The Land of Unlikeness

How to read the Consolation with a touch nuance
Two contemporary scholars have argued against Claasen’s and Chadwick’s kind of didactic reading (see last the post here). Both Joel C. Relihan and John Marenbon share the theory that Boethius is questioning Philosophy’s ability to lead him to an attainment of the good, but they differ as to Boethius method and what degree of impact the Menippean format has on Boethius’ project. ¹

John Marenbon’s thesis, on one hand, is simply as he states in the introduction to his book: “The Consolation is, as its complex literary structure should immediately suggest, not just a work of but about Philosophy; a subtle text which could be understood on various levels.”² But as Marenbon is also quick to point out, our approach to the Consolation requires more than philosophical proficiency. The Menippean Satire, rather than providing a neutral structure, as Chadwick and Claassen believe, infuses the work with a satirical bent (as the “satire” in Menippean Satire suggests). As such, the inclusion of poetry serves to help make sense of the gaps in Philosophy’s arguments, the fact that while she leads Boethius to the good (III.10), she can not help him attain it.³ In fact, Marenbon argues that the inclusion of the Menippean format is even more crucial to the Consolation than either the consolatio or the dialogue genre. While “modern discussion of the Consolation has tended to be either philosophical or literary,” he suggests that two factors are necessary for a whole reading: the poems, and Boethius’ Christianity.⁴ Operating between these two invisible hermeneutical poles are the two stated goals of the Consolation: 1. curing the sick Boethius by means of Philosophy’s remedies; and 2. demonstrating what true happiness is.⁵ Thus, Marenbon has the task of showing how his reading can better elaborate on these two goals. In terms of Boethius’ Christianity, Marenbon points to textual evidence. “The Consolation is a dialogue between a figure who is recognizably a Christian - Boethius - and a figure who is not - Philosophy. The reasons for making this assertion are almost too obvious to remark.”⁶ He also points to inconsistencies in Philosophy’s arguments when she’s forced to deal with issues raised in light of Boethius’ faith, as in book V when she (inadvertently?) defends causal determinism.⁷ Continue reading ‘Satire and Sufficiency III’

1. Marenbon is writing ten years after Relihan’s Ancient Menippean Satire (1993), and four years before Relihan’s The Prisoner’s Philosophy (2007); they represent a live conversation about the role of Menippean Satire in interpreting the Consolation.↩
2. Marenbon, Boethius, 4. ↩
3. Book III is, in many ways, the turning point of the Consolation: Boethius has recovered from his overwhelming grief through a back and forth with Philosophy. Maybe the discussion with Philosophy has provided a bit of a distraction. Maybe the philosophical give and take has been a grace to him in his solitude. Philosophy ends Book II by singing a song of cosmic love - “what binds all things to order, / Governing earth and sea and sky, / Is love” (II.m.8.13-15, Loeb ed.). Boethius declares his relief, both from her arguments and her rendition of the muse’s art, and his desire for more. Philosophy, in what could be seen as both haughty and seductive, responds: “[W]ith what desire you would burn if you knew where I am going to lead you” (III.1.15-17 Loeb ed.). She then asserts that she will lead him to true happiness; not the mundane sort that got him in the bind he’s in now, and that he has been pining away for, alone in a prison cell. No. This is the kind that occupied his heroes, Aristotle and Plato. Happiness, she explains, has been sought through different means - temporal power, self-sufficiency, fame, honor, and physical health. All, both characters agree, are simply means to something greater, namely true happiness. And while Boethius holds a more complex view of happiness, Philosophy believes that true happiness is actualized in a state of complete independence to these secondary states (wealth, health, etc..). This view, that the happiness which Boethius seeks is to be found only in rationality, will be the thrust of her argument through Book III, until she gets to discussing God, a discussion that comprises the end of Book III. This Book, therefore, is both a focal point of Philosophy’s energies, as well as the point in which Boethius, both as character and author, will break that focus through a barrage of dialogical questioning and the irony introduced through the Menippean form. ↩
4. Marenbon, Boethius, 99.↩
5. Marenbon, Boethius, 100.↩
6. Marenbon, Boethius, 157: The character Boethius affirms a quotation from Wisdom 8.1 by Philosophy; further, Boethius is evidently concerned about the efficacy of prayer in the absence of free will, in V.3.33-34.↩
7. Marenbon, Boethius, 158.↩

Due to the fantastic response we’ve garnered from our little Boethius snippet below, I’ve decided to push the envelope and post my recent essay on Boethius’s subtle subversion of philosophy. This is the first part.

The Consolation of Philosophy¹ has long been interpreted as a philosophical tour de force, written under duress, but no less magnificent or influential because of that duress. In fact, its dominance in medieval philosophy and theology was rivaled only by the renewed interest in the philosophical sources which it conveyed to scholastics of the middle ages, due in no small part to Boethius’ ambitious attempt to translate and comment on the Platonic and Aristotelian corpii. Its sway in the humanities has been less recognized in theological and philosophical circles. Not only was it translated into verse and prose by King Alfred, Queen Elizabeth I, and Chaucer, and borrowed heavily from by Dante; its creative combinations of original poetry and prose (prosimetrum), as well as philosophical dialogue and mythology arguably provided structural and substantial bases for The Divine Comedy and a number of Chaucer’s shorter poems and stories as well as “The Knight’s Tale” and “Troilus” in Canterbury Tales.²

Modern Christian readers tend toward two readings of the Consolation: they either baptize Boethius in a flat, non-literary, pedantic reading of the Consolation as a Christian text instructing a particular use of Philosophy, or they denounce him as at best a confused Christian engaged in an overly Platonized form of Christianity. Between these modern poles, we have Chaucer who uses the Consolation not to provide a “stable” intellectual platform for Christianity, but rather to destabilize reason and accepted norms, whether Christian or otherwise. Chaucer “was sensitive … to the tensions and uncertainties of Boethius’ text, the Roman author’s literary and intellectual subtlety, and his awareness of the uses of obliquity.”³ Following John Marenbon, I am suggesting that Chaucer’s model of a middle use is actually the proper use of the Consolation because it respects the milieu philosophical argumentation, the use of mythology, its several genres, and the author’s religious commitments.

It is my opinion that the normative, modern reception of the Consolation casts it as a didactic text, merely part of the compiling, commentary tradition of that era. However, if the above thesis is correct, that something like Chaucer’s “middle way” reading is best, then one can read the Consolation as Boethius challenge to Philosophy’s very ability to cash out her claims - to lead philosophers to the ultimate end of humanity. Thus, a suspicion or chastening of Philosophy is buried deep in the structure of the Consolation, making it anything but another work of the commentary tradition. It is not that Boethius has renounced Philosophy or is replacing her with something else. It is still the Consolation of Philosophy. And after all, Philosophy does come to comfort the innocent prisoner on death row. Rather, I am suggesting that couched within this overarching positive presentation of Philosophy is a subtle and far more complex subversion of Philosophy’s sufficiency, that is, her ability to exhaustively meet the demands of the classic Aristotelian doctrine of true happiness as not merely knowing but grasping or apprehending the good. While Philosophy makes many claims to be able to lead Boethius to such a grasp, the author Boethius never allows Philosophy to finish her quest or present a unified argument. Rather, one finds significant gaps in her overall presentation, due in part to the character Boethius’ voracious questioning, and also to Philosophy’s own arrogance and pretension.

1. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, rev. ed., trans. Victor Watts (London: The Penguin Group, 1999), 47; subsequent quotations for the Consolation come from the revised Penguin edition, unless otherwise noted; line number references come from the latin in the Loeb Classical Library, new reprint ed., trans. H. F. Stewart, et al. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).↩
2. Marenbon points to the influence of the Consolation on Alan de Lille’s (1128-1202) de planctu Naturae, Guillaume de Lorris’s unfinished Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), as well as Jean de Meun’s completion of the same work (c. 1270); cf. Marenbon, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 179-181.↩
3. Marenbon, Boethius, 182.↩