Philosophy’s Cold Comfort

By Erin Endrei

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is today little read in comparison to the works of one of the chief influences upon it, Plato, but in medieval Europe it was the era’s most widely copied secular text. It’s secular not in that it explicitly shuns Christianity, but that Christian symbols and ideas are not its focus, even though Boethius authored orthodox theological treatises and is now agreed upon by scholars to have been a Christian.

In alternating prose and verse, the Consolation of Philosophy depicts a fictionalized version of the exiled Roman senator at first being led, and later at times leading, a female personification of philosophy in a dialogue primarily about fortune, fate, and providence. It also incorporates discussions of deity, cosmic order, virtue, and free will. One scholar has proposed a double meaning within a symbol featured at the beginning of the Consolation, and this proposal sheds light upon two of the work’s most puzzling aspects: the first being Boethius’ silence in its fifth and final book, and the second being the apparent failure of philosophy, in the end, to provide the sort of consolation it initially seems to promise him.

The Consolation begins with the narrator, a fictionalized version of Boethius, lamenting his change in fortune: once both a respected scholar and a highly ranked politician, he has been imprisoned for alleged treason against the reigning Ostrogothic king. Just as the narrator (henceforth referred to as “Boethius”) is being comforted by the Muses, “Philosophy,” in the form of a supernatural female figure, enters and is angry to see them, whom she considers dangerous:

“Who,” said she, “has allowed yon playacting wantons to approach this sick man—these who, so far from giving medicine to heal his malady, even feed it with sweet poison? These it is who kill the rich crop of reason with the barren thorns of passion, who accustom men’s minds to disease, instead of setting them free.

This is the first clear opposition in the work of reason and passion, and the first sign that philosophy will be illustrative of the former, and poetry expressive of the latter.

Philosophy is introduced as Boethius’ former nurse, or rather nutrix, the lactational significance of which is made clear in the second prose section of Book I. (Latin nutrix gives French nourrice, which is the word corresponding to the “nurse” caring for infants in, for example, Madame Bovary.) The exiled Boethius is no longer a child in need of nourishment, but a despairing prisoner by turns mute and weeping while composing poetical laments, which in Philosophy’s eyes confirms him as nothing less than gravely ill. She now assumes the role not of nurse but of physician, diagnosing Boethius with having forgotten his own nature and promising to cure him by enabling him to remember it.

In the first prose section of the work, Philosophy’s appearance is described in some detail. She’s wearing torn robes with two Greek letters embroidered upon them—Π and θ—with a ladder woven between them. These symbols have, throughout the centuries of commentary upon the Consolation, been given just a single interpretation: Π stands for πρᾶξῐς, praxis, and θ for θεωρία, theoria; the ladder implies that philosophy enables its practitioners to ascend from the mundane reality of practical, physical, and political concerns to the intellectual and spiritual enlightenment furnished by theory. (H. R. James, the translator of the Standard Ebooks edition, says as much in a footnote.) This hierarchical representation of theory and practice, spirit and matter, is easy for a modern reader to grasp. But in 1984 the American classicist Danuta Shanzer raised the possibility that the θ on Philosophy’s robes could contain a double meaning: not just θεωρία, theoria, but also θάνατος—thanatos, or death.

This, Shanzer says, ties the Consolation more closely to Plato’s Phaedo and also answers those two vexed questions: why Boethius is silent in the last book of the work, and why Philosophy doesn’t appear to provide the consolation she initially promises Boethius.

Shanzer writes:

Oddly enough the interpretation followed by most people [theta as only θεωρία] is in a sense the more obscure one. Another valid reaction to a theta would be not θεωρία, but θάνατος. To the Platonic philosopher, however, the two concepts are far from incompatible: for what is philosophy other than the μελέτη τοῦ θανάτου, the study of the separation of the soul from the body? It is worth noting that at the beginning of the Consolation when Boethius calls upon Death, mors hominum felix, it is Philosophy who answers his call (Book 1 Prose 1, line 13).

Plato’s Phaedo depicts Socrates’ final days in prison awaiting execution, to which he has unjustly been sentenced. Shanzer points out Boethius’ explicit allusion, in Book 1 Prose 3, to the parallel injustices experienced by Boethius and Socrates, when Philosophy claims that “[i]n his lifetime, too, Socrates, his master, won with my aid the victory of an unjust death.” In prison, as imagined in Phaedo, Socrates spends time versifying Aesopic fables, but also engages in philosophical argumentation concerning among other things the separation of soul and body, and the possible destinations of the former after death. Socrates’ final words are instructions to repay a debt to a physician, to which detail Shanzer connects Philosophy’s assumed diagnostic and therapeutic role in Boethius’s Consolation.

Understanding the theta on Philosophy’s robes not just as θεωρία but also as θάνατος, and thereby alluding to Socrates’ last days, suggests a simple explanation for the apparently strange silence of Boethius in the final book of the Consolation: he’s dying, and perhaps approaching, as Socrates puts it in Jowett’s translation, his “pure home which is above.” In the previous four books Philosophy has not only guided Boethius around the plane of θεωρία, but accompanied him to his unjust and untimely death, as she did Socrates.

The second question the theta clarifies hinges on the fact that that Philosophy’s arguments are not, in the end, very consoling; she doesn’t complete the task that she sets for herself. She asserts that all fortune is good fortune, and H. R. James adapts Hamlet (Act II, Scene II) to express her view: “nothing is wretched,” he has her say in Book 2 Prose 4, “but thinking makes it so.” This legitimate philosophical position is cold comfort to those who are truly suffering, and this isn’t lost on Boethius, who has Philosophy admit at the beginning of the final book that she herself doesn’t thinks she has provided the full curative remedies she initially promised her patient. She expresses her anxiety to do so, but is derailed by Boethius himself, who has rallied enough to want to discuss a question of theoretical philosophy: whether chance really exists in light of divine providence. Philosophy warns him that entering into this matter won’t help her fulfill her promise to return him to his “native land,”—i.e., to cure him—but he insists that the discussion will be “rest” to him, perhaps another hint at his impending death.

This final derailment and apparent abandonment of Philosophy’s self-imposed task has led some scholars to speculate that the work is unfinished: that it’s not that the fictional narrator dies as the work ends, but that the veridical Boethius died in prison before he could finish his fictionalized counterpart’s narrative. But others have taken the work to end as it does by design; and if the theta on her robes also stands for θάνατος, death, then Philosophy hasn’t failed, but has in fact done all that she could do. In the Consolation, the truth, as represented by philosophy (and Philosophy) rather than poetry (and the Muses), doesn’t set the thinker-prisoner free before death. Philosophy might strike both Boethius’ contemporaries and modern readers as more venerable and noble a practice than flights of fiction or poetical expressions of emotion, but it’s as impotent as its affect-driven cousins to liberate prisoners, no matter how far it surpasses them in the subtlety or force of its definitions, distinctions, premises, inferences, and conclusions.

As Shanzer puts it:

The parallels to Plato, and the theta at the head of the ladder show the true consrum (3.1.1) [sovereign solace of the stricken soul], is no different from the one handed to Socrates by his jailer.

Taking the theta on Philosophy’s robe to indicate both “theory” and “death” then helps to explain Boethius’ silence and Philosophy’s apparent failure to complete her consolatory task. It also points the reader to the death of Socrates, and in doing so to the true consolation of the work, as meager or as bitter as it may seem: that by the aid of philosophy one may die not necessarily free, in any substantial sense, but nevertheless in knowledge of the truth. Whether this is any consolation for Boethius or for his readers isn’t at all a trivial question; the work remains so very interesting not least because it places this question so clearly before us.