Sometimes it feels like life is an endless cycle of ups and downs. When things go well, we wait for the other proverbial shoe to drop. The loss of a job can be devastating. Financial stress may even lead to suicidal thoughts and feelings. The pain of a broken relationship appears insurmountable. The sudden loss of a loved one leaves us in profound grief. When life hits rock bottom, where do we turn? 

This is a question Boethius had time to ponder in 524 A.D. as he awaited execution in prison in the city of Pavia, 500 miles from Rome. He had experienced first-hand the inconstancies of Fortune, the fickle goddess with her ever-turning wheel that seems to lift us up high for a season only to drag us down low for another. For years, he had been the most trusted adviser to Theoderic the Ostrogoth, ruler of Italy. But now, without affording his adviser and friend the chance to refute the malicious charges brought against him, Theoderic had sentenced Boethius to death. He had lost everything.

Boethius was born around 480 A.D. into one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most influential Roman patrician families. The Anicii had been among the first patricians to convert to Christianity in the age of Constantine. Illustrious family members included consuls, emperors, Pope Felix III, and notable figures like St. Benedict of Nursia (who founded the Benedictine order at Montecassino), and Demetrias (who at age fourteen chose to be consecrated as a virgin and received spiritual instruction from St. Jerome himself). Boethius’s father died when he was very young and he was adopted by the equally powerful Symmachus family. He later married their daughter, Rusticiana, and the union solidified his status amongst the Roman elite. 

A highly educated scholar, Boethius was one of the most brilliant minds of his time. He must have felt the pressure to preserve the ancient knowledge his world had inherited from Greece and ensure its survival and transmission to future generations. His goal was ambitious: first, to translate all of Plato and Aristotle from Greek into Latin and then, to write a commentary reconciling the two philosophers. He didn’t complete the project, but the texts he did bring into Latin, including some of Aristotle’s logical treatises and Porphyry’s introduction to the Categories, made it possible for the knowledge of Aristotle to survive in the West for centuries. 

Why didn’t he translate more? Boethius says everything changed for him when he read the Republic. He was inspired to action by Plato’s vision for just rule and the role philosophers had to play in it. Convicted, he pivoted to affairs of state in spite of the political turmoil of the age. In the sixth century, Rome’s light was fading. Boethius probably had no idea that it was about to expire, but the governance of Italy and the West had been a mess for decades. Just a few years before he was born, Odoacer had deposed the last official Roman emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 A.D. The young emperor was little more than a puppet for his military father, Orestes, who had overthrown and exiled Julius Nepos. For about twelve months, Orestes ruled in his son’s name but failed to pay the troops. These “foederati,” barbarian tribes like the Franks, Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths, who fought in the Roman army in exchange for financial subsidies, found a leader in Odoacer, a Germanic soldier who had risen through the ranks to become general. They staged a military coup and sent Augustulus, in turn, into exile. Odoacer is said to have sent the imperial insignia of the West back to Constantinople, ending a system of joint administrative rule between East and West established by Diocletian in 285 A.D. Then, in 489, when Boethius was nine or ten years old, Theoderic the Ostrogoth marched on Italy with the blessing of Zeno, emperor in the East. Theoderic laid siege to Odoacer at Ravenna for three years until the local bishop managed to negotiate a truce. A couple of weeks later, Theoderic invited Odoacer to a lavish banquet and murdered him in public: a decisive lesson for anyone who might think to cross the new King of Italy. 

Perhaps surprisingly, Theoderic is remembered by several contemporary sources as a relatively popular ruler. Raised as a ward of the emperor in the East due to a treaty that made him a political hostage for about a decade, Theoderic had received an enviable eastern Roman education. Then, when he was around eighteen, he returned to the region of Pannonia, roughly Austria today, and rose to preeminence as the leader of the Ostrogoths. (The term Ostrogoths was coined by the Roman writer Cassiodorus, who also served in Theoderic’s court, to designate the Germanic tribe that originated further East than the Goths.) As an educated man, Theoderic was well-versed in Roman law and traditions. He strengthened the administrative system, undertook a massive building and restoration program, and even wore the imperial purple. Zeno’s successor sent the imperial insignia that had been surrendered by Odoacer back to Theoderic, and he accepted them, prompting some historians to believe he acted as emperor of the West in all but name. Two senatorial inscriptions even survive from the period referring to Theoderic as “Augustus,” a title reserved for the emperor himself. 

It’s almost as if Boethius and Theoderic were destined to meet. Nothing could stop Boethius from rising up through the ranks of public service and he quickly caught Theoderic’s attention. No doubt the ruler was impressed by the brilliant statesman’s unique combination of erudition and practical wisdom. By 520 A.D., Boethius became “Master of Offices.” As Theoderic’s right-hand man, he was now the king’s most trusted adviser and the second most powerful man in all of Italy. It must have seemed that Boethius had it all: wealth, honor, power, fame, and even a delightful family life. But all of that came crashing down when he was accused of treason. Theoderic’s court was no stranger to political corruption and Boethius didn’t hesitate to speak out against it, to the point that he became unpopular amongst his peers. When his friend, the senator Albinus, was accused of treason for having written to the Emperor Justin against Theoderic, Boethius came to his defense, declaring that if Albinus had committed treason, then he essentially had as well. No doubt Boethius expected to save his colleague from an unjust fate. Instead, he lost everything: he was imprisoned without trial and sentenced to death. When Boethius’s father in law attempted to intervene, he, too, suffered the same fate. 

Today, 1500 years later, we still don’t know whether or not Boethius was guilty of treason. We’ll probably never find out. He claimed to be wrongly accused, but some historians think he may have been writing to the East to warn Justin I of the dangers Theoderic’s rule posed to orthodox Christianity. Theoderic not only tolerated Arianism, a heresy that denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, but promoted it and allegedly had plans to build an Arian cathedral to rival the seat of Western Christendom in Rome. It’s conceivable that in defending orthodox Christianity, Boethius felt that he was doing the right thing, by being loyal to what mattered most; or that it was not treachery to stand against a corrupt Senate that was itself betraying Italy. In any case, having served the king so closely as a trusted advisor, Boethius must have known when he fell out of favor that Theoderic would make an example of him. And he did: Boethius was strangled until his eyes bulged and then bludgeoned to death. (A conflicting account has him put to the sword.) 

In prison, as he stared his own mortality in the face, Boethius turned for comfort to his first love, philosophy. He reflected on the nature of true happiness and asked big questions, like how do we find meaning, purpose, and stability through all of life’s perceived ups and downs? He bequeathed his last thoughts to posterity in the form of a fictional dialogue between himself and Lady Philosophy, his old teacher and guide. For the next millennium, the Consolation of Philosophy was the second most read book in the West behind the Bible. Today, it remains as relevant (and counter-cultural) as ever. 

To save the prisoner from himself, Lady Philosophy stages an intervention: she chases out the Muses who have driven Boethius mad with self-pity and vows to replace them with her own, superior, Muses of philosophy. But poetry as a genre of human expression is not inherently at fault: it’s the type of poetry and specifically the motivation and intent behind it that is causing the prisoner more harm than good. Nothing is to be gained by wallowing in self-pity and abandoning reason to base desires and emotions, i.e., Aristotle’s passions. That said, Lady Philosophy herself guides the prisoner through speeches that alternate prose and verse as the dialogue progresses. Her poetry and song plays an important part in her quest to lift up and ennoble the prisoner’s mind and soul. The problem, as Lady Philosophy sees it, is that Boethius isn’t some common, uneducated man. He was once one of her own students. She nurtured him in all the schools of philosophy: Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Eleatics. He should know better. Her gentle yet firm rebuke of the prisoner rings close to home: you have forgotten who you are, she says, and also where you come from. If it sounds like she’s speaking directly to us today as well, it’s because she is. Sooner or later we all must confront our own mortality, wrestle with the ills of our own age, and take stock of how we’ve invested the time given to us. We’re only human: it’s inevitable that we get distracted and steered off-course by poor choices. We, too, seek happiness in all the wrong places, sometimes imagining or convincing ourselves that a broken world can provide true fulfillment or bestow upon our lives a keen sense of purpose and meaning. Lady Philosophy has come to help Boethius (and us) find our way back and remember who we are. Even as we live out our mortal lives in this world, we are destined for another. It’s not surprising that Dante, centuries later, drew on Boethius to frame the quest to lead his pilgrim out of darkness at the beginning of the Divine Comedy. There, the Roman epic poet Virgil, empowered by Divine Grace, is sent to fetch Dante’s soul, lost in a dark wood, and to help him find his way back to the light. Boethius speaks to a fundamental aspect of human existence, to our desire to pursue virtue and yet oftentimes fail and face setbacks along the way. 

But how did all of us get so lost in the first place? 

Lady Philosophy helps Boethius and his readers confront and cure our despair by examining the instability of worldly fortunes. Wealth, honor from high offices, power, fame, pleasure: all of these things we pursue in the hope of finding happiness are but transient gifts of fickle Fortune—fleeting and unreliable foundations for lasting fulfillment. And yet we pursue them as if they will promise us happiness itself. Therein lies the problem. 

The issue with wealth, in a nutshell, is that we’ll always want more. Sure, we need resources to meet our needs, like putting a roof over our heads. But pour out riches as abundant as the grains of sand on a beach? It will never be enough, says Philosophy. Humans will still complain. We will not be satisfied. Even if we were granted as many prayers for good fortune as there are stars in the night sky, we’d still feel hard done by. That’s what happens when we seek to anchor and ground our lives in the quest to fill a perceived lack. We’re stuck in a downward spiral. Surely, Philosophy hints, this kind of pursuit can’t be the key to true happiness? At the end of the day, riches empower us to buy things. We give them away in order to get something in return. But if riches were a source of true happiness and the highest good, we wouldn’t want to give them away in the first place. There wouldn’t be anything worth trading them for. 

Honor from high offices and power cannot be sources of true happiness either. In fact, Lady Philosophy explains, Boethius mourns the honor and power associated with his lost political offices for all the wrong reasons. It’s tempting to think that the office makes the man (or woman), when in fact it’s the other way around. The true worth of any position comes from the virtue and the wisdom of the person who occupies it. That’s why, when power falls into the hands of people who are not virtuous, it causes more ruin than the worst natural disasters we can imagine. At what cost do power-hungry men bring about their civilization’s ruin? Philosophy underscores just how laughable earthly power is when compared to eternity: what if a mouse declared itself king of all mice? She asks. Would you not laugh? Until we understand that earthly power is fleeting and high offices become ennobled by the virtuous soul that occupies them, we are no better than those mice. We declare our fiefdoms and doom ourselves to misunderstanding our place in the order of creation. At best, earthly power is an illusion. It cannot be the source of our happiness. 

Fame is vapid. Reputation, popularity, renown may seem important to us in our day-to-day lives. But in the grand scope of eternity? Not so much. Let’s say you achieve fame in this lifetime, posits Philosophy: what does that even mean? According to whom? Even if your name reached all around the world it would feel small to anyone who takes stock of the universe and the stars. From a cosmological perspective, the entire earth appears but a small object in the vast universe. Instead of focusing on earthly fame, she urges us to turn our attention to the heavens and gaze upon everything we’re missing.

Pleasure leads us astray. Lady Philosophy doesn’t say much about this because the lesson seems so obvious to her: anyone who bothers to reflect on their own excesses in the pursuit of pleasure, she says, knows that it brings only remorse and anxiety. More lust, more food, more wine… none of these things leads to happiness. In all of our pursuits and desires, we’re better served by the principle of just enough: not too much and not too little—what Aristotle called the golden mean. But pleasure makes us forget this. When, to the neglect of reason, we succumb to our unleashed and unquenchable desires for pleasure, we are no better than animals. Like Odysseus’s men turned into pigs, tigers, and other beasts by the sorceress Circe in Homer’s Odyssey, we cease to be who we were made to be. So much for Epicureanism, partying til we drop, modern reality TV, and our consumerist culture—all of these challenges to healthy community are equivalent to the kind of social collapse Boethius witnessed in his own time.

Wouldn’t it be better, asks the prisoner, if God put us out of our misery and didn’t give us free will? After all, the tides obey him; so do the stars and planets. The sun rises and sets every day. Nature submits to God’s will in all things. If we didn’t have the ability to choose not to, so would we. None of us could be wicked and cause harm to others. But of all living beings, responds Philosophy, only humans are endowed with reason and all rational beings possess free will. For Philosophy, this is a non-negotiable and it is a gift, not a constraint. After perfectly creating the whole world, why would God make a mistake with human beings? And aren’t we all compelled to turn to God in prayer? What place would Hope find in a world without free will and in which every human choice and action was predetermined? (This is one reason that I maintain that Boethius was not, as some modern scholars posit, a pagan, but indeed a Christian, who believed that humans are made in the image of their Creator and endowed with the ability to surrender to his will, or not.) God rules the universe with Love. It permeates everywhere and everything. Therein lies the true nature and source of all happiness towards which Lady Philosophy guides us, the home we have forgotten and must now remember: if only we open our eyes, we’d see that the Love that governs the sun and the other stars rules our hearts as well. But only if we accept Him and surrender our will to His. 

Of course, some will choose not to do this, and that is the source of the wickedness or evil that comes into the world: the refusal to pursue and accept God, and the Good. For Lady Philosophy, wickedness is thus by its very nature an absence of goodness rather than something in its own right. Another way to think about this is that human beings cannot choose to become wicked or pursue wickedness, because wickedness is the absence of good and so nothing at all. (An idea to which other theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, will return and probe in even greater detail.) Rather, those who are wicked have chosen to turn away from God and his Love and Goodness. But since only he is the source of true happiness, the wicked deprive themselves of that reward. No matter the havoc and harm they might inflict on others in this life, they are ultimately their own punishment. No doubt Boethius reflected on the actions of those who had accused and brought him down through this lens. 

Philosophy’s lessons remind us that human beings 1500 years ago already struggled with the same vices and distractions as we do, even if their world and technologies were strikingly different. Her “medicines” as she likes to call them remain a powerful antidote to some of the greatest challenges of modernity.  Still today, many of us identify our self-worth with jobs and the honors that come with titles. Our political arena is obsessed with power and party, rather than just rule. The lure of fame and celebrity culture remains evergreen: more than half of Gen-Z say they’d quit their jobs and become influencers if given the chance. Our consumerist culture fuels and enables the pursuit of pleasure through escapism, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and much worse. And yet, none of these things make us happy. Teen suicides are up. There’s a loneliness epidemic. Life expectancy has dipped not only in the US but across many countries and continents. All across the world, it’s as if we’ve forgotten who we are, surrendering to the powerful illusion of Fortune’s wheel and her fickle rule. We don’t even need a corrupt system to sentence us to death: as Lady Philosophy is keen to point out, we are our own worst enemies. And yet, there’s always hope. Philosophy argues that true happiness is found not in the world but within, through the cultivation of virtue and wisdom. That’s good news because it’s within our reach, too. By redirecting our focus from external circumstances to the strength of our inner character and relationship with God, we too can remember that an enduring sense of peace and purpose is attainable in this earthly life, even in the face of profound injustice and suffering. Turning away from the inconstancies and imperfection of the world and remembering that we are made, as CS Lewis gently nudges, for another, Philosophy leads us back to the perfect Good and source of all perfect Happiness: God. 

I’ve yet to meet a person who hasn’t been changed in a profound way by reading Boethius’s Consolation. Lewis himself counted it among his top 10 books of all time and said it would have been hard, until the 18th or 19th century, to find an educated person who hadn’t read it. Given the trials and turmoil of modernity, now seems as good a time as ever to pick it back up. As we mark 1500 years since his death, Boethius’s parting message to humanity rings as true as ever: if you don’t like the culture, change yourself. The love of wisdom can still lead us back to what really matters. Isn’t it time to remember who we are?

December 2024