The Prisoner's Philosophy Life and Death in Boethius's CONSOLATION [Paperback]

The Roman philosopher Boethius (c. 480-524) is best known for theConsolation of Philosophy, one of the most frequently cited texts in medieval literature. In theConsolation, an unnamed Boethius sits in prison awaiting execution when his muse Philosophy appears to him. Her offer to teach him who he truly is and to lead him to his heavenly home becomes a debate about how to come to terms with evil, freedom, and providence. The conventional reading of theConsolationis that it is a defense of pagan philosophy; nevertheless, many readers who accept this basic argument find that the ending is ambiguous and that Philosophy has not, finally, given the prisoner the comfort she had promised.

 

InThe Prisoner's Philosophy, Joel C. Relihan delivers a genuinely new reading of theConsolation. He argues that it is a Christian work dramatizing not the truths of philosophy as a whole, but the limits of pagan philosophy in particular. He views it as one of a number of literary experiments of late antiquity, taking its place alongside Augustine'sConfessionsandSoliloquiesas a spiritual meditation, as an attempt by Boethius to speak objectively about the life of the mind and its relation to God.

 

Relihan discerns three fundamental stories intertwined in theConsolation: an ironic retelling of Plato'sCrito,an adaptation of Lucian'sJupiter Confutatus,and a sober reduction ofJobto a quiet dialogue in which the wounded innocent ultimately learns wisdom in silence. Relihan's claim that Boethius's text was written as a Menippean satire does not rest merely on identifying a mixture of disparate literary influences on the text, or on the combination of verse and prose or of fantasy and morality. More important, Relihan argues, Boethius deliberately dramatizes the act of writing about systematic knowledge in a way that calls into question the value of that knowls.