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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius (trans. and ed. Joel Relihan)
2001 Indianapolis: Hackett.
pp. xxxiii + 216 ISBN: 0-87220-583-5 (pb) £7.95
Practical Philosophy (Book Reviews) Spring 2002 Volume 4.2
Reviewed by: Trevor Curnow
One of the pleasures of new translations of the classics is that they invite the reader to return to them and look at them from a fresh perspective. If they do not, they serve no useful purpose. Joel Relihan’s rendition of Boethius’s classic work adopts a strongly literary approach to it and in doing so helps to bring out dimensions of it that other translations have tended to obscure or ignore. That alone justifies its existence.
Although best known now for the Consolation, this is in many ways the least important of Boethius’s works. His great contribution to the history of philosophy was as a translator and commentator, rendering many works of philosophy (especially those dealing with logic) from Greek into Latin. The corpus of works thus established became the foundation of much of medieval thought. He came to a sad end, being executed on the orders of Theodoric in 524. The Consolation was composed in his prison cell. Written in the first person, it is a dialogue between a prisoner and Philosophy, ‘my nurse, in whose house and in whose presence I had dwelt since I was a child’ (p. 6). Although too fanciful to count as autobiography in the strict sense, it is clearly a personal meditation on the philosophical life.
As Relihan points out, the genre of the consolation was an established one. It consisted of ‘a moral exhortation, an address to one who is bereaved, an argument that death is not to be feared’ (p. xi). He goes on to suggest that Boethius’s work violates so many conventions of the genre that it can scarcely be regarded as belonging to it at all. His further suggestion that it fits more easily within the genre of satire is (he admits) rather more contentious. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the prisoner receives rather less consolation from Philosophy than he might have hoped for.
Perhaps Relihan makes too much of the conflicting philosophical influences that the Consolation betrays. Boethius was well versed in many of the major philosophical movements of antiquity, and a degree of eclecticism in his outlook would scarcely be surprising. On top of that, he was a Christian (later canonised as St Severinus – his tomb is in Pavia cathedral), which would clearly limit the extent to which he could wholeheartedly endorse any particular ‘pagan’ philosophy. As a consequence, there is something of a tension in the work between the idea found in the Stoics and others that death need not be feared (a real non-event according to Epicurus!) and the Christian conviction that it is to be positively welcomed. Furthermore, it might be argued that a man awaiting execution is entitled to take his comfort from whatever source he can and may be excused from having too many qualms about consistency.
Much of what the Consolation teaches is unexceptional. Philosophy advises the prisoner (p. 19) that ‘possibly the greatest cause of your disease [is] you have ceased to know who you yourself are.’ (The metaphor of sickness and cure runs through much of the book.) He is not to trust in the outside world as a source of happiness (p. 32). It is necessary to ‘dispel this darkness of confusing emotions, which arises from ... false opinions and which dazes the true vision’ (p. 20). His sights must be set on the divine, for goodness, happiness and godliness are one and the same thing (p. 101).
Boethius stands at the watershed between ancient and medieval philosophy. The Consolation is almost a distillation of the practical comforts offered by the schools of antiquity, but given a distinctly Christian twist. How much comfort he actually derived from them himself is unknown. That he met his death is certain: how he met it is not.
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