Picture a world in which everything is trembling. The second half of the fifth century, the Mediterranean after blessed Augustine: waves of Goths and Vandals invade the Roman Empire and, step by step, supplant Roman power. In 476 the chieftain Odoacer deposes the last Western emperor and sends the imperial insignia to Constantinople. But this is not yet darkness: the same people, the same libraries, the same senate — culture does not go out in an instant, but slowly, like a hearth growing cold. And it is amid this twilight, at the court of the Gothic ruler Theodoric — himself not overly learned, but one who prizes culture highly and wishes to be a continuer of the Roman tradition — that the figure of Boethius arises: the last keeper of ancient intellect in a perishing West.
He grew up an orphan in the house of Symmachus, a representative of the most ancient Roman nobility, whose son-in-law he later became. This house was not merely a store of wealth but, above all, a magnificent library — an entire storehouse of ancient thought. Boethius commanded both Greek and classical Latin with ease; by the age of thirty he had already composed textbooks on rhetoric and mathematics. He clearly sensed that ancient culture was slipping away, and hastened to preserve it. Hence his labor as translator and commentator: commentaries on Aristotle, in particular on his "Analytics." For many centuries these would become, for a medieval Europe unable to read Greek, almost the sole window onto Aristotle, whose works in the original remained inaccessible to it.
He, in effect, created the very language in which philosophy would speak throughout the coming thousand-year journey. A great many Latin concepts — for instance, substance, by which he translated the Greek "hypostasis" — are all owed to Boethius. He also drew up the celebrated square of opposition: a simple schoolroom model of what can be thought and what cannot. At the same time he was also a profound Christian theologian. On the mystery of divine foreknowledge he reasoned thus: in God there is neither past nor future, only an eternal now, and therefore God does not foresee but sees everything as present; man chooses freely, yet his choice is already known to God. In this way he attempted to reconcile what philosophers and theologians cannot reconcile.
Boethius attained the very summit of human happiness: an ancient and wealthy lineage, a noble and intelligent wife, sons who in a single year became consuls, a populace that honored him in the street as a sage; he held the highest office — what we would call the prime minister of the empire. And then slander overtook him. It was an ideologically fractured time: in the Greek East Orthodoxy was being established, while the Goths held to Arianism. Theodoric was informed that Boethius was in secret dealings with Constantinople — supposedly preparing to hand over power over Italy. He is thrown into prison and executed, according to tradition after severe torture, together with his father-in-law. He was forty-four years old, and his design to translate the whole of Aristotle remained unrealized.
But it was precisely in his prison cell, knowing that death awaited him, that he wrote a small book that would come to be called the golden book of the European Middle Ages — The Consolation of Philosophy. To the prisoner there appears a beautiful Lady — Philosophy herself — who bitterly asks how she could have abandoned one who had served her his whole life. The kinder fortune has been to you, she says, the more blind you are. All earthly joys and riches are not merely relative — they bring man no joy at all. But if everything that exists strives toward happiness, and these do not attain happiness, then happiness must be something else. And that something is the Good, that very Platonic category so revered by Plato; and the highest Good is God. Evil, by contrast, is relative: it exists only where you direct your freedom away from God.
This book was copied out thousands of times, learned almost by heart, and quoted right up to the Renaissance. And here is what is striking about it: reading it, one cannot immediately tell whether the person before you is a Neoplatonist or a Christian. Boethius writes as a highly cultured Roman who does not set the new faith against the ancient tradition, but seeks, by means of that faith, to illuminate, deepen, and fill it with meaning — a task far subtler and more difficult. Herein lies his place in history: he handed down to a perishing Europe both the language of thought and the image of a man who remains free even in chains. From him threads stretch forward — to the dispute over faith and reason which, several centuries later, minds such as Anselm of Canterbury would bring to perfection.