The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (43 page)

A R
OMAN
senator, in prison awaiting execution for treason, created a vehicle for ancient culture throughout the Middle Ages and a consoling classic to the troubled centuries. The unlucky leisure that occasioned this work had been enforced on Boethius by the illiterate but enlightened King Theodoric of the Ostrogoths, whom he had served. Now in 523, the victim of a suspicious king and jealous courtiers, he languished in a cell in the tower of Pavia near Milan. For years he had been preparing himself for this feat of prison literature.

Boethius (480?–524?) was born into a noble Roman family that had converted to Christianity long before his time. When his father, Roman consul in 487, died, the boy was raised by an influential guardian, whose daughter he married and so rose speedily in the Roman civil service. Knowledge of Greek was no longer common among the Roman upper classes, but Boethius somehow learned the language. His legendary mastery of Greek produced the myth that he had studied for eighteen years in Athens. The precocious Boethius improved Theodoric’s relations with barbarian kings. He directed the building of a water clock and sundial for the king of the Burgundians, and chose a harp player for the Frankish court of Clovis. By 510, when only thirty, he was raised to the consulship, a dozen years later he saw his young sons as the two consuls, and in the very next year he rose as
magister officiorum
to become King Theodoric’s intimate counselor.

Meanwhile Boethius had somehow found time to build an encyclopedic library—partly of his own writing, partly translated from the Greek. He invented the name
quadrivium
(at first
quadruvium
) for a program of education. These four “mathematical” disciplines (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) were the way to knowledge of the numerical “essences,” which the Neoplatonists called the only real objects of knowledge. Boethius wrote a treatise on each of the mathematical disciplines. His
Arithmetic
and
Music
(the first known work of musical theory in the Christian West) survived to become standard texts in the Middle Ages. So, for the Latin reader, the learned of medieval Europe, Boethius saved “the first elements of the arts and sciences of Greece.” By analogy to the
quadrivium
for the mathematical disciplines the Middle Ages would produce the
trivium
for the verbal disciplines (grammar, rhetoric, and logic).
Quadrivium
and
trivium
together comprised the Seven Liberal Arts. Boethius
also provided basic texts for the study of Aristotelian logic in the Middle Ages. In his four theological tracts on the nature of God and the person of Christ he provided the model of medieval scholasticism, the prototype for Saint Thomas Aquinas, and so merited the title of the First Scholastic. “Theology,” which we have seen had been pursued at least since Philo in the first century, Boethius now used to describe philosophic inquiry into the nature of God. And he gave it the rigorous Aristotelian character that seven centuries later would bear fruit in Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica
(c.1265–93).

The learned Cassidorus, Theodoric’s secretary of state, acclaimed the twenty-five-year-old Boethius. “In your translations, Pythagoras the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nicomachus the arithmetician, Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians.” As a young man, Boethius announced his lifetime project to “instruct the manners of our State with the arts of Greek wisdom.”

It was Boethius’s fatal fall from royal favor, in the very model of an Aristotelian tragic hero, that made him creator of the solacing classic of later centuries. Personal disaster, the isolation of prison, and separation from his books would stir a new vision all his own. And he managed to translate and transform the subtleties of Plato and Aristotle into a popular philosophy. Boethius’s personal tragedy was a symptom of the uncertainties of the age, the rivalries between the Eastern and the Western empires. Theodoric the Great was at first spectacularly successful in fostering a productive coexistence between the Goths and the Romans. Declaring all (including his Gothic tribesmen) subject to the Roman law, he insisted on tolerance of the orthodox Catholics and safety for the defenseless Jews. But the healing of the schism between the Churches of East and West fed Theodoric’s fears that his Italian subjects would renounce his rule in favor of the Eastern Orthodox emperor. When the Roman senator Albinus was accused of writing treasonous letters to the emperor Justin, Boethius impulsively protested, “The senate and myself are all guilty of the same crime. If we are innocent, Albinus is equally entitled to the protection of the laws.” The uneasy Theodoric, taking this to be a confession of guilt, had it confirmed by a forged letter from Boethius to the Eastern emperor and arrested Boethius on suspicion of high treason.

The imprisonment that provided his unwelcome sabbatical from official duties forced Boethius to concentrate on questions of fate and destiny. And his enduring work,
The Consolation of Philosophy
, was the creation of these last two miserable years of Boethius’s life. Gibbon, always hostile to metaphysics, found it “a golden volume … which claims incomparable merit
from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author.” In his prison cell and without his library, Boethius had to depend on his well-cultivated memory, the prime resource of scholars in the days before the printing press. If Boethius had been surrounded by his books he could hardly have written so concise or so popular a work. After the Latin Bible, his was perhaps the most widely read book of the European Middle Ages.

At first Boethius’s little one-hundred-page volume with its alternate brief passages of prose and verse has the look of a mere collection of writings by others. But all is really Boethius’s creation, an anthology of his own poignant classical memories.
Nam in omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum genus est infortunii, fuisse felicem
(For in every ill-turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of misfortune is to have been happy). In these few pages his vast reading in ancient philosophers had been refined, embellished, and simplified. The goddess Philosophy, Boethius’s interlocutor, leads us in dramatic dialogue from self-pity through “the gentler remedy” (understanding the whims of Fortune) to “the stronger remedy” (discounting the earthly goods which depend on Fortune). Man’s sin is mere forgetfulness, the clouded memory of the soul. For, as Plato explained, before birth every soul is pure, committed to the Good. Philosophy restores that memory. But how can evil exist in a world where God is Good and history is governed by God’s Providence? The everyday errancy of Fate does not disrupt the divine scheme of God, the “still point of the turning world.” The closer we come to that central point, retreating from the rotating changefulness of the world, the freer we too will be. Love holds us all together and helps each of us recover the memory of our pristine soul.

But if everything is foreordained by God, how can we be free to choose? Philosophy, the consoling goddess, distinguishes God’s way of knowing from man’s, which comes down to their different relation to time. The mind of the eternal God “embraces the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present.” “Whatever lives in time exists in the present and progresses from the past to the future, and there is nothing set in time which can embrace simultaneously the whole extent of its life: it is in the position of not yet possessing tomorrow when it has already lost yesterday. In this life of today you do not live more fully than in that fleeting and transitory moment.” This explains why God’s foreknowledge does not deny man’s moral responsibility.
The Consolation of Philosophy
is prison literature. And the pious prisoner must somehow “justify the ways of God to Man.” He cannot escape the problem of theodicy, of how a benevolent God could tolerate evil. This would also trouble other prison authors, Sir Thomas More writing his
Dialogue of Comfort agaynst Trybulacion
(1534) and John Bunyan at his
Pilgrim’s Progress
(1676).

For the generations who could not read Greek and had lost contact with
the wisdom of the ancients the form and style of Boethius’s
Consolation
gave help. Though closely reasoned, its brief chapters alternating prose and verse encouraged the casual reader. The dialogue between the optimistic Mistress Philosophy and the disconsolate prisoner carries along the troubled layman.

The book that was destined to be the classic of the Christian Middle Ages was not clearly the work of a Christian, although few of its notions are un-Christian. Boethius would have us “offer up humble prayers” to a personal God, “a judge who sees all things,” but he offers no distinctly Christian doctrine, nor does he quote the Bible. He lived up to the promise of his title, “The Consolation of
Philosophy
,” by helping every lonely prisoner reach God through his own reason.

Impatient with theology, Gibbon admired Boethius, for “the sage who could artfully combine in the same work the various riches of philosophy, poetry, and eloquence, must already have possessed the intrepid calmness which he affected to seek. Suspense, the worst of evils, was at length determined by the ministers of death.… A strong cord was fastened round the head of Boethius and forcibly tightened, till his eyes almost started from their sockets; and some mercy may be discovered in the milder torture of beating him with clubs till he expired. But his genius survived to diffuse a ray of knowledge over the darkest ages of the Latin world.…”

Later generations paid homage to Boethius, and his work enjoyed a rich and varied afterlife. Master translator Boethius would eventually himself benefit from the most eminent and adept translators. King Alfred the Great (849–899) did a free version of the
Consolation
into Anglo-Saxon with his own explanatory comments, and he made Boethius one of his golden four of “the books most necessary for all men to know.” In the next century a Swiss Benedictine at the monastery of St. Gall put the book into Old High German. Someone translated it into Provençal. Jean de Meung, the thirteenth-century author of the second part of
Le Roman de la Rose
, put the whole
Consolation
into French. This was probably the version that attracted Chaucer to translate the
Consolation
into English prose and to embroider Boethius’s philosophy into the poetry of “The Knight’s Tale” and
Troilus and Criseyde
. Dante placed Boethius among the twelve lights in the heaven of the Sun:

Chaucer’s was only the first of many efforts at “Englishing” the
Consolation
. The most famous and most remarkable was that by Queen Elizabeth I
(1533–1603). In 1593, desolate at the news that the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre (1553–1610) had forsaken the Protestant cause and taken up the Catholic faith at St.-Denis, she tried to allay her “great grief” by reading the Bible and the Holy Fathers and by frequent conferences with the archbishop. Then she solaced herself daily by translating Boethius, and shamed sluggish scholars by finishing one page every half hour. She wrote the verses in her own hand, but dictated the prose to her secretary, and completed the whole
Consolation
in something between twenty-four and twenty-seven hours. Scholars agree that she managed to retain the dignity of the Latin original with a certain “ragged splendour.”

B
OETHIUS’S
textbook on music (c.505), along with his
Consolation of Philosophy
, solaced generations with the harmony of the universe. Drawing on Pythagoras, Plato, and Nicomachus—whom he had translated and with whom he would be depicted in medieval drawings—he helped the great Greeks provide the mathematical basis for musical theory in the West.

And he perpetuated their grandiose concept of music. Boethius explained that “music is associated not only with speculation but with morality as well.… The soul of the universe was joined together according to musical concord.” Studying the universal concord, the
musicus
was a cosmologist. His relation to the composer or singer or player of music was like that of the architect to the bricklayer. Or, as Guido of Arezzo put it (c.1000), “he who makes and composes music is defined as a beast because he does not understand.” Boethius’s treatise spared no detail of the Greek theories and concluded with Ptolemy’s own theory of the divisions of the tetrachord. Despite or because of its technicality, Boethius’s work survived in 137 manuscripts, becoming one of the first musical works to go into print (Venice, 1491–92).

Christianity, conquering European culture in the Middle Ages, inherited this heavy baggage of musical theory. The “music of the spheres,” a pagan notion, still appealed, and the Pythagorean belief in numbers satisfied the need for symbols. Was it not exhilarating that the seven notes of the scale
expressed the pitches produced by the revolving of the seven planetary spheres? And that the number 7 also had a special meaning for man, since his earthly body was symbolized by the number 4 and his soul by 3. This
Homo quadratus
, the properly proportioned man, was described by the architect Villard de Honnecourt and depicted in a famous diagram by Leonardo da Vinci. Greek theories of monophonic music cast thinking about music in this appealing mold of Pythagorean numbers.

The Christian churches needed liturgy, which meant thinking of music not as numbers but as sound. The music of the word would be a way station from cosmology. Saint Paul had exhorted the faithful to sing and make melody in “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” The first record of Christian worship had been the hymn sung at the institution of the Lord’s Supper (Mark 14:26).

When the early churches first admitted music, they recalled classic warnings against the wrong sort of music. In his
Confessions
Saint Augustine described the perils. While the Church songs moved him to tears at his conversion, he was “moved not with the singing, but with the thing sung”: