Boethius in prison
The Consolation of Philosophy written before execution
Boethius is the last great Roman philosopher and one of the most important Christians of the early medieval period, and he is about to be executed for treason he probably did not commit.
He has served the Ostrogoth king Theodoric as a high official — a man who tried to bridge the Gothic and Roman worlds, who translated Aristotle into Latin, who wrote musical and mathematical treatises that will be the textbooks of the medieval university. He is brilliant, successful, universally respected.
Then he defends a colleague against an accusation of treason. His enemies use the opportunity to accuse him of the same charge. He is arrested, stripped of his offices, imprisoned, and sentenced to death.
In prison, awaiting execution, he writes the Consolation of Philosophy.
The book is a dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears to him in his cell and argues him through the central questions of his situation: why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer? What is true happiness? What is fortune, and why do men pursue it? What is providence?
The Consolation is remarkable for what it does not do: it does not invoke Christ or scripture. It argues from reason and classical philosophy. Boethius, writing as a condemned Christian, writes a Stoic-Platonic meditation on suffering and providence that never names the religion for which he is, in a sense, dying.
The medieval church will read it as the greatest book after the Bible. Chaucer translates it. Alfred the Great translates it. It shapes Thomas Aquinas and Dante.
Boethius is executed in 524 AD. The book survives.
“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.”
— Lady Fortune, Consolation of Philosophy II.1, c. 524 AD
“He said, Naked I came out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Boethius wrote his greatest work in a prison cell while waiting to die. He had lost everything — his offices, his reputation, his freedom, and soon his life.
His question was the oldest question: why do good people suffer while wicked people prosper? His answer was not a solution but a reorientation: you have been seeking happiness in the wrong places, and fortune's wheel has simply revealed the instability of what you were standing on.
The things that were taken from Boethius were real goods. He is not told that he was wrong to value them. He is told that they were never foundations — that the thing worth seeking is the one thing that cannot be taken.
What is Fortune's wheel taking from you right now? And what is the taking revealing about where your weight was actually resting?