Justified True Belief

(●) The last Roman philosopher and the first of the scholastic theologians, who wrote the Middle Ages’ most copied secular book while waiting in a cell to be killed. + A man in his early forties, stripped of office and condemned without a hearing, sits in confinement somewhere near Pavia with no library and no visitors worth the name. He has lost everything he had: the consulship, which was still the grandest honour the Roman state could hand a man, two consular sons, a great house, a name that went back centuries. What he does with the time is write a conversation. A woman appears at his bedside, tall, ageless, with letters woven into her gown, and she asks him what he thinks he has actually lost. The book that came out of that cell is the Consolation of Philosophy, and for the next thousand years no secular book in Europe was copied and read more. Boethius matters to Christian readers for two reasons that pull in different directions. The first is that he handed the Latin West nearly everything it knew of Greek logic and Greek mathematics: for six centuries, until translators went back to the Arabic and the Greek in the 1100s, Aristotle in Latin meant Boethius’ Aristotle. The second is that he wrote five short theological treatises which argue Christian doctrine the way a geometer argues, laying down terms and drawing conclusions, and in doing so he gave the church two of its most-used definitions: what eternity is, and what a person is. Thomas Aquinas quotes both, and both are still in circulation. Later readers called him the first of the scholastics, and the label is earned by that method rather than by anything unusual in what he believed. The scholastics, or schoolmen, were the teachers of the medieval cathedral schools and of the universities that grew out of them, and their trade was exactly his: settle what a word means, then reason from it in short steps, and see how far reason will follow what the church already holds. Here is the fact to remember. When a modern Christian says that God does not look ahead into the future because he sees all of time at once, the sentence being borrowed is his, written by a condemned man with an executioner in the corridor: eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment. His dates are conventions. The year of his birth is given anywhere from about 475 to 480, and the year of his death as 524, 525, or 526, because the sources fix his fall by other men’s consulships rather than by a calendar. The rounded c. 480 to 524 is the common figure, and every date resting on it carries the "c." that marks it as an estimate rather than a record.

(●) c. 480 AD: He was born into the greatest surviving family of Rome, and orphaned young into the house of another. + Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born in Rome around 480, four years after the last western emperor had been deposed and packed off to a villa in Campania. Rome still had its Senate, its consuls, its old families and its old manners; what it no longer had was an emperor of its own. His family, the Anicii, was the most distinguished name left in the city, Christian for generations and rich enough that public office was a duty rather than a career. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, held the consulship in 487 and died soon afterward, while the boy was still small. He was taken into the household of Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, a senator, a historian, and by every account a genuinely good man, who raised him and eventually gave him his daughter Rusticiana in marriage. Boethius never stopped being grateful. Writing from prison thirty years later, with almost nothing left to defend, he still reached for his father-in-law as a character witness: a man revered, he says, for his pure character and his active kindness. Where he learned his Greek is not known. Some have supposed a stay in Alexandria or Athens; the evidence is thin, and the honest answer is that we simply do not know how a Roman aristocrat of that generation came to read Greek philosophy better than anyone in the Latin world had read it in two hundred years.

(●) c. 505 AD: He set himself a task nobody had finished, to put the whole of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. + The plan he announced was breathtaking and, as it turned out, impossible. He would translate every dialogue of Plato and every treatise of Aristotle into Latin, write commentaries on them, and then demonstrate that the two great masters, who had been set against each other for eight hundred years, actually agreed. To even form the ambition was a quiet verdict on the learning of his day, which had let the Greek slip away. He never got to Plato. What he did finish is still remarkable: Porphyry’s Isagoge, the standard beginner’s introduction to logic, translated and then given two separate commentaries; Aristotle’s logical works translated one after another; a commentary on the Categories, two on On Interpretation, one on Cicero’s Topics; and half a dozen original handbooks on syllogisms and division. Alongside these he adapted the arithmetic of Nicomachus and wrote five books on music, and in the preface to the arithmetic he grouped arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy under a single word he seems to have coined, the quadrivium, the "four ways." Those four subjects were still the shape of a mathematical education a thousand years later. Buried in the second commentary on the Isagoge is a question he raised, turned over, and then deliberately declined to settle, and it turned into the longest argument of the Middle Ages. Suppose you say that Peter and Paul are both human. Is there something real, humanity, that the two of them share, something out in the world and not merely in your head? Or is "human" no more than a name you file them under, a convenience of speech with nothing outside our minds answering to it? Philosophers call the general kinds universals, as opposed to the particular things that fall under them: dog as against the spaniel asleep under the table. Boethius laid the question out with such clarity that generations of schoolmen took it up from his page, and they were still arguing about it six hundred years later. He did give a cautious answer of his own, closer to Aristotle than to Plato. The general kinds really are in the individual things, he said, so that there is nothing to humanity beyond what is there in Peter and in Paul; but the mind can take hold of that shared nature by itself and think about humanity apart from any body. Then he noted that Plato thought otherwise, and moved on.

(●) 510 AD: Rome made him consul, under a king who was a Goth and an Arian. + Italy in 510 was ruled from Ravenna by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, a Germanic king who had taken the peninsula by force and then governed it, for more than thirty years, with a light and careful hand. He kept the Roman Senate, the Roman law, and the Roman offices, and filled them with Romans. Boethius held the consulship alone that year, the old republican honour that by then meant prestige, expense, and games rather than power. One thing stood between the king and his subjects, and it was doctrine. Theodoric and his Goths were Arians. Arianism, named for the Alexandrian priest Arius, held that the Son is the highest and first of God’s creatures rather than God in the full sense, and the Council of Nicaea had condemned it in 325. Two churches therefore stood side by side in Ravenna and in Rome: the Catholic one of the Italians, and the Arian one of their rulers. For twenty-five years nobody made an issue of it. Then the eastern emperor Justin, in Constantinople, began to move against Arians in his own territory, and every Roman aristocrat with correspondents in the East started to look, to a Gothic king, a little like a man with divided loyalties. Theodoric used Boethius the way a modern government uses a physicist. Cassiodorus, the king’s secretary, preserved the letters: when Theodoric wanted a water clock and a sundial to send as a diplomatic gift to Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, he told Boethius to build them (Variae I.45); when the Frankish king Clovis asked for a harpist, it was Boethius who was told to find one (Variae II.40). The letters flatter him extravagantly and treat him, correctly, as the one man in Italy who could read the Greek manuals.

(●) c. 520 AD: By about this time he had written five short treatises that reasoned about Christian doctrine the way a geometer reasons about triangles. + These are the Opuscula sacra, the "little sacred works," and there is nothing quite like them before him. They were not written together: the one against Eutyches and Nestorius answers a letter of Greek bishops from about 513, and the two on the Trinity belong to the years around 519, when a party of Scythian monks had pushed the same question back into the open. They are brief, dry, and technical. He states his terms, defines them, and moves in short steps, and in one of them he even sets out axioms first and derives the conclusions afterward, exactly as Euclid does. The subjects are the hardest in Christian theology: how three persons can be one God, whether created things are good in the same way God is good, and how one Christ can be both God and man without being two of anything. He wrote them for a small audience and said so, with a sharpness that is easy to like. The first is dedicated to his father-in-law Symmachus, and the preface admits that he wraps his ideas in unfamiliar words on purpose, because everywhere he looks he sees either the apathy of the dullard or the jealousy of the clever, and a man who throws his thoughts to the crowd to be trampled brings the study of God into disrepute. Three of the others he sent to John the Deacon, a Roman churchman usually identified with the deacon who became Pope John I and who would himself die in a Gothic prison. Their authorship was doubted for centuries. The Consolation nowhere mentions Christ, and it seemed to many readers that the philosopher and the theologian could not be the same man. Then in 1877 Alfred Holder found a fragment of Cassiodorus, and Hermann Usener published it, and there in a list of a friend’s writings stood the entry: Boethius wrote a book on the Trinity, some dogmatic chapters, and a book against Nestorius. Which of the five the dogmatic chapters are is still argued, most readers taking them for the two short pieces sent to John the Deacon and the Loeb editors taking them for On the Catholic Faith, so on either reading one or two of the tractates are left resting on the manuscripts alone. What the scrap settled, and settled from the outside, is the thing that mattered: the philosopher and the theologian were the same man.

(●) 522 AD: His two sons entered the consulship together, and he was made master of the offices. + In 522 the two consuls of the year were both his boys, Symmachus and Boethius, named for their great-grandfather and their father. Two brothers holding the office in the same year was an honour so rare that it amounted to a public statement by the king about the family. Their father sat between them in the Senate house and delivered the panegyric in Theodoric’s praise, the set speech of formal compliment that such an occasion required, and in the Consolation, looking back at it from the cell, he lets himself remember that one day without apology. Around the same time he took the office of magister officiorum, master of the offices: the head of the civil service, the man through whom the king’s business, the court ceremonial, the messengers, and the audiences all passed. It meant leaving his books in Rome and living at Ravenna among people whose habits he despised. He did not last long there, and the reason he gives is his own conduct. The account he sets down afterward reads like a man counting his enemies and finding that he can still name every one of them. There was Conigastus, whom he blocked from stripping the property of people too weak to stop him themselves. There was Trigguilla, the steward of the royal household, whose designs he thwarted. There was the praetorian prefect, the senior civil administrator of Italy, who had ordered a forced grain sale that would have starved Campania in a year of scarcity; Boethius fought it, argued it out with the king himself hearing the case, and won. And there was the ex-consul Paulinus, whom he pulled out from under the courtiers who had already spent that man’s fortune in their heads. Every one of those was a man made into an enemy, and he knew it perfectly well while he was doing it. A person who holds fast to conscience, he wrote afterward, must think nothing of offending the powerful in the cause of justice.

(●) 523 AD: He defended a senator accused of treason, and before long the charge had turned on him. + A senator named Albinus was accused of writing to the emperor in Constantinople against the interests of the Gothic kingdom. Boethius, as master of the offices, stood up at Verona and argued for him, and by his own account he did not stop at Albinus. The king was working to spread the treason charge from the one man to the whole senatorial order, and Boethius answered him by defending the innocence of the entire Senate, careless, as he puts it, of his own danger. It was the correct thing to say and the most dangerous. The informer was a man named Cyprian, and he had allies. Within a short time three men lodged an information against Boethius himself, which in Roman practice meant laying a formal accusation before the court and standing behind it in one’s own name. It is worth looking at who they were. Basil had been dismissed from the royal household and was drowning in debt. Opilio and Gaudentius were both under sentence of banishment on the very day they gave their evidence, and had taken sanctuary rather than go. The charge was that he had obstructed an informer in order to save the Senate, and that he had hoped for the freedom of Rome; letters were produced which he says were forged. Then, when the treason charge began to look too honourable to stick, they added a second: sacrilege, the accusation that he had used forbidden arts in pursuit of his ambition. The Senate he had defended condemned him, and it did so while he was held nearly five hundred miles away, unheard and with no one speaking for him. That detail is the one he cannot get over. He notes, coldly, that a man charged with burning temples and butchering priests would at least have been produced in court.

(●) c. 524 AD: In prison at Pavia, without a book to hand, he wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, and then he was killed. + He was held in the north, somewhere in the country between Milan and Ticinum, the modern Pavia; the one ancient account of his death names an estate called the ager Calventianus, and later tradition settled on a tower at Pavia. Wherever the room was, he wrote in it five books that alternate prose and verse, a form the Romans called prosimetrum: an argument, then a poem, then the argument again. The whole thing is a dialogue between a prisoner who has begun by feeling sorry for himself and a woman named Philosophy who will not let him. She takes him through Fortune and her wheel, through the goods men chase and why none of them satisfies, up to the highest Good which is God, and then into the two hardest questions he has left: why the wicked prosper, and whether a God who knows what you will do tomorrow leaves you free to do otherwise. He worked from memory. His library, he says, did not come with him. He was executed around 524, though 525 and 526 are also defended. The one detailed report, the anonymous Gothic chronicle known as the Excerpta Valesiana, says a cord was twisted round his forehead until his eyes started from his head, and that he was finished off with a club. Symmachus, the father-in-law, was brought from Rome and executed a year or so later, because Theodoric had come to fear that he would avenge his son-in-law. Theodoric himself died in 526, and Pope John I, the John the Deacon of the dedications, died in Gothic custody at Ravenna in the same year. Boethius was buried at Pavia, and his tomb is in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, a few steps from the bones of Augustine. Northern Italy came to regard him as a martyr killed for defending Catholics against an Arian king, which is at best a simplification of a political trial; the local cult was formally confirmed for the diocese of Pavia by Pope Leo XIII in 1883, with 23 October as his day.

What He Taught

(T1) Fortune never promised to stay, and a man who is surprised by her has not been paying attention. + Everyone has met the person who is genuinely shocked that the market fell, or that the company reorganised, or that the friend who could always be relied on has moved away. Not sad, which would be reasonable, but affronted, as though a contract had been broken. Philosophy’s first move in the Consolation is to ask the prisoner what exactly he thinks was in the contract. She does it by handing Fortune a speaking part, which is the shrewdest thing in the book. Rather than lecture him, she lets Fortune answer for herself, and Fortune’s defence is unanswerable on its own terms. The consulship, the house, the honours: were they ever his? They came with her and they leave with her, and she gave no undertaking about the second half. The sky is allowed to cloud over, the sea to roughen, the year to turn from flowers to frost, and nobody accuses them of bad faith. Turning the wheel is not her cruelty; it is her job description. The point is not that losses do not hurt. Boethius says elsewhere in the same book, out of his own experience, that in bad fortune the sharpest sting of misery is to have been happy, which is not the sentence of a man pretending to be above it. The point is narrower and harder. If you build a life on things that by their nature come and go, you have not been unlucky when they go. You have been badly informed, and the remedy is to find something that does not turn.

(Q) "This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend. Mount up, if thou wilt, but only on condition that thou wilt not think it a hardship to come down when the rules of my game require it." + Source: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy II, prose 2 (H. R. James translation, 1897). Philosophy is speaking in the voice of Fortune, putting the case a reader is most likely to resent into the mouth of the one person entitled to make it. The wheel became one of the standard images of medieval art, carved on cathedral walls and painted in the margins of psalters, with four small kings climbing, reigning, falling, and crushed.

(T2) The things people chase are broken-off pieces of one whole Good, and that Good is God. + A man puts in for a promotion whose extra hours he does not actually want, and the evening he gets it he finds himself telling his brother about it over dinner. Ask him what he was after and he will say the money, and he will half believe it. But nobody wants the metal. What people want when they want money is to stop being afraid, to depend on no one, to be sure that no door will be shut in their face. What they want from a promotion is respect. From fame, that they should matter to somebody. From pleasure, that they should be glad. Boethius works through the list in the third book of the Consolation, one item at a time, and shows in each case that the thing being chased is a fragment of something larger: security, self-sufficiency, honour, renown, joy. Nobody is really after five different objects. They are after one thing, and they are trying to reach it through a piece of itself. That is why the pieces disappoint even when you get them, and he has a case ready for each one. Money promises freedom from worry and then hands back the worry of guarding it. High office cannot confer the respect it displays, since the very same office in a scoundrel’s hands earns contempt instead. Fame is loud in one province and has never been heard of in the next. Take any fragment on its own and it turns out to lack precisely what the other fragments had, and a good that lacks something is not the whole good. So the argument climbs. If all of these are parts of one complete good, then that complete good is a real thing and not a wish, and it lacks nothing, and a thing that lacks nothing is what everyone means by God. Notice what Philosophy concludes from that, because it is stronger than what a reader expects. She does not say that God gives happiness, as though happiness were a package he hands over at the door. She says that God is happiness, and that men become happy by getting God. Augustine had said the same thing in a warmer key, that the heart is restless until it rests in God. Boethius says it as a proof, and then adds one remark that can stop a reader short: this makes every happy man a god by participation. Participation is the old word for having a share in something that belongs first and fully to another, the way a poker left in the fire takes on the fire’s heat without ever becoming the fire. The Greek fathers used the idea constantly and would have recognised his sentence at once. It needs the ordinary distinction to be safe, and the distinction is simple enough: God is God by nature, and a creature can only share what it is given.

(Q) "Then, said she, it is necessary to acknowledge that God is very happiness." + Source: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy III, prose 10 (H. R. James translation, 1897). "Very" here is the older English sense of "true" or "itself," as in the creed’s "very God of very God": not that God possesses happiness but that he is it. Philosophy has just argued that there cannot be two supreme goods, since each would lack what the other had, and that God and happiness have both been shown to be the supreme good.

(T3) God does not have a past or a future, because he holds the whole of life at once. + Consider how little of your own life you have at any moment. Yesterday is gone beyond recall and tomorrow has not arrived, so what you actually possess is a sliver so thin it is over while you name it. That is what it is to live in time: to hold your life the way a man crossing a river holds the water, a handful at a time, losing behind what he gains in front. Now imagine the opposite. Not a very long life, and not a life that goes on without stopping, but a life with no losing and no waiting in it at all, every part of it held together and at once. That, says Boethius, is eternity, and it is the crucial distinction: everlasting is not the same as eternal. Aristotle thought the world had gone on forever and would go on forever, and Boethius points out that even so the world would not be eternal, because it still gets its existence one moment at a time. Endless duration is still duration. Eternity is a different mode of having a life, not a longer stretch of the same mode. He proposes keeping two words for the two things: God is eternal, the world is everlasting. The definition he wrote in that cell became the standard one. Aquinas quotes it word for word when he asks what eternity is, and it is still the sentence a Christian reaches for when explaining that God does not experience Tuesday after Monday. It also answers what Scripture had said without arguing it, that God is "from everlasting to everlasting" (Psalm 90:2), and that with the Father of lights "there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17).

(Q) "Now, eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment." + Source: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, prose 6 (H. R. James translation, 1897). The Latin is interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, and it is the most quoted sentence he ever wrote. Philosophy introduces it as a definition everyone can agree to before she uses it, having just said that God is eternal is a judgment on which all rational beings agree.

(T4) God’s knowing does not force your hand, because he is not looking ahead but looking on. + The prisoner puts the objection as sharply as anyone has: if God knew a thousand years ago what I would do this afternoon, then this afternoon I cannot do otherwise, and if I cannot do otherwise there is no point in praising me or blaming me, and prayer is a waste of breath. Boethius does not soften it. He lets his own character press it hard for pages, because he is about to answer it with a distinction, and a distinction only earns its keep against the strongest form of the problem. The answer turns on a rule he has already laid down: what is known is grasped according to the nature of the knower, not the nature of the thing. The same man is known one way by the eye, which sees a shape, and another way by the mind, which grasps a human being; the difference is in the faculty. So the question is not what God knows but how God knows. And since God has no before and after (T3), his knowledge is not foreknowledge at all. It is knowledge of an unending present. He does not look down the road and see you turning; he sees you turning. Then the homely test. You are watching a man walk across a courtyard right now. Your seeing him does not make him walk. Watching adds no necessity to what is watched, and a thing being certain to the watcher is not the same as a thing being forced on the walker. That is the move: the certainty is in the knowledge, and the freedom stays in the act. Boethius then adds one further refinement, and the schoolmen worked with it for centuries. Necessity, he says, comes in two kinds. There is the necessity by which the sun must rise, which belongs to the thing itself and would hold whether anybody was watching or not. And there is the necessity in the sentence "a man who is walking must be walking," which is true the moment you say it and takes nothing whatever away from the man, since he is the one doing the walking and could have stayed in his chair. The first kind constrains; the second only describes. God’s knowledge, on this account, puts what you will do this afternoon under the second kind and never under the first. Christians have not all been satisfied by this, and the argument between them is honest and old. But Boethius is the reason the discussion has the vocabulary it has, and he wrote it as a man with days to live who still wanted to say at the end that prayers are not offered in vain.

(Q) "Since, then, every mode of judgment comprehends its objects conformably to its own nature, and since God abides for ever in an eternal present, His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and, embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place." + Source: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, prose 6 (H. R. James translation, 1897). The sentence opens with the rule the whole answer rests on, that a knower takes hold of what it knows in the knower’s own way. Philosophy draws the conclusion a few lines later, that what God has should be reckoned "not foreknowledge as of something future, but knowledge of a moment that never passes," and that the right name for it is therefore providence and not prevision. The book then closes with the prisoner told to resist vice, practise virtue, and lift up his heart in prayer, since everything he does is done before the eyes of a judge who sees all things.

(T5) A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. + Two people can argue past each other for an hour before either of them notices that one word has been doing two different jobs, and the argument often ends the moment somebody stops and says what he means by it. The church in his lifetime was tearing itself apart over a question of arithmetic applied to Christ, and a fair share of the trouble was of exactly that kind. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople some eighty years earlier, had been understood to teach that because there are two natures in Christ, divine and human, there must be two persons as well. Eutyches went the other way and taught that the two natures had merged into one after the union, so that Christ ended up in a third category, neither quite God nor quite man. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had ruled against both: one person, two natures, unconfused and undivided. What Chalcedon had not done, because councils rule rather than define, was say what the words meant. Boethius, writing to John the Deacon, set out to supply the missing definitions, and he went about it by asking a plain question: where in the world do we actually find persons? A person, to begin with, has to be a substance. Substance in this vocabulary means a thing that stands on its own and has qualities, as against a quality that has to sit in something else in order to be anywhere at all. The horse in the field is a substance; the brown of its coat is not, because there is no brownness standing about in the field by itself. So a person is a substance, and it has to be a rational one, since we do not find persons among stones or horses. A person also has to be an individual rather than a general kind, since nobody meets humanity walking down a street; you meet Peter, and you meet Paul. Put the two halves together and you have it: a person is the individual substance of a rational nature. Nature, he adds in the same breath, is something else entirely, the specific property of a substance, what a thing is. Person is who. He even stops to explain where the Latin word came from, the persona or mask that an actor spoke through in the theatre, and why the Greeks called the same thing a face. Two natures in one person now says something. Nestorius counted wrongly, on this definition, because he assumed every nature brings a person with it. And the definition escaped Christology at once, because a definition of person is a definition of you. Every later Western argument about what makes a human being a someone rather than a something, in theology, in law, and now in medical ethics, is downstream of a sentence written to settle a quarrel about Christ.

(Q) "Wherefore if Person belongs to substances alone, and these rational, and if every nature is a substance, existing not in universals but in individuals, we have found the definition of Person, viz.: The individual substance of a rational nature." + Source: Boethius, A Treatise against Eutyches and Nestorius, chapter 3 (H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand translation, 1918). The Latin, naturae rationabilis individua substantia, is quoted in the schools for the next thousand years, usually without anyone bothering to say whose it is. Boethius notes in the next sentence that this is the Latin rendering of what the Greeks call hypostasis, their word for whatever stands on its own as a concrete individual rather than as a shared nature.

(Q) "If I am right and speak in accordance with the Faith, I pray you confirm me. But if you are in any point of another opinion, examine carefully what I have said, and if possible, reconcile faith and reason." + Source: Boethius, Whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit May Be Substantially Predicated of the Divinity, closing lines (H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand translation, 1918). The Latin is fidem si poteris rationemque coniunge, "join faith and reason, if you can," written to John the Deacon at the end of a treatise so austere it is barely three pages. Faith holds the doctrine and reason is invited to come and see whether it can keep up: the working assumption of the next seven centuries of Christian thought, stated by a layman in an empire that had just collapsed.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) For six centuries he was the only Aristotle the Latin West had. + When the Greek-reading world and the Latin-reading world drifted apart, the West kept what happened to be in Latin already, and in philosophy that meant Boethius and very little else. His translations of the logical works, his commentaries, and his handbooks on syllogism and division were the whole of formal reasoning available in Europe until Aristotle came back through Arabic and Greek channels in the twelfth century. Even then a good part of what came back was his: he had translated the Prior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations too, and those versions sat unread for six hundred years before the schools discovered them and put them to work. Cathedral schools taught logic out of him, and the medieval names for the parts of an argument, and much of the technical Latin of philosophy, are his coinages or his choices. That inheritance did real theological work. Anselm reasons in his idiom. Peter Abelard opens the twelfth-century argument about universals from the exact page of the Isagoge commentary where Boethius had left the question standing. Alcuin at Charlemagne’s court and Gerbert of Aurillac, the scholar who became Pope Sylvester II, both taught the quadrivium as he had arranged it, and the arithmetic and the music were still on university reading lists in England well into the modern period. There is an irony in it worth naming. A man who set out to make Plato and Aristotle speak Latin so that his own generation could read them ended up supplying the schoolroom of a civilisation he never saw, and the books that mattered most for that purpose were the technical ones he probably thought of as preliminary.

(†) Aquinas took his definitions off the shelf and built with them. + Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican whose Summa Theologiae is the most systematic work of theology the West produced, wrote line-by-line commentaries on two of the theological tractates, the one on the Trinity and the one on how created things are good. That is not a compliment he paid to many authors outside Scripture and Aristotle. Where he used him is more telling than that he used him. When the Summa asks what eternity is, the answer given is Boethius’ definition, quoted and then defended clause by clause. When it asks what a person is, the definition of Boethius is the one on the table, and Aquinas spends the article showing that it will do for the divine persons as well as for us. The distinction between what a thing is and the act by which it is, which runs through everything Aquinas wrote about creation, has one of its roots in the third tractate. And the division of the sciences into natural, mathematical, and divine, which Boethius sketched in a few lines, is the framework Aquinas adopts and defends. So the phrase in the old Loeb edition holds up: last of the Roman philosophers, first of the scholastic theologians. He is the hinge. The method he improvised for five short essays, define your terms, argue in steps, let reason work on what faith holds, is the method of the medieval schools.

(†) The book from the cell became the layman’s book of Europe, copied and translated more than any other work of secular Latin. + More than four hundred medieval manuscripts of the Consolation survive, which puts it in company almost nothing else in secular Latin can keep. It was read, glossed, and copied through the whole Middle Ages with an intensity matched only by the Bible and a few of the fathers, and the reason is not hard to find: it is short, it is beautiful, and it speaks directly to anyone who has lost something and wants to know whether the loss is the last word. Look at who translated it. An Old English version came out of Alfred the Great’s programme to educate a kingdom from the ruins of a Viking war, and the manuscripts credit the king himself, though scholars now doubt he did the work with his own hand. Notker Labeo put it into Old High German. Jean de Meun made a French version. Geoffrey Chaucer translated it into English as his Boece, and the ideas run through Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale. Queen Elizabeth I made her own translation late in life, at speed, apparently for the pleasure of it. Kings, poets, and monks kept reaching for the same small book. Dante puts him in heaven for it, in the circle of the sun among the great teachers, and has Aquinas do the pointing: the soul that showed the world’s deceit to anyone who listens well, whose body lies below in Cieldauro, and who came to this peace from martyrdom and exile (Paradiso X). Edward Gibbon, no friend of the church, called the Consolation "a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully," which was his name for Cicero.

(†) Where his own record is open to challenge: a Christian’s last book that never names Christ, and a definition of person that later theologians had to repair. + Two criticisms belong to Boethius himself, not to anyone who came after him, and both have been made from the beginning. - The silence of the Consolation. A baptised Christian, in a cell, facing execution, wrote a book about how to face death, and Christ is not in it. There is no cross, no resurrection, no church, and no named quotation of Scripture, only one unmistakable echo of the Wisdom of Solomon in the good that rules all things in strength and disposes them sweetly; the comforter who comes to his bedside is Lady Philosophy, and the highest Good she leads him to is reached by argument. The old suspicion that he had abandoned the faith is dead, killed by the fragment of Cassiodorus that lists his theological works. What remains is a question about the book he chose to write, and the choice is his own. His defenders answer that he was keeping two disciplines apart on purpose, doing philosophy in the one and theology in the other, and the tractates show he could do both. It is a real answer. But Scripture does not offer the dying the consolation of an argument. It offers a person: "the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction" (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). And what Paul had to say to the philosophers was not a better philosophy but a scandal: "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:23–24). A reader is entitled to notice that the man in the cell had that available and reached instead for Fortune’s wheel. - The definition that would not stretch. "The individual substance of a rational nature" (T5) works beautifully for a human being and strains badly when applied to God, because three individual substances sound very much like three Gods, which is precisely the error the Trinity tractate exists to refuse. Richard of St Victor pressed the point in the twelfth century and proposed a replacement, that a divine person is an incommunicable existence of the divine nature. Aquinas kept Boethius’ words but had to spend an article explaining in what qualified sense they apply above. The definition is one of the most useful sentences in Christian theology and it is also the one his successors had to keep patching, and that is a fair thing to hold against its author. Neither charge touches the debt. He kept the tools of reasoning alive through the darkest stretch of Western history, and he wrote, under sentence of death, that our hopes and prayers are not fixed on God in vain.