Around the year 525, one thousand five hundred years ago, a Roman aristocrat died a typically horrific martyr’s death at the hands of a tyrannical king. On the way to that death, he suffered the loss of his considerable political power and eminent social prestige, the confiscation of his (vast) property—including, worst of all, he says, his library—and the impoverishment of his wife, while finally spending an unknown period imprisoned in exile, far from his home. The man’s name was Severinus Boethius. His crime? Sedition. The king, Theodoric, was Arian, and Boethius was Catholic. The information is spotty, but it seems that his theological interventions into ecclesial debates that sought to deepen the ties of unity of the Roman Christians with the Greeks of the neighboring empire (whose emperor had designs on Italy) led to suspicion, then accusation, and finally conviction of the prominent Boethius. A similar fate fell on his best friend, Saint Pope John I, who died in prison perhaps a year later.
At the nadir of his incredible fall, Boethius, imprisoned, on death row, wrote one of the most enduring works of Western literature. The book is called On the Consolation of Philosophy. Its theme? Hope amid great suffering. The question, or the enigma of suffering is common, you could say, to a number of the world’s great works: the Bible’s Book of Job, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Plato’s Phaedo, Shūsaku Endō’s Silence, and the epic Hindu poem, The Ramayana spring to mind. All great works are unique in their own manner. Boethius’ Consolation is no exception.
In the book, an enchanting lady appears in a man’s cell as, his eyes full of tears, he gives vent to his tragic fate in song. The lady is Philosophy personified; the man is Boethius himself. Philosophy, literally, “the love or pursuit of Wisdom,” commits herself to healing her patient, whose illness of despair had reached, like Job or Jeremiah, the point of willing to die. He will be healed, she says cryptically, when he remembers what it means to be human. Thus begins a five-part pursuit of memory lost by way of songs, speeches, disquisitions, interrogations, arguments, and…storytelling.
On the way, there are many great spiritual teachings elaborated, such as that the happiness of evil men is actually its opposite; or that in the pursuit of the five ‘faces’ of happiness—pleasure, power, fame, wealth, or glory—men are only ever seeking God who is the infinite possession of all of these and therefore happiness itself. And that in seeking such goods, tragically, evil men are but putting in God’s place what he is not. The book ends after a fireworks display of philosophical creativity that attempts to show the compatibility of God’s control of the world and human freedom: God’s providence, his relation to the future is more like our relation to the present; he is present to all time as the one who sees all, the one who, in the end, establishes all justice—a justice that, if we but had eyes to see, is always being worked out, even through human freedom that wills to oppose it, even here, and now.
One of the common elements in all the teachings of Consolation is that what seems to be the case is not what really is. So, it is fitting that the most crucial teaching of Philosophy is not directly said anywhere but is nevertheless, albeit indirectly, said everywhere through the book, that she herself is indeed but an echo or trace of the Wisdom she does not possess but only teaches her patient to love and pursue. The point of the book is the acquisition of Wisdom, but she herself cannot give it. She can only orient one to it, prepare one for it, get the patient out of bed and on the way towards it. Philosophy, in this great saint and philosopher’s last will and testament, gives one the power merely to hope, to pray, and to pursue virtue (to cite the last lines of the book), trusting that, despite all appearances, God is our happiness and wills to carry us into it.
In other words, Philosophy reminds us who we are, humans in need of God’s grace that transforms our suffering into the glory, honor, delight, wealth, and power that he himself is and which is found by letting go of them all and casting ourselves onto him. What appears as defeat is actually victory; ignominy for justice, the highest honor; impoverishment by the hands of evil men the acquisition of permanent wealth; death is in reality the overcoming of death. This should sound familiar to Christian ears, of course, but the book says nothing of the Christian hope, of Christ, of the Cross, or of the Resurrection. At least, it says nothing directly—perhaps, to say it all the more profoundly. In this book, Wisdom is elusive, just like in real life. It’s difficult to grasp, yet everywhere; it’s strange and paradoxical, and yet, once embraced, it illuminates all.
St. Severinus Boethius, pray for us.
Dr. Chris Hackett, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology