to use coercion when they dared. But at the same time the influence of the one upon the other was very great. During these centuries much that was of Pagan origin was built irremovably into the Model. It is characteristic of the age that more than one of the works I shall mention has sometimes raised a doubt whether its author was Pagan or Christian.
The precise nature and even, in some senses, the width of the chasm which separated the religions can easily be mistaken if we take our ideas solely from political or ecclesiastical histories: still more, if we take them from more popular sources. Cultured people on both sides had had the same education, read the same poets, learned the same rhetoric. As was shown sixty-odd years ago, social relations between them were sometimes friendly.
I have read a novel which represents all the Pagans of that day as carefree sensualists, and all the Christians as savage ascetics. It is a grave error. They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man. The leaders on both sides were monotheists, and both admitted almost an infinity of supernatural beings between God and man. Both were highly intellectual, but also (by our standards) highly superstitious. The last champions of Paganism were not the sort of men that Swinburne, or a modern ‘Humanist’, would wish them to have been. They were not lusty extroverts recoiling in horror or contempt from a world ‘grown grey’ with the breath of the ‘pale Galilaean’. If they wanted to get back ‘the laurel, the palms, and the paean’, it was on most serious and religious grounds. If they longed to see ‘the breasts of the nymph in the brake’, their longing was not like a satyr’s; it was much more like a spiritualist’s. A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons. Both alike would have embarrassed him with stories of visions, ecstasies, and apparitions. Between the lower and more violent manifestations of both religions he would have found it hard to choose. To a modern eye (and nostril) Julian with his long nails and densely populated beard might have seemed very like an unwashed monk out of the Egyptian desert.
It will occur to everyone that in an age of conflict those authors whose allegiance has been doubted may have deliberately made it doubtful through caution. This is always a possible hypothesis, but not a necessary one. Where so much ground was—or at least seemed to be—common, a writer could sincerely produce much that was acceptable to many Christian and many Pagan readers alike, provided his work was not explicitly theological. The remoter religious implications of philosophical positions were not always grasped. Hence what we might take to be the difference between a clearly Christian and a possibly Pagan work may really be the difference between a thesis offered, so to speak, to the Faculty of Philosophy and one offered to that of Divinity. This seems to me to be the best explanation of the gulf that separates Boethius’ De Consolatione from the doctrinal pieces which are (I presume, rightly) attributed to him.
On its highest level the Pagan resistance can almost be identified with the neo-Platonic school. In it the great names are those of Plotinus (205–70), Porphyry (233–304?), Iamblichus (ob. 330), and Proclus (ob. 485). The first was a genius of the highest order, but Porphyry—and even he often indirectly—was the principal influence in the West. The whole school, while partly a spontaneous development of the Greek genius, seems to me to be also a deliberate response to the challenge of Christianity and, in that respect, indebted to it. In it the last Pagans are carefully dissociating themselves from popular polytheism and saying in effect, ‘We too have an explanation of the whole universe. We too have a systematic theology. We, no less than you, have a rule of life—have saints, miracles, devotions, and the hope of union with the Highest.’
The present study, however, is interested not in the short-lived impact of the new religion on the old but with the enduring effect of the old upon the new. The last, and neo-Platonic, wave of Paganism which had gathered up into itself much from the preceding waves, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and what not, came far inland and made brackish lakes which have, perhaps, never been drained. Not all Christians at all times have detected them or admitted their existence: and among those who have done so there have always been two attitudes. There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici, or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.
The work of Chalcidius is an incomplete translation of Plato’s Timaeus stopping at the end of 53b (that is, about halfway through) and a much longer commentarius. This is hardly what we should call a commentary, for it ignores many difficulties and expatiates freely on matters about which Plato had little or nothing to say.
It is dedicated to one Osius or Hosius, who has been identified, not very certainly, with a Bishop of Cordova who attended the Council of Nicaea (325). Even if the identification is correct, this would not enable us to date the work very closely, for we are told by Isidore that the Bishop lived to be over a hundred.
The religion of Chalcidius has been questioned. In favour of his Christianity we note:
(1) The dedication to Osius (always assuming that he really was the Bishop).
(2) He calls the biblical account of Adam’s creation ‘the teaching of a holier sect’ (sectae sanctioris).
(3) After glancing at a supposed astrological doctrine in Homer, he mentions the star of the Nativity as something vouched for by ‘a holier and more venerable story’.
(4) He describes himself as deriving from ‘the divine law’ truths to which Plato had been guided ‘by the impulse (instinctus) of truth herself’.
On the other hand:
(1) When he draws on the Old Testament, instead of calling it ‘the sacred writings’, he usually says merely that he is following the Hebraei.
(2) As witnesses to the benefits we mortals have received from good daemons he summons ‘all Greeks, Latins and barbarians’ (cuncta Graecia, omne Latium, omnisque Barbaria). This is a sharp contrast with St Augustine’s view that all the daemons of Paganism were evil—were ‘demons’ in the later sense of the word.
(3) In one place he treats the divine inspiration of Moses as something open to doubt (ut ferunt).
(4) He cites Homer, Hesiod, and Empedocles as if they were no less to be taken into account than the sacred writers.
(5) He describes Providence as Nous (Mind), a being which holds the second place after the summus deus by whom it is perfected as it perfects all other things. This is very much more like the neo-Platonic Trinity than the Christian.
(6) He discusses at great length whether silva (matter) is inherently evil, without once mentioning the Christian doctrine that God made all things and pronounced them very good.
(7) He wholly rejects the anthropocentric cosmology of Genesis in which the heavenly bodies were made ‘to give light upon the earth’. He holds it would be absurd to suppose that the ‘blessed and eternal’ things above the Moon were ordered for the sake of the perishable things below.
The two last items are less evidential than we might at first suppose. Though Christians were logically bound to admit the goodness of matter that doctrine was not heartily relished; then, and for centuries, the language of some spiritual writers was hardly to be reconciled with it. And I think that there remained throughout the Middle Ages an unresolved discord between those elements in their religion which tended to an anthropocentric view and those in the Model which made man a marginal—almost, as we shall see, a suburban—creature.
For the rest, I think Chalcidius is a Christian, writing philosophically. What he accepted as matters of faith were excluded, as matters of faith, from his thesis. Biblical writers might therefore appear in his work as eminent authors to be taken into account like any other eminent authors, but not treated as the ‘oracles of God’. That would have been contrary to the rules of his art: he could be a methodological purist, as we shall see later. Of the deep discrepancy between his neo-Platonic Trinity and the fully Christian doctrine I believe him to have been unaware.
By translating so much of the Timaeus and thus transmitting it to centuries in which little else of Plato was known, Chalcidius determined what the name of Plato should chiefly stand for throughout the Middle Ages. The Timaeus has none of the erotic mysticism we find in the Symposium or the Phaedrus, and almost nothing about politics. And though the Ideas (or Forms) are mentioned, their real place in Plato’s theory of knowledge is not displayed. For Chalcidius they become ‘ideas’ almost in the modern sense; thoughts in the mind of God. It thus came about that, for the Middle Ages, Plato was not the logician, nor the philosopher of love, nor the author of the Republic. He was, next to Moses, the great monotheistic cosmogonist, the philosopher of creation; hence, paradoxically, the philosopher of that Nature which the real Plato so often disparaged. To that extent, Chalcidius unconsciously supplied a corrective for the contemptus mundi inherent in neo-Platonism and early Christianity alike. It was later to prove fruitful.
As his choice of the Timaeus was momentous, so was the fashion in which he treated it. His admitted principle of interpretation was one which makes an author more liable to be misrepresented the more he is revered. In hard places, he holds, we must always attribute to Plato whatever sense appears ‘worthiest the wisdom of so great an authority’; which inevitably means that all the dominant ideas of the commentator’s own age will be read into him.
Plato clearly said (42b) that the souls of wicked men may be re-incarnated as women, and if that doesn’t cure them, finally as beasts. But we are not, says Chalcidius, to suppose that he meant it literally. He only means that, by indulging your passions, you will, in this present life, become more and more like an animal.
In Timaeus 40d–41a Plato, after describing how God created the gods—not the mythological ones but those he really believed in, the animated stars—asks what is to be said about the popular pantheon. He first degrades them from the rank of gods to that of daemons. He then proceeds, in words almost certainly ironical, to decline any further discussion of them. It is, he says, ‘A task quite beyond me. We must accept what was said about them by our ancestors who, according to their own account, were actually their descendants. Surely they must have been well informed about their own progenitors! And who could disbelieve the children of gods?’ Chalcidius takes all this au pied de la lettre. By telling us to believe our forebears Plato is reminding us that credulitas must precede all instruction. And if he declines to discuss further the nature of daemons, this is not, for Chalcidius, because he thought the subject was not a philosopher’s business. What he suggests as the real reason reveals the vein of methodological pedantry which I have attributed to him. Plato, he says, is here writing as a natural philosopher and it would have been inconveniens, would have been a solecism, to say more about the daemons. Daemonology belongs to the higher discipline called epoptica (an epoptes was one who had been initiated into the mysteries).
A very brief reference to dreams in the original (45e) leads to seven chapters on them in the commentary. These are of interest for two reasons. In the first place, they include a translation of Republic 571c, and thus hand on, ages before Freud, Plato’s ur-Freudian doctrine of the dream as the expression of a submerged wish. Banquo knows about it. In the second place, they throw light on a passage in Chaucer. Chalcidius lists the types of dream, and his list does not exactly agree with the better known classification of Macrobius. It includes, however, the revelatio, a type vouched for by Hebraica philosophia. It will be remembered that Chaucer in the Hous of Fame, though otherwise reproducing the classification of Macrobius, adds one more type, the revelacioun. He doubtless derived it, though perhaps indirectly, from Chalcidius.
Astronomy in Chalcidius has not yet fully settled down in its medieval form. Like everyone else, he declares that the Earth is infinitesimally small by cosmic standards, but the order of the planets is still open to dispute. Nor are their names yet irrevocably fixed. He gives (here agreeing with the Aristotelian De Mundo) Phaenon as an alternative to Saturn, Phaethon to Jupiter, Pyrois to Mars, Stilbon to Mercury, and either Lucifer or Hesperus to Venus. He also holds that ‘the diverse and multiple motion of the planets is the real source (auctoritatem dedit) of all the effects that now come to pass’. All that is suffered (cunctae passiones) in this mutable world below the Moon has its origin from them. But he is careful to add that such influence upon us is not in any sense the purpose for which they exist. It is a mere by-product. They run the course appropriate to their beatitude, and our contingent affairs imitate that felicity in such halting fashion as they can. Thus, for Chalcidius, the geocentric universe is not in the least anthropocentric. If we ask why, nevertheless, the Earth is central, he has a very unexpected answer. It is so placed in order that the celestial dance may have a centre to revolve about—in fact, as an aesthetic convenience for the celestial beings. It is perhaps because his universe is already so well and radiantly inhabited that Chalcidius, though he mentions the Pythagorean doctrine (which peopled the Moon and other planets with mortals), is not interested in it.
Nothing will seem stranger to a modern than the series of chapters which Chalcidius entitles ‘On the utility of Sight and Hearing’. The primary value of sight is not, for him, its ‘survival-value’. The important thing is that sight begets philosophy. For ‘no man would seek God nor aspire to piety unless he had first seen the sky and the stars’. God gave men eyes in order that they might observe ‘the wheeling movements of mind and providence in the sky’ and then, in the movements of their own souls, try to imitate as nearly as they can that wisdom, serenity, and peace. This is all genuine Plato (from Timaeus 47b), though hardly the Plato we learn most of at a modern university. Similarly, hearing exists principally for the sake of music. The native operations of the soul are related to the rhythms and modes. But this relationship fades in the soul because of her union with the body, and therefore the souls of most men are out of tune. The remedy for this is music; ‘not that sort which delights the vulgar . . . but that divine music which never departs from understanding and reason’.
Though Chalcidius had invented a reason for Plato’s reticence on the subject of daemons, he does not follow his example. His account of them differs in some respects from that given by Apuleius. He denies the Pythagorean or Empedoclean belief that dead men become daemons; all daemons are for him a distinct species, and he applies the name daemons to the aetherial as well as to the aerial creatures, the former being those whom ‘the Hebrews call holy angels’. But he is completely at one with Apuleius in affirming the Principle of Plenitude and that of the Triad. Aether and air, like Earth, must be populated ‘lest any region be left void’, ‘lest the perfection of the universe should anywhere go limping’. And since there exist divine, immortal, celestial, and stellar creatures and also temporal, mortal, earthly, and passible creatures, ‘it is inevitable that between these two there must exist some mean, to connect the extremes, as we see in harmony’. We need not doubt that the voice which issued prohibitions to Socrates came from God; but we may be equally sure that it was not the voice of God itself. Between the purely intelligible God and the earthily corporeal Socrates there would be no unmediated conciliatio. God spoke to him through some ‘mean’, some intermediate being. We may seem to be moving here in a world utterly alien to the Christian; but we shall find statements not unlike this of Chalcidius in authors whose Christianity has never been questioned.
So far Chalcidius is on common ground with Apuleius. He then proceeds to another application of the Triad. The cosmic Triad can be envisaged not only as a harmony but as a polity, a triad of sovereign, executive and subjects; the stellar powers command, the angelic beings execute, and the terrestrials obey. Then, following the Timaeus (69c–72d) and the Republic (441d–442d), he finds the same triadic pattern repeated in the ideal state and in the human individual. In his imagined city Plato assigned the highest parts to his philosophical rulers who command. After them comes the warrior caste which carries out their orders. Finally, the common people obey. So in each man. The rational part lives in the body’s citadel (capitolium), that is, the head. In the camp or barracks (castra) of the chest, warrior-like, the ‘energy which resembles anger’, that which makes a man high-spirited, has its station. Appetite, which corresponds to the common people, is located in the abdomen below them both.
It will be seen how faithfully their triadic conception of psychological health reflects either the Greek or the later medieval idea of the nurture proper to a freeman or a knight. Reason and appetite must not be left facing one another across a no-man’s-land. A trained sentiment of honour or chivalry must provide the ‘mean’ that unites them and integrates the civilised man. But it is equally important for its cosmic implications. These were fully drawn out, centuries later, in the magnificent passage where Alanus ab Insulis compares the sum of things to a city. In the central castle, in the Empyrean, the Emperor sits enthroned. In the lower heavens live the angelic knighthood. We, on Earth, are ‘outside the city wall’. How, we ask, can the Empyrean be the centre when it is not only on, but outside, the circumference of the whole universe? Because, as Dante was to say more clearly than anyone else, the spatial order is the opposite of the spiritual, and the material cosmos mirrors, hence reverses, the reality, so that what is truly the rim seems to us the hub.
The exquisite touch which denies our species even the tragic dignity of being outcasts by making us merely suburban, was added by Alanus. In other respects he reproduces Chalcidius’ outlook. We watch ‘the spectacle of the celestial dance’ from its outskirts. Our highest privilege is to imitate it in such measure as we can. The Medieval Model is, if we may use the word, anthropoperipheral. We are creatures of the Margin.
Chalcidius handed on more than the Timaeus. He quotes, sometimes at moderate length, from the Crito, Epinomis, Laws, Parmenides, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, Sophist, and Theaetetus. He knows Aristotle but has little of the later reverence for him. Aristotle had passed over all save one of the species of dreams ‘with his usual supercilious negligence’ (more quodam suo . . . fastidiosa incuria). He quotes and expands him, however, with more respect when arguing that matter, though not inherently evil, being the potentiality of all particular bodies, is doomed to (though logically distinct from) the privation (στέρησις, carentia) of Form. That is why matter craves her perfecting or embellishment (illustratio) as the female desires the male.
The influence of Chalcidius produces its richest results in the twelfth-century Latin poets associated with the school of Chartres, who in their turn helped to inspire Jean de Meung and Chaucer. The Lady Natura, from Statius and Claudian, and the cosmogony of Chalcidius, might be said to be the parents of Bernardus Silvester’s De Mundi Universitate. Its feminine Noys (νοῦς, Providentia), so oddly introduced where we should expect the Second Person of the Christian Trinity, shows her lineage unmistakably: and perhaps owes her gender not so much to any Jungian archetype as to the gender of Providentia in Latin. In Chalcidius too we find the probable explanation of the mysterious garden called Granusion which Bernard’s Urania and Natura enter on descending to Earth. Chalcidius had distinguished not only aether from air but also upper air from lower, the lower, which men can breathe, being a moist substance, umecta substantia, ‘which the Greeks call hygran usian’. Bernard knew no Greek, and the (to him meaningless) hygranusian, perhaps in a bad text, has become the proper name Granusion. In Bernard’s successor, Alanus ab Insulis, we find an equally close linkage. In his Anticlaudian we are told that the soul is fastened to the body gumphis subtilibus, ‘with tiny little nails’. We may smile at the (almost ‘metaphysical’) quaintness of the image, which, if deliberate, would be quite characteristic of Alanus. In reality he is exactly following Chalcidius, who is exactly following Plato, and may not even know very clearly what a gumphus is. Such trifles deserve mention only as illustrations of the close discipleship that Chalcidius won from the poets of Chartres. The importance of that discipleship lies in the vigour, the gusto and sprightliness, of their response and the part it played in recommending certain images and attitudes to the vernacular authors.
Macrobius lived at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries. His religion also has been doubted, but there seems no solid reason for supposing that it was other than Paganism. He belonged, however, to a circle in which Christian and Pagan could freely mingle. The Christian Albinus and that great Pagan champion the elder Symmachus were among his friends. Of his two works, the Saturnalia, a long, learned, urbane, and rambling conversation-piece, does not concern us. Our business is with his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis. This, and the text which accompanied it, saved that part of Cicero’s Republic for us. Nearly fifty manuscripts survive; it was a work of immense reputation and long-lasting influence.
On geography Macrobius repeats Cicero’s doctrine of the five zones. It is reasonable to suppose that the Southern Temperate Zone is, like ours, inhabited, ‘but we never have had, and shall never have, the possibility of discovering by whom’. Macrobius finds it still necessary (it would not have been in the Middle Ages) to remove a childish misunderstanding of what we call gravitation. There is no danger lest the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere should fall off into the nether sky; the Earth’s surface is ‘down’ for them as it is for us (II, v). The Ocean covers most of the Torrid Zone; two great branches from it in the East, and two in the West, flow North and South, to meet at the Poles. From the meeting of their currents the tides result. The dry land thus falls into four main divisions. The great land-mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa is doubtless one of these four (II, ix). A diagrammatically simplified version of this lay-out survives in the later ‘wheel-maps’. As we are cut off, in space, from the Antipodes, so we are almost cut off, in time, from most of the past. Nearly the whole human race has frequently been destroyed by great global catastrophes; nearly, for there has always been a remnant. Egypt has never been destroyed; that is why Egyptian records remount to an antiquity elsewhere unknown (II, x). The idea goes back to Plato’s Timaeus (21e–23b) which in its turn may have been suggested by the delightful story in Herodotus (II, 143): Hecataeus the historian, visiting Egyptian Thebes, boasted that he was descended from a god in the sixteenth generation—which would take him safely back to a period before any continuous Greek records. Then the priests took him into a hall where stood the statues of those who had held the hereditary priesthood, and traced the line back, son to father, son to father; when they had reached the 145th generation they had still not come within sight of a god or even a demigod. This reflects the real difference between Greek and Egyptian history.
Thus, though civilisation in most parts of the Earth is always comparatively recent, the universe has always existed (II, x). If Macrobius describes its formation in terms which imply time, this must be taken merely as a convenience of discourse. Whatever was purest and most limpid (liquidissimum) rose to the highest place and was called aether. That which had less purity and some small degree of weight became air and sank to the second level. That which had still some fluidity but was gross (corpulentum) enough to offer tactual resistance, was gathered together into the stream of water. Finally, out of the whole tumult of matter all that was irreclaimable (vastum) was scraped off and cleansed from the (other) elements (ex defaecatis abrasum elementis), and sank down and settled at the lowest point, plunged in binding and unending cold (I, xxii). Earth is in fact the ‘offscourings of creation’, the cosmic dust-bin. This passage may also throw light on one in Milton. In Paradise Lost, VII, the Son has just marked out the spherical area of the Universe with His golden compasses (225). Then the spirit of God
downward purg’d
The black tartareous cold infernal dregs. (237)
Verity takes this to mean that He expelled them from the spherical area, purging them ‘down’ into chaos, which in Milton, for certain purposes, has an absolute up and down. But ‘down’ might equally well mean towards the centre of the cosmic sphere, and ‘dregs’ would exactly fit the conception of Macrobius.
To a modern reader what Macrobius has to say about dreams (I, iii) will seem a not very important item in his commentary; the Middle Ages must have thought differently, since it is clearly to this section that he owes the title Ornicensis or Onocresius which follows his name in some manuscripts and is there explained as quasi somniorum iudex or somniorum interpres: both words would be garbled transliterations of ὀνειροκρίτης. His scheme is derived from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus (first century A.D.). According to it there are five species of dreams, three veridical, and two which have ‘no divination’ (nihil divinationis) in them. The veridical kinds are as follows:
(1) Somnium (ὄνειρος). This shows us truths veiled in an allegorical form. Pharaoh’s dream of the fat and lean kine would be a specimen. Every allegorical dream-poem in the Middle Ages records a feigned somnium. Nearly all dreams are assumed to be somnia by modern psychologists, and the somnium is the ‘dreem’ in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame, I, 9.
(2) Visio (ὅραμα). This is a direct, literal pre-vision of the future. Mr Dunne’s Experiment with Time is mainly about visiones. This type appears as ‘avisioun’ in Chaucer (op. cit. I, 7).
(3) Oraculum (χρηματισμός). In this one of the dreamer’s parents or ‘some other grave and venerable person’ appears and openly declares the future or gives advice. Such dreams are Chaucer’s ‘oracles’ (op. cit. I, II).
The useless kinds are:
(1) Insomnium (ἐνύπνιον). This merely repeats working preoccupations—‘the carter dremeth how his cartes goon’ as Chaucer says (Parlement, 102).
(2) Visum (ϕάντασμα). This occurs when, not yet fully asleep and believing ourselves to be still awake, we see shapes rushing towards us or flitting hither and thither. Epialtes or nightmare is included in this class. Chaucer’s ‘fantom’ is clearly the visum (Hous of Fame, I, II), and his ‘sweven’ is presumably an insomnium. This is more likely than the alternative equation (‘dreem’ for visum and ‘sweven’ for somnium) in view of the contempt with which Dame Pertelote speaks of ‘swevenes’ in B 4111–13; she was a well-educated bird and knew both physic and the Distychs of Dionysius Cato.
A dream may combine the characters of more than one species. Scipio’s dream is an oraculum in so far as a venerable person appears in it to predict and warn; a visio in so far as it gives literal truths about the celestial regions; a somnium, in so far as its highest meaning, its altitudo, is concealed. To this altitudo we must now turn.
Cicero, as we have seen, devised a heaven for statesmen. He looks no higher than public life and the virtues which that life demands. Macrobius brings to the reading of Cicero a wholly different point of view—the mystical, ascetic, world-renouncing theology of neo-Platonism. The centre of interest for him lies in the purgation of the individual soul, the ascent ‘of the alone to the Alone’, and nothing could well be more foreign to the mind of Cicero.
This change of spiritual atmosphere meets us very early in his commentary. Cicero’s feigned somnium could be attacked, as Plato’s vision of Er had been attacked, on the ground that no species of fiction is becoming to a philosopher. Macrobius replies by distinguishing different kinds of figmentum: (1) where all is feigned as in a comedy by Menander. No philosopher would use this. (2) Where the reader’s mind is stimulated to behold some form (or appearance) of virtues (or powers)—ad quandam virtutum speciem. This may be subdivided into (2A) and (2B). In (2A) the whole story is feigned, as in Aesop’s fables; but in (2B) ‘the argument is grounded in solid truth but that truth itself is exhibited by means of fictions’. The stories about the gods in Hesiod or Orpheus (which of course Macrobius interpreted allegorically) are examples. The knowledge of holy things is here hidden under ‘a pious veil of figments’. This last is the only sort which philosophy admits. But note: it does not admit even this on all its themes. It will treat thus of the soul or of the aerial and aetherial beings or of ‘the other gods’. But the licence to feign extends no further. Philosophy would never use this method when speaking ‘of God the highest and first of all things, whom the Greeks call τἀγαθόν (the Good) and πρῶτον αἴτιον (the First Cause), or of Mind, whom the Greeks call νοῦς, which is the offspring of and procession from the Highest, wherein dwell the archetypal Forms of things which are called Ideas’ (I, ii). We have here a chasm between the Divine and all merely creaturely beings (however exalted), a sheer transcendence, which earlier Paganism, and especially Roman Paganism, had never dreamed of. The word gods in this system is simply not the plural of God; there is a difference in kind, even an incommensurability, between them, as there is also between the ‘holiness’ of the ‘holy things’ (sacra) shadowed forth in Orpheus or Hesiod and that Holiness which Macrobius, though he does not use the word, so obviously feels when he thinks of the First Cause. Paganism here becomes, in the full sense, religious; mythology and philosophy have both been transmuted into theology.
The God and Mind mentioned in the last paragraph are of course the first two members (or persons? or moments?) of that neo-Platonic Trinity which is at once so like and so unlike the Christian. God de se Mentem creavit, created Mind out of Himself. A Christian would probably be ill-advised to give creavit a sense that could be opposed to ‘begot’. The words ‘out of Himself’ discourage the Nicene distinction (‘begotten not created’) and creare in Latin is freely used of sexual generation. This Mens is the Noys of Bernardus Silvestris. As soon as Macrobius begins to describe Mens, he reveals a profound difference between neo-Platonism and Christianity. ‘In so far as Mens contemplates her parent she preserves the full likeness of her author; but when she looks back at things behind her, she creates out of herself Anima, Soul’ (I, xiv). The Second Person of the Christian Trinity is the Creator, the provident wisdom and creative will of the Father in action. The idea that He became less one with, or turned away from, the Father by creating would be repugnant to Christian theology. In Mens, on the other hand, creation is almost a sort of infirmity. She becomes less like God by creating, declines into creation only because she turns her gaze away from her origin and looks back. The next step is the same. As long as Anima fixes her attention on Mens she puts on the nature of Mens; but gradually, as her contemplation withdraws, she sinks (degenerat), though herself incorporeal, to the making of bodies. That is how Nature comes into existence. Thus from the very beginning, where Christianity sees creation, neo-Platonism sees, if not exactly a Fall, yet a series of declensions, diminutions, almost of inconstancies. The universe seeps, as it were, into existence at those moments (for we can talk only in temporal language) when Mind is not perfectly ‘waiting upon’ God, nor Soul upon Mind. We must not, however, press this too far. Even on these terms the glory (fulgor) of God illumines the whole world ‘as one face fills many mirrors placed in due order’. Dante uses this image in Paradiso, XXIX, 144–5.
All this, I suspect, would have interested Cicero very little; certainly Macrobius, thinking such thoughts, cannot be content with an ethic, and an eschatology, centred on civic life. Here, therefore, occurs one of those amazing tours de force to which syncretism is driven by its determination to find in all old texts what its own age accepts as Wisdom. Cicero, explaining his statesmen’s heaven, had said that ‘Nothing—nothing anyway that goes on on earth (quod quidem in terris fiat)—is more pleasing to God than those councils and communities of men bound together by law which we call commonwealths’ (Somnium, xiii). What Cicero meant by his parenthetical reservation I am not sure; probably he was distinguishing earthly affairs from the motions of the heavenly bodies, which God would undoubtedly prize more highly. But Macrobius (I, viii) regards this saving clause as Cicero’s way of leaving room for a whole system of ethics which Cicero might have strongly repudiated: a system which is religious, not secular; individual, not social; occupied not with the outer but with the inner life. He accepts the classical quaternion of virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice. But he adds that they all exist on four different levels and on each level their names have different meanings. On the lowest, or Political, level they mean what we should expect. The next level is the Purgatorial. Up there Prudence means ‘to contemplate divine matters with contempt of the world and all that it contains’; Temperance, ‘to renounce, so far as nature permits, all things that the body requires’; and Justice, to accept the practice of all the virtues as the only road to the good. Fortitude, on this level, is not so easily grasped. It enjoins ‘that the soul be not terrified when, led by philosophy, she recedes in a manner from the body, and may feel no shudder at the height of the perfect ascent’. This is based on Phaedo, 81a–d. On the third level, which is that of souls already purified, Prudence means no longer to prefer divine things but to take no account at all of any others. Temperance means, not to deny, but wholly to forget, earthly desires. Fortitude means, not to conquer the passions but to be ignorant of their very existence; and Justice, ‘to be so linked with that higher and divine Mind that one keeps an inviolable pact with her by imitation of her’. There remains the fourth level. Within Mens or νοῦς itself dwell the four Archetypal Virtues (virtutes exemplares), the transcendent Forms, whereof the four on the lower levels are shadows. Apparently it was to leave room for all this that Cicero wrote the five words quod quidem in terris fiat.
Like Cicero, Macrobius believes that the soul can return to heaven because she first came thence; that the body is the soul’s tomb; that the soul is the man; and that each single star is larger than the Earth. Unlike most authorities, however, he denies that the stars produce terrestrial events, though they may by their relative positions enable us to predict them.
In the Middle Ages four books (The Celestial Hierarchies, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology) were attributed to that Dionysius who was converted by hearing St Paul’s address to the Areopagus. This attribution was disproved in the sixteenth century. The real author is thought to have lived in Syria, and he must have written some time before 533, when his works were quoted at the Council of Constantinople. He was Latinised by John Scotus Eriugena who died about 870.
His writings are usually regarded as the main channel by which a certain kind of Theology entered the Western tradition. It is the ‘negative Theology’ of those who take in a more rigid sense, and emphasise more persistently than others, the incomprehensibility of God. It is already well rooted in Plato himself, as we see from Republic 509b and the Second Epistle (312e–313a), and central in Plotinus. Its most striking representative in English is The Cloud of Unknowing. Some German Protestant Theology in our own time, and some Theistic Existentialism, has perhaps a remote affinity with it.
But this, though the most important thing about pseudo-Dionysius, is not the one that concerns us. It is by his angelology that he contributed to the Model, and we can therefore confine our attention to his Celestial Hierarchies.
Our author differs from all earlier and some later authorities by declaring the angels to be pure minds (mentes), unembodied. In art, to be sure, they are represented as corporeal pro captu nostro, as a concession to our capacity (i). And such symbolism, he adds, is not degrading, ‘for even matter, deriving its existence from the true Beauty, has in the fashion of all its parts some traces of beauty and worth’ (ii). This statement, in a book which came to be so authoritative, may be taken as proof that educated people in the Middle Ages never believed the winged men who represent angels in painting and sculpture to be more than symbols.
It was pseudo-Dionysius whose arrangement of the angelic creatures into what Spenser calls their ‘trinall triplicities’, into three ‘Hierarchies’ containing three species each, was finally accepted by the Church.
The first Hierarchy contains the three species, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. These are the creatures closest to God. They face Him ἀμέσως, nullius interiectu, with nothing between, encircling Him with their ceaseless dance. The names of Seraph and Throne are both associated by this author with ideas of heat or burning; a characteristic well known to the poets. Hence Chaucer’s somnour had ‘a fyr-reed cherubinnes face’, and it was not only for rhyme’s sake that Pope wrote ‘the rapt Seraph that adores and burns’.
The second Hierarchy contains the κυριότητες or Dominations; the ἐξουσίαι (Potestates, Potentates, or Powers); and the δυνάμεις or ‘Virtues’. This does not mean moral excellences but rather ‘efficacies’, as when we speak about the ‘virtues’ of a magic ring or a medicinal herb.
The activity of both these Hierarchies is directed towards God; they stand, so to speak, with their faces to Him and their backs to us. In the third and lowest Hierarchy we at last find creatures who are concerned with Man. It contains Princedoms (or Principalities, or Princes); Archangels; and Angels. The word angel is thus both a generic name for all the nine species contained in the three Hierarchies, and also a specific name for the lowest—as sailor in English sometimes includes all seafaring persons and is sometimes confined only to those who berth forward.
Princedoms are the guardians and patrons of nations, so that Theology names Michael the Prince of the Jews (ix). The scriptural source of this is Dan. xii. I. If Dryden had written his Arthuriad, these creatures would now be better known, for he intended to use them as his ‘machines’. They are Milton’s ‘Angels president in every province’ and Thomas Browne’s ‘provincial guardians’. The two remaining species, Archangels and Angels, are the ‘angels’ of popular tradition, the beings that ‘appear’ to human individuals.
They are indeed the only superhuman beings that do so, for pseudo-Dionysius is as certain as Plato or Apuleius that God encounters Man only through a ‘mean’, and reads his own philosophy into scripture as freely as Chalcidius had read his into the Timaeus. He cannot deny that Theophanies, direct appearances of God Himself to patriarchs and prophets, seem to occur in the Old Testament. But he is quite sure that this never really happens. These visions were in reality mediated through celestial, but created, beings ‘as though the order of the divine law laid it down that creatures of a lower order should be moved God-ward by those of a higher’ (iv). That the order of the divine law does so enjoin is one of his key-conceptions. His God does nothing directly that can be done through an intermediary; perhaps prefers the longest possible chain of intermediaries; devolution or delegation, a finely graded descent of power and goodness, is the universal principle. The Divine splendour (illustratio) comes to us filtered, as it were, through the Hierarchies.
This explains why even a message of such cosmic moment as the Annunciation, even to so exalted a person as Mary, was brought by an angelic being, and even by a mere archangel, a member of the lowest species but one: ‘angels were first shown the divine mystery and, afterwards, the grace of knowing it reached us through them’ (iv). On this point Aquinas, centuries later, quotes pseudo-Dionysius and confirms him. The thing was done thus (for several reasons, but among them) ‘that even in so great a matter (in hoc etiam) the system (or pattern, ordinatio) whereby divine things reach us through the mediation of angels might be unbroken’.
By a tour de force comparable to that which Macrobius performed when he made Cicero into a good neo-Platonist, our author finds his principle confirmed in Isa. vi. 3. There the Seraphim are crying to one another ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Why to one another rather than to the Lord? Obviously because each angel is incessantly handing on his knowledge of God to the angels next below him in rank. It is, of course, a transforming, not a merely speculative, knowledge. Each busily makes his colleagues (collegas) ‘images of God, bright mirrors’ (iii).
In pseudo-Dionysius the whole universe becomes a fugue of which the Triad (agent-mean-patient) is the ‘subject’. The total angelic creation is a mean between God and Man, and that in two senses. It is a dynamic mean, as God’s executive. But it is also a mean as a lens is a mean, for the celestial Hierarchies are revealed to us in order that the Ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth may imitate, as nearly as possible, ‘their divine service and office’ (i). And the second Hierarchy is doubtless a mean between the first and the third, and in each Hierarchy the central species is a mean, and in each individual angel, as in each individual man, there are ruling, and intermediate, and obedient faculties.
The spirit of this scheme, though not every detail, is strongly present in the Medieval Model. And if the reader will suspend his disbelief and exercise his imagination upon it even for a few minutes, I think he will become aware of the vast re-adjustment involved in a perceptive reading of the old poets. He will find his whole attitude to the universe inverted. In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light. He will also understand that something besides individual genius (that, of course) helped to give Dante’s angels their unrivalled majesty. Milton, aiming at that, missed the target. Classicism had come in between. His angels have too much anatomy and too much armour, are too much like the gods of Homer and Virgil, and (for that very reason) far less like the gods of Paganism in its highest religious development. After Milton total degradation sets in and we finally reach the purely consolatory, hence waterishly feminine, angels of nineteenth-century art.
Boethius (480–524) is, after Plotinus, the greatest author of the seminal period, and his De Consolatione Philosophiae was for centuries one of the most influential books ever written in Latin. It was translated into Old High German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek; into French by Jean de Meung; into English by Alfred, Chaucer, Elizabeth I, and others. Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.
Boethius, scholar and aristocrat, was a minister to Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the first barbarian king in Italy and an Arian by religion, though no persecutor. As always, the word ‘barbarian’ might mislead. Though Theodoric was illiterate, he had passed his youth in high Byzantine society. He was in some ways a better ruler than many Roman emperors had been. His reign in Italy was not a sheer monstrosity as, say, the rule of Chaka or Dingaan in nineteenth-century England would have been. It was more as if a (popish) highland chieftain (who had acquired a little polish and a taste for claret in the French service) had reigned over the partly Protestant and partly sceptical England of Johnson and Lord Chesterfield. It is not, however, surprising that the Roman aristocracy were soon caught intriguing with the Eastern Emperor in the hope of delivering themselves from this alien. Boethius, whether justly or not, fell under suspicion. He was imprisoned at Pavia. Presently they twisted ropes round his head till his eyes dropped out and finished him off with a bludgeon.
Now Boethius was undoubtedly a Christian and even a theologian; his other works bear titles like De Trinitate and De Fide Catholica. But the ‘philosophy’ to which he turned for ‘consolation’ in the face of death contains few explicitly Christian elements and even its compatibility with Christian doctrine might be questioned.
Such a paradox has provoked many hypotheses. As:
(1) That his Christianity was superficial and failed him when brought to the test, so that he had to fall back on what neo-Platonism could do for him.
(2) That his Christianity was solid as a rock and his neo-Platonism a mere game with which he distracted himself in his dungeon—as other prisoners in like case have tamed a spider or a rat.
(3) That the theological essays were not really written by the same man.
None of these theories seems to me necessary.
Though the De Consolatione was certainly written after his fall, in exile and perhaps under arrest, I do not think it was written in a dungeon nor in daily expectation of the executioner. Once, indeed, he speaks of terror; once he describes himself as doomed to ‘death and proscription’; once Philosophia accuses him of ‘fearing the bludgeon and the axe’. But the general tone of the book does not match these momentary outbursts. It is not that of a prisoner awaiting death but that of a noble and a statesman lamenting his fall—exiled, financially damaged, parted from his beautiful library, stripped of his official dignities, his name scandalously traduced. This is no language of the condemned cell. And some of the ‘consolations’ which Philosophia addresses to him would be comically cruel mockeries to a man in that situation—as when she reminds him that the place which is exile to him is home to others, or that many would regard as wealth even those remains of his property which he has managed to save. The Consolation Boethius seeks is not for death but for ruin. When he wrote the book he may have known that his life was in some danger. I do not think he despaired of it. Indeed he complains at the outset that death cruelly neglects wretches who would gladly die.
If we had asked Boethius why his book contained philosophical rather than religious consolations, I do not doubt that he would have answered, ‘But did you not read my title? I wrote philosophically, not religiously, because I had chosen the consolations of philosophy, not those of religion, as my subject. You might as well ask why a book on arithmetic does not use geometrical methods.’ Aristotle had impressed on all who followed him the distinction between disciplines and the propriety of following in each its appropriate method. We have seen this at work in Chalcidius; and Boethius draws our attention to it in his argument. He compliments Philosophia on having used ‘inborn and domestical proofs’, not ‘reasons fetched from without’. That is, he congratulates himself on having reached conclusions acceptable to Christianity from purely philosophical premises—as the rules of art demanded. When, on the other hand, she draws near the doctrines of Hell and Purgatory, he makes her check herself—‘for it is not now our business to discuss such matters’.
But why, we may ask, did a Christian author impose upon himself this limitation? Partly, no doubt, because he knew where his true talent lay. But we can suggest another, and probably less conscious, motive. The distinction between Christian and Pagan can hardly, at that moment, have been more vividly present to his emotions than that between Roman and barbarian; especially since the barbarian was also a heretic. Catholic Christendom and that high Pagan past to which he felt so deep a loyalty were united in his outlook by their common contrast to Theodoric and his huge, fair-skinned, beer-drinking, boasting thanes. This was no time for stressing whatever divided him from Virgil, Seneca, Plato, and the old Republican heroes. He would have been robbed of half his comfort if he had chosen a theme which forced him to point out where the great ancient masters had been wrong; he preferred one that enabled him to feel how nearly they had been right, to think of them not as ‘they’ but as ‘we’.
As a result, the specifically Christian passages in the book are few. The martyrs are clearly referred to. In contradiction to the Platonic view that the Divine and the human cannot meet except through a tertium quid, prayer is a direct commercium between God and Man. When Philosophia, speaking of Providence, uses the words ‘strongly and sweetly’, from Wisdom viii. I Boethius replies, ‘I am delighted with your argument, but much more by the very language you use’. But far more often Boethius is saying what Plato or the neo-Platonists would have confirmed. Man, by his reason, is a divine animal; the soul is fetched from heaven, and her ascent thither is a return. In his account of creation Boethius is much closer to the Timaeus than to Scripture.
Apart from its contributions to the Model De Consolatione had some formal influence. It belongs to the kind called Satira Menippea in which prose sections alternate with (shorter) sections in verse. From Boethius this descends to Bernardus and Alanus and even into Sannazaro’s Arcadia. (I have often wondered that it has never been revived. One would have thought that a Landor, a Newman, or an Arnold might have turned it to good account.)
In Book I the appearance of Philosophia as a woman both old and young is borrowed from Claudian’s Natura in the Consulship of Stilicho (II, 424 sq.). It will re-appear in the Natura of the French poem which Lydgate translated as Reason and Sensuality (line 334). She tells him, among other things, that we—we philosophers—must anticipate calumny, for it is our express purpose (maxime propositum) to displease the rabble. This towering vaunt, this philosophic panache which goes beyond mere indifference to mud-flinging and actually courts it, is of Cynic origin. Milton’s Christ is infected with it, when he describes the common herd as people ‘of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise’ in Paradise Regained (III, 54). But poor Boethius is not yet ready for so high a strain; he is as deaf to it as a donkey to the harp—an image Chaucer appropriated in Troilus, I, 730. Everyone is now slandering him, though in reality his conduct while in office had been of flawless purity. He adds with almost comic inconsistency—Boethius the author here ruthlessly exposing Boethius the natural man—that his virtue was all the more admirable because he practised it with no thought of being admired. For, he adds, virtue is tarnished if a man displays it so as to get credit for it.
This modest maxim cuts right across the ideals of the Dark Ages and of the Renaissance. Roland unashamedly desires los as Beowulf desires dom or the heroes in French tragedy desire la gloire. It was often discussed in the later Middle Ages. Alanus knows it but agrees with it only up to a point. The good man should not make fame his object, but to reject it altogether is too austere (Anti-claudian, VII, iv, 26). Gower, on the other hand, applies it in its full rigour, even to knightly deeds,
In armes lith non avantance
To him that thenkth his name avance
And be renomed of his dede.
(Confessio Amantis, I, 2651.)
Boethius then passionately demands an explanation of the contrast between the regularity with which God governs the rest of Nature and the irregularity He permits in human affairs. This is made a central theme of Nature’s ‘complaint’ in Alanus and of her ‘confession’ in Jean de Meung. Later still Milton is recalling, and no doubt expects us to recognise that he is recalling, this place from Boethius in one of the choruses of Samson, (667 sq.). The whole concept will seem less remote to some modern readers if they relate it to the Existentialist position that Man is a passion inutile and compares very unfavourably with the irrational or even the inorganic world.
With Book II we embark on that great apologia for Fortune which impressed her figure so firmly on the imagination of succeeding ages. Comments on good and bad luck and their obvious failure to correspond with good and ill desert may be expected in any period; but the medieval allusions to Fortune and her wheel are exceptional in their frequency and seriousness. The grandeur which this image takes on in the Inferno (VII, 73 sq.) is a reminder how entirely it depends on individual genius whether a locus communis shall or shall not be what we call ‘commonplace’. And this, like a thousand inferior passages, is part of the Boethian legacy. No one who had read of Fortuna as he treats her could forget her for long. His work, here Stoical and Christian alike, in full harmony with the Book of Job and with certain Dominical sayings, is one of the most vigorous defences ever written against the view, common to vulgar Pagans and vulgar Christians alike, which ‘comforts cruel men’ by interpreting variations of human prosperity as divine rewards and punishments, or at least wishing that they were. It is an enemy hard to kill; latent in what has been called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ and rampant in the historical philosophy of Carlyle.
At every point in this discussion we meet ‘old friends’—that is, images and phrases which first became our friends when they had grown very much older.
Thus from Book II: ‘The most miserable misfortune is to have been happy once.’ Dante’s nessun maggior dolore (Inferno, V, 121) and Tennyson’s ‘sorrow’s crown of sorrows’ leap to mind. ‘Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.’ We remember Chaucer’s ‘no man is wreched but himself it wene’ in the Ballade of Fortune and Hamlet’s ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’. We are told that we cannot lose external goods because we never really had them. The beauty of fields or gems is a real good, but it is theirs, not ours; the beauty of clothes is either theirs (the richness of the stuff) or the skill of the tailor—nothing will make it ours. The idea will turn up again unexpectedly in Joseph Andrewes (III, 6). Soon after this we hear the praises of the prior aetas, the primeval innocence pictured by the Stoics. Readers of Milton will here notice the pretiosa pericula which became his ‘precious bane’. From this prior aetas came both the ‘Former Age’ of Chaucer’s ballade and ‘the old age’ mentioned by Orsino (Twelfth Night, II, iv, 46). We are told that nothing so much beguiles those who have some natural excellence but are not yet perfected in virtue as the desire for fame. It is a maxim from the Agricola of Tacitus; it will later blossom into Milton’s line about ‘that last infirmity of noble mind’.
Philosophia proceeds to mortify this desire, as Africanus had done in the Somnium, by pointing out how provincial all earthly fame is since this globe, by cosmic standards, is admittedly to be regarded as a mathematical point—puncti habere rationem. But Boethius deepens this stock argument by stressing the diversity of moral standards even within this tiny area. What is fame in one nation can be infamy in another. And anyway how short-lived all reputations are! Books, like their author, are mortal. No one now knows where the bones of Fabricius lie. (Here, for the benefit of his English readers, Alfred happily substituted ‘the bones of Weland’.)
Adversity has the merit of opening our eyes by showing which of our friends are true and which are feigned. Combine this with Vincent of Beauvais’ statement that hyena’s gall restores the sight (Speculum Naturale, XIX, 62), and you have the key to Chaucer’s cryptic line ‘Thee nedeth nat the gall of noon hyene’ (Fortune, 35).
From Book III: All men know that the true good is Happiness, and all men seek it, but, for the most part, by wrong routes—like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home. Chaucer reproduces the simile in the Knight’s Tale (A 1261 sq.).
Yet even the false routes, such as wealth or glory, show that men have some inkling of the truth; for the true good is glorious like fame and, like wealth, self-sufficient. So strong is the bent of nature that we thus struggle towards our native place, as the caged bird struggles to return to the woods. Chaucer borrows this image for his Squire’s Tale (F 621 sq.).
One of the false images of the good is Nobility. But Nobility is only the fame (and we have already exploded fame) of our ancestors’ virtue, which was a good of theirs, not ours. This doctrine had a flourishing progeny in the Middle Ages, and became a popular subject for school debates. It underlies Dante’s canzone at the opening of Convivio, IV, and the other place in De Monarchia (II, 3). The Roman de la Rose (18,615 sq.) goes beyond Boethius and boldly equates gentilesse with virtue. The English version at this point (2185–202) further expands its French original. The Wife of Bath reproduces Boethius more exactly (D 1154). Gower, like the Roman, identifies nobility with ‘vertu set in the corage’ (IV, 2261 sq.). One may be forgiven a smile when a (not otherwise very ignorant) author finds in this passage a proof that Gower expresses the feelings of the middle class which in his day was (as usual) ‘rising into new importance’.
The argument now climbs to the position that the whole and perfect good, of which we usually chase only fragments or shadows, is God. In the course of proving this—though it needed no new proof either for Platonists or Christians—Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things. It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans. I have already stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.
Those who have once risen to contemplate ‘the admirable circle of the divine simplicity’ must be careful not to look back again to worldly objects. The moral is enforced by the story of Orpheus and his fatal backward glance at Eurydice, and this telling of that story was as widely influential as Virgil’s. It is also of great structural importance in the De Consolatione, for Boethius himself, when Philosophia visited him in Book I, was indulging in just such a retrospection. Here, too, he reaches his highest point as a poet in the famous lines
Orpheus Eurydicen suam
Vidit, perdidit, occidit.
From Book IV: The doctrine of divine Providence, Boethius complains, rather aggravates than solves the real problem: why is justice—certainly ‘poetic justice’—so unapparent in the course of events? Philosophia makes two replies.
(1) It is all justice. The good are always rewarded and the wicked always punished, by the mere fact of being what they are. Evil power and evil performance are the punishment of evil will, and it will be infinite since the soul is immortal (as philosophy, no less than Theology, asserts). The passage looks back to Virgil’s hell whose inhabitants ausi omnes immane nefas ausoque potiti, ‘all purposed dreadful deeds and got their way’ (Aeneid, VI, 624). It looks forward to Milton who says of the wiser Pagans that ‘to banish forever into a local hell . . . they thought not a punishment so proper and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with sin’ (Doctrine and Discipline, II, 3). And yet, pleads Boethius, it is very strange to see the wicked flourishing and the virtuous afflicted. Why, yes, replies Philosophia; everything is strange until you know the cause. Compare the Squire’s Tale (F 258).
(2) That which ‘in the citadel of the divine simplicity’ is Providence, when seen from below, mirrored in the multiplicity of time and space, is Destiny. And as in a wheel the nearer we get to the centre the less motion we find, so every finite being, in proportion as he comes nearer to participating in the Divine (unmoving) Nature, becomes less subject to Destiny, which is merely a moving image of eternal Providence. That Providence is wholly good. We say that the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer. But we do not know who are the wicked and who are the innocent; still less what either need. All luck, seen from the centre, is good and medicinal. The sort we call ‘bad’ exercises good men and curbs bad ones—if they will take it so. Thus, if only you are near the hub, if you participate in Providence more and suffer Destiny less, ‘it lies in your own hands to make your fortune what you please’. Or, as Spenser turns this passage, ‘each unto himself his life may fortunize’ (F.Q. VI, ix, 30).
The noblest descendant of this passage, however, is not in words. At Rome in Santa Maria del Popolo the cupola above Chigi’s tomb sets the whole Boethian image of the wheel and the hub, of Destiny and Providence, before our eyes. On the utmost circumference the planets, the dispensers of fate, are depicted. On a smaller circle, within and above them, are the Intelligences that move them. At the centre, with hands upraised in guidance, sits the Unmoved Mover.
In the fifth and last book the argument is closer, and succeeding generations were unable to pluck out of it many isolated plums. But this does not mean that it proved less influential. It underlies every later treatment of the problem of freedom.
The conclusion of the previous book has left us with a new difficulty. If, as its doctrine of Providence implies, God sees all things that are, were, or will be, uno mentis in ictu, in a single act of mind, and thus foreknows my actions, how am I free to act otherwise than He has foreseen? Philosophia will not put Boethius off with the shift that Milton is reduced to in Paradise Lost (III, 117), that, though God foreknows, His foreknowledge does not cause, my act. For the question never was whether foreknowledge necessitates the act but whether it is not evidence that the act must have been necessary.
Can there, then, be foreknowledge of the indeterminate? In a sense, yes. The character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the object known but on that of the knowing faculty. Thus in ourselves sensation, imagination, and ratio all in their several ways ‘know’ man. Sensation knows him as a corporeal shape; imagination, as a shape without matter; ratio, as a concept, a species. None of these faculties by itself gives us the least hint of the mode of knowledge enjoyed by its superior. But above ratio or reason there is a higher faculty, intelligentia or understanding. (Long afterwards Coleridge reversed this by making reason the higher and understanding the lower. I postpone further consideration of the medieval terminology till a later section.) And Reason cannot conceive the future being known except as it would have to be known, if at all, by her; that is, as determinate. But it is just possible even for us to climb up to the intelligential level and get a glimpse of the knowledge which does not involve determinism.
Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life. Time, even endless time, is only an image, almost a parody, of that plenitude; a hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. That is why Shakespeare’s Lucrece calls it ‘thou ceaseless lackey to eternity’ (Rape, 967). And God is eternal, not perpetual. Strictly speaking, He never foresees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not foresees) your tomorrow’s acts because He is already in tomorrow. As a human spectator, by watching my present act, does not at all infringe its freedom, so I am none the less free to act as I choose in the future because God, in that future (His present) watches me acting.
I have so ruthlessly condensed an argument of such importance, both historical and intrinsic, that the wise reader will go for it to the original. I cannot help thinking that Boethius has here expounded a Platonic conception more luminously than Plato ever did himself.
The work ends with Philosophia thus speaking; there is no return to Boethius and his situation, any more than to Christopher Sly at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. This I believe to be a stroke of calculated and wholly successful art. We are made to feel as if we had seen a heap of common materials so completely burnt up that there remains neither ash nor smoke nor even flame, only a quivering of invisible heat.
Gibbon has expressed in cadences of habitual beauty his contempt for the impotence of such ‘philosophy’ to subdue the feelings of the human heart. But no one ever said it would have subdued Gibbon’s. It sounds as if it had done something for Boethius. It is historically certain that for more than a thousand years many minds, not contemptible, found it nourishing.
Before closing this chapter it will be convenient to mention two authors who are later in time and very much inferior in rank. They are not, like those whom I have been describing, contributors to the Model, but they sometimes supply the handiest evidence as to what it was. Both are encyclopaedists.
Isidore, Bishop of Seville from 600 to 636, wrote the Etymologiae. As the title implies his ostensible subject was language, but the frontier between explaining the meaning of words and describing the nature of things is easily violated. He makes hardly any effort to keep on the linguistic side of it, and his book thus becomes an encyclopaedia. It is a work of very mediocre intelligence, but often gives us scraps of information we cannot easily run to ground in better authors. It also has the enormous advantage of being accessible in a good modern edition.
The same, unhappily, is not true of Vincent of Beauvais (ob. 1264). His huge Speculum Majus is divided into the Speculum Naturale, the Speculum Doctrinale, and the Speculum Historiale. We might expect that the ‘Doctrinal Mirror’ was concerned with Theology. Actually, it deals with morals, arts, and trades.