As I prepare for PMR in October, I’ve been reading more Boethius. Brendan from the Well At The World’s End recommended Pieper’s Scholasticism as he has a bit on Boethius as a transitional figure - between Rome and Goth, Ancient and Medieval. What I’ve read so far fits my description of the Consolation as a mediating text - prose and poetry, Philosophy and Theology, spirit and body. As I’m working through this now, I thought I’d include a portion of the text below to see if any of you had thoughts you’d like to share.
From Josef Pieper, Scholasticism
The most important of Boethius’ books, the one that indubitably belongs to the world of literature, was one that never planned to write. This work, the only which has been generally mentioned and remembered in connection with the name of its author, is likewise one which is in now way linked with anything in his previous writings. For the book was forced upon Boethius in terrible fashion….
It was as a prisoner awaiting death that he wrote his book, The Consolation of Philosophy. This book revealed a wholly new Boethius– so unlike the Boethius of the theological tracts that for a long time me could scarcely believe that these were written by the same Boethius. (We have spoken of the double role which Boethius must have seemed to play in the eyes of his contemporaries: his personality must have seemed an ambiguous one. This fact had strange reverberations: on the one had it has been asserted down to the most recent times that Boethius was not a Christian at all; and on the other hand he has enjoyed the reputation of being a virtual martyr who suffered death for his faith. Both these hypotheses have been proved false; but it seems highly significant that they ever could have been reasonably entertained.)
The Consolation can be read in many different ways. The reader can view it in its purely literary aspect, as a latter-day Platonic dialogue, the imitation of an early work of Aristotle. Or else he can “recognize” in it the model of Dante’s Vita Nuova and see in its content the doctrines of the Neo-Platonists or the intellectual legacy of the Stoa. The historically trained reader is only too pronoe to this kind of reading, and he is constantly being encouraged from all quarters to practice it… The danger is that it will also prevent the reader from hearing the true voice of Boethius himself, the vox humana in the book… that here we have a man who has had all the richness of his life’s possessions knocked from his hand without warning, and is now trying to answer the questionof what is left to him. Face to face with death, this man undertakes to secure his last cash in hand… He is concerned with the horribly concrete, life and death question of whether the world and existence have now become meaningless to him- yes or no? It is an eternal question of humanity which can enter everyone’s life any day. And the answers to it given by Plato or Stoics are not dismissed as something “historical,” for all that the Christian may be able to provide a new, superior, or even final answer….
And this is the greatness of the Consolatio: that the tension of this monologue is here in all its strength, is here without any final resolution….
I love the way it’s punctuated by poetry. It gives a more lyric sense of the man in despair… Definitely an oft-read favorite.